[–] eagleshigh 0 points 3 points 3 points (+3|-0) ago (edited ago)
Please explain how a selection process that's repeated every generation is teleological.
You understand that survival during a mass extinction is strongly predicated on chance right?
Do different genotypes respond to the same environment in different ways? Do the same genotypes respond to the same environment in different ways? New phenotypic changes brought about by changes in genotype are caused due to the arrival in a new environment, whether running from a predator or competing with a new competitor. Ie the process is unpredictable due to the myriad of ways one organism can migrate to a new habitat.
Many criticisms of Darwinism rest on a misunderstanding of the nature of teleology. Systems of biology that are end-seeking are thought to be end-directed, something that Darwinism makes no use of in its models. Outside biology - indeed, outside science - you can use external teleology all you like, but it does not work as an explanation of any phenomena other than those that are in fact the outcomes of agents like stock brokers. And even there, teleology is not always useful, for which stock brokers (or cabal of stockbrokers) desired the goal of the 1987 crash, or the 1930 depression? External teleology is useless in science, and any science that attempts to be teleological will shortly become mysticism.
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/evolphil/teleology.html
The question of whether or not large-scale historical trends in the design of organisms represent progress (i.e., improvement of design) has attracted attention since the beginning of evolutionary thought but has proved extremely resistant to objective analysis. Some of this difficulty reflects the range of time scales and phylogenetic contexts for which the question might be posed, but a more fundamental problem involves the definition of improvement itself. When improvement of design is discussed within the context of current evolutionary thought, it is frequently portrayed as the expected outcome of the sustained operation of natural selection on variation within populations. Such an interpretation of large-scale historical trends in morphology frequently involves some degree of orthoselection and/or adaptive replacement. An alternative interpretation is that many such trends reflect little more than the Markovian aspect of the evolutionary process. Trends do have a finite, and not always small, probability of occurrence in systems whose underlying causal structure behaves in a pseudorandom fashion. According to this second interpretation, the appropriate level for causal analysis may be well below that at which the trend is manifested. This is equivalent to suggesting that the causal basis of the trend may be extremely heterogeneous. Both selectionist and Markovian models of morphologic change can be tested, but it is always a particular model, defined by its own assumptions and boundary conditions, that is corroborated or refuted, not the whole class of selectionist or Markovian models. Certain large-scale morphologic trends documented in the fossil record (e.g., increases in brain size within mammals) indeed appear to represent the intermittent or sustained operation of directional selection. Other trends (e.g., changes in morphologic complexity or in amount of genetic information within most phyla or classes) show patterns that are best interpreted as a simple random walk or a branching process (depending on the phylogenetic structure of the problem). However, a large number of trends (e.g., body size within certain higher taxa) can be explained by “diffusion” models or models of branching processes in which directionality is imposed by the position of the initial state of the system relative to the total range of accessible states. Because of the frequency of environmental change, the multiplicity of factors underlying fitness, the possibility of frequency-dependent and epistatic interactions among features, and the consequent possibility of nontransitive fitness relations between phenotypes, selection acting within populations frequently, though not inevitably, fails to produce unidirectional trends. The extent to which unidirectional trends dominate, or fail to dominate, the fossil record is therefore not a measure of the adequacy of neo-Darwinian mechanisms as causes of large-scale patterns in evolution.
http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-3-642-70831-2_6
The minimal complexity of vertebral columns probably did not change (indeed, the actual minimum seems to have remained close to the theoretical minimum), ancestor-descendant comparisons in subclades of mammals reveals no branching bias, and the mean subclade skew was negative, all pointing to a passive system.
https://sites.duke.edu/mcshearesearch/files/2014/03/Mechanisms-HQ.pdf
Get with the pogrom.
@SarMegahhikkitha @bojangles @watitdew @crensch @stretched_girl @bilbo_swaggins
[–] Antiracist6 ago
Read Nagel's book. Take notes. Summarize it.
Page 284: https://books.google.com/books?id=bKpnXhUrWtgC&q=Biology#v=onepage&q=Gerd%20sommerhoff&f=false
[–] Antiracist10 ago
https://books.google.com/books/content?id=bKpnXhUrWtgC&pg=PA154&img=1&pgis=1&dq=teleology&sig=ACfU3U13GSH3FeTF0Q1PZPk7Uw2d135ZHw&edge=0