RE: Simplify Evolution
April 20, 2013 at 10:46 am
(This post was last modified: April 20, 2013 at 11:04 am by The Grand Nudger.)
"Descent with modification" there you go, three words, that's as simple as it gets, and is accurate in every particular. You'll never lack for examples of it. Nothing else is required. Presumably you both have a mother and father - and you are at least auditioning to be so yourselves. You are, again presumably, different from your mother and father in some way - and would expect the same of any future progeny the two of you might have. That's it, that's all there is to it.
In this context, you have cousins (more closely related to your mother and father respectively -depending upon which side they fall- than they are to you) and so do humans as a species. An LCA is, essentially and accurately, you and your cousins grandparents. You may be a Johnson (your father), your cousin may be a Smith (his father) - but you are both Howards (your shared grandfather). There's really nothing spectacular about this in principle.
(I've always been tickled by the idea of "species" and all of the other rungs up the ladder as eing frozen in time. Perhaps they may be so, a little, for dead-ended branches of the bush, but if we're going to continue using this system we will have to keep adding rungs to the "bottom" of the ladder. For every "Smith" and "Johnson" in the world today there will one day be a "Clark" and "Hennessy" beneath/above them on their family tree)
In this context, you have cousins (more closely related to your mother and father respectively -depending upon which side they fall- than they are to you) and so do humans as a species. An LCA is, essentially and accurately, you and your cousins grandparents. You may be a Johnson (your father), your cousin may be a Smith (his father) - but you are both Howards (your shared grandfather). There's really nothing spectacular about this in principle.
(I've always been tickled by the idea of "species" and all of the other rungs up the ladder as eing frozen in time. Perhaps they may be so, a little, for dead-ended branches of the bush, but if we're going to continue using this system we will have to keep adding rungs to the "bottom" of the ladder. For every "Smith" and "Johnson" in the world today there will one day be a "Clark" and "Hennessy" beneath/above them on their family tree)
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