Para had the opening,
quote:
Thus the finished creatures belong to a species, while the unfinished creatures are deemed somewhere "in between" species. Also, a transitional creature is supposed to exhibit useless features, or even defective features, because they are not the "finished product". But this is a false picture. The reality is that all species are transitional. There is no such thing as a "finished species". It's a mirage, for two reasons.
I do not think that Para was not onto something here. I would have to reanalyze Mayr's thought that Darwin changed his mind not by a loss of faith but by attendant failures to support three creationist perspectives, one of which was pefection in the world, or for the sake of a mirage in the desert or sand of EvC "finished species". Yes, my last deviation from a former 'prose' clarity was the direction to "finish" that polishable discussion we are havin.
Mayr in truth in the same year publising when my Human Behavior was being involutarily committedat a foreign state mental hospital due to a phone call from someone I never met under the questioning "if I had ever thought I was Jesus" (Jesus Christ, NO!) re-read Agassiz's classification and noticed that the past 20 years of Phd's he gave out in behavior were anticipated as a discipline by Agassiz 50 years prior. I cant see how Ethology should not reflect seriously within Aggaisiz's thought AND THIS CAN BE DONE REALLY AND SECULARLY by pursuing Croizat's contribution. The funny thing was that Mayr insisted that "we would call this(Agassiz stress on animal habits) somehting like the biological speciesconcept"!!!!!!!!!!
I can not even believe some of the "biology" I read. Well if that is the case there is NO NEED to defend evolution from Creationism, just let the "behavior" speak for itself. Anyway, no I am not arguing from the missing fossils but from what forms the fossils can show in general and if this has anything to do with what Para was trying to show. I had meant to dig up the classic paper on Tiatothere horns which shows how someone used to reason from strata forms to genes. That bears on how difficult the problem of figuring out what the form inbetween is supposed to be and look like. I'll find it if you like. I believe Gould even referred to the paper in his last tome.
Problem with Mayr's view of dimensionality is that he thinks he can write a 0-dimensional biological logos where he says essentialism and creatinoism connoted the same dimensional object. THEY DO NOT. In effect I asked Mayr if rather they do not but he personally can not (could not as he is no longer with us)comprehend the question. He has apparently used the notion of dimension to strucutre his claims about what counts as "population thinking" and what does not. This is in part a reponse of his to Dobhshanky's notion of adaptation and the assertion that individuals can not adapt and that there is no sense of population in biology as in physics but when I might have suggested my computational trees I am disagreeing by distinguishing Hausdorff dimension from the view of horizonatl vs vertical info transfer in any graph of the nexus of lineages. But that is biology and need not necessarily relate to the creationist thought of perfection but it might to the notion c/e wise if finished species and perfection are kept in the same motivated thought. They might. And they might Biblically just as some creationists discuss Ice cores.
If however one thinks that Agassiz was discussing Mayr's "biological species" I continue to ONLY think that Mayr inadaquately generalized from birds what he accusses Waddington of having done in biology by making too easy analogies to language.
None of this actually answers Paras query but perhaps I was just too caught up in Para's rather correct presentation of ecological/deme knowledge.
Where Para started talking about "morphological species" I am still thinking about nonliving niche margins of species (hence in para lingo I could easily misread Gould for Mayr but I refuse to do so).
As for teleology Mayr accused Waddington of this in particular and thus I tried to reexpress my feeling on-it-in terms of his ideas without all of the current language of molecular biology(to be added).
I hope this helps.
If you want a less nuanaced simple presentation of the Titatothere paper and the relevance to issues of e/c then I can easily supply it provided the paper is poppable from the stack I think it is in. I dont think this would be the best choice of a "finsished species" as I tend to think of consumers of viruses not bacteria as that. But that could easily be wrong. Best, Brad.
quote:
Titantotheres, common in the area, were ponderous and titanic perissodactyls (odd-toed, hoofed mammals) that stood 2.5 meters tall at their massive shoulders. Titantotheres acquired bony, slingshot-like horns on their skulls that may have been used in courtship and defense. Abundant in the early Tertiary the herbivorous Titantotheres disappeared in the late Oligocene as short grass spread over the dry plains.
@
http://home.att.net/~sgeoveatch/pawnee_buttes.htmI'm guessing is the place. The old paper does not seem to be on-line. I'll scan some of it later.
This message has been edited by Brad McFall, 10-18-2005 07:31 AM
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