Innovation and Speciation: whale changes (Evolution)

by David Turell , Monday, May 29, 2017, 14:44 (2734 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: My further thought from yesterday: Sunday, May 28, 2017, 02:47 I don't think 'improvement' and 'complexity' carry the same theoretical implications.

dhw: I have listed the three stages in order to stop you once and for all harping on about speciation not being required. We have agreed that it is the drive for improvement/complexity that leads organisms to take advantage of new opportunities. Whether it is one or the other makes no difference to that particular argument.

You have completely skipped over my examples (recently minor spine changes within a species) without demonstrable 'improvement'. I gave a long discussion that improvement/complexity are not equal concepts. The whale series is certainly explained more easily as an odd branch pursuing complexity for complexity's sake. So I don't accept your I/C equivalence. They are not.

dhw: Complexity just for the sake of complexity does not seem as purposeful to me as complexity for the sake of improvement.

Complexity will generally lead to improvements but not will the same sense of purposefulness as in your thoughts.

dhw: But so long as we agree that there is a drive which explains why speciation took place though it was not required by environmental change, I’m not that bothered.

Nor I, and it allows for speciation first without environmental change.

DAVID: No. my Cambrian example is the correct interpretation. Environmental change offers an opportunity nothing more, and in that sense is an initiator.

dhw: Just in case you have forgotten, your final version and mine now reads: the drive for improvement/complexity is set in motion by environmental change (the initiator), and then uses the new opportunity.

We are not together. Speciation an precede environmental change. We just had a discussion about already existing hominins taking advance of climate change in Africa as it happened (less trees, more grasses).