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Carey: . . . 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.
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Yeah, essentially survival and perpetuation of the traits/individuals that are the “fittest.†I don’t doubt that life “evolves†and that the traits that result in higher survival and reproduction rates are going to, well, survive and reproduce at higher rates . . . I mean how could it be otherwise? All we need do is attempt to determine the specific traits/individuals that are actually surviving and reproducing at higher rates, and we simply back into our predictions—can’t go wrong unless we somehow misidentified the required traits, in which case we’d simply reassess things, maybe get more grant money for more “research,†re-determine the required traits, and eventually a correct prediction is inevitable, even for a “fawning undergrad psych student,†using one of MM’s characterizations.
Hell Carey, using your paradigm of evolution driven by differential reproductive success, I’ll even make a prediction: Since atheists typically have lower birth rates, and are also a rather small percentage of the population, I’d predict that folk having religious traits will continue to have more offspring than atheists . . . but then the Bible has more or less already predicted that religious folk will inherit the earth.