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Showing posts with the label natural selection

In business, evolution versus free market, why competition matters.

In a recent article the actions of the president to chose a stance that seems anti-environmental has gotten many eye brows to raise. The action involves giving up a little bit on the environmental conservation in hopes of enabling businesses to create more jobs in a particular sector. The nuance of the give and play of politics is only a side actor to the real story driving the debate which to me falls on a simple core difference between the free markets and species in evolution. A capitalist economy...models in a very similar way, the natural process of survival of the fittest identified by naturalist Charles Darhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifwin. Though he and Adam Smith weren't contemporaries I am sure they would have seen eye to eye on many ideas and I am sure watching nature inspired Smith. The difference is that in evolution species emerge in environmental niches due to the selection processes produced by the fact that environments shift *under* populations of com...

Fallacies in the idea of a Cambrian Explosion.

A common mistake made by people describing the Cambrian era of 545 mya is to assume that the incredible diversity of forms found in the shale strata that dates to this period is some how unique to the period. This mistake falls from the assumption that because we don't see the same level of diversity in later rock strata that it means there was less diversity in general over all possible living environments , but this doesn't follow. In the roughly 540 million years since the Cambrian age , the Earth's geology has changed significantly along with the animal forms, they did this while radiating into new habitats that were different from those in which the Cambrian creatures thrived. The homogeneity of the limited living environment of these early forms bares a contribution to the apparent diversity of animal forms found in the strata. We know that the early seas were incredibly homogeneous and it makes sense that as animal forms proliferated that they would team across...