The fallacy of misplaced concreteness

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"Competition implies an agreement, a set of actions that follow rules, but in the game of real life the 'rules'--based on chemistry and environmental conditions--change with players. To compete, people--for example on opposite teams--must basically cooperate in some way. "Competition" is a term with limited scientific meaning, usually without reference to units by which it can measured. How does the green worm or the lichen fungus assess its competitive status? By the addition of points in its score or by dollars or Swiss francs? No. Then what are the units of competition? If you ask what are the units of biomass we can tell you in grams or ounces. If you ask how light or biotic potential is to be measured,we answer in lux or foot-candles or number of offspring per generation. But if you ask "what are the units of competition" we reply that yours is not a scientific notion.

Vogue terms like "Competition," "Cooperation," "Mutualism," "Mutual benefits," "energy costs," and "competitive advantage" have been borrowed from human enterprises and forced on science from politics, business, and social thought. The entire panoply of neodarwinist terminology reflects a philosophical error, a twentieth-century example of a phenomenon aptly named by Alfred North Whitehead: "the fallacy of misplaced concreteness." The terminology of most modern evolutionists is not only fallacious but dangerously so, because it leads people to think they know about evolution of life when in fact they are confused and baffled. The "Selfish genes" provides a fine example
What is Richard Dawkin's Selfish genes? A gene is never a self to begin with. A gene alone is only a piece of DNA long enough to have a function. The gene by itself can be flushed down the sink; even if preserved in a freezer or a salt solution the isolated gene has no activity whatsoever. There is no life in a gene. There is no self. A gene never fits the minimal criterion of self, of a living system.

The time has come in serious biology to abandon words like competition, cooperation, and selfish genes, and replace with meaningful terms such as metabolic modes, ecological relations, and measurable quantities. So many current evolutionary metaphors are superficial dichotomizations that come from false clarities of language. They do not beget but preclude Scientific understanding."

Excerpt from Lynn Margulis book: Acquiring Genomes.
Lynn pioneered the idea that mitochondria were originally prokaryotes that were engulfed by eukaryotic cells. Although she did not invent the idea of symbiosis, she has been a militant advocate of it ever since. Her challenge to evolutionary biologist who believe the cause of inherited variations to be 1- by mutations, and 2-that these mutations are a result of a random process--has been that their is no evidence within the current scientific literature, that organisms have evolved as a result of the accumulation of random mutations--basically mutation accumulation does not lead to new species. Its known that over 99.9 percent of mutations are deletrious and do not confer any advantage. She argues that the acquisition of entire genomes, sometimes involving entire organisms, to be the driving seat of the cause of the inherited variations. The mechanism by which this occurs, she explains is through symbiogenesis.

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I will be using this topic for my next topic, since their is some relationship between the two.

Human breeding of plants & Animals & Evolution:

One of the things that has fascinated Charles Darwin, has been the ability of humans to breed certain animals, say a horse to grow with certain qualities such as speed, strength, etc--such that over time the continued selection of certain traits would lead to an optimized animal for human needed tasks. In the field of crops and vegetation, these two is quite evident were fruits and vegetables of certain species are selected, interbred and overtime lead to say tomatoes of ever larger sizes. Likewise, humans have been able to select certain species of cows that provide more meat and more milk. Darwin envisioned that in the natural environment, natural selection would play the role of the human breeder, ever selecting those whose traits were favorable leaving behind the less suited ones.



The modern synthetic theory of evolution or as its better known, the Neo-Darwinian Theory of Evolution, attribute the source of the inherited variations that natural selection works on, on random errors created during DNA replication. If the mutations that occur by chance-are positive, then its selected for. By positive it’s meant that it confers some advantage to the organism, such that it enhances It’s ability to survive and reproduce. Such traits would allow it to spread throughout the population and become the dominant species.


Now back to breeding. In Genetics, two types of traits are differentiated by how quickly the show up in a population. A qualitative trait shows up abruptly after a mutation, while a quantitative trait is often difficult to discern and seems to be continuous. It’s the quantitative trait of organisms that humans have taken advantage of since the dawn of time. Often, these variable traits already exist within the population, and are not something knew that has risen as a result of random mutation. However, not all plants are diploidy, and it has been documented that mutations at specific sites seemed to contribute to increased specific traits which humans like; such as protein production and successive interbreeding has led to an ever increase in that trait

It has been found that the mutations at these sites are regulatory genes which control both the expression and the inhibition of that gene that encodes for that specific protein. In ability to regulate or inhibit the gene which encodes the trait causes cells to continuously produce the protein. The cause of this inability are mutations which have occurred, over time by random processes. The continuous selection of organisms with ever greater lack of regulation of specific genes of interest leads to an ever increasing production of that said trait. The maximum yield would occur when all inhibitory function ceases to function.


Now the question is-does a process that occurs as a result of disruption of the cells ability to self regulate due to random mutations in regulatory genes be an example of modern synthetic theory of evolution?