Stochastism lives!
The old theory is that the first and oldest species in our family tree, Homo habilis, evolved into Homo erectus, which then became human, Homo sapiens. But Leakey's find suggests those two earlier species lived side-by-side about 1.5 million years ago in parts of Kenya for at least half a million years... Overall what it paints for human evolution is a "chaotic kind of looking evolutionary tree rather than this heroic march that you see with the cartoons of an early ancestor evolving into some intermediate and eventually unto us," Spoor said in a phone interview from a field office of the Koobi Fora Research Project in northern Kenya.
Yet even in chaos, there is still order...
Posts
2 comments:
I'm a little puzzled by this article. Evolution, Darwinian or Neo-Darwinian [or even Lamarckian, for that matter], never posited an "heroic march" where one species began as the other ended. [That was never more than, literally, a cartoon picture; and one drawn by cartoonists to boot. ]
Speciation necessarily has overlap between a species and new species which may flow from it, and these overlaps may be very long ones indeed. The randomness involved in evolution, the chance element of an organism's interaction with its environment is already a prominent motif with Darwin, never mind later....
What this article claims as "news" was already very much textbook stuff when I took paleontology back in the 80's...
Weird.
What this article claims as "news" was already very much textbook stuff when I took paleontology back in the 80's...
Postmodernity prevails, AA: there's no such thing as a New Idea. Journalists, however, need to sell their print, and the ads to boot. Therefore, this is a "NEW" idea. Get it?
Also see: Yellow Journalism Light.
Post a Comment