Comments on: What is meant by “mosaic evolution” and other matters

By: Greg Laden

Greg Laden — Sun, 09 Jan 2011 19:47:35 +0000

I don’t like messing with Wikipedia directly. It requires skills I don’t have, and there is something about the consensus approach that I’m glad to see in operation there but can’t participate in. I would only engage with subjects where I’m so much more likely to be right than anyone else involved that I would have to insist that my text not be substantively changed.

Plus, I have this totally obnoxious self aggrandizing and egotistical attitude. I keep it well hidden, but it would be obvious in the Wiki context.

By: UBS

UBS — Sun, 09 Jan 2011 19:33:33 +0000

Greg: Feel free to improve the content on Wikipedia anytime. It is beneficial for all of us 🙂

By: Drivebyposter

Drivebyposter — Sat, 08 Jan 2011 12:52:54 +0000

I hate to disagree with you Greg, but Mosaic Evolution is clearly the process in which many many individual tiles slowly come together over millions of years and form a low resolution mural on a wall or floor.

By: sleeprunning

sleeprunning — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 22:22:14 +0000

Our understanding is that the term “evolution” is misleading. What is more accurate? Descent?

By: cheapweddingdress

cheapweddingdress — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 02:56:54 +0000

I have been very interested in functional languages, and I still am, I suppose, but it’s pretty obvious to me that to do the work that my company’s program does now, functional languages would be a pain. All of them. You’d need extremely skilled people to be able to use them for anything non-trivial, and even then you would have to sweat blood to do things that are easy in the languages made for our kind of software – Java and C#.

By: Greg Laden

Greg Laden — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 15:59:37 +0000

It is a possibility. But, the evidence for what the LCA looks like is pretty strong Gorillas and chimps have similarly thin enamel, both chomps and bonobos have similar enamel. The earliest australopith remains have thinner enamel than the later ones. But, we’ve been surprised before.

By: Christina

Christina — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 14:49:59 +0000

All known Australopiths dating to after 3.5 million years or so had bigger teeth and thicker enamel than a presumed chimp-like ancestor, and it does not matter that the biggest-toothed, thickest-enameled ones did not happen to be our direct ancestor. It is still true1 that tooth size went up, then down

*Can* we be sure that the ancestors of the austrolopiths increased their tooth size? Could it be, rather, that the LCA had very large teeth, and that *both* the human *and* the chimp lineage have had reductions in tooth size? Not saying that *is* the case, but it seems to me that that’s one possibility, or am I missing something?

By: Greg Laden

Greg Laden — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 13:40:35 +0000

Robert, at a certain level above the individual the web becomes much less important than the tree. You are thinking at the level of intermingling individuals within overlapping populations. Trees operate at the level of distinct lineages that are no longer interbreeding at all. (Or if they are, only very very rarely).

By: Robert S.

Robert S. — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 10:49:16 +0000

The idea of a tree of life never made a lot of sense to me. A web always seemed closer to reality. If someone could comment on the following as it sort of smacked into my brain at a hour where thoughts are either stupid or inspired, or both.

A graphing of individuals, one axis representing time,
new branches can start along another branch (parthenogenesis) or at the crossing of 2 branches, at conception, and ends at death. By definition there would be separation at the species level, and by charting boundaries you would see the so called tree of life emerge.

When a fossil is found, the best case is that you find the end of one, single, line. A huge amount has been learned from them, and more still lies in wait, but you cant find a missing link in the tree, as the tree is a convenient fiction. In reality there is a web, and in a web as diverse and interconnected as a global ecosystem, what is one missing link, or for that matter, a single found one.

By: Phillip IV

Phillip IV — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 01:12:41 +0000

Greg Laden @ #12

As a paleomammalogisgt of sorts

Paleomammalogist: from Greek palÃ¤ (old) and Latin mamma (female breast): a scientist who closely studies old female breasts