quote:
If one reads the fundamental monographs underlying the evolutionary synthesis by Fisher, Morgan, and then Dobzhansky (2nd ed) and Mayr, gradualism is the major tempo, with accumulated small change the scenario. It is this version of neo-Darwinism informed the hardcore sociobiologists and their scions the evolutionary psychologists. The history of evolutionary biology gives the needed perspective here
I am not quite sure that this is not simply self serving.
I understand your linking of what you claim is readable as "the major tempo" 'informing' sociobiology and I understand how ****if***** your target of criticism was that change in biological study and reserach since the 60s you THEN say,
quote:
appreciating that the extrapolation from bacterial genetics/genomics of the 1960s to multicellular organisms, while seemingly valid at the time, is now known to be totally inappropriate, even though it continues to inform the use of molecular clocks.
but there are miles of interpretation of the history of biology between
"as it also does" and " to be a minor case. If one reads the fundamental monographs underlying the evolutionary synthesis "
My grandfather taught evolutionary biology at SUNY Fredonia during the these time periods and passed onto me the "sense" of gradualism INDEPENDENT of sociobiology. That doctrine was only of major psychological importance during my education AFTER I got to Cornell and saw the links between the Neurobiology and Behavior Dept. and the Psychology Dept. even though others under the same influence were in the Dept of Evolution, Ecology and Systematics. Gradualism probably comes more properly from somewhere during WWI, historically, if not earlier, I would guess( I also can imagine it later but not from the 60s only on). It was needed for eugencis it seems again.
As for the whole idea of molecular clocks...
Well, I took a course called "Molecular Evolution" at Cornell in the 80s wherein that, was the subject. I did well, an A-, but I did not enjoy the experience as I was called on to subvert my organismic sense of morphological change to purely defined entities. Just as I reacted to Gould's ideas during High School as proposing a "second" evolutionary theory (than Mayrs') when/as the first one did just as well, I had felt that this notion simply introduced a supplement that depended on atomic knowledge even if this was not supported by whole organisms.
I do not have a good molecular sense of the need for and "increased mutation rate". Could you explain atomically why this is a desired outcome.
There is quite a bit of difference between expecting and being able to predict a morphological gap in anatomy and another one to simply NOT expect any continuity at all ( I even suggested to Henry Morris that if creationists could predict the morphological disjunctions creationists might be able to do for science what evolutionists had not done. Creationists DO seemed to have missed this opportunity but I may be misreading what Wise is doing).
It seems to me that the "silent spreading" indeed has many consequences for predicting gaps which nontheless appear in whole organism shapes (changing D'Arcy Thompsonian reference frames) regardless of the specific hypothesis for the change, and your very particular attachment to a specific group of proteins.
Do you think I am mistaken in so thinking ??
Edited by Brad McFall, : clarity of thought
Edited by Brad McFall, : title simely removed
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