Harvesting – An Alternative to Natural Selection

Has Alfred Russel also muzzled John A. Davison from any further participation on his thread as William Dembski and Gil Dodgen already have? JohnADavison

I don't get it. How does harvesting differ from any other environmental factor that might cause death? Someone said a lightning strike, and that sounds reasonable, but some trees survive a lightning strike. Is there something I am missing? Chiefley

Natural selection is both very real and very important. It prevents change. Just as nature abhors a vacuum so She abhors change and will resist it as She always has right down to inevitable extinction as the fossil record so clearly testifies. Don't take my word for it. "The struggle for existence and natural selection are not progressive agencies, but being, on the contrary, conservative, maintain the standard." Leo Berg, Nomogenesis, page 406 It is perfectly clear that selection can accomplish nothing more than the establishment of intraspecific varieties and subspecific races none of which are incipient species in any event. Natural selection, the sine qua non of the Darwinian myth, never had anything to do with the appearance of any true species or of any other higher taxanomic category. Get used to it as Leo Berg, Pierre Grasse, Otto Schindewolf, William Bateson, Reginald C. Punnett, Robert Broom all did: and so have I! JohnADavison

@skeech 1: "which incidentally is why it's false to say, as many opponents of Darwinian evolotion do, that natural selection is a tautology" You're correct. However "many opponents" say that "survival of the fittest" is a tautology not "natural selection". Everybody agrees with natural selection, but not everybody agrees that natural selection is a perfect filter "preserving and adding up all that is good". Anyway selection doesn't create new things. critiacrof

Wow, the standard is dropping. Google genetic drift. eintown

If the Harvesting Effect is real, then Darwinists must differentiate its effects from that of natural selection. So far this issue has not been addressed. Harvesting or the Harvesting Effect is a hypothesis in epidemiology. It occurs when an agent causes death in an individual who would die or enter a hospital in any case within a few days of exposure to the agent. The idea is that the agent - the assigned determining factor in death - is irrelevant. Had the patient been generally healthier they would not have succumbed to the agent. Again, had they not been exposed to the agent they would have been dead anyway within a short time. Therefore, assigning the agent as the cause of death is not truly correct. So apparently he's saying its often incorrect to ascribe features of life to agents. JT

Alfred, I'm afraid I don't see the problem. Natural selection doesn't "care" about what causes the death of particular individuals; it only cares about whether a particular trait is beneficial on average to those who possess it. A particular individual, though perfectly fit, can be killed by lightning, while a less fit individual standing next to him happens to survive [which incidentally is why it's false to say, as many opponents of Darwinian evolotion do, that natural selection is a tautology]. But the fact that fitter individuals sometimes perish doesn't prevent natural selection from working; it's enough that fitter individuals survive and reproduce better on average. Thus, the harvesting effect will not keep natural selection from happening. skeech

I may be mistaken, but I don't get the point. It doesn't matter what the causal agent was, but only that the organism dies. If it was going to die anyway, it doesn't matter if some other agent kills it. If it wasn't going to die for selective reasons, and some agent kills it, this is called genetic drift. ihateaphids