I found the preamble a tad confusing. It seems to imply that all our evolutionary behaviours aim at solving a problem. I had understood that they are simply the emergent phenomenon of selection - in other words they are the behaviours associated with successful individuals/groups. Is this just a sort of shorthand - assigning a kind of design _intention_ to Nature as a simpler way of expressing this? If so, isn't it anyway the case that not all selected behaviours do actually solve a problem, but are sometimes just a case of "stuff that became associated with success"?
I should say my last encounter with biology was a GCSE some time in the 1990s.
> Is this just a sort of shorthand - assigning a kind of design _intention_ to Nature as a simpler way of expressing this?
Yes, and it's a fairly common, if misleading, shorthand. It's easy to communicate and so gets spread quickly and easily but it always takes careful reading to work out if the author is perpetuating a misconception around intelligent design or merely using an easily digestible metaphor. I suspect the author is doing the latter from a cursory reading, but I might be wrong.
You could describe it as bad language. Two physics examples.
A classic momentum problem where a moving railroad car "acts on" a stationary car making the cars couple and move together, slower. There's no ambiguity with language like "acts on". I'm sure a very angry physicist could get very unhappy about the finer details of "acts upon" in that context but mostly people are pretty tolerant of it.
But what, is acting on what, in a classic quantum mechanics double slit experiment? Is one slit acting on the other? I mean, you can't even define the wave/particle as a wave or a particle much less what the whatever it is, is acting on. A physicist sees it where a wave/particle is interacting with a system of slits sounds pretty suspect to a non-STEM person even if it is the weird truth. Or truthier than some other interpretations.
So given the two examples what does "acts on" mean in a physicist sense across all physics problems? Keeping in mind that the intelligent design people say things like "God acts on the earth via miracles" now how does that statement fit in with the two physics thought experiments on the topic of "acts on"?
Layman here. Wouldn't that metaphor be valid if the "problem" being solved is actually a driving factor of selection?
E.g., birds capable of flight have numerous physiological changes which could be seen as "optimizations" for flight. Yet, formally, "flight" doesn't appear anywere in the equation - it's just genetic markup that has been driven in a certain way by recombination and selection.
However, for many birds, the ability to fly - and to fly better than their predators or competitors in some aspect - actually highly influences the ability to survive: Therefore genetic markup that results in physiology more capable of flight results in a higher likelihood than markup that worsens the ability to fly.
(Of course other factors, such as environment, influence selection. Additionally, certain traits can increase likelihood of survival in a different way - even if they are poor solutions to the original "problem" - and lead to adaptation. So the metaphor is obviously not perfect)
The line is blurred here because it's describing human behavior, and we're certainly capable of intent. A little bit of it at a time, amortized over many generations and selected via evolution, but still intent.
The short short version is that once things have intention, they can evolve more rapidly in synch with that intention (Assuming that the intention also yields more viable offspring)
By "stuff that became associated with success", do you mean something like "the mutation that causes the occasionally life saving trait X also causes blue noses, and that's why our noses are now blue"?
I'm no gene expert, but I don't think it normally works that way. There are a lot more genes involved and a lot more degrees of freedom, making the nose color and X independent. Or so I, as a non expert, think.
I should say my last encounter with biology was a GCSE some time in the 1990s.