At 02:48 PM 1/14/03 -0800, Michael Motyka wrote: >I guess bifurcation points and speciation seem very clear because of the aliasing >problems in our sampling methods. The speciation exists but is prolly ( probably ) often >fuzzier than we think. Almost everyone would say that an American Bison and a Scot's >Highland are two different species but they can hybridize. Maybe we non-Biologists >measure the distance between "species" inaccurately.
Probably not. Lay knowledge usually has substantial truth. (The major problem with lay knowledge in bio/geo/climatology is lack of scale ---no sense that things change, and this is a snapshot, so don't get so attached.) A species is operationally defined as a population that can't breed with another. The layman and/or farmer knows this, or learns this upon trying to cross things :-) Its empirically verifiable. On forking: Nature's RCS is distributed. Un-interoperable forks (species) are documented by those wetboy cladistics folks, gnostic Linneans. And these days the sequencemensch and their fluorescing machines, ravers dancing to evolution's endlessly refined tune.. >Is the evolution towards a more efficient language an active or passive process? Is it >driven by an internal inclination towards expansion, freeing up system resources as it >were, or is it a coping mechanism for sensory overload? A major job of Mr Brain is finding efficient representations (ie by finding regularity). At every level, from sensory to conceptual. Humans are also very very good at imitation and linguistic acquisition. (The same ready programmability is maladaptive when e.g., religion infests the mind...) ..... Summary: It is adaptive for a critter to maximize the bits/baud over a given channel. Xerox errors in the genome try lots of things. Similarly with memes & culture & linguistics. Some things work better. You can get hurt if you misunderstand. You might not have children if you get hurt. Do the math :-)
