From: colby@bu-bio.bu.edu (Chris Colby)
Newsgroups: sci.bio
Subject: Re: The Evolution of Death
Date: 15 Apr 92 21:53:58 GMT
Reply-To: colby@bu-bio.UUCP (Chris Colby)
Organization: animal -- coelomate -- deuterostome

In article <3529@rosie.NeXT.COM> jdoenias@next.com (Josh Doenias) writes:

>In Dr. Lewis Thomas's book [deletion]
>He also states that evolutionarily, this is a perfectly natural thing to  
>expect.  As he says (and here I paraphrase) 'Organisms who have spent the  
>last few million years dieing would no doubt have evolved some sort of  
>mechanism for coping with this situation.'  In other words, they would  
>have become good at it.

>My question is this.
>It seems to me that this is completely counter-intuitive.  A gene (or an  
>allele) will be propagated via natural selection if it confers some sort  
>of evolutionary advantage for that gene.  These advantages boil down, at  
>some point, to the ability to leave more offspring, and thereby more  
>copies of that gene.
>Using this line of resoning, what possible advantage could there be to  
>evolving some sort of mechansim for coping with the death of an organism?
>The gene for making an organism "good at" dieing is obviously only going  
>to expressed at the time of death.  By that time, it is obviously too late  
>for the organism to do any reproducing.

	Ding, ding, ding... we have a winner! Dr. Lewis Thomas must
be absolutely clueless about evolution to state anything so un-
bearably stupid. He seem to subscribe to the popular notion that
evolution makes things better all the time, ugh. Evolution is a
change in the gene pool of a population over time. The only adaptive
mechanism of evolution (there are several non-adaptive mechanisms)
is natural selection. Natural selection if differential reproduction
of genetic variants in the gene pool. In other words, some organisms
leave more offspring than others. Traits that are expressed after the
average age of reproduction or not subject to natural selection
directly. However, they can be indirectly selected for in the case
of parental care.

	But, in this case I would say that is very unlikely. It's
not going to matter one bit if an animal dies with a sense of
euphoria or otherwise (as far as selection is concerned). One
poster suggested that it would keep the animal from killing kin when
it died. This would make sense if animals got old and died of
natural causes with their family around as is often the case in
humans. However, in the wild, the old eventually fall to predators.
And, you can bet the family is long gone by the time grandpa or
grandma is being dragged down. (But, I don't want to flame this
poster as they obviously knew enough about evolution to see that
some sort of indirect selection would be needed to explain this
-- this person obviously knows orders of magnitude more about 
evolution than the bonehead doctor.)

	It never ceases to amaze me how everybody and his dog seems
willing to comment about evolution from a stance of absolute ignorance.
BTW, if anyone out there enjoys talking/reading about evolution --
check out the newsgroup talk.origins. It is mostly a forum for debating
creationism vs. evolution but recently many discussions of a purely
evolutionary nature have started. Or, you can email me and I'll send
you a FAQ I keep for that board that gives a brief description of
what evolutionary theory really is (as opposed to the crap that gets
perpetuated in the popular press as well as creationist pamphlets.)
	
>Joshua Doenias
>Media Group, NeXT Computer, Inc.
>(and arm-chair Darwinist/Dawkinist)

Chris Colby 	---	 email: colby@bu-bio.bu.edu	---
"'My boy,' he said, 'you are descended from a long line of determined,
resourceful, microscopic tadpoles--champions every one.'"
 	--Kurt Vonnegut from "Galapagos"

Newsgroups: sci.bio,sci.physics,comp.ai