By some, it is the most brilliant idea a human mind has ever conceived !!!
Natural Selection is the most important mechanism of the Evolution of Species !!!
To understand it, we compare it with something very familiar: Artificial Selection.
The different races of dogs were created by humans from wolves.
It was done by breading with Artificial Selection.
We humans artificially select animals having intense the desired characteristics and breed them.
It is breeding control by humans.
Most animals and plants are sexually reproducing organisms.
Some descendants deviate with more intense characteristics.
To create a tall race of dogs, we select the tallest and we breed them…
Most descendants resemble their parents.
Some of them deviate to become taller and some shorter than their parents.
The bell curve distribution is a typical biological distribution.
As you see 10% of new dogs are the tallest, taller than their parents.
We kill or castrate the shorter dogs.
These tall dogs we spared are from the progeny
– which means first generation in Greek.
Then we selectively breed these progeny tall dogs with each other.
They produce descendants, the deuterogeny which means second generation in Greek.
Again we spare the tallest dogs to breed and we kill or castrate the rest.
We breed these tall dogs again and we end up with a tall race of dogs.
Once we are satisfied with the height of the race we stop.
Natural Selection is almost the same thing.
What is the difference?
The environment and nature select the individuals with the desired characteristics.
Natural Selection is a fundamental Evolutionary Mechanism.
Nature always selects the fittest individuals for a given environment.
This way, over time, the characteristics of species change.
And we get individuals that better fit the environment.
Two oversimplified examples.
Like humans, the wind can do breeding control.
Very tall wheat plants are broken by the wind in the mountains, before reproducing.
Wheat plants have thin stems, and the taller they are, the easier they break.
The mountain is an inclined surface, exposing tall wheat plants to the wind.
Short neighboring wheat plants don’t cover the tall ones enough to withstand the wind.
Only short plants survive and reproduce.
Thus the wind creates a race of short wheat on mountains.
Short enough to withstand the high winds.
Here we see the same graphics as we saw with the dogs.
The selection mechanism is the same.
Instead of humans selecting, the wind does the job.
Here is another example, with the breeding control of the Sun.
Like all plants, wheat plants need sun energy to photosynthecise and grow.
Short wheat on the plains don’t reach the sun because they are covered by the tall ones.
Without Sun energy, they die without reproducing.
Thus the Sun creates a race of tall wheat in the plains.
Height is just a characteristic, but we, the organisms, have thousands of characteristics.
Artificial selection is understood and practiced for thousands of years.
This ancient Assyrian king does genetic engineering on plants based on artificial selection.
Natural Selection is misunderstood even by people in academia in 2022 !!!
This is because Natural Selection justifies evolution of species.
Evolution challenges some religious beliefs, and although self evident, some don’t accept it.
I will make another video, just for Evolution itself.
Modern “scholars”, YouTubers and others, stand in awe in front of Charles Darwin.
Portraits and statues of Darwin are in Biological institutions and Museums around the world.
These scholars admire Darwin for his noble idea about Natural Selection.
Alfred Russel Wallace came up with the same idea independently and simultaneously.
All credit went to Darwin because his final work was promoted better.
These 19th century English Scholars had quality education and they knew ancient Greek.
They were able to read the ancient Greek scientists, straight from the original text.
The Russian author Leon Nikolayevich Tolstoy once said, there is no education without Greek literature.
Charles Darwin admittedly studied Aristotle and it seems he was a good student.
After all, Aristotle is the father of Biology, which we don’t learn in modern education.
Now, what if I tell you that neither Darwin not Wallace discovered Evolution and Natural Selection?
It is well known that evolution appeared with Anaximander and Empedocles thousands of years ago.
What no-one talks about anywhere, is Aristotle’s Natural selection.
Aristotle was the first to mention natural selection in his Physics.
He did in his second book on Physics called Peri Fyseos, About Nature (physis is nature in Greek).
And he does so in all genius.
He states that nature is a final cause.
Thus Nature’s driving force is necessity and not a special plan or design.
He supports necessity with two examples:
The rain doesn’t fall by Zeus in order to help wheat grow.
Instead because humidity elevates to colder levels, condenses into water and falls like rain.
It may rains and the wheat of someone gets lost in the threshing floor.
That means it just happen to rain.
The rain wasn’t a special universal plan for him to loose the wheat, but it just happen to rain.
Even though the farmer may think that the whole universe is working around him.
In a very clever way, Aristotle sets the ground to reject religious and superstitious explanations.
He prepared the ground for strict rational thinking.
He explains that the teeth have special characteristics:
the incisors to cut and the molars to grind the food.
Teeth were not planed or designed as such, they just happen to be like that.
The same holds for all characteristics that may seem purposefully designed.
By saying this, he clearly rejects the superstitious version of creationism and intelligent design.
There are bigots who fight against science, to promote this intelligent design hypothesis…
And then he goes straight into natural selection and he says:
Organisms with combination of useful characteristics survived
because they were found in an appropriate composition.
Those without this combination of characteristics got lost and they continue to be getting lost.
In other words he says that natural selection is dynamic and keeps going.
Aristotle says that it happens like Empedocles explains his text with the Man-Faced ox-progeny.
Aristotle connects his Natural Selection to an Evolution text of Empedocles.
Empedocles stated that humans, other animals and plants are those combinations of elements
(today we would call it nucleic bases)
that retained the ability to survive and reproduce due to the fortuitous arrangement of their parts (characteristics).
For Aristotle, organisms with the appropriate characteristics survive.
Those without them perish and continue to perish.
Well, this is the evolutionary mechanism of natural selection.
According to Aristotle the final cause in nature is to form species.
Natural Selection, especially in environmental changes, change species and create new species.
Cladogenesis and anagenesis create new species which are new forms.
But why doesn’t Aristotle get the credit for natural selection?
Is it because he wasn’t promoted well like Wallace?
And why wasn’t he promoted well?
Is it because Aristotle was not an Anglosaxon? A jew or a Christian? A German at least?
Is it because contrary to Darwin, Wallace, and Newton, modern science “scholars” don’t speak Greek?
Is it the anti-Greek spirit as explained by Friedrich Nietzsche in his book The Birth of Tragedy?
It is for very deep reasons, and I will make a full video about this matter.
For now I will just mention that lack of Greek makes modern scholars memorizing animals.
The majority of the scientific terms are Greek and Greek language helps deep understanding of terms.
This is why all Mathematicians I met, don’t know what Mathematics mean etymologically.
As Epictitus said, etymology is the basis of wisdom (The visit of names).
Even scholars of classics nowadays, teach Greek without speaking it.
Except a few we can count with our ten fingers…
I will provide a translation of a half page long text in the video description.
Both the ancient text and the translation will help you justify what I mentioned.
The ancient Greek language is very advanced and translation cannot be super fluid.
Now I will read three key sentences from the ancient text, translated by me.
I will go word by word and without changes to fit the English language.
This way you cannot say that I cooked conclusions through the translation.
ὅπου µὲν οὖν ἅπαντα συνέβη, ὥσπερ κἂν εἰ ἕνεκά του ἐγίγνετο,
Where accordingly therefore everything happen just as even is because of becoming
ταῦτα µὲν ἐσώθη ἀπὸ τοῦ αὐτοµάτου συστάντα ἐπιτηδείως·
Those have survived from the automatic presented suitably
ὅσα δὲ µὴ οὕτως, ἀπώλετο καὶ ἀπόλλυται, καθάπερ
Those though not in this manner perish and keep perishing exactly as.
And please don’t take me wrong.
Darwin and Wallace promoted and established this idea of Natural Selection in very difficult times.
They went very deep and they made this theory rigid.
But we can’t overlook Aristotle.
The answer is in Aristotle’s Physics and in particular in the “About Nature” book.
The full translation of Aristotle’s Physics is here: http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/physics.2.ii.html
Here you can find the ancient text, but with some Modern Greek comments in between: https://ikee.lib.auth.gr/record/289405/files/Aristotelis.pdf
But here is a translation I did, word by word on the three lines where Aristotle declares Natural Selection:
ὅπου µὲν οὖν ἅπαντα συνέβη, ὥσπερ κἂν εἰ ἕνεκά του ἐγίγνετο,
Where accordingly therefore everything happen just as even is because of becoming
ταῦτα µὲν ἐσώθη ἀπὸ τοῦ αὐτοµάτου συστάντα ἐπιτηδείως·
Those have survived from the automatic presented suitably
ὅσα δὲ µὴ οὕτως, ἀπώλετο καὶ ἀπόλλυται, καθάπερ
Those though not in this manner perish and keep perishing exactly as.
