I’m not yet familiar enough with Gould to understand your reference. All the descriptions of orthogenesis I know of use the idea of directed change, usually from an internal or unspecified source. This occasionally included the concept that extinction could be the result when the mindless continuation of the process resulted in excessively large teeth, antlers, etc.

The site http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/mammal/artio/irishelk.html gives an explanation refuting orthogenesis and then gives the following as a reference:

Gould, S.J. 1977. The misnamed, mistreated, and misunderstood Irish elk. Pp. 79

I disagree. Orthogeneticists had some extremists and bad ideas movig around but some of them did have a point.

Well, it looks like it’s a bit of a definitional matter, going by the Wikipedia article on more recent co-option of the term.

I should probably have written “deader than vitalism”, which would have been funnier.

It is now a strawman zombie.

As far as I can see, the reason the chimp genes went away was because nature told them to, and the reason inheritable features such as face-shape stayed with us was for the same reason.

Funny, isn’t it, how “nature told them to” looks exactly like a bunch of accumulated mutations.

such as quantum particle bombardment.

Go easy on the Star Trek. Scientific exactitude is not something that SF on TV is noted for.

And keep in mind the “selection” part of “natural selection”.

Take some Irish elixir.

Actually, you should go cold turkey on that stuff; it kills brain cells and liver cells and gives you hallucinations. In larger doses, it will kill you deader than orthogenesis.

Most of the differences between you and him are not the loss of ‘chimpness’ genes. Slowly over the approximately 5 million years since he lived, individuals in particular environments had better reproductive success if they had a given mutation.

For example, duplication of a gene allows beneficial changes to occur in one copy while retaining critical functions of the original gene.

Whether or not congenital warts are inheritable, I won’t consider. Any inheritable characteristic that does not reduce reproductive success will not be selected against. The less lethal it is in the current environment and the later it appears in life with respect to child bearing, the more likely it is to persist in the population.

You know, you could easily find such information for yourself, and with better authority. Try the ‘Human evolutionary genetics’ article on Wikipedia, for a start.

As far as I can see, the reason the chimp genes went away was because nature told them to, and the reason inheritable features such as face-shape stayed with us was for the same reason. This “Nature” I would like to meet some time.
Unless of course it wasn’t Nature, the Animist’s Diety, but random events in nature, such as quantum particle bombardment. The sort of bombardment that would have killed the moon astronauts, had a storm hit them?

OH best beloved, the Great Grey Green Greasy Limpopo has its attractions. Take some Irish elixir.

EVOLUTION in my usage EQUALS UNROLLING. COMMON DESCENT equals AN IRISH PHURPHY GONE TO SEED.

Can you please explain, in a short, understandable way, what the heck that means?

Congratulations again to Owlmirror for allowing that human knowledge isn’t perfect yet.

I am a geologist and I know a small amount about fossils, not so much about genetics. The fact that great-grandaddy was a chimp but we have got rid of his genes, yet can’t shake grandma’s inherited worts, has me intrigued. I am so unlearned in such matters, it’s not worth the while giving me an explanation. Likewise the Public. So why not give the explanation, here, in less than 500 words, in everyman’s language. Or go to the site that you can’t seem to find and tell people whether the explanation there is feasible. Do some science!

Give rational investigation a try.

Rational investigation, over the past century and a half or so, has shown that the theory of evolution by natural selection, with certain additions and modifications resulting from new knowledge of paleontology, genetics, and developmental biology, is the best explanation for biological diversity that there is. In fact:

“Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution”

You know, the discoverers of the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation thought it was noise in their equipment. It turned out it was a signal containing a lot of information about the biggest explosion ever. So far, there is no need for goddidit as an explanation.

I’ll set aside the possible interpretation that little ol’ YOU consider yourself the biggest noise in existence. I know what you were implying and I’ll ignore the potential Freudian slip.

The Christian religion has resisted every scientific discovery that tended to show how insignificant mankind is in the cosmos. There’s no egotism to “created in His Image”? How ironic in the extreme to then accuse atheists of egotism when they argue against self puffery.

I thought one of the main talking points of those who defend themselves against atheism was that it is too depressing to consider because there can be no purpose or meaning if we are a random result and not specially created. Damned if we do and damned if we don’t.

Clastito, I despair that he is too blinded by wishful thinking to benefit from study of the scientific evidence. Our posts may never change his mind. We can only hope to prevent him from misleading others.

Second, stasis, or non evolution, is a fact. That is, species do not HAVE to evolve, “progress” like some would have it. Transtional forms may live for millions of years with other trasnitional species alongside. What SJ Gould showed, was that species can spend a very long time in stasis while speciation occurs in much shorter times than those spent in stasis. That reflects in the fossil record.
Even so, there ARE cases where the time resolution in some deposits is good enough that we find very gradual transitions and actual difficulty in keeping species separate.
It is a matter of stasis being much more easy to see in the fossil record than the comparatively much shorter time in which speciation occurs.

My answer is Egotism. The men (women not included) who were responsible for these ancient writings flattered themselves that everything was about them.

They were:
Created in God’s image.
Created separately from animals and women.
Given dominion over the earth et al.
The reason for the creation of everything.
At the centre of everything.
His Chosen people.
Betrayed by women.
etc.

Evidence obtained through science casts doubt on several of these items, but being related by birth to monkeys seems to cut the deepest. As a consequence of descent with modification, somewhere back when, we had a many-times great grandmother whose sibling is the ancestor of all the other primates.

Myself, I’m definitely not ashamed of my distant primate cousins. If only I could be sure that their descendents won’t someday accept religion as an ego crutch.

There are of course, quite a few closer cousins who shamefully prefer wishful thinking over the evidence. They but defend the pedestal their predecessors created for them to stand on.

The challenge for all those thousands of creationist paleontologists out there, is to come up with fossils that falsify common descent or evolution. Of course, if by some surprise, they do, honestly using the tools of science, then they will have added to science.

Similarly, even lions and tigers can be interbreed, and have fertile descendnts. And no one would doubt that these are in fact quite different kinds of animals.

The distinction of species is in fact not clear clut, and as is well-known, not applicable to asexual organisms to begin with. Does this mean there is no common descent? Of course not. Blurriness to limits testifies to the continuity of life through common descent, if anything.

In fact new species that breed mostly within their own kind can originate form the hybrids between different species, as is well documented in the case of plants and insects. Species hybridization is a source of evolution. The whole species topic is still under study and probably will always remain so, since there are for sure, discrete types in nature, that tend to breed within their own kind, yet at the same time, we find the links between kinds and blurry limts here and there.

Only a very prejudiced mind indeed, who knows aforehand where it wants to go, deduces any evidence for supernatural creation from these honest scientific discussions.

And, they will resort to all kind of banal contextualizations as arguments to substitute for any REAL bological discussion. And of course, use the ocassion to merely proselitize their website.

No serious attempted to answer the questions nor grasp the concepts.

What questions?

The only questions I saw were these:

We can clone a sheep. Sexual creatures can be caused to reproduce asexually. That may lead somewhere?

How does this support your ideas? Cloning of placental animals is a hard problem. It is so difficult that it is only made possible by extremely hard-working and intelligent scientists with a deep understanding of all aspects of the biology involved, and even then requiring multiple failed trials before reaching even one success. All of this argues against the possibility of such a thing happening suddenly and spontaneously.

And then there’s these questions:

Theoretically we are going to have to do something about autoimmune rejection. If we can rewrite the immune system somehow, can we get a goat to bear and rear a sheep? Theoretically, something of this order may be possible?

Hacking the immune system is a hard problem, which, again, argues against it happening spontaneously in nature.

Where’s your evidence that a completely alien zygote will spontaneously erupt, ever?

The evidence that species don’t grade into each other is seen every day by anyone with their eyes open.

I did ask you what research you have done into current models of speciation. The thing is, from my reading, species do grade into each other. There are various different species that can nevertheless interbreed, to a greater or lesser extent; have you not read of these hybrids? (horse-donkey; lion-tiger; dolphin-orca; housecat-serval; serval-caracal, etc)

Have you not read of “ring species”, where one population may interbreed with the population immediate adjacent to it, but not the populations at the far extremes of the distribution?

Speciation is a difficult topic, and I certainly don’t understand everything about it, but the assertion that species “don’t grade into each other” is simply not correct.

The cry for evidence, when breakthroughs were still in the pipeline, is precisely what people demanded of Copernicus, Kepler, & co.. Then when Galileo came along with his telescope, it took some of them years before they could bring themselves to look into it.

Hmpf! Kepler had evidence, in the form of Tycho Brahe’s excellent observational data, as well as having the mathematic skills to create the formulas that correlated all of that data, which he published. And he furthermore was able to use his formulas to make successful astronomical predictions.

And so far, what you’ve shown is not Galileo’s telescope, but rather the equivalent of Kepler’s earlier confused idea of correlating planetary orbits with the Platonic solids. He puttered around with that for a while, before giving up on it because he couldn’t get the math to work – it did not match the data.

So I think it’s only fair to ask about your notion of spontaneous-speciation-via-quantum-thingamajigs-in-DNA: Where’s the data? Where’s the math? Where are the predictions?

Notice how these commentators and indeed many convinced parties in this debate simply wind back to some previous spot in the script and go again from there? Or get personal? Standard practice if ever you bump into a religious/political sect on the street corner, or if you get a visit from people with fervent zeal in their demeanor.

The evidence that species don’t grade into each other is seen every day by anyone with their eyes open. More on that soon.

The cry for evidence, when breakthroughs were still in the pipeline, is precisely what people demanded of Copernicus, Kepler, & co.. Then when Galileo came along with his telescope, it took some of them years before they could bring themselves to look into it. I have to go. My third son is at the top of a tree, making strange roaring noises at a man with long hairy arms who is riding a two-humped horse, followed by a cat that barks and cocks its leg at every fifth post.
And there’s a bloke further down the street burning copies of NEW SCIENTIST and holding forth about what he says is all this new junk science.
Well, one supposes it helps keep the Press in pocket?