Daniel Smith
Posts: 970
Joined: Sep. 2007
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| Quote (Reciprocating Bill @ Feb. 23 2009,15:08) | | Quote (mitschlag @ Feb. 23 2009,17:21) | | I have bolded sections that trouble me. Can you guess why I'm troubled? |
What I find interesting in these passages, and the above juxtaposition of Schindewolfe and Stephen Jay Gould, is that one of Gould's abiding interests was the impact of developmental constraints upon the course of evolution - as distinct from panadaptionists who attribute to natural selection the ability to sculpt any form. He argued that species do, in fact, sometimes become constrained to follow certain evolutionary pathways once committed to those pathways - not by dint of such a pathway being fore-ordained, but rather as a result of commitment to a developmental plan that limited the options for further evolution. He was one of the first to recognize the importance of evo-devo in providing both opportunities and constraints in the large scale patterns observed in evolution, a recognition displayed in his 1985 book Ontogeny and Phylogeny. This was certainly a major theme of The Brick.
Many of the patterns that Schindewolfe attributed to "planning" are much more elegantly explained by these ideas. Ironically, this is also the theme of his essay and book "The Panda's Thumb." Seems to me there is a blog that borrowed that title.
Daniel, if you weren't wedded to placing conclusion before evidence, and were really interested in understanding the history of life, particularly large scale patterns such as identified but misattributed by Schindewolfe, you would find Gould a very interesting read.
[developmentally constrained edits] |
Bill,
Perhaps if you knew a bit more about Schindewolf, you'd appreciate where Gould got his ideas from (see above).
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"If we all worked on the assumption that what is accepted as true is really true, there would be little hope of advance." Orville Wright
"The presence or absence of a creative super-intelligence is unequivocally a scientific question." Richard Dawkins
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