Re: Rapid Lizard Evo

[Adam <adam@crowlspace.com>]

Hi Dan/ns

Good points both (tho one we will leave alone.) Lynn Caporale's work on 
Darwinism in the genome seems to imply that genes have evolved for 
"evolvability", thus allowing - if not actively accelerating - mutation 
in some parts of genes when an organism faces environmental stresses. 
With all that we are learning about epigenetics and how a mother can 
"prime" gene switches in her children, and what that implies for the 
Baldwin effect's rapidity in "fixing" new behaviours, well... evolution 
is a lot more than mere passive change of gene frequencies. But I guess 
we kind of knew that all along.

Adam

Dann Pigdon wrote:

> Dan Chure writes:
>
> > Of course, the argument to be made from this, in some circles, will 
> > be that evolution does not take millions of years to occur and this 
> > is in line with a young Earth.  Phenotypic plasticity is meaningless 
> > to the general public and will sound like a scientific coverup.
>
>
> One of the worst generalisations about evolution is that it mostly 
> involves random genetic mutations over long periods of time. I suspect 
> that random mutation plays only a very small part in the evolutionary 
> process, and that other processes (recombination, RNA interferance, 
> learned behaviour, to name a few) provide far more fodder for natural 
> selection to act on, and on a much smaller time scale.
> Relying on random mutation is fine, as long as those mutations are 
> actually beneficial (which most aren't), and as long as your 
> environment doesn't change faster than *beneficial* random mutation 
> can keep up with (which it almost certainly will). Otherwise you'd 
> better have some short-term backup plans just in case.