That would be called a... wait for it... circular argument. They are fit because they are fit. You are wrong because you are wrong. I am right because I am right. They survived because they are the species that survived.
I'm sorry I baited you for so long and had to be so mean to teach you a lesson about how you don't really play fair on here. What I can't figure out is why you never once denied you believed in an eternal universe or even bothered to look into who Lawrence Krauss was. None of the sites you were posting had any remote association with Mr. Krauss.
No it wouldn't be a.. wait. for it... circular argument, because we are not talking about logical arguments here. We are talking about demonstrable proof about a claim. You asked about fitness, and I'm not quite sure why, first of all. This is not a topic or a term of contention among evolutionists, or anybody.
I am shocked by your statement!!! The whole TOE hinges on fitness keeping random, chance mutations! Ever heard the term "Survival of the Fittest"!?!?!? How can you show natural selection is real if you can't show traits that make a species more fit are kept??? Your statement this is not a topic of contention shows the relevance of my claim students are not educated regarding the problems facing the TOE. Mass brainwashing and dumbed, down public schools that don't teach critical thinking must be responsible!!
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Lewontin was not the only central figure in evolutionary biology who long ago recognized the difficulty of assessing the fitness, or adaptive value, of traits. In 1953, the paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson opined that “the fallibility of personal judgment as to the adaptive value of particular characters, most especially when these occur in animals quite unlike any now living, is notorious.”[16] And in 1975, the geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky wrote that no biologist “can judge reliably which ‘characters’ are useful, neutral, or harmful in a given species.”[17]
One evident reason for this pessimism is that we cannot isolate traits — or the mutations producing them — as if they were independent causal elements. Organism-environment relations present us with so much complexity, so many possible parameters to track, that, apart from obviously disabling cases, there is no way to pronounce on the significance of a mutation for an organism, let alone for a population or for the future of the species. To pose just one question within the sea of unknowns: even if a mutation could in one way or another be deemed harmful to the organism in its current environment, what if the organism used this element of disharmony as a spur either to reshape its environment or to alter its own behavior, thereby creating a distinctive and advantageous niche for itself and others of its kind?
To see the frailty of the fitness concept most clearly, look at actual attempts to explain why a given trait renders an animal more (or less) fit in its environment. For example, many biologists have commented on the giraffeÂ’s long neck. A prominent theory, from Darwin on, has been that, in times of drought, a longer neck enabled the giraffe to browse nearer the tops of trees, beyond the reach of other animals. So any heritable changes leading to a longer neck were favored by natural selection, rendering the animal more fit and better able to survive during drought.
It sounds eminently reasonable, as such
stories usually do. Problems arise only when we try to find evidence favoring this hypothesis over others. My colleague Craig Holdrege has summarized what he and others have found, including this: First, taller, longer-necked giraffes, being also heavier than their shorter ancestors, require more food, which counters the advantage of height. Second, the many browsing and grazing antelope species did not go extinct during droughts, “so even without growing taller the giraffe ancestor could have competed on even terms for those lower leaves.” Third, male giraffes are up to a meter taller than females. If the males would be disadvantaged by an inability to reach higher branches of the trees, why are not the females and young disadvantaged? Fourth, it turns out that females often feed “at belly height or below.”
And in well-studied populations of east Africa, giraffes often feed at or below shoulder level during the dry season, while the rainy season sees them feeding from the higher branches — a seasonal pattern the exact opposite of the one suggested by the above hypothesis.[18]"
This begs the question: Is natural selection responsible for the Giraffes long neck? If we can't come up with document-able, observable evidence to support such a claim, how can we even begin to claim the TOE is even a valid theory, much less a fact?
Nice stories about necks and bird beaks are not science!!!
"In Lewontin’s summary: “What is required is an experimental program of unpacking ‘fitness.’
This involves determining experimentally how different genotypes juxtapose different aspects of the external world, how they alter that world and how those different environments that they construct affect their own biological processes and the biological processes of others.”[22] I doubt whether anyone has even pretended to do this unpacking in a way adequate to demonstrate the randomness of mutations relative to fitness".
The New Atlantis » Evolution and the Illusion of Randomness
