From: Peter L Borst <[log in to unmask]>

>Still waiting here, to discuss. 

Me too.

I'm not expecting for my ideas to go "unchallenged"....but I'm not going to discuss a straw man.

I laid out a more specific scenario than what was posited as how local adaptation occurs in honeybees.  What had been said was:

"Nature follows no such plan in breeding of bees, adaptive traits are formed by the interbreedin of large populations without admixture from other regions. That is, evolutionary change takes place over long time periods with large gene pools. Local changes are temporary and short lived at best. That is, unless they are largely imaginary, which I suspect."

....I expanded on this, and showed how local adaptations can occur rather quickly in a "boom or bust" situation...and (most interesting to me) how it is analogous to some of the techniques used by humans to intentionally breed other organisms.

If you are under the impression that I'm advocating a creationist or intelligent design theory, then I apologize for misleading you.  As I said in my first reply on the subject, I'm hardly the first to animate natural process to illustrate them.  There is no implication of intentionality.

Whatever it is that "causes life" (be it God, intersection of physical laws, flying spaghetti monster, randomness, it's all a dream that started when i was born and ends when i die, etc), it works counter to entropy....it tends to organize.  This directionality doesn't need to be intentional, but it must have mechanisms via which it organizes.  Once again, if you don't like using the terms "tool" or "strategy" to describe these mechanisms, there is no need for you to do so.  To belabor the point when I do so isn't productive, as this is (again) common usage both in lay and scientific circles (not to mention published studies).

Just as a ball at the top of a hill "wants" to roll down the hill (or we could talk about potential energy...but we are talking about the same thing), life "wants" to persist.  "Wants" to reproduce.  Life that survives was able to adapt to a changing world in relation to that of its ancestors.

It appears that we can't get beyond simple semantics here.  I used terms in ways that they are commonly used...even in the world of science....and this has been the entire focus of the responses...nothing about the "meat" of my post.

All this discussion on intentionality is a distraction.  I don't think there is a "hand" guiding such things...but things that work (like sexual reproduction for large, multicellular organisms) tend to become "popular"...asexual reproduction is too prone to parasites...so almost everyone bigger than a pinhead uses sex.

Similarly, "Boom/Bust", "Inbreeding", "Fixing", "Outbreeding", "Hybrid vigor" are mechanisms by which evolution occurs.  It is a functional path from what is well adapted today to what is well adapted tomorrow.  A tool, a strategy by which evolution actually progresses in a changing world.

>It is not a trivial matter to discuss the meaning of strategy and tools in the context of evolution. 

Yes, things change once you add human intelligence into the equation...but the scenario that I laid out had nothing to do with humans...it had to do with what happens within large populations of bees when there is boom and bust.  You are welcome to have that discussion, but I'm not sure why there is an implication that this has anything to do with what I had posted about.

I'm on my way out, so I'll tell Mother Nature you said hello :)

deknow

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