Question on evolutionary Rates

You're confusing exponential growth with linear growth. It's not one new species every 200,000 years; it's every species produces a new species every 200,000 years. (Assuming this model is correct. It's probably not accurate to apply conclusions from Foramanifera to all species.)Go back and do the math with the correct calculations - have the number of species double every 200,000 years over 3.8 billion years. I think you'll find it's way, way more than you could possibly imagine; and indeed, way, way more species than have been known to exist. (Because your model doesn't take into account extinction.)

Sure. At the bottom level, though, you'd have 2^7500 different species.It's all but impossible to imagine how many species that is. That's more species than there are atoms in the entire visible universe. That's more than the number of atoms in 100 visible universes exactly like ours.Is it really so unreasonable to believe that Homo sapiens would be just one of those species? I don't see that it is. It's more unreasonable to believe that Homo sapiens wouldn't be one of those species. Sexuality, as near as we can tell, emerged quite early in evolutionary history, so I don't see how it's a problem. We have so many sexual organisms because they're all the decendants of the first sexual species, not because they all evolved sexuality independantly. (It's possible, now that I think about it, that sexuality may have evolved two or three times independantly, since there's at least two or three different chromosomal schemes for sex determination that we know about.) It's not a hard problem to solve. Consider a genetic factor that's passed on only 50% of the time. If you have it, you're Sex A. If you lack it, you're Sex B.Of course, that's not the only way to do it. You can have more than 2 genders, and many species do. But specialized sex structures and body types come long after the genetic basis for sex in evolutionary history. It's interesting but it's not a major problem.

You know, it had been a while since I'd seen as dishonest a quote-mine as you did, just now. Congratulations, I guess. Here's where that phrase appears:

quote:

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The Mammaliaformes, as current fashion spells it, are defined as: the last common ancestor of Sinocodon and modern mammals and all of its descendants. Luo et al. (2002). Sinocodon + Smilodon is one way to remember it. However, for our purposes, we have used a working definition anchored on Haramiyavia, assuming that the unknown intersection between multituberculates and modern mammals is the appropriate break point. This assumes that Haramiyavia really is a primitive allotherian, which is hotly debated.

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Assuming all this -- quite a lot to swallow -- we can envision the Mammaliaformes as made up of three main groups: the Allotheria, the Docodonta and close relatives (e.g. Morganucodon), and the Symmetrodonta. The Allotheria consist largely of the multituberculates. They outlasted the dinosaurs and are the single longest lived branch of mammaliforms. The docodonts were relatively short-lived, but left us with a superb fossil record. The Symmetrodonts (e.g. Kuehneotherium) are no longer bel ieved to be a separate branch at all, and include the living mammals. ATW020316.

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So, what you characterize as "too much to swallow" is just a minor, disputed point in the evolutionary history of mammals. Dishonestly, you characterize it as an assumption upon which the entire evolutionary model hinges, when clearly it's no such thing.