Inference and its role in NS (General)

by David Turell , Sunday, January 16, 2011, 21:04 (5058 days ago) @ xeno6696


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> > http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-11063939
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> There's an evolution simulator I've run in the past, and when an organism first jumps into an environment where it can flourish, it takes over rapidly. Differentiation then becomes an issue within the groups as resources become scarce; this usually leaves to dietary changes and/or exploration of new environments. Which makes sense--even among human beings we try to avoid combat (competition) as a first response and try other alternatives first. 
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> This is a great article, but I honestly thought that this idea was clearly intuitive and well-explored...-Your description above fits punctuated equilibrium, which is Gould's point of view not Darwin's. Obviously, there are several types of competition: for lebensraum with other organisms allowing rapid advance and differentiation when space is made available, and then with crowding, intraspecies competition as well as interspecies competition. The competition drives differentiation. The winners are chosen through the competition and Darwin calls it natural selection. NS is totally passsive. The genome drives the differentiation. That is why the epigenetic discoveries are so important. It removes the other passive aspect of Darwin's theory: waiting for chance mutations.