‘all life on Earth has descended with modification from a common pool of ancestors’
That’s pretty reasonable, but, yes, I might not have a good sense of what Richard means by “evolutionary theory”.
It’s also an empirical claim that any of the differences between real-world organisms in the same breeding population are heritable.
Yes! That’s a good qualification and important for lots of things.
But I think the claim that any/many differences are heritable was massively overdetermined by the time Darwin published his ideas/theory of evolution via natural selection. I think it’s easy to overlook the extremely strong prior that “organisms in the same breeding population” produce offspring that is almost always , and obviously, member of the same class/category/population. That certainly seems to imply that a huge variety of possible differences are obviously heritable.
I admit tho that it’s very difficult (e.g. for me) to adopt a reasonable ‘anti-perspective’. I also remember reading something not too long ago about how systematic animal breeding was extremely rare until relatively recently, so that’s possibly not as extremely strong of evidence as it now seems like it might have been (with the benefit of hindsight).
That’s pretty reasonable, but, yes, I might not have a good sense of what Richard means by “evolutionary theory”.
Yes! That’s a good qualification and important for lots of things.
But I think the claim that any/many differences are heritable was massively overdetermined by the time Darwin published his ideas/theory of evolution via natural selection. I think it’s easy to overlook the extremely strong prior that “organisms in the same breeding population” produce offspring that is almost always , and obviously, member of the same class/category/population. That certainly seems to imply that a huge variety of possible differences are obviously heritable.
I admit tho that it’s very difficult (e.g. for me) to adopt a reasonable ‘anti-perspective’. I also remember reading something not too long ago about how systematic animal breeding was extremely rare until relatively recently, so that’s possibly not as extremely strong of evidence as it now seems like it might have been (with the benefit of hindsight).