Ophiolite
Valued Senior Member
You aren't very good at it.Naturally. I enjoy showing off.
I have no need to justify it.The only way this would be a justifiable claim to make at all is to add the qualifier "... around here" to the end of this sentence.
No, I don't believe you did. (This is a polite way of saying you did not.) Is English your second language?Not quite. Shit does, indeed, happen. I asked you why..
I never entertained such a naive idea. It's good that you've overcome it.For example, as I used to have when very young, with some vague romantic idea (admitted or not) that "Mother Nature" somehow had a hand in the proceedings, making conscious decisions on what was beneficial and what was not.
Which is exactly what the scenario you described is - an accident. All accidents, better described as incidents, are the product of the events and actions leading up to them. If this occurence is non-unique, then clearly, from an evolutionary perspective, the loss of specific genes on the occassions when this does arise is secondary to the benefits attending the actions and events that led to it.Or, as Ophiolite has described above, dismissed as "accidents" of an otherwise successful propagation method. Not that I'm going to dismiss that answer entirely, because there are often accidents of this nature which are just that - accidents.
It doesn't alter the fact that this is not an evolutionary advantage to the dun beetles, or to the dung beetle genome. What it is in an insufficient disadvantage to lead to the extinction of dung beetles and thus dung beetle genes.
You are probaly quite ignorant of the fact that these are two completely different scenarios. I don't think you are deliberately trying to deceive. It's just some of that youthful naivety surfacing again.How is it beneficial to the species if a female dung beetle is drowned in shit during an intensive mating competition?
Or, for a probably more cogent example :
How is it beneficial to the praying mantis to have the female eat the male during copulation?
In the case of the dung beetle no mating occurs. Genetic material is lost to the gene pool. In the case of the praying mantis mating does occur and genetic material is passed on to the next generation. The first is an evolutionary negative, the second an evolutionary positive.
Sorry. I missed something. Who, apart from a stuffed aardvark, or a brain damaged seagull, would consider the 'On the Origin' to be a definitive work. Not even Darwin considered it to be a defintive work.But to consider the "Origin of the Species" the definitive work on the theory is to commit a grave error. .
To even vaguely contemplate that as a possibility you would have had to have failed to understand the work itself, ignored the rediscovery of Mendel's work by de Vries and others at the beginning of the 20th century, pretended that Haldane and Fisher couldn't do maths, discarded the unifying efforts of the likes of Dobzhansky and Mayr, decided that Gould and Eldridge's notions of punctuated equilibrium were total nonsense, and missed completely the growing impact of evo-devo and epigenetics. Is this your naivety playing a role again? You really ought to get that seen to.
Oh please. I've read all Dawkins books. I keep them on the top shelf of my library, out of reach of children. Anytime I wish to be reminded of the dangers of trite, simplistic, overbearing writing, I dip into one of his works. (Though I'll concede The Ancestor's Tale is an honourable exception.)Darwin opened the doors, paved the way for a new era in science. ......there are new names which will begin to make clear in the future what was only dimly understood to begin with.
One of those names is Richard Dawkins.
Check him out, Ophiolite. You might pick something up.
Williams, not Dawkins deserves the credit for whatever merit there is in the idea of a selfish gene (and there is a fair amount). Wilson and Sober, however, and others active in the field provide convincing arguments for the importance of forms of group selection. This is a dynamic field with some of the heavyweights of biology participating in it. Limiting ones' viewpoint to a narrowly focused book by a known egocentric, published over thirty years ago, is way too much of a limitation for me.
I'm delighted the book has fired your imagination, but please don't try patronising me with your oversimplifications again. It won't lead to a useful dialogue.