The problem is that there is no mechanism in the process of natural selection for stuffing that foresight generated by brains back into the genome. Learn all you want but it isn’t passed onto you kids via your genes. That’s the rub. That’s why natural selection is blind to the future. The idea that natural selection is blind is perfectly accurate.
That’s also true for the small minority of organisms on the planet that actually have brains that predict the future. So I am talking about the instance of natural selection operating on this planet. Your idea is not a valid notion even when restricted to down to the minority instance of human evolution. I gave you that specific example of humans in the last comment.
We do not predict the future via natural selection, and our predictions about the future do not become translated into a form which can be transmitted via the genome for future selection. Natural selection can only select with hindsight. It can only select after a prediction works and only on the genes that produced the predictor and not the prediction.
BTW, the leaf fall that trees perform is a kind of prediction. It wasn’t generated by induction, or foresight. It was generated by simple pruning, falsification of bad hypothesis (mutations) on whether and when to drop leaves. Natural selection produced an organism that does prediction without doing any prediction on it’s own.
Tim,
The problem is that there is no mechanism in the process of natural selection for stuffing that foresight generated by brains back into the genome. Learn all you want but it isn’t passed onto you kids via your genes. That’s the rub. That’s why natural selection is blind to the future. The idea that natural selection is blind is perfectly accurate.
That’s also true for the small minority of organisms on the planet that actually have brains that predict the future. So I am talking about the instance of natural selection operating on this planet. Your idea is not a valid notion even when restricted to down to the minority instance of human evolution. I gave you that specific example of humans in the last comment.
We do not predict the future via natural selection, and our predictions about the future do not become translated into a form which can be transmitted via the genome for future selection. Natural selection can only select with hindsight. It can only select after a prediction works and only on the genes that produced the predictor and not the prediction.
BTW, the leaf fall that trees perform is a kind of prediction. It wasn’t generated by induction, or foresight. It was generated by simple pruning, falsification of bad hypothesis (mutations) on whether and when to drop leaves. Natural selection produced an organism that does prediction without doing any prediction on it’s own.