🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Nov17.022553.18928@monu6.cc.monash.edu.au> John Wilkins <john@publications.ccc.monash.edu.au> writes:
>In article <1992Nov10.004237.50028@Cookie.secapl.com> Frank Adams,
>frank@Cookie.secapl.com writes:
>>The main content of evolutionary theory is that *random* mutation is the
>>only input to this process.  So another sense of "survival of the
>fittest"
>>is a negative one: survival of the fittest is the only thing driving
>>evolution.  This would not be true, for example, of Lamarckian evolution.
>
>A point of clarification:
>
>"Recent" evolutionary biology (post-synthetic) admits of several
>different inputs to evolution: drift, non-genetic heredity, and so forth.

I am aware of these; the original comment was directed more at "Darwinian"
evolution (which is where the slogan "survival of the fittest" comes from).

>I think the point is that the variation that results has to be random
>with respect to the selection pressures active on a population (is that
>the point of your scare quotes?)

That is probably a better statement of it that I would have managed to come
up with.

---------------
A point I have never seen dealt with (which does not mean no one *has* dealt
with it) is that "random", by itself, is not well defined.  You have to
specify a distribution.  An evolution based on an entirely different genetic
substrate (even something as simple as using a different molecule than DNA)
would probably produce a qualitatively different evolution -- that is, given
an evolutionary history based on one or the other, one could tell which it
was based on without directly examining the genetic mechanism.