Uh-oh. She opened her mouth again.
BACHMANN: If you want to look at economic history over the last 100 years. I call it punctuated equilibrium. If you look at FDR, LBJ, and Barack Obama, this is really the final leap to socialism. … But we all know that we could turn this around and we can turn this around fairly quickly. We’re still a free country.
And as the Democrats are about to institutionalize cartels — that’s what they’re very good at — they’re trying to consolidate power, so we need to do everything we can to thwart them at every turn to make sure that they aren’t able to, for all time, secure a power base that for all time can never be defeated.
She calls what punctuated equilibrium? I don’t think she knows what it means, and I don’t believe she knows anything about either biology or economic history. It’s interesting to see the Republican version of bipartisanship so nakedly exposed, at least.
(By the way, I have a bumper sticker on my car that says, “Honk if you understand punctuated equilibrium!” No one ever honks.)
Oh yes, the standard Rovian gambit: accuse your opponent of doing what you’re guilty of.
People like her want economics red in tooth and claw. None of that Xian nonsense.
But admitting that nature ended up with teeth and claws due to visible causes, well that’s just blasphemy.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/6mb592
Punctuated equilibrium?
PZ, you idiot, that’s because Darwinism doesn’t explain Thermodynamics.
Or Gravity.
Makes perfect sense to me.
Honk! But then, I also passed P-chem.
/Honks Bachmann’s big, red nose…
This woman scares me, it’s her eyes.. they’re empty.
Elected to do the people’s business, she’ll stand in the way as much as she can. I guess she really is being true to herself, be as much of a ideological wingnut as you can.
That’s because folks in Morris are too nice. Now if your bumper sticker read, “Wave if you understand punctuated equilibrium!” you’d probably find the whole neighborhood is on top of the issue.
The american buzzword culture is quite sickening. So many commentators harping on about socialism as if it were armageddon itself. The word has been used so much that I’m not sure if anyone is left knowing what the word really means. For fucks sake, you’re breeding a nation of Stimpys!
She didn’t mean punctuated equilibrium, she meant her punctured cerebellum.
In all fairness, I don’t honk when I agree with a bumper sticker because if the person with said sticker is having a bad day I may get shot at (I live in Georgia, you see, and being shot at is something I have to be concerned about 24/7).
I’m still unsure on how punctuated equilibrium could work in the context of evolution. Where’s a good starting place on the topic?
Oh please, we all know that she be da man!
Anyone who thinks that Obama is a socialist is either ignorant or a liar. In Bachmann’s case, it’s probably (c) All of the above.
Well and quickly posted PZ! I imagine you sitting in your stately ivy covered lab building, correcting papers, you look out the window, only to see the Batshit Signal projected against the clouds. America’s equilibrius hangs in the balance! You grab the Batshit Phone and brace yourself for the latest from Ms. Bachman. You post it with the appropriate witty and eviscerating comment. Bachman Woman is vanquished yet again, equilibrium is restored . . . but she’ll be back.
I’ll buy that. Similarly, if you want to look at the first 18 years of most children’s lives. I call it learning. If you look at learning to read, learning how to do math, and graduating from school, this is really the final leap to not being a gibbering fucking moron. But we all know that you could turn this around and you can turn this around fairly quickly. You’re still a country fulla fuckwits.
Isn’t punctuated equilibrium essentially the idea that populations which reproduce sexually experience very little genetic change over long periods, punctuated by short stretches of greater change? (Which is usually thought of as due to a drastic change in environment, allowing for mutations to fill a newly created niche?)
Do I get to honk?
“(By the way, I have a bumper sticker on my car that says, “Honk if you understand punctuated equilibrium!” No one ever honks.)”
Hey! I have one of those too! Except I never put it on my car. I live where I knew no one would honk (or wave). :o)
If all of these republo-servitives who are busy covering up their own incompetence and ignorance by screaming about the supposed Democratic socialism would just give up their social security payment and their federal health care packages, we’d probably put a pretty good dent in our deficit.
I love this woman!!
She makes me feel like my reps here in Ohio are on the ball.
I mean, at least they’re not this batshit.
I used to have that same bumper sticker! Unfortunately, it fell off. I only had one person honk.
e,q.u;i:l!l&i?b@r#i$u*m
That word.. I do not think it means what you think it means.
At #16,
It isn’t that they accumulate little genetic change, it is that they accrue little morphological/physiological change (ie, functionally, they are identical) over long periods of time. They are still getting genetic variation, though. It is just that the selection acting on them keeps them morphologically/physiologically/whateverologically very conservative and set.
Then, when the environment changes, the end members on the advantageous side of the now-wide genetic spectrum are strongly selected for and the population “speciates” very, very quickly.
Punctuated equillibrium does not postulate anything about the rate of genetic change, just about the rate of speciation (though some would argue nowadays that those two things are synonomous).
In this way, as long as environments are stable, you have a stable morphology. Once the environment changes, your equillibrium is punctuated and you speciate very quickly.
At least, that’s the understanding of it that I have gathered from talking with my professors (geologists and biologists).
Sometimes I wish that British politics were as polarised and divisive as American politics are. Then I look at American politics and wonder if I should be careful what I wish for?
I don’t really have a comment, but… *honk* :)
I don’t know which is worse, Steve King, R-Iowa or Michell Bachman R – Minnesota. What’s wrong with the Midwest?
I’d just like to remind everyone that I live in Canada, where we have universal health care (at least, theoretically), and thus all comments I make are under the supervision of a jack-booted thug holding a gun to my head.
[Knocks the gun away and temporarily disables the jack-booted thug] Okay, this is the real Brownian writing for once! Bachmann is right; Obama is Hitler/the Antichrist/Stalin. Run, run from socialism, as fast as you can! Deregulate everything and let the market take over! The tiniest bit of regulation, having measurement standards, even the fact that the atmosphere keeps at a relatively steady 21% oxygen; all of these will immediately lead inexorably down a slippery slope to 1984, and I don’t just mean like in the book, but the actual year as well where you’ll have to endure Two Minutes’ Hate and while listening to Yes’ “Owner of a Lonely Heart” over and over. From one who lives there, I urge you to–Ack! No, Lieutenant, I would never write anything against the Glory of the Motherla–
[Silence.]
Remember, boys and girls:
* $35 billion to send sick American children to the doctor: zOMG SOOOOOOOOCIALISM!
* Unlimited funds to send healthy Iraqi children to the grave: USA! USA! USA! USA! USA!
and in an unconnected but curiously coincidental development Sanjay Gupta renounced his non-candidacy for sturgeon general, thus opening the door a bit more for Dr. Egnor.
I can understand, under the circumstances, not closing the ital tag, but how the hell did Brownian type that “[Silence.]”?
(By the way, I have a bumper sticker on my car that says, “Honk if you understand punctuated equilibrium!” No one ever honks.)
That’s the result of a simple truth: the set of people that understand punctuated equilibrium and the set of people that honk when a bumper sticker says to honk have an extremely small intersection, not normally distinguishable from random city noise.
“(We) can’t allow Obama to make of 2009 what Franklin Roosevelt made of 1933 or Johnson of 1965. Slow down the policy train. Insist on a real and lengthy debate. Conservatives can’t win politically right now. But they can raise doubts.”
Bill Kristol
You mean marking a start on ending the Great Depression and allowing all Americans civil rights under the law.
The truth comes out, neo-cons (and sadly so few have been convicted yet), would rather the economy collapse than allow their “enemies” to succeed in repairing the economy.
What else would you expect from such treasonous self-centered bastards. Oh yeah, there’s the “Slavery was good for those ignorant & uncivilized blackies” movement.
http://www.amren.com/mtnews/archives/2008/08/slavery_was_goo.php
http://www.alternet.org/rights/20906/
I wish there was a “sturgeon general.” And a cabinet-level Secretary of the Actinopterygii.
Just think of the Caviar
Punctuated equilibrium? That’s just one end of a spectrum of rates of
evolutionary change.
I think of the punctuation part as what happens when a disaster wipes out most of the “normal/average” members of a population, and leaves only a few freaks out on the fringes. The freaks then inbreed, and whatever kept them alive–tree-climbing, burrowing, swimming–gets concentrated as hell, and the species changes. Or splits into freaks and normals, or those freaks and some other kind of surviving freaks.
So, yeah, tree-dwelling inbreeding freakazoids. That sounds about right.
@ 21 – I’m ashamed at how long that took me to get, and at how much I startled my cat when I did.
@ 28 – clearly, guns and bombs are totally manly and teh awesomes, where as only gurls deal with babies. So, uh, if we want our country to be strong, we need to blow shit up all the time.
yeah. like that.
When “W” wanted to help the banks, it was a “bailout.” When Obama wants to do the same, it’s “socialism.”
Go figure.
Since you guys are so convinced the PE occurs, why don’t you give us ONE piece of empirical evidence supporting the premise. (And don’t forget to notice that the HOX gene mentioned below is a “potential mechanism,” meaning that there is NO evidence.)
If you come up with anything, please forward it on to the Smithsonian Department of Paleobiology so they can update their records:
“… Punctuated equilibrium helped to explain why many transitional forms apparently were missing from the fossil record. According to the hypothesis of punctuated equilibrium, transitional forms existed for brief periods of time, and so were unlikely to become fossils.
This view has not been universally accepted, by paleontologists or biologists working with modern species. Some, such as paleontologist Philip Gingerich, have argued that many mammal species indeed evolved gradually, without any apparent episodes of rapid change. Others have argued that small mutations could not produce the large changes in organismal structure needed to drive the process of punctuated equilibrium. However, the discovery of Hox genes–which code for entire structures, rather than single components–identified a potential mechanism for rapid evolutionary change.
http://paleobiology.si.edu/geotime/main/foundation_life3.html
Yeah, but Bush was helping the banks. Obama was helping the people–that’s socialism.
To be honest she’s not the only one who doesn’t quite grasp the concept of “punctuated equilibrium.” But then I don’t go throwing around the phrase in conversation.
Sweden is the archetypical socialist country. It’s not a free country?
Pippi Longstocking even says: “Why am I walking backwards?” said Pippi. “This is a free country, isn’t it? Can’t I walk as I please?” and the Swedish anthem starts “You old, you free.”
Gah! That’s an egregious oversimplification, whoever wrote it.
#38: Begone, foul troll.
“Now if your bumper sticker read, “Wave if you understand punctuated equilibrium!” you’d probably find the whole neighborhood is on top of the issue.”
I think that should be “Wave if you understand quantum mechanics.
I’d like to protest against bumper stickers, but I don’t know how to show it.
(came to me via Mitch Hedberg)
Ack!! Just one more reason that I need to move back to MN. Someone needs to vote Bachman out of office, and it sure won’t be my parents.
*sigh*
Is Dawkins still in town? Might we arrange a meeting so that he can explain some evolutionary theory to her?
I once knew a fervent christian who would sound her horn whenever she saw a “Honk If You Love Jesus” bumper sticker. She says she often got the finger from the driver of the bestickered car!
This woman is so painfully stupid I can’t stand it. And that we’re paying her a salary of almost $200,000 a year is enough to make me sick.
There needs to be some sort of minimum intelligence requirement for serving in congress.
And how many of these honks are accompanied with one fingered waves?
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I always considered punctuated equilibrium an evolutionary expression of the Law of Diminishing Returns. As any species becomes more effectively adapted to an environment, further positive adaptations become less likely to evolve.
It’s analogous to modern car engines, for example, whereby in the early decades of engine design. Great leaps from 10 horsepower to 200 horsepower occurred withing 30 years, an in increase of 2000%. However, since then the upper limit is around 1400hp, only a 700% increase over twice the time span.
A species evolving faces the same ceiling. As its prototypic adaptations reach a certain point, the genotype can no longer provide sufficient variability to increase its suitability to the environment. This leads to a “slowing down” of evolution as adaptations confer smaller, more precise adaptations.
However, as when the political environment thrusts a new paradigm onto automobile companies leading to new technological advances in fuel economy, a drastic change in environment changes the rules for the species within it. A leveling of the playing field so to speak, and an opportunity for new phenotypic expressions and placing new pressures on the genotype.
This is just how I pictured it in my mind during Anthropology lo those many years ago. Obviously automobiles evolve do to conscious decisions made by humans, whereas species evolve due to natural selection. Those more versed in biology and evolution feel free to tear me apart ;)
who is your creator, you troll. We are not “so convinced that PE occurs”. We just find it quite likely to have happened sometimes, and an entirely possible scenario, if rare. A disaster with inbreeding freak survivors, and Bob is your phenotype.
As for empirical evidence, go whistle. Punctuations would occur rapidly, with a small surviving population–in other words, to a small fraction of all animals. Fossilization also occurs infrequently, to a small fraction of all animals. Put those two low-probabilities together, and what do you get? Bloody little fossil evidence.
And, given the behavior of the anti-evolutionist whackjobs, an irrefutable set of fossil evidence would be disputed. So take your mechanism and see if you can fulfill your potential as an inbreeder.
Or, better, chug some really strong disinfectant–don’t worry, you are a Christian, it cannot harm you–that kills 99.9% of your internal bacteria, wait for the survivors to recover, then chug again, and see that the survivors are more numerous the second time. Then chug some more.
That should be “phenotypic” not “prototypic” in the third paragraph. . .
So to try and get some clarification on punctuated equilibrium:
These are probably all stupid questions, but I hope at least to get some discussion going. Beyond a few articles on the net and Dawkins’ commentary on the subject in The Blind Watchmaker I know little on the subject and thus find it hard to reconcile ideas. My personal thought is that adaptation to an environment would mean that almost all mutations that diverge would not be beneficial and thus not passed on. So natural selection could account for apparent stasis in the fossil record of species. Where am I going wrong?
*Honk* And seriously, where can I get one of those bumper stickers?
@ 38: Ummm…ok, you’re saying there’s still debate about whether evolution occurs gradually or through punctuated equilibrium. You realize that both sides of that debate acknowledge that evolution occurs, right? And you’re actually bringing up the ‘no transitional forms’ argument? Seriously? Try going to a museum sometime and educating yourself–there are tons of transitional fossils. Reading books would be acceptable if you don’t live near a natural history museum. To help get you started on your research, here’s a few of the more famous transitional forms: Tiktaalik, Acanthostega, Ichthystega, Archeopterix, Sinosauropterix, Confuciusornis…and hey, what about the modern Duckbilled Platypus and Echidna? Have fun learning about these, and don’t say anything here about a lack of transitional fossils until you do.
I wouldn’t call the years between FDR, LBJ, Obama, &c. “equilibrium.” I would call them (or at least some of them,) “regression.”
Just love the comment on thinkprogress.org –
“like a female version of Ann coulter”
There are some of us who, as Libertarians, realize that both parties are full of it across the board… And that the bailouts are socialism…writ large and getting larger.
@#53 Kel
“My personal thought is that adaptation to an environment would mean that almost all mutations that diverge would not be beneficial and thus not passed on.”
WRONG. Most mutations are neither beneficial nor harmful, and therefore just increase the variation in the population. Natural selection works on variation that is already there.
cactusren @ #54
*honk*
You can find the bumper sticker here:
http://atheists.org/store/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=3&products_id=113
And don’t let #38 punctuate your equilibrium. Not worth it.
That’s right, this is America. Socialism is a evil and wrong and mud to throw on your opponent in a debate. Corporate Socialism is perfectly fine though. Banks lending cash to shady governments in south america who (shock! horror!) can’t pay it back? No problem! Energy company causing blackouts for money? Got you covered, buddy! Auto industry not competing? Ching! Airlines in trouble? Bing!! How about an insurance company dying? Checkbook is already out my friend. The rich plunder the poor, not the other way around, duh.
It’s just like how, you know, the death penalty is totally alright and should be easier to do but the corporate death penalty, the revoking of a charter, is quite rare and should only be used in extreme circumstances with considerable caution, many saying it to be immoral.
Kel, I may be wrong about freaks surviving disasters, but:
* Could natural selection bring about adaptation in such a short space of time?
The odd survivors were “pre-adapted” (so to speak) just by chance, their freakish survival IS natural selection.
* From there, if adaptations were perfectly suited to the environment would that then show a macroscopic stability?
Yes, if the new environment is stable.
* What role does the rarity of beneficial mutation play?
Variation within a species is what contributes to species survival. Much variation comes from sexual gene mixing–that’s why we do it. Mutations CAN cause a Punctuation, if the new features allow new modes of survival. Otherwise, mutations are just a part of variation within a species.
* Would there still be genetic drift in which the overall morphology of a species is not affected?
Yes, slowly during stable periods, but a punctuation is a change in morphology. I think.
This is all from something I’ve been working up on understanding evolution, so it may not fit the books.
Just finished reading Darwin: Discovering the Tree
of Life by Niles Eldredge, one of the original punk
eek guys. He claims that Darwin came thisclose to
elucidating punctuated equilibrium on his own, but when it
came time to write his great huge book, went with gradualism
instead, thus missing his chance for immortality.
Read and enjoy:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/04/080417112433.htm
New morphological features developed in a small satellite population within the span of just a few dozen generations.
I want a bumper sticker that says, “Don’t honk if god doesn’t exist”, and then put it next to another that says “Honk if you’re an atheist!” so I can have it both ways.
Hmm… only 38 posts before we encounter a jesus troll on this thread. Yet the 9 year old abortion post has over 200 comments and not faith-head in sight.
@agnostictheocrat #50
That’s pretty close to how I’ve always imagined it working, although I never explicitly connected it with the so-called Law of Diminishing Returns… may have to steal that!
These neocon twits really need to let the socialism shit go. They’re fucking embarrassing themselves (I know–shock!).
They’re perfectly fucking fine with the U.S. military, an organization that absolutely falls within their view of what constitutes socialism. They happily pay their fucking taxes to support the military (if they have enough money left after the double wet-suits for sex games), and happily let someone else decide how that military support gets spent (i.e., they don’t get to choose which group of destitute third-world citizens I get sent off to slaughter this week). And they don’t seem to have a problem with the fact that the city taxes that they pay are used to provide water to old Mrs. Johnson’s house five whole miles down the road from their house (they’re not drinking her water, yet their taxes help deliver it to her–socialism!!).
There are a number of facets of U.S. society where individual monies are used collectively for the benefit of the larger group, and where the individuals don’t get a direct say in how their shares are spent. That seems to be kind of stuff they’re targeting when they’re screeching about SOCIALISM, but they are fucking fine with those aspects of the machine.
However, HOWEVER, if we decide that we want to use some of those group funds to craft a new facet that tries to get affordable health care for everyone in the group, then all of the sudden the very foundations of the Republic itself are in peril.
Fantastic.
No surprise she doesn’t understand punctuated equilibrium. I just wonder where she heard it.
To #38
Do coelacanths and horseshoe crabs count? A key feature of punctuated equillibrium is the equillibrium part. That is, species should, unless something changes, stay relatively the same for a long time. Other approaches argue that they should be constantly improving. There is a clear and empirically documented trend of morphological stasis in organisms. Not everything slowly becomes better and bette; plenty of things stay the same. Likewise, Loros published in a 2006 issue of Science about rapid evolution of lizard limbs in the Carribbean after exposure to an introduced predator. They didn’t speciate, but if a noticable and measurable morphological change can occur in less than 20 years, I think it is reasonable to say speciation could occur relatively quickly, IF SELECTION WAS STRONG ENOUGH.
No one that I know of argues for pure PE anymore. PE is one explanation for SOME phenomenon SOME times. Certainly a lot of the fossil evidence for PE is bias, as mroe recent taxa (IE horses and whales) show a much more “traditional” trend, implying that a better resolved fossil record yields less PE and more gradualism.
Only for middle class and poor people. Rich people and corporations still get plenty of government subsidies.
Honk.
I think.
Carl Sagan used to have a “Reunite Gondwanaland” sticker on his Porsche 914.
@ 72: Reuniting Gondwanaland is a fine goal, but why stop there? I say, Reunite Pangaea! (and yes, I have a t-shirt that says this, though a bumper sticker would be great, too).
The thing to remember about PE is that the overwhelmingly vast majority of speciation events are allopatric. Heck, it wouldn’t be too hard to argue that ALL speciation events are allopatric, I wouldn’t think. The sympatric examples are never quite as good as I think they should be.
And because speciation almost always happens when a small population becomes isolated, then PE is pretty much the way that things HAVE to work. After all, communities of organisms are surprisingly stable. If there’s a climatic shift, they don’t go extinct (…until we came along, of course), they just shift their ranges to stay in the same climatic conditions as before. So forests move north and south as temperatures fluctuate, which leads to a fairly stable (and so fairly non-selective)(mostly) environment.
And so when you look at the fossil record, you see very long stretches of one species (it’s actually “most species in the ecosystem”, but who wants to look at plants when there’s mammals running around?) surviving nicely. And, most importantly, not speciating very often, since easy speciation requires isolation!
Onychomys: Nice nym. I used to love hearing those guys squee when camping in the Mojave.
Wouldn’t domestication constitute a “punctuation?”
Red jungle fowl, wolves, wild pigs, African wildcats, gerbils and budgies are pretty much of a muchness. But take them indoors for a few dozen generations and you get an explosion (or, in lolcats, an esplosion) of variations.
Dogs in particular exploded, with a two order of magnitude variety of size, dozens of coats and colours and behaviours and mentalities. Budgies now have hundreds of distinct colours and a fair amount of size variation. Gerbils and hamsters have only been captivated less than 100 years, but differences in size and colour showed up pretty early on.
Noni
surrounded by punctuated canids
Jon @23
Thankyou for explaining PE in terms that a casual reader of popular science-type books (e.g. Blind Watchmaker, Language Instinct etc) can understand. I’ve trying to find an explanation precisely like yours for a long time now!
Yo wherearemymeds, your mom called. The pills are in the kitchen cabinet next to your pot. Take them, the nice guys from 911 are getting tired of taking you to the hospital when you act out.
FWIW, WAMMeds is a true troll. She spams the threads trying to steer traffic to her website. Don’t bother feeding that one, the troll won’t read, care, or understand a word you write.
Yes, put Gondwanaland back together, rep-ed by Pangea, so that they can cover Planet Earth
Michele ventures,
And how, Michele, is your intent to consolidate power any different from “ThEiRs?”
Pot. Kettle. Black.
No net progress.
Thanks for nothing. (not to be confused with the nothing that created everything)
I’m just so relieved that now that BO has finally fixed the economy he can focus on health care.
Mully410:
fucking ‘tard.
Healthcare is a major economic issue.
If you don’t have a job, you don’t have healthcare (you have emergency room, which is an extremely expensive way to provide primary care).
If you do have a job, you are likely to lose your healthcare benefits – either directly due to ‘economic challenges’ forcing companies to drop employer contributions, or indirectly, due to pay cuts or reduced hours forcing you to eliminate costs (and healthcare is mighty expensive).
You are a fucking idiot. Are you perhaps a republican?
Where do I get a bumper sticker that says that?! That’s wonderful!
Although what I really want is a bumper sticker that says “honk if you understand the evolution of evolvability.” Sexy.
Okay, I had to google ‘punctuated equilibrium,’ Good. That’s why I keep coming back. I learn something new every time. As for Michele, UGH! Do people of her ilk ever read books or engage in any kind of critical thinking? – I don’t think so.
Since it hasn’t been addressed, by, say, comment 70 or so, when they say “very rapid” about punctuated equilibrium, they mean “rapid” in geological terms.
If you want to look at Republican idiocy over the last 30 years. I call it punctuated equilibrium. If you look at Reagan, Bush 41, and Bush 43, this is really the final leap to theocratic fascism. … But we all know that we could turn this around and we can turn this around fairly quickly. We’re still a free country.
I remember when the term “punctuated equilibrium” first appeared in either Time or Newsweek –several years ago. A sub-headline was “no missing link” –and the article noted that Steven j. Gould and Niles Eldredge had come up with this theory to account for the absence of missing links in the fossil record. They decided Evolution must have occured in spurts –too quickly to leave fossils behind as evidence. A theory.
A prominent evolutionist in the same magazine was quoted as saying regarding his field of science, “I wish I were in something more honest –like used car sales.” There had been many fraudulent claims and even a rigged up fossil to look like some transitional creature. Fact is, it doesn’t matter what kind of fossils are found. They may prove common design features with modern creatures; they won’t prove conclusively “common descent.” DNA in common can’t prove common descent –it proves a common design –whether by God or evolution remains to be proven by either side.
In fact, the year was 1972 when Gould and Eldredge announced their theory of P.E.
Yes, those leftover pieces of virus code that are in exactly the same place on both the human and chimpanzee code must show that God designed it. He just made it look like humans and chimpanzees once had an ancestor that shared the genetic imprint of horizontal gene transfer.
Doesn’t look like Barb’s going to be honking at you anytime soon, PZ.
Tony says, “You are a fucking idiot. Are you perhaps a republican?”
Do you really want to go there???
This is no time for democrats to brag –when the spotlight is now on you and it doesn’t look good. you may have a majority but I see it dwindling 2 years from now. You’ve got Daschle who wants to raise taxes but not pay his own 100,000 arrearage –until he had to.
You’ve got a head of the Treasurey who made 40,000 worth of errors on HIS taxes–and he’s going to head the IRS.
You’ve got Obama spending more in one month than Bush did his first 5 years in office.
You’ve got dems blaming GOP for mortgage loan crisis when the blame belongs on Democrat door for Fannie and Freddie. Even Bush warned Congress that they needed to do something about the mortgage loan mess. but Dems wanted the easy money.
You’ve got Obabma saying he wanted to reduce numbers of abortions –while doing everything he can to make sure the tax payer pays for more abortions and for family planning clinics abroad to help foreigners obtain abortions.
You’ve got a party that wants to help American labor while harboring, using, and offering amnesty to illegal laborers.
You have that vapid-gazed Nancy Pelosi who insisted she have a bigger jet for a bigger carbon footprint.
You have democrat leaders blasting everybody but themselves for our economic problems when they all own foreign-made cars.
You’ve got Clinton, Chaundra Levy’s lover/congressman, and John Edwards –who can’t keep it zipped up –and these are your party leaders.
and finally you have a demand for national health care run by gov’t –when the real problem is LITIGATION and malpractice suits and insurance –BUT THE democratic lawyers won’t allow tort reform.
No time for you to be smug, Donkeys.
KEl writes “Yes, those leftover pieces of virus code that are in exactly the same place on both the human and chimpanzee code must show that God designed it. He just made it look like humans and chimpanzees once had an ancestor that shared the genetic imprint of horizontal gene transfer.”
Yes, like GM, Ford, Chrysler and Toyota –all have 4 wheels on their cars, gasoline engines, sparkplugs and batteries, transmission, etc. etc. But these cars didn’t give birth to each other or happen accidentally. They were designed with common forumlas for design. God can do that.
You really should be seeing some other creatures transitioning to higher forms of life today if evolution is true –you don’t and you won’t.
@Tony
Yup, definitely a Rethuglican. Barb just fired off a week’s worth of O’Reilly and Limbaugh rhetoric in one convenient jizz.
“You really should be seeing some other creatures transitioning to higher forms of life today if evolution is true”
There is no such thing as a “higher” form of life. Seriously, go back to Biology 101. Kel was right, your opinions on this subject are worthless.
“A prominent evolutionist in the same magazine was quoted as saying regarding his field of science, “I wish I were in something more honest –like used car sales.””
No name, no citation, no context…no surprise. Creationists sure are hung up on quotes. Probably because it’s the most information they can hold in their heads at once. They also seem to be awfully hung up on the personal behaviors of politicians and other public figures, as evidenced in #91. Shallow thinkers.
*facepalm
Okay… my automobile analogy @ #50 was not even remotely related to barb’s complete lack of understanding. Just to be clear, I wasn’t saying PE insinuates design…
Michele Bachmann is a Poe.
Question to Barb: why are you afraid of evolution? You know that it is possible to be a Christian and accept the fact of evolution. You know that millions of Christians already do it. Some of them, undoubtedly, are friends or acquaintances of yours, and I’ll wager that you wouldn’t mind having them as family. So what’s the big deal? What are you so afraid of?
Hmm. The ones I’ve met always seemed pretty blasé. Would this represent a reversion to the wild type?
If we are going to work on the subjects of fallacious analogies, why not actually extend the argument? Where would any of the cars we drive now be without the predecessors? The Model T ford springs to mind. But before that there was still transport. There was the refined carriage. Then before that the horse and cart – none of which were possible without the wheel.
Now you may be thinking, what does that have to do with anything? And that’s precisely my point. Cars can’t replicate – life can. As such each time there’s replication, there’s also variation. You are a mixture of your parents genes, plus a few copying errors that creep in. But that’s not the only way to modify your DNA – retroviruses have the ability to transplant their DNA into yours and thus any children you have will have the DNA of that damn pesky virus.
So what does that mean? It means that we have the ability to trace back ancestry through a process that in no way involves the standard modification of your DNA. And as such we can see common ancestry through ERVs (Endogenous retroviruses) by seeing where virus DNA has been inserted. So when we see ERVs in exactly the same position between species, it’s a sure-fire indicator that those species once shared a common ancestor.
This is the beauty of science, it updates as more information comes to light. Horizontal Gene Transfer has somewhat revolutionised evolutionary theory, but that’s what happens when people make conclusions based on the evidence. Which is completely unlike creationism – the conclusion is that Goddidit no matter whether the evidence points to it or not.
The same way Joseph of Arimathea managed to carve “Aaaaaarrrrggghhh” on the wall of the cave of Caerbannog.
Barb, go away, you arrogant
obstinatelywillfullydeliberately ignorant sow.And wipe the seat. It’s undoubtedly thick and dripping with the slime oozing from your cloaca, brought forth in the self-righteous arousal that overwhelms you as you feign a knowledgeable opinion and chastise us heathens.
Stop using us to assuage your perverse hungers. The next time you’re overcome by your oestral urges while Mr. Barb is away, leave us alone and just rub your Bible on it until satiated.
Ragutis #102 FTW.
Minnesota’s gift to comedy, surely.
There are some of us who, as Libertarians,
realize that both parties are full of it across the board… And that the bailouts are socialism…writ large and getting largerare complete fucking morons who can’t see that the unprecedented scale of the current crisis is a consequence of financial deregulation. – Jim@57Fixed for you.
Being inclined to tackle things alphabetically, I am still working on punctuating English, but the eq’s will be coming up shortly.
Tip of the iceberg, innit? Makes you start to think…and question…and think some more…and question some more…
AAARGH!! blockquote fail
Randomfactor @ 21,
LoL! Wonder how many honks you’d get if your bumper sticker asked people to honk if they got that.
Can I steal that and make my own bumper sticker please?
Hehe, I like that bumper sticker, personally, my favorites are “So many right-wing christians – so few lions” and “Karl Marx was wrong – Religion is the opium of the ASSES”
I prefer Dr. House’s version: “Religion is the placebo of the masses.”
Barb, you seem to have a penchant for lying (and probably being stupid, but with your comments it’s difficult to tell where one ends and the other begins).
“You’ve got dems blaming GOP for mortgage loan crisis when the blame belongs on Democrat door for Fannie and Freddie.”
No, this has been pointed out as false several times.
“You’ve got a party that wants to help American labor while harboring, using, and offering amnesty to illegal laborers.
I seem to remember the “amnesty plan” (which wasn’t one) that had so many conservatives up in arms was backed by several prominent Republicans as well.
“You have that vapid-gazed Nancy Pelosi who insisted she have a bigger jet for a bigger carbon footprint.”
That’s one of your more blatant lies, as any quick search will find.
“The brouhaha kicked off when Speaker Pelosi inquired about the availability and rules regarding the use of military aircraft other than the C-20B. Critics quickly maintained that Pelosi had insisted on being allowed to use a “Big Fat 200-seat jet” (a C-32 Boeing 757) so she could travel in luxury and reward financial contributors with lavish trips.”
From later in the article.
“Republican leaders stated – with no evidence – that she wanted to use the plane to reward financial contributors.
When asked whether Pelosi would be willing to use a smaller plane as long as it could fly coast to coast non-stop, the response was ‘Of course'”.
Still more.
“House Speaker Nancy Pelosi did not request a larger plane for personal use to travel cross-country without stopping, Bill Livinggood, the House sergeant-at-arms, said.
Livingood said the request was his, and he made it for security reasons. ”
Finally,
“For years, speakers flew commercial like everybody else in Congress. After the September 11 attacks, it was deemed that anyone two heartbeats away from the presidency warranted a military jet.
Until now, the only speaker affected was Republican Dennis J. Hastert, who commuted to his Illinois district in a small executive-style military jet.
But those aircraft require ideal weather conditions to make the cross-country trip without stopping to refuel.’
Records from Andrews Air Force Base show that, at the end of 2008, the C-20B, the plan e you assert was demanded, had been used only once.
I don’t expect facts will cause you to stop using these lies, because they are easy to spew you don’t seem to have the integrity needed to change your pattern. I doubt you could tell truth if you tried. It would be thrilling to have you prove us wrong.
Hey, Barb dropped in! Barb still won’t answer whether a two year old is worth more than a petri dish full of embryos, because she’s a hypocritical git.
Michelle Bachmann does serve one useful purpose: keeping rational Minnesotans humble. Every time we start feeling superior to places like Oklahoma, we have Michelle Bachmann to remind us:
IT CANNN HAPPEN HEEEERE! [/reverb tank]
Hmm, it seems like you know as little about car function as you do about logic and evolution. Cars actually use all that stuff to work. Therefore, none of those things are analogous to leftover segments of DNA that match other species but are not functional.
Also, the 4 wheels, gasoline engines, etc. actually support common descent. They are all based off the same original car. Instead of inventing a new car with 3 or 5 wheels, car manufacturers modified existing cars.
You can believe ID if you really want to, and pretend that we were designed by Zeus, but your analogy shows that we had a common ancestor whether we were designed or not. Even ID believers don’t deny the fact of common descent, and this theory was around long before Darwin.
Environments change constantly, so there is always pressure to adapt. Even if climate in a particular niche were perfectly stable, there is always competition for resources. The basic premise of evolution by natural selection is that most individuals have more than one or two offspring, even though the environment can’t necessarily support more individuals. Some of them have to die before reproducing. If one individual gets a beneficial mutation, they are statistically more likely to have more offspring and the mutation will spread through the population over time. There are many other factors that can contribute to selection. There are usually predators, and prey is also adapting to be harder to catch. Diseases mutate. Weather changes. Accidents happen. There is just no way to ever be “perfectly” adapted to an environment that is constantly changing.
Bachmann is yet another person who fails to understand the difference between political and economic systems. Democracy is not the same as capitalism, and socialism would not infringe on our rights as a democracy. Of course, we’re not becoming socialist anyway, and what we have right now can barely be called capitalism, with things like OPEC, lobbying, and farm subsidies.
Also, it is really hypocritical for her to claim that Obama is trying to concentrate power, after the past 8 years of a Republican trying to tear up our constitution.
In response to #63, cecal valve ‘evidence’ for PE, go to:
An example that evolutionists use to claim that evolution can make a new feature appear is the appearance of a cecal in a lizard: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/04/080417112433.htm
Here are the problems with that claim:
1. 1% of ALL scaled reptiles posses cecal valves, so latent DNA is the most likely answer to how they appeared. Example: Organisms restore latent DNA for features several generations AFTER the feature has disappeared:
* “Here we show that Arabidopsis plants homozygous for recessive mutant alleles of the organ fusion gene HOTHEAD5 (HTH) can inherit allele-specific DNA sequence information hat was not present in the chromosomal genome of their parents but was present in previous generations. This previously undescribed process is shown to occur at all DNA sequence polymorphisms examined and therefore seems to be a general mechanism for extra-genomic inheritance of DNA sequence information. We postulate that these genetic restoration events are the result of a template-directed process that makes use of an ancestral RNA-sequence cache.”
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v434/n7032/abs/nature03380.html
* “Here, we show that a rice triploid and diploid hybridization resulted in stable diploid progenies, both in genotypes and phenotypes, through gene homozygosity. Furthermore, their gene homozygosity can be inherited through 8 generations, and they can convert DNA sequences of other rice varieties into their own. Molecular-marker examination confirmed that this type of genome-wide gene conversion occurred at a very high frequency. Possible mechanisms, including RNA-templated repair of double-strand DNA, are discussed.” http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17502903?ordinalpos=1&itool=EntrezSystem2.
PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_DiscoveryPanel.Pubmed_Discovery_RA
2. If evolutionists claim that cecal valves miraculously appeared without latent DNA, they need to explain how evolution produces the genetic change necessary to ‘build’ them.
3. Since the valves supposedly evolved in just 35 years, it should NOT be difficult to find the beginnings of a valve, which might display an actual evolution-in-process event.
See, this is why I know that Behe’s impossible “test” of ID involving the re-evolution of the flagellum (tard, evolution is contingent, so while it might evolve over millions of years, perhaps it would never re-evolve) would never be accepted even if it were shown to re-evolve in the lab.
First there is the problem I mentioned parenthetically, the fact that evolution doesn’t even expect the same thing, so demanding that the same evolutionary pathway occur in the laboratory is not a test of “natural processes.” The impracticality of the “test” is obvious. And above all, they just demand every last step–and even if they got them all, then they’d even demand that we show that none of the steps involve the supernatural.
And then, since no one can definitively rule out supernatural intervention, they’d claim victory.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/6mb592
In regard to #100 and ERVs being ‘evidence’ for common descent, please answer these questions … and reference your research articles to back your claims:
“How is it that ERVS are Considered Copies of Disease Producing Exogenous Retroviruses but None Have Been Proven to Directly Cause Disease?”
“By Chance, What Made ERVS Evolve into “The Cure,” Instead of Remaining Disease Related Viruses?”
“By Chance, What Made ERV Elements Change From Viral Activities to Cellular Activities and Create New Essential Genes?”
“ERVS Created the Specie-Specific Regulatory Network that Controls the Expression of Cells in a Collective Manner. What Came First, the Host or the Regulatory Network?”
“By Chance, What Made ERV LTRS Immediately Turn into Essential Gene Regulators Upon Insertion?”
“By Chance, What Made LTRS Gain Transciptional Abilities for Essential Genes?”
From:
http://whoisyourcreator.com/endogenous_retroviruses.html
@#119,
Oh, grow up already. If you had been shown a species of lizards that had lost its cecal valves, you wouldn’t have hesitated to call it a loss of information. Why then should the appearance of cecal valves not be regarded as an increase in information? You can’t have it both ways.
Andrew Dice Clay had a term for women like this, “Snapper-head”.
Now, more than ever.
You be the man, PZ.
Seriously, it’s embarrassing to have her as a Representative of my home state, let alone of our country in general. It’s even worse that she was reelected in an otherwise excellent election this past November.
And let’s not forget this episode of hers: http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/11/22/214728/99/857/665288
In regard to #122:
“Oh, grow up already. If you had been shown a species of lizards that had lost its cecal valves, you wouldn’t have hesitated to call it a loss of information. Why then should the appearance of cecal valves not be regarded as an increase in information? You can’t have it both ways.”
Please note that the word ‘latent’ does not mean lost. Also note in my original post on #119 to the first research articles referencing a “restoration event” not a new “appearance”:
“We postulate that these genetic restoration events are the result of a template-directed process that makes use of an ancestral RNA-sequence cache.”
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v434/n7032/abs/nature03380.html
The fact remains that if you had been presented with a lizard species that lost its cecal valves you would have called the change a loss of information. I’ve seen ID proponents do it dozens of times. You do not now have the luxury of refusing to recognize the opposite process.
If you have evidence for an ancestral RNA cache for cecal vales, let’s have it. I should also remind you that the “ancestral RNA cache” is only a hypothesis and is hardly an accepted fact in the scientific community.
http://www.plantcell.org/cgi/content/full/17/11/2856
I’m afraid your hypothesized, undemonstrated repository of ancestral RNA in plants doesn’t trump the known, demonstrated appearance of an anatomical feature in lizards.
“(By the way, I have a bumper sticker on my car that says, “Honk if you understand punctuated equilibrium!” No one ever honks.)”
I had that bumper sticker on my car also when I was an undergrad…in Murfreesboro, TN! I was so excited one day when someone honked….it turned out to be one of my biology profs.
I also had people united for separation of church and state sticker and a darwin fish amongst other thing…oh, and I lived just down the street from a publication house called “sword of the lord”!
In regard to post #126:
“The fact remains that if you had been presented with a lizard species that lost its cecal valves you would have called the change a loss of information. I’ve seen ID proponents do it dozens of times. You do not now have the luxury of refusing to recognize the opposite process.
If you have evidence for an ancestral RNA cache for cecal vales, let’s have it. I should also remind you that the “ancestral RNA cache” is only a hypothesis and is hardly an accepted fact in the scientific community.
http://www.plantcell.org/cgi/content/full/17/11/2856
I’m afraid your hypothesized, undemonstrated repository of ancestral RNA in plants doesn’t trump the known, demonstrated appearance of an anatomical feature in lizards.”
______________________
Since you reject the latent “ancestral RNA cache” hypothesis, then please explain in detail how the ridiculous premise of ‘convergent evolution’ created the EXACT genetic duplicate of a previous structure.
Give it a whirl and refer to this link to help you out:
http://www.whoisyourcreator.com/how_does_evolution_occur.html
Raivo Pommer
raimo1@hot.ee
Schwarze geld
Die Schweizer Regierung will am Bankgeheimnis vorerst nicht rütteln. Sie bietet allerdings Gespräche über die anonyme Zinsbesteuerung, wie sie schon mit der EU besteht, und die Amtshilfe an. Nach einer Regierungssitzung sagte Bundespräsident und Finanzminister Hans-Rudolf Merz, die Schweiz habe viele völkerrechtliche Verträge geschlossen, die eine Grundlage für den Informationsaustausch mit anderen Staaten böten. Mit einer Expertengruppe soll diese Zusammenarbeit über „Steuerdelikte“ verstärkt werden, kündigte Merz an. Der Finanzplatz dürfe keine Wettbewerbsnachteile erleiden. Zugleich schloss der Finanzminister nicht aus, dass die Schweiz auf eine „schwarze Liste“ geraten könne.
Die Schweiz leistet Amtshilfe nur bei mutmaßlichem Steuerbetrug, nicht jedoch bei Steuerhinterziehung. Der Begriff „Steuerdelikt“, den Merz jetzt verwendete, lässt den weiteren Weg offen. Merz hatte vor wenigen Tagen gesagt, das Bankgeheimnis solle „weiterentwickelt“ werden. Mit ihrem Gesprächsangebot versucht die Regierung dem wachsenden internationalen Druck zu begegnen. In der Finanz- und Wirtschaftskrise haben die Kritiker vermehrt Gehör gefunden, welche die „Steueroase“ Schweiz austrocknen wollen. So erwägen die wichtigsten Industrie- und Schwellenländer (G-20) unter Führung der Vereinigten Staaten, Großbritanniens, Frankreichs und Deutschlands entsprechende Beschlüsse auf ihrem Weltfinanzgipfel am 2. April in London. Eine Teilnahme der Schweiz wurde abgelehnt.
What’s your source for claiming the cecal valves are an exact “genetic duplicate” (by which I assume you mean arising from an identical genetic mechanism) of any previous structure?
Or are you talking about the hothead genes, which are not an anatomical structure but rather a single gene. I linked above to an alternate hypothesis by Comai and Cartwright. Read it. It isn’t about convergent evolution.
I fail to see how the contents of your link bear on the question, other than by revealing you as yet another cut-and-paste artist.
Are you talking about the Podarcis cecal valve? It’s not a “genetic duplicate,” let alone EXACT. Its genetic underpinnings are unknown (as is true, so far, for the vast, vast majority of morphological phenotypes in animals). And what is “ridiculous” about the idea of convergent evolution?
What? There are no cecal valves known in the entire ancient family Lacertidae (to which Podarcis belongs). You’re a pretty good cut-n-paster, but you don’t understand what you’re talking about.
Another alternate hypothesis for HTH reversion in Arabidopsis:
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=2600959
This one is much more elegant in its simplicity and is backed by experimental evidence. When grown in isolation from plants carrying the old HTH gene, no ‘reversion’ occurred. The frequency of reversion events also decreases with increased distance from the former. This is all solid evidence that these claims of “ancestral RNA caches” are much ado about simple cross-pollination.
That’s rich. So are you telling me that if my dog has puppies with prehensile tails, or venomous spurs, or blowholes, you wouldn’t consider them examples of new structures?
Thanks, DaveL for restoring my briefly wobbly worldview.
Paging Barb! Paging Barb!
Barb’s presence is urgently requested at http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/03/the_headline_says_it_all.php – if anyone here should happen to see Barb, please send her over there right away!
Well, I guess I’ve never seen your car then….
“If we are going to work on the subjects of fallacious analogies, why not actually extend the argument? Where would any of the cars we drive now be without the predecessors? The Model T ford springs to mind. But before that there was still transport. There was the refined carriage. Then before that the horse and cart – none of which were possible without the wheel.
Posted by: Kel
And what use is a wheel & axle without the cart?
The anti-evolutionist’s concept of “irreducible complexity” would tell you that the wheel & axle are of no use without the cart, in the same way that feathers & wings are of no use to an animal if it can’t fly.
Why did people invent the wheel & axle before they invented a cart (or at least a wheelbarrow)?
Why did dinosaurs evolve feather & wings when they couldn’t fly with them?
People invented the wheel for a purpose completely unrelated to moving from place to place. The wheel & axle were invented to make pots. Potters’ wheels have an archeological record that preceed the use of the wheel & axle by a millennia or so. Transportation was a secondary creative adaptation of the wheel & axle.
Dinosaurs evolved feathers as controllable insulation for their warm-blooded metabolisms. Running dinosaurs evolved wings to increase their mobility/stability while running & leaping. Flight was a secondary evolutionary adaptation of feathers & wings.
The difference between the wheel & axle and feathers & wings is simply because one object, the wheel & axle, is created; while the other objects, the feather & wings have evolved.
The two different functions of the wheel & axle are quite separate from each other, and there are no intermediate stages between the potters’ wheel and the wheeled transport. There are also no preliminary stages in the creation of the wheel(ie. triangular wheel to square wheel to pentagonal wheel to hexagonal wheel, etc.) This is what one would expect for a created object.
Feathers have value even in the earliest stages of development as tiny nibs on the skin, which have value in changing the amount of surface area (think goosebumps) and solar shading of the skin. As they evolve into more sophisticated feathers, there is an increase in their ability to control body temperatures. This is what one would expect from evolved creatures.
Wings also had value long before they were capable of sustained flight. Fast running & leaping dinosaurs (activities which require thermal control) would benefit from the smallest amount of controllable stabilization and lift from their nascent wings. Again, this is what one would expect from evolved creatures.
I lurrve how Barb gets all excited and types a couple of comments all in a flurry and then fucks off. I reckon if she doesn’t bugger off permanently soon, we do the same to her blog – drop a few random statements about christianity – better if they’re completely false (like she does about evolution) – and then run away (squealing wickedly like little girls).
Bet she censors
Jaycubed@137,
Feathers were probably also used, pre-flight, for display and species recognition – after all, modern birds use certainly use them in these ways. IIRC there was a very recent discovery of feathered non-bird and flightless dinosaurs where the conformation of the feathers looked much more like a display feature than insulation.
They would, but I bet I could find a use for each part independently.
If I might wade in here and return to the original topic of the thread:
The correctness or otherwise of saying that Obama is “a socialist” really depends on what you mean by “socialist”. He is certainly far, far from being a doctrinaire socialist. Rather, he is what Americans clumsily call a “big-government liberal”, and the rest of the world would term a social democrat.
He doesn’t reject the free market entirely, because he isn’t stupid – just as New Labour in this country don’t reject the free market. Any intelligent person can recognise the market’s ability to produce superior economic efficiency, and can see the failures of economic central planning. Obama, like Tony Blair or Gordon Brown, is bright enough to understand this.
But what they all lack is a deontological belief in liberty. They are willing to put up with the free market on pragmatic grounds, where it’s practical, expedient and efficient to do so. But they are equally happy to expand the size and reach of government, and promote more government interference with individuals’ lives, where it’s expedient to do so – because they retain the left-wing belief that government can actually make things better, and they don’t believe in the constant imperative of increasing liberty and reducing government control.
Walton, please take your libertarian fantasies and idiocies to your own blog. You’ve been warned before that nobody is interested in discussing how to turn Western Civilization into Somalia.
I have that bumper sticker as well. Two honks, to date… although one of them might have been because I was inadvertently drifting out of the lane on the motorway, in a reverie about transitional fossils, but who can tell? I count it anyway.
This is not something that can be argued, it’s a matter of definition. There are at least 25 different definitions of “species” out there. They have nothing in common except the word “species”, and depending on the definition there are between 101 and 249 endemic bird species in Mexico.
The hypothesis (or arguably theory) of punctuated equilibrium (one L) implies a “Morphological Species Concept”: a species is something I can recognize in the fossil record. As you say, it doesn’t say anything about genetic change.
Bingo.
“Very quickly” of course means “within a few thousands or tens of thousands of years, as opposed to hundreds of thousands”. Remember, we’re talking about people who can’t tell last week from last ice age.
Simply read this paper! Both punk eek and (even more) gradual evolution occur in the fossil record, the former more often than the latter and — unsurprisingly — under different conditions.
Indeed, the Hox genes (plural! You have about 40 of them!) shouldn’t have been mentioned. Whoever wrote that outdated page 1) had little to no idea of development genetics and 2) hadn’t understood that punk eek is a very small-scale phenomenon! To see it in the fossil record, you need an extremely high resolution that usually isn’t available.
I’ll get back to that below.
This is another idea of Gould’s that has nothing to do with punk eek. Gould used it to explain why phyla and classes originated en masse in the Cambrian Explosion and why no phyla and almost no classes have emerged ever since.
And that’s complete bullshit. Dawkins put it best by comparing Gould to someone who sees an old oak and marvels at the fact that no thick limbs have grown on it for a long time, only tiny twigs! Gould had fallen into the trap of believing that Linnaean ranks exist in nature. Well, every genius makes one big mistake in their life. :-|
No, see above: we can see in the fossil record that it has occurred in the majority of the (very few!) cases where we can tell either way.
Of course.
Doesn’t happen.
As long as the environment stays stable.
Even without perfection, that’s what we see. It’s called stabilizing selection.
Practically none. Well, it probably has an influence on precisely how long the punctuation takes, but that’s hard to see in the fossil record with such precision anyway.
Yes — and indeed there is.
Stabilizing selection.
We have a winner.
Punk eek is not a separate mechanism of evolution! It’s an outcome of natural selection. What Gould & Eldredge were basically saying is that the environment changes in small steps rather than gradually.
:-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D
As examples of morphological stasis and plenty of genetic drift? Yes.
(Not too far back, though. There were fairly whacked-out coelacanths in the Early Carboniferous.)
There’s no point in — or, rather, no selection for doing so. Once a population is adapted well enough, it is adapted well enough.
That’s a punctuation.
And you can’t simply say “[t]hey didn’t speciate”. Whether they did almost certainly depends on the species concept! Remember, punk eek only cares about morphology.
See paper above.
No, that’s a common misunderstanding (which Gould largely failed to clear up). Punk eek vs gradualism is a very small-scale phenomenon; it talk about what happens from one morphospecies to the next.
You know, you can still buy T-shirts with it. Also “Support a united Pangea — One Continent. One World.” (I have one) and now “I support Scientific Triassicism”…
Sagan? Had a Porsche?
Well, as I just mentioned, every genius makes one big mistake in their life. :-|
Really? What about cichlid species flocks, and what about selection for a bimodal distribution? There are many cases (like Darwin finches in dry years) where morphospecies can have fertile hybrids, but there’s selection against them, in other words, selection for behavioral mechanisms that prevent hybridization.
Of course.
1) Several decades ago, not years.
2) Once again the confusion about the scale to which punk eek applies. The missing links Gould & Eldredge were talking about where those between species. Not those between Eusthenopteron and salamanders; not those between Tiktaalik and Greererpeton; not those between Acanthostega and Ichthyostega; but those between Ichthyostega eigili and Ichthyostega stensioei!
3) Learn here what the technical term “theory” means. You seem to believe it means “speculation”. You couldn’t be any wronger.
That’s ridiculous. During those 5 years the US military budget rose to a level higher than all other military budgets of the world combined… so I don’t even need to mention the tax cuts for the rich anymore.
The blame belongs to deregulation.
What exactly is it about “legal, safe, and rare” that you don’t understand???
Oh, I get it: you didn’t notice the efforts in education and contraception. That explains something.
Just like the Reptilian Party, which has all the cheap-labor conservatives donating to it.
Capitalism, Barb. Telling Americans to buy American cars just out of patriotism, without regard to which cars are actually better, would be an intervention into the free market. Is that really what you want?
<taps on Barb’s little head and smiles paternalistically>
So what? JFK fucked everything female that didn’t escape quickly enough, and? Was he a bad president?
If you have evidence that political competence is positively correlated with monogamy, bring it on.
(Also, why exactly does only the Reptilian Party have a long series of hypocritical anti-gay gays who make a scandal and then crash & burn?)
How childish of you. How ignorant. Probably you don’t even know that the USA and South Africa are the only halfway developed countries without universal health insurance. Have Europe or Canada or Japan or Oz or NZ become Somalia? Huh?
How pathetic.
Define “higher”.
Hint: you can’t. Many have tried to define “higher” or at least “more complex”, and none came up with a definition that made any sense. All failed. No wonder that Darwin scribbled “Say never higher or lower” into the margins of a book in 1844 (15 years before he published On The Origin of Species).
There is no progress in evolution. Natural selection leads to whatever happens to be advantageous at the moment; in different environments, direct opposites can be advantageous.
Yeah, plants do that kind of stuff. Their cells are all connected, so RNA can diffuse from one cell to the next throughout an individual; also, they have RNA replication, which other organisms lack.
Furthermore, Podarcis lacks ancestors with valves.
1) Scientists by definition don’t claim anything happened miraculously.
2) “Latent DNA” would be junk DNA till the instant it would be needed. It would accumulate mutations that would render it incapable of functioning, and these mutations would not be selected against. What a poorly thought-through concept!
3) I bet somebody is working on exactly what happened genetically. Patience! This kind of research project doesn’t go from idea to publication in a few months. In fact, most journals take longer from submission of the manuscript to publication itself!
Sounds reasonable, but you forget about selection. On that tiny island, I don’t think any lizards with incipient valves are left after that many generations.
What Sense Does All That Capitalization Have?
– Some have been demonstrated to shred the genome in kangaroos. That’s why rock wallabies all have drastically different chromosome numbers.
– “Copies” does not mean “exact copies”. Mutation! Hello-o!
– Cure of what? WTF are you talking about???
– What stopped them from causing diseases is mutation. Retroviruses insert their genome into the host genome and cut it out again sometime later, sometimes generations later. This is, sometimes, enough time for mutations to happen that make the cutting-out process impossible.
Chance. Mutation.
Really, what are you imagining when you think of an ERV? What are you imagining when you think of a retrovirus in general?
This is just gibberish. “Expression of Cells” doesn’t mean anything, and neither does its context. Will you please stop throwing scientific-sounding words around like fucking confetti?
They already are gene regulators, so they stayed gene regulators — when they happened to have the start of a gene nearby. (Remember that ERVs are distributed randomly in the genome.)
The random chance that made some of them lie next to essential genes. Remember, LTRs* are the transcription promoters of retroviruses; when such a thing comes to lie in front of a gene, the gene gets transcribed more often than otherwise.
It’s so simple! And you are so ignorant!
* That stands for “long terminal repeats”. You almost certainly didn’t know that.
Blowholes are not new, they’re just the nostrils that have moved a little.
No, the rest of the world terms that a mainstream conservative. Check it out at politicalcompass.org.
Yes! They are pragmatists, not fucking ideologues.
We’ve seen where ideological certainty leads, and so has Obama.
(I feel obliged to mention that I also have a “Scientific Triassicism” T-shirt.)
Thanks for answering those questions David.
Is there any possibility that Walton doesn’t even believe the crap he spews, but does it just to annoy people?
I would like to think that it is impossible for someone to be so blazingly stupid about so many things.
“There is no progress in evolution.”
Posted by: David Marjanović,
Yet, all contemporary organisms are the result of the progression of evolution.
It is easy to see why some people are confused about this concept, and not just from self-importance (ie. “humans are the epitome of evolution so we must be the result of progress”).
We are the result of a progression, 2: a continuous and connected series of events. (M-W)
We are not the result of progress, 2: a forward or onward movement (as to an objective or to a goal) 3: gradual betterment ; especially : the progressive development of humankind (M-W)
The same is true of all living species.
Bachmann babbled:
What a frakkin’ moron. She’s a good example of the kind of myopia and projection we sometimes see from the members of the GOP and their constituents. (Not that the Left doesn’t have its share of loonies and incompetents, but we’re not talking about them at the moment. Heh.)
Here are the words of John Dean, who knows a few things about the abuse of executive power.
Actually, if you ignore where Walton @142 is coming from, he’s making sense there. Except that in any other country, Obama is way far right of centre, and would be called Conservative.
In Canada, even our Conservative party would probably baulk at his ideas.
Plus, ignoring his own slant, if you take it as read, it would actually be great. A left-leaning non-ideologue with a pragmatic approach to government.
A breath of fresh air, actually.