Glen > No, I don't agree. I had intended to reply to Dave's (twice repeated) > question about the speed of evolution with this response. But I'll do it, > here, anyway. Remember that I'm not a biologist. So, corrections of what I > say are more than welcome. It seems to me that natural selection is > multi-grained. Even if we reject the general concept of group selection, I > think it's safe to say that something like our "dopaminergic system" can be > selected for or against just as well as some behavior like fight or flight. > At the very least, we can talk about the speed of evolution in bacteria and > the idea that we are covered in, and filled with bacteria (which affects our > survivability in the face of what we eat and breathe). But you're right that > I would NOT argue that the map from mechanism to phenomenon is simple. > Selection is phenomenal. However, the structure of the systems being > operated on are not merely 2-layer gen-phen systems. They're a complex > convolution of 2-layer systems, some fast, some slow, some tiny, some large, > etc., all inter-embedded with each other. The phenomenal "function" of one > 2-layer part might well be considered the generative mechanism of another > 2-layer part. > > So, no, natural selection doesn't simply select function. Even if > *technically* true, that's an over-simplification. I DO agree with this last point. However, my argument should be more correctly that *IF* we are going to make a drastic oversimplification of natural selection,reducing it to *selecting for form* to the exclusion of *selecting for function* is not warranted, except perhaps to make the point that the vice-versa is also bogus? I responded (reacted) to your seeming to prefer the form over the function and suggested that bias might be because it was more easily measured/quantified?
I agree that natural selection is multiscale and that one must consider selection of the "ecosystem of self" which would include the human microbiome, which based on generational scale alone would be presumed to evolve much more quickly than humans whose characteristic reproductive time scale is on the order of decades rather than days or even hours. I can't tell if we are converging or if we are refolding in the subthreads that Dave and Nick (and others) intended. Threads here seem to easily/naturally diverge (fray?). > > > On 02/21/2018 11:59 AM, Steven A Smith wrote: >> But don't you agree that *physiology* is NOT what is being directly >> selected for, but rather what is more directly *expressed* from what is >> *encoded* (genome) (therefore easier to identify/detect/measure). Is it >> not *function* rather than *form* which is being selected? Isn't that >> the point of *exaptation*, that one phenotypic element originally >> selected for around *one* context/utility function trips into another >> context with an entirely different utility? ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove
