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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Neocon who wrote (24972)	7/20/2000 11:36:57 AM
From: TigerPaw	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769668

You've touched into several areas which are beyond the basics. likely to change before there is a clear selecting out of the trait. Species tend to be very stable over time. Let me digress a bit. Many critisisms of evolution poke some holes in Darwin's original writings. Darwin tried to fit his theory into the accepted age of the earth, about 10-100 million years (based on Lord Kelvin's estimate of how long it would take a molten mass to cool to the current temperature of the earth). Of course now we know that radioactivity threw that estimate out the window with the earth stabilizing at approximately the current temperature 4 billion years ago. Darwin had never heard of the Mendelian concept of genes much less the mechanism of DNA. He also dismissed the idea that the continents could have been connected either by land bridges, ice bridges, or my moving around in the oceans. can turn into something ... , I doubt that several will do. The genetics of this planet are arranged to keep species stable. The general algorythm is to make the next generation a close copy of the current one. While new genes may appear they will become diluted in the general population. For the most part sex eliminates variations since two copies of the genes are matched before an offspring is produced (of course it can't be an exact match, so some mixing occurs which allows minor traits to continue in the population). The digital nature of DNA makes the copy process quite accurate. The net result is that the next generation on the whole is very much like the current generation. This is refered to as equilibrium. Darwin proposed continuous change, otherwise there would not be enough time to fit all the varieties and species into his tens of millions of year timetable. He also proposed a higher rate of change more consistent with an analog reproduction scheme (He proposed genes could not copy exact and therefore mutated a bit with each generation). We now know that significant change to a species is the result of the more extreme selections. Humans are unusual. Absolutely. This is why I drag meme theory in now and then. At it's core evolution is about the the reproduction and accumulation of information. Until humans the only effective method was the storage of information in DNA chains and it's only expression was through protean chains. Human survival is affected by information stored not only in tissue and brains, but by books and songs and other long term storage. Humans do play by different rules and even change the rules for the other creatures in their environment. TP