Yes, there appears to be some confusion about what 'evolution' is meant
to mean.
> What I am saying is that Dawkins posits the existence and action of two
> mechanical processes -- mutation and natural selection -- as what,
> following the first appearance of life (known as abiogenesis, although I
> don't recall Dawkins using that term in The Blind Watchmaker), account for
> all the diversity of biological species, varieties, and structures (taking
> into account Rylander's further restriction on this term "all"). In other
And you are wrong about this. Dawkins *does* think that selection is
responsible for *adaptive* evolution (and you keep ignoring sex, BTW...).
He does *not* think that all evolution is adaptive. He does think that
non-adaptive evolution is boring. He does not, therefore, think that it
doesn't exist. The argument is not whether there are multiple processes
that drive evolution--everyone, including Dawkins, thinks that this is
true, despite what you keep trying to say--the argument is over what is
interesting and why. Dawkins agrees that genetic drift is responsible for
a great deal of evolutionary history; he just thinks it is responsible
for the boring parts. Personally, I think he's wrong about this, but
I think you are misrepresenting what he is saying. There is a whole T.O
thread dedicated to this exact argument called 'The High Table Debate'
around 07/1996, you can find on DejaNews. These issues come up there and
again, the debate condenses to what is important and why.
> words, Dawkins posits no more than those two mechanisms, and furthermore
> he claims that those two mechanisms, operating in whatever fashion they
> operate and with whatever restrictions and specifications need to be put
> on their operation, account for all "organized complexity" in the
> biological order.
That may be, but not all evolution produces 'organized complexity.' That
is what you are apparently not understanding yet.
> I am not saying that Dawkins says that mutation and natural selection
> operate at the same time. One way of putting this, as I understand it,
> could be to say that, according to evolutionists, mutation introduces
> variety, and natural selection (understood in whatever further refined way
> it may be) chooses (so to speak -- but it's a "blind watchmaker" form of
> choice, not a choice by a conscious agent) which of those novelties
> (introduced by mutation) to keep and perpetuate.=20
I can see no contribution added by considering whether mutation and
natural selection are operating at the same time. Where it *does* come
into play is in the relative rates of the processes--if natural selection
is much faster than mutation, then it will prune negative mutations very
quickly and fix positive mutations very quickly. If it is much slower
than mutation processes, then these will tend to create a more sizeable
amount of diversity in the species, and natural selection will then
fiddle with what is already there. This is certainly an important question,
but I don't see that it is very much related to this one.
-Greg