Wow, that's simple! The evolution I believe in is pretty much summed up the same way. Adaptation of species to their changing environments, period.
As Einstein said, everything should be made as simple as possible but no simpler. Biological evolution isn't simply change. It is an adaptive feedback process, over generations, such that offspring differ from parents. Boiled down as simply as I can, evolution has three requirements: 1) A constant source of variation 2) Heritability of variation from one generation to the next 3) Too many offspring for the resources available If you have these three requirements met, you get evolution.
Change can only occur as much in biology as it does in everything else that influences biology. How much more or less Sun energy and information can be acquired or lost in biology?
Sorry I have no idea what you mean by this. maybe if I change the q. Do you think that there is some genetic limit or barrier that says an organism can only "evolve' within its "kind' such that there could be no possibility of a new species arising from a previous one?
This question rests on the fact that there is no fixed definition of what a species is. Within a population, there's a great deal of variation, a kind of deep pool of potential. Speciation sometimes occurs because mutation produces some new variation, but mostly it occurs due to concentration of some variations within a subpopulation. For example, there might be a pool of variation of pheromones, but if one sort tends to concentrate, those individuals might only be interested in breeding with one another. Soon enough, breeding isolation allows new mutations to cause increasing divergence. But the trigger wasn't a new mutation, it was a stochastic distribution of some variation. A new species is always a member of the clade to which its parent belonged. No matter how wild the dog-breeder's art, the results will always be dogs. If eventually enough variation is isolated so that interbreeding is no longer successful (sterile offspring, for example), we might come up with a different NAME for this species, but it will still be a dog just as surely as humans are still apes, and apes are still mammals.
We get asked about one species having descendants that are a completely different species. Sheesh. We are not completely different from fish.
I guess the problem is binary thinking. We're really not talking about completely different/NOT completely different. We are talking about the degree of morphological and genetic divergence over time. Given enough divergence, a species can be quite different from a distant ancestor. Humans share a common ancestor with jellyfish and sponges.
I pretty much have the same definition as Flintc. I might turn it into a sentence by saying that evolution is change in allele frequency within a population due to mutation and selective pressure.
and a cavalier king charles spaniel is also a wolf. just within in the canine world alone, and within astonishingly short time frames, all the information is there.
The whole "adaptation exists but there can't be changes in kinds" argument makes no (*)(*)(*)(*)ing sense. Small changes add up to big changes over time. It would be like me saying that the "Theory of Long Distance Walking" says that if one walked long enough they could go from one area to another, like from New York to Los Angeles. Then someone comes along and says that, yeah sure, walking exists and someone can walk away from their area to another one, but they can't go beyond their general geographic area. Its an illogical arbitrary line. - - - Updated - - - It's not a "code". It's a chemical reaction. Stop anthropomorphizing it.
I am not sure what you mean; simply learning the right "code" could enable transmutation from lead into gold. Even chemical reactions produce useful information even if we do not know exactly how or why it is accomplished.
"information" implies an internal meaning. DNA is just a chemical compound that undergoes chemical reactions.
Gradual development. In my subject, we refer to stars as evolving, so confining the word to only refer to organic beings is too tight for me.
