Natural Selection: Strictly Local
"If deterministic constraints exist, then certain regularities or trends in the large scale pattern of evolution should be evident. Yet very few studies have addressed this problem.
One main reason is that natural selection is strictly a local mechanism and hence inherently unable to account for any global trend or pattern. Another reason is that evolutionary pattern itself is the product of inference from available data.
Where inference is habitually made under certain presumptions, the resulting pattern becomes correspondingly biased. A case in point is the phylogenetic classification of organisms."| | Mae-Wan Ho and Peter T. Saunders,
Biologist, The Open University, UK & Mathematician, University of London (respectively). Eds., "Beyond Neo-Darwinism: An Introduction to the New Evolutionary Paradigm," Academic Press: London, 1984, p.7). |
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