Darwinian Theory

In the style of the Darwinian Theory, the quality of a chromosome is called its fitness. The quality or fitness of a ehromosome is usually caleulated with the help of an objeetive function, which is a mathematical function indicating how good the solution, and thus the chromosome, is for the optimization problem. This computation of the fitness is done for each chromosome in each population,... 

Evolutionary psychologists go to some lengths to insist that, unlike exponents of earlier versions of social Darwinism, they are not genetic determinists, or as they sometimes put it, nativists. Rather, they argue that the nature/nurture dichotomy is a fallacious one. Instead, they seek to account for what they believe to be universals in terms of a version of Darwinian theory - a version which in practice owes more to Dawkins reductive fundamentalism than it does to Darwin s own more pluralistic and observation-rich insights. 

The younger students of natural science of to-day are beginning to forget what their fathers told them of the fierce battle which had to be fought, before the upholders of the Darwinian theory of the origin of species were able to convince those for whom the older view, that species are, and always have been, absolutely distinct, had become a matter of supreme scientific, and even ethical, importance. 

There is a considerable gap in the neo-Darwinian theory of evolution, and we believe this gap to be of such a nature that it cannot be bridged with the current conception of biology.12... 

This can be compared to answering the question How is a stereo system made with the words By plugging a set of speakers into an amplifier, and adding a CD player, radio receiver, and tape deck. Either Darwinian theory can account for the assembly of the speakers and amplifier, or it can t. 

Is it possible that this ultra-complex system could have evolved according to Darwinian theory Several scientists have devoted much effort to wondering how blood coagulation might have evolved. In the next section you will see what the state-of-the-art explanation is for blood clotting in the professional science literature. But first, there are a few details to attend to. 

The impotence of Darwinian theory in accounting for the molecular basis of life is evident not only from the analyses in this book, but also from the complete absence in the professional scientific literature of any detailed models by which complex biochemical systems could have been produced, as shown in Chapter 8. In the face of the enormous complexity that modern biochemistry has uncovered in the cell, the scientific community is paralyzed. No one at Harvard University, no one at the National Institutes of Health, no member of the National Academy of Sciences, no Nobel prize winner—no one at all can give a detailed account of how the cilium, or vision, or blood clotting, or any complex biochemical process might have developed in a Darwinian fashion. But we are here. Plants and animals are here. The complex systems are here. All these things got here somehow if not in a Darwinian fashion, then how ... 

Schiitzenberger, M. P. (1967) Algorithms and the Neo-Darwinian Theory of Evolution in Mathematical Challenges to the Neo-Darwinian Interpretation of Evolution, ed. P S. Moorhead and M. M. Kaplan, Wistar Institute Press, Philadelphia, p. 75. 

This perhaps startling point of view is admirably explained and defended by Daniel Dennett in his lucid philosophical meditation on Darwinian theory, Darwin s Dangerous Idea, where he neatly explains the necessity for Platonic thinking by using this intriguing thought experiment ... 

Second, and more specifically, two logically separate but related scientific aspects of these questions have frequently been intertwined, if not conflated. However, they have quite different evolutionary foci and interdisciplinary ramifications. These involve questions of what might be considered the necessary versus sufficient conditions for the evolution of life. The first question involves the issue of which features of the abiotic environment are requisite to the origin and manifest diversification of life. This has been the traditional domain of fine-tuning arguments. A less metaphysically laden and more historically consistent way to speak of it would be in terms of the fitness of the environment, as emphasized nearly a century ago by Lawrence J. Henderson (1913). Darwinian theory typically addresses the fitness of organisms to the environment. A complementary question - which at face value is a priori to the question of natural selection - is the fitness of the environment to life, or the preconditional requirements of the theater, to support an evolutionary drama. 

The strategy nature uses to adapt organisms to new demands is evolution. According to Darwinian theory, the fantastic diversity of life was created by random mutation and natural selection111. The power and simplicity of the evolution... 

The principle of in vitro selection is governed by a number of the same principles that apply to the Darwinian theory of evolution, as shown in Figure 2. First, the random sequence DNA is prepared by automated solid-phase synthesis. A mixture of four types of nucleotide is added in a stepwise condensation reaction process. When necessary, this DNA library may be converted to an RNA library by in vitro transcription or to a peptide library by in vitro translation. Second, the prepared DNA, RNA, or peptide library is subjected to affinity selection, and the molecules that bind to a target molecule are selected. Because only a very small part of the library is selected in each selection, the selected fraction is then amplified by a polymerase chain reaction (PCR) or a reverse transcription PCR (RT-PCR) technique. Successive selection and amplification cycles bring about an exponential increase in the abundance of the targeting DNA, RNA, or peptide until it dominates the population. 

Patterson, C., Evolution neo-Darwinian theory, in The Oxford Companion to the Mind, Gregory, R.L., Ed., Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1987, pp. 234—244. 

The reconciliation of the Darwinian theory of natural selection and of Mendelian population genetics has been based on this model (Fisher, 1930 Wright, 1931). 

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