Posted: Apr 03, 2011 9:13 pm
pfrankinstein wrote:Paul Almond wrote: I have a question, pfrankinstein, and I think it is important to this discussion. Could you say exactly what you regard the word "evolution" as meaning, in the context in which it is being used by you, here?
The word "evolution" is Victorian slang for what Charles Darwin himself preferred to refer to as "descent with modification by means of Natural selection". It is Darwin's meaning of the word "evolution" that i use.
Paul.
Does this mean that "evolution", in the sense that you are using the term here, involves:
1. random variation - some mechanism that produces versions of something that are based on some original version, but randomly altered in small ways.
2. selection - some mechanism that selects particular versions according to some criteria as the ones that will be used as the original versions on which further random variations will be based.
?
(Most people in this discussion would say that both of these elements are needed for a Darwinian evolution process.)