Here's what happened...<p>I loaded HN, saw a headline which mentioned "evolution", saw that this headline was sourced from the Wall Street Journal, and thought to myself "Damn, the Journal really is turning into yet another right-wing rag...I wonder what they've dredged up this time"<p>...then I did something that, apparently, most of the members leaving comments thus far did not do: I read the article.<p>First, this is a book review. The only question of accuracy is how well the review represented the content of the book. Second, though the term is not used in the article, the mention of Gould gives away the topic of the book. It's a concept called "punctuated equilibrium", and it's very much an open question in biological research.<p>The most troubling result of the ID movement is the subsequent balkanization of views on all sides of the issue. What we have here (and by here, I mean this comment thread, not the article) is a prime example of individuals jumping to "defend" evolution without giving much thought or analysis to what it is they're defending.<p>Modern theories of Evolution are as complete and sound as Newton's laws of motion... I should know, since I'm currently completing a Ph.D. looking into some of them...
The Wall Street Journal should know better than to comment on stuff they haven't got a clue about.<p>Every time an egg gets fertilized that's evolution in progress, every time a human being does not get offspring because his/her desired mate gets snagged by a more appealing specimen that's evolution in progress and every time somebody gets killed by accident before they get to reproduce that's evolution in progress too.<p>The fact that the changes accumulate too slow for you to witness this in real-time does not mean it does not happen.<p>Any scientist that works in biology claiming that human evolution has stopped will soon find himself/herself the laughingstock of his profession.
No. People need to stop asking this.<p>As far as I understand it, evolution is not a thing that stops.<p>I am significantly annoyed at the propagation of stuff like this. It's like this horrible catch-22 where such a small amount of the population actually understands current theory, and the rest just have these really off-the-wall interpretations, with a similarly small percentage admitting that they have no clue what they're talking about - like how the (stereotypical) average american citizen thinks of abiogenesis, evolution, and the big bang as one big lump of a theory.<p>Please, correct me if I'm wrong, but saying somethings "evolution has stopped" is nonsense, right?
I was unimpressed by their analysis of the genetic causes of intelligence. Just because some genetic disorders and intelligence happen to be correlated doesn't mean that both are caused by the same gene. I think the reasoning in this article was incredibly sloppy.
It is an interesting discussion.<p>The article's points about evolution continuing in terms of disease prevention, ability to fight germs, etc. are understandable, as with greater population density, exposure to those things do go up.<p>On the other hand, every time we make a scientific advance which allows people to continue living/reproducing when they wouldn't have before, we lower the selection criteria, and it seems like this would have to slow evolution as a result, right?
There is macroevolution (molecule-to-man theory) and microevolution (no increase in complexity and no new species).<p>And then there is natural selection, which decreases the amount of variation of a species.<p>It's very important to keep different things separate.