Comments on: Biology Never Was The Same: Mark Borrello

By: Ron

Ron — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 13:58:50 +0000

First clone was most likely the first cutting rooted to produce another plant that was interesting. Time-frame was probably prehistoric.First genetic map? Not sure on that one.

By: Greg Laden

Greg Laden — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 09:06:21 +0000

How could the entire history of the study of evolutionary pattern and process distilled into one sentence NOT be an oversimplification????By the way, Mark’s version was only a little less oversimplified, and he explicitly stated during his talk that he expected people to complain but insisted that this was sufficient for the current pedagogical purposes of the talk. I claim the same for my blog post, dagnabbit!!!By the way, wasn’t that last round of hopeful monster talk sparked by Judson’s column? She’ll be speaking tonight at Evolution 2008. Stay tuned!!!

By: Laelaps

Laelaps — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 08:56:01 +0000

If you're really interested the early primate playback experiments using phonographs (and the debate about animal language in general) definitely check out the book The Simian Tongue. It's not light reading but it's great.I do think that the following statement is a little bit of an oversimplification, though;"Huxley warned Darwin about Darwin's gradualism, saltational (jumping) evolution emerged anyway, but was put to bed by Ernst Mayr, to be revived later by Eldridge and Gould."Proposing a quicker rate for evolution (like G.G. Simpson's "quantum evolution") does not require saltations (like Goldschmidt's "hopeful monsters.") Punk eek is about stasis and fast changes in terms of speciation, not major jumps in one generation. Regardless of whether evolution happens relatively fast or slow the process creates gradations as life changes; saltations are something entirely different. (John covered the history and meaning of the idea of "nature makes no jumps" here when the last round of hopeful monster debate broke out.)

By: Greg Laden

Greg Laden — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 08:41:09 +0000

I have messed with the offending comment. Click on the links, see what happens…

By: Elizabeth

Elizabeth — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 08:32:37 +0000

What a shame to have this spam on this particular post.

By: felizkrilll

felizkrilll — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 00:53:16 +0000

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