The changes themselves are not a description. A description of the changes would be a description.
Changes occur all the time. Yesterday it was raining, today it is sunny. Changes are always there. Pragmatism is, at least in part, the ability to make the best of changes. So I should do my gardening on the sunny day, and the indoors work on the rainy day.
Thanks Neil. Once again I was stung by my own words. I was referring to the “description of the changes”… the fact that they were deleterious, neutral or beneficial. I don’t see why those details are so often included in the narrative, because the outcome seems to imply the description. Does that make sense?
I should mention that I’m also an outsider. I’m a mathematician, not a biologist.
The problem with “neutral” and “beneficial”, is that what counts as beneficial depends on the organism and its niche. A particular mutation might appear to be detrimental. And, because of that, the organism might change its behavior and, in effect, move to a slightly different niche. And that overall change might be beneficial even though the mutation appeared detrimental in the original niche.
That is to say, it is complicated.
What is important, however, is for an organism to be able to make the most of whatever changes benefit it, and minimize what changes seem harmful. Natural selection, as a background statistical effect, cannot do that. The organism itself possibly can. And I see that as a kind of primitive intelligence in the organism. And that primitive intelligence is part of what drives evolution.
Those details are part of the traditional narrative of Darwinism. So biologists see it as important to mention them. I’m inclined to agree with you, that those details could be omitted. However, the primary readers of biological research papers are other biologists. And maybe those other biologists do want such details.
End of the day, the path from a single cell organism to the current diversity of life is series of “particular changes”… so if you don’t explain particular changes… you don’t explain anything.
Interestingly that assumption only been the result of serious philosophical argument in the earlky centuries of such thought. Parmenides denied that change was possible, and Zeno’s paradox (which is still significant enough for Josh to have quoted it to me in the context of evolutionary gradualism) is all about that impossibility.
Change does actually raise problems, as this discussion shows.