Punk Eek for Redwolf

redwolf, Eldredge & Goulds formulation of PE is indeed marred by their insistence that PE be associated with cladogenesis, from an evidential perspective, at any rate. It is also true that there is no fossil evidence of cladogenesis being associated with evolutionary rate change (hereafter ERC). This is sciences problem with strong PE.Your claim that PE is to be proved by a lack of evidence is a horrific distortion. The lack of evidence of cladogenetic ERC is appealed to because of allopatric small populations & the low chance of fossilisation. No one other than creationists & yourself would so grossly misrepresent the case as to allege that the lack of evidence is purported to prove the case. It isn't. Gould would have loved palaeontological evidence of cladogenesis being associated with ERC, I'm sure!However, there is plenty of evidence of anagenetic rate change, or weak PE, if you will, in the fossil record. Globoritalia plesiotumidia (Malmgrem et al. 1983). See also volume changes in the genus Calciolispongia (Teichert 1949) for two examples. There are many others. This is patently false. Accelerated fixation of alleles does not require inbreeding. It requires a smaller population size &/or a stronger selective pressure.The attraction to a cladogenetic ERC is that it involves small populations, & that new variation can be fixed (or eliminated) rapidly by dint of a small population size (located allopatrically in a new environment with different selective pressures).PE appeals some/all of the following; the founder affect, accelerated fixation & elimination of alleles, & different selective pressures relative to the parent population (regardless of whether speciation has occurred or not). PE IN NO WAY "AMOUNTS" TO INBREEDING!!!! Nope, weak PE, even Gouldian PE for that matter, just requires changing environments, & potentially changing population sizes to shift the balance of selective pressures & get the new variation fixed faster."Tiny peripheral groups"? You overstate the case, however; cats, rabbits & rats; see below. Most evolutionary radiations occur after extinctions against what Andrew Knoll calls a "permissive ecology". That is, many niches are unoccupied because of extinction, allowing the colonisation of habitats to occur by organisms against much less competition. This does occur in real life.Man has introduced VERY small populations (cats, rabbits & rats) to locations that never had them before, & they have done very well. They managed to "beat" the competition, that's three examples of small populations being enormously successful off the top of my head. This also occurs in real life. Both of which falsify your point.Regardless, anagenetic ERC doesn't require allopatry. Indeed, many examples of ERC in the fossil record happen in the same geographical location. Firstly, there is nothing to stop larger numbers of any given species spilling over from one habitat to another, they just need to be able to interbreed & have different selective pressures. Interestingly very, very small numbers of any given species seem to do very, very well when introduced by man to a foreign environment. Cats, rabbits & rats! The fact that this has been observed falsifies your point. Um, they did exactly that, & I've noted the salient points above.ERC is observed in the fossil record. It may not be as Eldredge & Gould envisaged it, but there is a raft of palaeontological evidence in support of it.Mark

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"Physical Reality of Matchette’s EVOLUTIONARY zero-atom-unit in a transcendental c/e illusion" - Brad McFall

redwolf, Why can't the Pleistocene extinctions have been due to non-biological factors? You are assuming that organisms must become extinct because of biological reasons alone. The "herds" you mention may have become extinct because the climate changed & their habitat vanished. The new habitat being subsequently recolonised by other critters. Nonsense, & you know it is. Beneficial mutations have been observed, hell, even new operons have been observed to evolve in the lab (Hall 1982). The actual number of mutations that were culled before a beneficial one comes along is not a probablistic miracle. Nor is a probablistic miracle for a second one to come along that facilitates the function of the first. Increased enzyme efficiency requires this & it is well studied.It would be more of a probablistic miracle to not get the beneficial mutations. Like I say, these multiple beneficial mutations have been observed. Rubbish. This is like saying a miracle occurred because two cars whose registrations are X590 1DZ & G790 7WE followed on from each other. The odds of this are (26*10*10*10*10*26*26)^2 = 30,891,577,600,000,000 : 1. Praise the Lord!! After the event reasoning.You assume that entire sequences have to appear in situ. They don't. If they did you'd have a point. Mutations are retained or culled by natural selection, they don't all occur at the same time. You are basically equating PE with saltationism.An analogy; consider the number 12345678900987654321. The chance of me rolling a 10 sided die for each loci & getting the correct no is 10^20:1. Effectively impossible to do in my lifetime. However, if I get to throw away the wrong numbers & roll again, whilst retaining the right ones the whole proposition becomes much more likely. I could do it in about half an hour. So much for a probablistic miracles. Let's keep those goalposts right where they were, please.We are talking about PE, not macroevolution. They are different things. That's because I DID invent the term, I abbreviated "evolutionary rate change" to ERC for the sake of brevity in my last post. Not only that but I gave two cites to support my claim. I can give you more if you want, it just didn't seem necessary to swamp you with cites. Maybe it is. Anagenetic means in a single lineage, which juxtaposes with cladogenetic, which in this context means one lineage splitting into two. How on earth can a "globally" adapted organism be introduced into a new habitat? There is no such thing. Perhaps you mean organisms with a large range? Regardless, cats, rats & rabbits are NOT found everywhere, even when there is no geographical reason for them not to be.The original points were, that you claimed that tiny populations were unviable, I showed they were not.You claimed "tiny peripheral groups" could not conquer vastly larger groups. I showed they could, or at the very least didn't have to.Mark[This message has been edited by mark24, 04-21-2004]

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"Physical Reality of Matchette’s EVOLUTIONARY zero-atom-unit in a transcendental c/e illusion" - Brad McFall

redwolf, Once again, & as as I've mentioned before, I am not basing the formation of our present biosphere on PE. Gradualism is recorded in the rocks, too. I merely point out that Gouldian PE lacks unequivocal fossil evidence whilst anagenetic PE has lots.Furthermore, & this should be abundantly clear by now, I am not advocating Eldredge & Gould's formulation of PE & I refuse to defend it specifically, but I am defending the notion that rate change in some form or another does occur.As I have pointed out previously, in order to get rate change you do not require a geographical change of location at all. In fact, the fossil evidence of rate changes generally occurs in the same geographical location, by definition. That is, in order to see ERC it is simply easier for palaeontologists study fossils in the same geographical location (with reference to range of exposed rock units), & then study the changes in fossil character values vertically in the rock beds.This doesn't to my mind particularly weigh against Gouldian PE, it just makes it a much more tentative proposition. There is nothing to suggest that allopatric PE doesn't occur, but the new species will, by definition, exist in a different habitat, one in which is either not exposed rock, or has a lesser chance of fossilisation. So, in this sense there may very well be a sampling error when comparing the efficacy of Gouldian PE & the more general idea of evolutionary rate change. What you shouldn't be taking your eye off is that ERC occurs in the same geographical location.There is no such thing as a globally adapted organism. If there were globally adapted organisms we'd get dogs existing arboreally in triple canopy rain forest. They are adapted to an environment, & can achieve a greater or lesser degree of success in others. If they find themselves in a location that has open niches to which they possess exaptations, they will flourish. That we have seen three organisms do this in recent history suggests it is not rare or at all unlikely. Well, you've mentioned the heath hen, & I've shown three times as many examples that aren't unviable when population levels are small. Care to swamp me with studies that show small populations are unviable? Nope, dogs did not compete with the thylacine, humans did. Actually, this is a stab in the heart of your "globally adapted organism" notion. According to you, the thylacine should simply have become extinct because of the competition of introduced dogs. They didn't, indicating your beloved globetrotting canines aren't as environmentally ubiquitous as you'd like them to be. Nope, I've addressed this, when there is a mechanism for choosing what gets kept & thrown out the improbabilities vanish.Once again:

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Rubbish. This is like saying a miracle occurred because two cars whose registrations are X590 1DZ & G790 7WE followed on from each other. The odds of this are (26*10*10*10*10*26*26)^2 = 30,891,577,600,000,000 : 1. Praise the Lord!! After the event reasoning.

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You assume that entire sequences have to appear in situ. They don't. If they did you'd have a point. Mutations are retained or culled by natural selection, they don't all occur at the same time. You are basically equating PE with saltationism.

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An analogy; consider the number 12345678900987654321. The chance of me rolling a 10 sided die for each loci & getting the correct no is 10^20:1. Effectively impossible to do in my lifetime. However, if I get to throw away the wrong numbers & roll again, whilst retaining the right ones the whole proposition becomes much more likely. I could do it in about half an hour. So much for a probablistic miracles.
  —mark

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You seem to be clinging to "ye olde creationist improbability argument". Barry Hall (Hall 1982) eliminated the lac operon in E.Coli. That is, he eliminated the enzyme itself, the associated permease, & the expression control system. He grew this on a substrate of lactose & another sugar. Lo & behold, genes for all three evolved.Isn't that impossible? Vanishingly unlikely? No, that's the efficacy of RM&NS. Isn't that an increase in function, complexity, information? Only if you define information in such a way as to exclude function from information. Then you face the problem that you have just defined DNA as a non-information carrying molecule. Throw the baby out with the bathwater!Anyhow, this thread is about PE, if you wish to discuss genetics, please open a new thread.In summary, if you are insisting that PE occur allopatrically/peripherally then you are contradicted by evidence. Even if I accepted this premise, you still have only provided one example to my three. Did it occur to you that many species get by very happily only ever having small population sizes? Practically any species living on a small island, for example, or the megafauna almost anywhere you look numbers thousands rather than millions.If you accept Noah's ark existed, then the biblical account requires rapid evolution from small population numbers a tad more than the ToE does! For this reason I've always wondered why fundies want to discredit PE when they need it more than we.Mark[This message has been edited by mark24, 04-22-2004]

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"Physical Reality of Matchette’s EVOLUTIONARY zero-atom-unit in a transcendental c/e illusion" - Brad McFall

redwolf, Yes it does. You can draw a straight line between P. ralstoni & P. jarrovii. It will be diagonal indicating gradualism. Once more for the hard of understanding. I used the terms cladogenetic PE & anagenetic PE to distinguish between two modes of rate change. One is Eldredge & Goulds version of PE & is associated with spoeciation; hence the word "cladogenetic". The other, the one that is observed in the fossil record is associated with single lineages, hence the word "anagenetic". I'll happily use the terms strong & weak PE if you'd like, but quite obviously I have to make a distinction by putting words together into phrases. We call this "sentence construction".Oh, & I'm very sorry you can't get all of your scientific information from a google. God forbid you should actually be forced into reading books & consulting the scientific literature directly. The terms as I've used them are used in the standard literature when such discussions come up. If you recall, I cited two studies showing rate changes in the fossil record. Why don't you stoop to reading them rather than trying a standard search engine? Correct, that's not one species brances into TWO, which would be cladogenesis. It's one lineage staying one lineage. Right? All the textbooks I have describe the words as I've been using them.Do you understand what I mean by Gouldian PE/cladogenetic PE/strong PE, & anagenetic rate change/anagenetic PE/weak PE, & how the latter differs from the strong claim made by Gould & Eldredge? You'd better see Gould & Eldredge about that, I'm not defending rate change with cladogenesis. How can I be more clear about this? Do I have to spell it out AGAIN? Bullshit yourself. It happens the same way phyletic gradualism would do it, just rapidly followed by relative stasis. They don't need to provide a new mechanism because it's the same as before. The mechanism of rate change is also provided, you just need to be able to read (one of my previous posts, for example). The only difference between PE & phyletic gradualism is rate change brought about by the changing environment (including the species in question) at large.You should become familiar with the subject you are criticising.And again, please don't conflate PE with macroevolution. It smacks of evasion & goalpost moving. This thread is about Puntuated Equilibrium/ Evolutionary rate change.Mark[This message has been edited by mark24, 04-22-2004][This message has been edited by mark24, 04-22-2004]

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"Physical Reality of Matchette’s EVOLUTIONARY zero-atom-unit in a transcendental c/e illusion" - Brad McFall

redwolf, Yep, & the evolutionary rate change is gradual & constant. You claimed gradualism didn't occur "in the rocks", all I had to do was produce one example where it did. I could produce more, but one is enough to falsify your claim. This is the third attempt at moving the goalposts in exactly the same way. Please read the following capitalised, italicised section very, very carefully; PUNCTUATED EQUILIBRIUM IS NOT MACROEVOLUTION. OK?Now, given that you appear to have given up on attempting to defend your original comments 1-5, can I assume that you accept the criticisms of said points? If not, could you please backtrack & address them.Mark

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"Physical Reality of Matchette’s EVOLUTIONARY zero-atom-unit in a transcendental c/e illusion" - Brad McFall

redwolf,This is the fourth attempt at moving the goalposts in exactly the same way. Please read the following capitalised, italicised section very, very carefully; PUNCTUATED EQUILIBRIUM IS NOT MACROEVOLUTION, & NEITHER IS GRADUALISM MICROEVOLUTION, OK?.This thread is about Punctated Equilibrium.Now, given that you appear to have given up on attempting to defend your original comments 1-5, can I assume that you accept the criticisms of said points? If not, could you please backtrack & address them.I am quite happy to discuss macroevolution & the vast odds against cladograms matching stratigraphy, but only once this thread has been concluded.Mark[This message has been edited by mark24, 04-23-2004]

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"Physical Reality of Matchette’s EVOLUTIONARY zero-atom-unit in a transcendental c/e illusion" - Brad McFall

Redwolf,Can we assume from your lack of response in this thread, but participation in others in this forum, that you concede that the argument you made ragarding PE was flawed?Mark[This message has been edited by mark24, 04-27-2004]

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"Physical Reality of Matchette’s EVOLUTIONARY zero-atom-unit in a transcendental c/e illusion" - Brad McFall

Loudmouth,Redwolfs original post was pretty arrogant, & deserves to be treated so.I always saw myself as more of a Harkonnen than Atreides, or one of the sisters .Mark[This message has been edited by mark24, 04-27-2004]

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"Physical Reality of Matchette’s EVOLUTIONARY zero-atom-unit in a transcendental c/e illusion" - Brad McFall