Lice offer clues to origin of clothing

USA TODAY ^ | 8/18/2003 | Tim Friend

[demlosers]

Human body lice appear to owe their origin to the invention of clothing, and the types that reside on our bodies appear to have hitchhiked along as modern humans migrated out of Africa about 100,000 years ago.

Mark Stoneking and colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, made the connection between the origin of clothing and the rise of human body lice by checking so-called molecular clocks found in the cells of all living creatures.

[DittoJed2]

You have to understand: To a paleontologist a transition that occurred 100 million years ago, can last for 100,000 years and still look like a blink of eye to the geological record. And of course, 100,000 years can represent 100,000 generations' worth of evolving!

That is why punctuated equilibrium's challenge to orthodox gradualism is immaterial to the question of the truth of evolution.

Was he saying gradualism worked or no?

[goodseedhomeschool (returned)]

Missy LOL

[whattajoke]

Was he saying gradualism worked or no?

See, the real world works a bit differently from your fundamentalist black and white one. Evolution is universally accepted by those who got more than 106%'s in just random history/theology classes. (I once got a 106 myself in Organic Chemistry, 1993, UConn. So there.).

The METHOD of said accepted evolution is still discussed and debated. Darwin proposed one possibility (gradualism), Eldridge and Gould proposed another (PE) and others fall somewhere in between. This is how science works.

In your fundamentalist myopic world, stuff happens one way or it doesn't happen. No debate, no change, no growth, no learning. THIS...IS...THE...WAY...IT...IS.

To each their own, I suppose.

[PatrickHenry]

PatrickHenry continues to remain aloof!

[DittoJed2]

Yes or no.

[whattajoke]

Yes or no what? Yes or no a scientist about whom you know nothing questions gradualism as the only mechanism by which evolution proceeds, accounting for the diversity of life on earth? In that case, yes, the particular scientist you mined some quote from some creationist website from, has indeed stated that perhaps some, if not most, of the species (past and present) most likely evolved in a way other than perfectly played out gradualism would suggest. So what?

Do you "win" b/c maybe Charles Darwin (long dead, btw) didn't put forth a 100% complete and absolutely correct idea as to just how we've arrived at the current diversity of life on earth? Again, so what? There are very few, if any "absolutes" in the life sciences.

Get used to it. It's the way this stuff works. It's not as easy and simple as your particular brand of philosophy.

[DittoJed2]

The known fossil record fails to document a single example of phyletic evolution accomplishing a major morphologic [structural] transition and hence offers no evidence that the gradualistic model can be valid.”
Now you are misquoting him. He is saying that the phyletic evolution fossil record offers zilch in way of supporting the validity of gradualism. That's why he's doing the punctuated equilibrium song and dance. My quote was not out of context. You all are trying to make it say more than it was saying. I offered it as an example of evolutionists show that elements of evolution are not as as solid as Aric was saying. Aric makes it look like the fossil record is iron clad supportive of Darwinistic evolution. Darwin and p.e. are two different things. Both are evolution, but they are not the same.

[js1138]

Add to the list of things Free Republic could use (in addition to Ignore and the ability to edit posts) spell-check.

Definitely. As a solid conservative, taking full responsibility for my own actions, I blame JR for not having a spell checker.

And why the heck doesn't Microsoft, with all its bloat, have a spell checker built into IE?

[Lurking Libertarian]

He is saying that the phyletic evolution fossil record offers zilch in way of supporting the validity of gradualism.

Do you know what "phyletic" means?

[CobaltBlue]

Not being a computer programmer, I have no idea what it takes to build these features into interfaces. It is pretty close to voodoo for all I can grasp it.

[goodseedhomeschool (returned)]

LOL

[DittoJed2]

I was waiting for the Nose-bleeding libertarian monkey's son placemark.

[goodseedhomeschool (returned)]

It is funny how they show up all at one.

[goodseedhomeschool (returned)]

*once
for the spelling police.

[goodseedhomeschool (returned)]

No reply? No hugs?
I am deeply hurt.
Am I wrong?

[jennyp]

That is why punctuated equilibrium's challenge to orthodox gradualism is immaterial to the question of the truth of evolution.

Was he saying gradualism worked or no?

I assume by "he" you mean S.J.Gould and/or Niles Eldredge. Gradualism isn't really a process that would "work" or not, so much as a statement about what patterns we should see in the fossil record, given how evolutionary theory tells us new species arise.

Let's let Richard Dawkins explain it:

Here, then, is our orthodox neo-Darwinian picture of how a typical species is 'born', by divergence from an ancestral species. We start with the ancestral species, a large population of rather uniform, mutually interbreeding animals, spread over a large land mass. They could be any sort of animal, but let's carry on the thinking of shrews. The landmass is cut in two by a mountain range. [A small population of shrews somehow make it to the other side, and create a new isolated population that gradually diverges from the ancestral population. Eventually the two races of shrew become two species. If the second population were to migrate back to the ancestral homeland, they wouldn't be able to interbreed with the first.]

[T]he likelihood is that the two species would not coexist for very long. ... It is a widely accepted principle of ecology that two species with the same way of life will not coexist for long in one place, because they will compete and one or other will be driven extinct. ... If it happened to be the original, ancestral species that was driven extinct, we should say that it had been replaced by the new, immigrant species.

The theory of speciation resulting from initial geographical separation has long been a cornerstone of mainstream, orthodox neo-Darwinism, and it is still accepted on all sides as the main process by which new species come into existence (some people think there are others as well). Its incorporation into modern Darwinism was largely due to the influence of the distinguished zoologist Ernst Mayr. [The punctuationists asked themselves:] Given that, like most neo-Darwinians, we accept the orthodox theory that speciation starts with geographical isolation, what should we expect to see in the fossil record?

... The 'gaps', far from being annoying imperfections or awkward embarrassments, turn out to be exactly what we should positively expect, if we take seriously our orthodox neo-Darwinian theory of speciation. ... [W]hen we look at a series of fossils from any one place, we are probably not looking at an evolutionary event at all: we are looking at a migrational event....

The point that Eldredge and Gould were making, then, could have been modestly presented as a helpful rescuing of Darwin and his successors from what had seemed to them an awkward difficulty. Indeed that is, at least in part, how it was presented - initially. ...

Eldredge and Gould could have said:

Darwin, when you said that the fossil record was imperfect, you were understating it. Not only is it imperfect, there are good reasons for expecting it to be particularly imperfect just when it gets interesting, just when evolutionary change is taking place; this is partly because evolution usually occurred in a different place from where we find most of our fossils; and it is partly because, even if we are fortunate enough to dig in one of the small outlying areas where most evolutionary change went on, that evolutionary change (though still gradual) occupies such a short time that we should need an extra rich fossil record in order to track it!

But no, instead they chose, especially in their later writings in which they were eagerly followed by journalists, to sell their ideas as being radically opposed to Darwin's and opposed to the neo-Darwinian view of evolution ....

... The proper way to characterize the beliefs of punctuationists is: 'gradualistic, but with long periods of "stasis" (evolutionary stagnation) punctuating brief episodes of rapid gradual change'. The emphasis is then thrown onto the long periods of stasis as being the previously overlooked phenomenon that really needs explaining. It is the emphasis on stasis that is the punctuationists' real contribution, not their claimed opposition to gradualism, for they are truly as gradualist as anybody else.
Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker, 1996 ed., pp238-252

[Lurking Libertarian]

Do you know what shove it up your nose means?

Just because I dispute your arguments is no reason to turn nasty. I believe I've been civil to you throughout our discussions.

The reason I asked if you know what "phyletic" means is that you seem to be misinterpreting Dr. Stanley's comments. As is explained here, "phyletic evolution" means evolution within a single species --what you call "microevolution." Stanley's full quote, without the clever editing of whatever website you found it on, says that phyletic evolution doesn't show major morphological changes, because such changes occur at the level of evolutionary transition between species.