Who cares. Dawkins doesn’t define evolution for the scientific community, and neither does Christian de Duve.
You haven’t shown us a reason for accepting them.
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Natural selection is certainly a key mechanism for adaptation. Neutral theory is also an important mechanism.
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You tell us. Why do you focus on Dawkins instead of the tens of thousands of peer reviewed papers by thousands of other scientists who have researched the topic?
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Note that you have, in that sentence, moved from adaptive evolution to evolution, period. Natural selection remains the primary explanation for adaptive evolution, but given that most of your genome is junk, evolving neutrally, selection is not the primary explanation for evolution.
Note that cultural evolution has nothing necessarily to do with biological evolution, so again you are changing the subject. This sort of equivocation is not conducive to reasoned argument.
Likewise, you seem very confused about the views of S. J. Gould, no least feature of which could be characterized as Lamarckian.
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This is fairly close a tautology, so I’d say yes.
Natural selection is an important evolutionary mechanism, but it isn’t the only one. And in some contexts, it may not even be the most important one.
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Thanks for your answer. For me as a moral theologian/philosopher the most relevant context is the behavioural one.
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Natural selection surely is important. Merely natural selection is not the null hypothesis, not the default explanation, in most cases. I think there will be debate about the extent of its role in adaptive evolution, but that’s also a loaded question. A lot of why appears to be adaptive evolution isn’t. The bigger question is the importance of selection in evolution (of the adaptive and non adaptive sort) and what other mechanisms are, and how they interact.
In this context, adaptive evolution is highly contested in the examples you raised. There is far more plasticity and variability to human behavior, and often evolutionary psychology has not survived in scrutiny. It is just too easy to build a just so story that doesn’t to take into account human plasticity and variability, and does not adequately engage positive and negative controls.
However there is some deeper work on, for example, the evolution of altruism which does have a more solid foundation.
Regarding the “moral” issue, all too often, it seems like the evolutionary analysis fails on the is-ought distinction, sometimes to very racist and misogynistic ends.
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I would think everyone without exception, unless they’re a creationist, accepts that natural selection remains the primary explanation for adaptive evolution. But that they would dispute that most evolution is adaptive. An important distinction.
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I would dispute it there. Even in that case, non selective mechanism are extremely important, and is some examples sufficient. So I would resist anything that reduces evolution to Natural Selection. That is just one mechanism among many.
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But isn’t the failure of the is-ought distinction a serious moral problem, or do I misunderstand you? For me the impact of natural selection on our behaviour explains racism and misogyny. Yes, we have plasticity and changing cultural environments can change our behaviour for the better.
For adaptive evolution? What are those examples that explain adaptive evolution with nonadaptive mechanisms?
I know that, just giving an example of differences of opinion in theology. Gould was similar to Lamarck in their common view that moral progress is cultural, not in the causal evolutionary mechanisms. Gould was into evo-devo
Where did the standing variation come from? That wasn’t usually by natural selection.
Relying on evolutionary explanations to derive morals seems like it usually falls for the is-ought FALLACY. That fallacy can lead to serious moral problems, yes, but that is not solved by finding more evolutionary explanations.
Rather, I think we need to collectively move past the nonsense that evolution can tell us what is right and wrong. Perhaps it can give us helpful information at times, but can’t bring us to a moral code.
And I would dispute this quite strongly. That analysis lacks appropriate controls, and alternate more plausible theories are being neglected. Moreover it is far to reductive of both racism and misogyny, so reductive as to make it ahistorical (especially in the case of racism) to the point of absurdity.
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Is it your understanding of the concept of adaptive evolution that it does not selection among mutations?
Thank you for your answer.
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Im just resisting reductive explanations here. The detailed technical points are probably for another day. I’d wager we agree entirely in the particulars, but are framing them differently.
Perhaps the point (or at least a point if not the point) would be that there are multiple important mechanisms–mutation, selection, drift, recombination, gene flow, etc.–operating basically all the time. And it’s not very satisfying intellectually to just point to an adaptive trait and say “selection did that” without considering the other processes that may also be involved.
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Exactly, not very satisfying, and not even very true.
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