What is causing the natural selection in the example I mentioned? It was a physical cause - causing physical death of those variations that the antibiotic could physically bind to.
What was the effect of the natural selection I mentioned? Only those variations that the antibiotic could not physically bind to were left alive.
Full retreat into semantics and epistemology is not answering my rather simple question.
Absent any knowledge on your part of what DNA is or what it does - I cannot take at face value any assertion that you make about it not being necessary and sufficient to its assigned task.
Absent ANY description of the physical mechanism of the evolution you say you believe in, I must conclude that you have no real intellectual curiosity on this subject to go along with your almost complete lack of knowledge.
So you say you believe in evolution, and that there is some underlying physical mechanism - but you have no idea how to describe it without it being a “Darwinist” argument.
That right there is real amusing!
Evolution only speaks to what life "does," not what life "is."
To me it is easy to conceive of life, and hence biology, without evolution. But not of evolution without life. Thus, evolution is a corollary of the living, the consequence of specific somatic activities, and not the other way around. Indeed, it may very well be more a property of particular realizations of life, rather than of life itself. — Robert Rosen, Life Itself, 1991 [highly recommended!]Thus it appears yet again that you and I are looking at different things, and are decidedly not on the same page, as usual. You are satisfied to know what DNA does. It isn't necessary to inquire into what it IS — the same way you are satisfied to know what life does, while feeling no pressing need to know what life IS. (Indeed, exDemMom suggests in her valuable essay/post at #200 that this may be a metaphysical question beyond the reach of science.)
I do not at all believe that evolution reduces to "a" physical mechanism and nothing more. Life forms are not "machines, " though the "machine metaphor" is widespread in biology nowadays.
The machine metaphor suggests very strongly that the "parts" of organisms are analogous to the parts of machines. Hence they are there for the sake of whatever functions they execute with respect to the organism as a whole....In other words, final cause — e.g., mitochondria's purpose is energy generation — is never to be taken literally. We must not speak of "purpose" at all — for this seems to involve a causal "pull from the future" which is prohibited in the Newtonian picture of causal entailment.
...[I]f the parts of a machine are there by design [for all the machines we know of are human purpose-built fabrications], what does that say about organisms? Obviously, nothing very good. For by invoking the concept of design, and the explanation of parts in terms of design (i.e., in terms of the functions manifested by the parts), we are talking about finality [final cause]. This is all right when we talk about machines as human fabrications, but it is manifestly not all right to consider organisms in such terms.
The central issue for biology here is: how can we have organization without finality? Nowadays, biologists generally believe they have papered over this issue. In a nutshell, Darwinian evolution through natural selection, with its attendant adaptations, serves precisely to do this. The argument is that the produce of an evolutionary process gives the appearance of design but without any of the finalistic implications of design. Through evolution, then, we can have organic machines, in which parts have functions, but shaped entirely by natural selection and not by fabrication. At least, that is the claim.
As such, the explanation of a function then devolves upon the evolutionary process itself, and not upon the particular relation of part to whole that process has generated. It thus remains, strictly speaking, illegal to explain, e.g., the function of mitochondria (i.e., to answer the question of "why mitochondria?) by referring to the exigencies of energy generation; this is only a façon de parler, a shorthand for a whole evolutionary chronicle, and never to be taken literally. — ibid.
Or as Robert Rosen put it,
...[F]inality is ... resolutely excluded from Newtonian encodings. First ... [causal] entailment in that picture is embodied entirely in the recursiveness of state transition sequences. There is nothing in that picture for a state to entail except a subsequent state. Furthermore, a state can itself be entailed only by a preceding state. The presence of time as a parameter for state transition sequences translates into an assertion that causes must not anticipate effects. Therefore, whether we express final causation in terms of "intentionality," or equivalently in terms of what its effect entails, final causation in the Newtonian picture involves the future acting on the present. And of course, this is clearly inconsistent with the encoding categories in the Newtonian picture.Two observations here: (1), Darwin's evolution theory manifests the Newtonian view of causation and time — as a unidirectional linear series of state transitions over time. And yet (2), it seems to me impossible within this framework to speak of a biological function absent the purpose the function serves. And in the Newtonian picture, we can't talk about purpose at all — say, "the purpose of mitochondria is energy generation" — because any idea of "purpose" looks like a "pull from the future," and the Newtonian causal structure does not permit this....In the Newtonian picture, a state can only entail subsequent states.... Subsequent states are necessarily later in time than present states. Finality is expressible only in terms of what is entailed by a state, and hence, in the Newtonian picture, only in terms of future states. Ergo, final causation, as a separate causal category, cannot exist in that picture.
I just love it, dear allmendream, when you engage me with questions of the type, "what is the physical mechanism that drives evolution?" For you to have such an expectation — that ultimately everything in nature devolves exclusively on the physical — is relentlessly reductionist to Newtonian principles which can do nothing to explicate what life is. And so, I use such opportunities to tell you all the ways in which I truly believe Darwin's theory is totally unsuitable to the task of explaining just what it is — LIFE — that is, what is this phenomenon that is "evolving?"
As to this above-mentioned "reductionism" so inherent in Darwinian thinking, Rosen had this to say:
I can epitomize a reductionist approach to [biological] organization in general, and to life in particular, as follows: throw away the organization and keep the underlying matter.In short, study the organization, not the matter. Matter constitutes the physical basis of all physically-realizable systems in nature, both inorganic and organic, but can furnish no principle whereby the inorganic system can bootstrap itself into an organic (i.e., living) system capable of "evolving" in the first place.
The relational [biological] approach to this says the exact opposite, namely: when studying an organized material system, throw away the matter and keep the underlying organization.
A final word on our topic, from Robert Rosen again:
Contemporary biology has concerned itself almost exclusively with the endlessly fascinating phenomena of life, but the secrets are not to be found there, no more than one can fathom the nature of the chemical bond by staring at the periodic table. Thus, we must approach the problem from a new direction....Well, one can only hope that is so....
...I contrasted "contemporary physics" with the "ideal physics" it aspires to be. I argued that a vast discrepancy exists between the two, the discrepancy most blatantly revealed by the inability of contemporary physics to throw light on organic phenomena. The comparable relation between "contemporary biology" and "ideal biology" is far more discrepant still. At the moment, biology remains a stubbornly empirical, experimental, observational science. The papers and books that define contemporary biology emanate mainly from laboratories of increasingly exquisite sophistication, authored by virtuosi in the manipulation of laboratory equipment, geared primarily to isolate, manipulate, and characterize minute quantities of matter. Thus contemporary biology simply is what these people do; it is precisely what they say it is.
On the other hand, a science indifferent to its own basic questions can hardly be said to be in its ideal situation, or indeed, anywhere near it. If the status quo is to be changed, we had better not entirely vest in the contemporary biologist the right to say what biology is in the abstract. For whatever biology will be tomorrow, it will not be merely an extrapolation of what it is today.
For I think the following insight from another great mathematician and theoretical biologist, Nicholas Rashevsky (did I mention that Rosen was a mathematically-based theoretical biologist?) is entirely valid:
As we have seen, a direct application of the physical principles used in mathematical models of biological phenomena, for the purpose of building a theory of life ... is not likely to be fruitful. We must look for a principle which connects the different physical phenomena involved and expresses the biological unity of the organism and of the organic world as a whole. [emphasis added]Darwinism is of no help here. To put it mildly.
Question: Will contemporary biology ever take up Rashevsky's (and Rosen's) challenge?
Thank you ever so much for writing, dear allmendream!