Guy Hoelzer 
> Subject: Re: what is life
> 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.

JE:-
Natural selection is an external mechanism of
adaptive change re: somatic cell fitness if
and only if, this fitness is a nested set of 
fitness within Darwinian fitness (as defined by 
myself). There is no other mechanism except natural
selection "that can coordinate an adaptive structural 
change to changing environments". This does _not_
mean that selection had to operate on _cells_ within
a body when you get a sun tan. It means that the
plastic response of these cells constitutes a heritable
trait (not each plastic response itself) that was 
selected at the Darwinian  fertile organism level 
of selection. Only ONE level of selection determines 
fitness  within any nested set of fitnesses. This 
is always the fitness of the largest (outer most) 
nested set.

Regards,

John Edser
Independent Researcher

PO Box 266
Church Pt
NSW 2105
Australia

edser{at}tpg.com.au
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