The story of evolution
The "Truth" issue:
Mayr (page 5)
What is the story? Who wrote it?
Darwin was a good story teller?
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"evolutionism" (p 5)
As an example of a distinction between two story telling styles
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non-narrative: things are the way they are because they are part of a larger fixed and unchanging pattern, usually reflecting a plan or intention whose origins itself are not accessible (or at least not easily accessible) to human beings | things are the way they are because of change over time; admits of possibility of no fixed pattern either in past or future |
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Darwinian/evolutionary story telling | Other kinds of story telling |
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Population thinking and continuous largely undirected change
| Essentialism
Finalism
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Raised issues not only about past but about future (predictability? progress? purpose/meaning?).
"Evolution in the sense of common ancestry might be true, but evolution in the neo-Darwinian sense -- an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection -- is not. Any system of thought that denies or seeks to explain away the overwhelming evidence for design in biology is ideology, not science" ... Christopher Schönborn, New York Times, 2005 |
Raises issues also about science, literature, life?
On randomness and order
"It is sometimes claimed that evolution, by producing order, is in conflict with the "law of entropy" of physics, according to which evolutionary change should produce an increase of disorder. Actually, there is no conflict, because the law of entropy is valid only for closed systems, whereas the evolution of a species of organisms takes place in an open system in which organisms can reduce entropy at the expense of the environment and the sun supplies a continuing source of energy" (p 8)
Directionless change ("expansion", consistent with "law of entropy") can yield directed change; the two are not only not in conflict but may be mutually dependent. See |
Will deal with all the above in more detail, but first the principal question for a scientific story:
What are the observations being summarized?
Not quite the same thing as "evidence for evolution" (p12) ... supported by such an overwhelming amount of evidence that it could no longer be called a theory ... had to be considered a fact, like ethnocentricity ... most inferences made by evolutionists have by now been tested successfully so often that they are accepted as certainties" ... for better or for worse? |
Clumpy diversity |
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Can do #1-5 with "common descent" (p 21) and reproduction with variance
Need differential survival for #6?
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