Darwinism

[Anto Kennedy]

Natural selection is the process by which heritable traits that make it more likely for an organism to survive and successfully reproduce become more common in a population over successive generations. It is a key mechanism of evolution.

That's only a wikipedia definition which refers to biological evolution and the natural selection of species, individuals and genes for extinction.

Natural selection is also in the beginning stages of being applied to the evolution of other phenomena such as cosmology. Indeed, in The God Delusion Richard Dawkins hints at this; perhaps there was more than one universe, many unstable universes that were blinked out of existence as soon as they became manifest, others last longer but still don't make the cut. And our universe could be that one universe whose physical laws were so finely tuned allowing for a bunch of monkeys, sorry apes, like us to be considering the nature of reality. Interesting stuff.

As for memes, well again it's Dawkins who hints at the evolution through natural selection of packages of information.

The concept of a tournament itself displays natural selection as it's core component. We start of with say a group of 16 participants, with each round the weaker participants are eliminated until eventually there is only one winner.

Natural selection is a part of everyday life, it isn't something that only appeared in the 19th Century when Darwin called it into existence. Darwin started off with the theory that animals share a common ancestry, there would have to be an evolutionary mechanism for this. The mechanism he proposed was natural selection, yet many biologist disagreed with this. It was until the early 20th Century that natural selection became accepted as the mechanism by which the evolution of species occurs.

There's the history lesson, now let's get down to the bollox you claim I spout. Let's exchange organism for meme.

Natural selection is the process by which heritable traits that make it more likely for a meme to survive and successfully reproduce become more common in a population over successive generations.

Or a universe

Natural selection is the process by which heritable traits that make it more likely for a universe to survive and successfully reproduce become more common in a population over successive generations.

Different generations of universes, interesting stuff. For such a stable universe as our own, lasting 14 billion years isn't bad going, we may be quite a number of generations down the line. Who knows...

Let's try the Word of God

Natural selection is the process by which heritable traits that make it more likely for the Word of God to survive and successfully reproduce become more common in a population over successive generations.

Don't take my word for it, I'm just a bigot, here's what Dawkins has to say about it,

many people have not had their consciousness raised, as biologists have, by natural selection and it's power to tame imporabability....

.....Another theoretical physicist, Lee Smolin, has developed a tantalizingly Darwinian variant on the multiverse theory, including both serial and parallel elements. Smolins idea, expounded in The Life of the Cosmos, hinges on the theory that daughter universes are born of parent universes. Smolin adds a form of heredity: the fundamental constants of a daughter universe are slightly 'mutated' variants of the constants of it's parent. Heredity is the essential ingredient of Darwinian natural selection, and the rest Smolin's theory follows naturally. Those universes that have what it takes to 'survive' and 'reproduce' come to predominate in the multiverse.

(The God Delusion, p174 - 175, The Anthropic Principle, Cosmological version)

IOW he's talking bollox.

Heredity is the essential ingredient of Darwinian natural selection

still other seed fell on good soil. It came up, grew and produced a crop, multiplying thirty, sixty, or even a hundred times."

Why do you believer we may be the only creatures that exhibit sapience?

Homo Sapiens are very unlikely. If complex organisms were to evolve on another planet, they would most likely be cold blooded reptiles like the dinosaurs, who are superior than mammals in perhaps every way in terms of survivability. The mass extinction event that wiped out the dinosaurs was a BIG fluke. Of course, the alien dinosaurs may be wiped out in a similar fashion, but this is highly unlikely, there may be just several planets were this does occur in the entire universe, or none at all.

Now mammals are warm blooded, and as such suffer a severe disability; they harbour viruses. Cold blooded animals like the dinosaurs don't suffer this same disability, and without a mass extinction event, weak mammals cannot grow to dominate an ecosystem. And, my guess is, only mammals exhibit the kind of consciousness that could grow into a sapient consciousness capable of space travel.

But sure, I'm just a bigot. BTW, why was Fr0do banned? If you don't mind me asking.