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We're all Pickles aliases on one level or another.

I keep saying this to myself.(I suppose if you really need to find a rationale, tim's post above does the trick.)

And an additional cost - you run the risk of loss of fitness at other gene sites due to inbreeding. The benefits of HbC only accumlate in the face of potent genetic costs. It does become a tangled knot. You've got millions of individual organisms with tens of millions of different genes, each of...

The first sentence of the response made me giggle: ID considers itself to have challenges? I thought the whole point was that it didn't have intellectual challenges.

Right, you have to be careful with your interpretations. After all, just because a series of mammal-like reptiles evolves, it doesn't necessarily mean that the primitive reptiles have gone extinct. So you can see primitive forms in rocks younger than derived forms. In the same way, we're...

It's a self-effacing post (casting me as some screaming evolutionary wingnut), and self-effacement is always cool.

Just all up in his grill, face purple, spittle flying...

:grabsgolddiggerbythelapels: Just listen to me, dammit! LISTEN to me!

Sure. Punctuated equilibrium suggests that the fossil record will be rich with transitions at higher taxonomic levels (reptile-to-mammal; dinosaur-to-bird; monkey-to-man), but relatively sparse transitions at the species level (smaller tyranosaurid-to-larger tyranosaurid; three-spined...

Well then you've taken with wind out of my sails, since common descent is the idea that's usually at issue in creationism/evolution debates. I get so roided up trying to force common descent down people's throats that I don't have the energy to argue the finer points like neutralism and whathaveyou.

It is a way to explain why species level gaps are to be expected in the fossil record. (and here I'm directly channeling Richard Dawkins) It's a perfectly Darwinian idea though. The evolutionary changes in punctuated equilibrium are still gradual - a compilation of minute changes over tens to...

BTW, good luck with this.

Evolution has been and continues to be tested and verified almost every day. The same as Chemistry, it does so by assaying things not directly observable (atomic and molecular orbitals for chemistry, historical relationships among species for biology) using things that are directly observable...

Gould also made a career of overemphasising the importance of punctuated equilibrium in evolutionary biology.

Darwinism actually makes several very specific predictions. It's difficult to disprove now, simply because those predictions have been, by-and-large, borne out. But at the beginning it wasn't so clear which "creation" idea would be the winner. Lamark had a pretty well-respected evolutionary...

How so?

Nobody's "allowing" anything. Those are actual definitions of the word. And it's perfectly reasonable to talk about step 2 in the absence of step 1. We simply state "Step one happened some way some how, maybe by natural events, maybe by martians, maybe by a god", and then go our merry ways...

That's what I mean when I say it's semantics. Biological evolution means many things, one of which is a change in allele frequencies in a population. So the moth story, even if it's just an increase in white moths vs. black moths without any new mutation, is evolution according to a perfectly...

Ray is *always* ready for a gangbang.

No, no. It's not going to get like that.