Evolution quotes 15 Apr 2010 Natural Selection is not Evolution. Yet, ever since the the two words have been in common use, the theory of Natural Selection has been employed as a convenient abbreviation for the theory of Evolution by means of Natural Selection, put forward by Darwin and Wallace. [Ronald Aylmer Fisher, The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection, 1930: 1] Evolution History Quotes EvolutionHistoryQuotes
History What is a species? 29 May 2008 If somebody asked me to write a short essay giving an overview of my favourite topic, the nature of species, I doubt that I could. I can write a long essay on it (in fact, several) but it would be excruciatingly hard to write a short one. For that, we… Read More
Evolution ROUS’s? I don’t believe they exist. 15 Jan 2008 Anyone who knows the film The Princess Bride knows what happens next. Westley gets hit hard by a rodent about the size of a pitbull. However, it seems that ROUS’s (Rodents of Unusual Size) actually may have existed, in Uruguay. Nature reports that the skull of one has been discovered,… Read More
Also, isn’t it about time we dispense with the ‘natural’ part and just leave it as ‘selection’? There’s no fundamental difference between ‘natural’ and ‘artificial’ selection anyway, as humans are nowadays well accepted [by reasonable people] to be as much part of nature as anything else. There’s only one selection, the ‘natural’ is rather superfluous IMO… Added to the equation of selection with evolution is also the utter neglect of non-selective processes and a rather horrible teaching thereof at lower levels (drift is generally taught as this unimportant thing that happens only in remote endangered species populations or something…), and get the epic facepalm that is the inability even of some professional biologists to grasp evolution properly…
Whether or not it is of significance for our understanding of organic evolution, there is a reasonably clear distinction between artificial and natural selection. In cases of the former there is an effective intention to influence the relative frequencies of different types in a population. In cases of the latter, intentions do not play such a role.
Yeah, but what did this Fisher guy know, eh? I mean, he wasn’t even a biologist – he was a bloody mathematician! and a theologian. Just like Dembski. They both even invented concepts of information (hm, actually Fisher was a bit of a waster, only inventing one).
Putting Darwin on a pedestal and proclaiming him to be the saviour of biology certainly didn’t help in getting this across to the public at large..