From: John Wilkins (j.wilkins1@uq.edu.au)
Date: Wed 26 Oct 2005 - 08:31:41 GMT
On 26/10/2005, at 6:18 PM, Derek Gatherer wrote:
> At 22:04 25/10/2005, Dace wrote:
> [Snip Ted's intentional fallacy]
>> Instead of God
>> creating species, a combination of mutation and selection
>> determines it.
>>
>
> Excellent. Hoyle's fallacy finally gone. Yes, that is how species
> originate, you might say it is a single sentence precis of the
> "Origin of Species" (perhaps a pedant might demand "variation"
> replaces "mutation" in order not to force a Fisherian anachronism
> on Darwin)
But of course most speciation now is in fact thought to occur through
random variation and random fixation rather than by selection as
Darwin thought. There's good reason to think that some speciation is
due to selection, but not much. I worry that we think only that
Darwinian evolution is about selection (natural or sexual), when in
fact another really deep aspect of his view is common descent, and
this is not tied now to selection.
[snip]
-- John S. Wilkins, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Biohumanities Project University of Queensland - Blog: evolvethought.blogspot.com "Darwin's theory has no more to do with philosophy than any other hypothesis in natural science." Tractatus 4.1122 =============================================================== This was distributed via the memetics list associated with the Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission For information about the journal and the list (e.g. unsubscribing) see: http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit
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