Perspectives on Evolution

[The Grand Nudger]

There most definitely is a gene pool, it is a thing, and it is undergoing a process over time.  DNA isn't theoretical.

All words are shorthand for something, Benny. All of them. The simplest concept being built out of elaborate logical/linguistic/sensory underpinnings, and all that jazz.

[bennyboy]

There most definitely is a gene pool, it is a thing, and it is undergoing a process over time.  DNA isn't theoretical.

All words are shorthand for something, Benny.  All of them.  The simplest concept being built out of elaborate logical/linguistic/sensory underpinnings, and all that jazz.

"Gene pool" isn't "DNA."  DNA is a sequence of chemical markers arranged in a helix.  The gene pool is. . . what?  Over generations of individual members of a species, how would you describe the thing that is the gene pool?

[The Grand Nudger]

It's any collection of DNA being considered, at whatever resolution you choose to consider it.  It could be the gene pool of our species.  It could be the gene pool of a distinct subgroup in our species..or it could be the gene pool of all extant species.

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-this was previously explained to you, in this thread, btw.  The example of the board with lights.

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I have to ask, do you also have these objections to the term "car pool" ?

[Whateverist]

Evolution is one of the areas in science that bother me.  It's not that I don't believe in it-- in fact, I think evolution is a fundamental property of any system with complexity, bonded interactions, and time.

My problem is that when we talk about the evolution of a species, we are talking about a species as though it's a thing.  This strikes me as somewhat mythological: humans cannot evolve (except in a different sense intellectually perhaps), but what it means to be human is slowly shifting-- there's a kind of Archetypal Man who is changing over time, both genetically and memetically (if I can coin that term).


So what, exactly, is changing over time?  Nothing, in fact, is changing, at all, ever, in evolution, any more than colors change from red to blue in a rainbow.  Nothing is developed, and yet it obviously IS developed.

Heck, the only thing separating one species from another is the inability to interbreed.  That means that, over enough time, a species becomes an entirely different species in the sense that it could no longer breed with the species it had been before.  Sometimes one population of a species isolated from the rest will evolve to the point where it can no longer breed with the rest of the population which remains largely unchanged.

I don't think that really poses any big problem though.  Very little is really static, certainly not amongst living things.  

That's my initial take, now I'll go see where the discussion has gone.

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Philosophy? Religion for atheists.

Not if you do it right.

[bennyboy]

It's any collection of DNA being considered, at whatever resolution you choose to consider it.  It could be the gene pool of our species.  It could be the gene pool of a distinct subgroup in our species..or it could be the gene pool of all extant species.

Is it, though? Or is it a narrative about a hypothetical collection of genes?

I have to ask, do you also have these objections to the term "car pool" ?

I don't object to the term gene pool-- it's a useful term; however, I think it gets used as a "thing" word rather than as what I think it is-- part of the narrative of the idea of genetic contribution-- i.e., a placeholder word to represent something like "sum of all DNA of a collection of individual organisms, whatever that happens to be."

In the end, if I ask "what evolves," I'm looking for a thing which may actually undergo the process. I suspect that evolution is more of a label for changes in samples than a process which anything can be said to be undergoing.

[The Grand Nudger]

It's any collection of DNA being considered, at whatever resolution you choose to consider it.  It could be the gene pool of our species.  It could be the gene pool of a distinct subgroup in our species..or it could be the gene pool of all extant species.

Is it, though?  Or is it a narrative about a hypothetical collection of genes?

If we have a bucket...and in that bucket, we have water with bleach and some blue food coloring....and we call that our "Bucket Pool"......are you going to insist that the bucket pool isn't a thing?  If we add red food coloring, are you going to insist that the bucket pool hasn't changed?

Is the bucket pool a narrative about a hypothetical collection of chemical constituents....or is it a term for an actual collection of chemical constituents?

[bennyboy]

Is it, though?  Or is it a narrative about a hypothetical collection of genes?

If we have a bucket...and in that bucket, we have water with bleach and some blue food coloring....and we call that our "Bucket Pool"......are you going to insist that the bucket pool isn't a thing?  If we add red food coloring, are you going to insist that the bucket pool hasn't changed?

If the bucket pool was an indeterminate number of individual bodies of water, yes, I'd say it wasn't a thing.  But it's not.  That's an actually single collection of water molecules, not a conceptual one.  If you said our conceptual bucket was "all those bodies of water with a P.H. of about 7.0" and you then went around adding acid or bases, then that might be a better parallel.

[Anomalocaris]

Yeah, it's metaphors like "gene pool" that I was talking about.  I don't think there IS a gene pool, i.e. as a thing which is undergoing a process over time.  Clearly, those words are a mathematical shorthand for a theoretical sum of the DNA of organisms who match our ideas of what "human" means, either in a subset or overall.

What do you think there is when there is a population of creatures sharing sufficient genetic similarity such that they can interbreed and exchange genes amongst themselves, but not breed with those from outside the population, thus confining the interbreeding into discrete pools?

[chimp3]

The evolutionary process does not care what we know or think about it. Darwin did not describe it until it had already been happening for billions of years. It would have occurred whether we knew about it or not.

[The Grand Nudger]

If we have a bucket...and in that bucket, we have water with bleach and some blue food coloring....and we call that our "Bucket Pool"......are you going to insist that the bucket pool isn't a thing?  If we add red food coloring, are you going to insist that the bucket pool hasn't changed?

If the bucket pool was an indeterminate number of individual bodies of water, yes, I'd say it wasn't a thing.  But it's not.  That's an actually single collection of water molecules, not a conceptual one. 

If I told you my bucket pool was the contents of two buckets, is it suddenly not a thing.  Does the water disappear or something..when there's more than one bucket?   

If you said our conceptual bucket was "all those bodies of water with a P.H. of about 7.0" and you then went around adding acid or bases, then that might be a better parallel.

So, if i added specificity..like..the gene pool of species x, or of subspecies y, or of all species.........and then I started adding species z...or subtracting some........