Tree of life not real (Introduction)

by dhw, Thursday, February 13, 2014, 15:58 (3914 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: New DNA studies say evolution goes back and forth in complexity through time, eventually more complex from the more simple, but a tortuous route.:-http://nautil.us/issue/9/time/evolution-youre-drunk-As Simon Conway Morris noted convergence smells of teleology.-
I don't know where convergence comes into this research, let alone teleology. Here is the conclusion:-Perhaps the fact that people are stunned whenever organisms become simpler says more about how the human mind organizes the world than about evolutionary processes. People are more comfortable envisioning increasing complexity through time instead of reversals or stasis. Physicist Sean Carroll calls humans " terrible temporal chauvinists" for this reason, because they desperately want the street from the past to the future to run in one direction. The textbook scenarios on early animal evolution might be correct, but they should be treated as hypotheses built by temporal chauvinists. When new data suggests a rearrangement, it must be considered no matter how perplexing the conclusion seems.-Casey Dunn, an evolutionary biologist at Brown University in Providence, R.I. who took part in the still-contentious comb jelly project, now doubts all notions of increasing complexity. Instead, he says the environment selects whatever form handles the challenges at hand, be it simple, complex, or plain ugly. Mother Nature, with her 4 billion years of experience, does not work like Steve Jobs, continuously designing sleeker versions. When asked whether de-evolution, a reversal from the complex to the simple, happens frequently, Dunn replies, sure. "But," he adds, "I wouldn't call that de-evolution, I'd call it evolution."
 
The utter randomness and unpredictability of the evolutionary process described here speaks of anything but an ultimate purpose, other than individual organisms constantly seeking ways of coping with an ever changing environment.-****-Thank you for this and an array of interesting articles.