Re: Culture is not consciously developed? Q for Wilkins



"whitesickle@xxxxxxx" whitesickle@xxxxxxx

Guy Hoelzer:-
Drift always happens in every
population all of the time without exception. This is not an opinion,
rather it is a necessary consequence of the finiteness of all
populations.
It is selection that can come and go along with heritable variation for
fitness.

Michael Ragland:-
I'm not real familiar with the concept of drift but what is it "useful"
for. Does it confer either an advantage, disadvantage or both on a
population?

By definition, the term "genetic drift" can only represent the random
process of sampling error. If you take a population of just about anything
and then reduce it by randomly removing some of the members, the number of
similar types in the reduced population will mostly be different to those in
the original population. The smaller the sampled population the larger the
drift effect becomes. Random sampling error can be verified in only one way:
the observation of a single idealized pattern known as a "random pattern".
Since evolutionary theory is predicated on a change in the number of types
within one population over time (temporal change) sampling error matters.
The question is, in exactly what way does it matter? Since drift is just a
random process it can only randomly reduce/remove alleles from a population,
i.e. produce TEMPORAL RANDOM VARIATION and NOT RANDOM EVOLUTION simply
because "random evolution" is a contradiction of terms. The NON random
process of natural selection operates on as many types of random heritable
variation that exist. Unlike drift selection provides NON random
evolutionary changes observable as NON random patterns where each pattern
can be unique. However, gene centric Neo Darwinism regards the random
temporal pattern produced by drift to represent evolution when it can only
validly represent temporal variation. Neo Darwinists have incorrectly
redefined evolution to become ANY change in gene freq. within one
population, no matter if that change is just random. At the stroke of a pen
evolutionary theory was reduced from a Darwinian non random and empirically
refutable process to just an irrefutable random mathematical process
stopping the evolution of evolutionary theory.


I've often read evolution is glacial in its slowness. Is
this due to the low rate of natural selection i.e. mutations that come
along with heritable variation for fitness?

JE:-
As EMPIRICAL observations enter theory, natural selection acting on any form
of variation (which includes random temporal variation) has been observed
(as expected) to be much faster than predicted by selection acting on just a
mythical gene-by-gene basis. The unexpected tiny size of the human genome
(20,000-30,000 polypeptide coding genes) and the paltry number of these
genes which are different in chimps threw out Haldane's gene centric
"dilemma" simply because it never existed. Haldane required large genomes
(100,000's of genes) and much larger differences than those observed between
Human and chimp genomes because the heritability concept he used remained
oversimplified as additive (after Fisher). It takes many more genes to code
for the phenotypes concerned whenever you restrict the coded information to
be just additive where these additive associations can only evolve slowly.
OTOH, it only takes a small number of genes to code for the same observed
phenotypes, where these genes can evolve much more quickly if they are
allowed to be coded in a non additive way. The real reason why non additive
genetic associations remain ignored is because they destroy gene fitness
independence and the gene centric theory along with it. The vast majority of
heritable traits have to be coded by just a small number of NON additive
genetic associations in order to be able to explain the tiny size of the
human genome and microscopic number of genes which are different to a chimp.


Also, its my impression
natural selection is adaptive to the environment in conferring fitness
yet there are some populations which retain naturally selected
mutations which are no longer adaptive to their environment. In such
cases they can die out. Why is natural selection so slow?

JE:-
Genes work together in a non additive fitness way. Just because one gene
appears to be "bad" when associated with some genes does not mean that the
same gene remains "bad" when associated with others. IOW there is no such
thing as a "bad gene", just a less fit set of gene associations and bad
theories which delete non additive gene associations as non heritable.

Do you think
genetic engineering could be a form of 'natural selection' in the
future selecting traits which make us adaptive to our environment?

JE:-
As Guy Hoelzer has agreed, everything, including "genetic engineering"
remains subject to the Darwinian non random process of natural selection. It
seems to me a great pity that Guy continues to refuse to discuss exactly the
same argument in reference to the selection of meiotic drive genes.

snip<


Regards,

John Edser
Independent Researcher

edser@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx





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