An Open Letter to Professors Jerry Coyne and Richard Dawkins on the Nature of Natural Selection
To Professors Jerry Coyne and Richard Dawkins,
The concept of natural selection on the surface seems to be a rather simple concept to grasp and you both have explained the concept in your respective writings. I have a few question regarding your views about the nature of natural selection, questions that I feel are not explicitly answered or addressed in your various writings. I have four basic questions, each with their own subset of questions:
1) Is natural selection a prescriptive or descriptive term?
2) Is natural selection a mechanism?
3) Is natural selection a cause or a force?
4) Is natural selection a process or an outcome?
Good questions, all. Although Darwinists assert that natural selection is a central mechanism/cause/force in evolution, its surprising how evasive they can be when asked deeper questions about selection.
Question 1: Prescriptive or Descriptive?
Do you view natural selection as prescriptive whereby natural selection is a cause or a force that "guides" the interaction or change of traits of biological entities, it "maintains" the prevalence of beneficial mutations, or "limits" or "favours" some variations over other variations, or "steers" biological change toward the local maxima in the "fitness landscape". On this view natural selection is an agent (albeit impersonal and blind, as in non-directional) that causally influences biological change by “maintaining” or “favouring” or “producing fitter” biological entities etc.Agency means capacity to act as a cause of change in something else. Agents are things-- people, planets, rocks, animals, etc. For example, if you are hit by an out-of-control red truck, you are hit by the truck, not by the 'out-of-control' and not by the 'red'.
Change in things is caused by things, not by ideas or by properties.
Natural selection is defined as 'differential reproductive success in a population'. There are variants on this definition, but all variants preserve the implicit assertion that natural selection is an effect of adaptive causes. Change in population is caused by things-- predators, reproductive organs of varying effectiveness, muscles of various strength and speed, etc. Only things can have agency and cause change. An animal attacked by an angry brown bear is attacked by the bear, not by the 'angry' and not by the 'brown'.
But 'differential reproductive success in a population' is an effect of agents, not an agent itself. An idea or an observation is not an agent.
Do you view natural selection as a descriptive term that describes what happens when you have individuals in a population that have some kind of variation (e.g. genetic) and fitness differences and are able to pass on their traitsTechne notes that natural selection is a description-- an observation-- of change, not an agent or cause of change.
So what is natural selection?
More to come.