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Not irrelevant, your honor. People are always picturing people of the past as being much like themselves but wearing different clothes. It hasn't been hijacked so much as that, in Darwin's time, it was adopted, having been part and parcel of their mentality for generations on end. (IMHO).

As to the inbreeding, you'd need someone who knew something about genetics

I think that's the most polite argument I've ever been witness to. Also very "wordy". One of those arguments which is difficult for bystanders to follow. Pip, pip and cheerio......dudes.

uniface wrote:

Whoever controls the past, controls the future.

That's straight out of Nineteen-Eighty-Four...

What ever uni, it still defines exactly an end result. Those who survive are by definition the most fit for that scenario. It is unfortunate that the phrase has been bastardised for political ends.

Roy.

It's a tidy theory retroactively. Those that survive do so because they're best fitted for survival. It's circular reasoning ("scientifically" inadmissible), but it's plausible.

The rub comes when you try to use it predictively. (If it's made it past the hypothesis stage to "theory" it's got to be tested and validated at doing this).

Those that survive tend not to be the biggest, the strongest, the most agile nor the most clever. On the contrary (as I see it) a kind of broad average continues on down through the generations, with the extremes disappearing.

Case in point : Fredrick the Great collected giants for his palace guard. Paid handsome dowries to tall women who would marry them. His ambition was to breed supersoldiers. It came to nought -- nature wouldn't co-operate.

After however many thousands (hundreds of thousands ?) of years nature has supposedly been refining our genetic endowment through the survival of the fittest business, it would seem that what constitutes "fittest" (the end result) is such a broad category that there might as well not be one at all.

nature wouldn't co-operate.

Which proves something I imagine.

Roy.

Hellllooooooo in there !

As a rationalisation of the outcome, in retrospect, it appears plausible. The big folk didn't survive. Therefore they were less fit. By an after-the-fact circular reasoning loop that goes on forever.

But only in retrospect.

If you can't identify the more fit in advance and predict their greater survival and flourishing rate compared to the ordinary sort, you don't have a theory.

Scientifically, at best, you have an hypothesis. Which, because it can't be tested to predict (not just rationalise) real world outcomes, remains someone's fancy.

After-the-fact rationalisations are a dime a dozen. You allege they didn't survive "because" they were less fit. I can allege they didn't survive "because" invisible secret saboteurs from a parallel dimension saw to it that they didn't. Someone else could say it was "because" nature doesn't like Prussians.

You can't not see what I'm saying (?)

Fredrick the Great collected giants for his palace guard. Paid handsome dowries to tall women who would marry them. His ambition was to breed supersoldiers. It came to nought -- nature wouldn't co-operate.

Austrian and Russian muskets in the 7 Years War may have had a lot to do with that.

Fredrick the Great collected giants for his palace guard.

How the hell would you identify the more fit in advance? Fit for what?

Roy.

Napoleon's cuirassiers were supposed to be big men (6 feet +) on big horses. The Grenadiers of the Old Guard did not have such a requirement....although they did wear big bearskin hats to give the illusion of height.


Of course, Napoleon didn't care who they slept with.

And large men don't necessarily produce big offspring anyway do they Min? That's Lamarkian and thoroughly discredited.
I'm 5ft 7 ih height. My father was 5ft 8, my mother 5ft and my son is 6ft 2!

Roy.

I suspect that nutrition is a more reliable predictor of physical size than genetics. Go to a museum and look at Medieval suits of armor.

Absolutely! I think also Min that there is a lot of misunderstanding about natural selection and what it is supposed to do and what it cannot do and how.

Roy.

Some of the misunderstanding about natural selection is intentional, Dig. (The crocoduck scenario that creationists trot out, for instance!)

On another board today I had some jackass wonder about the evolutionary benefits of corn kernels popping under heat to make popcorn. I mean....one can not make this stuff up.

I'm reading Dawkins' "The Greatest Show on Earth" and so far, unlike The God Delusion, it is concentrating on the nuts and bolts of evolution by natural selection.