[MD] Oneness, Dualism & Intellect

[Case]

[Platt]
Is this a report of an actual experiment or is it conjecture? Changing
surface characteristics of organisms is hardly evolution. Animal breeders do
it all the time. Can you conceive of a similar scenario in which a fruit fly
becomes a house fly, a horse fly or a dragon fly? That would be evolution.  

[Case]
What Craig offered up is an example of evolution in action. He shows how the
distribution of traits in a population is effected by the environment. Of
course animal breeders do this all the time. Darwin made many references to
animal breeding. He was attempting to show how the same principles apply in
the wild.

What Darwin suggests is that given enough time the distribution of traits in
isolated populations becomes so different that speciation occurs. Darwin's
finches from the Galapagos Islands were similar to one another in many ways
but their geographic isolation into different environments produced
different distributions of traits and ultimately different species of
finches.

You seem to think that evolution means that a fruitfly can be transformed
over night into a wooly mammoth. This is absurd. Fruitfly populations can
diverge overtime until they become different kinds of fruitflies. Given
enough time and the right environmental pressures one population might lose
its wings for example.

Madagascar is a famous example of this sort of thing where the lemurs became
the dominate primate species on the island after it separated from Africa.
Lemurs filled many of the ecological niches occupied by monkeys elsewhere.
There are more lemur species in Madagascar than anywhere else on the planet
and they have evolved to take advantage of a wide variation in food
supplies. There were even species of very large lemurs the size of
orangutans on the island before men rendered them extinct. 

Once you get the idea that a species is a collection of traits, you can see
how the distribution changes based on environmental pressures. Over time the
distributions of traits can vary so much that the populations can be treated
as distinct. The environment ultimately determines the rate of change as the
population must adapt to survive.

Probability enters the picture from the beginning since a frequency
distribution of traits in one generation determines the possibility of which
traits can be passes to the next. The frequency distribution of successive
generations is influenced by how well particular traits confer reproductive
success. Even a slight selective advantage will magnify over time in much
the same way that a casino make lots of money because the house has a slight
probabilistic advantage. Gamblers call this vigorish or "vig". 

Platt, have you actually read "The Selfish Gene" or E.O. Wilson's works like
"On Human Nature" or "Biodiversity" or any of Gould's collections of essays?
Often it seems people here, myself included, are trying to give you crash
courses in basic biology. The MoQ is an evolutionary philosophy after all.