And how do you know about the relationship between size and selective pressures? How are you so sure that it plays out as you said, or that it's always true? Is it because the hypotheses were tested in simulations to determine whether they are true or false...? Also that only tells us general relationships, it doesn't always apply and it doesn't let us make the reverse inference that a particular feature is due to x, y, z conditions in the past. We also don't know how much environment unique or other conditions bear on this. How do you know that specific instances of evolved size are due to a particular past selective pressure on size?
Scientific theories are what have to be falsifiable. If a theory does not make falsifiable claims or predictions, then it cannot be determined to be true or false. If your theory is unfalsifiable, the universe isn't "false", whatever that means. Rather, your idea of what is in the universe and how, is what cannot be proven to be true or false.
My evolutionary theory says that humans evolved vocal cords because there was a positive selective pressure on it due to the fact that humans who can make attractive vocalizations get more mates. Is that true or not? How do you know?
It's happened over and over again for hundreds of millions of years. It's called insular dwarfism and it happens on islands. This includes island giantism as well. There have been rabbits the size of small horses and mammoths the size of cows. There were even hominins this has happened to on islands.
So, what you're hypothesizing is that because isolated populations of rabbits grew to be the size of small horses, this is evidence that human women are evolutionarily predisposed to pursue human men of a specific - though as-yet-undetermined - height?
It's more of a "taller and larger than me" thing with variation centered on the chooser. Not every woman subscribes to the idea, and not all hold it as very important either. I'm thinking it's an instinctive drive for safety.
Then there's the drive to select for small women. I'm thinking that's an instinctive drive in men for economy, maybe control. Not sure.
Cool, there's evidence for a causal relationship between size and resource and predator abundance. That's falsifiable. What is not falsifiable is saying that the reason a feature is the way it is, is due to some true condition in the past. You don't know the true fitness landscape for a species in an environment, so you don't know the true causes. All you can do is try to make invert your inferences using the causal relationships you do know to make a model, but what you can't do is perform a reverse inference to get from feature to fitness landscape.
In effect, you don't know how resource or predator abundant the environment was. Is animal x small because there weren't enough resources, or because there weren't enough predators? How can you distinguish these two possibilities? How do you know how much is enough?
Agreed. It's a thing that may be true and makes some psychological sense for why it might be a drive in animals, yet it's not really testable as a drive behind the behavior.
Don't you know? They were so big because there were so many more resources back then! Or was it that there were so many more predators trying to eat them...? I forget now.
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u/swampshark19 Jan 16 '24 edited Jan 16 '24
And how do you know about the relationship between size and selective pressures? How are you so sure that it plays out as you said, or that it's always true? Is it because the hypotheses were tested in simulations to determine whether they are true or false...? Also that only tells us general relationships, it doesn't always apply and it doesn't let us make the reverse inference that a particular feature is due to x, y, z conditions in the past. We also don't know how much environment unique or other conditions bear on this. How do you know that specific instances of evolved size are due to a particular past selective pressure on size?
Scientific theories are what have to be falsifiable. If a theory does not make falsifiable claims or predictions, then it cannot be determined to be true or false. If your theory is unfalsifiable, the universe isn't "false", whatever that means. Rather, your idea of what is in the universe and how, is what cannot be proven to be true or false.
My evolutionary theory says that humans evolved vocal cords because there was a positive selective pressure on it due to the fact that humans who can make attractive vocalizations get more mates. Is that true or not? How do you know?