Berkeley’s “Understanding Evolution” Website Explains Natural Selection

_{Cornelius Hunter

July 13, 2015

Intelligent Design}

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With a small army of evolutionists working on it, and several National Science Foundation grants funding it, the University of California at Berkeley’s “Understanding Evolution” website has a surprising number of errors. One of the more egregious ones is on a page that is intended to clarify the concept of natural selection. It is entitled “Misconceptions about natural selection,” but it begins with what is perhaps the worst of all: “natural selection can produce amazing adaptations.” Read more

Comments

ES58: well, first it selected something that gave it an advantage, then another, then another, and, pretty soon, you got where you are now.
Instead of "selected" one should rather say "leaves untouched":
"first it leaves untouched something that gave it an advantage, then another, then another, and, pretty soon, you got where you are now".
Natural selection is the grim reaper. Things only have a chance when it is inactive.Box_{July 13, 2015
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Time for sit in at berkeley eh. The great point is that THEY NEED to do a website because of the power of modern creationism and criticism of evolutionism. they are talking behind the scenes and afraid. they need a army but it won't save them. They have already lost.its unlikely serious criticism of a science idea will end in the idea prevailing. Evolution should not be under so much stress if it was a scientific idea and plain right.Robert Byers_{July 13, 2015
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Mung, It is painful reading Lizzie as she has already shown that she doesn't understand natural selection. It is more than just mere differential reproduction. You can have differential reproduction absent of natural selection. In order for there to be natural selection that differential reproduction has to be due to heritable happenstance mutation, ie heritable random genetic change. Dr Hunter wrote:
If a mutation occurs which improves differential reproduction, then it propagates into future generations.
And the TSZ ilk scream that he omits variation as part of natural selection! Really?! Futuyma says the following about adaptation:
An adaptation is a characteristic that enhances the survival or reproduction of organisms that bear it, relative to alternative character states (especially the ancestral condition in the population in which the adaptation evolved).
Compare to Lizzie:
And “adaptation” is the name we give to variants that are preferentially reproduced.
"We" doesn't include evolutionary biologists...Virgil Cain_{July 13, 2015
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"well, first it selected something that gave it an advantage, then another" But Es58, that does not even begin to explain how the fantastic mechanism was assembled. Has to assembled before it can be selected. Natural Selection had no role. Needless to say, Natural Selection does squat (doesn't do squat?) at the magical bio machinery level lol. Do you believe in magic?ppolish_{July 13, 2015
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es58- There isn't any selecting going on. From "What Evolution Is", Mayr, page 117:
What Darwin called natural selection is actually a process of elimination.
Page 118:
Do selection and elimination differ in their evolutionary consequences? This question never seems to have been raised in the evolutionary literature. A process of selection would have a concrete objective, the determination of the “best” or “fittest” phenotype. Only a relatively few individuals in a given generation would qualify and survive the selection procedure. That small sample would be only to be able to preserve only a small amount of the whole variance of the parent population. Such survival selection would be highly restrained.

By contrast, mere elimination of the less fit might permit the survival of a rather large number of individuals because they have no obvious deficiencies in fitness. Such a large sample would provide, for instance, the needed material for the exercise of sexual selection. This also explains why survival is so uneven from season to season. The percentage of the less fit would depend on the severity of each year’s environmental conditions.
Contingent serendipity is a better term but that obviously doesn't have the hypnotizing sound-byte quality of "natural selection".Virgil Cain_{July 13, 2015
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Mung@7: well, first it selected something that gave it an advantage, then another, then another, and, pretty soon, you got where you are now; I think that's how it supposedly goes; it's too long ago to figure out what the exact sequence was, but, it just kept going til it got where it is now; and, I'm sure someone who's clever could probably describe how at least a few of those steps made sense, and the rest would be by inference. what am I missing? Isn't that pretty much how the whole process works? And every other life form came about the same way. So, why should this one be any different? As dumb as this may all sound, the question can still be asked, why pick this mechanism over any other? Either it's all absurd, or it all makes some kind of sense.es58_{July 13, 2015
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Just what it says. It's a fantastic mechanism. What role do you think natural selection plays in it?Mung_{July 13, 2015
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About the chameleon's ability to change color, Dr Hunter says: "It is a fantastic mechanism and, needless to say, natural selection plays no role in it." OK, although it's "needless to say" would anyone here care to say why? Thankses58_{July 13, 2015
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C.Hunter: It [natural selection] selects for survival that which already exists. Natural selection has no role in the mutation event. It does not induce mutations, helpful or otherwise, to occur. According to evolutionary theory every single mutation, leading to every single species, is a random event with respect to need.
NS just destroys valuable information. It makes the blind search from bacteria to man even more improbable. Every time a highly improbable blind search comes up with something most of it is destroyed by "helpful" natural selection.Box_{July 13, 2015
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Darwinian evolution is an optimizing system because it increases fitness. As with all such systems, it suffers from several serious problems such as overfitting, getting stuck in local maxima/minima or simply dying as a result of a combinatorial explosion. These problems are the bane of all the current optimizers used in AI research: genetic algorithms (GA), deep neural networks, reinforcement learners, etc. There is nothing wrong with optimizers if your search space is small and well delineated. But the moment the search space becomes realistic, optimizers become a problem in search of a solution. The only way to break out of the rut is to not optimize. This is why the brain does not optimize. It discovers. And this is why AI research is stuck in a rut in spite of the recent successes.Mapou_{July 13, 2015
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Meanwhile over at TSZ they think "adaptation" is just "whatever survives natural selection" and fault Dr. Hunter for not understanding this basic fact of evolutionary theory.Mung_{July 13, 2015
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Another superb article by Dr. Hunter that points out the flawed thinking that is used to prop-up Darwinism. To reiterate what he said, understanding structure, function and mechanism does NOT "prove evolution did it."OldArmy94_{July 13, 2015
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Intelligent selection for traits by humans is a well known fact of biology. It follows that nature, being so much more intelligent than humans, can select for much more sophisticated designs and over much longer periods of time. This is what we call natural selection.Mung_{July 13, 2015
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