Yay! Great vid. While working on the script of Jackson Wheat's video on stasis, I also wondered whether developmental constraints could play a role in stasis apart from stabilising selection. But the script was already long enough for the video, so we didn't include that. Glad you did it here.
I like to compare the evolution of a population to a big messy video game skill tree. Skills are mutations or combinations of mutations which will spread fast in the population as soon as they are "unlocked". Some cost more to unlock, some less, dependent on how unlikely the mutation is to occur. Some skills require many other skills to be unlocked first. Some may only be available in certain environments. There may be a skill that is extremely hard to get access to but as soon as you do, it opens up tons of new skills, some of which are very easy to unlock. That would be a case of punctuated equilirbium. Sure, it's just an analogy and it may not be perfect but I think it's a interesting way to visualize it.
Makes you realise how many critics of Gould never bothered to read Gould. This is all explained in his essays written for a non-specialist audience - I can understand creationists not reading them, but Dawkins and Dennett?
dawins is a right wing person. lewontin and gould were left wing. they hated each others guts. scientists don't like to air dirty laundry, but there is a lot of dirty laundry in science. dawkins is also not an original scientist. he popularizes the ideas of hamilton and williams, and williams often didn't agree with his oversimplifications.
My senior thesis was on the original Goldschmidt vs the evolutionary synthesis debate and how it was recapitulated in the punk eke debate. So I am your ideal audience.
I did not realize punctuated equilibrium was controversial. I have only a superficial knowledge of evolution but it seems reasonable if the environment changes species are under pressure to adapt. If the change reduces the population causing a genetic bottleneck "new improved" traits ought to rapidly diffuse through the population.
I think the only thing that was controversial was whether it was controversial. The people that proposed it said it was new and the response was "we never thought that was wrong". But I think it was worth making the theory explicit, even it was vaguely held before then.
Thanks, PZ. I've been looking forward to this video and you did not disappoint. When you discussed Goldschmidt and hopeful monsters, I remembered Gould's essay, The Return of the Hopeful Monster, from chapter 5 of The Panda's Thumb. I read the book just after learning about Punk Eek in my archaeology grad program. I was delighted to see that the essay is online, and I just reread it with pleasure. Here's the link to the full essay: www.stephenjaygould.org/library/gould_hopeful-monsters.html
Mr Meyers, first of all: thanks for the video - I really liked it! Stasis is Data - said a German soldier in Omaha beach on C day. It seems you are participating in an intellectual debate with creationists; or is this just a good explanation that treats creationists respectfully? Either way, I find this commendable action! ----- I found your 'about me' video, Prof. Meyers. And that cleared my doubts - a very commendable behavior, indeed! ----- As you probably know, in System Optimization, engineers and mathematicians use the technique called Genetic Programing or Genetic Algorithms that try to replicate natural selection in an abstract universe. There's nothing physical (at least most of the time) and the selection is made based on the optimization goal. Do you know if someone has published a work based on observing how evolution occurs in those models with observed data about evolution? Thanks! One more question: Is Cladogenesis basically aboot Curling? ... you know, pandemic, 7 months at home ... one needs to keep the good humor up. The quality of the jokes suffer, though. Once again, thanks for the video - I'm trying to learn about punctuated equilibrium.
Evolution has given some mammals more "limbs". Certain kangaroos get significant force from their tail in jumping, more than from their legs, making it effectively another leg. Some species have effectively turned their tails into another "arm", and elephants have turned their nose into an "arm". It seems like if four wasn't a decent number of limbs, those evolutionary lines would be more dominant, instead of our ancestors losing tails all together. Millipedes have more legs, but I think scale makes far more of a difference there.
Gould was a great scientist, like Lewontin. He's controversial because of his politics, his personality (even many of his allies don't seem to have liked him), his lack of fairness to the other side (as editor), and because many biologists are not terribly intellectual and are basically center right people scared of any one too far left.
Sounds pretty logical that most of the random gene mutations just don´t do much until something useful shows up. Also it is interesting when you think about us doing it whit agriculture.
I think what you have here is very harsh evolutionary change when either the environment abruptly changes or, more significantly, when the gradual changes built up over millions of years reach some kind of breaking point where something that already exists can undergo sharp directional selection into a completely novel form and so profoundly disrupts this system that has been stretched to its limits as to completely overturn it with novel developments, even in raw, unrefined form. Is this not a pattern we see everywhere even in other fields? There have been plenty of events in history where something changed very gradually for hundreds of years and very slowly, reached some point of limit and began to stagnate, before some element made very sharp but very harsh and crude changes that destabilized this equilibrium with a new order.
Wouldn't things like sharks, alligators, and other species that are, essentially, identical to their fossil ancestors, be direct evidence of punctuated evolution in those species? Also, given the dramatic evolutionary changes within other species during the same period,isn't this indicatory of the fact that not all species follow the same patterns / rates of morphological changes? At this point much of this has to be a case of QED, surely?
Have you ever looked at shark phylogeny? It's a great big complicated branchy mess with all kinds of variants. It's like looking at mammals and saying "gosh, they haven't changed a bit since the Permian."
Okay, maybe sharks aren't the best example. This I will happily concede; given they, like alligators, were an example taken off the top of my head at short notice. The point I was obviously making, as you also raised in the video, is that there are current species that are still morphologically the same as their fossil ancestors, while other animals have been through many such changes during the same time period - and that includes many of the variants within their species.
I think your point is valid, you just need a better example. The Coelacanth only changed a little bit and shows just some limited variety in 400 million years. It changed, but other species changed a lot more in just 50 thousand years than this one did in 400 million years.
Do you know better examples? For vertebrate animals, i could not find a better example. The pelican did not change much for 35-40 million years, but that is a 10 times shorter time period. If you think our examples are not good, suggest better ones.
I'm having a problem sinking my teeth on Macroevolution ... why, God! Why won't Amazon ship the book to Brazil? God just sent me a message: Bezos is busy and won't be able to talk to Him anytime soon.
Yay! Great vid. While working on the script of Jackson Wheat's video on stasis, I also wondered whether developmental constraints could play a role in stasis apart from stabilising selection. But the script was already long enough for the video, so we didn't include that. Glad you did it here.
I like to compare the evolution of a population to a big messy video game skill tree.
Skills are mutations or combinations of mutations which will spread fast in the population as soon as they are "unlocked". Some cost more to unlock, some less, dependent on how unlikely the mutation is to occur. Some skills require many other skills to be unlocked first. Some may only be available in certain environments.
There may be a skill that is extremely hard to get access to but as soon as you do, it opens up tons of new skills, some of which are very easy to unlock. That would be a case of punctuated equilirbium.
Sure, it's just an analogy and it may not be perfect but I think it's a interesting way to visualize it.
Well done Sir! Thank you for taking the time.
It's great that you take your time to educate!
Makes you realise how many critics of Gould never bothered to read Gould.
This is all explained in his essays written for a non-specialist audience - I can understand creationists not reading them, but Dawkins and Dennett?
dawins is a right wing person. lewontin and gould were left wing. they hated each others guts. scientists don't like to air dirty laundry, but there is a lot of dirty laundry in science.
dawkins is also not an original scientist. he popularizes the ideas of hamilton and williams, and williams often didn't agree with his oversimplifications.
This video is the perfect version of, "I walked into a discussion on a topic about which I have a minimal understanding, but had to absorb."
Yeah, I remember Dawkins saying that in the epilogue of The Ancestor’s Tale. Great video.
Jackson Wheat
Your video about stasis was great too
Very disappointed to find out that I misheard you, and their names weren't actually "Eldritch and Ghoul," but anyway great and interesting video
My senior thesis was on the original Goldschmidt vs the evolutionary synthesis debate and how it was recapitulated in the punk eke debate. So I am your ideal audience.
Thank you, this was very helpful
I did not realize punctuated equilibrium was controversial. I have only a superficial knowledge of evolution but it seems reasonable if the environment changes species are under pressure to adapt. If the change reduces the population causing a genetic bottleneck "new improved" traits ought to rapidly diffuse through the population.
Seems completely logical to me !
I think the only thing that was controversial was whether it was controversial. The people that proposed it said it was new and the response was "we never thought that was wrong". But I think it was worth making the theory explicit, even it was vaguely held before then.
Thanks, PZ. I've been looking forward to this video and you did not disappoint. When you discussed Goldschmidt and hopeful monsters, I remembered Gould's essay, The Return of the Hopeful Monster, from chapter 5 of The Panda's Thumb. I read the book just after learning about Punk Eek in my archaeology grad program. I was delighted to see that the essay is online, and I just reread it with pleasure. Here's the link to the full essay: www.stephenjaygould.org/library/gould_hopeful-monsters.html
Mr Meyers, first of all: thanks for the video - I really liked it! Stasis is Data - said a German soldier in Omaha beach on C day.
It seems you are participating in an intellectual debate with creationists; or is this just a good explanation that treats creationists respectfully? Either way, I find this commendable action!
-----
I found your 'about me' video, Prof. Meyers. And that cleared my doubts - a very commendable behavior, indeed!
-----
As you probably know, in System Optimization, engineers and mathematicians use the technique called Genetic Programing or Genetic Algorithms that try to replicate natural selection in an abstract universe. There's nothing physical (at least most of the time) and the selection is made based on the optimization goal. Do you know if someone has published a work based on observing how evolution occurs in those models with observed data about evolution? Thanks!
One more question: Is Cladogenesis basically aboot Curling? ... you know, pandemic, 7 months at home ... one needs to keep the good humor up. The quality of the jokes suffer, though.
Once again, thanks for the video - I'm trying to learn about punctuated equilibrium.
Evolution has given some mammals more "limbs". Certain kangaroos get significant force from their tail in jumping, more than from their legs, making it effectively another leg. Some species have effectively turned their tails into another "arm", and elephants have turned their nose into an "arm". It seems like if four wasn't a decent number of limbs, those evolutionary lines would be more dominant, instead of our ancestors losing tails all together. Millipedes have more legs, but I think scale makes far more of a difference there.
Gould was a great scientist, like Lewontin. He's controversial because of his politics, his personality (even many of his allies don't seem to have liked him), his lack of fairness to the other side (as editor), and because many biologists are not terribly intellectual and are basically center right people scared of any one too far left.
Excelent video, it's now part of my countercreationism arsenal.
Sounds pretty logical that most of the random gene mutations just don´t do much until something useful shows up. Also it is interesting when you think about us doing it whit agriculture.
I think what you have here is very harsh evolutionary change when either the environment abruptly changes or, more significantly, when the gradual changes built up over millions of years reach some kind of breaking point where something that already exists can undergo sharp directional selection into a completely novel form and so profoundly disrupts this system that has been stretched to its limits as to completely overturn it with novel developments, even in raw, unrefined form. Is this not a pattern we see everywhere even in other fields? There have been plenty of events in history where something changed very gradually for hundreds of years and very slowly, reached some point of limit and began to stagnate, before some element made very sharp but very harsh and crude changes that destabilized this equilibrium with a new order.
AWESOME !!!!!!
Wouldn't things like sharks, alligators, and other species that are, essentially, identical to their fossil ancestors, be direct evidence of punctuated evolution in those species? Also, given the dramatic evolutionary changes within other species during the same period,isn't this indicatory of the fact that not all species follow the same patterns / rates of morphological changes? At this point much of this has to be a case of QED, surely?
Have you ever looked at shark phylogeny? It's a great big complicated branchy mess with all kinds of variants. It's like looking at mammals and saying "gosh, they haven't changed a bit since the Permian."
Okay, maybe sharks aren't the best example. This I will happily concede; given they, like alligators, were an example taken off the top of my head at short notice. The point I was obviously making, as you also raised in the video, is that there are current species that are still morphologically the same as their fossil ancestors, while other animals have been through many such changes during the same time period - and that includes many of the variants within their species.
I think your point is valid, you just need a better example. The Coelacanth only changed a little bit and shows just some limited variety in 400 million years. It changed, but other species changed a lot more in just 50 thousand years than this one did in 400 million years.
Uh, no. Coelacanths have changed a lot -- from freshwater to marine, for instance.
Do you know better examples? For vertebrate animals, i could not find a better example. The pelican did not change much for 35-40 million years, but that is a 10 times shorter time period. If you think our examples are not good, suggest better ones.
Yessss!!
Well done! Lies last forever, unfortunately.
I'm having a problem sinking my teeth on Macroevolution ... why, God! Why won't Amazon ship the book to Brazil?
God just sent me a message: Bezos is busy and won't be able to talk to Him anytime soon.
Darwinism doesnt explain saltations.