Re: Evolution on earth: directional and progressive?

Bob Kolker wrote:
Tim Tyler wrote:

Natural evolution on earth /is/ directional and progressive.
It consists of a process which makes technological discoveries,
remembers good ones and discards bad ones.

You jump to conclusions. Humans have been around less than 3 million years.

Technological progress did not start with humans.

Photosynthesis, haemoglobin, sexual recombination, nitrogen fixation,
cell walls, multicellularity, nucleic acids, are all among nature's
inventions.

I have an essay about this:

http://originoflife.net/direction/

This process is then iterated.

This process is also overrated. The ants do much more and much better
than humans and no matter how technically advanced we become the ants
eat our lunch at picnics.

Over rated? I see it the other way around. I /keep/ encountering
nonsense about the evolutionary process /not/ being progressive.

Gould is often cited. I tend to cite back Dawkins:

``Notwithstanding Gould's just scepticism over the tendency to label
each era by its newest arrivals, there really is a good possibility
that major innovations in embryological technique open up new vistas
of evolutionary possibility and that these constitute genuinely
progressive improvements (Dawkins 1989; Maynard Smith & Szathmary 1995).
The origin of the chromosome, of the bounded cell, of organized
meiosis, diploidy and sex, of the eucaryotic cell, of multicellularity,
of gastrulation, of molluscan torsion, of segmentation - each of
these may have constituted a watershed event in the history of life.
Not just in the normal Darwinian sense of assisting individuals to
survive and reproduce, but watershed in the sense of boosting
evolution itself in ways that seem entitled to the label progressive.
It may well be that after, say, the invention of multicellularity, or
the invention of metamerism, evolution was never the same again. In
this sense there may be a one-way ratchet of progressive innovation in
evolution.''

``For this reason over the long term, and because of the cumulative
character of coevolutionary arms races over the shorter term, Gould's
attempt to reduce all progress to a trivial, baseball-style artefact
constitutes a surprising impoverishment, an uncharacteristic slight,
an unwonted demeaning of the richness of evolutionary processes.''

[from R.D. A Devil's Chaplain]
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