That's not what the other poster said, "Evolution is not order. It’s random and chaotic."
Which is not correct. Evolution follows a clear progression. Single cell. Multi cell. Vertebrates. Tetrapods. Nothing out of order. That's neither random nor chaotic. We aren't finding rabbit fossils in the Jurassic period, nor will we ever. We don't have a "random chance" of finding a bird fossil in a 2 billion year old rock. The chance is zero.
That isn’t what I meant by random. The mutations are random and sometimes chaotic. Whether they lead to a creature better suited to its environment or to a creature that can’t survive even one day depends on the environment. That part isn’t random.
You're more right than what
Fort Fun Indiana is making up.
Yes, I've read of it. It's called the chaos theory and it's all due to chance (which you bring in as mutations).
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Forget finding the laws of evolution. The history of life is just one damn thing after another
IN 1856, geologist Charles Lyell
wrote to Charles Darwin with a question about fossils. Puzzled by types of mollusc that abruptly disappeared from the British fossil record, apparently in response to a glaciation, only to reappear 2 million years later completely unchanged, he asked of Darwin: “Be so good as to explain all this in your next letter.” Darwin never did.
To this day Lyell’s question has never received an adequate answer. I believe that is because there isn’t one. Because of the way evolution works, it is impossible to predict how a given species will respond to environmental change.
This is a long-running debate. In 1972, for example, Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould challenged the assumption that evolutionary change was continuous and gradual. Their “punctuated equilibrium” hypothesis argued that change happens in short bursts separated by long periods of stability, as distinct from the more continuous change over long periods expected to be the outcome of natural selection and adaptation.
Later, John Endler, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Exeter, UK, scrutinised claimed examples of natural selection but found a surprising lack of hard evidence (chronicled in his 1986 book
Natural Selection in the Wild). More recently, and controversially, cognitive scientists Jerry Fodor of Rutgers University at New Brunswick, New Jersey, and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini of the University of Arizona in Tucson have pointed out philosophical problems with the adaptationist argument
(New Scientist, 6 February, p 28).
Forget finding the laws of evolution. The history of life is just one damn thing after another
www.newscientist.com
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