RE: Vision and Evolution (A Critique of Dawkins)
August 4, 2019 at 10:50 am
(This post was last modified: August 4, 2019 at 11:15 am by The Grand Nudger.)
Diving further into usefulness, evolutionary emergence, and the order of development.
Digestive systems. Our digestive systems are contemporary representatives of one of our lineages earliest adaptations. Yet, they are not fully formed or functional until well after our birth.
This issue that delayed systems run into is covered for by another set of adaptations, our mammalian apparatus. Human beings are literally born with “half a digestive system”.... but it’s still useful, and you certainly wouldn’t want to be born without one. In a series of gradual steps that culminate months after our delivery, it becomes fully functional (most of the time)....though people’s changing environments can make it less functional with respect to what food sources we have available. Or more, with some other adaptation, like an enzyme in our saliva, or the increased ability to process grain. An increased capacity to host beneficial bacteria, even.
Those that survive and breed pass on the architectural plans for building yet another “half an x”. Everything is always, potentially, half a whatever it is. We don’t have any idea what maximal improvement or function would look like, or how we could even quantify it. This destination of yours is not part of evolutionary theory or borne out by any fact of biology. Even fully formed or functional organisms continue to express mutations over the remainder of their lives.
All that can be said here is that the problem you have with biology is that it has no destination. Well, okay... but that’s your problem, not an issue for biology. It just keeps plugging along regardless of our misgivings about how it operates. I’m sure we could all write a tome about how we wished our biology operated in contrast with how it does, lol.
A short, fun way to describe what evolutionary biology is doing, is to imagine barrels full of darts being thrown at a wall. Some hit the target, some don’t. Evolutionary history, in reference to current biology, is the story of which darts hit, and how.
Every generation, the darts that miss are discarded, the darts that hit are retained, and new darts are added to the barrel. Rinse and repeat.
Digestive systems. Our digestive systems are contemporary representatives of one of our lineages earliest adaptations. Yet, they are not fully formed or functional until well after our birth.
This issue that delayed systems run into is covered for by another set of adaptations, our mammalian apparatus. Human beings are literally born with “half a digestive system”.... but it’s still useful, and you certainly wouldn’t want to be born without one. In a series of gradual steps that culminate months after our delivery, it becomes fully functional (most of the time)....though people’s changing environments can make it less functional with respect to what food sources we have available. Or more, with some other adaptation, like an enzyme in our saliva, or the increased ability to process grain. An increased capacity to host beneficial bacteria, even.
Those that survive and breed pass on the architectural plans for building yet another “half an x”. Everything is always, potentially, half a whatever it is. We don’t have any idea what maximal improvement or function would look like, or how we could even quantify it. This destination of yours is not part of evolutionary theory or borne out by any fact of biology. Even fully formed or functional organisms continue to express mutations over the remainder of their lives.
All that can be said here is that the problem you have with biology is that it has no destination. Well, okay... but that’s your problem, not an issue for biology. It just keeps plugging along regardless of our misgivings about how it operates. I’m sure we could all write a tome about how we wished our biology operated in contrast with how it does, lol.
A short, fun way to describe what evolutionary biology is doing, is to imagine barrels full of darts being thrown at a wall. Some hit the target, some don’t. Evolutionary history, in reference to current biology, is the story of which darts hit, and how.
Every generation, the darts that miss are discarded, the darts that hit are retained, and new darts are added to the barrel. Rinse and repeat.
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