Falacy of Seeking Too Much Purpose in Evolutionary Adapta...

Darwin’s concept of evolution is centered on natural selection, or survival of the fittest [1]. Although Darwin did realize that organisms possess structures and even entire organs that might not have an extant function, as is the case of rudiments [2], on the whole, selectionist thinking has heavily dominated the biological literature ever since. In its extreme but not uncommon form, the selectionist, or adaptationist, paradigm perceives every trait as an adaptation. Under this view of bio...

 Attributes of Domesticated Animals

The study of domesticated animals since Darwin’s influential work (1868) has culminated in the formation of a set of changes that are claimed to distinguish domestic populations from wild species (for recent outlines of these see Price 1984, 1999; Hemmer 1990; Tchernov and Horwitz 1991; Hall 1993; Teichert 1993; Smith 1995; Zohary, Tchernov, and Horwitz 1998; Clutton-Brock 1999; Trut 1999). Although not uniformly present in all domesticated species, those affecting the skeleton may include ...

 Conceptual and Technological Revolutions

There are two kind s of scientific revolutions, those d riven by new tools and those d riven by new concepts. Thomas K uhn in his famous book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, talked almost exclusively about concepts and hard ly at all about tools. His id ea of a scientific revolution is based on a single example, the revolution in theoretical physics that occurred in the 1920s with the advent of quantum mechanics. This was a prime example of a concept-d riven revolution. K uhn's book...

 Darwin and the Origins of Life

There is a curious parallelism between Darwin's twenty-year delay in publishing his theory of evolution and Newton's {102} twenty-year delay in publishing the Principia. And Newton's refusal to publish his cosmological speculations finds a parallel in Darwin's silence concerning the problem of the origin of life. If we are to understand in general terms the place of life in the universe, we must also understand life's origin. Darwin explicitly excluded the origin of life from the scope of ...

 Tangled Bank of the Primeval Cell

In our present state of ignorance, we have a choice between two contrasting images to represent our view of the possible structure of a creature newly emerged at the first threshold of life. One image is the replicator model of Eigen, a molecular structure tightly linked and centrally controlled, replicating itself with considerable precision, achieving ho-meostasis by strict adherence to a rigid pattern. The other image is the "tangled bank" of Darwin, an image which Darwin put at the end of...

 Science Unifiers

Now it is generally true that the very greatest scientists in each discipline are unifiers. This is especially true in physics. Newton and Einstein were supreme as unifiers. The great triumphs of physics have been triumphs of unification. We almost take it for granted that the road of progress in physics will be a wider and wider unification bringing more and more phenomena within the scope of a few fundamental principles. Einstein was so confident of the correctness of this road of unificati...

 The Evolution of the Eye

To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree. When it was first said that the sun stood still and the world turned round, the common sense of mankind declared the doctrine false; but the old saying of Vox populi, vox Dei, as every...

 Friedrich Engels Funeral Oration for Marx

Just as Darwin discovered the law of evolution in organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of evolution in human history; he discovered the simple fact, hitherto concealed by an overgrowth of ideology, that mankind must first of all eat and drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, science, religion, art, etc, and that therefore the production of the immediate material means of subsistence and consequently the degree of economic development attained by a given people ...

 Overbeliefs

The "overbeliefs" of an enlightened man rest on the firmest basis of reality available. This he finds in the scientific picture of the universe of his age. On this foundation of natural knowledge he erects a unique unproven structure of "overbeliefs" concerning his universe, origin, life, hereafter, religion and God. "A man's religion must not give the lie to the world in which he lives. It must be as intelligent as Man". If the overbeliefs of an individual cannot be proven inconsistent with ...

 The Meme-Unit

It is possible that this appearance of non-particulateness is illusory, and that the analogy with genes does not break down. After all, if we look at the inheritance of many genetic characters such as human height or skin-colouring, it does not look like the work of indivisible and unblendable genes. If a black and a white person mate, their children do not come out either black or white: they are intermediate. This does not mean the genes concerned are not particulate. It is just that there ...