Posted on 08/15/2007 2:51:14 PM PDT by blam
Ideas from the evolutionary sciences are being applied to certain cutting edge areas of finance, which is my specialty. Hence I developed an interest in evolutionary science and studied some, as an elective, while in grad school. It's not the focus of my research, but I keep current in the latest developments throughout my field. It's so new, that it's not covered in the required Ph.D. level finance courses, yet, but one of the professors I worked for in grad school has published several papers applying lessons from evolutionary biology to finance. He also manages a hedge fund, where he has put actual money at stake using these ideas, and they have worked remarkably well.
PE was an attempt to get around at least three of what Gould and several of his compatriots viewed as the big problems of standard Darwinism, i.e. the lack of intermediate fossils, the Haldane dilemma, and the fact that evolutionary dogma was preventing palaeontologists from publishing papers which dealt with questions of stasis in the fossil record.
Wow. There's so much wrong with that paragraph, I don't know where to begin.
First of all, the so-called Haldane dilemma has nothing to do with Punctuated Equilibirum. Why are you so intent on liking together all these unrelated concets? First it was punk eek and allopatric speciation. Now it's punk eek and Haldane's so-called dilemma. What gives?
Let me educate you a little. Back in the 1950's, Haldenae published a paper that purported to find a "cost" to natural selection, which in turn, he thought, would make evolution so slow as to make it impossible for man and ape to share a common ancestor. Well, genetics has advanced a lot since the 1950's, and other researchers have found he made some big errors in his math. This website outlines it quite well:
http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CB/CB121.html
Yes, it's a popular site, not a peer-reviewed paper, but the site has references to the peer-reviewed literature that refutes Haldane, which no geneticist or evolutionary biologist takes seriously anymore. You can look up the references for yourself.
As to the notion that before Gould no paleontologist could get published, well, that's just plain absurd.
Punctuated Equilibrium was proposed because the fossil record, in many cases (not all cases!), exhibits long periods of stasis (on the order of millions and sometimes tens of millions of years), as well as relatively "rapid" periods of evolution. "Rapid," in this case, however, isn't rapid according to a human time scale. Rather, it's "rapid" in terms of geological time, which means something on the order of hundreds of thousands of years.
This has absolutely nothing to do with either Haldane's so-called dilemma, nor allopatric speciation.
The interesting thing is Gould and Eldridge weren't the first to come up with Punk Eek. They got credit for it, IMHO, undeservedly. At best, you can credit them for coining the term, and perhaps showing that the fossil record tends to fit it. But it was Darwin himself who proposed the idea of punctuated equilibrium in the Origin of Species. He doesn't actually use the term, but the idea is clearly there:
"It is a more important consideration ... that the period during which each species underwent modification, though long as measured by years, was probably short in comparison with that during which it remained without undergoing any change."(Origin of Species, Ch. 10, p. 428)
That pretty much sums up all there is to punk eek, coming straight from Darwin!
"Allopatric speciation" is precisely the thing which the Haldane dilemma forbids.
Sorry, but that's just wrong. Haldane's so-called dilemma was simply an (unsuccessful) attempt to measure a "speed limit" on the acclamation of beneficial mutations through natural selection. It had absolutely nothing to do with speciation through geographic separation.
A reader would therefore be correct to assume ( as I did and you didn't know enough to) that the final paragraph of the article above referred to the possibility of small groups being isolated as Gould and others describe (i.e. ala PE).
Sorry, but you're wrong again. Erst Mayr formulated the idea of allopatric speciation in 1942, 30 years before Gould and Eldridge published their first paper on punctuated equilibrium. Neither concept depends on the other. Allopatric speciation could be true without punk eek, and punk eek could be true without allopatric speciation. The evidence, however, suggests that both are the predominant (but not only) way in which evolution actually happens.
Educate yourself first.
I have, thank you very much. Now it's your turn.
There IS NO application of evolutionary theories to finance.
Hence I developed an interest in evolutionary science and studied some, as an elective, while in grad school. It's not the focus of my research, but I keep current in the latest developments throughout my field. It's so new, that it's not covered in the required Ph.D. level finance courses, yet, but one of the professors I worked for in grad school has published several papers applying lessons from evolutionary biology to finance. He also manages a hedge fund, where he has put actual money at stake using these ideas, and they have worked remarkably well....
That would be an extreme case of God looking out for idiots as he sometimes does. Do not put any of your own money at risk by counting on such a run of luck to continue very long.
PE was an attempt to get around at least three of what Gould and several of his compatriots viewed as the big problems of standard Darwinism, i.e. the lack of intermediate fossils, the Haldane dilemma, and the fact that evolutionary dogma was preventing palaeontologists from publishing papers which dealt with questions of stasis in the fossil record.
Wow. There's so much wrong with that paragraph, I don't know where to begin.
You got the second part of that right....
First of all, the so-called Haldane dilemma has nothing to do with Punctuated Equilibirum. Why are you so intent on liking together all these unrelated concets? First it was punk eek and allopatric speciation. Now it's punk eek and Haldane's so-called dilemma. What gives?
PE has EVERYTHING to do with the Haldane dilemma (the dilemma is one of the two primary motivations for it) but, again, this may not be obvious from a cursory reading of material intended for yuppies and you have to dig just a tiny bit for it, mostly in the writings of Ernst Mayr. Again, I have and you, obviously, haven't e.g.
"...The claim of rapid evolutionary advance in large, widespread, populous species was questioned, on a theoretical basis, as far back as 1957 by Haldane and more recently by some mathematical population geneticists (Newman, Cohen, and Kipnis, 1985; Lande, 1985)...."
Let me educate you a little. Back in the 1950's, Haldenae published a paper that purported to find a "cost" to natural selection, which in turn, he thought, would make evolution so slow as to make it impossible for man and ape to share a common ancestor. Well, genetics has advanced a lot since the 1950's, and other researchers have found he made some big errors in his math. This website outlines it quite well:
http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CB/CB121.html
The talk.origins website is maintained by a collection of uneducable ideologues.
As to the notion that before Gould no paleontologist could get published, well, that's just plain absurd.
"...The attitude of population geneticists to any palaeontologist rash enough to offer a contribution to evolutionary theory has been to tell him to go away and find another fossil, and not to bother the grownups."
"Allopatric speciation" is precisely the thing which the Haldane dilemma forbids.
Sorry, but that's just wrong. Haldane's so-called dilemma was simply an (unsuccessful) attempt to measure a "speed limit" on the acclamation of beneficial mutations through natural selection. It had absolutely nothing to do with speciation through geographic separation.
Wikipedia and other sources define allopatric speciation as occuring between large groups of the same animal which have been separated. The Haldane dilemma describes the impossibility of passing genetic change through large groups, separated or not.
The most simple minded description of the dilemma goes like this:
(Remine)Along the relevant primate line, our supposed pre-human ancestors had an effective generation time of 20 years. (I quote sources and details in my book, so I'll spare you here.) Imagine ten million years ago -- (that is two to three times the age of the alleged chimp-human split) -- that's enough time for 500,000 generations of our presumed ancestors.
Imagine a population of 100,000 of those organisms quietly evolving their way to humanity. For easy visualization, I'll have you imagine a scenario that favors rapid evolution. Imagine evolution happens like this. Every generation, one male and one female receive a beneficial mutation so advantageous that the 999,998 others die off immediately, and the population is then replenished in one generation by the surviving couple. Imagine evolution happens like this, generation after generation, for ten million years. How many beneficial mutations could be substituted at this crashing pace? One per generation -- or 500,000 nucleotides. That's 0.014 percent of the genome. (That is a minuscule fraction of the 2 to 3 percent that separates us from chimpanzees). [or of the devide between humans and neanderthals which is generally described as about half that for that matter]
That isn't complicated; that's basically more like higher arithematic than like higher math and there's no real way to argue the point. That says that in the 10,000,000 years which supposedly separate us from our "ape-like ancestor", the furthest any ape could evolve would be into an ape with a slightly shorter tail.
Again, you need to educate yourself first.
So now you presume to lecture a finance professor about finance.LOL. Yeah, whatever you say.
PE has EVERYTHING to do with the Haldane dilemma
Okay, so in you own words, please explain how the so-called Haldane dilema motivates punctuated equilibrium. And no, throwing up quotes by Mayr that don't even address the question doesn't count.
Wikipedia and other sources define allopatric speciation as occuring between large groups of the same animal which have been separated.
Yey, you finally got something right, though the way you express it is very unclear.
The Haldane dilemma describes the impossibility of passing genetic change through large groups, separated or not.
Now you're confused again. Allopatric speciation has nothing to do with passing genetic changes "through" separated groups, whatever that means. The whole point is that the separated groups don't exchange genes. They form seperate gene pools, which then start to become more and more different over time.
Again, this has nothing to do with punctuated equilibtrium, and was known some 30 years before Gould and Eldrige published their first paper.
That isn't complicated; that's basically more like higher arithematic than like higher math
Yeah, it's arithmatic based on highly flawed assumptions. For instance, it assumes a singe benefitial mutation only changes one gene per generation. That's a bad assumption, as a single mutation can affect multiple genes. It ignores the effect of genetic recomination and "crossing over." It ignores splitting and fusing of chromosones, which can also cause big changes in the genome in one generation. In short, the calculation ignores pretty much all the developments in the field of genetics over the last 50 years, which isn't surprising given that it was published in 1957! That makes his so-called "dilema" meaningless today.
So now you presume to lecture a finance professor about finance.LOL. Yeah, whatever you say.
Don't flatter yourself. If I'm going to imitate something it will be something worthy of imitation.
PE has EVERYTHING to do with the Haldane dilemma
Okay, so in you own words, please explain how the so-called Haldane dilema motivates punctuated equilibrium. And no, throwing up quotes by Mayr that don't even address the question doesn't count.
It isn't complicated. In plain language, the two motivations for PE were:
Wikipedia and other sources define allopatric speciation as occuring between large groups of the same animal which have been separated.
Yey, you finally got something right, though the way you express it is very unclear.
The Haldane dilemma describes the impossibility of passing genetic change through large groups, separated or not.
Now you're confused again. Allopatric speciation has nothing to do with passing genetic changes "through" separated groups, whatever that means. The whole point is that the separated groups don't exchange genes. They form seperate gene pools, which then start to become more and more different over time.
To do that, both groups obviously have to pass myriads of genetic changes through their populations. A typoical real-life case would be the cats. In real life after the continents separated, you had large populations of cats on both sides of the Atlantic which became lions and leopards in Africa and Jaguars in the Americas. None of them became dogs or bears. Aside from that being impossible for probabilistic reasons, the Haldane dilemma forbids it; the populations on both sides quickly became too large.
That isn't complicated; that's basically more like higher arithematic than like higher math
Yeah, it's arithmatic based on highly flawed assumptions. For instance, it assumes a singe benefitial mutation only changes one gene per generation. That's a bad assumption...
It's the only assumption which gives evolution any sort of a prayer at all and it's only a prayer. In real life, the overwhelming bulk of all mutations are harmful or fatal and if you start passing ten or twenty of them through a population simultaneously, the herd will most definitely die out in a few generations.
The common English term for "mutation" is "Birth Defect". Ever notice the women walking around collecting for the Mothers' March of Dimes? Ever notice that they are ALWAYS collecting for research to PREVENT mutations and never to CAUSE them? Think there might be some sort of a reason for that???
Try thinking a bit. You've somehow or other convinced yourself that it's possible to be a Christian and an evolutionite at the same time and it most definitely is not, any more than you could be a Christian nazi or a Christian communist. Evolution is junk science and, as junk science goes, a spectacularly dangerous variety of junk science with something like 200,000,000 dead bodies to its credit after a mere century and a half.
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