| ™ |
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.