lucaspa
Legend
TomInCT said:
Nowhere in BIOLOGICAL evolution. Just as nowhere in Cell Theory is matter created from nothing. Or nowhere in Stem Cell Theory or in Mendel's Theory of Genetics. Do you get the picture yet, Tom? Theories have BOUNDARIES. There is no theory of everything. Biological evolution accepts the existence of matter and the existence of life. Given those, biological evolution explains the diversity of life on the planet.
How about a discussion of PE from one of the inventors, SJ Gould? Of course, being so "widely read" in evolution, I'm sure (cough, cough) that you have already read this.
SJ Gould, The episodic nature of evolutionary change. In The Panda's Thumb, 1980, pp.179-185.
"Darwin portrayed evolution as a stately and orderly process, working at a speed so slow that no person could hope to observe it in a lifetime. Ancestors and descendants, Darwin argued, must be connected by "infinitely numerous transitional links" forming "the finest graduated steps." Only an immense span of time had permitted such a sluggish process to achieve so much.
"Huxley felt that Darwin was digging a ditch for his own theory. Natural selection required no postulate about rates; it could operate just as well if evolution proceeded at a rapid pace. The road ahead was rocky enough; why harness the theory of natural selection to an assumption both unnecessary and probably false? The fossil record offered no support for gradual change: whole fauna had been wiped out during disarmingly short intervals. New species almost always appeared suddenly in the fossil record with no intermediate links to ancestors in older rocks *of the same region*. [emphasis mine] Evolution, Huxley believed, could proceed so rapidly that the slow and fitful process of sedimentation rarely caught it in the act. ...
In short, Darwin argued that the geological record was exceedingly imperfect - a book with few remaining pages, few lines on each page, and few words on each line. We do not see slow evolutionary change in the fossil record because we study only one step in thousands. Change seems to abrupt because the intermediate steps are missing. ...
"The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology [Note: Gould did not say absence, but rarity; examples do exist of transitionals]. ... Yet Darwin was so wedded to gradualism that he wagered his entire theory on a denial of this literal record: 'The geological record is extremely imperfect and this fact will to a large extent explain why we do not find interminable varieties, connecting together all the extinct and existing forms of life by the finest graduated steps. He who rejects these views on the nature of the geological record, will rightly reject my whole theory.'
"Paleontologists have paid an exorbitant price for Darwin's argument. We fancy ourselves as the only true students of life's history, yet to preserve our favored account of evolution by natural selection we view our data as so bad that we almost never see the very process we profess to study [Note: almost never, not never. Again, cases of fine transitions of one species to another are known.].
"For several years, Niles Eldredge ... and I have been advocating a resolution of this uncomfortable paradox. We believe Huxley was right in his warning. The modern theory of evolution does not require gradual change. In fact, the operation of Darwinian processes should yield *exactly* what we see in the fossil record. [emphasis mine] It is gradualism that we must reject, not Darwinism.
"The history of most fossil species includes two features particularly inconsistent with gradualism:
1. Stasis. Most species exhibit no directional change duing their tenure on earth. They appear in the fossil record looking much the same as when they disappear; morphological change is usually limited and directionless.
2. Sudden appearance. In any *local* area, a species does not arise gradually by the steady transformation of its ancestors; it appears all at once and 'fully formed.' [Note, emphasis mine, but the key here is the local area where you did for fossils.]
"Evolution proceeds in two major modes. In the first, phyletic transformation, an entire population changes from one state to another. If all evolutionary change occurred in this mode, life would not persist for long. Phyletic evolution yields no increase in diversity, only a transformation of one thing into another. Since extinction (by extirpation, not by evolution into something else) is so common, a biota with no mechanism for increasing diversity would soon be wiped out. The second mode, speciation, replenishes the earth. New species branch off from a persisting parental stock.
"Darwin, to be sure, acknowledged and discussed the process of speciation. But he cast his discussion of evolutionary change almost totally in the mold of phyletic transformation. ...
"Eldredge and I believe that speciation is responsible for almost all evolutionary change. Moreover, the way in which it occurs virtually guarantees that sudden appearance and stasis shall dominate the fossil record.
"All major theories of speciation maintain that splitting takes place rapidly in very small populations. The theory of geographic, or allopatric, speciation is preferred by most evolutionists for most situations (allopatric means 'in another place'). A new species can arise when a small segment of the ancestral population is isolated at the periphery of the ancestral range. Large, stable central populations exert a strong homogenizing influence. New and favorable mutations are diluted by the sheer bulk of the population through which they must spread. They may build slowly in frequency, but changing environments usually cancel their selective value long before they reach fixation. Thus, phyletic transformation in large populations should be very rare - as the fossil record proclaims.
"But small, peripherally isolated groups are cut off from their parental stock. They live as tiny populations in geographic corners of the ancestral range. Selective pressures are usually intense because peripheries mark the edge of ecological tolerance for ancestral forms. Favorable variations spread quickly. Small, peripheral isolates are a laboratory of evolutionary change.
"What should the fossil record include if most evolution occurs by speciation in peripheral isolates? Species should be static through their range because our fossils are the remains of large central populations. In any local area inhabited by ancestors, a descendent species should appear suddenly by migration from the peripheral region in which it evolved. In the peripheral region itself, we might find direct evidence of speciation, but such good fortune would be rare indeed because the event occurs so rapidly in such a small population. Thus, the fossil record is a faithful rendering of what evolutionary theory predicts, not a pitiful vestige of a once bountiful tale.
"Eldredge and I refer to this scheme as the model of punctuated equilibria. Lineages change little during most of their history, but events of rapid speciation occasionally punctuate this tranquillity. Evolution is the differential survival and deployment of these punctuations. (In describing the speciation of peripheral isolates as very rapid, I speak as a geologist. The process may take hundreds, even thousands of years; you might see nothing if you stared at speciating bees on a tree for your entire lifetime. But a thousand years is a tiny fraction of one percent of the average duration for most fossil invertebrate species - 5 to 10 million years. Geologists can rarely resolve so short an interval at all; we tend to treat it as a moment.)"
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