#natural-selection

[faithfulnews]

Responding to Lightner’s Comments on Natural Selection: Points of Agreement and Disagreement

My paper was criticizing what Guliuzza has publicly written in which he denies the reality of natural selection: a claim that he has never publicly retracted.

Go to the article

[faithfulnews]

Responding to Lightner’s Comments on Natural Selection: Points of Agreement and Disagreement

My paper was criticizing what Guliuzza has publicly written in which he denies the reality of natural selection: a claim that he has never publicly retracted.

Go to the article

[ravi]

Life, Structure and Natural Selection

BI/Quanta have an exciting piece describing the work of MIT physicist Jeremy England in trying to explain the physical principles underlying life. Of tangential interest is the following bit, which parallels and possibly vindicates one half of Jerry Fodor's criticism of Natural Selection: > Having an overarching principle of life and evolution would give researchers a broader perspective on the emergence of structure and function in living things, many of the researchers said. “Natural selection doesn’t explain certain characteristics,” said Ard Louis, a biophysicist at Oxford University, in an email. These characteristics include a heritable change to gene expression called methylation, increases in complexity in the absence of natural selection, and certain molecular changes Louis has recently studied. > > If England’s approach stands up to more testing, it could further liberate biologists from seeking a Darwinian explanation for every adaptation and allow them to think more generally in terms of dissipation-driven organization. They might find, for example, that “the reason that an organism shows characteristic X rather than Y may not be because X is more fit than Y, but because physical constraints make it easier for X to evolve than for Y to evolve,” Louis said.