DARWINISM DEFENDED
A Guide to The Evolution Controversies
Michael Ruse
Last updated: September 21st Sunday 19:51, 2003, Ankara, Turkiye
- Gaps in Darwinism...What is Life?
- Divergence and splitting (p34-)
- Difficulties and applications (p36-)
- Gaps in creationism
- "Natural selection is opportunisitc, taking advantage of the situation, with no "ultimate" goal."
- "...once an organism has gone extinct, it can never return. There is no possibility of a second chance, given so undirected a phenomenon as natural selection."
- "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny: the belief that in the development of an individual one sees the embryo go through all the forms of the ancestors. Thus, both in the fossil record and in embryological development one sees the sequence: fish, frog, mammal, man."
- Note the mechanical engineering explanation taking sensing abilities as criteria...Shear force, normal force, orientation sensing...Floating phase (babies)...Find the guy who is doing master in our department on that subject...
- Why man and dog should have similar embryos (p42-)
- Rudimentary organs (p43)
- Critics about artificial selection analogy (p49)
- Doubts on "that selection working on blind, small variations simply could not be the cause of the wonderful adaptations like the hand or the eye" (p51)
- "...one had to wait until religion started to loosen its grip on the popular imagination."
- Controversies in Britain (p53, cartoon on p54)
- "The characteristic that most distinguishes Darwinism from all other theories is that evolution is seen as a function of popuþation change, not of individual change" (p76, compare it with Lamarckism)
- "The Hardy-Weinberg Law is the foundation of modern evolution theory...Whatever the inital distribution of genotypes, in the next and all succeeding generations the distribution of genotypes will be p^2 AA+2pq Aa+q^2 aa. Moreover, in each generation the ratio of A to a alleles will stay constant at p:q...Genetic changes will not vanish due to random or other background factors." (p77-79, works for large populations)
- Dobzhansky's Balance Hypothesis: "One would not have to think of selection as waiting patiently for the occasional occurence of a new mutation. Ant population would contain massive variation, and if selection were to demand it, for instance, as a result of moving into a new ecological niche, it would be waiting there ready for use." (p92-93, examples)
- Speciation models (p107, figure 4.11)
- Difference between science and nonscience statement (p133-135)
- Compare Darwinism, Lamarckism, Saltationism (macromutations), Orthogenesis (p143-)
- Darwinism evaluated (p151)
