But can we distinguish things as artificial and natural by the initial state as "active thought"? — Christoffer
Rejecting God or any diety is easy. But as you say, what is exceptionally hard for many people is the difference between "man" and "nature" as obviously humans are part of nature too, so there's no justification for humans to be different anymore. Yet then comes all the normative baggage of what we "as humans" ought to do "to the environment" and how we ought to live. Atheist aren't willing to give up the exceptionality of humans, sometimes they promote it even more.Now folks that want to manage without God have a problem, which has been pointed out here, that Man and Nature, or artificial and natural, collapse as man is part of nature sans god. And such a collapse deprives 'nature' of any meaning, because it deprives it of any negative. If there is nothing that is unnatural, then 'natural' means the same as 'everything'. But this is a purely linguistic phenomenon, and non-philosophers are happily immune from such vandalism of useful words and continue to use 'natural' in contrast to 'man-made', and trust that god has provided an appropriate hell for philosophers. — unenlightened
These are all natural agents, their rationality is irrelevant, and there is no reason to single out man as something different, or unnatural, as Darwin actually did, when he theorized about the difference between natural and artificial selection. — Hrvoje
Rejecting God or any diety is easy. — ssu
I think the distinction is a bit meaningless anyway. It's not clear what sort of human behaviour is no longer natural but artificial. Or at what point natural behaviour produces an artifact. Monkeys using a branch, tearing of leaves and twigs to make a stick, to reach ants in a tree bark made an artifact out of the branch. Or possibly not. It depends on your definition, which is a bit arbitrary. — Benkei
A bit off from the subject, but for an atheist it's quite easy. And in the process of "natural selection" you really don't need God, when you have a random process how species get their genes and then the process of those most adapted to the environment making more offspring. The result isn't the best or optimal, but just a result. First and foremost, Darwinism is part of science, not an ideology, and hence it's based on objective study. More of a need for God would be to answer moral questions, what is wrong or right, but atheists typically just refer to humanism in this case.Is it really so easy? The word "selection" implies choice, and choice requires an agent who is doing the choosing. In the case of "natural selection", if the agent who is doing the choosing is not God, then who is it, Mother Nature? It appears to me that as long as we maintain the concept of "natural selection", some sort of God or deity is implied as that which is doing the selecting. — Metaphysician Undercover
A bit off from the subject, but for an atheist it's quite easy. And in the process of "natural selection" you really don't need God, when you have a random process how species get their genes and then the process of those most adapted to the environment making more offspring. — ssu
First and foremost, Darwinism is part of science, not an ideology, and hence it's based on objective study. More of a need for God would be to answer moral questions, what is wrong or right, but atheists typically just refer to humanism in this case. — ssu
As I said, it really depends on your definition where to put the line between natural and artificial and that is arbitrary. Artificial is meant as "man made rather than occuring naturally". My issue with that, is that anything man made is natural in my view. Perhaps it's easier to just do away with "artificial" and simply say man-made as something understood as a more specific process found in nature. — Benkei
Time and again it is established that what we find aesthetically pleasing in mates has everything to do with survivability. — Benkei
And even if we couldn't link it to survivability it's not as if it wouldn't become just another selective pressure that has no intentionality whatsoever as I don't control who I'm attracted too. If we did, the religious could rejoice and start "curing" gay people. — Benkei
As I said, it really depends on your definition where to put the line between natural and artificial and that is arbitrary. Artificial is meant as "man made rather than occuring naturally". My issue with that, is that anything man made is natural in my view. Perhaps it's easier to just do away with "artificial" and simply say man-made as something understood as a more specific process found in nature. — Benkei
This, though, is a non-sequitur through and through. The whole question of intentionality is an irrelevancy - the question is simply: is sexual selection an independent evolutionary mechanism to natural selection, yes or no? — StreetlightX
From the naive point of view such antagonistic evolution is counterproductive: wouldn't it be better if we could all get along instead of wasting resources on pointless competitions? Make love not war! But of course nature doesn't care about such "commonsense" sentiments: it just does what it does for no reason at all. — SophistiCat
The work done by the word 'natural' in 'natural selection' is to indicate that the selection is not done by a conscious being who says 'we'll have this one instead of that one'. With that meaning, there is no redundancy. It's a different meaning of 'natural' from the one you envisaged.The syntagm "Natural Selection" in Darwin's theory is redundant in a sense that the word "Natural" could/should be omitted, as there is no alternative to nature when we talk about reality, ie not imaginary processes but real processes. — Hrvoje
This, though, is a non-sequitur through and through. The whole question of intentionality is an irrelevancy - the question is simply: is sexual selection an independent evolutionary mechanism to natural selection, yes or no? Is mate choice a driver of evolutionary change in its own right, or not? Whatever the 'metaphysics' of 'choice' at work here is irrelevant. Ironically, one of the reasons sexual selection was so violently rejected as an independent evolutionary mechanism in the time after Darwin theorized it was because the very idea that animals - specifically females! - could play any causative role in driving evolution was nothing less than an offence to Victorian puritan mores. That same regressive hangover remains an infection on our understanding of evolution today. — StreetlightX
You quoted someone calling sexual selection the handmaiden to natural selection — Benkei
I'm certain sexual selection is a mode of natural selection. — Benkei
And that's the key point: sexual selection and natural selection can lead to divergent evolutionary outcomes. Specifically, sexual selection can make a species less than optimized to its environment, making it evolutionarily worse-off than it otherwise would be. This is why runway selection is such a big deal: once selection starts to occur due to aesthetic criteria (rather than criteria of pure survivability), you get a divergence in selective parameters, as it were. You get two dimensions along which to measure evolutionary success, each of which can, depending on the situation, complement or conflict with each other. — StreetlightX
Monkeys who like unripe fruit which is more difficult to open the less ripe it is so only the strongest monkeys can open the really hard ones. Only to die from poison. — Benkei
Heh, I wouldn't say 'no reason at all', but rather, for more interesting and varied reasons than we are usually prepared to countenance. — StreetlightX
Nature is scary and wildly facinating. — StreetlightX
the question is simply: is sexual selection an independent evolutionary mechanism to natural selection, yes or no? — StreetlightX
Unfortunately, this is not true. Or rather, for quite a while its been thought to be true, but has begun to crumble under large swaths of emerging evidence that it simply does not account for a great deal of evolutionary phenomena. Ascribing 'what we find aesthetically pleasing in mates to survivability alone' simply flies in the face of evidence - Prum, the Yale ornithologist who I'm relying upon here - cites case after case after case (from the wings of Manakins, to the reproductive systems of ducks, the displays of the great Argus, and so on) where attempts to account for aesthetic phenomena in terms of survivability simply does not work. The evidence itself needs to be read to be discussed, so I can only encourage that you read his work. None of this is to say that what we find aesthetically pleasing in mates has nothing to do with survivability. Only that survivability does not exhaust accounts of aesthetic phenomena. — StreetlightX
Whatever the 'metaphysics' of 'choice' at work here is irrelevant. Ironically, one of the reasons sexual selection was so violently rejected as an independent evolutionary mechanism in the time after Darwin theorized it was because the very idea that animals - specifically females! - could play any causative role in driving evolution was nothing less than an offence to Victorian puritan mores. That same regressive hangover remains an infection on our understanding of evolution today. — StreetlightX
I still hear claims that organisms reproduce "for the good of the species" or similar utterances, which is pretty amazingly wrong. Organisms reproduce for the sake of their genes, a selection process which sometimes even bumps up against the genetic interests of of their own offspring (and siblings, to say nothing of their unrelated conspecifics).It sure is. One of the more disturbing instances of antagonistic evolution is the struggle between the mother and the offspring. The (future) offspring wants to suck in as many nutrients as it can, grow as big as it can, but the mother wants to ration her considerable investment of resources more prudently, so that she has more chances to reproduce (starting with surviving the childbirth). It's hard to wrap your mind around the fact that this struggle takes place inside one and the same organism! — SophistiCat
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