Why noctogenesis is a flawed concept
In his recent two-part essay on evolution, Lloyd Merriam introduces the concept of noctogenesis as a way in which “Nature.. ..is drawing into time a form that stood timelessly among the possible”. Here, I will argue that this new concept 1) poses a strawman, 2) is basically a categorical error to begin with and 3) introduces nothing novel but is instead nothing more than a linguistic transformation of key-concepts in evolutionary biology, in a silly game of semantics used to justify an illogical and unfalsifiable conclusion. Genetic drift cannot be beneficial; the strawman In preparation (part 1) of his thesis, Merriam refers to the ‘neutral theory of molecular evolution’ to argue that traces of genetic drift are far more prevalent in genomes of different species than traces of natural selection, genetic drift would only lead to genomic noise and that therefore there must be an underlying steering mechanism to evolution - which Merriam presumes to be a quantumprocess. The idea that gen...
