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Date: | Sat, 7 Oct 2023 13:50:00 -0400 |
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I think this is relevant:
"Darwinism says many things, especially about our species, which are too obviously false to be believed by any educated person; or at least by an educated person who retains any capacity at all for critical thought." — David Stove (1995)
Stove went to great pains to emphasize that by challenging Darwin and his interpreters, he was not joining the Creationist camp. Darwin and others laid the groundwork for further exploration of what constitutes evolution. To criticize Darwin is like saying a piano is an inadequate instrument with which to perform a wide range of music. That's not a slur on the piano. Obviously, music consists of much more than piano sonatas.
It is pretty clear that evolution contains no purposeful action, other than the urge to keep on living. All organisms proceed as if their goal is to survive, and reproduce if possible. But this is circular: the ones that survive are the ones that survive. There is no particular prediction which can be made as to how they will survive, whether by being smarter, faster, or by finding some niche like the gut of another organism.
Langstroth fell into the same error as everyone else: thinking that the honey bee is on this Earth for the purpose of providing services to humankind. By housing bees we make them into something different from what they are when they are completely wild. The proposal to liberate them from our "nefarious purposes" makes little sense to me, though.
The thing that gets lost in all of these discussions is the role of variation. Without variation, there would be no evolution, no differences for selection to act upon. The infinite variety of life forms is one its key features, and infinity variety can hardly be assigned a purpose. Variation is the driver, without variation the whole world might be covered with Archaea.
PLB
There is hardly any question in biology of more importance than this of the nature and causes of variability. —Weismann (1882)
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