wellwisher
Well-Known Member
Randomness? Chance?
I don't understand how this would work as a mechanism to generate beneficial change in a population, because that's all natural selection is.
Please explain how artificial selection generates beneficial changes in a population.
Are you sure you understand what natural selection is? You seem to be imputing human motives, psychological and social effects to it that aren't there.
Natural selection involves life being selected based on the potentials set by the natural environment. Artificial selection involves using potentials created via artificial environments; human created.
For example, in Arctic areas of the earth, natural selection will favor animals with thick fur and lots of body insulation. If we add humans, who build a heated dome city, in the middle of a glacier, that is stocked with transported food from all over the world, you don't need to be hairy to be selected. If you were the billionaire, who paid for the project, you can be the one always selected, simply by pandering to yourself. This selection may not be the same result found in nature.
Say a bunch of con artists, create a social environment, called the collusion delusion, where fantasy, intrigues and false witness, takes the place of honesty and reality. In this artificial environment, social selection goes to the most delusional and devious. This is not the same selection as a natural culture, which seeks truth in nature and man.
Say there was massive logistical damage to human civilization, due to a series of natural and manmade disasters. The humans that remain now live in a broken civilization environment, that is being overrun by nature. The selection process will change, since style, money and politics, may not matter compared to the woodsy skills of the boy scout who understands nature.
Darwin, in a way, tried to return things back to natural causes. Darwin published in 1859. Beginning in roughly 1760, the industrial revolution began in England and spread to other places like America by 1820. This placed more and more humans in artificial factory dominated environments, which broke contact with natural rural farm life.
The family farm, was historically, subject to natural blessings and curses, such as floods, droughts, pests, vermin, hot and cold, all of which may be a function of local geography. Natural selection was part of farm life and farm death.
The big factories of the Industrial revolution worked year round with little change coming from the natural environment. The human mind over the 100 years until the Publication of Darwin, became detached from nature and made confused by the artificial environments. Darwin traveled away from civilization and factory culture, to a remote place where only nature controls life. There he reaffirms nature.
His premise is similar to the premise of the bible, in the sense that something beyond man, was at the foundation of selection. The details of origin are different, but both orientations place man secondary. In modern times, returning to nature, natural or organics foods, and maintaining natural sanctuaries, satisfies both the needs natural science and religion.