Robin: There are, but George Williams made his case for more than one form of complexity having not “progressed” over the last hundred million years, including complexity of morphological form, etc. So I stand by my statement that Gould utterly misrepresented what the field of evolutionary biology thought about complexity, creating false chaos so his bizarre criticisms could appear as avenging heroism.
The only progress I would defend as being visible in some recent evolutions is progress in quality of vertebrate brain software (not complexity or size per se), and this shift in adaptive emphasis must necessarily have come at the expense of lost complexity elsewhere. Look at humans: we’ve got no muscles, no fangs, practically no sense of smell, and we’ve lost the biochemistry for producing many of the micronutrients we need. This is yet another shift of adaptive emphasis, which in this case just happened to win the lottery, not an illustration of a general trend toward evolutionary progress.
There were eras of genuine evolutionary progress in some organisms, just not recently. They would occur subsequent to the development of new error-correcting mechanisms that shifted upward the equilibrium of adaptive complexity.
Robin: There are, but George Williams made his case for more than one form of complexity having not “progressed” over the last hundred million years, including complexity of morphological form, etc. So I stand by my statement that Gould utterly misrepresented what the field of evolutionary biology thought about complexity, creating false chaos so his bizarre criticisms could appear as avenging heroism.
The only progress I would defend as being visible in some recent evolutions is progress in quality of vertebrate brain software (not complexity or size per se), and this shift in adaptive emphasis must necessarily have come at the expense of lost complexity elsewhere. Look at humans: we’ve got no muscles, no fangs, practically no sense of smell, and we’ve lost the biochemistry for producing many of the micronutrients we need. This is yet another shift of adaptive emphasis, which in this case just happened to win the lottery, not an illustration of a general trend toward evolutionary progress.
There were eras of genuine evolutionary progress in some organisms, just not recently. They would occur subsequent to the development of new error-correcting mechanisms that shifted upward the equilibrium of adaptive complexity.