Re: Gould's PE

John Harshman <jharshman.diespamdie@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

John Wilkins wrote:

John Harshman <jharshman.diespamdie@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:


John Wilkins wrote:


John Harshman <jharshman.diespamdie@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:



Davej wrote:



In what book or publication did Gould best describe his ideas
regarding punctuation and stasis?

That would be in The Structure of Evolutionary Theory.



Were his ideas on PE truly original?

Ernst Mayr would have said not (and in fact did say not), but he's
dead too.


George G. Simpson also held that he came up with it first, in the later
introduction to the reissue of Tempo and Mode in Evolution.

I now retract that claim.

But I hold that the first person to put forward a PE theory was Pierre
Tremaux in 1865. I have a paper in preparation on that.

What, in your mind, constitutes the definition of "a PE theory"? My
contention would be that it's the idea that most phenotypic evolution is
coincident with speciation, and that some force generally prevents
phenotypic evolution from happening at other times.

Did Tremaux's theory fit that definition?

[snip]


Yes, absolutely. Tremaux says that change occurs when a population finds
itself in a new habitat ("sol") from natural selection, and that
interbreeding ("croisement") thereafter prevents it changing whilst in
that habitat.

That does sound like a PE sort of thing. How exactly is interbreeding
supposed to prevent change? Blending inheritance?

Yes, in Tremaux's case, exactly that. Averaging keeps a local population
(he calls it a "colony") at the adaptive peak.
--
John S. Wilkins, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Philosophy
University of Queensland - Blog: scienceblogs.com/evolvingthoughts
"He used... sarcasm. He knew all the tricks, dramatic irony, metaphor,
bathos, puns, parody, litotes and... satire. He was vicious."

.

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