The Six Essentials for a Darwinian Bootstrapping of Quality

[Vene]

More toward decline and extinction.  I was trying to think of an animal that had developed a modification which was an incumbrance rather than an aid, but couldn't... I figure there must be a few...

Does cancer count?
link
It's the only thing I can think of.

[Kai]

More toward decline and extinction.  I was trying to think of an animal that had developed a modification which was an incumbrance rather than an aid, but couldn't... I figure there must be a few...

Megaloceros.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megaloceros

Its believed that sexual selection for antler size is what caused the decline and ultimate extinction of the genus. The larger the antlers grew, the harder it was to forage and avoid predators.

Edit: reading the articles, it was likely more than one single factor, but it seems that large antler size, whether causing nutrient deficiency or defeating predator avoidance, played an important role in the extinction of the species M. gigangteus.

[Honey]

The arbitrary ape
22 August 1998
From New Scientist Print Edition
Dylan Evans, London

http://space.newscientist.com/article/mg15921485.400-the-arbitrary-ape.html

Hi There,

I was wondering if you had any thoughts on the above article?  I found it while searching for something else & found it very interesting but don't know really where to go with it?  Can you suggest any further reading?  Thanks.  Respect.

I agree with the premises of the paper, that descent with modification does not always lead to order or complexity, whatever those biased statements might be. Descent with modification leads to, well, descent with modification. Its change over time, and factoring in genetic drift, none of it has to follow any ideas of order or complexity. "Mother Nature keeps what works." If seemingly "random" behavior works better, then it may be the behavior that will continue to occur. The problem is when biologists try to ascribe too much purpose or meaning to natural selection. We can talk about the function of such and such a structure, and speculate on how it evolved, but because of random events such as genetic drift and environmental variability, there is no progress. The pattern that replicates and continues replicating and does not dissapear is the one we automatically view as most sucessful because thats the only one we have physical evidence of. Perhaps the one that we would view as truly most successful is the one that got wiped out by a random event.  See how human subjectivity sullies the science? I literally have to modify my language in order to overcome that bias. When I say things like more basal or more derived, I'm talking purely from a phylogenetic level, because if I use words like more complex or less complex, then I'm working on human ideals of progress, and I'm loosing sight that descent with modification does not always mean greater complexity. In fact, if we look at lineages over time, we see that often times systems symplify, while other systems become more complex, meaning, often times levels of complexity or "order" (whatever that means) don't change at all.

I wouldn't know where to point you, really.

I appreciate your insight.  & I do agree that human subjectivity sullies the science.  The language used in different disciplines does the same thing, hard to avoid.  Thanks.