Strictly speaking there is no such thing as “natural selection” or “fitness” or “adaptation” or even “evolution”. 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 it’s practically impossible to talk about physical systems without fudging a bit of teleology in, so I don’t think it’s 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 ‘natural selection is not optimizing fitness’, 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 ‘natural selection’ molecules to be found anywhere.
And even the patterns are highly contingent on many factors, perhaps infinitely many, so they can’t be said to have discrete, separable, relationships in the literal sense.
It’s 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.
Strictly speaking there is no such thing as “natural selection” or “fitness” or “adaptation” or even “evolution”. 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 it’s practically impossible to talk about physical systems without fudging a bit of teleology in, so I don’t think it’s 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 ‘natural selection is not optimizing fitness’, 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 ‘natural selection’ molecules to be found anywhere.
And even the patterns are highly contingent on many factors, perhaps infinitely many, so they can’t be said to have discrete, separable, relationships in the literal sense.
It’s 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.