RE: Natural Selection Seems Insufficient
20 minutes ago
Soooo, jumping in the on the initial premise of this entire thread [apologies, but 67 pages is too much for me to catch up on]:
Quote:Natural Selection Seems Insufficient
I suppose because, in a way, natural selection IS insufficient. Bear with me and I'll explain...
Evolution itself is a process - it "happens" via random mutations. It isn't a case of "evolution something how 'thinks' and thus does what is best for the organism" which I think some people assume is how it works.
As an example: Giraffes have long necks. This is [via evidence we have found of both the items I am going to mention] their food sauce started small, and grew taller to survive. But it was obviously not "knowingly" so - the smaller/lower to the ground food sauces got eaten quicker, thus died off before they had time to produce seeds. Thus those that survived were simply taller - this then effected the giraffe population in the same way. At first over time, nothing major would change, but as the food sauces got taller and taller, eventually only those animals with pysically longer necks would indeed be able to reach, thus the shorter animals would die off before they passed their new mutated genes on. And so on, and so forth.
And that's the point - evolution only favors those that get to live longer. Where the "natural selection" comes in is where the natural world favors something that then influences where this goes - For example, humans picking a partner based upon things we see: facial hair/eye colour etc - all of those things will ultimately factor into how humans now evolve over time. A more strange example: humans have been born with extra fingers - completely separately from each other all over the world. One could argue, that if [for some reason] a trend of "people are really hot that have extra fingers" comes around, we would most likely see an increase of babys born [later, from parents now with extra active fingers] until the general population now has 6 fingers - you could argue "well you can grip tools better" which might be true, but the ultimate cause in this example at least, is that it was a "natural selection" process to amend that. Not that this why we look the way we do, with x amount of digits etc, but thats the natural selection part via mate - where as other things come because those that have X mutation just live longer because it suits the environment etc.
Evolution ultimately is something that "happens" regardless if its actually beneficial or not. It helps "weed out" those that won't be able to reproduce, but of course with human beings certains changes are now no longer "natural world" style natural selection because we can actively choose what we like/not like in some circumstances etc.
Wall of text, but there we go
