Re: Heritability of fitness


"g" <gillawton@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:dp6lul$1q8n$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Again, you are far ahead of me on this entire area of study, but it has
> bugged me from the first day I read anybody's ideas about how a species
> could change (evolve) that I could not bring myself to imagine a species ALL
> having a single mutation-in-common occur. It only seems feasible to imagine
> that first ONE individual within a species would have a given mutation (*see
> footnote 1).

No need to feel bugged. NO ONE suggests that the same mutation happens near
simultaneously in multiple members of the population.

[snip long passage containing more very conventional ideas coupled with the
suggestion that these ideas are unconventional.]

> It is nice to have someone of your intelligence to bounce this off of.

Consider it bounced. I contemplated deprecating your contribution
"in broad, grandiose judgmental terms... yet offering nothing of
substance to refute". But that would have been uncharitable since you
so sincerely complimented my intelligence.

[snip]
> A lot of the discussions I have seen on the subject of "gradualism" versus
> "punctuated equilibrium," seem to imply that species change as an entirety,
> and sometimes almost instantaneously.

Hmmm. You must be reading different discussions than I am. Or perhaps you
are reading only Gould's side of the discussion, where he distorts his opponents'
critiques into something ridiculous for rhetorical effect. No, probably
not - since even Gould doesn't use such transparent tactics, at least not often.

[snip remainder]


.

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