The Founder Selection Effect
- From: "John W Edser" <edser@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 4 Feb 2008 13:22:35 -0500 (EST)
Tim Tyler <seemysig@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:-
The Founder Selection Effect:
``The founders may represent a non-random sample of the
original population. This is very likely to be true
when the founders have succeeded in penetrating a
challenging barrier which normally acts to prevent migration.
In that case the founders may be individuals with
exceptional capabilities - since they penetrated the
barrier before any of the other members of their species
managed to do so.''
- http://alife.co.uk/essays/the_founder_selection_effect/
JE:-
At first glance, the idea that it is possible to produce a "Founder
Selection Effect" appears reasonable. However, a closer inspection of
Darwinian rationale will show that the situation is more complex.. Founders
may indeed require special qualities to be able to enter a new environment.
However, these qualities are not selected FOR within the new environment but
entirely within the old environment and its surrounds. IOW, whatever
qualities founders need to have to be able to enter a new environment are
not _necessarily_ a benefit within the new environment. Selection is always
operating on any founder but the key question is: from within which
environment and what exactly are the fitness implications? This can only be
more fully answered by more fully understanding what Darwin proposed.
The Darwinian rationale was and remains predicated on the evolution of
isolated-for-just-an-undetermined-amount-of-time, additive in fitness
groups, which occupy one particular environment which remains delimited by
each group such that only individual fertile, adult forms, which can pass
on their genes, can be selected FOR. The Darwinian fitness of each parent
within each population is an exact and therefore _falsifiable_ constant
total per adult per population: a tally of the total number of adult forms
reproduced per parent per population, i.e. within just the one, same
environment as delineated by that population. Each parental, independent
fitness total, which can only exist per the one, same population, are
compared by simple default providing the Darwin's non random, monocentric
process of natural selection (not to be confused with Wallace's di-centric
proposal). The net result is that any adult forms exported to a new
environment have to leave their original environment in which they provide
one fitness unit for their respective parent/parents fitness total producing
a new total within the new environment for the same parents. For example, if
a parent has a fitness total of 5 in environment A such that one reproduced
adult leaves to found environment B, then the fitness of that parent as a
total within A must be reduced by 1 to 4 while the fitness of the same
parent in B increases from 0 to 1. IOW it has cost the parent a reduction in
total fitness in A in order to provide a new minimal fitness total in B of
just 1. This may result in the same parent being selected against in A while
being selected for in B. The fitness audit required to make Darwinism
falsifiable imposes a very strict rationale on evolutionary theory which can
produce non intuitive results.
Regards,
John Edser
Independent Researcher
edser@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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