The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #154775   Message #3638073
Posted By: TheSnail
01-Jul-14 - 09:59 AM
Thread Name: BS: Scientific misconceptions.
Subject: RE: BS: Scientific misconceptions.
Neo-Darwinism.

Right. Steve seems to think it's the root of all evil. I wasn't all that familiar with the term so I did some Googling. Its meanng seems to have drifted a bit over the last 120 years or so but this will do for a start -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neo-Darwinism

If you've got an hour and twelve minutes to spare there's this - Neo-Darwinism Lecture by Richard Dawkins. Moderately tedious history of the progress of thought on Evolution but it has some interesting points. For instance at around 42 minutes Dawkins says, in a discussion on the brightness or dullness of guppies in the absence or presence of predation -

Natural selection favours those individuals who in this distribution are a bit more brightly coloured than the others.

Staring at 56 mins 37 secs there is a sequence which does seem to support Steve's point of view. During it he says -

Since the whole point about neo-Darwinism is that it is changes in frequencies of something, you've got to look for something that can be said to have a frequency at all.

I'm a little confused, or perhaps Steve is.