Posted: Aug 20, 2010 3:33 am
I'm sorry Templeton, I'm still not fully grasping your position..
Are you essentially saying that behaviors that we engage in can influence evolution? That is, if your fish (species) in the river chooses to inhabit a different part of the stream, then it will come under different selective pressures and evolve differently? So the evolution is still determined by evolutionary processes, but the behaviors change how these evolutionary processes manifest. If so, then obviously I agree.
Maybe it's your talk of "behavioral genes" adapting to the environment that's confusing me. Looking at the situation again, if you have a population of fish that live in one area of water, and then a group of them choose to swim somewhere else (to escape predators, to find food, for more space, etc), this would not be a result of a change in behavioral genes. They would have the same base behavioral laws that dictate how they behave, but the difference would be the environmental cues that act as the input change the output.
In other words, the behavioral genes of the fish would have a simple rule like: "If A, then do B, and if X, then do Y". One group of fish is exposed to environmental variable A so they do B (stay where they are). Another group is exposed to X so they do Y (move somewhere else). But there's no (significant) genetic difference between the two groups. That is, it's not like Group 1 has the behavioral genes for "stay where you are" and Group 2 has the behavioral genes for "go somewhere else".
Are we still discussing the same thing, or have I gone off on a completely unrelated issue?
Are you essentially saying that behaviors that we engage in can influence evolution? That is, if your fish (species) in the river chooses to inhabit a different part of the stream, then it will come under different selective pressures and evolve differently? So the evolution is still determined by evolutionary processes, but the behaviors change how these evolutionary processes manifest. If so, then obviously I agree.
Maybe it's your talk of "behavioral genes" adapting to the environment that's confusing me. Looking at the situation again, if you have a population of fish that live in one area of water, and then a group of them choose to swim somewhere else (to escape predators, to find food, for more space, etc), this would not be a result of a change in behavioral genes. They would have the same base behavioral laws that dictate how they behave, but the difference would be the environmental cues that act as the input change the output.
In other words, the behavioral genes of the fish would have a simple rule like: "If A, then do B, and if X, then do Y". One group of fish is exposed to environmental variable A so they do B (stay where they are). Another group is exposed to X so they do Y (move somewhere else). But there's no (significant) genetic difference between the two groups. That is, it's not like Group 1 has the behavioral genes for "stay where you are" and Group 2 has the behavioral genes for "go somewhere else".
Are we still discussing the same thing, or have I gone off on a completely unrelated issue?