A solid effort at thinking from first principles and hew close to indisputable facts.
And yet...the natural-selection framework is very unwieldy (I'm not arguing for any other) because it is starkly anti-teleological ("there was no plan, this only *happened*"), whereas we are hard-wired (it would seem) to think teleologically ("this happened for that *purpose*). Accordingly, it is very difficult (and scientists fall into this trap all the time) to describe things in a language that is intelligible but "true" to the natural-selection "logic". This accounts in large part for problems #1 and #2 that you mention, in particular the "just-so-story" problem.
Here's an example: "Both these adaptations—along with skin with hair rather than fur *designed* to release and manage heat via sweat—are clearly selections for a tool-using species [...]" (my emphasis). It may, or may not be true that fur-less skin is better at shedding heat - it *does* sound intuitively plausible of course, but where's the testing of that simple property? Never mind that a fur-less animal is better at running in mid-day heat than a furry one, *all other things being equal*? But the giveaway is the inadvertent use of "designed", because it comes so naturally, doesn't it? And that's precisely the problem. As a species, we're primed to see "designs" everywhere and if we fought this tendency all the time to remain true to the framework, we'd bore ourselves silly and would never get anywhere (or maybe it would read like Marxist prose, ahaha). But going with the flow keeps yielding these slightly suspect, just-so stories, alas.
A solid effort at thinking from first principles and hew close to indisputable facts.
And yet...the natural-selection framework is very unwieldy (I'm not arguing for any other) because it is starkly anti-teleological ("there was no plan, this only *happened*"), whereas we are hard-wired (it would seem) to think teleologically ("this happened for that *purpose*). Accordingly, it is very difficult (and scientists fall into this trap all the time) to describe things in a language that is intelligible but "true" to the natural-selection "logic". This accounts in large part for problems #1 and #2 that you mention, in particular the "just-so-story" problem.
Here's an example: "Both these adaptations—along with skin with hair rather than fur *designed* to release and manage heat via sweat—are clearly selections for a tool-using species [...]" (my emphasis). It may, or may not be true that fur-less skin is better at shedding heat - it *does* sound intuitively plausible of course, but where's the testing of that simple property? Never mind that a fur-less animal is better at running in mid-day heat than a furry one, *all other things being equal*? But the giveaway is the inadvertent use of "designed", because it comes so naturally, doesn't it? And that's precisely the problem. As a species, we're primed to see "designs" everywhere and if we fought this tendency all the time to remain true to the framework, we'd bore ourselves silly and would never get anywhere (or maybe it would read like Marxist prose, ahaha). But going with the flow keeps yielding these slightly suspect, just-so stories, alas.
Yes, I should have said ‘structured’. But we are very much oriented towards intention/purpose. See, for example, Aristotle’s theory of causation.
Yep very interesting Lorenzo. But can you explain this?
https://plebeianresistance.substack.com/p/the-models-of-earth-that-we-have
Also my comment here.
https://substack.com/profile/32104763-richard-seager/note/c-285954896