Dollo's Law...

DAVID STOCKHOFF · 16 May 2011, 15:27 · from 2011-May.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: dstockhoff at verizon.net (DAVID STOCKHOFF)
Date: Mon, 16 May 2011 08:27:19 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: (urth) Dollo's Law...
In-Reply-To: <BANLkTin8dAhhHUx3ouCBGh+hcqHzuJBnSw at mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <603314.3775.qm at web84108.mail.mud.yahoo.com>

Like most of these Laws turn out to be.

"... In 2003, scientists showed that some species of insects have gained, lost and regained wings over millions of years."

That's a good example of a common-sense reversible adaptation. If humans experienced million-year floods every million years, we might evolve, devolve, and revolve webbed fingers and toes---because the original structure from which the webs were derived are still going to be around. Evolution uses the tools at hand. Tress have used and re-used the same basic leaf shapes for millions of years. 

I have forgotten the trait that brought up Dollo's Law---mind projection? mimicry? opposable thumbs?

--- On Mon, 5/16/11, Dan'l Danehy-Oakes <danldo at gmail.com> wrote:

> From: Dan'l Danehy-Oakes <danldo at gmail.com>
> Subject: (urth) Dollo's Law...
> To: "The Urth Mailing List" <urth at lists.urth.net>
> Date: Monday, May 16, 2011, 11:10 AM
> ... appears to be more, well, a
> guideline.
> 
> http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/05/110511162538.htm
> 
> -- 
> Dan'l Danehy-Oakes
> _______________________________________________
> Urth Mailing List
> To post, write urth at urth.net
> Subscription/information: http://www.urth.net
>

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net