- Gradualism is the cornerstone of Darwin’s Theory of Evolution because without it, he could not justify the idea that one organism changes into another. ‘Gradualism’ equals ‘Continuity’ but also presupposes a significant change, not just variations around a static mean (regression to the mean).
- In math, a function is gradual if continuous. A continuous function has a Grade’ (Slope) at every point. If a function is not gradual (continuous), then it is Discrete and has no ‘Grade’ (Slope). A Discontinuous function is a special case of ‘Continuous over limited ranges’. Some argue that large collections of discrete points appear continuous, thus justifying gradualism. This view were acceptable if and only if the contribution of the discrete points were strictly cumulative (such as when many water molecules form water waves).
- Is Nature Gradual? No, Nature is Discrete from the most elementary particles, to molecules, cells, and organisms. New organisms are created by discrete processes and result in newborns that are measurably different from each parent while all DNA mutations are discrete events. Gregor Mendel observed the discrete nature of biology as early as 1865 in the inheritance of dominant and recessive alleles. Darwin might have learned that from Mendel’s papers sent to him, had he read and correctly interpreted the results. To be fair, Darwin’s gradualism was in line with the incorrect view of his times that considered matter a continuum. Only in the late 1800s the true discrete nature of matter started to become common knowledge. However, today everyone knows, yet the gradualism hypothesis remains central to evolution despite lacking any basis.
- The list of discrete elements in biology includes but is not limited to: atoms, molecules, biochemical reactions, DNA, RNA, proteins, enzymes, genes, chromosomes, organelles, cell types (pro/eukaryote), cell division (mitosis/meiosis), sex type (male/female), body organs, organ systems, and organism classification. Changes at the discrete micro level including mutations and exposure to free radicals, radiation, and misfolded proteins are not cumulative and can potentially impact the entire organism. Continuous measure such as temperature, volume and weight are not true biologic properties as these change over the life of organisms and are primarily statistical measures at population level in particular populations, environments and time.
- We classify organisms into distinct groups with little if any overlap and with significant homogeneity within the group. If Gradualism were the norm, all living animals would fill a continuous spectrum which would make their classification in various taxa completely arbitrary. Were gradualism true in time – call this vertical gradualism, then gradualism over the current living – horizontal gradualism – should also be the norm. Instead, we observe that even unicellular organisms with huge populations and short-lived generations do not occupy a biological continuum. Plant diversity over the altitude & latitude continuum is a good example of Discontinuity in Nature: as conditions change, we see a changing mix of distinct species, rather than hybrid species as would be expected if Gradualism were true. Animal territoriality is also an example of discrete successful designs dominating certain ranges and mixing with each other at range boundaries without significantly changing their characteristics.
- What about Speciation and Hybridization? And what about the Fossil Record? A certain flexibility appears built into each biological design – more in some than in others. What we call Speciation and Hybridization may in fact be no more than adaptations within these flexibility ranges. Without confirming experiments on living organisms, it is impossible to determine whether the Fossil Record shows Gradualism or instead predisposition to Gradualism prompts an incorrect interpretation of the Fossil Record.
Pro-Con Notes
Con: Individuals heights are gradual. Height is one of the characters Mendel used with his pea plants, and height at maturity is influenced by a host of loci.
Pro: Height is not a proper biologic measure because height changes all the time, not just during development and because it is arbitrarily determined. Just as well you can sort by vertical reach or eyes height (on or off tiptoes), etc. – these can be more important for survival than the standard measurement and will throw off your statistics. Also food/climate/parasites during development affect size at maturity. And when exactly is maturity?
Con: Gradualism is the rule in evolution, since different alleles usually differ in their phenotypes only marginally. Phyletic gradualism does not claim that there is an absolutely smooth spectrum of species change over time.
Pro: Alleles are not gradual as demonstrated by Mendel. Darwin decreed gradualism precisely to support “smooth spectrum of species change over time”.Where do you see gradualism when everything in biology is 100% discrete from sub-atoms to atoms, molecules, genes, chromosomes, each element of cell structure and cell process, sexes, prokaryotes, eukaryotes, dominant-recessive, etc. etc.?
Con: The fossil evidence supports gradual changes in species.
Pro: The fossil record is “evidence” in the same sense animation is “evidence” of real life events.
Con: Is the DNA of a newborn measurably different and a significant leap from a random combination of the DNA of both parents?
Pro: Yes. Darwin’s theory of inheritance was “blended characteristics” (gradualism). That is, the offspring was a “blend” of both parents. The contrary idea of discrete alleles of genes had been found and proven by Mendel that hypothesized instead that traits, such as eye color or height or flower hues, were carried by tiny particles that were inherited whole in the next generation.
Links:
https://phys.org/news/2010-11-darwin-theory-gradual-evolution-geological.html
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/library/06/1/l_061_01.html
I don’t see why he should have to say what he means, since, obviously, he doesn’t want to. 😣
Nonlin.org,
OK, thanks for the clarification. Not all species “regress to the mean”. Therefore evolution happens, because some variants persist, and “regression to the mean” is one massive red herring. Brill. Thanks for playing.
A polymorphism (in traditional biological circles at least) arises as a result of a single mutation in one individual being inherited (at that locus) by its descendants. Now you may think that first mutation is ‘discrete’ – you may even think of the birth or death of an individual as ‘discrete’. In which case – as I said pages and pages ago – you have defeated ‘gradualism’ by definition. Well done.
As to whether this means that mutations don’t happen, or aren’t changed in frequency in real populations … well, clearly they do happen, and clearly frequencies do change, so I don’t know what the hell you think that concession gets you. It’s not gradual. Great. Therefore what?
Well yes, see above. You think if you can find an example where a change can be labelled ‘not gradual’, you have defeated evolution. But … uh … it’s still a heritable change.
Your sense, as far as I can gather – discontinuous.
You’re mixing up two senses of discreteness. That at the mutational level clearly has a different character from that at population level. Anyway, you can end up with discreteness gradually. I don’t really see ‘gradual’ and ‘discrete’ as antonyms. If you do, that’s fine; I don’t know what that proves.
Entirely up to you old bean.
Ahh you’re still laboring under the misconception that evolution has to always result in the formation of a “new species” in order to qualify as an example of evolution.
The first problem here is you haven’t defined what a “new species” is, but thankfully biologists have done so, and multiple definitions are used.
The second problem is that evolution, the trans-generational change in the genetic and physiological makeup of a population of organisms, does not HAVE to result in the formation of a “new species” in order to constitute a valid example of evolution in action.
Under those definitions of speciation employed by biologists, multiple types of speciation have been observed, both in the wild and in laboratory experiments. Speciation of both plants, animals, and microorganisms.
So evolution has been observed, as in evolution defined as it is by biologists has been observed. Speciation (as defined by biologists, not your personal fantasy) has been observed, as in the formation of a new species by the process of evolution.
It simply doesn’t matter that your personal confabulations about what evolution is supposed to be like, or what you personally demand that evolution produces, has not been demonstrated to your satisfaction. That’s is completely inconsequential. Your demands and opinions are irrelevant and have zero bearing on real-world facts, such as what the process of evolution is actually like, how it takes place, and how new species evolve.
Yes because obviously the whole goddamn population doesn’t magically change all at once. It’s not like brown bears run around and then one day they all magically become white and then all decide in one instant to move to the arctic regions. And a bear being better adapted to the arctic regions doesn’t mean that it will somehow magically and mysteriously be instantly killed if it moves out of that environment. The same geographical area can even contain multiple environmental niches to which different species of bears can be better adapted.
That depends on the selective pressure in question, the lifestyle of the organism, and on the particular environment. Predators that hunt prey with good eyesight in arctic regions covered by snow and nice are under a selective pressure to blend in with their surroundings so they can get close to their prey before they can run away.
It’s almost like simply turning on your brain would allow you to figure this out for yourself instead of you having to exemplify prototypical volitional obtuseness on the internet.
Since you have an absolutely fatuous definition of gradualism, nobody cares that you think it’s missing.
Regression to the mean is a concept that applies to chance combinations of fixed objects.
If genomes never mutated, then recombinations would, in fact, be like dice throws.
But genes do mutate, and the probability of reversing a series of mutations is vanishingly small. Population genomes change over time. They do not simply recombine.
We do see something like regression to the mean in small populations over short periods of time. But speciation is change over geologic time. Hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of generations.
I disagree. With drift predominant, variation still decreases steadily, and the original mean is shifted and narrowed. A mean at any point in time serves to dictate the likely direction of successive measurements of that distribution. But it’s not an attractor, just a simple statistic. With sample-and-replacement, and a broad initial distribution, the likeliest future mean is always somewhere else.
Allan Miller,
Here’s what I’m driving at: if you simply sample a distribution, you will see regression to the mean, in that an extreme measurement is more likely to be followed by a central one – simply due to the statistical fact that there are more such measurements to be made. But if you then duplicate your sample and add that to your population, you have shifted that mean, ever so slightly. Likewise if you remove a member – there are more ‘mean’ members to remove than those at the extremes.
With such a dynamic added to the picture, the common intuition of a stable distribution, within which there is a little ebb and flow but not much overall change, is wrong. Indefinite preservation of ancestral distributions is the least likely result of all. In an analogy of entropy, there are more places to go that are different than those that are the same or similar, so that’s the future tendency – change. In the distribution of possible future populations, many more of them are different than are similar, so that’s where repeat runs tend to go. That’s the ‘true mean’: a tendency to change.
I’m not sure that’s a disagreement.
The disagreement is longer than the sentence abstracted. But basically, you don’t get nonlin-style ‘regression to the mean’ in small populations. That’s the claim I disagree with. If you did, loss of variation in threatened species would not be an issue.
It implies either some kind of memory or an attractor, and I don’t see any means for that to be implemented, in either case.
When I said “a kind of”, I was thinking of the tendency in families for genius to diminish over the course of generations. There are no intellectual or artistic dynasties. I think this would apply to measures like height, also.
And apparently to feral dog populations, which tend to lose the distinguishing characteristics of breeds.
petrushka,
Certainly the tendency is for commoner alleles to assert themselves. Breed characteristics are more likely to be lost than retained, since the gene pool of breeds is artificially restricted, and dilution in a wider pool is more likely to result in loss than fixation. They don’t become wolf-like, however. There is a confusion inherent in that term ‘regression’.
I don’t see any problem other than a misunderstanding of the term regression.
Regression to the mean in a population means that a trait of the descendants of an unusual member of a population is more likely to be closer to the mean for the population. This is an observation, and it is probably why Darwin thought inheritance was blended.
After Mendel, it became obvious through experiment, that most traits have multiple loci. Mendel was lucky to find a bunch that have discrete genes.
Your specific reference was to small populations, but now talk of what happens in large ones.
It’s not merely the connotation of the word ‘regression’, it’s the misuse of a term from statistical sampling to refer to the future behaviour of a population. Populations don’t ‘regress to the mean’, samples do.
I disagree. In the example of the regression of extreme values to the mean (say in a comparison of parents and offspring) the phenomenon occurs no matter how large a sample you take, and if we could take an infinite sample we would see it too.
When nonlin.org invokes regression to the mean to argue that change in the mean will be lost in later generations, nonlin misunderstands why the regression happens.
It occurs because the offspring are mixtures of genes from their parents. Mendelian segregation and recombination lead to regression toward a mean. But that mean is the mean you would get if you continued to randomly mate individuals in that population.
If there is selection (either artificial or natural) it shifts gene frequencies from the parent to the offspring generations. If you then stop selection and continue random mating, the mean you regress to is the mean you would get if you had many generations of random mating in the offspring generation. It will be somewhat different from the mean you would get if you randomly mated the parent generation over many generations, without any selection.
Technically speaking, the equations for change in selection compute the change in “breeding values” (additive genetic effects of alleles). Those change owing to the change in gene frequencies, and are not lost on further breeding without selection. The population regresses to a new, somewhat different mean, changed by each generation of selection.
Not sure I follow. If you sample the population’s distribution, successive samples will show regression to the mean. But an ‘infinite sample’ would appear to be the entirety of the (infinite) population. Successive such infinite samples would show the same, population-level statistic, not departures from it.
Joe Felsenstein,
Even without selection, there is an implication in invoking regression that the prior mean is an ‘attractor’ of some kind. Under drift alone, the ‘mean’ drifts (whatever we mean by ‘mean’ – I’m not sure what the mean of 33.3% each of alleles A, B and C would be).
The case of regression that I was thinking of is when you put a population under selection (say, breeding from all individuals above a certain value). Then you get a population of the survivors. They breed and produce a population of offspring, which regresses partway. If you do no further selection it will end up approaching a mean, but not the original mean of the population.
Rather, it will approach the mean of the “breeding values” of the survivors. To the extent that the response to selection was due to environmental effects on those particular individuals, or dominance or gene interaction, that part of the response will be lost as genes appear in new combinations and individuals are exposed to more environments. But the part that is due to shifts in gene frequencies will remain and become the new value to which the population regresses.
There is no attraction to values of ancestors beyond that. Nonlin misunderstands this.
Yes, genetic drift can change breeding values too. And afterwards the population regresses to that mean, not the original one.
Joe Felsenstein,
OK, thanks. It is somewhat counterintuitive that ‘real’ population processes are themselves sampling processes. By iteratively sampling samples, change seems inevitable, up to fixation. Yet the notion of a static, remembered ‘mean’ seems hard to shift.
Fuck you retard. The transition to Cit+ was discrete, not gradual.
More lines, letters, marbles and whatever bullshit. Retards continue to not see the difference between REAL LIFE and imagined crap.
This has been explained many times. Why can’t you read? Height, color, weight, etc. are not biological measure as they apply equally to the inert.
“Species” is a failed concept. Forget it. This has also been discussed many times. Look at the pictures in this OP and see NO GRADUALISM.
Snowflakes, etc. are LIFE FORMS?!?
Example? Keep in mind “divergence of character” nonsense is supposed to happen in a stable population (not under environmental stress).
Exactly. “Gradualism” fails.
Nah. Failed “gradualism” is just another nail in the “evolution” coffin. One of too many.
Except there’s no “gradualism” at the population level either – see the bear map (once again…) So you lose both ways.
Anything short of transmutation is “bullshit evolution”. Like the bullshit “evolution” only more retarded.
Yep. See above.
Let’s recap: the environment changes gradually, yet the STABLE bear populations are discrete and even OVERLAP in the SAME ENVIRONMENT. How retard must one be to not see the problem with “gradualism” right there?
Who cares about these “explanations” by and for the stupid?
Aww he’s mad now, how quaint.
False! No “speciation” whatsoever in LTEE eColi or any other observed geologic time. Let’s not hide behind “millions and billions of years”. If not ongoing now, the logical conclusion is “it never happened”. Be honest.
Where is your real life example?
Yet so many “living fossils” and even long dead ones (like trilobites) disagree with you. Why not come to your senses?
Then what’s the magic number below which ‘regression to the mean’ stops working? Real life anything? Anyone?
Of course.
What’s “commoner alleles” anyway? Regression to the mean has nothing to do with “wider pool”. That’s exactly the point: it’s happening even to isolated pools as petrushka observed above.
False, Falsenstein! At least in humans there is no random mating (despite the nauseating PC crap, let’s be honest). And YET, regression to the mean is alive and well while “divergence of character” is nowhere in sight. And even in pure breed animals, maintaining their exceptionalism is increasingly harder the more pure they are. Everyone knows. Even Darwinistas when not thinking how this conflicts with their religion.
And your real life example is…?
Cough cough, living fossils?
It’s as if someone is talking from their little red book or something. Isn’t theory great when you need not produce real life examples?
Nah. As you can see, I responding in kind and move on.
My comments on regression to the mean should be taken as addressed to everyone here except nonlin.org. He apparently knows better (somehow). For the rest of you who think that using theory in population genetics to work out when regression to the mean might occur, and to which mean, I comment you all for not engaging in loudmouthed ignorant declarations. If any of you (other than nonlin, of course) disagree with my conclusions from theory, I’d be happy to hear your thoughtful arguments.
I understand this isn’t exactly what you’re talking about, but in terms of some population “reverting”, it feels natural for me to think of this in terms of different alleles, which really means different DNA sequences present in a population.
If some of those alleles are lost, as in their frequency goes to 0%, it will be extremely unlikely for those exact same alleles to re-evolve for statistical reasons that should be pretty obvious. I can’t help but see a parallel to the 2nd law of thermodynamics. There are just so many more ways for entropy to increase than decrease. In the same way there are just so many more ways for mutations to result in new alleles, than exactly re-creating lost ones.
We may see the population “re-adapt” in a sense to something that superficially appears phenotypically like the ancestor, but at the level of DNA sequences the population can’t help but move ever further away from the ancestral state, on average.
Does it desperately matter? It happened, all by its little self.
Therefore what? If we concede that a change isn’t gradual as you choose to define it, what can we conclude from that in regard to biological change?
Alleles of which there are more than those of which there are fewer. Is English your first language?
Nonlin.org,
Hang on, why do I need to give an example? You said that my interpretation of your thesis – “all variants die out” – was wrong. Now you want me to provide an example of that which you claim to accept. You claim you don’t think variants always die out as the population ‘regresses to the mean’. Chihuahas and Lenski’s E. Coli were your examples. Maybe they go to a farm or something, I dunno.
Could you give an example of a case when “all variants eventually die out” does not hold, and thereby answer your own challenge?
Nonlin.org,
Be honest, there are barely any examples of living fossils; they are vastly outnumbered by extinct forms. And even among them, we have no data on allele preservation, only superficial morphology, which is contributed to by rather few alleles.
If a trilobite wishes to join the discussion, I would be happy to listen to its arguments, but for now that’s just hearsay.
It would take a better man than you to sort me out
OMG, how stupid ARE you?
Wow, the nitwit is screaming now. He’s like a Donizetti character.
Tenors don’t scream. They soar.
Nonlin.org,
So you are saying that “gradualism” has a problem because different, potentially interbreeding variants can occupy the same range without merging? Surely that’s a strike in its favour? Speciation has more modes than simple allopatry. +1 for divergence. Sorry, “divergence”. Or should that be DIVERGENCE?
I was thinking of a (mad) soprano there, actually.
walto,
Florence Foster Jenkins.
The likes of Nonlin often remind me of the contestants in the early stages of Idol, convinced they can sing like a bird (they can, but you’ve got to pick your bird).
That’s simply not true and even Wikipedia explains it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._coli_long-term_evolution_experiment#Investigation_of_potentiation
So I think we can safely say if anyone should fuck off it should be you.
If only Lenski had kept sample of generations.
But as I read it, this only shows that things were even MORE discrete than nonlin thought. Instead of a single discrete divine miracle, we had a whole long chain of discrete divine miracles, making the transition even LESS gradual and more discrete, as well as even more miraculous.
This is analogous to finding a “missing link” only to discover that we have created two gaps out of one, requiring yet another missing link to be found.
You must purge from your mind the idea that there is some limit, otherwise you will persist in this state of being constantly surprised by how low it goes.
👍
That’s deep, man.
Quantum means, or implies, discrete.
Like, man, electrons jump from one orbit to another without passing through the intervening space. No gradual transitions at all.
Except though the pyramid.
Woah.