Deathism?

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How do we have selection if everything survives, moving, yes, into different environments like the cocktoach staying out from under my foot?

Not even worrying about the fact that nothing gets to recycle nutrients and the golddifh bowl becomes a solid mass of admittedly differentiate animalcules. Every fly survives and breeds. Eternally. If the system even could GET to flies, which need mortality in other life forms to survive.

You can get adaptation, sure, while the planet lasts, but unless you can remove "survival of the fittest" and still have Darwinian evolution, you gonna want mortality.

Please forgive. Most of that stuff is beyond my comprehension.

Death isn't the criterion for selection; having sex more or less efficiently is. Here's a model in simple math;

Organism A; reproductive rate = (2^n)
Organism B; reproductive rate = 1.2(2^n)

the above formulae describe exponential growth. As n increases, the ratio of B;A increases in B's favour. Although neither organism dies, within 100 generations organism B's progeny makes up the majority of the population

Of course, there wouldn't be any Saprophytes or Carnivores, but there would still be evolution. Mutations happen at a steady rate, and a mutation that makes a bacteria divide slightly faster would take over the world. It would just happen that the original "great great great..." grandparents to every organism would be around, reproducing slower than the rest of the modern population.

That said, everything would be effectively sterile within a few million years, because all the Carbon in the world would be used up and stored indefinitely in animals.


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Whether or not we quibble is it Darwinian and is it evolution sensu stricto if nobody is even discommoded, I will note that your schema has to bring mortality in at the end anyway.

Example of an evolutionary dead end?

Natural Selection is pretty much an entirely mathematical process, it will occur in anything that meets the criterion of reproducing with incomplete hereditary fidelity (if it's 100% accurate, there is no change across generations, if it's 0% there should be no overall change across generations, just occasional fluctuations) and differential reproductive fitness.

If you really think about it, it can apply to non living things too, such as proteins. If a protein reproduced within a body (I have prions in mind), and mutates in a way which affects its rate of reproduction, then the % frequency of the more efficient proteins gets larger relative the the older, redundant proteins.

The same idea can be abstracted into math, if your interested I can PM you a mathematical model.

Sorry if I'm overstressing this idea, but I think the fact that Natural Selection is at heart a mathematical process with such simple criterion is pretty interesting. Death may shape Biology in our world, but Evolution would carry on, even among the Immortal.

you would get the evolutionary tree with no pruning
-Jake

you would get the evolutionary tree with no pruning
-Jake[/quote]

Nature does the pruning. It is impossible for all the offspring to survive. The issue from exponential growth would fill the earth to the height of Mt. Everest in short order.

ruveyn

Hypothetically, yes. It would be a phylogeneticists dream.



For something like E. Coli you would get something insane like (2^1000 = 1.07 x 10^301) organisms within 20 days. Luckily, growth isn't usually exponential.

Most people simply do not comprehend exponential growth.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Bartlett

ruveyn

This is why we need to appreciate mortality.

Of course without mortality there would be no people to appreciate it.