From: Robin Hanson (hanson@econ.berkeley.edu)
Date: Fri Sep 25 1998 - 10:56:00 MDT
Curt Adams writes:
>>Granting that there is some variation in the rate at which environments
>>change, the question is: how much variation is that? ...
>
>I should have been more precise by saying that punctuated equilibrium
>predominates in *speciation*... the most important genes do
>roughly follow the exponential model, and the combined effects of the
>most important genes explains most of the variation between species. So
>even if small-effect genes are affected by environmental variation and
>don't follow Orr's model, they're not important for speciation, because
>the total effect of all minor genes combined is fairly small.
This thread started when Eliezer referred to punctuated equilibrium
as support for his claim that future intelligence trajectories will
mainly consist of big fast jumps between periods of little change.
For this purpose, the relevant question is how concentrated in time was
biological innovation. And given the framework you describe, to answer
this we need to know both what fraction of biological innovation happens
from speciation, and just how fast speciation innovation happens.
Even if "the combined effects of the most important genes explains most
of the variation between species", it is not clear to me that this implies
most biological innovation happens at speciation. And even for genes
which do "follow the exponential model", the crucial question is "over
how many orders of magnitude"?
Robin Hanson
hanson@econ.berkeley.edu http://hanson.berkeley.edu/
RWJF Health Policy Scholar, Sch. of Public Health 510-643-1884
140 Warren Hall, UC Berkeley, CA 94720-7360 FAX: 510-643-8614
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 14:49:36 MST