@farmerman,
farmerman wrote:Lamarkian"inheritance of acquired characteristics" and Nat Selection (as conceived by Darwin) are BOTH classically incorrect in that the concept of pangenesis as defined by Darwin , was a similarly wrong answer to the struggle that DArwin had with heritable variation.
Ummm... pangenesis is certainly a hypothesis Darwin made that has been rejected, but it wasn't a part of natural selection. In TOS, he listed a huge number of things and a huge number of possibilities for sources of variation and inheritance. When one mentions Darwinism and isn't being a creationist hack (Ben Stein et al), they are almost never referencing pangenesis as part of it, but primarily Darwin's postulates and natural selection.
As you say, Darwin knew little of the mechanisms of inheritance and neither did Lamarck. That's one of the reasons when we cite Darwinism, we don't include those mechanisms : all that is necessary for his postulates, for example, is that there is at least partial inheritance of parental traits. This is entirely reconcilable with Lamarckism's general traits.
farmerman wrote:We pretty much agree, however, Gould and ELdredge NEVER proposed PE to be a replacement for nat selection , only a "special case" in which stasis was measurable over significant geologic times.
I agree, of course! If I said something like that, I apologize for miscommunicating.
Very interesting info on Gould + PE. I knew that fellow scientists said many of the punctuations vs. stasis listed by Gould were exaggerated, which sadly is often the case with Gould. I didn't have any specific references, though. I own 'The Structure of Evolutionary Theory', although I haven't exactly finished it. You could teach Pedantry 101 with that thing!
I think it's worth noting that Eldridge was the more reasonable of the two and much more open to correction. Gould, in my opinion, would say/publish things he knew were false just to be a bit of a gadfly or balancing force. His constant railing against a semi-mythical ultra-adaptationist orthodoxy is one example.
I like that quote by Darwin. It can be tied to Gould as well, as he claimed that it was not true imperfections in the fossil record that led him to say that, but rationalizations. The jerk! Far more interesting than any imperfections, I think, are the known biases in the record, the lack of organisms with soft bodies which don't fossilize as obviously or easily. As astounding as our record is, it barely captures a part of a percentage of the total species that have lived.
. I know what you're saying, of course, and that's the cool thing about genetic drift interacting with adaptation. It's another potential source of new proteins/functions.
