J_Thomas2 comments on Beware of Stephen J. Gould - Less Wrong

27 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 06 November 2007 05:22AM

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Comment author: J_Thomas2 11 November 2007 05:55:00PM 6 points [-]

We still haven't heard anything about what PE says that's new or interesting. I can't agree that arguments against creationists is that big a deal.

OK, it could be somehow important to paleontologists. But paleontologists have known all along that skeletal morphology is mostly fixed. After all, a species that has particularly variable morphology is likely to be classified as multiple species. And so the dog that didn't bark in the night is that when you look at the bones from one species they seldom show slow gradual directional change over the lifetime of the species. Who would have predicted that they would?

Here is a simple ascii art story.

When a mutation spreads through the population through selection, you can usually expect it to increase logisticly.

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How would this graph look if you took only a few samples for each timepoint and compressed the scale?

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There's nothing profound about this.