RE: Is artificial selection considered "evolution"?
March 12, 2012 at 5:45 pm
(This post was last modified: March 12, 2012 at 5:53 pm by The Grand Nudger.)
Neither the word natural or artificial needs pruning. Your understanding of the differences between the two either need to go through heavy vegetative, or is being intentionally pruned.
The ants have no understanding of what they are doing. The moisture levels of their mounds is the result of those ants which did not keep their mounds at this temperature and moisture level not being able to farm said fungus. What the ants feed the aphids has to do with the aphids not dying a terrible death. You are describing a symbiotic relationship between two creatures that have no conceptual understanding of that relationship whatsoever. Now this isn't to demean their accomplishment, they simply lack the processing power required to call this "artificial". Not only do they not understand what they are doing, they are physically incapable of understanding what they are doing. Our own processing power, in and of itself, was not capable of understanding this, we had to augment it. Ants do not hybridize their aphids, and they are wild captures. There is no central ant aphid breeding program. Other ants, which do not capture and keep them for milking and eventual death nevertheless milk aphids that they find out in the brush. Why is it that ants who farm fungus don't learn to farm fungus from other ants that do? Again, because a conceptual understanding is not how this behaviour emerged in the first place, to the best of our understanding.
Lets count the ways that aphid farming and cattle farming are similar.
1, we call them both farming
2, there is no two, one is it.
Help me out here, in what way am I failing to describe the distinction between what we call natural selection, and what we call artificial selection? Now, I love to talk about aphid farming, and all of the other things that animals do that might knock our own idea of ourselves down a peg. It doesn't take a whole lot of brains to keep cattle or aphids. But that isn't what we're talking about. NS, AS. They are simply words, they denote a difference in the process. How might I word this so that it becomes more clear?
![[Image: images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQy0vYs7CHucBExycM9B6B...zvMBAKLW23]](https://encrypted-tbn3.google.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQy0vYs7CHucBExycM9B6BC07Yjl8vy8NkckN-17xzvMBAKLW23)
Natural selection is on the left, artificial selection is on the right.
The ants have no understanding of what they are doing. The moisture levels of their mounds is the result of those ants which did not keep their mounds at this temperature and moisture level not being able to farm said fungus. What the ants feed the aphids has to do with the aphids not dying a terrible death. You are describing a symbiotic relationship between two creatures that have no conceptual understanding of that relationship whatsoever. Now this isn't to demean their accomplishment, they simply lack the processing power required to call this "artificial". Not only do they not understand what they are doing, they are physically incapable of understanding what they are doing. Our own processing power, in and of itself, was not capable of understanding this, we had to augment it. Ants do not hybridize their aphids, and they are wild captures. There is no central ant aphid breeding program. Other ants, which do not capture and keep them for milking and eventual death nevertheless milk aphids that they find out in the brush. Why is it that ants who farm fungus don't learn to farm fungus from other ants that do? Again, because a conceptual understanding is not how this behaviour emerged in the first place, to the best of our understanding.
Lets count the ways that aphid farming and cattle farming are similar.
1, we call them both farming
2, there is no two, one is it.
Help me out here, in what way am I failing to describe the distinction between what we call natural selection, and what we call artificial selection? Now, I love to talk about aphid farming, and all of the other things that animals do that might knock our own idea of ourselves down a peg. It doesn't take a whole lot of brains to keep cattle or aphids. But that isn't what we're talking about. NS, AS. They are simply words, they denote a difference in the process. How might I word this so that it becomes more clear?
Natural selection is on the left, artificial selection is on the right.
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