Yup. Look at it this way. As long as those interruptions take less time on an average day than your commute would have then you are still time ahead.
I've worked from home for several different customers (I'm a consultant) over the last 12 years and gotten of ton of my life back.
60 minute average round trip 200 commute days a year 200 hours 12 years of doing this is 2400 hours You're only awake 16 hours or so each day so 2400 hours is 150 days
That's almost half a year I've gotten back just in reduced commute.
There are also significant money savings. A car costs about 30 cents a mile to operate. Let's assume your average speed is going to be 40 over the course of your commute. That's almost $29,000 in auto costs saved simply by not going to the office.
Lot's of people go out for lunch every day. That's another $17,000 in savings over the last 12 year.
I've also seen that many more employers allow flexible scheduling. Probably partly because they know they can't monitor you closely and partly because they already believe they can measure output or you wouldn't be working from home. As a result you can much more frequently work the hours that suit you than in an office setting. Yesterday, for example, I started at about 09:00, worked until 14:00 went to the doctor, played a couple hours of soccer (yeah! first indoor games of the season) and got home at about 21:00. Wrapped up a few things I had left hanging and called it a night.
Between the half a year I've gotten back, $40K I've saved, the flexible hours and the more quiet environment I'm sold. I'll keep doing this as long as I can.
Won't this ruling hurt the garage inventor that doesn't have the business accumen to bring a product to market, but has the creativity needed to make new stuff?
Is the ruling, in essence, "patents were made to protect products, not ideas"?
Errr, don't you get the same sorta BS from your clients?
Yes. But as a consultant you can usually say no if you want to and are only accountable to yourself. And, if you do take the gig anyway, you keep the margin to pay for thing *you* think are important instead of looking at the nice car your CEO drives but you cannot afford.
Yes, I was indeed thinking of an algorithm that would actually compress data sometimes. As I said in a cousin posting, I agree with what you say in the parent.
Because the arbitrary data compression algorithm must add data to the result file in order to distinguish it from a file that has been compressed. Think of it in terms of a header that says "take the rest of this file as a literal".
Previous employers, for liability reasons, will usually only indicate whether the subject worked for them.
You know, I've heard this for years and as someone who hires people regularly, I have to say it doesn't jive with my experience. Most of the time if we ask for a reference from a boss at previous companies we get one and they are willing to talk.
And as an employer I think the corollary is some mechanism to stop job hunters from sending their resume to every job posted on the system. If it cost 50 cents or a buck to submit a resume I bet that would cut down a ton on the amount of resumes I get that are completely and utterly inappropriate for the jobs I've posted but not impact legit job searches in the slightest.
Interesting, so that total includes land that is being grazed in the "non-farmed" total. I wouldn't have done that, but that might account for a large part of the difference. In my area we don't really have any land laying fallow despite being it a quite poor quality area. But a lot has been turned over to grass for pasture. In fact, by that measure almost all of my land is non-farming now. about a third in pasture, a third in CRP and a third in rotation.
In one sense that's fair because pasture isn't terribly efficient thanks to the process of converting grass to meat. However, by that same measure most of the corn grown in this country is waste since it is used to feed livestock.
We've lost a lot of smaller farms as the farming industry has been consolidated into larger firms. As a result, we've dropped from 1.2 billion acres in the 1960's to ~968 million acres in 1997. That's over 200 million acres (or about 20% of previous capacity) to explain away as poor farmland!
Correct. The biggest losses have come through urbanization (according to your own citation).
The amount that we could actually reclaim (and the amount I refer to previoiusly) is the stuff that has not been turned into town homes. It's the HEL and CRP acres (about a third of my land is in a CRP program). Not anything close to 200M acres.
We've still got more than enough. Some analysts are put off by the idea of massive increases in farm land, but they tend to ignore the fact that the US farms less land than ever before to produce more crops than ever before.
The reduction in farmed land is pretty insignificant and takes place mostly on "highly erodable land" or in buffer zones around water. Neither of these are very appealing places to put back into rotation.
The second point would be a good one except that replacing crude with corn would take a lot of land. Much more than we make up in increased yields.
In any case, there is a thread about algae elsewhere in this commentary that is worth thinking seriously about. There is also the possibility of using one of the microbes Venter found in his current voyage to extract hydrogen from water.
I've used rosetta stone for both polish and spanish and find it to be a very useful part of learning a new language. The key there is part. I also have the pimsluer stuff for both and took a spanish class with my wife. Different people learn in different ways and rosetta stone is probably the single best tool for me (much better than classes, for example, due to my hectic schedule), but having several different approaches is very useful.
Not only is the eye not irreducibly complex, but there are many different kinds of eyes in animals today and in the fossil record. The eye most definately evolved.
No, no, no, no and NO! Replacing oil dependence with a farming dependence is stupidly insane! Instead of being at the mercy of foreign countries and their oil production, suddenly we're at the mercy of farming methods, pests, crop productions - and farm subsidies.
Aside from the fact that we are *already* at the mercy of farming methods, pests and crop productions (we depend on farming for food) there are a couple other problems with that argument.
First is that using biomass for fuel would likely *remove* the need for farm subsidied by creating more demand. We subsidise farmers today because as a nation we don't have the stomach to bankrupt thousands of farm families by letting the market work and we produce more than we need. (This is also why CRP programs are successful (also known as "paying farmers not to farm". They do indeed pay farmers not to farm, but kill two birds with one stone by creating better wildlife habitate and reducing agricultural polution)).
Second is related to the idea that we have to chose biomass *or* mechanical (or solar) options. The best solution is surely to have many modes of production. This may be slightly more expensive in any given year, but it is an insurance policy that we don't have today. Right now, oil is a huge component of the energy picture, if it were 20% with equal quarters rounding out the other 80% then we would have greatly improved stability. It's kind of the investment banking view of energy. Sure you would have done great if you bought Apple three years ago, but you would be sad if you had bought Enron. Diversification is the key to stability in both the stock market and energy, but as a nation we have ignored that for the most part.
Finally, the entire thing is way overblown. Energy is a critical component, but there are a number of ways to produce energy for two to three times the price of oil. Oil is cheap today and tripling that single input cost would indeed have an effect on the economy, but it wouldn't cripple it.
That can be equally said of the evolutionist community, who waited 70 years to incorporate genetics into their view, because it was against evolutionist sensibilities.
Huh? Genetics was predicted long before the mechanism of the "gene" was found. When it was found it was very quickly understood and embraced. To say otherwise is comically bad revisionist history.
Likewise, the idea that transposons are tools used by the cell was proposed by McClintock who original found them in the 1940's, yet science has rejected this view because it, again, is against their evolutionary sensibilities.
My mouth is hanging open in disbelief on this one. McClintock won the nobel prize for this work, that's hardly a rejection by science for *any* reason, much less so called evolutionary sensibilities.
Also, you have to look at what you mean by "disproved" as well. Simply because someone claims that an argument is disproven doesn't make it so.
Correct. A point the creationist community should start taking a lot more seriously.
You're confusing real change with heterozygous fractionation
No, creationists are making up new terms that sound cool, but really are just admissions that change does occur, but they think it doesn't occur across "kinds".
Take this change and add billions of years and there is nothing yet seen which it cannot explain. And there is, further, much evidence in the fossil record showing exactly what one would expect from this hypothesis.
For real change, asexual organisms such as Pseudomonas can actually manufacture a pair of genes to adapt to new food sources in less than 9 days.
So which is it? "Semantic information" cannot be created or it can be created in 9 days? Or is the proposal now on the table that Pseudomonas could not have created new information without divine intervention?
If this were the result of undirected mutation, then change this radical this fast would result in error catastrophe.
Ok. So the allegation is that it could not have occured without divine intervention.
Interesting theory. A cosmic ray (or something) caused a mutation, but because information theory says this is unlikely then the cosmic ray must have been cast down by god.
Well, prove that god exists and then this hypothesis has a leg to stand on. Until then it seems like we should go with the simpler solution.
In the sense that they will probably search for new demarcation lines, definitely.
Really? Cause they are still using a lot of arguments which were disproven in some cases decades ago?
In any case, this kind of evolution is shown in more than one instance in the fossil record and creationists continue to claim otherwise. At some level it was a rhetorical question. The creationist community accepts new evidence between a decade and a century behind the scientific community. (when they accept it at all, they often just make things up with long words to make it sound better).
It's not the name, it's what it signifies. The interesting thing about DNA is that the message is distinct from the medium.
Only partially true. The message of climate change is external to the process as well, but no one is claiming that the process therefore is being controlled by a deity.
This whole thing boils down to "beauty is in the eye of the beholder". A handful of folks went out and looked for the hand of god and, unsurprisingly, they found it. In previous generations they did this also and attributed weather change, pestilence and disease to the hand of god. Now that we know these as not be messages, but natural phenomena those same kinds of people have retreated to DNA. There is no more "message" in DNA than there is in a tornado. There is no evidence of a "designer" intelligent or otherwise in the function and information contained in a tornado and there is none in the chemistry of DNA. Both are explained just fine with naked science, to add more is unreasonable.
This is the nuttiest explanation of evolution I have ever heard.
That probably explains why you are a creationist. This is a very simple, but mostly accurate, way of understanding why change happens.
So, if you deny that mutation has any role
No one did any such thing. Merely that it wasn't the driver of change. For reasons which you well illustrate by pointing out that punctuated equalibria don't work if mutation is the main driver.
The world is rarely one of absolutes. If creationists want to pretend that mutation is everything and knock it down, fine. If they want to pretend that the only alternative is sibling love, then that's fine too. But neither is correct. A little mutation and a lot of breeding go a long, long way together.
To say that happenstance genetic material combines in happenstance ways to someone bring microbes to man is a far-fetched hypothesis, and it only works in the sexual case. It won't do anything to progress asexual organisms.
Right. So, if we were to test this hypothesis one of the things we would look for is slower change in asexually reproducing things than in sexually reproducing ones. And, unsurprisingly since evolution is so widely accepted by folks who have done just such analysis, we see exactly that. Sexual things are capable of much more rapid change than asexual things. It's almost as if sexual reproduction is the more important driver of change when compared to mutation.
I didn't say it was an indication that evolution was false. I said it was a perpetuation of a secular myth. Just as you don't want religious myths being perpetuated by the school system, I don't see any reason why secular myths should likewise be perpetuated.
It is implied by bringing it up in this forum that it discredits evolution. But with the clarafication above we agree. The drawings have been discredited, I've not seen a text book in over a decade which included them. I'm aware that the creationist camp makes a big deal out of this, but that's ok. They can do that if they want, but they only point out that science works. The results were questioned, discredited and are being removed.
Creationists believe that the original "created kinds" were roughly at the family level of taxonomy, at least for vertebrates.
So does that mean that they will stand behind their hypothesis and, when someone can show evolution from one "kind" to another, admit that their hypothesis has been disproven?
Therefore, the work of Mendel should have been disregarded at the outset, yes?
Not disregarded, but also not taught in a scientific classroom as a reasonable alternative to the science of the day.
What about research based on the atheistic assumptions of no God?
It should be viewed via a scientific lens just as the results from those who start from a platform trying to prove that god exists. Whichever is *factually* true will win the day regardless of the motivations of their respective camps.
How about the existence of the symbolic codal system of DNA?
ACTG is not fancier than a myriad of other natural actions. Calling it fancy names like "symbolic codal system" doesn't change that it is simply a chemical reaction and that the fashion in which it works is sufficient to explain everything without resorting to a divine maker.
No. And in fact mutation is not the driver of *any* evolution. The creationists focus on mutation because it is much more likely to be harmful than beneficial, but it isn't the main driver.
What do you mean by "a chance to do massively different things?"
What happens when siblings have kids? The kids have a much higher likelyhood of having problems. However, they also have a chance of getting the benefit of latent genes which both parents owned but were not making use of because another gene dominated. This is not far from why change can happen more quickly when the environments changes drastically. Because there is a smaller set of individuals which survive to breed, there are otherwise unknown bits that combine in new and novel ways. When that works out the species survives (or becomes another species in a much shorter time than it otherwise might have). When it doesn't, the species dies. The latter is what usually happens. Something better than 99% of what has lived no longer does.
Otherwise, drastic environmental change would naturally select nothing at all, or the lack of environmental change would keep an organism at stasis, and actually downward-moving.
Partly true. It isn't that the drastic change selects nothing, it's that very few survive. But those few that do then have a chance to do massively different things. This is exactly what is seen in the fossil record when the environment drastically changes.
Evolution _assumes_ that for every _tiny_ step in evolution (not just the big ones), there must be an advantage for every intermediate step that is a local maxima AND genetically stable.
Nope. Evolution only demands that the change not be sufficient to render the thing dead before it has a chance to breed. It might not be a big advantage, it might even be a temporary liability, but as long as the thing manages to breed, it is "successful enough".
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At least that way my commute is shorter.
Yup. Look at it this way. As long as those interruptions take less time on an average day than your commute would have then you are still time ahead.
I've worked from home for several different customers (I'm a consultant) over the last 12 years and gotten of ton of my life back.
60 minute average round trip
200 commute days a year
200 hours
12 years of doing this is 2400 hours
You're only awake 16 hours or so each day so 2400 hours is 150 days
That's almost half a year I've gotten back just in reduced commute.
There are also significant money savings. A car costs about 30 cents a mile to operate. Let's assume your average speed is going to be 40 over the course of your commute. That's almost $29,000 in auto costs saved simply by not going to the office.
Lot's of people go out for lunch every day. That's another $17,000 in savings over the last 12 year.
I've also seen that many more employers allow flexible scheduling. Probably partly because they know they can't monitor you closely and partly because they already believe they can measure output or you wouldn't be working from home. As a result you can much more frequently work the hours that suit you than in an office setting. Yesterday, for example, I started at about 09:00, worked until 14:00 went to the doctor, played a couple hours of soccer (yeah! first indoor games of the season) and got home at about 21:00. Wrapped up a few things I had left hanging and called it a night.
Between the half a year I've gotten back, $40K I've saved, the flexible hours and the more quiet environment I'm sold. I'll keep doing this as long as I can.
Won't this ruling hurt the garage inventor that doesn't have the business accumen to bring a product to market, but has the creativity needed to make new stuff?
Is the ruling, in essence, "patents were made to protect products, not ideas"?
Errr, don't you get the same sorta BS from your clients?
Yes. But as a consultant you can usually say no if you want to and are only accountable to yourself. And, if you do take the gig anyway, you keep the margin to pay for thing *you* think are important instead of looking at the nice car your CEO drives but you cannot afford.
Yes, I was indeed thinking of an algorithm that would actually compress data sometimes. As I said in a cousin posting, I agree with what you say in the parent.
lol
ok, fair enough.
Because the arbitrary data compression algorithm must add data to the result file in order to distinguish it from a file that has been compressed. Think of it in terms of a header that says "take the rest of this file as a literal".
1.
I can compress anything you give me by a factor of at least 1 (inclusive of my own output).
"-1 pedantic", I know.
It would be more pedantic if it were accurate...
Previous employers, for liability reasons, will usually only indicate whether the subject worked for them.
You know, I've heard this for years and as someone who hires people regularly, I have to say it doesn't jive with my experience. Most of the time if we ask for a reference from a boss at previous companies we get one and they are willing to talk.
Jobs not recruiters.
Amen to that.
And as an employer I think the corollary is some mechanism to stop job hunters from sending their resume to every job posted on the system. If it cost 50 cents or a buck to submit a resume I bet that would cut down a ton on the amount of resumes I get that are completely and utterly inappropriate for the jobs I've posted but not impact legit job searches in the slightest.
Interesting, so that total includes land that is being grazed in the "non-farmed" total. I wouldn't have done that, but that might account for a large part of the difference. In my area we don't really have any land laying fallow despite being it a quite poor quality area. But a lot has been turned over to grass for pasture. In fact, by that measure almost all of my land is non-farming now. about a third in pasture, a third in CRP and a third in rotation.
In one sense that's fair because pasture isn't terribly efficient thanks to the process of converting grass to meat. However, by that same measure most of the corn grown in this country is waste since it is used to feed livestock.
We've lost a lot of smaller farms as the farming industry has been consolidated into larger firms. As a result, we've dropped from 1.2 billion acres in the 1960's to ~968 million acres in 1997. That's over 200 million acres (or about 20% of previous capacity) to explain away as poor farmland!
Correct. The biggest losses have come through urbanization (according to your own citation).
The amount that we could actually reclaim (and the amount I refer to previoiusly) is the stuff that has not been turned into town homes. It's the HEL and CRP acres (about a third of my land is in a CRP program). Not anything close to 200M acres.
We've still got more than enough. Some analysts are put off by the idea of massive increases in farm land, but they tend to ignore the fact that the US farms less land than ever before to produce more crops than ever before.
The reduction in farmed land is pretty insignificant and takes place mostly on "highly erodable land" or in buffer zones around water. Neither of these are very appealing places to put back into rotation.
The second point would be a good one except that replacing crude with corn would take a lot of land. Much more than we make up in increased yields.
In any case, there is a thread about algae elsewhere in this commentary that is worth thinking seriously about. There is also the possibility of using one of the microbes Venter found in his current voyage to extract hydrogen from water.
I'm much more interested in how you came up with a food crisis.
What if tillable land became in demand for non-food crops to generate fuel?
I've used rosetta stone for both polish and spanish and find it to be a very useful part of learning a new language. The key there is part. I also have the pimsluer stuff for both and took a spanish class with my wife. Different people learn in different ways and rosetta stone is probably the single best tool for me (much better than classes, for example, due to my hectic schedule), but having several different approaches is very useful.
Not only is the eye not irreducibly complex, but there are many different kinds of eyes in animals today and in the fossil record. The eye most definately evolved.
No, no, no, no and NO! Replacing oil dependence with a farming dependence is stupidly insane! Instead of being at the mercy of foreign countries and their oil production, suddenly we're at the mercy of farming methods, pests, crop productions - and farm subsidies.
Aside from the fact that we are *already* at the mercy of farming methods, pests and crop productions (we depend on farming for food) there are a couple other problems with that argument.
First is that using biomass for fuel would likely *remove* the need for farm subsidied by creating more demand. We subsidise farmers today because as a nation we don't have the stomach to bankrupt thousands of farm families by letting the market work and we produce more than we need. (This is also why CRP programs are successful (also known as "paying farmers not to farm". They do indeed pay farmers not to farm, but kill two birds with one stone by creating better wildlife habitate and reducing agricultural polution)).
Second is related to the idea that we have to chose biomass *or* mechanical (or solar) options. The best solution is surely to have many modes of production. This may be slightly more expensive in any given year, but it is an insurance policy that we don't have today. Right now, oil is a huge component of the energy picture, if it were 20% with equal quarters rounding out the other 80% then we would have greatly improved stability. It's kind of the investment banking view of energy. Sure you would have done great if you bought Apple three years ago, but you would be sad if you had bought Enron. Diversification is the key to stability in both the stock market and energy, but as a nation we have ignored that for the most part.
Finally, the entire thing is way overblown. Energy is a critical component, but there are a number of ways to produce energy for two to three times the price of oil. Oil is cheap today and tripling that single input cost would indeed have an effect on the economy, but it wouldn't cripple it.
That can be equally said of the evolutionist community, who waited 70 years to incorporate genetics into their view, because it was against evolutionist sensibilities.
Huh? Genetics was predicted long before the mechanism of the "gene" was found. When it was found it was very quickly understood and embraced. To say otherwise is comically bad revisionist history.
Likewise, the idea that transposons are tools used by the cell was proposed by McClintock who original found them in the 1940's, yet science has rejected this view because it, again, is against their evolutionary sensibilities.
My mouth is hanging open in disbelief on this one. McClintock won the nobel prize for this work, that's hardly a rejection by science for *any* reason, much less so called evolutionary sensibilities.
Also, you have to look at what you mean by "disproved" as well. Simply because someone claims that an argument is disproven doesn't make it so.
Correct. A point the creationist community should start taking a lot more seriously.
Go back to the data.
You're confusing real change with heterozygous fractionation
No, creationists are making up new terms that sound cool, but really are just admissions that change does occur, but they think it doesn't occur across "kinds".
Take this change and add billions of years and there is nothing yet seen which it cannot explain. And there is, further, much evidence in the fossil record showing exactly what one would expect from this hypothesis.
For real change, asexual organisms such as Pseudomonas can actually manufacture a pair of genes to adapt to new food sources in less than 9 days.
So which is it? "Semantic information" cannot be created or it can be created in 9 days? Or is the proposal now on the table that Pseudomonas could not have created new information without divine intervention?
If this were the result of undirected mutation, then change this radical this fast would result in error catastrophe.
Ok. So the allegation is that it could not have occured without divine intervention.
Interesting theory. A cosmic ray (or something) caused a mutation, but because information theory says this is unlikely then the cosmic ray must have been cast down by god.
Well, prove that god exists and then this hypothesis has a leg to stand on. Until then it seems like we should go with the simpler solution.
In the sense that they will probably search for new demarcation lines, definitely.
Really? Cause they are still using a lot of arguments which were disproven in some cases decades ago?
In any case, this kind of evolution is shown in more than one instance in the fossil record and creationists continue to claim otherwise. At some level it was a rhetorical question. The creationist community accepts new evidence between a decade and a century behind the scientific community. (when they accept it at all, they often just make things up with long words to make it sound better).
It's not the name, it's what it signifies. The interesting thing about DNA is that the message is distinct from the medium.
Only partially true. The message of climate change is external to the process as well, but no one is claiming that the process therefore is being controlled by a deity.
This whole thing boils down to "beauty is in the eye of the beholder". A handful of folks went out and looked for the hand of god and, unsurprisingly, they found it. In previous generations they did this also and attributed weather change, pestilence and disease to the hand of god. Now that we know these as not be messages, but natural phenomena those same kinds of people have retreated to DNA. There is no more "message" in DNA than there is in a tornado. There is no evidence of a "designer" intelligent or otherwise in the function and information contained in a tornado and there is none in the chemistry of DNA. Both are explained just fine with naked science, to add more is unreasonable.
This is the nuttiest explanation of evolution I have ever heard.
That probably explains why you are a creationist. This is a very simple, but mostly accurate, way of understanding why change happens.
So, if you deny that mutation has any role
No one did any such thing. Merely that it wasn't the driver of change. For reasons which you well illustrate by pointing out that punctuated equalibria don't work if mutation is the main driver.
The world is rarely one of absolutes. If creationists want to pretend that mutation is everything and knock it down, fine. If they want to pretend that the only alternative is sibling love, then that's fine too. But neither is correct. A little mutation and a lot of breeding go a long, long way together.
To say that happenstance genetic material combines in happenstance ways to someone bring microbes to man is a far-fetched hypothesis, and it only works in the sexual case. It won't do anything to progress asexual organisms.
Right. So, if we were to test this hypothesis one of the things we would look for is slower change in asexually reproducing things than in sexually reproducing ones. And, unsurprisingly since evolution is so widely accepted by folks who have done just such analysis, we see exactly that. Sexual things are capable of much more rapid change than asexual things. It's almost as if sexual reproduction is the more important driver of change when compared to mutation.
I didn't say it was an indication that evolution was false. I said it was a perpetuation of a secular myth. Just as you don't want religious myths being perpetuated by the school system, I don't see any reason why secular myths should likewise be perpetuated.
It is implied by bringing it up in this forum that it discredits evolution. But with the clarafication above we agree. The drawings have been discredited, I've not seen a text book in over a decade which included them. I'm aware that the creationist camp makes a big deal out of this, but that's ok. They can do that if they want, but they only point out that science works. The results were questioned, discredited and are being removed.
Creationists believe that the original "created kinds" were roughly at the family level of taxonomy, at least for vertebrates.
So does that mean that they will stand behind their hypothesis and, when someone can show evolution from one "kind" to another, admit that their hypothesis has been disproven?
Therefore, the work of Mendel should have been disregarded at the outset, yes?
Not disregarded, but also not taught in a scientific classroom as a reasonable alternative to the science of the day.
What about research based on the atheistic assumptions of no God?
It should be viewed via a scientific lens just as the results from those who start from a platform trying to prove that god exists. Whichever is *factually* true will win the day regardless of the motivations of their respective camps.
How about the existence of the symbolic codal system of DNA?
ACTG is not fancier than a myriad of other natural actions. Calling it fancy names like "symbolic codal system" doesn't change that it is simply a chemical reaction and that the fashion in which it works is sufficient to explain everything without resorting to a divine maker.
Does the mutation rate change?
No. And in fact mutation is not the driver of *any* evolution. The creationists focus on mutation because it is much more likely to be harmful than beneficial, but it isn't the main driver.
What do you mean by "a chance to do massively different things?"
What happens when siblings have kids? The kids have a much higher likelyhood of having problems. However, they also have a chance of getting the benefit of latent genes which both parents owned but were not making use of because another gene dominated. This is not far from why change can happen more quickly when the environments changes drastically. Because there is a smaller set of individuals which survive to breed, there are otherwise unknown bits that combine in new and novel ways. When that works out the species survives (or becomes another species in a much shorter time than it otherwise might have). When it doesn't, the species dies. The latter is what usually happens. Something better than 99% of what has lived no longer does.
Otherwise, drastic environmental change would naturally select nothing at all, or the lack of environmental change would keep an organism at stasis, and actually downward-moving.
Partly true. It isn't that the drastic change selects nothing, it's that very few survive. But those few that do then have a chance to do massively different things. This is exactly what is seen in the fossil record when the environment drastically changes.
Evolution _assumes_ that for every _tiny_ step in evolution (not just the big ones), there must be an advantage for every intermediate step that is a local maxima AND genetically stable.
Nope. Evolution only demands that the change not be sufficient to render the thing dead before it has a chance to breed. It might not be a big advantage, it might even be a temporary liability, but as long as the thing manages to breed, it is "successful enough".