How do things know how to evolve?

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Claim

How do things know how to evolve? For example, how do plants know what flavor of berries to evolve so the birds will eat and disperse them? How does a coconut tree know there is an ocean nearby?

Source

  • "Roadking1576", 2003 (Aug. 20). Got a question. Talk.origins post, Message-ID: <20030819222202.05573.00000213@mb-m16.aol.com> [1]

Responses

  1. Living things don't "know how to evolve", any more than atoms know how to combine into molecules of greater or lesser complexity; in both cases, they just do, in strict accordance with physical law. One might just as well ask how sodium atoms and chlorine atoms know how to form salt crystals.
  2. Living things vary, and natural selection then brings about the spread of favorable mutations. None of this requires any foresight.
  3. The claim assumes that creatures must understand the process by which they do something in order to do it. A similar argument would run: "I don't know the neurons in my brain I used to type that question. Therefore I don't know how to type. Therefore, I could not have typed it. Therefore, God typed it."
  4. The physics and chemistry of the universe do not depend on conscious decision to occur. They operate on immutable laws like the Pauli exclusion principle and Fermi-Dirac statistics.
  5. To answer the specific examples:
    • According to the fossil record, coconut trees are indigenous to India and spread to New Zealand and Australia over 15 mya. Coconut trees only grow near the ocean because the physiology of the tree requires a habitat that is warm, sunny and humid. Coconut trees tend to grow near the ocean because they tend to have their large seeds washed out to sea on a regular basis.
    • For the berry scenario, the bushes with the "right" flavor of berries will have birds flock to it and disperse its seeds, while the bushes that don't have the "right" flavor of berries will be ignored, and will eventually die without having any seeds dispersed to new areas.
  6. Evolutionary mutations or adaptations which are advantageous to the life form will increase that life forms ability and likelihood to reproduce and pass along its genetic information. Life forms with weak physical traits, or adaptations which do not suit its environment will cease thriving, limiting the ability for reproduction, possibly leading to extinction. If there are mutations within a population which are advantageous within a different environment, that life form may change habitats, and exploit a previously unexploited biological niche. When this happens, the morphological traits which are advantageous for the new environment will be passed on to the next generation because the parents were able to thrive; in time those advantageous traits will continue to be passed down from generation to generation, giving rise to a new species. An example of this can be seen in the evolution of beavers and muskrats. It was advantageous for those creatures to have flattened tails, webbed toes and other aquatic adaptations, so the ancestors to the modern species which possessed the predecessors to these traits were better suited to their environments, had more offspring, and passed their genetic information along more effectively.
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Fallacies contained in this claim

Further Reading

  1. Dawkins, Richard, 1996. The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design. W.W. Norton & Company.

See Also

Acknowledgements

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