It’s vitally important when spreading a new scientific idea to come up with a catchy name for it. “Punctuated equilibrium” was very good. However, the idea behind the name was very very fuzzy. It was a grab-bag of ideas, that never quite fit together. Where did the “hopeful monster”s fit in? It turns out they didn’t. Punctuated equilibrium did not make sense in any unified way though a collection of disparate ideas were supposed to be it.
I finally found the concepts expressed clearly in a book by Eldredge. All the various obvious explanations were included. There was nothing mystical. There was nothing new. Standard population ecology concepts fit the whole thing. Unless of course Gould was describing other things that Eldredge didn’t consider.
The spandrels concept was like something Eliezer might come up with. A fine name for a simple concept about how people sometimes misunderstand things. The “trait” that you notice may be a side-effect of what’s selected. It’s worth reminding beginners about that and worth remembering. It isn’t more special than the average of Eliezer’s hundreds of bias ideas.
Gould talked as if he had something that standard science did not explain easily. He was misleading. No hopeful monsters were needed. Everything he described was implied directly from standard approaches. Gould mostly did not describe solutions to his conundrums—I think because if he had, he would have made it obvious that he was not actually posing any problems to be solved.
“I have yet to see anybody here offer up even one, much less ten, new ideas in evolutionary theory more important than Gould’s of punctuated equilibrium.”
Can you describe just what the dea is? When people ask for a description of Gause’s Law or Weber’s law or Fisher’s Fundamental Theorem etc you could say pretty clearly what the idea is, right?
Gause’s Law: No two species living in the same environment will live quite the same way. They will tend to differ in ways that are critical to their survival, because if they were in direct head-to-head competition for the same limiting factor one of them would tend to win and the other would go extinct. (It follows that two species that too much share the same critical limiting factor will tend to evolve in separate directions to reduce the overlap. They will evolve toward different ecological niches.)
Weber’s Law: Animal senses distinguish differences, and the differences they can distinguish tend to be some fraction of the size of the stimulus. So if you can tell a 1% difference in how bright a light is when it’s very dim, you can likely tell a 1% difference in brightness when the light is very bright also. If you can tell a 1% difference in sound volume for faint sounds it’s likely to be around 1% for loud sounds too. This all happens within limits and it doesn’t always work, but it’s the way to bet.
Fisher’s Fundamental Theorem: The rate of natural selection is directly proportional to the variance in fitness within the populatoin. This follows directly from the usual definitions of fitness and natural selection. If all individuals are just as fit then there’s no selection, if there’s a big difference in fitness then the less-fit are removed faster than with a small difference.
Can you describe what Punctuated equilibrium says? Perhaps the 2nd-most important new idea in evolutionary theory, can you describe the idea clearly?
It’s vitally important when spreading a new scientific idea to come up with a catchy name for it. “Punctuated equilibrium” was very good. However, the idea behind the name was very very fuzzy. It was a grab-bag of ideas, that never quite fit together. Where did the “hopeful monster”s fit in? It turns out they didn’t. Punctuated equilibrium did not make sense in any unified way though a collection of disparate ideas were supposed to be it.
I finally found the concepts expressed clearly in a book by Eldredge. All the various obvious explanations were included. There was nothing mystical. There was nothing new. Standard population ecology concepts fit the whole thing. Unless of course Gould was describing other things that Eldredge didn’t consider.
The spandrels concept was like something Eliezer might come up with. A fine name for a simple concept about how people sometimes misunderstand things. The “trait” that you notice may be a side-effect of what’s selected. It’s worth reminding beginners about that and worth remembering. It isn’t more special than the average of Eliezer’s hundreds of bias ideas.
Gould talked as if he had something that standard science did not explain easily. He was misleading. No hopeful monsters were needed. Everything he described was implied directly from standard approaches. Gould mostly did not describe solutions to his conundrums—I think because if he had, he would have made it obvious that he was not actually posing any problems to be solved.
“I have yet to see anybody here offer up even one, much less ten, new ideas in evolutionary theory more important than Gould’s of punctuated equilibrium.”
Can you describe just what the dea is? When people ask for a description of Gause’s Law or Weber’s law or Fisher’s Fundamental Theorem etc you could say pretty clearly what the idea is, right?
Gause’s Law: No two species living in the same environment will live quite the same way. They will tend to differ in ways that are critical to their survival, because if they were in direct head-to-head competition for the same limiting factor one of them would tend to win and the other would go extinct. (It follows that two species that too much share the same critical limiting factor will tend to evolve in separate directions to reduce the overlap. They will evolve toward different ecological niches.)
Weber’s Law: Animal senses distinguish differences, and the differences they can distinguish tend to be some fraction of the size of the stimulus. So if you can tell a 1% difference in how bright a light is when it’s very dim, you can likely tell a 1% difference in brightness when the light is very bright also. If you can tell a 1% difference in sound volume for faint sounds it’s likely to be around 1% for loud sounds too. This all happens within limits and it doesn’t always work, but it’s the way to bet.
Fisher’s Fundamental Theorem: The rate of natural selection is directly proportional to the variance in fitness within the populatoin. This follows directly from the usual definitions of fitness and natural selection. If all individuals are just as fit then there’s no selection, if there’s a big difference in fitness then the less-fit are removed faster than with a small difference.
Can you describe what Punctuated equilibrium says? Perhaps the 2nd-most important new idea in evolutionary theory, can you describe the idea clearly?