Ah, but A is still A, no matter what any of you may say... :-).

Benquo,

You are right. I misread it. The first case is one of irrationality.

Eliezer is correct that lots of people are very bad at calculating probabilities, and there are all kinds of well known biases in calculating when affect gets involved, especially small sample biases when one is personally aware of an outlier example, especially a bad one.

However, the opening example is perfectly fine. Eliezer even has it: the higher insurance is to cover the real emotional pain of losing the more personally valued grandfather clock. How much we subjectively value something most certainly depends on the circumstances of how we obtained it. There is nothing irrational about this whatsoever. Rationality above all involves following that old advice of Polonius: know thyself.

OTOH, if they are creationists who have been reading too much Stephen Jay Gould, who knows what sorts of trouble they might get into. They might even tragically start selecting partners on multi-levels, while disobeying the correct equations, :-).

Oh, tsk tsk. But women with "creationist" brains just don't have the sort of one night stands implied by your story, at least not as often as the ones with "evolutionary" brains, :-).

Ah, finally got some real action out of you guys. Not bad.

Eliezer,

Pretty decent list. Of course, no way we are going to resolve this, especially if we are going to rule out such "objective" measures as citations, where indeed I suspect p.e. will beat most of those. Also, there is the complication that several of those are really extensions of each other, such as Price's equation providing conditions for multi-level evolution, which is also partly connected to reciprocal altruism, not to mention that the since the gene's-eye view tends to imply gradualism, which is hardly dead, p.e. challenges it.

J Thomas,

I would agree that it is of the greatest importance to palenotologists. One importance of p.e., ironically, is that although creationists sometimes tried to use Gould's arguments against evolution, p.e. provides an answer to the old creationist gibe about "where are all the missing links?" (although somehow those folks conveniently ignore good old Archeopteryx somehow).

J Thomas,

So, we are running in circles. Adaptive radiation is just a special case of the more general phenomenon, although it might not be if the rate of change/speciation continues rapidly without convergence to some equilibrium. Adaptive radiation was described in Darwin, without the term, and in some later editions he did note the variabilty of rates of evolution, although he did not exress the idea that much speciation would occur very rapidly followed by long periods of substantial stasis. This idea is never stated anywhere in Origin of the Species, nor does it appear in any writings prior to Eldredge and Gould.

One could say that what is involved here is the stating of a hypothesis, that is then given a label. It is a much broader idea than just adaptive radiation arising from genetic drift, which is indeed something that had been described earlier, but I repeat is only a special case and does not include the crucial addendum regarding long periods of stasis. Indeed, as I noted earlier, it is this latter point that is really the new part of E and G's idea of p.e. Certainly that speciation might occur rapidly under various circumstances, especially when the general environment is changing rapidly, as for example during a Cuvierian "catastrophe" such as wiped out the dinosaurs, was noted previously. But such catastrophes are also essentially special cases, just as is adaptive radiation. It is the adding of the long periods of stasis that distinguishes the idea/hypothesis, or whatever you want to call it. But let us be clear "adaptive radiatiom" does not equal "punctuated equilibrium."

BTW, you will not find my most extensive discussions of evolutionary theory on my website. The most extended discussion appears in my 1991 book, From Catastrophe to Chaos: A General Theory of Economic Discontinuities, Kluwer, especially in Chap. 12.

Again, probably for the last time, I await from anybody an idea appearing in the last 50 years, besides coevolution, that has been more important, or perhaps more influential, than punctuated equilibrium. Without such an offering, I would say my case rests, and very solidly.

Douglas,

I am perfectly willing to buy that Gould's scientific writings are more defensible than his popular writings.

J Thomas,

In my later comment I did not repeat my earlier comment. There I had specified, "one of the top ten ideas in the last half century," not of all time. So, Weber's Law dates from the 19th century, and those of Gause and Fisher from the 1930s. Not relevant. Still waiting for someone to come up with something other than coevolutions, which, as I have already pointed out, is definitely in Darwin, if not the term, neologized by Ehrlich just as Gould and Eldredge neologized punctuated equilibrium, whereas the latter is only ephemerally in Darwin, at best, and only then in later editions of Origin of the Species.

A definition? That a substantial amount of speciation occurred during (geologically) relatively short periods of time, between which were long periods of relative stasis without actual speciation, although gradual changes were always occurring. Gould himself in TSOET emphasizes that p.e is not in contradiction with the neo-Darwinian synthesis of the 1930s and 40s. And I know from talking to some of the developers of that theory that they do not disagree with that statement of his. Rather the issue is seeing this particular outcome as widespread and important rather than as some weird sideshow not even openly discussed, much less labeled. Sorry, but Gould and Eldredge did in fact make a theoretical breakthrough of great importance. Heck, Einstein himself argued that relativity was already implicit in the work of Galileo.

windy,

You are correct about reciprocal altruism. But that does not undo the more general argument. Apologies for getting sloppy, but indeed plenty of people are taking multi-level evolution seriously. And, more to the point, it remains the case the Eliezer is simply dead wrong about the consensus of evolutionary theorists regarding the status of Gould. Again, one might as well make claims about the historical significance of Milton Friedman based on the opinions of Marxist economists. That is effectively the equivalent of what Eliezer attempted here in this post.

BTW, creationists did use Gould at a certain point based on his rhetoric criticizing "fundamentalist Darwinism" to dump on Darwinism and evolutionary theory in general. This probably did feed into the extreme annoyance by some evolutionary theorists with Gould at one point.

Caledonian,

Your distinction between altruism and the more general "group-friendly" is useful and relevant.

TGGP,

Regarding artificial selection it is worth remembering that this was one of the major examples that Darwin himself emphasized in Origin of the Species, the efficacy and effect of efforts at artificial breeding and selection by humans of both plants and animals.

I suggest reading the special issue of the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, January 2004, where the matter of multi-level evolution is dealt with at length, with some of the commentators evolutionary geneticists, mathematical ones at that, and at the highest level. The conditions for higher level selection are laid out there. Wynne-Edwards did not know these and was accurately put down by Williams in 1966. They are the Crow-Hamilton-Price equations. I suggest you read it, Eliezer, and, yes, I am the editor of the journal, the leading one in the world on evolutionary economics.