> At 09:44 PM 27/08/70 +0000, David Leeper wrote:
[CLIP]
> >I'm not prepared to equate a Flounder's eyes with a Peacock's tail.
> >One's sexual selection, the other's not.
>
> That's not why I brought up peacocks. I brought it up to show that
> biologists consider growing or changing phenotypic structures to
> put the organism at a relative disadvantage as far as fitness is
> concerned. That is what we were discussing if you will remember.
That isn't obvious. I would agree that there are large classes of
circumstances where that is true. Neither of these examples are
plausibly inefficient by a simple generic reason, though.
The flounder example coincides with an extreme change in preferred
environment. Looking at the seafloor is a waste of visual resources for
an adult flounder [seafloor], but not a problem for a juvenile flounder
[open sea].
Any time "sexual selection" comes up, the reasoning chain behind the
usual energy costs of phenotypic alteration starts to collapse.
[CLIP]
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/ Towards the conversion of data into information....
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/ Kenneth Boyd
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