/lit/ - Literature

>>22808846
way more about bird beaks than you ever fucking wanted to know

>>22808846
No reason to read that over a textbook on evolution. Science isn't like literature or philosophy, primary sources don't matter besides for historical interest.

might as well buy an evolution textbook

>>22808854
>>22808855
did the theory of evolution by natural selection change or something?

>>22808863
Significant theoretical and evidential developments. DNA wasn't even identified as the mechanism of inheritance for close to a hundred years after it was published.

>>22808863
Darwin once said that peacocks drove him mad, because he didn’t understand how their feathers gave an advantage. This book explains why they evolved, along with many other counter-intuitive traits in humans and animals.

>>22808863
yes and no. the general principle of evolution is the same, but the specifics of how it happens (punctuated equilibrium vs gradualism, for example) are still subject to debate -- along with what constitutes evolutionary pressure, how species are distinguished, etc. evolutionary biology is still a vibrant, active field.
>Futuyma's "Evolution"
>Human Evolutionary Anatomy by Aiello and Dean
>Evolutionary Analysis: Fifth Edition by Herron and Freeman
are all solid introductory textbooks. the middle focuses on human evolution, if that's what you're interested in. you can find good editions on libgen for free. if you're not really in the mood for textbooks, anything by Stephen Jay Gould is great. "The Structure of Evolutionary Theory" is pretty long and pretty dense but exhaustive. beware that Gould pulls really, really hard for punctuated equilibrium, and while he's probably right, he's not exactly impartial. "The Panda's Thumb" or "The Flamingo's Smile" are far more approachable. "The Greatest Show on Earth" by Richard Dawkins is unironically pretty good too.

>>22808871
The fisherian runaway?

>>22808868
>>22808871
>>22808886
I’d rather hear it from the horses mouth, thank you

>>22808991
...I mean, sure? you'll be getting an inaccurate view of evolutionary biology, but whatever, if you're only reading Origin to say you've read Origin then whatever works for you. but if you actually want to understand the field you should pick another book

>>22808997
I want to understand the darwinist view in its purest original form, that’s all

>>22808991
Darwin didn't come up with the idea to begin with. He just gave his own largely unscientific and outmoded contributions to it. Social Darwinism is way more important as an influential and persistent ideology.

Although even current ideas about evolution are largely unscientific and unusable. Evolution is just assumed broadly but it's not yet given a proper, comprehensive scientific treatment and it isn't really useful outside of the principle and a few speculations of varying specificity/utility about it littered in disciplines that don't really rely on it despite its apparent importance.

depends if you read the right edition

>>22809021
social darwinism is a meaningless word combination it's just natural extention of darwinism observed in different fields of life.

I’ll take advantage of this thread to ask where I could find books concerning the subject of biological determinism. I have no idea what is the current scientific position on this matter. Does the majority of scientists eschew the topic because of the ethical implications it could prompt? Also another thing: I’m planning to read Darwin’s Descent of Man, isn’t this one of the primary scientific texts worth reading?

>>22809676
The term can be meaningless word combination taking each in an absolute sense, but the term has a historically concrete meaning. I think I would not consider it as an extention of darwinism observed in different fields of life but rather an engineering of the natural theory applied to society.

nump

>>22809710
"Making sense of heritability" by Neven Sesardic is good for clarifying the "nature/nurture" issue, which is probably what you're looking for. "Biological determinism" is used as a straw man to attack people who argue that genes matter. You won't find a single biologist who declares himself a "biological determinist".

"The descent of man" is worth reading, but if you want to learn biology then read a modern textbook instead

>>22808871
Yeah, Darwin didn't fully understand sexual selection but put forward some rudimentary theories about it. Then came Fisher's runway theory, then Zahavi's handicap model.

>>22811231
Sesardic's book seems to consider the subject I'm looking for indeed. Thank you for that.

>>22811321
It’s not just sexual selection. Handicapped traits are reliable signals to other males and other species as well, which certainly affects survival

>>22809021
This post is not good. It is bad.

Going to type some thoughts here, welcome corrections. New to the topic.

Is it true that when it comes to fossils time correlates with proximity to current species? Newer fossils more closely resemble current species, and older ones deeper beneath are more simple lifeforms? If this is so, I don't see how evolution couldn't be real. How do you explain this fact without it?

Then the question becomes what kind of evolution is real, right? And that's where I'm at right now. Natural selection explains the variation we see within parts of the fossil record, and extant species like weird mosquitos and other bullshit have been shown evolving in real time after some decades in an environment separate from their ancestor population. Particularly the mosquitos were left in the London Underground during construction and over the decades their behaviour changed and they became unable to share genetic material with the populations up above.

Then there's stuff like plankton that dies on the seabed. Supposedly we have cores that sufficiently demonstrate the evolution of plankton over billions of years. Dating all this stuff relies on radiometric techniques that scientists have observed and tested within labs. So even if our fossil record is woefully incomplete, we have certain samples that would be very difficult to explain without natural selection from what I understand.

Another basic argument is one against intelligent design, but I dunno about this one. The argument goes something like "since up to four billion animals are hypothesized to have existed throughout the earth's history, why would an intelligent design waste so much resources on so many failed experiments?"

Are there any killshots, examples in favour of or against evolution, that I should know about? Only started reading about this stuff yesterday.

>>22808846
A Freemasonic psyop to disintegrate the relationship between man and his divine creator in order that a short period of Zionist world gov't administer a technocratic control system designed to drag as many souls to hell.as possible.