Is Darwin's evolution always the guiding principle? Imagine this scenerio?

Question

Let's imagine that 50,000 years ago there was a small group of humans living somewhere in the forest of Northern Europe: 7 grown men, 12 grown women and 9 children. Six of those men are prime examples of masculinity, strong, muscular and sweaty, each "taking care" of 2 women. One, however, is a deformed geek who is tolerated by others, but not allowed to actively participate in the life of the group.

One day, the six able-bodied men go off hunting for a mammoth. Several days pass, but there's no word of them. It appears that they all died tragically. The geek suddenly becomes the only grown male of the group and he takes full advantage of that, inseminating each woman repeatedly until they're all pregnant with his offspring.

His joy is short-lived, however, because now the group has lost their main source of food. They are forced to forage for berries and mushrooms and starvation sets in. 2 women and all of the children die of hunger, leaving only the deformed geek and his harem.

OK, to conclude my story, they all manage to survive and bear 20 kids, which then manage to procreate further and thus spread the geek's orginal genes.

Now, is that consistent with Darwin's theory that the strongest gene always survives?

Answer 1

I used to be an ameba, living life completely free.

Then I became a fish, swimming in the sea.

Then I was monkey, hanging from a tree,

And now, I'm a doctor with a Ph. D.!

The thing to remember is that evolution is just a theory, a speculation, an unproven assumption....and NOT supported by the fossil record.

Answer 2

>"Now, is that consistent with Darwin's theory that the strongest gene always survives?"

Ack! That's NOT Darwin's theory! It does *NOT* say that "the strongest gene always survives"! Only that the strongest genes *TEND, ON AVERAGE* to survive better. There's a HUGE difference.

The part you miss is that natural selection is a *statistical* process.

In other words, it means that *ON AVERAGE* (over a large population, and over many generations), those traits that are advantageous will *tend* to propagate more than those that are not advantageous, or those that are harmful. That's all.

Specifically, natural selection does not rule out random acts of nature, or specific events (like all of your hunting party getting killed by an animal they didn't expect).

As a simple example, a child could be born with some incredible mutation that makes it *extremely* "fit" ... *dramatically* bigger and stronger than the others in its tribe ... if he grows to adulthood, he will survive longer, live healthier, woo the ladies better, and leave twice as many children as anybody else ... the classic image of "fitness." .... But if a rock falls on his head when he's 10 years old before he's had a chance to reproduce ... that's the end of that incredible mutation. He's the "fittest", but he didn't survive.

Again, the "survival of the fittest" thing is true *ON AVERAGE*. It does not mean that the "fittest" *ALWAYS* survive.

The scenario you are talking about is called a 'population bottleneck' ... and is a well-known part of modern evolutionary theory. Rather than a population of only 28 ... imagine a population of 2,800 living in a valley. If a huge flood or disease comes and wipes out 85% of the population, the remaining 15% of the population are left to start repopulating again ... and the genetic makeup of this new population may not be representative of the original population. That flood has nothing to do with natural selection ... nothing to do with "survival of the fittest" (those who perish are no more or less "fit" than those who survive) ... but natural selection does not rule it out either.

That is why biologists recognize *two* main driving forces of evolution: ... natural selection, and genetic drift. Population bottlenecks are one example of genetic drift. It does not contradict natural selection ... it just works in tandem with it.

Another example of genetic drift is the 'founder effect' ... where a small population separates from the main group and starts to repopulate a new region. If that splinter group has a different average genetic makeup than the original group, you suddenly have a very different makeup.

Population bottlenecks and the founder effect can be responsible for many effects we see in evolution. Where natural selection provides the driving force for steady, generation-to-generation evolution ... a migration can produce a significantly different population ... which may be reponsible for differences between ethnic groups in humans ... or even in splitting of a species into multiple subspecies in other organisms.

So natural selection is the guiding principle ... but that does not rule out other factors at work as well.

Answer 3

Well it sorta actually happened somewhere but not 50,000 years ago and it was not a geek but someone that was at least mild mannered and could read and write. Ever hear of Pitcairn Island. OR the Mutiny on the Bounty. Ever wonder what happened to the mutineers. That's what happened, all those men and woman from Haiti. The men made a alcohol and then killed each other off and left one man and all those woman and children. Except nothing killed off the woman and other children but the guy left decide that the kids needed to learn to read and write so he taught them out of the only book he had a Bible and I think there was a hymnal there too. True story.

Answer 4

If these were the only humans in existence, this outcome might be so. This of course assumes the "geek" survives long enough to be able to procreate, and doesn't become a sabre-tooth tiger's lunch .

In practice, group of humans migrated all over the place. Thus, a more likely fate would be that the women are captured by a stronger group and the "geek" is killed.

Answer 5

You misunderstand Natural Selection. It is not about physical strength. It is about the odds of survival / reproduction (and the odds of your descendants and relations surviving / reproducing). Those traits which give a statistical benefit to survival or reproduction are passed on in increasing frequencies.

So by your example, the six idiots who got killed by a mammoth or whatever and left no surviving children, are "unfit". The geek who left at least some surviving children is "fit". But that in itself is a mischaracterisation as natural selection works statistically at a population level, not at an individual level.

Answer 6

My dear friend, the bible view on creation is not against the theory of micro evolution. See for example http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6814048597272982882
The mechanisms of natural selection, gene flow, etc. are not rejected by the bible at the micro level. The example that you gave belongs to this micro evolution. You are fighting a theory that is universally accepted by scientific non Christians as well as scientific Christians. The issue is macro evolution, the evolution from monkeys to humans, etc. not the evolutions inside a given specie.

Answer 7

The only problem of your theory is that you limited the scope of your theory to a small group of people in small area.

What happened to vast number of people you didn't include in your theory? Darwin never said, his thory is applicable in MICRO scale in every single small group. When looked at in MACRO scale, strongest wins.

You tailored your senario too far to meet your objectives. Did you ever thought what would happen to the remaining people without peole who will hunt food for them and protect them? Likely, none would live long enough to spawn off-springs.

Answer 8

Darwin's theory is survival of the fittest. The strong men died off because of nature and that's what just happened. The two women and children die because they weren't strong enough- again survival of the fittest. He was able to produce children and so he did and he survived because he didn't take enough risks. It still supports Darwin's theory.

Answer 9

It is not Darwin's theory that the "strong" always survive. It is better represented that those that produce more fit offspring will increase in numbers relative to those that don't.

Answer 10

In this case, the geek's gene was the "strongest," because he didn't succumb to whatever took the lives of the hunters.