Wesley R. Elsberry
Posts: 4991 Joined: May 2002
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Quote | What then, is your position on the lack of evidence in the fossil record for gradualism?
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What meaning of "gradualism" are you interested in? Might it be the "phyletic gradualism" described by Eldredge and Gould in 1972?
Quote | In this Darwinian perspective, paleontology formulated its picture for the origin of new taxa. This picture, though rarely articulated, is familiar to all of us. We refer to it here as “phyletic gradualism” and identify the following as its tenets:
(1) New species arise by the transformation of an ancestral population into its modified descendants.
(2) The transformation is even and slow.
(3) The transformation involves large numbers, usually the entire ancestral population.
(4) The transformation occurs over all or a large part of the ancestral species’ geographic range.
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-------------- "You can't teach an old dogma new tricks." - Dorothy Parker
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