Details of Natural Selection. I Need help.
Posted: Thu Sep 23, 2010 9:39 pm
I generally believe in natural selection as the mechanism driving evolution, but the devil is in the details so to speak.
There has been a nagging question I have had for years, a question I have asked many professors, and even members here, and I have never been quite satisfied with the answer. Perhaps this dissatisfaction is caused by my inability to correctly imagine the answer, or maybe the answer is not the right one, and so this question persists, in my mind, coming to the surface every now and again.
Allow me to explain:
Take the finch experiment of Darwin. He observed several finch species from the Galapagos islands seemed not only related to each other, but also related to the parent species from the mainland. The island birds seemed to have evolve a different size and shaped beaks to allow them to eat the prey that was unique to that island.
Now, my question was how does natural selection work? how does the gene responsible for the trait change over time to match the changing environment?
The most common answer I have gotten is that there are random mutations in the genome for every trait that eventually result in changes to the trait that the environment is putting pressure on, and the most adapted trait survives, while the others disappear.
However, the first question that arose is - isn't it quite rare that a coding random mutation would result in a complete change in a trait in the first place?
And the next question is - how rare is it that this random mutation would also consequentially match the changing environment that the organism moved into that put pressure on that one particular trait?
Moreover, that seems like winning the lottery to me, and if the odds are that low that any of this should happen, it doesn't seem to make sense, considering how a species can face significant changes over a short time. Another problem I have with the 'random mutation theory' is if its true, this means that every trait of a species is constantly being mutated, and tested by the environment, but this would mean that random mutations would result in the finches having a large spectrum of beck size differences, along with differences in every other trait imaginable, but that sort of inefficiency doesn't make sense to me, especially when some of the environmental changes happen over a short period of time, and do not threaten any of the other traits.
And I have had biologists laugh at me when I question this theory of how natural selection works, but in other sciences, such as physics, Einstein made observations such as god does not play dice, or everything happens for a reason, and even though "random mutation of genes' is a reason, it doesn't seem like the right one to me, as some of the best scientific theories are quite simple, elegant and have a certain beauty to them. This theory feels awkward, clumsy, and lacking in refinement.
Any thoughts?
There has been a nagging question I have had for years, a question I have asked many professors, and even members here, and I have never been quite satisfied with the answer. Perhaps this dissatisfaction is caused by my inability to correctly imagine the answer, or maybe the answer is not the right one, and so this question persists, in my mind, coming to the surface every now and again.
Allow me to explain:
Take the finch experiment of Darwin. He observed several finch species from the Galapagos islands seemed not only related to each other, but also related to the parent species from the mainland. The island birds seemed to have evolve a different size and shaped beaks to allow them to eat the prey that was unique to that island.
Now, my question was how does natural selection work? how does the gene responsible for the trait change over time to match the changing environment?
The most common answer I have gotten is that there are random mutations in the genome for every trait that eventually result in changes to the trait that the environment is putting pressure on, and the most adapted trait survives, while the others disappear.
However, the first question that arose is - isn't it quite rare that a coding random mutation would result in a complete change in a trait in the first place?
And the next question is - how rare is it that this random mutation would also consequentially match the changing environment that the organism moved into that put pressure on that one particular trait?
Moreover, that seems like winning the lottery to me, and if the odds are that low that any of this should happen, it doesn't seem to make sense, considering how a species can face significant changes over a short time. Another problem I have with the 'random mutation theory' is if its true, this means that every trait of a species is constantly being mutated, and tested by the environment, but this would mean that random mutations would result in the finches having a large spectrum of beck size differences, along with differences in every other trait imaginable, but that sort of inefficiency doesn't make sense to me, especially when some of the environmental changes happen over a short period of time, and do not threaten any of the other traits.
And I have had biologists laugh at me when I question this theory of how natural selection works, but in other sciences, such as physics, Einstein made observations such as god does not play dice, or everything happens for a reason, and even though "random mutation of genes' is a reason, it doesn't seem like the right one to me, as some of the best scientific theories are quite simple, elegant and have a certain beauty to them. This theory feels awkward, clumsy, and lacking in refinement.
Any thoughts?