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^"permissions":^"read":ӶӺ,"update":ӶӺ,"delete":ӶӺ,"admin":ӶӺ°,"user":^"id":6,"name":"Sarah Oberbichler"°,"id":"F9biv20md4","ranges":Ӷ^"start":"/divӶ3Ӻ/divӶ4Ӻ/divӶ1Ӻ/pӶ8Ӻ","startOffset":0,"end":"/divӶ3Ӻ/divӶ4Ӻ/divӶ1Ӻ/pӶ8Ӻ","endOffset":2348°Ӻ,"quote":"An “efficient” cause is an item to which we attribute the power to create a change, and the resulting change is then considered its effect. The agent in natural selection is the environment, or Nature, if you will—conspecifics and everything except the organism itself—and the change it creates is on the negative side alone: It eliminates. Insofar as it selects, Nature neither fosters nor encourages, it merely kills off. What does it kill? It kills those organisms that do not manage to overcome the difficulties, the obstacles, the pitfalls that it presents to them. Hence it is thoroughly misleading to speak of selection for—selection is always against. In other words, Nature places constraints in the path of survival and reproduction. That, however, still does not fully explain selection. If all organisms were exactly the same, there could be no selection and no differential reproduction. Facing an obstacle, they would either all perish or all survive. But there is variability, and organisms are never all the same. This is due partly to mutations and partly to the imperfection of their procedures for reproduction and replication.3 The variations that constitute the stock within which selection can operate are wholly accidental. There must be no suggestion of evolutionary design or of environmental pressure toward survival mechanisms, for the moment we allow any such idea of directed change, the theory of evolution collapses into a teleological myth. On the other hand, if all variation is accidental, and if selection operates on what is there, by setting up constraints that eliminate some variants while others pass, it should be clear that the word “adaptation” cannot refer to any activity on the part of the surviving organisms.","highlights":Ӷ^"jQuery321073766502845175832":^°°Ӻ,"text":"","order":"mw-content-text","category":"Prämisse","data_creacio":1550605810188°
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