Peeling back the palimpsest, and finding selection again By Razib Khan | September 7, 2013 2:04 am
Excerpt: “Where this debate about the power of selection will end is anyone’s guess. Nor do I care. Rather, what’s important is getting a finer-grained map of the dynamics at work so that we may perceive reality with greater clarity.”
My comment: Debate about the power of Darwinian selection will end when everyone realizes what must be selected to enable the ‘conditions of life‘ that Darwin put before the concept of natural selection for morphological variation. Clearly, all life is nutrient-dependent and reproduction is controlled by the metabolism of nutrients to pheromones in species from microbes to man. For an accurate representation of how this occurs in mammals, see: Modeling Recent Human Evolution in Mice by Expression of a Selected EDAR Variant and Identifying Recent Adaptations in Large-Scale Genomic Data.
I can’t make it any easier for others to understand the concept of nutrient-dependent pheromone-controlled adaptive evolution until they are willing to read reports like these and quit thinking in terms of uncontrolled mutation-driven evolution. Darwin wrote: “When a variation is of the slightest use to any being, we cannot tell how much to attribute to the accumulative action of natural selection, and how much to the definite action of the conditions of life.” That was before anything was known about genetics or epigenetic effects of sensory input. Continuing to place evolution outside the context of Darwin’s ‘conditions of life,’ which are clearly nutrient-dependent and pheromone-controlled, is academically irresponsible nonsense.
