Everybody neglects the benefit of keeping open multiple ideas towards multiple hypotheses, all the time.
I am constantly trying to re-paraphrase and to enhance my conceptions. Thank you!
I find your posts interesting, but in some instances it is the same horrified interest one experiences when watching an accident about to happen that one can do nothing to prevent. I think your two comments above may explain why that is so. Your posts lack coherence and clarity, but they do contain contradiction.
This post of mine is critical, but whether you perceive that criticism as positive and negative is in your hands. My intent is to be honest and helpfull.
Yes, new niches only happen when or if they happen (contingency), and there is a sort of macro-micro mutation process (among any species that happened to survive the disappearance of the old niches) to shape fitness to it and not beyond it.
Obviously events only happen when they happen, so your first clause is redundant and - I suspect - is missing something you thought was implied.
You need to define what you mean by a macro-micro mutation process. I daresay if I reflected on it I could come up with five disparate definitions. I would have no way of knowing which, if any, were intended by you.
Th ray of sunshine is your coherent and correct statement that niches cannot (contribute) to the shaping of fitness beyond the confines (in time and space) of the niche.
The "application" of micromutation differs by kind of creature: for example moths change more easily from black to white to black again, than I expect tigers do.
That appears to be, superficially, a trivial remark. That is to say, it is an obvious and accepted statement. Did you intend something more significant by it?
Gould for one proposed what I would call macro-macro mutations prior to the Cambrian event (which is what he mainly wrote about). Thus it happened that some of the species that existed afterwards bore little resemblance to some that had existed long before. Then again Gould worked in a conventional diachronic scheme.
Point 1: You keep mentioning Gould. I've never seen you mention, for example, Mendel or the trio (de Vries, Corren, Teschmark)who re-discovered the genetic principles, or the population geneticists (Haldane, Sewall Wright, Fisher) who laid the foundation for the Modern Synthesis produced by another trio (Dobzhansky, Mayr, Simpson). Nothing on the thoughts of E.O.Wilson's sociobiology, or Stebbins' work in botany, or Tattersall's research on human evolution. The list goes on.
My point is that if you are going to be strongly influenced by any single expert in a field it is probably not a good idea to select one with a reputation as an iconoclast.
Point 2: I have no idea of what you mean by a macro-macro mutation. Surely not one of Golschmidt's "hoperful monsters"!
Point 3: As a point of information, it is plausible that some of the distinctions between Ediacaran and Cambrian fauna may be partly a consequence of taphonomy.
Point 4: I have no idea what alternative to a "conventional diachronic scheme" you think Gould could have used.
Point 5: You say he wrote mainly about the Cambrian. Of the twenty five of his books listed in
Wikipedia only one, Wonderful Life, is about the Cambrian. (The Cambrian may be mentioned in passing in some of the others, but not in any major way.)
I have not located a complete list of his papers, but if you refer to your copy of The Structure of Evolutionary Theory that I understand you have, you will see 96 items listed in the References. Of these only two items relate to the Cambrian: Wonderful Life and a paper on the Burgess Shale. The two things he wrote about most were the gastropod genus Cerion, a currently extant group. No connection with the Cambrian.
Those references are only about 1/3 of his published papers, so perhaps the Cambrian ones are to be found in the other 2/3. It occured to me that the logical place to find any papers he wrote on the Cambrian would be in the Bibliography of his single book on the Cambrian. There he references eleven of his papers. None of them are on the Cambrian.
This looks very much like an error. That undermines confidence in the content of your posts.
Some anti-evolutionists only concentrate on micro-evolution, and some evolutionists deny very major contingencies.
Can you give an example of evolutionists denying "very major contingency". It would be helpful if you defined what you mean by a "very major contingency".
Many evolutionists fail to highlight the three kinds of phases in mutations.
What do you think the three kinds of phases are?
Most of the confusion around what pre-Darwinists called evolution stems from its poor presenting as well as conceiving. I like most have had to struggle extremely. Many scientists such as those attending Santa Fe Institute Proceedings XIX couldn't grasp evolution.
My knowledge of the Santa Fe Institute relates mainly to the work of Stuart Kaufmann, which I greatly admire. I have no idea, consequently, what you mean by your last sentence, or what evidence you have to support that view. Perhaps you will be more forthcoming in your response.
Note: any seeming hostility in this post is an artifact of concision and directness and should be ignored. (Hopefully not the factual content.)
Edit: Ironic that in a post critiquing Amittai's clarity I mistyped coherent and missed out a couple of other words here and there. My argument, however, remains unchanged.
