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Shapes of Time
Many popular books on evolution ignore or downplay the role of growth and development, of ontogeny. But in Shapes of Time Kenneth McNamara's focus is on heterochrony, on evolutionary changes in the timing of developmental features and in rates of growth. As he puts it:
"evolution is not only about genetics and natural selection. Just as crucial are the changes in the timing and rate of development, with the three, genetics, heterochrony, and natural selection, forming an interdependent evolutionary triumvirate."Heterochrony constrains natural selection; it also provides it with raw material, allowing small genetic changes to have big phenotypic effects.
Ideas about the relationship between ontogeny and phylogeny (evolutionary history) have changed over the last few centuries, with notions of recapitulation and paedomorphosis going in and out of fashion. McNamara's outline of this covers Ernst Haeckel, Karl Ernst von Baer, and Walter Garstang, ending with Stephen Jay Gould, from whose Ontogeny and Phylogeny he takes the terminology for different kinds of heterochrony. The basic division is into paedomorphosis (less growth) and peramorphosis (more growth). These can each take three forms: paedomorphosis can be the result of progenesis (finishing early), neoteny (slower growth rate), and postdisplacement (starting late), while peramorphosis can result from predisplacement (starting early), acceleration (greater growth rate), and hypermorphosis (finishing late).
That's a lot of technical terms, but don't let them scare you away - the bulk of Shapes of Time consists of lively and engaging examples of heterochrony, taken from across the animal kingdom, from dogs and humans to invertebrates (McNamara is an invertebrate paleontologist), which help both to explain those terms and to fix them in the memory. But first McNamara presents a little bit of developmental biology, covering the stages of neofertilization, differentiation and growth, touching on Hox genes and morphogens, and mechanisms of organ and appendage formation. This is enough background for the higher level (zoological and ecological and paleontological) survey that follows, but may be frustratingly slender for those after more, after a better understanding of the developmental biology behind heterochrony.
McNamara begins his tour of heterochrony with dog varieties - even looking at paedomorphosis in depictions of Snoopy in Peanuts cartoons - and examples from insects and salamanders. Heterochrony is "all-pervasive" in the generation of sexual dimorphism, from simple size differences to extreme cases with males that are little more than "parasitic" sperm sacs. And heterochrony can play a key role in speciation, often combining with environmental gradients to separate populations; examples include Darwin's finches, brachiopods, and bushbucks.
Are some forms of heterochrony more common than others in particular lineages? In some cases paedomorphism seems unusually common, notably among the amphibians (axolotls are paedomorphic salamanders, for example); McNamara also looks at paedomorphism in lungfish, cats, and various invertebrates and at connections with genome and cell size. In other cases peramorphosis seems to dominate: a dramatic example is the combination of hypermorphosis and acceleration that produced increasing size in dinosaur lineages, but Cope's rule suggests that size tends to increase more generally. More common is the mixing of peramorphism and paedomorphism, acting on different features and subject to "trade-offs": examples here come from the evolution of wings (and of flightlessness) and tetrapod limbs, with a brief glance at the origin of turtle shells.
Heterochronic mechanisms enable the adaptation of life cycles to different environments: hypermorphosis and neoteny are more common in stable environments ("K-selected") and progenesis and acceleration in unpredictable ones ("r-selected"). Heterochronic changes can be driven by biological "arms-races", with a clear example in the evolution of sea urchins in response to predation by cassids (marine snails). And heterochrony has played a key role in human evolution, where McNamara highlights peramorphic features against a tradition which has stressed paedomorphism.
McNamara sometimes appears to reduce the significance of ontogeny in evolution to heterochrony, when it is actually considerably broader. There are ontogenetic constraints and processes other than those of timing and rate: biophysical and biochemical limits, ways in which novel proteins or cell types arise, and self-assembly and exploration allowing "adaptive" development, to list just a few. If there is a "triumvirate" that rules evolution it has to be "genetics, ontogeny, and natural selection". Still, there's no doubting that heterochrony is one of the key links between ontogeny and phylogeny - at least not after reading Shapes of Time.
You might like to check out Danny's other evolution, developmental biology, and popular science reviews. You can purchase Shapes of Time from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Oh and btw. If you got scared please read this afterwards.
The shape of time is a hypercube--a cube in the geometric 4th dimension. I wonder if they will make a Rubik's hypercube someday.
And how long will it take to solve? (without taking off and rearranging the stickers?)
Repeat after me: There is no such thing as "macroevolution." Biological evolution is change in the gene pool of a population over time. That's all that it is. That this happens is an undisputable matter of fact. The only difference between what fundamentalists call "microevolution" and "macroevolution" is the amount of time that evolutionary effects take to manifest themselves. The physical process itself is the same.
If I stand on one side of my living room and walk heel-to-toe, I will eventually end up at the other side of my living room. If I stand in San Francisco and walk heel-to-toe in an easterly direction, I will eventually end up in New York. Fundamentalists would call the former activity "microwalking" and the latter "macrowalking", but it should be perfectly obvious that the process in both cases is exactly the same; the difference is in the scale of magnitude.
"Macroevolution" is a fictional concept invented by fundamentalists who have discovered (to their chagrin) that biological evolution cannot be honestly denied, but cannot be allowed to be the explanation for the biodiversity on life on Earth. It's just too bad for the fundamentalists that their basic premise (that evolution is incompatible with religion) is one of the most outlandish and potentially destructive lies ever told.
Two problems with this contentin that I can see right off the bat:
Helium balloons want to be free.
What on earth are you gibbering about? Can macroevolution , in your confused view, decribe the initial non-living conditions or not?
Anyway, what is metaphical about the emergent properties of matter? Go read this for some real evolutionary metaphics.
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
I hope this doesn't have anything to do with the Time Cube guy, he creeps me out.
___
Cogito cogito, ergo cogito sum.
Biological evolution is change in the gene pool of a population over time. That's all that it is
You seem to have a narrow view of evolution derived from the classical genetics viewpoint circa 1930. As someone who has written papers on molecular evolution, I could equally claim that "changes in the gene pool" is a fictious concept because from the molecular viewpoint it is obviously just DNA mutations. And a chemist looking at the situation could say "no, it is just chemical reactions" and the physicist could say "no, it is just subatomic interactions". Science works on many different levels. Like the story of the blind men and the elephant, the true story can only be put together from integrating the various viewpoints.
Nope.
If you read Wolfram's "A new kind of science" you'll see that behaviour of systems like this is typically independent of initial conditions. It's the rule that counts. Of couse when a lot of rules are competing in parallel then the most efficient will win, so presumably DNA has itself evolved so that typical mutations are viable.
For example, there's the idea Dawkins called "evolution of evolvability" - certain body plans might be more adaptable than others, allowing some phyla to radiate more rapidly (e.g. insects). That's not part of classical natural selection, but it's probably an important process.
Also, long term trends might be influenced by catastrophes. A sudden environmental change might alter the rules of selection overnight. You might see pruning of groups which can't survive meteor impacts.
That's not to say that natural selection isn't the most important part of evolution. It's the only way that complex adaptations can evolve.
The review is interesting but it falls in the beginning and end into a fallacy. Why this stupid Triumvirate? Are we talking about Evolution or fighting factions in Roman Senate? Considering the way the analyst glued to this term, soon we will see people discussing who's the Caeser and Pompei of Evolution, or when we catch Emperor Augustus...
There is something very dangerous on using and fixing the attention to certain terms that are simply used as metaphoras. We have an example right here, where we already see two "triumvirates" fighting each other. Frankly I believe that the original author was sincerly remarking the importance of his ideas in the frame of three important conditions for Evolution. However the reviewer made a serious mistake on catching up with this. Whatever happens in Evolution, surely is not a triumvirate and we may be quite far from it. I think that the idea of the book is utterly incomplete, but I have to read the book to be sure for that. The reviewer sincerly makes a bigger mistake on remarking three important factors of Evolution and forgetting that this is too overclassical and artificial from the very start. One cannot simply put three simple conditions to explain all the complexity of the evolutionary process. While it is important to simplify the fundamental conditions of Evolution, I think that we cannot hold up to "Three conditions". That also sounds to much as an revival of the traditionalist "Three Laws" of Physics. This sounds too human to be scientific and too subjective to accept.
> If there is a "triumvirate" that rules
> evolution it has to be "genetics, ontogeny,
> and natural selection"
On the other hand, ontogeny is also genetic. Even the development constrained (or encouraged) by environmental conditions are responses that pushes the organism down an existing genetic pathway. Heterochrony is an important aspect of evolution, but it is an aspect of genetic adaptation, and cannot stand alone (although I agree that it can be singled out for purposes of study).
Natural selection acting on genetic (or, better yet, phenotypic) variation is the whole of evolution (and here I'm considering the neutral network stuff to also be phenotypic as it is a product of the genome's position in a topoloical structure).
(email addr is at acm, not mca)
We are Number One. All others are Number Two, or lower.
--The Sphinx
To see where the reviewer, and most modern criticism against evolutionary biology, comes from -- see The Dialectical Biologist.
I stopped reading the popular criticism after coming to the opinion that there are two different religions that have dogmatic problems with evolution -- Xians/Muslims and Marxists.
I think I understand why the Xians have problems accepting that some (tendencies to) behavior are built into humans. I never read up enough on Marxism to understand their problem. I leave that to people with more religious needs.
Karma: Excellent (My Karma? I wish...:-( )
Again, this is a false dichotomy. Macroevolutionary changes are only detectable after the fact. They are microevoultionary changes, physically. There is no "jump" over an ocean.
Humans determine when a "macroevoltuionary" event has occured in hindsight. Nature does not care whether we deem it a "micro" or "macro" evolution. As far as the physical process is concerned, there is nothing but microevolitionary changes or, in your analogy "footsteps".
There are no oceans seperating a mutated child from it's parent. The only way oceans occur is after the fact, when ancestors of the new orgamism die out.
I think you have oversimplified the difference between the two. Your analogy is appealing at first, but it doesn't correspond well to evolutionary processes. The fact the random (or manufactured) genetic mutations can produce changes within species is easily proven. We can can observe the process just as we can observe your walking across your living room.
But can we observe speciation or massive shifts from one type of organism to another? No. We know how you you could walk from SF to NY, but exactly how does a dinosaur become a bird or a monkey become a man? There are vague and general theories, but the case is far from closed. Evolutionists respond that we shouldn't expect to see this happening because of the vast amounts of time required, when pressed on this issue.
Now, I may have given away my bias, but I'm trying to be objective here. On the one hand, we understand the process very well, we can observe it in nature, and reproduce it in the lab. On the other hand, we have some "what if's", "maybe's", and such. Nothing observable. I think that warrants some special care to distinguish between the two. Economics on any scale uses concepts such as supply and demand, the rationality of individual choice, etc. but I had to take a microeconomics class as well as a macroeconomics clss. Apparently, it is still important to know the difference between the two.
You can see the evidence for "macroevolution," if you insist on defining it as something different from "microevolution," quite plainly in the fossil record for large organisms; you can also see it on a human timescale in small organisms. (There exist, e.g., species of bacteria which are obligate jet-fuel feeders; they can't live on anything else. I rather doubt Noah had those on the Ark ...) The only people I've ever heard deny this, despite the overwhelming evidence, are in fact fundamentalists.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
The fossil record is VERY incomplete and is by far the weakest evidence for evolution. The large gaps in it go no where to show that chasms between certain evolutionary paths exist or not. It's in how you interpret the gaps in the record. It is hardly irrational to look at microbiology and the gaps in the fossil record and then think maybe, just maybe those gaps were never filled.
The fossil record is a complete as any resonable person could expect it to be. Fossilization is rare - the vast majority of organisms don't fossilize. You can't get to most fossils. And even if you could, you'd have to divert a huge portion of the world economy to unearth them. And some transitional species may not have been around enough to even leave a fossil. Despite all this, we have fossil evidence for many lines of evolution's history. Trilobites are probably the best documented example...
You can claim that some gaps were never filled, but until you come up with evidence that it was not filled or an alternate theory that is actually *evidenced*, evolution simply has no competition.
Intelligent designers never provide a scintilla of evidence that any creator/guider exists. They just complain that the (literal) mountains of evidence that scientists have unearthed which favors evolution is not enough. They are nothing but a peanut gallery.
But can we observe speciation or massive shifts from one type of organism to another? No.
Yes. Read this and this.
but explain to me how angler fish evolved.
:)
I remember when the standard was the bombadier beetle. Now it's the angler fish. Evolution in action!
I can't tell you *how* it evolved, because I, personally, wasn't sitting around watching it. However, you ought to be able to come up with a scenario of how it *could* have happened.
Until scientists orbit a Moon sized object around an Earth sized object in the lab, there is no way to prove that Macrogravity is not really caused by the invisible hand of the Lord Jesus Christ!
While one can test microgravity by dropping an apple from a suitably leaning tower, science only draws it's conclusions about macrogravity from observation and forensic evidence, just like Macroevolution. But all good Xians know that this "evidence" the anti-religion scientists put forth is really put there by the dark one to fool us!
We must stop these anti-religious scientists from teaching our children to distrust the invisible hand of Christ and so commit all sorts of immoral acts I can't even begin to type, with their subversive theory of MacroGravity!
But can we observe speciation or massive shifts from one type of organism to another? No. We know how you you could walk from SF to NY, but exactly how does a dinosaur become a bird or a monkey become a man? There are vague and general theories, but the case is far from closed. Evolutionists respond that we shouldn't expect to see this happening because of the vast amounts of time required, when pressed on this issue.
We observe speciation quite regularly, even in mammals (ie, Fenroe Island house rats).
As for monkey to man, well, take a chimpanzee, strip the duplicate of chromosome 2, and change the ~2,000,000 genetic variables that matter (give or take half a million) (only 3-5% of our genes matter).
Obviously, such things are not that simple, at with only ~100 mutations occurring in any given generation, well, that's a lot of time to get things straight, as it were - humans and chimpanzees are about a quarter million generations apart (About 3 billion base pairs, a 1.8% difference between the two, for about 50 million base pairs different (ignoring the duplicated second chromosome in the chimpanzee), they are diverging, ie, split in two, they only need half the generational diference, at 100 mutations a generation, leaves you with a quarter million generations).
I think the problem most antievolutionists have is that they can't wrap their heads around the (admittingly) mind-boggling timescales involved. They certainly are very humbling, to say the least.
I am a science fantasy fan
You're using an abnormally rigourous definition of "faith" here.
The toast you had for breakfast started out life as a series of wheat plants growing on a farm somewhere. It was then subjected to a variety of processes that ultimately ended up in the toast on your plate.
I can describe these processes in the general, but would find it very difficult to reconstruct those processes in reverse, finally ending up on the plot of land where the wheat once grew that constituted your breakfast.
Instead, it is far easier to generalize somewhat, describing the processes in the chain from wheat to toast in a less specific manner - and you must take it "on faith" that these general processes map to your specific piece of toast.
That inability to provide specific evidence with regards to your breakfast does not mean that the generalization of how toast is made is de facto invalid.
So with regard to your angler fish, the underlying mechanisms and processes - natural selection, random and inheritable mutation, and so on and so forth - can suffice to show how the species _could_ have evolved, without needing to present you with the preserved corpses (and all their contained genetic information) of each successive generation of "angler fish" back to some earlier ancestor.
If you want to see examples of the mechanisms of evolution at work, where you _can_ track change through successive generations, you have to work forward - and there's lots and lots of examples done with fruit flies (whose gestation period is sufficiently short to permit experimentation) and realize - call it an act of "faith" if you must - that the same mechanisms apply to all known DNA-based organisms.
DG
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
BLASPHEMER!! ALL know that it is the MIGHTY THUMB OF THOR which keeps us solidly in place upon this earth! His mighty Thumb also keeps the many planets in their correct orbits via gently correction (And/Or smashing them really hard with his mjollinor in the guise of meteor impacts) if you continue to blaspheme against him I warn you! He might remove the protection granted by his thumb and allow you to be fling off into cold and heartless space!
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
Why does everyone who has stigmata exhibit it with bleeding palms when He was nailed up through the wrists? Why is alchohal considered a sinful ahen He turned water into wine?
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
Evolution is not a force. It is a reaction. It has no goal. It simply reacts.
The problem is with the statement that evolution is the survival of the fittest. This places an emotional constraint in the eyes of people that makes them demand that there is a goal. There isn't. Evolution never set out to create humans, or any other species.
In its most simple terms evolution is life reacting to changes in the environment. Those speices that can adapt to those changes either survive or give rise to new species. Those that can not die.
Evolution doesn't get "new information" for free (this isn't information theory anyway). Life creates the needed inforamtion at great cost. Most mutations are lethal. Many that are not lethal are useless (who needs atwo-headed turtle?) Life is not a closed system by any means. Energy is constantly being pumped in from the sun and the mineral resources in the earth.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
I'm not sure where' you're going with that reply.
:)
Are you implying that the aluminum your hammer was made of exists because of divine intervention?
As far as your archer fish is concerned, there are evolutionary process analogues to turning, milling, drilling and so on. Some of those processes can be demonstrated in the lab, much the same way that you demonstrated "machining" on scrap metal that was "not your hammer" but was sufficiantly "like your hammer" to demonstrate the validity of the process as applied to "hammers"
So while nobody is going to start with some sort of proto-archerfish and "evolve" it into a bona fide archerfish in front of you, they can demonstrate the mechanisms by which proto-archerfish could develop into bona fide archerfish, and this should be sufficiant to prove the point.
You could call that "faith" if you really wanted to, but to do so is to miss the point.
Incidently, people _have_ "developed" atoms before. You can make helium out of hydrogen given enough energy.... it's been done.
DG
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
> With every new dissertation on evolution, I find it interesting that no researcher seems to address the fundamental, underlying problem which dogs evolution:
Read a lot of dissertations on evolution, do you?
> Where does new genetic information come from?
Depends on how you define "information". If you use Shannon information, the less predictable an observation is then the more information you get from the observation. From that perspective a mudslide generates more information than a birth with a mutation does.
Evolution deniers have tried their hand at defining genomic information and making a claim that information so defined can't increase spontaneously, but those claims never stand up to the test. The closest thing to rigor was the attempt by Lee Spetner, but a close reading shows that he pulls a bait-n-switch argument when the chips are down. To all appearances, there is no law of nature that says "information can't increase".
> Why is it so important? Because they're saying we're getting something from nothing.
No, we're getting that "something" from evolution.
Scientists are very like creationists when they see something amazing and say "That could never have come about by chance!". The two camps part ways after that observation, with the creationist invoking the "goddidit" mantra and the scientist trying to figure out what actually caused the counterintuitive event. In this case, the explanation is neo-darwinian evolution. But there's nothing special about that; we don't get "something for nothing" when planets form, when hurricanes form, when snowflakes form, or when NaOH + HCl => NaCl + H2O. Science is all about understanding why those things happen rather than some other outcome.
> A system which isn't directed towards any goal teleologically goes nowhere.
Loaded semantics there. Is a mudslide "directed towards a goal"? A hurricane? A supernova?
> And if it is directed, it must have a net positive influx of information. What is that source?
Impossible to say without hearing your definition of "information", but the usual intuitive answer is "from the environment". By intuitive standards, genetic algorithms can "create information" simply by interacting with their environment (i.e., the fitness evaluation). Why can't the "biological algorithm" do the same?
The problem with your argument is that there's no empirical reason to be concerned with it. It's the armchair argument of people who want to show that evolution is wrong for reasons that have nothing to do with information.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
No, you will eventually end up somewhere on the east coast of the United States. The channelling and constraints of the road system make it more likely that you will follow certain paths than others (going due east continuously is not an option!) and also make it likely that you will reach the east coast in an urban centre or road junction, rather than a random point.
Danny.
I have written over 900 book reviews
No. Consider these two statments:
If I make the first statement, I am asserting that God made the fish and that's that. You must have faith to agree with me.
If I make the second statement, I am only offering a possibility. Agreeing with me in this case only means that you agree that my scenario is *possible*.
Substitute 'car' for 'angler fish. If you point at a car and ask where it came from, I can either say that God made it, or I can say that I know that some cars come from Europe on a boat, and that some come from Detroit on a train, so it might have been one of those two possiblities. Which one requires faith?
If you're trying to convince me
What am I supposed to be convincing you of?
So, in short, phenomena are "meaningless", except in the presence of an observer who assigns some arbitrary and personal "meaning" to them? The only problem with this interpretation is that it is quite unclear about which assigned "meaning" is valid. For example, Xtians and Evolutionists assign conflicting and often mutually exclusive "meanings" to the same inherently meaningless phenomena, and there's no practical way to determine which of them is "correct". Neither of them is talking about what actually is, after all--only about what it means, subjectively, to them.
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
If an explanation is requested and the answer is to "just believe" in an unsubstantiated theory, then that, my friend, is a request of "faith" as the answer.
Evolution is anything but an unsubstantiated theory. This is a good site to start with.
No other source needed.
A system which isn't directed towards any goal teleologically goes nowhere.
This sentence anthropomorphizes a natural process: think about it, what is the "direction" of plate tectonics? The "direction" of planetary orbits?
Likewise, evolution doesn't have a "goal" and it's not "directed", rather life survives by being flexible, and that flexibility takes new forms. Forms that survive well in the new conditions make lots of copies of themselves, while forms that don't change or change in a way that doesn't work so well don't make lots of copies, and disappear.
By the way, Gould most certainly did "touch on this" in fact devoted a good deal of Wonderful Life to describing where new genetic information comes from.
Where does new genetic information come from?
From random mutations.
If you're talking about the classic "evolution violates Newton's third law" argument, the answer is that Newton's third only applies to closed systems (like the universe). The Earth is not a closed system; it happens to be right next to a powerful energy source: our sun. The "something from nothing" is actually "something from solar energy". (And probably geothermal energy.)
A system which isn't directed towards any goal teleologically goes nowhere.
Or everywhere. An expanding system goes in all directions if it's not directed. And evolution isn't directed. However it is constrained by natural selection. Thus harmful mutations are weeded out by the simple fact that those with harmful mutations die (or, more to the point, fail to reproduce).
"think about it"...
Easy enough: start with an ambush predator (on that lies in wait for prey, there are plenty of those), due to a slight mutation one comes along with a lighter or slightly raised patch on it's head, some fish swim in to check it out and are more easily caught, members of the species with the variation tend to catch more, and thus have more offspring. Many of the offspring have the raised patch, some a bit larger some a bit smaller.
The ones with a bit larger catch more and have more offspring, and so on, eventually you have something like an angler fish, no magic hand waving & no faith required, just small changes that confer small advantages that are selected for over millions of years...
understand the difference between a closed system and an open system, they have no fear..
More==>
The numerical calculation of entropy changes accompanying physical and chemical changes are very well understood and are the basis of the mathematical determination of free energy, emf characteristics of voltaic cells, equilibrium constants, refrigeration cycles, steam turbine operating parameters, and a host of other parameters. The creationist position would necessarily discard the entire mathematical framework of thermodynamics and would provide no basis for the engineering design of turbines, refrigeration units, industrial pumps, etc. It would do away with the well-developed mathematical relationships of physical chemistry, including the effect of temperature and pressure on equilibrium constants and phase changes.
So what you are really asking when talking about thermodynamics is where does the energy needed to reverse entropy come from? The aswer is big, hot, and round, and has often been called a god in the past, but unlike the Xian god can be seen quite easily with the human eye.
Meanwhile, the origin of the first cell is interesting (and certainly there are plenty of researchers who aren't afraid of looking into that), but has nothing to do with evolution, since Evolution is the theory of what happened AFTER the first cell formed (which is why Darwin's book is called the Origin of the Species, not the Origin of Life.
My favorite example of a mutation producing new information involves a Japanese bacterium that suffered a frame shift mutation that just happened to allow it to metabolize nylon waste.
Well, not so good if you like to wear nylon, but good for the bugs who can now eat it...
Most interesting assertion, but, adding energy to a system increases its entropy, not its order.
Huh? Is that -2lot? The 2lot that works in an anti-matter universe? Here, in this universe, releasing energy from a system increases entropy & decreases order (a bush burned to ash), while adding energy to a system tends to decrease entropy and increase order (the growing bush before it burned).
Of course if one system releases so much energy that it overwhelms the ability of another system to absorb that energy, both systems can release their energy and decrease their order (the invisible flame thrower with which might Thor ignited the bush), but in both cases the release of energy accompanies the decrease in entropy and order as the systems burn to a lower energy state (ashes to ashes).
But if you are from an anti-matter universe, I can see how this whole debate would be very confusing to you...
By what cause did "natural selection" arise?
Different issue entirely, but I glad you are starting to see that it has nothing to do with 2lot in the normal matter universe, since yes we are getting a "free lunch" from the god formerly known as Ra. Organic molecules tend to organize themselves in the presence of a steady input of energy, so once we have the free lunch courtesy of the Sun, increasing order is entirely expected.
Of course, non of this speculation is a valid criticism of the theory of evolution, since evolution specifically deals with what happens after the first life has formed...
Once you have the first 2 life forms, small differences between the two lead one to do better in a slightly higher place and the other to do better in a slightly lower place, and so natural selection begins.
from Hegel, and unfortunately tainted a rather useful concept in the process.
For Hegel, the dialectic was the observeable process of societal change to a more complex state, which Marx misrepresented as a controllable process with a finite goal: the Worker's Paradise. Of course, if you are trying to get folks to follow you, it's best to promise them a better world will result from drinking your koolaid.
Which maybe is why Marxists don't like Evolution, since like Hegel's dialectic, Evolution is an ongoing process without an ideal ending, rather a road to Paradise.
PS, try reading the Manifesto and then reading Revelations sometime, the two are eerily similar...
than the one used by physicists:
Negative, moving atomic particles around is not equivalent to making an atom no more than cooking an omelet makes you a chicken.
Atoms are of course made of sub-atomic particles, and are formed by "moving" sub-atomic particles, so this makes no sense. If you move a proton and an electron together, you have made a hydrogen atom. If you add a neutron, you have made a helium atom, refresh your knoledge of atomic theory, please.
You also seem to be building a false dichotomy between theory and fact: fact is, scientific theories describe facts (generally called observations). We see the fact that things fall when you drop them, and derive from that the theory of gravity. We see the fact that species exist and change over time and develop from that the theory of evolution.
Meanwhile predictions are made based on a theory to see if theories do in fact describe facts, if predictive experiments haven't been done, the theory is called a hypothesis.
But you seem to be using the term 'theory' in the way scientists use 'hypothesis', which makes your arguments regarding science rather illogical. We both have to agree something is a hammer before we can discuss hammers, so long as you keep insisting a hammer is a chicken, the process will lead to neither a well driven nail nor to a tasty omelette.
That's just completely false. Shapes of Time is one counter-example, as is Patterns and Processes in Vertebrate Evolution , but there are thousands of other non-marxist biologists who have used Gould's ideas on evolution. Check the citation record for Ontogeny and Phylogeny sometime!
Danny.
I have written over 900 book reviews
Danny.
I have written over 900 book reviews
Do the critics of Gould's popular writing really include Mayr, Maynard Smith, George Williams, Hamilton, Wilson, Trives, etc?
There's been lots of criticism of Gould, sure. Some of it has been very uninteresting or demonstrably wrong, but a lot of it has been quite solid. Some of Gould's responses have been weak, but sometime's he's revised his ideas and come back stronger than before. And both "sides" have on occasion resorted to "playing the man" instead of the ideas. But this is how debate works...
Frankly, I never understood the fuss. I can read Dawkins and Wilson - I'm just reading The Ants now, it's an incredible achievement - and Gould and Lewontin, and find them all well worthwhile. And when what they say is incompatible... well, we can't expect everything to be handed to us on a platter!
And Wilson certainly has cred when it comes to ants, but frankly Sociobiology has aged less well than Ontogeny and Phylogeny and while I haven't read Consilience, reports suggest it isn't entirely convincing. And if you want to know how Gould is considered by palaeontologists, Carroll's highly regarded Patterns and Processes of Vertebrate Evolution is quite critical - but definitely not dismissive. If this is "Gouldism"... well, then Gouldism has totally permeated palaeontology.
For my information, is it really true that Gould really dropped all references about brain size from the first and second edition of "mismeasured"?
There's plenty of discussion of brain size in the 2nd editon of Mismeasured... And someone borrowed my 1st edition and never returned it, so I can't compare.
OK, Gould claims (in his popular writing) that evolutionary biologists ignore alternatives to selection for changing gene frequency. Despite genetic drift being accepted for decades.
It's possible for something to be neglected while still being known... and neutral theory had to fight for a place. In any event, there's no doubt at all that the range of approaches to evolution - in terms of levels of selection, understanding of developmental constraints, etc. - is much broader now than it was fifty years ago.
Dawkins is not a myopic as some critics have suggested, but some of his attacks misrepresent people woefully too. I can't remember the Dawkins article in the Langton volume - and my copy of that isn't where it ought to be on my shelf, so I can't comment on that directly - but there's a difference between evolvability and levels of selection.
If I have learned anything yet in life, it is that idealists lie.
Idealists?? I think you must be using a different sense of that word to the rest of the philosophical community. And accusations that people are "lying" always remind me of creationists, who have to fall back on accusing biologists of lying because they have no other response to what they are saying...
Danny.
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