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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!!
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To: jbe who wrote (35325)4/19/1999 1:26:00 AM
From: Chuzzlewit  Read Replies (1) of 108807
 
Peace is always preferable to hostilities.

Teleology is an easy trap to fall into, and unfortunately too many people who ought to know better stumble on this issue. It has even been fought in the laboratory! Here's an instructive example. For some time there was a raging debate among geneticists concerning pre-adaptation and post-adaptation. Basically, the argument revolved around the idea of specific mutations arising to adapt the organism to an environmental change. That was really a disguised teleological argument. Careful studies showed that mutations are pre-adaptive -- that is, they arise all the time regardless of the environment and the environment acts as an instrument of natural selection. The implication, of course, is that mutations are not directed.

What I was objecting to in your original formulation was a form of the same argument. You hear this stuff time and time again as a kind of short-hand. Most biologists understand what is meant by the shorthand, but often lay people get confused. That's why I insist that we talk about behaviors and not impute emotion to account for those behaviors.

So I would phrase infanticide among lions as follows: Infanticide seems to offer adult males two reproductive advantages. Killing the offspring of other lions tend to decrease dilution of the lion's genetic contribution to the next generation. Additioanlly, nursing lionesses are infertile; thus infanticide increases the lions fecundity.

As to lion thoughts, they are probably driven by sexual desire for the female, but who knows?

TTFN,
CTC
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