i actually enjoy these little blurbs. i'm always like "dude! i studied that in biology class!" and i understand it completly.
Nate Dogg... "life is hard. But its one helluva lot harder if you're stupid"- -John Wayne

-i jus found it interesting and a view i hadn't heard expressed before, but had wondered about. i enjoyed the discussion or lecture on this view
http://www.pgholyfield.com/maah/

Dude, come on. It doesn't "pick up the right things," it cuts them off of rocks and glues them onto its claws. How many random crabs doing random things -- and SURVIVING -- does it take before this becomes a strategy that impacts survival?

And do find that information about the Anglerfish's evolution. I'd love to hear about it. Because to say an isolated fin-spine that looks like a fish is a "small change" is akin to saying it's a "small change" that led to the cuttlefish being able to make lightshows with its skin, or an octopus to change its skin color AND texture to perfectly mimic its surroundings, or a sea turtle to engineer a nest that happens to collapse at exactly the time the eggs are hatching, or the "small changes" that led from gliding to self-powered flight, or ...

Yeah. Small changes.

in Heaven and Earth than are dreamed of in your philosophy" 

SynapticJam on Toast - hhhmmm... tastes like chicken (aka PUVJK)

-evoluionary leaps are just that, leaps, some evolutionary changes are gradual, some are leaps ahead in change and behavior. i cannot remember exactly how it works (been awhile since i got that degree) so some small changes do happen over time that accummulate and seem like a major change and some are a major change that just happens over a short period of time, so mr. boxer crab may have developed this behavior over time or it happened within a couple of generations. look at dawins work on gallapados isle. the finches that use tools to get insects. lizards that returned to the sea to eat, these are behaviors that are both learned and passed on as "instincts" ... evolution, it's real, it's here
so the angler fishes adaption could have happened with a couple of generations and the offspring that have the trait that is survival good live to pass on this trait until they are the only variety of the species to survive.

scott, you do good science, when are people gonna see that??
http://www.pgholyfield.com/maah/

Scott, I've loved this book since day one. I was hooked then and I'm hooked now...

But I've got to say, the evolutionary rant by Mason was less than clear on, at least, my understanding of how evolution works.

My main beef is that you can't talk about evolutionary timescales the way you talk about human timescales. Evolution takes ever so much longer... not a few generations but a few hundred, or thousand generations. Million? When you talk about slow changes, you're talking really, really slow changes.

That's what the small changes thing is about. The anglerfish's appendage from the dorsal fin didn't happen overnight... it happened over a million years, or more. A tiny change in the fin gives that fish a tiny edge, it gets more to eat and has 2 more children than those around it. That is a small change, but multiply that by a million (the time frame we are looking at) and I think you can see how those small changes, stacked on top of one another year after year over a million years and you could get something that looks like the anglerfish.

Instinct is a set of behaviors built over this kind of time frame and that is what separates it from memory. Here's a simplified (and fictionalized... I have no way of knowing if this is the way it happened) description of how instinctual behavior is built. A bird has a preference for sitting on a brown branch... just a built in preference for brown over gray, and it fits in more than the one that likes gray, and survives because it has brown feathers, and it passes that trait to her childen. Then one year there is a disease, and all the large branches where the bird would sit have turned gray, so the bird takes small brown sticks and puts them on the branch to make it look brown,and this has the added benefit of holding the eggs better, keeping them safer, and so more of that bird's children survive. A thousand years go by and now most of the birds put brown sticks together into just a basic "nest", but, of course, those who put the nest together more carefully, those who have an eye for making more of a "bowl" than a "raft" have even more of their children survive, and anotehr 10,000 years go by and now all of these birds make nests like we know them. The instinct is not put together like a memory, but a series of short traits, built in preferences, that when stacked, one after another over a million years, creates a complex behavior pattern that doesn't seem possible without something like memory. But it is only like memory in that it is a recorded set of patterns... but that recording is in the DNA and not in the brain.

All of Mason's speech was talking about these things as if they happened in a few generations... that one day the crab just put the stuff on his claw, but it doesn't work that way, and just because you can't see the benefits of the small changes between the before and after,they are there, and one benefit might lead to a surprisingly different benefit later on (like looking for the brown sticks above leading to the benefits of a nest... or maybe sexual display behavior, evolved over time might lead to a crab putting an anenemy on his claw and gaining the benefit of protection as well).

I do love your writing, Scott, and usually your science, but this was...problematic science at best.

-the instinct to pick up the stick would a trait, how to use it would be learned.
http://www.pgholyfield.com/maah/

-we do not have the capability to observe it in action ove larger amounts of time. in the geologic record, evolution has been seen to happen over long periods of time and shorter ones. it depends on the isolation of the traits from the general population and how successfull the trait is over time. some traits are more successfull than other and are incorperated faster (a few million years as opposed to 10's of millions, or even faster) a crabs natural defensive behavoir is to jut their pinchers in their opponents face, one group of eggs lead to a generation of crabs putting anenomies on their pinchers. this would have been a genitic mutation (a combination of genitic mutations can occur in one generation or several to perfect this trait), which would have lead to more successfull breeding, and more of the crabs offsprings who kept this trait would have out lived the ones who did not get it. those with the trait would have bred more successfull offspring and quickly have taken over the species.
anyway, this is all speculation on our part anyway, since we cannot observe this type of change first hand.
http://www.pgholyfield.com/maah/

this thread certainly is some light reading.  

I would say this thread is for the intelligent people amongst us. 

[1st Dutch junkie] All that matters is getting my fix.

His story, his rules.  I must defend the FDO's use of science.  It made sense to me. My hypothesis is that there are those among the Junkies who simply can't wrap their minds around the quantum leap in evolutionary theory that the FDO is describing.  It is NOT a question of intelligence! It is a question of a mind simply not accepting what is put before it due to the sheer horror that acceptance wiuld require.

Now that that is out of the way, where do I sign up for my random mutation? I always loved rolling up mutants and mutated animals in Gamma World.

-
http://www.pgholyfield.com/maah/

• "We may have days, we may have hours. But sooner or later, we all push up flowers..." -Grim Fandango

-just pointing out the obvious
http://www.pgholyfield.com/maah/

Cardinal to Pope Siglericus XXX

is a disturbing image....
Nate Dogg (#8 crackhits if SOMEONE doesn't keep trying to pass me)... "life is hard. But its one helluva lot harder if you're stupid"- -John Wayne

the theory of punctuated equalibrium??
Nate Dogg (#8 crackhits if SOMEONE doesn't keep trying to pass me)... "life is hard. But its one helluva lot harder if you're stupid"- -John Wayne

that since the nocturnals breed in such a small population, that excellartes the evolution. though i could be (and probably am) wrong...
Nate Dogg (#8 crackhits if SOMEONE doesn't keep trying to pass me)... "life is hard. But its one helluva lot harder if you're stupid"- -John Wayne

"Then one year there is a disease, and all the large branches where the bird would sit have turned gray, so the bird takes small brown sticks and puts them on the branch to make it look brown,and this has the added benefit of holding the eggs better, keeping them safer, and so more of that bird's children survive."

Dude, get your head out of the established doctrine and look at the obvious logic of what you wrote. At what point does a random gathering of sticks provide any protection for the eggs? First of all, the act of collecting the sticks is NEW, because before, the bird wasn't collecting anything, it simply showed a preference for a certain color habitat. For the bird to recognize the habitat change, then go collect material to re-engineer its habitat is a MAJOR change in behavior. And since you chose a behavioral change for your example, it reinforces my argument: new behaviors are passed down and become instinct. That's the point of the rant -- new behaviors provide survival advantages, and those behaviors are passed down, therefore, there is some way to change what is coded in the germline DNA. Granted, the vast majority of changes are random mutation, but some adaptations are so utterly severe that one has to wonder how they could occur through "multiple small changes."

Please try another example, because this one is very, very weak - no offense, but you can't jump from "collecting sticks" to having something that provides an engineered survival advantage, because the advantage of the interim states needs to be significantly higher than the birds that do not have this interim survival advantage.

And going back to the Angler fish - please, tell me what the INTERIM benefits are of the small changes of a single dorsal spine moving from the fin to the head. Of course it's slow, with small changes: but the examples I've given provide zero survival advantage from the interim state to the final, advantageous stats. For each interim state to be passed on (over the millions of years you described), there needs to be some advantage, or the minor changes would be blended into the population and likely lost.

And let's talk about the crab. What are the small states that lead to such a unique surival advantage? For the small states to be passed on, they each need to provide some advantage for survival or attraction to mates.

Having actually studied evolutionary systematics in college (even though that was a long time ago in a galaxy far far away)... I can actually babble about the subject some.

Population diversity:

A diverse population is required to survive environmental changes.  This is what Darwin observed in the Finch population of the Gallapagos.  The finches had 3 different beak types, thin long beak, medium beak, and large blunt beak.  A drought hit.  Those with the thin long beaks could get at insects inside plants (think, woodpecker).  The large blunt beaks could crack open shell fish.  The medium beaks died out from lack of food.  That study happened while Darwin was on the island observing it -- not over a few hundred millions of years.

That is why there is concern over a genetic "bottleneck" -- where the diversity of a species is not sufficient enough to survive an environmental catastrophe.  This likely helped with the creation of the "endangered species list".

Within the past few years, there was a discovery that a naturally-enough occuring protein acted as a hormone and caused the same mutation across fish, mammal, and birds.  From the context of small changes over millions of years evolution, that means the diversity/adaptability/new-trait was given on a "whim" -- "overnight".  That particular enzyme is used to increase jaw bone growth size -- and, as I stated, does so across a wide species line (fish, birds, & mammals).  They still do not know what else is out there to be discovered that could cause other viable "mutation" effects.

What really makes one think, though....

Chromosomal mutations are typically fatal.  About the only one people are familiar with in humans is Down's syndrome -- and I think it was the only non-fatal one.  The genomic pairing of the 23 (female) + 23 (male) for 46 chromosomes does not offer genetic (chromosomal) variability.  Even if one did get an extra chromosome, the resultant birth is typically fatal or does not find a mate within the species to procreate (if procreation is actually possible -- sterility is almost a guarantee).  As far as I know, and I have been waiting to observe any results to counter this, evolution does not allow for chromosomal counts to change.

To put it a different way.  Chromosomal changes are not driven by normal evolutionary means.

That means there had to be an "Ancestor" with the 46 chromosomes we currently have.  Likewise, for any organism, there had to be an "ancestor" that has just as many chromosomes as the finished, current/modern, organism.  Now the species and organisms may have been different throughout history -- but the number of chromosomes does not offer a viable scheme for "change".... and chromosomal changes had to have happened.  "How" has been a big question for a long time.

Even if a chromosomal change happened, that new organism (there is only one) would have to be compatible enough to mate and reproduce with the previous (parent-species) organism.  If the chromosomal change is not dominant, it would be bred out.  If the enough of a population diversity was not created, it would become extinct (flu/drought/etc).  There also would have to be some mechanism to prevent "common" birth defects of mating within the new species.

Extensively studying evolution, evolutionary systematics, and how chromosomal changes would not be viable under those "rules" -- leads one to think there was something more than evolution involved with the species of the world.  I may sound kind of off; but consider, Darwin -was- an agnostic that believed in a "personal God".

As was obvious to me in my studies, there is something "missing" in the theories to describe how chromosomal shifts can occur and produce a viable offspring-species.

Scott offers a viable theory, external dominant (or recessive) chromosomes introduced into the mix by breeding with other similar species.  External sources probably have a higher chance of producing a viable chromosomal shift in organisms than random chromosomal mutations.

Scott's theory with the chromosomes is even demonstrated in horse + donkey = mule.  Donkey's have 62 chromosomes, horses have 64 chromosomes.  Mules (the offspring) are almost always sterile and have 63 chromosomes (my point, the chromosomal shifts do not produce enough diversity & enough viability).

Regardless, there is a BIG gap of knowledge in how chromosomal shifts happen in species and in evolution.  Or at least, there was -- I usually look for articles on it and am waiting to find one.

Oh, and Scott's theory for Ancestor is one of my favorites.

I was able to read this without wanting a drink... no... wait a minute... I DO want a drink... just not from this...  10 crack hits to YOU!

SynapticJam on Toast - hhhmmm... tastes like chicken (aka PUVJK)