Isn't this what actually happens? After some period, all individuals who have bad genes have perished, while those who remain do not have them.
Of course, a single individual may survive to reproduction even though it has been born with a less-than-optimal lung or a stiff leg, but after some generations, these will have been weeded out. Can it get more deterministic than that?
I have a loaded die that preferentially gives a six when I throw it. But it does not always give a six. Do you really believe that if somebody tells me that I have to use a die that gives random results, I can just say this die is 'random'?
In the clip it showed how just the smallest bias can lead to huge changes in a less than 12,000 generations (such a short time compared to how long time life has been evolving)--
And if there were any doubts--look at the variety of dogs--just tweaking wolves for 10,000 years or so--and you get Chihuahuas and Great Danes. Without DNA, you couldn't guess they were even the same species from their skeletons. And nature isn't as kind as humans with her culling of runts and rejects. Random Selection? Hardly.
I think mijo is partly (and purposely) confused, because neutral and junk DNA will hang around forever--but anything that changes the phenotype (physical organism created by the DNA) will be acted upon by the environment and either selected or not...in a continual culling (honing) of the phenotype via random tweaks to the genotype. Natural selection can't read "DNA"--it can only "see it" if it creates an organism.
Genotype is information (like a computer code or a recipe)
Phenotype is the result that is acted upon (the program or nozzle or recipe result). Random mutations in the former can only be
selected if they result in beneficial changes to the latter. Natural selection can't look at the recipe and tell if it "tastes good"-- you have to actually make the food before the recipe can be selected before or against. (You can have a little bit of yucky in a recipe without changing the fact that overall it's yummy.) Mijo just jumbles all the randomness together and decides it makes sense to say "evolution is random because each part can be described by a probability distribution." Yes, there's "random crap" in DNA--but that doesn't make the selection process random.
A loaded die will "select for" a particular number and this won't be a random result, and only one interested in obfuscating would call such a result a "random result" as opposed to a "biased result" or something else more explanatory.
It's almost as if he's saying, "well you still can't predict exactly how a loaded die will land
every time--so it's still random". (Remember, his definition of random is that "it can be described by a probability distribution".) So, per his definition--the dice IS "random"--but that is uninformative as to the loaded nature of the dice and purposely misleading (Or so the Gaming Control Board would say.)
You can almost hear Dawkins annoyance at the creationist obfuscation of natural selection in his speech, but when you read mijo you can understand Dawkins' frustration completely, can't you? I mean, you just cannot have a dialogue with some people. They have a mental block that shuts out everything that negates what they are saying in the slightest way. It's like his brain can only register information that allows him to say, "
evolution is random, evolution is random...85 years of research says evolution is random" like a crazed parrot.
