How about this.
I take a walk in a random direction and constantly changing my random direction. If I have a camera with me, I'll take random snapshots from where I started to where I end up at 10 years from now. After I am dead, others can look at my photos and try to determine where I had been. The more photos they find, the more accurate their map will be.
Better?
Nice job. I was thinking along those lines exactly, but was having difficulty putting it into words without getting to technical.
The better question is why not? If you keep having mutations after mutations after mutations over many many generations, what's to keep the future population from being so different than the original population that a rep from the original population wouldn't be able to reproduce an offspring with a rep of the same population in a distant future?
Well the original populations very existence would prevent the future population from ever completely evolving into some sort of daughter species because they'd be continually interacting with each other.
Wouldn't it take some event, like geographic isolation, to allow the 'future' pop to evolve into a seperate species?
That's where the natural selection argument starts to seem thin to me: if the 'future' pop has some sort of advantage due to mutation, why doesn't it overwhelm or replace the parent pop without such a drastic event occurring?
The genes just seem too stable over long periods of time. Take sharks or crocodiles, pretty much the same organisms, if not exactly the same, for eons. Why aren't they eventually displaced by a daughter species that has developed some sort of competitive advantage. Isn't that how NS is supposed to work?
This message has been edited by custard, 02-25-2005 04:25 AM
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