Philosophical Question about Human Evolution

[SkepticLance]

To Dak

Re bananas

I know this is not central to the debate theme, but I have this quirk - I hate to see misconceptions promulgated.

 

The Gros Michel banana and its extinction was not the fault of humans. It was simply a banana tree that suffered a mutation to make it seedless, and was propogated by cuttings thereafter by people. It was gonna die out regardless - it could not make seeds. No doubt, its close relatives which make seeds are still growing in the wild.

 

The die out of the Gros Michel could not alter wild banana's fitness, since there was no interbreeding.

 

Ditto for the Cavendish, which is the one in current widespread use. Neither was bred, since there was no sexual reproduction leading to seeds - just cloning which does not permit breeding. The current problem is a natural banana disease to which the Cavendish has no immunity. This does not affect wild bananas to the same degree, which have seeds, and the genetic diversity to develop immunity. The point is that the only hope to save the Cavendish for human use is GM, or the massive use of fungicides.

 

Seedless bananas have nothing to do with the fitness of wild bananas. They are a sterile offshoot that happens to be of value to us. Nothing else.

 

The problem did not come because of anything humans did, except to make use of a mutant version of a banana. However, to save that mutant, which is extraordinarily useful, we need GM.

[Edtharan]

Slight misconception here. We were talking about natural selection - not evolution. NS is based on the word 'natural' meaning 'occurring in nature'. Something that happens inside a computer is not natural, hence not NS. A computer program can evolve, but selection of variations has a different basis, even if it has some similarities. Ok, this is semantics, but word meanings are crucial to good debate.

I agree that in a good debate that semantics are important.

 

I dispute that a computer is not "Natural".

 

Would you consider a termite mound to be Natural. It is the construction of organisms. Most people would consider a termite mound to be natural because it is made be animals.

 

But, they seem to place humans above this. If a human makes an object, it is not seen as natural. Humans are organisms too, they are an animal. So if an animal can make a "natural" construction, then by all rights human constructions should also be considered as natural too.

 

Computers are made by humans, so then if we don't create any special pleading for humans (they are animals not separate from animals), then computers are just as natural as termite mounds (or any other construct made by organisms).

 

It is a kind of reverse Appeal to Nature and a Special Pleading. The special Pleading is that Humans are somehow outside of nature, and then the reverse Appeal to Nature is that we are talking about Natural Selection so because Humans are outside of Nature anything they do with evolutionary algorithms can therefore not be "Natural" (it is a reverse because it is an appeal to "humans aren't part of Nature").

 

In fact, this is just a reworking of the Elan Vital thinking. Instead of there being "something special about life", it has been turned into "there is something special about humans".

[Mr Skeptic]

None of this stops NS being capable of dealing with the fact that we're artificially allowing what would otherwize be bad traits to remain. Ultimately, the only way we allow them to remain is by preventing them from being so bad that NS can't cull them, so NS is still ultimately in charge of our evolution.

 

This is what I was getting at. Artificial selection is a subset of natural selection. Therefore it is inconsistent of lucaspa to say argue that natural selection is smarter than humans as an argument against anything, since what we are doing is a subset of natural selection. So the disappearance of the Gros Michel banana can be faulted to both human interference and natural selection. Indeed, any human failings in the area of genetics or breeding can equally be blamed on natural selection -- hence, proof that in some circumstances natural selection is not smart.