The American Philosophical Society has an excellent website entitled APS Museum which contains one of the most concise explanations of Darwin's "Big Idea" (i.e. the theory of natural selection) that I have ever seen:
Before Darwin, many naturalists believed that plants and animals were unchanging, designed and created once and for all for a specific environment. Others believed that organisms changed in response to their environment by becoming more complex in form over many generations.
Darwin’s theory differed from these earlier ideas. He identified a process called “natural selection.” The key was not that organisms changed by adapting to a given environment, but rather that a given environment favored certain organisms, and those organisms would survive at a higher rate and pass on their traits. Eventually, he argued, this process produced new species, and it accounted for the history of all life on earth over many millions of years.
Three Principles of Natural Selection:
1. Organisms produce offspring with different traits, which can be inherited.
2. Organisms produce more offspring than can survive because the world has limited resources.
3. Offspring whose traits are best suited to their environment survive and pass on those variations to their offspring.
Correcting Misconceptions about Evolution:
1. Organisms do not progress from less evolved to more evolved. Humans and insects are equally evolved.
2. Present-day humans are not evolved from present-day apes. Both evolved from a common ancestor now extinct.
3. Evolution is not random. While variations in inherited traits are random, natural selection is not.
Last week, one of the APS readers posed the question Would Darwin Tweet? and issued the following challenge:
The bar is set by Dawkins, who wrote in The Selfish Gene that evolution is “the outcome of non-random survival of randomly varying replicators”.
This is not only brief but it incorporates all four pillars of Darwin’s conception of evolution by natural selection, that is:
1. more individuals are born than survive
2. struggle for survival
3. variation and inheritance
4. natural selection (modeled after artificial selection)
Thus: “non-random survival” = 1 + 2 + 4 “randomly varying replicators” = 3
My hat will go off to anyone who can top that!
Thus: “non-random survival” = 1 + 2 + 4 “randomly varying replicators” = 3
My hat will go off to anyone who can top that!
Not surprisingly, it appears that Richard Dawkins has (via Twitter) provided the most succinct response which is simply: "Random mutation, non-random selection."
Modern evolutionary theory has significantly altered some of Darwin's first musings on natural (as opposed to artificial) selection.
ReplyDeleteFor example, "survival of the fittest" has been replaced by "survival of the reproducers". If A lives 100 years and has 5 offspring, and B lives 50 years because B is less fit than A, but B has 10 offspring, then chances are that more of B's traits than A's will be apparent in the next generation.
I'm thrilled to see the three basic principles of natural selection receiving clear, concise articulation. I actually blogged about this a few months ago (http://freeradical9.blogspot.com/2008/09/open-letter-to-richard-dawkins-and.html), begging evolutionists to start making that the standard again - in a way, I think listing the three principles is even better than handling it Dawkins' way, at least to laymen.
ReplyDeleteMaybe this way people will stop thinking evolution is a magical force and start understanding it as very nearly a logical syllogism.