[HN Gopher] 'Evolution happens much quicker than Darwin thought'
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'Evolution happens much quicker than Darwin thought'
Author : Brajeshwar
Score : 38 points
Date : 2024-07-22 15:59 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theguardian.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theguardian.com)
| Lance_ET_Compte wrote:
| "Punctuated equilibrium."
| linearrust wrote:
| I remember seeing this posted a few days ago. When I hover over
| '8 hours ago', it shows '2024-07-22T15:59:19'. That's not 8 hours
| ago. Why is a post from 4 days ago showing as a recent post? Is
| it a title change issue?
|
| Regardless. What's the point of the article. We have known for
| decades that evolution 'can' happen much quicker than darwin
| thought. From large animals to bacteria. Not only that we know
| that 'lamarckian' epigentics exists.
| Terr_ wrote:
| There is a feature where sometimes old submissions are
| resurrected and/or merged with newer ones, and it leads to
| incorrect timestamp anchor text.
| aoki wrote:
| > What's the point of the article
|
| It's an interview with Rosemary Grant, occasioned by her new
| memoir.
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| As Terr_ said, HN has a feature that allows mods to give a post
| a second chance to get comments and upvotes.
|
| The motivation is explained here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308
|
| If you don't know about it, it can cause some head-scratching,
| as you wonder whether the prior post was just in your
| imagination:)
| Terr_ wrote:
| It's interesting to look all the modern dog breeds and think:
| "There are very few actual newly mutated genes here, we just
| encouraged different re-mixes or even un-mixing of an enormous
| variety that was already latent."
|
| (And then, for a few dog breeds: "I'm so sorry, we have much to
| answer for.")
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| There was a Russian experiment (still running after decades) to
| breed domesticated foxes starting from wild animals. The
| friendliest pups in a litter were selected for future breeding.
| Within just a few generations, the animals were tamer and even
| started to look like dog puppies.
|
| Wikipedia
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domesticated_silver_fox
| joe_the_user wrote:
| The idea that evolution isn't a gradual process of improvement
| but rather more like a dynamic system, is fairly widely accepted
| and essentially originates with Stephan Jay Gould.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punctuated_equilibrium
| wjnc wrote:
| These people did 40 years of fieldwork to prove the point.
| 'Beak of the finch' by Jonathan Wiener is a very readable story
| about their work.
| skybrian wrote:
| I'm not sure that's fair summary. It doesn't seem like they
| ruled out gradual evolution? Perhaps I'm misremembering Gould.
|
| From the Wikipedia article:
|
| > Much confusion has arisen over what proponents of punctuated
| equilibrium actually argued, what mechanisms they advocated,
| how fast the punctuations were, what taxonomic scale their
| theory applied to, how revolutionary their claims were intended
| to be, and how punctuated equilibrium related to other ideas
| like saltationism, quantum evolution, and mass extinction.
|
| But it in any case, I don't think they were talking about the
| 40-year scale. The fossil record doesn't allow paleontologists
| to see things at so fine-grained a scale.
| dwaltrip wrote:
| Contrary to some of the comments here, I found the article quite
| interesting. It, along with a paper it links to, describes a very
| cool study of rapid speciation (over a few generations) observed
| in the wild. Nice to see the guardian actually link to a paper!
| fanf2 wrote:
| Speaking as a Finch (large F) I am delighted by this study of the
| finch (small f)
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