"If we want to know how objects fall, though, we shouldn't ask people with the socially-awarded status of authority, we should look at falling things - like bricks."

But now we don't do much of that, we read physics books and work out the homework. There isn't time to repeat all the experiments. When it comes to supercolliders etc it would take years to work out the math and deal with the confounding variables and such.

xoc, the names of commenters are at the bottom of their comments, not the top. The commenter you were responding to was actually Buzzcut, not Eliezer.

Buzzcut, if you pay more for water than you do for gasoline, I want to suggest you find a cheaper source for your water. I can buy certified water in gallon jugs for not much over $1/gallon, but gasoline here is $3/gallon. I can get water cheaper in larger quantities, and I could buy a cheaper brand but then I find myself wondering about the certification. Kind of like buying the cheapest gasoline....

Reinforcement learning isn't trivial, but it might be kind of modular. Evolution doesn't have to create reinforcement learning from scratch every time, it can re-use the existing structures and just hook in new inputs.

Learning takes a lot of overhead. Much less overhead if you can simply be born knowing what you need to know, instinctively. Konrad Lorenz believed that instincts somehow develop out of learned behavior. He looked at related species where one had an instinctual behavior and the other had to learn the same behavior. It takes so long to learn instincts by mutation and selection, it's intuitively obvious that learning should come first and then be replaced by instinct over time. But Lorenz didn't propose a mechanism for that to happen and I don't know a mechanism either.

We do so much less instinct than other animals that I'm tempted to think we haven't spent much time in consistent predictable environments. Maybe we've always lived by disrupting ecosystems and surviving in the chaos -- a role we would manage better than animals that do less flexible thinking.

A long time ago I read a newspaper article which claimed that a Harvard psychological research project had women chew up chocolate and spit it out, while looking in a mirror and connected to some sort of electrodes. They claimed that after that the women didn't like chocolate much.

I tried it without the electrodes. I got a 2 pound bag of M&Ms. I usually didn't buy M&Ms because no matter how many I got they'd be gone in a couple of days. I started chewing them and spitting them out. Every now and then I'd rinse out my mouth with water and the flavor would be much more intense after that. I got all the wonderful taste of the M&Ms but I didn't swallow.

I did that for 15 minutes a day for 3 days. After that I didn't much like chocolate, and it took more than a year before I gradually started eating it again.

I think the esthetic pleasure of chocolate must have a strong digestive component.

I first read about adaptive radiation in 1965 or so, I believe it was in Ralph Buchbaum's _Basic Ecology_. Or maybe it was World Book encyclopedia. It said that we get lots of speciation events right after a big extinction event, and then they slow down for a long time. You say that this is a special case. Because somebody hypothesised that it had something to do with genetic drift, while nobody hypothesised that PE had anything to do with genetic drift?

There is nothing you have described about PE that isn't true about adaptive radiation. Can you say what's special about PE? The fossil record already showed us that we got long periods of stasis in hard-parts, that was not a new observation. Did Gould perhaps suggest a new reason for the stasis, one that the population ecologists hadn't already stated?

I could easily be wrong that there's nothing here that's important and new. But you have said nothing to show what that something might be, or why it's important. If it's one of the fundamentally important things, why can't you say simply what's new and important about it?

Is it actually such a complicated idea that you can't explain the fundamentals in a short post?

"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."

Mr. Rosser, This definition is very much like that in Wikipedia, true. As stated, it follows directly from observed adaptive radiation -- which has had explanations involving genetic drift. There is nothing new in this definition. It is not a new observation. Tnere is no new idea expressed here beyond the old observation. This is a pretty shiny packaged christmas present with nothing in it.

Can you state a definition that shows what's special about punctuated equilibrium? If you can't, then there's no reason to think you understand it.

I looked at your economics homepage. I think you're studying a fascinating specialty and I wouldn't be at all surprised if I learn interesting and useful things as I read your publications. Thank you for the link.

'Would "innovation" in genetic error correction, or changes to the proteins responsible for allowing greater or fewer mutations in DNA...'

'...would such "meta-changes" (changes to the mechanisms of DNA replication) be the basis for group selection?'

If they can't interbreed, then you get selection like that between two different clones of bacteria. Either the better species survives, or they both survive in their own ecological niches.

If they can interbreed then you might get evolution by group selection but it isn't the way to bet. You'd want a specific case for a particular gene.

'If not this, how did "innovations" to DNA error correction and selection for the different rules about how many mutations to allow in DNA copying even form in the first place?'

Given alternative genes that result in alternative behaviors (either from different enzymes or different regulation of those enzymes or something else) -- the one that works better results in its individuals outcompeting other individuals. That's what natural selection involves. The way you know it's fitter is that the gene frequency increases. We hope that on average things that increase gene frequency also improve survival of the individuals that carry them, and improve survival of the population. But there are examples otherwise.

Sometimes genes can increase because of selection among groups. This can happen but it's a complication that tends not to happen.

How does a mutation in a gene for mutation rate get changed in a population? When it starts out it's outnumbered a hundred million to one. The first favorable mutation that happens will almost certainly be among one of those hundred million and not in the single mutant.

And further, given mutations that are all about as good, the first one to get established gets the lion's share of the results. However, in a large population the mutation that makes a better mutation rate will happen occasionally in individuals that have a favorable mutation, and will spread with them. In the absence of selection against it, it will reach a fluctuating equilibrium for that reason. And this subpopulation will mutate at a better rate, and the result is that it will increase some with each population changeover. With each changeover the better mutation-rate mutants will tend to increase at the expense of the worse mutation-rate variants. Slow but reasonably sure, given a large population.

It's possible for genes to evolve that regulate things like mutation rate. They might increase the rate or decrease it according to whatever cues seem to work well on average. Selection can work to let populations evolve faster, and it's selection on indvidual genes (or combinations of genes) that does it.

It's possible to get genes that improve the survival of groups. But unless they spread they have limited chance to improve group survival.

Barkley, you have given us no idea what idea it is you say is so important.

Is your claim that what it means is that there are some times when evolution of bony parts is fast, and other times when it is slow? That follows directly from "adaptive radiation", which has been known for a very long time and which suggests a reason. Nothing new there.

If it's such an important idea surely you can tell us what it means. Take all the time you want. Don't worry about it scrolling off, we'll wait for you.

At this point the argument isn't whether PE is important. The question is whether you know what it says. We can talk about how important it is after you show us you know what it means.

Douglas, I don't claim that Gould's theory was wrong or unimportant. I claim that Gould's theory was incoherent to the point that there's no way to tell whether it was wrong or unimportant.

It's like deciding whether a horoscope or a Rorschach test is wrong or unimportant.

Eldredge's theory of Punctuated Equilibrium was unimportant. Eldredge explained it well enough to see what he was saying. Gould apparently was talking about something else.

"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."

That's it? But we've known about adaptive radiation for a very long time. What's the new idea here, beyond this obvious observation?

I didn't quote those three to say they were important new ideas, I quoted them to give an idea what sort of explanation I'd accept. Reasonably short, showing what it was about, leaving out caveats and exceptions etc.

You haven't begun to show what Punctuated Equilibrium was about. I don't think it can be explained simply because there isn't a central new idea there.