Local maxima

By -

Silas offers a good explanation for why dragonflies don't just "figure out" how to fly in the shade. I think it is on target... as far as it goes.

My goal in this post and the previous one has not been to knock existing evolutionary explanations as incorrect. I am just pointing out that they leave a lot unexplained. (And we would expect as much in the average scientific theory.)

For instance, wouldn't it seem a little easier for fireflies to make the transition from flying in sunlight to flying in shade and sunlight, than for creatures that don't fly and don't have wings to transition to creatures that do fly and do have wings? It's as though your mechanic told you it was impossible to turn you plane that only flies in the daytime to one that can also fly at night, but definitely he could turn your car into a plane.


Comments

  1. rob10:32 AM

    Assuming that all animals started out not flying, some must (mutation by mutation , with each individual mutation giving them some advantage) have developed wings and aerial ability. Others must have had mutations that would have started them on the path to flying - but for some environmental reasons these mutation had no advantage so they stayed earth-bound. The reason for flying v not-flying might be quite complex but would in theory make sense if all data was known to evolutionary biologists.

    So it may well be that dragonflys do occasionally have mutations that would start them on the path to flying in the shade - but either these adaptions were of no benefit, so they didn't stay in the gene pool, or they start an evolutionary branch that after other adaptions lead to the evolution of a species other than the dragonfly, that is better designed to hunt mosquitoes in the shade.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose
Read more