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Old May 30th, 2006, 09:59 AM
Carey N Carey N is offline
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Join Date: Jul 2004
Location: New Jersey
Posts: 138
Default Re: Emergent Networks and Fine Art

Quote:
Originally Posted by Fred
whereas I see [natural selection] as being a circular explanation, that ultimately doesn’t really explain all that much, for the obvious fact that life “evolves.”
Well, you see it wrong, my friend. Evolutionism is a belief because Richard Dawkins says so? Give me a break - if I were to tell you that such-and-such were true because Dawkins says so, without actually substantiating my argument, you would readily rip me a new one.

PLEASE, Fred, go read an intro textbook on evolutionary biology and then come back to tell me that you still believe that it "doesn't explain all that much" - I'm going to provide you here with one example illustrating that you are mistaken. I encourage you to find out about others, which are abundant and all very interesting.

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Parasitoid wasps lay their eggs inside the bodies of other animals, often caterpillars of some kind. The eggs hatch and then consume their hosts from within before emerging to pupate and metamorphose into an adult (BTW . . . explain to me why a benevolent Intelligence would ever put together such an arrangement). As you may or may not know, wasps possess an unusual mechanism of sex determination (haplodiploidy) - when a mother allows one of her eggs to be fertilized by a sperm, the egg developes into a diploid female offspring. When a mother lays an unfertilized egg, it develops into a haploid male. Thus, these wasps have relatively precise control over the sex of their individual progeny.

Crucially, in parasitoid wasps, females benefit more from larger body size than males (due to the demands of egg production, finding hosts in which to lay eggs, etc.). Adult body size in these insects is directly related to the amount of food available during the early part of their lives - i.e., when they were inside their unfortunate caterpillar hosts. Because 1) females benefit more from larger adult body size than males; 2) a given mother wasp can roughly predict the amount of food available to her offspring (by gauging the size of the larvae into which she is laying eggs); and 3) mother wasps have control over the sex of individual offspring; it was PREDICTED that mother waps will preferentially lay female offspring in larger host larvae, and male offspring in smaller host larvae. This prediction relies completely upon the paradigm of evolution driven by differential reproductive success: mother wasps that bias the sex ratio of their offspring toward females when laying eggs into large hosts will have more grand-children in the long run than mother wasps that do not do this, leading to the fixation of sex ratio bias behavior. Some famous experiments by Charnov in the 1980's, and an abundance of work thereafter, confirmed that this is the case. In many instances, there is not only a qulitative but also a quantitative match between predicted sex ratio bias and that observed under experimental conditions.

The above example illustrates that evolutionism 1) explains not just that life evolved, but also how and why it evolved, and 2) makes testable predictions . . . two things that you have repeatedly denied out of a lack of understanding of natural selection, and a lack of reading experience in this field of science. So, Fred, give it a rest until you can come back and dish out an argument, rather than a statement of personal conviction, on this matter.
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