Talk:Evolution/Misc

Moved from Talk:Evolution. --Brion 23:17 Jan 19, 2003 (UTC)

Misc. The sentence "Evolution therefore allows life to persist over time" was changed to read "...to persist over greater spans of time." Lineages can certainly evolve but still eventually die out. Also, the paragraph on the molecular basis of evolution was added primarily to continue the campaign against teleological thinking about adaption. Suze

Disagree. Some lineages eventually die out, but there are others that show no sign of being about to, and life as a whole seems to be doing a great job persisting itself. --JG

I disagree, in that the phrase 'persist over time' does not mean 'persist throughout time', i.e., it does not imply eternal persistence. So the change was unnecessary. But the current wording is not bad - just not better, in my opinion. TS[?]

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Is there a good place to put what I think of as "Evolution Analogizing". For instance, we have a good entry on Meme, but the concept of meme should be recognized for what it is - creeping evolutionary analogizing.

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The first paragraph defines biological evolution as change in the genetic characteristics of a population over time.

But this is surely not called transmutation, right? Something is wrong. Isn't evolution simply the change of species over time, and the appearance of new ones? Genetics seems to properly belong to the theory of evolution, because one could conceivably try to explain this transmutation without genetics. --AxelBoldt

I just changed the "refers to the change in the genetic characteristics of a population[?] over time" because of the above reason. If we define evolution as the change of genetic characteristics of populations, then Darwin did not know anything about evolution. --AxelBoldt