Strictly speaking there is no such thing as ânatural selectionâ or âfitnessâ or âadaptationâ or even âevolutionâ. There are only patterns of physical objects, which increase or decrease in frequency over time in ways that are only loosely modeled by those terms.
But itâs practically impossible to talk about physical systems without fudging a bit of teleology in, so I donât think itâs a valid objection.
Yes, agreed. Teleology is still very useful in biology. Describing the above post with chemistry would be like describing a high level programing language using only NAND gates (I.e. not very useful).
So of course ânatural selection is not optimizing fitnessâ, since none of those things actually exist in the atoms, and electrons, and spacetime fabric, etc⌠that make up planet Earth.
i.e. There are no ânatural selectionâ molecules to be found anywhere.
And even the patterns are highly contingent on many factors, perhaps infinitely many, so they canât be said to have discrete, separable, relationships in the literal sense.
Itâs just convenient shorthand to describe something many people believe to be sufficiently understood enough among their peers, that they can get away with skipping some mental steps and verbage.
So natural selection is not optimizing fitness? Please elaborate. đ
Strictly speaking there is no such thing as ânatural selectionâ or âfitnessâ or âadaptationâ or even âevolutionâ. There are only patterns of physical objects, which increase or decrease in frequency over time in ways that are only loosely modeled by those terms.
But itâs practically impossible to talk about physical systems without fudging a bit of teleology in, so I donât think itâs a valid objection.
Yes, agreed. Teleology is still very useful in biology. Describing the above post with chemistry would be like describing a high level programing language using only NAND gates (I.e. not very useful).
So of course ânatural selection is not optimizing fitnessâ, since none of those things actually exist in the atoms, and electrons, and spacetime fabric, etc⌠that make up planet Earth.
i.e. There are no ânatural selectionâ molecules to be found anywhere.
And even the patterns are highly contingent on many factors, perhaps infinitely many, so they canât be said to have discrete, separable, relationships in the literal sense.
Itâs just convenient shorthand to describe something many people believe to be sufficiently understood enough among their peers, that they can get away with skipping some mental steps and verbage.