"Guy Hoelzer"  wrote in message
news:cf0iaq$1nfs$1{at}darwin.ediacara.org...
> in article cev3s3$17hl$1{at}darwin.ediacara.org, Chris Gordon-Smith at
> address{at}homepage.net wrote on 8/5/04 10:10 PM:
>
> > Tim Tyler wrote:
> >
> >> Chris Gordon-Smith  wrote or quoted:
> >>
> >> [One big organism?]
> >>
> >>> Suppose for a moment that we do have such a high level
entity, able to
> >>> optimise itself by selecting lower level units that are
beneficial to it.
> >>> If its environment now changes, the fitness function that
it uses to
> >>> select the lower level units may no longer be
appropriate. However, it
> >>> has no way to change this fitness function, because it is
part of its
> >>> fixed phenotype; it cannot be evolved by the lower level
units (they know
> >>> nothing about the fitness function of the high level entity).
> >>
> >> AFAICS, nothing need be fixed.
>
> [snip]
>
> I snipped the rest of Tim's worthwhile post to make a simple point.  All
> biologists AFAIK accept the notion that all organisms are capable of some
> degree of adaptive phenotypic plasticity (some prefer the term acclimation)
> without expecting that natural selection is the internal mechanism of
> adaptive change.
>
> When you get a sun tan do you think that natural selection just operated
> inside of your body or cells to achieve the adaptive response to sun
> exposure?  If not, then you must think that there are mechanisms other than
> natural selection that can coordinate an adaptive structural change to
> changing environments.

Yes, but the conventional wisdom is that those "mechanisms other than
natural selection that can coordinate an adaptive structural change"
must have themselves arisen through natural selection.  Chris's argument,
if I understand it, is that the conventional wisdom holds in the case
of the "one big organism", and hence that:
A. The one big organism arose through natural selection.
 and
B. The one big organism will be unable to adapt to any new environmental
challenges outside the range of challenges that it has already been
evolved to adapt to.
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