Redundant Expressions in Science
Is it usually just a bad style, redundant, instead of concise and precise, or is it usually a sign that a content is also lacking quality?
I can give you one example (that I think it's an example, you may not agree with me), for which I think it is just a bad style. The syntagm "Natural Selection" in Darwin's theory is redundant in a sense that the word "Natural" could/should be omitted, as there is no alternative to nature when we talk about reality, ie not imaginary processes but real processes.
As a naturalist, I reject existence of supernatural processes that may influence natural processes, and as an evolutionist I reject existence of artificial processes, that are somehow separate from natural processes. What criteria could we establish to distinguish between them (at least in the context of evolution)? If we define artificiality as a human intervention into nature, then this is also too anthropocentric for me, and any true evolutionist should disregard that definition, because homo sapiens is just one natural species among many of them.
The other alternative is to talk about "Environmental Selection" process, as it has more sense, as environment is that agent that is acting selectively.
I can give you one example (that I think it's an example, you may not agree with me), for which I think it is just a bad style. The syntagm "Natural Selection" in Darwin's theory is redundant in a sense that the word "Natural" could/should be omitted, as there is no alternative to nature when we talk about reality, ie not imaginary processes but real processes.
As a naturalist, I reject existence of supernatural processes that may influence natural processes, and as an evolutionist I reject existence of artificial processes, that are somehow separate from natural processes. What criteria could we establish to distinguish between them (at least in the context of evolution)? If we define artificiality as a human intervention into nature, then this is also too anthropocentric for me, and any true evolutionist should disregard that definition, because homo sapiens is just one natural species among many of them.
The other alternative is to talk about "Environmental Selection" process, as it has more sense, as environment is that agent that is acting selectively.
Comments (57)
The problem here, is that nature really does not "select". Selection is a matter of choice, and some sort of will is required to choose. So the phrase "natural selection" creates the illusion that nature has the capacity to choose. This breaks down the classical division between natural and artificial.
So "Natural Selection" is not redundant at all. It's a phrase purposely chosen to break down that division between natural and artificial, thereby bringing human beings, along with all of the "artificial" things which they create, into the realm of "nature". Whether or not this is a good, and true, representation is a matter of opinion. I think it's false, as represented in my first sentence, nature really does not select, individual living beings make choices, not nature.
Take for instance when Heidegger writes about technology distancing people from nature, or the ordinary language claim that a food contains 'only natural ingredients'. Would you take these statements to mean something else, or to be using the phrase natural incorrectly?
No I don't, and I thought that is what naturists or nudists do. I think naturalist means something else. :lol:
OK, do you think that human beings, along with all of the "artificial" things which they create, need "bringing into the realm of nature"? Aren't we already there, always were, and always will be part of nature? Maybe our anthropocentric views are the real problem here, and just an illusion, what criteria justifies them? If we are as natural as the rest of nature, how come the selection that we do is not natural, so that it deserves special attribute, ie "artificial"? Maybe that is the only thing here that is artificial, our notion of artificiality?
I don't agree that farmer (ie homo sapiens) is the only being capable of purposeful actions, and that elsewhere in nature only unconscious processes can make selection.
I agree that artificiality may have some kind of meaning. For example, artificial smile, artificial lake, artificial insemination, all things that happen in a not usual, "natural", way. But "usual" is very imprecise word in a scientific context, as well as "natural" in the same context. The only artificial thing that I admit gives any right to human kind to think we are above nature, is artificial intelligence, and more generally, artificial life. If and when both of these things happen, only that can justify our anthropocentrism.
I think there is a division to be made between living things and non-living things. And I don't
see how a non-living thing could make a choice or a selection. Yet we refer to non-living things as being natural. So "natural selection" doesn't appear to refer to anything reasonable to me because it still requires a division between living natural things, and non-living natural things, the former being capable of selecting.
Also you should not confuse notation with meaning. No one who reads scientific literature expects to encounter some specialist term or symbol and instantly understand its meaning without any explanation or context. The fact that, when taken out of context, notation can be misunderstood is not a serious concern. Some care is usually taken to make a term appropriately suggestive and not grossly misleading, but in the end this is a matter of personal taste.
Close, but no cigar! You have all the right notes here - they're just not quite in the right order.
Natural selection is a term that distinguishes selection due to the high mortality rate of animals from hunger, cold, heat, predation and so on, from sexual selection. Both are means by which only a select few are able to pass on their characteristics to subsequent generations - one due to death before breeding, the other from not being chosen as a mate by the opposite sex. So, it's not a redundant term, and it is not employed to distinguish natural from supernatural, nor primarily - to distinguish natural selection from selective breeding by pigeon fanciers, or farmers.
Then I'll simply thank you for your unsubstantiated opinion.
We never see a completed infinite sequence. So "Lawful" only refers to actively using a recipe to generate a sequence or to predict a sequence, say an equation or calculator, whereas "Lawless" refers to merely observing a sequence unfold before us 'without us having an idea or plan'.
But isn't there always uncertainty when using a recipe? Don't we invariably resort to consulting with a calculator? So unless we are platonists, Lawfulness and Lawless aren't terms that describe unfolding sequences in and of themselves. Rather they are merely informal practical designators for how we are using or generating sequences.
I think the distinction is a bit meaningless anyway. It's not clear what sort of human behaviour is no longer natural but artificial. Or at what point natural behaviour produces an artifact. Monkeys using a branch, tearing of leaves and twigs to make a stick, to reach ants in a tree bark made an artifact out of the branch. Or possibly not. It depends on your definition, which is a bit arbitrary.
No that's not the case at all, because non-reasoning creatures make selections as do reasoning beings. The non-reasoning ones just don't make rational choices. But non-living things don't make choices at all. So where I see the problem is in classing the living together with the non-living as "natural".
I think that in the case of "natural selection", "selection" is not a good choice of words. That is because there is nothing which makes a choice, nothing which decides the creatures "selected", and this is what is required for "selection", a choice. For example, when you flip a coin there is nothing which chooses the outcome, so whether it lands heads or tails it is not an act of selection. To say that something "selects" whether the coin ends up heads or tails would be a misuse of the word.
Quoting karl stone
Only a master debater could debate oneself.
How do you define controlled evolution then? It is not supernatural and not programmed by any other, but ourselves. Controlled evolution is going to be a thing moving forward. Both in genetics and in cybernetics, so that would apply "artificial" to the terminology of "selection".
Are you essentially saying that when getting rid of "God" in the terminology, there is nothing that could be called artificial, since each artificial result is the result of what is essentially natural?
That a car is essentially natural since it was made by machines, which were made by man, which designed the car, using computer simulations designed and invented by man.
But can we distinguish things as artificial and natural by the initial state as "active thought"? That a car cannot be evolved as a natural thing in nature and might possibly never be without the active thought of making something like a car? So by thinking, we create something that isn't part of natures automatic causality, but controlled? Like I described "controlled evolution" above.
In that sense, artificial can be negative to natural in order to have a terminology outside of concepts like God.
"In 1871, with the publication of The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, Darwin boldly addressed both the problem of human origins and the evolution of beauty. In this book he proposed a second, independent mechanism of evolution—sexual selection—to account for armaments and ornaments, battle and beauty. If the results of natural selection were determined by the differential survival of heritable variations, then the results of sexual selection were determined by their differential sexual success—that is, by those heritable features that contribute to success at obtaining mates.
... in Origin, Darwin saw sexual selection as simply the handmaiden of natural selection, another means of guaranteeing the perpetuation of the most vigorous and best-adapted mates. This view still prevails today. By the time he wrote Descent, however, Darwin had embraced a much broader concept of sexual selection that may have nothing to do with a potential mate’s being more vigorous or better adapted per se, but only with being aesthetically appealing ... Within Darwin’s argument for mate choice in Descent was [the] revolutionary idea: that animals are not merely subject to the extrinsic forces of ecological competition, predation, climate, geography, and so on that create natural selection. Rather, animals can play a distinct and vital role in their own evolution through their sexual and social choices.
If evolutionary biology is to adopt an authentically Darwinian view, it must recognize, as he did, that natural selection and sexual selection are independent evolutionary mechanisms. In this framework, adaptive mate choice is a process that occurs through the interaction of sexual selection and natural selection." (Richard Prum, The Evolution of Beauty).
Just so, it is a pragmatic distinction but no longer absolute; one has to allow a degree of arbitrariness in claiming a significant difference between a straw hut and a bird's nest. and one would have by your criterion of active thought, to go along with the idea that sexual selection is artificial selection - the peacock's fan being the result of the peahen's choice, as @StreetlightX argues above, as is the weaver bird's nest building, although that seems also to have natural component.
Where the distinction becomes really unhelpful though would be in trying to work out whether or not a termite mound is or is not the product of a group mind, termites functioning as neurone-analogues.
But personally, I am quite sympathetic to maintaining the now arbitrary distinction as natural/man-made, as peasants do, bouyed by tradition. and then peacock feathers are natural, unless they are made of plastic.
Rejecting God or any diety is easy. But as you say, what is exceptionally hard for many people is the difference between "man" and "nature" as obviously humans are part of nature too, so there's no justification for humans to be different anymore. Yet then comes all the normative baggage of what we "as humans" ought to do "to the environment" and how we ought to live. Atheist aren't willing to give up the exceptionality of humans, sometimes they promote it even more.
Of course, one simple solution is to define anything that is found in nature absent of man making it is natural and what man has made is synthetic/artificial or man made, opposite to "natural". Like there aren't many personal computers found in any natural environment where humans haven't been, even if the raw materials that it is made of can be found.
No, you still don't understand Darwin's argument - maybe if you actually read the book where he introduces his terms, you would see where he was coming from. That selection practiced by a sheep breeder or a horticulturalist on the one hand, and by non-anthropogenic environmental factors on the other hand - both resulting in differential reproduction - was rather his point - a point that would not be immediately obvious to his readers. So he starts by describing something his readers would be well familiar with - what he calls Man's selection or artificial selection, offers an explanation for it, and then proceeds to apply that same explanation to other forms of selection that had been in operation on Earth long before sheep breeders and horticulturalists.
Is it really so easy? The word "selection" implies choice, and choice requires an agent who is doing the choosing. In the case of "natural selection", if the agent who is doing the choosing is not God, then who is it, Mother Nature? It appears to me that as long as we maintain the concept of "natural selection", some sort of God or deity is implied as that which is doing the selecting.
Wouldn't it better serve the purpose of evolutionary theorists, to remove the word "selection" from the description of the natural processes which are related to death? We all die and there is no selection (by the grim reaper) involved. Then "selection" is left to describe the reproductive processes, like those described by StreetlightX, which are responsible for the continuity of existence. There really is no need for a concept of "natural selection".
I haven't read Descent, so quite possibly Darwin had a change of heart but then I still have a conceptual problem with the distinction. How are aesthetics in natural selection separate? Time and again it is established that what we find aesthetically pleasing in mates has everything to do with survivability (hips and tits as a sign of fertility, strength for virility and protection). And even if we couldn't link it to survivability it's not as if it wouldn't become just another selective pressure that has no intentionality whatsoever as I don't control who I'm attracted too. If we did, the religious could rejoice and start "curing" gay people.
What does one mean by ''artificial'' then?
I'm no linguist but ''artificial'' was probably invented to distinguish human activity from the rest of nature. We do stuff to the world, like inventing machines, which no other animal, save some chimps, can do. It's a worthwhile distinction to make - human artificial and the rest natural.
The catch is creating the artificial comes naturally to us.
There are advantages to stepping back some way and looking at ourselves and our purposeful activity, such as building dwellings - and yes, breeding sheep - as being a kind of ecological adaptation in itself - and thus being a part of the same dynamics that is exhibited in the "natural" world. But so too there are advantages to stepping closer and distinguishing different varieties of selective pressures and adaptations. And of course in appropriate contexts there are any number of reasons for distinguishing "man-made" from "natural."
Do you think Darwin was mad when he titled his second book: 'The Descent of Man' - given that evolution is generally speaking, a process of weeding out, shouldn't it be: 'The Ascent of Man'?
Or do you suppose he coined the phrase in relation to the religious idea of Creation at the beginning of time, that implies a descent from the ideal into corruption?
With regard to the human species, as the only intellectually intelligent animal, I think it important to stress the direction of knowledge over time, from less and worse, toward more and better.
Yet the reception of Darwin's works by a religious world, ranged from muted to outraged via outright mockery. So maybe he was angry when he chose the term 'descent.'
A bit off from the subject, but for an atheist it's quite easy. And in the process of "natural selection" you really don't need God, when you have a random process how species get their genes and then the process of those most adapted to the environment making more offspring. The result isn't the best or optimal, but just a result. First and foremost, Darwinism is part of science, not an ideology, and hence it's based on objective study. More of a need for God would be to answer moral questions, what is wrong or right, but atheists typically just refer to humanism in this case.
But a random process is not a selection. When you toss a coin do you think that something selects whether heads or tails will appear?
Quoting ssu
Science is an ideology, a methodological ideology, but that's irrelevant. Darwin had to select the words used in description of his theory, and the fact is that he used "selection". If you explain what Darwin called a "selection", as a random process, then clearly you are misinterpreting what Darwin intended. He meant, that nature selects from processes which would, without such selection, produce random results. So you cannot dismiss as non-essential to his theory, that act of selection, leaving the whole thing as random processes. "Selection" does not mean random.
Quoting Benkei
But Darwinian evolutionary theory breaks down the division between human beings and other animals. So to divide between artificial and natural, along the lines of human vs. all else, is not justified or supported by any real principles. This means we need to either extend the class of "artificial" to include the activities of other living beings, or else dismiss it altogether leaving everything as "natural".
Unfortunately, this is not true. Or rather, for quite a while its been thought to be true, but has begun to crumble under large swaths of emerging evidence that it simply does not account for a great deal of evolutionary phenomena. Ascribing 'what we find aesthetically pleasing in mates to survivability alone' simply flies in the face of evidence - Prum, the Yale ornithologist who I'm relying upon here - cites case after case after case (from the wings of Manakins, to the reproductive systems of ducks, the displays of the great Argus, and so on) where attempts to account for aesthetic phenomena in terms of survivability simply does not work. The evidence itself needs to be read to be discussed, so I can only encourage that you read his work. None of this is to say that what we find aesthetically pleasing in mates has nothing to do with survivability. Only that survivability does not exhaust accounts of aesthetic phenomena.
Quoting Benkei
This, though, is a non-sequitur through and through. The whole question of intentionality is an irrelevancy - the question is simply: is sexual selection an independent evolutionary mechanism to natural selection, yes or no? Is mate choice a driver of evolutionary change in its own right, or not? Whatever the 'metaphysics' of 'choice' at work here is irrelevant. Ironically, one of the reasons sexual selection was so violently rejected as an independent evolutionary mechanism in the time after Darwin theorized it was because the very idea that animals - specifically females! - could play any causative role in driving evolution was nothing less than an offence to Victorian puritan mores. That same regressive hangover remains an infection on our understanding of evolution today.
This insistence on everything being natural is a self-inflicted semantic confusion. The point being made is silly: everything is natural, because nature is everything, by definition. This does not say anything meaningful, it's just a tautology. Yeah, I get it, you don't believe in gods and the supernatural. If that's what you want to say, then say it (though why you would want to bring that up in the present context - I have no idea). But why do violence to language?
In the early 1500s, we see a usage of "unnatural" a la "at variance with moral standards," and the "artificial" sense apparently doesn't pop up until the mid 1700s.
As far as a particular gene/genome is concerned, the source of the selective pressure is of no consequence: it is the same heritable variation/selection mechanism. Of course, from a wider perspective of a species there is a difference.
What accounts for the difference? In the simple Darwinian scenario the environment - and thus the fitness landscape - is fairly stable, and the population either adapts to it gradually, through successive generations, or goes extinct. However, in the case of sexual selection the fitness landscape is not only dynamic, its evolution is tightly coupled to the evolution of the population genome. This is now a very different game.
Those who studied the basics of partial differential equations may be familiar with a variant of the following problem. An island is populated by goats and wolves. Goats eat grass, wolves eat goats. The populations of grass, goats and wolves grow or shrink in response to the availability of food and/or predation. This can be modeled by a system of coupled partial differential equations. The model is so ridiculously simple that it actually has an exact analytical solution (a rare thing in real-life modeling). And yet even this extremely simple setup gives rise to an interesting dynamics in the phase space, with loops, spirals, regions of stability/instability and tipping points. The reason for this complicated dynamics is the mutual dependence of processes that make up the toy model.
And now imagine something similar in principle, but hugely more complicated - that is what the dynamics of sexual selection is like. But not just sexual selection: similar antagonistic evolution results in arms races between males of the same species
or between predators and prey.
From the naive point of view such antagonistic evolution is counterproductive: wouldn't it be better if we could all get along instead of wasting resources on pointless competitions? Make love not war! But of course nature doesn't care about such "commonsense" sentiments: it just does what it does for no reason at all.
Heh, I wouldn't say 'no reason at all', but rather, for more interesting and varied reasons than we are usually prepared to countenance. For sexual selection in particular, the generally agreed upon mechanism is that of 'runaway selection', where, while (aesthetic) features might have initially begun to be selected for as signs of better fitness, as those features become more prominent over evolutionary time, they become more and more desirable for their aesthetic qualities alone. In other words, runaway selection creates positive feed-back loops which become autonomous and independent of the dynamics of natural selection (within certain threshold boundaries of course).
Such runaway processes have also been invoked to explain the emergence of cooperation and altruism among certain species (us!) where one would expect a more dog-eat-dog world. It's not all sunshine through - as Prum notes, in the case of ducks, such runaway processes have led to an intra-sexual 'arms race' where male and female ducks have evolved some terrifying genitalia because male ducks are, well, very rapey, and female ducks have literally evolved different genitalia in order to stop being impregnated by male ducks they don't want to be impregnated by. Nature is scary and wildly facinating.
That is a naturist, not a naturalist.
The work done by the word 'natural' in 'natural selection' is to indicate that the selection is not done by a conscious being who says 'we'll have this one instead of that one'. With that meaning, there is no redundancy. It's a different meaning of 'natural' from the one you envisaged.
A more accurate alternative would be 'unconscious selection' or 'accidental selection', but they don't sound as good.
How so? Darwin dinstinguishes artificial selection from natural selection by pointing to human intentionality. Based on that distinguishing feature, sexual selection would fall within the scope of natural selection. I also don't see how sexual selection falls outside of the four principles of natural selection. Obviously, I'm reading a bit on this left and right and the easily accesible sources describe sexual selection as a mode of natural selection as well. Also, see andrewk's commenton "accidental selection"; it is in that sense relevant whether there's intentionality or not. At least in my view.
Also, I'm wondering whether we're really saying different things. You quoted someone calling sexual selection the handmaiden to natural selection where my original comment concerned the juxtaposition between artificial selection and natural selection (which Darwin makes in his origin of species) and the claim that instead Darwin was comparing/juxtaposing sexual selection and natural selection that I disagreed with.
I don't agree it's either confusion or violence to language. I don't like the word "artificial" (or "natural" for that matter) for the reason that it is often quickly followed by appeals to nature and the like. I try to avoid such terms as much as possible as a result. It's also not that I do not understand what people try to convey or that it's necessarily wrong, I just think - as in this case - there are better and clearer terms.
To be fair, I didn't quote anyone! That said, I was implicitly responding to this:
Quoting Benkei
- the wording of which I mirrored in my first post here ("sexual selection is not a mode of natural selection"). Perhaps the issue can be put like this: if one wants to conceive sexual selection as a mode of natural selection, this can be done, but only at the price of broadening the the concept of natural selection so that it loses its specificity. To put the problem crudely, if you conflate sex and death as sources of selective pressure (so as to lump them both under the label 'natural selection'), you lose the ability to properly conceptualise the evolutionary dynamics specific to each.
And that's the key point: sexual selection and natural selection can lead to divergent evolutionary outcomes. Specifically, sexual selection can make a species less than optimized to its environment, making it evolutionarily worse-off than it otherwise would be. This is why runway selection is such a big deal: once selection starts to occur due to aesthetic criteria (rather than criteria of pure survivability), you get a divergence in selective parameters, as it were. You get two dimensions along which to measure evolutionary success, each of which can, depending on the situation, complement or conflict with each other.
Now of course one can just ignore all of this and say 'its all natural selection', but then this would be like trying to parse a fine-grained phenomenon with a knife too large to do the job. You would not capture the specificity of the dynamics at a resolution appropriate to it. If you don't make the distinction, and make it well, you deprive yourself of the ability to properly understand certain evolutionary phenomena.
--
As for the OP, we probably agree. The whole thing hinges on a very silly understanding of what is implied by 'natural' in 'natural selection'.
This apparently even happens with what you consider natural selection sans sexual selection. Monkeys who like unripe fruit which is more difficult to open the less ripe it is so only the strongest monkeys can open the really hard ones. Only to die from poison.
But the only selection criteria at work here is death: the strength of the monkey isn't relevant. Natural selection is 'indifferent' to how you die; only that you die is relevant.
In the coming apocalypse, our cockroach brethren are far more likely to be far better suited to the wasteland than we are, for all our apparent gifts.
Yeah, I didn't mean to imply that it's completely random and chaotic; of course there are reasons - they just aren't the obvious reasons that we like to attribute to nature.
Quoting StreetlightX
It sure is. One of the more disturbing instances of antagonistic evolution is the struggle between the mother and the offspring. The (future) offspring wants to suck in as many nutrients as it can, grow as big as it can, but the mother wants to ration her considerable investment of resources more prudently, so that she has more chances to reproduce (starting with surviving the childbirth). It's hard to wrap your mind around the fact that this struggle takes place inside one and the same organism!
Quoting StreetlightX
It's not such a cut and dried question. On the one hand, there are distinctions between different types of selection, sometimes very obvious ones. On the other hand, the reason Darwin ultimately set sexual selection apart from natural selection may have to do with the fact that he tended to think about natural selection as survival of the fittest (even if he didn't coin that phrase). Later thinkers amended that formula as differential reproduction of the fittest - not as snappy, but more in keeping with the thrust of the theory. Dying before reproducing and surviving but failing to reproduce have exactly the same effects on fitness. Put that way, sex - reproduction - has everything to do with natural selection. Again, I am not a "lumper" - I don't believe that everything is the same as everything else and all distinctions are meaningless; but selection categories are not as starkly distinct as some make them out to be.
Quoting StreetlightX
Quoting StreetlightX
I can see where some of the negative reaction to Prum's book may be coming from. I haven't read it, but I have seen some of the media reporting, like this New York Times piece: How Beauty Is Making Scientists Rethink Evolution. One can easily recognize a familiar narrative: a maverick scientist bravely challenges the dogma, only to be met with outraged howls from hidebound academia. And this precious flourish about "Victorian puritan mores" is a topping on the cake.
Only there seems to be something wrong with this story, starting with the subtitle of the book: "How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World - and Us." Now wait a minute, Darwin's theory of sexual selection was never forgotten or abandoned, as Prum claims (judging by the reporting that I have seen). Challenged, modified, developed - yes. It is true that Alfred Wallace, Darwin's younger colleague and the co-discoverer of the theory of evolution, was skeptical about the role of female preference, but the idea that female preference is one of the most important drivers of sexual selection has been the received view since at least Ronald Fisher's 1930 hugely influential work on population genetics (he was the one who introduced the idea of "runaway" evolution in connection with sexual selection). Yes, purely adaptationist explanations of sexual selection have been put forward (starting from Darwin himself), and, as it often happens, some scientists tried to put all their chips on that idea, but it never became the mainstream dogma. For example, one idea that gained some popularity, which is that females choose bizarre and maladaptive male traits precisely because they are maladaptive (a male who thrives in spite of the handicap must be very strong indeed) has been extensively criticized, including by Dawkins in The Selfish Gene.
I still hear claims that organisms reproduce "for the good of the species" or similar utterances, which is pretty amazingly wrong. Organisms reproduce for the sake of their genes, a selection process which sometimes even bumps up against the genetic interests of of their own offspring (and siblings, to say nothing of their unrelated conspecifics).