Evolution Message Board - Msg: 22558010

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Politics : Evolution

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To: LLCF who wrote (1438)	6/20/2006 10:12:02 AM
From: TigerPaw	Read Replies (1) of 69300

As Gould and Eldridge pointed out in their theory of Punctuated Equilibrium (and extension of natural selection), random selection lead to periods in which there is no great change to the species involved. To use the horse example again: Once horses evolve to the point that they fit well into their niche, then small changes are not likely to be reliably selected for the same characteristic. If a horse is just a tiny bit faster than most of the other horses then it will only make a tiny difference in whether it is the one caught by a mountain lion. It is much more likely to be decided by which horse happened to be closer to the lion, or stepped in an unseen ground-squirrel burrow, or some other nearly random factor. It's even more likely that the horse that is getting old is the one caught, and given enough time all the horses get old. So it is normal for a species to enter periods in which they barely change at all. Tiny differences are not selected overwhelmingly in the same direction and so the genes are swamped by sheer numbers of genes in the herd as a whole. The species reaches equilibrium.

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