Life as Evolving Software... (Chaitin) (Humans)

by xeno6696 , Sonoran Desert, Saturday, December 24, 2011, 15:04 (4517 days ago) @ David Turell

Paleontologists have paid an exorbitant price for Darwin’s argument. We fancy ourselves as the only true students of life’s history, yet to preserve our favored account of evolution by natural selection we view our data as so bad that we never see the very process we profess to study.” [[Stephen Jay Gould 'Evolution's erratic pace'. Natural History, vol. LXXXVI95), May 1977, p.14.] [[HT: Answers.com]

What were his thoughts on all this in the latter part of his career? I realize he was trying hard to revitalize a relatively stable field, but none of these quotes explain why fossils are not snapshots.

I don't agree with your interpretation of Gould. From all I've read by him and about him, he consistently pointed to the gaps and the sudden appearance of new forms. Which is why I look at the whale development, and see no intermediaries, just new forms many thousands-plus years apart, each quite different. I'll look for references I can quote, but I've never read his last magnum opus.

Again, all the quotes you posted there don't give me a strong reason to consider that fossils aren't snapshots. We know that in a human lifetime, stress can kill us by giving cancer... the body's response activating things like p53.

Who says that one explanation of cancer in humans isn't genetic evolutionary processes gone awry? Who says that in previous portions of our history, that same machinery fired a branch of apes down the path towards the consciousness we have today, and that since the first of us became conscious, evolution (for us) has ceased to be down the path of physical changes?

Whales... I could buy your story if modern whales didn't have vestigial legs.

--
\"Why is it, Master, that ascetics fight with ascetics?\"

\"It is, brahmin, because of attachment to views, adherence to views, fixation on views, addiction to views, obsession with views, holding firmly to views that ascetics fight with ascetics.\"