Slashdot Mirror
Move Over, Archaeopteryx
Reedo writes "The clearest evidence ever of the missing link between dinosaurs and birds has been found in a newly discovered "feathered" fossil in northeastern China, claim scientists. The specimen was found embedded in a large slab of rock, in what scientists think was a former lake or pond."
Natural selection is a predicative theory.
It predicts that the "fittest" individuals (whether
those individuals are considered to be genes,
organisms, or whatever your model uses) will tend
to survive in a competitive environment, at the
expense of less fit individuals. Evolution follows
as a result of this differential survival rate when
reproduction is a factor.
As a direct example, John Holland's schema theory
predicts that the number of schema S in a population
at time t + 1 equals a function of it's number at
time t multiplied by it's relative fitness and
survivability under crossover and mutation.
(email addr is at acm, not mca)
We are Number One. All others are Number Two, or lower.
--The Sphinx