Re: Evolution is NOT random

On May 13, 2:23 pm, dkomo <dkomo...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
So why do people keep discussing it as though it were?
I think the statement that I keep hearing is:
"Variation is random with respect to the fitness of the variation."
Or variations on this. Another statement I hear is:
"Mutations are random with respect to the functionality of the
mutation."
The idea being presented is not "determinism versus
indeterminism." The idea is: "viability versus nonviability."
In the case of Gould's "punctuated equilibrium," by contingency
he is saying that even after long periods of natural selection, the
variation that accumulates is not viable with regards to episodic
events. For example, some species of animals may have survived the KT
extinction merely because they were hibernating or migrating somewhere
else at the time of the meteor impact. The correlation between
surviving the KT event and the accumulated variations is nil.
The nautilus species may have survived because the common
ancestors of all extant nautilii were in their deep water larval state
at the time of the impact. The fact that they spend part of their time
in deep water was uncorrelated to the episodic fall of bolides. That
they happened to be in deep water in April rather than October is even
less correlated with year to year viability. However, some Nautilus
species just happened to luck out.
This may have been deterministic on a vast Newtonian level, using
a supper computer with the trajectories of all bolides in the solar
system already stored in memory. However, there is no such computer
now and there certainly wasn't 65 million years ago. Really and truly
those nautilii were hatched under a lucky star (which maybe literal).
I would have to say, though, that given the number of planets in
our solar system, and the number of solar systems in our galaxy, and
the number of galaxies in the universe, there may be some determinism.
I mean, somewhere a nautilus-like species had to coexist with a
primate-like species with the smarts. Large numbers make all events
probable. So much for Gould's "contingency."

.

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