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That's not my point. My point the effect of population including natural selection is seen depending on how fast species churn up generations.

Can you really tell that natural selection is happening because a couple of trees are centuries old.

rocketmike: You would. You spelled natural wrong.

Yeah, I can see where you're going with this....

Slow stuff gets eaten, fast stuff doesn't.

Scholars of Julianos live and proliferate goodness and knowledge. Worshippers of Hermaeus Mora just blabber incessently about anything to anyone that will listen, ending up with their extermination out of sheer annoyance on the part of the poor [clubfoot] that happened to pass by them while in the midst of their cute lil rant about "Apocrypha", "my big 'ol brain is bigger than your brain....nyah nyah", or whatever type of hopeless insanity strikes them while they furiously scrub away in a vain attempt to eliminate the eternal and noxious odor of crab from their bodies, which will soon stink anew from Arkay's influence.

Yeah....I can see that.


___The Word Merchant of Julianos

Ummm...clarify, because the way you worded that statement is awkward.

Of course major catastrophes aren't beneficial. They don't happen very often. But, how is that any more different than giving ampicillin to an E. coli strain?

The reason the latter has a greater effect than the former (besides amp resistance plasmids) is out of frequency of existing pressures. Of course, if the former happened too often, life wouldn't have appeared on Earth in the first place.

The point is that Natural Selection applies only to hereditary genetic traits and how they're inherited by the generations of organisms that carry them. Citing a major catastrophe as a natural selective process is incorrect because, say, a meteor collision only alters the environment of the genes and their organisms and not the genes themselves.

Just being my usual nitpicky self. :goodjob:

I suppose that's a question, in which case, no.

Well, I can, but I wouldn't.

But I can tell you it's happening... because it is.

Natural selection applies to a lot of things that might be epigenetic. Life isn't neatly figured out especially on higher ecological scales above individuals.

Regardless, I find this absolutely ridiculous. Of course it changes the environment. Where the hell is the source of pressure that causes natural selection anyway? And how does that affect phenotype and individual fitness and all those probabilities?



Are we talking about ES or are we talking about real world? I can't tell.

But, the former, it doesn't matter.

The latter, no duh.

Yay bio! Hands out Mitochondria to everyone.

You do realize natural selection is simply when an animal survives his peers because of a certain trait that they do not have, such as a faster animal outrunning the slower and the slower gets eaten. That is natural selection, which means it indeed does exist in TES.

Right. So what does this mean? A level 21 warrior wearing full enchanted ebony armor with Umbra will more likely be favored over a level 1 mage with a starting spellbooks and red silk robes when confronted against three clannfears? Sure.

Oh wait, I forgot. Peers. crap.

Uh... are we disagreeing here? Because I did say that it does alter the environment, not that it doesn't.

True. A meteor collision isn't a selective process. Predation and reproduction are. A meteor collision would alter the climate, temperature, et cetera... which would influence the actual selective processes.

Like I said, I was nitpicking.

Selection is all of those. That's was environment means, a sum of both biotic and abiotic components. It's the source of selective pressures that drive the changing make up of a population.

Major catastrophes are selective processes, but they're not frequent and few organisms are actually adapated against them.

My point of contention is that a meteorite isn't a gene-carrying organism and therefore cannot participate in selection directly - i.e., the way a mutation would - which is why I hesitate to call a catastrophe a "selective process". It can indirectly influence the factors that determine which genes are selected, as you said.

You seem to have some experience in the matter, and I'm just a gap year yokel with a good biology mark. Where does your knowledge of the subject come from?

I'm puzzled how you even got that meteorite is a gene-carrying organism from me.



I'm a bio major.

I never did. The only point we differed on was the definition of a "selective process".



Then I defer to your experience.

And I envy your course of study. I'll hopefully be studying the same thing next year, when I relocate to a country where I don't suffer a high chance of being mugged and killed if I frequent a university.


Anyway. Natural Selection. TES.

:grumble:



Best chances to you.

Yes it does, because that's what the whole discussion is about.

No, it doesn't. And it does matter.

There's not enough information that that's how it works in Nirn. We're more exposed to mythic stories of the origins of the world than interjected snippets of bio 1 info in the missive and phylogenies.

And don't give me that [censored] that it could happen without providing concrete proof. I don't waste time on that bull.