Darwinian Selection Logic


Darwinian selection logic is a double reverse trick. It's not that, oh, such and such feature would be beneficial to survival and reproduction and therefore presto, it appears. No. It's that Pambios is trying gazillions of experiments by mutation, and AFTER one of those happens and AFTER it IS actually surviveable through organismal maturity rather than fatal early, and AFTER it happens to spread from its original, single, mutation carrier, through normal exponential reproduction within the given system or species in its given environment to the point that it characterizes a survivable subpopulation of the species, and AFTER the species comes under such killing population pressure that some on the old nonmutated plan would fail to survive and reproduce, and AFTER the mutation happens to provide a new feature that is beneficial to survival and reproduction in ths context of some in the species failing to survive and reproduce, and AFTER the non-reproduction and non-survival of the non-mutated proceeds to the point that ALL the non-mutated are gone and only the mutated ones are still surviving and reproducing, THEN THEN THEN ONLY THEN the mutation becomes a characteristic of the species, And THEN we can look at it and see that the feature makes sense, whatever it did it played a key role in the survival and reproduction of the species, just at the point of the killing and not at the point of the mutation, the survivability, the spread, or the pleasant phase of low killing pressure on the population. So having a new feature is a random event, it had to randomly happen, successfully survive and spread, and then happen to make a difference when the species is being killed left and right, and only at that point does its functional utility or lack thereof become a selection target. However, species grow exponentially, and resources are always finite, so there is almost always harsh population pressure on all species. The brief moments of expansion follow dramatic changes in the environment or new ecosystem opportunities for the species; the rest of the time things are a grind, and members may or may not survive simply because there are too many to be carried by the environment. Indeed it would be kind to develop population self-regulating features: if they happened to happen, that would be nice. This is the logic of evolution, Darwinian Selection Logic. You can't really intend to say such and such survival-impacting functional feature came about by design or intention, because it comes about by a long chain of merely possible-but-random events, it merely happens to come about and might not have. You might wait a long time for that functionality to appear, or forever. On the other hand when that HAS happened and it DOES now characterize a population, then there WAS some functional role of the feature in better enabling the survival and reproduction of the members of the species, for some reason, so that when the others died these lived. That reason involves the particular things it does, and what it does different or better, and how that interacts with the environment. There is a functional logic, what it does, does better, and how that helps, otherwise there couldn't have been a systematic selection of just those members, without another highly-improbable event that eventually culled all the old type members without there being a reason to select them. Since organisms encounter individual circumstances not just generic ones, they might have individually happened to be culled, but seen statistically that's Bernoulli with some probability P of culling, but filtered by selecting only the old type. The random event of culling all and only those, at the scale of a species population, is not impossible, but vanishingly, vanishingly improbable. Whereas if there is an actual functional reason, then it can make sense, and by the faith of the intellectual, it will make sense if we will just understand the process to the point we can see the differentiating reason. Someone, some irrationalist, say, could deny the efficacy of reasons in general, which is tantamount to saying things do happen for no systematic reason, but things happen for no reason on the individual level, not on the level of all members of a species doing the same thing the same way over and over and so that all of them are now surviving with this particular way and only this way and none of the others. So its a kind of double reverse logic. It didn't happen by logical functional design, but when it happened randomly (and was survivable individually and spread to be survivable as a species), it could only be selected for, and come to characterize the species, because of a logical design characteristic that functionally impacted survival and reproduction in a species under population pressure. So as a whole the system went away from logic, function, and design -- in the creation and stabilization of the new feature -- but then it came back to logic and function, which are some of the characteristics of design, in the selection phase. "Designed"-looking, logically (systematically), functional features come to characterize species through this first anti-logical and then anti-anti-logical path. Double reverse. So when I go on talking about system design, this is what I mean. I'm not saying some feature evolved outside this double reverse process through the tender fingers of some embodied-individual God's design. No. But humans (like you) are great with ideas and logic and designs and my audience gets my point when I talk about a system design. There doesn't have to be a designer for there to be a design. Yet through random operation of mutation and selection, designs arise and systematically, logically persist by means of some particular, differentially adaptive, functionality. I do talk a lot about the functional logic of evolution, so this footnote might need to be referenced often. So I will annotate my text with this tag, DSL, to reference this Darwinian (Double-reverse) Selection Logic I'm expressing in a given case. Then if you, dear reader, are actually one of my biology professor friends who feels the need to discredit fascist misuse of evolutionary theory or to police theocratic science-denial, you might be satisfied that I'm not the problem you are patrolling for. Okay? DSL. Okay.
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Modified: February 10, 2023