On a completely different note, I would like to apologize to you if the thing that I have said implied that you were diametrically opposed to my approach in every respect. Having gone over you posts in the thread, I now see that you have cautiously agreed with me several times. Again, I am sorry, for being unnecessarily confrontational.
Thank you. I think I understand your reaction because of the way the thread has evolved and the way that you have been attacked.
I'm sorry but you entered the discussion with the philosophical presupposition that "nothing is truly random", and that is what I think is our sticking point. I'd be willing to discuss the possibility that evolution could be non-random, but it is seems doomed to failure if the underlying assumption is that nothing is truly random.
Actually I don't make that presupposition. I generally precede comments concerning determinism with "if" statements. Sometimes I leave them out, though, which I realize can cause confusion. But what we see in nature appears determined. From what I understand, the general consensus is that the quantum indeterminacy at lower levels is "washed out" in what we see at higher levels so that we can speak of a determined universe (not at a fundamental level but at an operational one). I am fully aware that the very idea of determinism is possibly wrong, but at the level where organisms interact it seems to be THE force.
Ultimately it doesn't matter for this discussion, though, for a couple reasons.
I fully grant the description we use to discuss the abstraction of evolutionary change as random. But that description is a description. There is nothing fundamental about it. We often mistake the mathematics for the "thing itself" -- a practice that Edmund Husserl warned against around the turn of the century. The fundamental level is still one organism fighting for survival. The abstraction we create of many organisms we can only speak of in probabilistic terms. To talk of the nuts and bolts of this process we absolutely need that description. In fact, I think we are relatively handicapped without it. But I think it is important for us all to realize that it is a "mid-level" description (if that makes sense) -- not the "thing in itself" of the organisms or the ultimate emergent property we call 'evolution'. If, however, you want to argue that indeterminacy (due to quantum fluctuations) impacts the evolutionary process, then you must admit that it impacts everything, so everything is random and the only non-random elements are mathematical abstractions. If everything is random, then it doesn't make sense to speak of evolution as random. It is simply part of everything.
And when it comes to the emergent property of 'evolution', well this is just one more example that shows that the emergent property is not the components that make it up. Just as the random interactions of water molecules produce wetness. We speak of the water molecules as random. We don't speak of wetness as random. We speak of the movements of gas molecules in a container as random but do not speak of their aggregate activity -- the emergent property of pressure -- as random.
Lastly, the whole idea of using 'random' in this discussion, as I have said before, doesn't add that much when you really look at the process. In fact, it is almost a truism since we cannot even speak of the nuts and bolts of evolution without recourse to variation, which is described in probabilistic terms. But, again, that is part of the abstraction and not the "things in themselves".
This is really just a long-winded way of me saying -- drop the word fundamental from your descriptions and I think we are mostly on the same page. It may just be me, but fundamental (to me) implies a discussion of the basic, bottom-level elements of the process. The really basic elements of the process are probably determined (one organism fighting for survival). There is no way for us to know for sure unfortunately but that is how it looks. The abstraction (many organisms competing with variability being a core component), however, only makes sense in descriptions that employ probability. I fully agree (and always have) that a description of evolutionary processes at the level of discussing species survival and change - how Darwin described it - requires the concept of 'random' (mathematical definition) because one of the central tenets is variability. That is why the literature is replete with such descriptions.
Do those distinctions make sense?
