This is something I still don’t understand very well about evolution. They need it, and therefore they develop it? Is there anything that leads them to develop it, or is this related to the “evolving to extinction” chapter?
I’m not a biologist or anything, but I think I’m competent enough to answer this question.
You’ll often see biology framed in teleological terms. That is, you’ll often see it framed in terms that seem to indicate that natural selection is purposeful, like a person or God (agent) would be. I’ll try to reframe this explanation in non-teleological terms. Animal husbandry/selective breeding/artificial selection is a good way to get an idea of how traits become more frequent in populations, and it just seems less mysterious because it happens on shorter timescales and humans set the selection criteria.
Imagine you have some wolves. You want to breed them such that eventually you’ll have a generation of wolves that will do your bidding. Some of the wolves are nicer than others, and, rightly, wolves like these are the ones that you believe will be fit to do your bidding. You notice that nice wolves are more likely to have nice parents, and that nice wolves are more likely to give birth to nice pups. So, you prevent the mean wolves from reproducing by some means, and allow the nicest wolves to mate. You re-apply your selection criterion of Niceness to the next generation, allowing only the nicest wolves to mate. Before long, the only wolves you have around are nice wolves that you have since decided to call dogs.
In artificial selection, the selection criterion is Whatever Humans Want. In natural selection, the selection criterion is reproductive fitness; the environment ‘decides’ (see how easy it is to fall into teleology?) what reproduces. Non-teleologically, organisms with more adaptive traits are more likely to reproduce than organisms with less adaptive traits, and therefore the frequency of those traits in the population increases with time. Rather than thinking of natural selection as ‘a thing that magically develops stuff,’ imagine it as a process that selects the most adaptive traits among all possible traits. So, we’re not so much making traits out of thin air as we are picking the most adaptive traits out of a great many possibilities. You didn’t magically imbue the wolves with niceness; niceness was a possible trait among all possible traits, and you narrowed down the possibilities by only letting the nice wolves mate, until at one point you only had nice wolves left.
Like the things that we discussed earlier in the welcome thread, teleological explanations of biology are artifacts of natural language and human psychology. Well before humans spoke of biology, we spoke of agents, and this is often reflected in our language use. As a result, it’s also often much more concise to speak in teleological terms. Compare, “Life forms need to be able to mentally model each other, and thus develop modeling software,” with my explanations above. Teleological explanations are also often a product of the aforementioned mental-modeling software itself, just as we have historically anthropomorphized natural phenomena as deities. Very importantly, accurate biological explanations that are framed teleologically can be reframed in non-teleological terms, as opposed to explanations that are fundamentally teleological.
Please feel free to ask questions if I didn’t explain myself well. And to others, please correct me if I’ve made an error.
No, you explained that really well!! Everything is a lot less fuzzy now! Thank you :) I think with science, the first time I read it, it makes sense to me, but I had such a bad habit of filing scientific facts into the “things you learn in school but don’t really need to remember for real life” category of my brain that now, even when I actually care about learning new information, it still takes multiple explanations, and sometimes one really good one like yours, before it really start to sink in for me.
I’m not a biologist or anything, but I think I’m competent enough to answer this question.
You’ll often see biology framed in teleological terms. That is, you’ll often see it framed in terms that seem to indicate that natural selection is purposeful, like a person or God (agent) would be. I’ll try to reframe this explanation in non-teleological terms. Animal husbandry/selective breeding/artificial selection is a good way to get an idea of how traits become more frequent in populations, and it just seems less mysterious because it happens on shorter timescales and humans set the selection criteria.
Imagine you have some wolves. You want to breed them such that eventually you’ll have a generation of wolves that will do your bidding. Some of the wolves are nicer than others, and, rightly, wolves like these are the ones that you believe will be fit to do your bidding. You notice that nice wolves are more likely to have nice parents, and that nice wolves are more likely to give birth to nice pups. So, you prevent the mean wolves from reproducing by some means, and allow the nicest wolves to mate. You re-apply your selection criterion of Niceness to the next generation, allowing only the nicest wolves to mate. Before long, the only wolves you have around are nice wolves that you have since decided to call dogs.
In artificial selection, the selection criterion is Whatever Humans Want. In natural selection, the selection criterion is reproductive fitness; the environment ‘decides’ (see how easy it is to fall into teleology?) what reproduces. Non-teleologically, organisms with more adaptive traits are more likely to reproduce than organisms with less adaptive traits, and therefore the frequency of those traits in the population increases with time. Rather than thinking of natural selection as ‘a thing that magically develops stuff,’ imagine it as a process that selects the most adaptive traits among all possible traits. So, we’re not so much making traits out of thin air as we are picking the most adaptive traits out of a great many possibilities. You didn’t magically imbue the wolves with niceness; niceness was a possible trait among all possible traits, and you narrowed down the possibilities by only letting the nice wolves mate, until at one point you only had nice wolves left.
Like the things that we discussed earlier in the welcome thread, teleological explanations of biology are artifacts of natural language and human psychology. Well before humans spoke of biology, we spoke of agents, and this is often reflected in our language use. As a result, it’s also often much more concise to speak in teleological terms. Compare, “Life forms need to be able to mentally model each other, and thus develop modeling software,” with my explanations above. Teleological explanations are also often a product of the aforementioned mental-modeling software itself, just as we have historically anthropomorphized natural phenomena as deities. Very importantly, accurate biological explanations that are framed teleologically can be reframed in non-teleological terms, as opposed to explanations that are fundamentally teleological.
Please feel free to ask questions if I didn’t explain myself well. And to others, please correct me if I’ve made an error.
No, you explained that really well!! Everything is a lot less fuzzy now! Thank you :) I think with science, the first time I read it, it makes sense to me, but I had such a bad habit of filing scientific facts into the “things you learn in school but don’t really need to remember for real life” category of my brain that now, even when I actually care about learning new information, it still takes multiple explanations, and sometimes one really good one like yours, before it really start to sink in for me.