writing friends

I've been getting the impression lately that I may be trying to contact people by the wrong e-mail addresses. I've sent out a couple of e-mails to friends but I get the impression that nobody is getting them. Either that or they just haven't written back yet. Michelle wrote me back and did it rather promptly. I've written Sudeep twice in the last two months and haven't gotten any reply. Perhaps he feels bad about the fact that I spent more time with Michelle the last time I was in California than with him. If that is the Case, I'm sorry dude. Ok, that could explain one lack of response. What's wrong with the rest of you. I lead a really boring life here in South Dakota and it means alot when I get correspondence.

perminance and imperminance

I was surprised today to find out that the wiki that I created about the value of public participants in field work still exists despite the fact that it was at one point slated for deletion due to its enormous size. It's no longer under the heading field work, but you can get to it from a link in that heading or using the above link. I am kind of depressed that whoever relocated it specified it as archaeological despite the fact that there isn't one archaeological organization that I surveyed. He must not have even read the abstract.
Besides checking out my old Wiki, I've been filling up my G-mail account. I think I must be the only person to have already filled close to 30% of my free Gigabite of space already. I've been sending myself my digital photos so I can get them off of my memory card. I didn't want to burn them onto a cd yet because it seemed like only 240 megabytes of an available 700 would be a waste of space. In retrospect I should have just burt the cd as a session and added more later. Oh well.
In other news, somebody took my idea and is making a whole lot of money off of it. Well, actually they just had a similar idea and are making money off of a limited academic circle. There's a book called "the dinosaur paper 1676-1908" (dates may be wrong here) in which it repuplishes all of the original papers starting with the very first description of a dinosaur and going to the start of the 20th century. My idea was a bit more limited in scope. I just wanted to do this for each major journal that published dino papers separately. Whoever compiled this is briliant, and clearly very hard working. I have no idea how they got some of these papers. Anyway, I must have this book. Unfortunately, It's just as costly as a text book ($75 USD) so I think I'll wait until I can get it used. Or, since I'm only buying used texts now, I think I'll use what I save on those to buy it. I've spent alot lately on my paleo adiction (Lebanese and Moroccan fossils) so I think I should wait.
Another book that I'm really sorry that I have to wait to buy is Alfred S. Romer's "The Osteology of the Reptiles." It looks like a great book but its about $110 USD. That's alot for book that hasn't had a new edition in over 30 years and doesn't have a single color plate. Perhaps some money making scheme of mine will cover it. Who knows?

Good to be me

It's good to be me, especially since I've got some seriously cool hookups. Matt Vavreck is currently in Lebanon doing some research for Dr. Chatterton. While there, he's doing a little shoping for me. I'm not quite sure what I'm getting, but its between several varieties of Cretaceous age fossil fish. Apparently, I could get some small ones for $5 each or bigger ones for more. I might even get a cretaceous ray (now if only I could remember the name of the Alberta variety so I could do some comparison, beggins with an M,I think).
Meanwhile elsewhere in the Middle East (Morocco) Stacey Gibb (also doing research for Dr. Chatterton) has money from me specifically for some dinosaur material and an enormous Trilobite.
I'd personally rather be doing this shopping my self but it's nice to be able to get the local price discount on otherwise expensive fossils. A great example of just such a discount is something I happened upon just the other day. I was walking around town (window shopping without the intention to buy) when I spied a couple of fossil turtles from the White River formation. A smaller one (about 10 inches long and 6 inches wide) was missing the majority of the carapase (showing just the endocast) and the plastron was obscured by matrix. The larger one (12 inches by 7 inches) still has about half of its carapase (also showing an endocast where shell is missing) and the plastron is once again obscured by matrix. Normally, If I were to buy this from a retailer in California who knows anything about fossils, I would be charge about $100-$150 for the better one. I bought it from a shop that had a couple of fossils (but mostly used books) for a grand total of $35, plus tax. Now I have a project in cleaning it up. I particularly like it because if reminds me of when I was a kid and I preped the same Oreodon skull (from the same formation) for 5 years (I'm alot faster now).

DinoData

Once again I would like to sing the praises of Dinodata. It's been a while since I've visited the site but I'm glad that I did. Apparently an oviraptor called Ingenia (one who's photo has long eluded me)has been shown to gave numerous impressions of blood vessels on the inside of its brain case, indicating that at least in that group, the brain was snuggly fitting within the skull, much like modern birds and mammals. As for what this evidence indicates in terms of phylogeny its pretty inconclusive if you ask me. The camp that says that oviraptors are within the crown group birds would argue that they inherited their larger brains from their birdy ancestors, where as the group that puts oviraptors in an outgroup relation to birds would argue that birds and oviraptors inherited the larger brain from a common ancestor. I personally like the idea that an ancestor with either a much lower body mass or a dramatic change in bite mechanics (reduces shock transmission to the brain) facilitated the transition to a more closely fitting brain. Still this hypothesis could go either way in terms of phylogeny.

What a Good Day!!!

Today's been going pretty good. It turns out somebody actually reads my blog! Who knew, huh? I've also taken care of the financial stuff for the U of A paleo society (that I to say I'v passed the buck to somebody else), I've packed up most of my stuff and I got Gmail. As for the comment on my last blog about becoming a superhero called Mammoth Man, I've decided to pass on that. After all, I've always wanted to be a super villain rather than the hero and people might be kind of confused when they expect somebody mammoth in proportion but only get me. On top of that, the idea of an evil paleontologist has been done. Remember the 80's movie BABY, about a baby dinosaur that's being hunted by an evil paleontologist in the Congo and a beautiful but ditsy female paleontologist and her husband are trying to save it? The movie did ok, but the evil paleontologist dies at the end, and i really don't want that kind of precedent set for me.

The end is near

Well, despite the fact that everything I touch seams to be doomed to ruin (even especially this blog), I can just about see the end at hand. Eleve more days until I leave for field school and about ten more after that until I leave for south Dakota. My housing situation is taken care of for once and I just have to worry about getting through my exams and field school alive. Given that my shoes are absolute crapola (I was going to buy new ones but cheaped out) I think I'm going to buy some insoles and glue tire tred onto the bottom of my current shoes. That ought to extend the life of them for another year or so. The next time I blog, odds are I'll have something to say about the pleistocene of South Dakota.

Putting an end to it

In the opinion section of the Gateway (the University of Alberta student's union run news paper) there has been something of a debate each week regarding evolution and creation. Since for some reason, the debate is now even being advertised on my site, I figured I'd just try to put an end to it. The fact of the matter is that anyone who has ever become embroiled in such a debate has inadvertently come to the inevitable conclusion that you will never convince someone of a different opinion than yourself that they are wrong and that they will never convince you. You walk away from the conversation wondering how the other person could be so closed minded and blind to the obvious truth. People are stubborn. Pretty much once they've reached the age of 15 their ideologies are set and only life altering experiences will ever change it. A person may become more complacent over time about their ideology and this may lead that person having less of an impact on the ideology of the next generation, but the persons themselves are rather unchanging. It's like evolution is suppose, any individual is stuck in their genetic place. Small changes can occur but its just a matter of how much impact that individual has on the next generation that determines the eventual outcome of the population. The population will fluctuate with changes in the environment, but without the introduction of novel features or a stark need for change, there will be a fair amount of stasis in the relative proportions of ideologies in the population.

piling up

Right now I'm supposed to be working on either of two systematics papers, one on gerrids one on conodons, or an applied ethics paper, or even a paper on the value of amature field assistants to paleontology (particularly in day digs programs) or an interpretation of a wheeler diagram that my strat team constructed this last week. I haven't started any of them. And frankly I really don't feel like doing any of them today. What I'd really like to do is scan through my annotated bibliography of dinosaur paleopathology and find articles relevant to predator-prey relations (for somebody elses research project) or look up the mineralology of dinosaur bone from different locals or continue my ongoing quest to measure all of the relevant qualities of all the fenestrae in theropod skulls. After all, I haven't even been given the topics for my ethics paper, I don't have the references for my conodonts paper and I didn't print out my trees for my gerrids systematics paper. That prety much leaves the Day Digs paper and the wheeler diagram write up. Being that the wheeler diagram is due sooner, in the spirit of procrastination, I think I'll work on the Day Digs paper instead. University would be great if you got to do your own research, on topics that hold your interest. I've been told that grad school is like that (but not by grad students or profs) so I guess I'll have to wait until i've got a degree before people will just let me research what I like in peace.

A call for Wikipedia submissions

I was surfing wikipedia and was shocked to find that there was practically no discussion of marine reptiles. A search for Euryapsida doesn't even turn up any results. I'm imploring anyone with expertise on marine reptiles (even extant ones) to submit to the site. Honestly, how are people supposed to learn if we don't teach them. I set up a stub site that has a basic break down of the marine reptiles into diapsids (mosasaurs, marine crocs and marine iguanas) and Euryapsids (plesiosaurs, ichthyosaurs and placodonts) there is of course a plethora of others but I don't have the time to fill them in.

I hate the people who advertize on this site

When I've looked at the top of the screen on my blog yesterday and today, I was shocked to see ads for creation science, 7 day creation, bible help etc. HAVE I MENIONED THESE AT ALL? I'm a devout atheist and usually talk about biology, paleontology or ethics, not creationism. I usually don't even give creationism the time of day. If you are interested in these bible help places, please don't link to them from my site. It's just embarassing.

Free Vert Paleo Papers

I found a great web site that is giving away free copies of recent paleotnological papers in pdf format. I highly recomend visiting the site soon. I don't think that it is quite in agreement with international copyright laws and may be shut down soon. So all of you Paleo Pirates should head over now! the addresss is :
www.geocities.com/mesozoicdinosaurs/dinopapers.html#dinosaurs

the book quiz

You're The Grapes of Wrath!

by John Steinbeck

You're mired in a deep depression that encompasses you and everyone
you know. You're trying to get out of the depression, but your idea of help is, in
itself, pretty sad. While some are convinced that this all has a deeper meaning, you're
really just dull and tedious. And utterly obsessed with dust. You really need to focus
on something other than dust. Your best moments center around turtles.


Take the Book Quiz
at the Blue Pyramid.

Another Ethical thought

My ethics class has been talking alot lately about what human nature is and why its so important. Frankly, I think most of what's been said is a load of crap. Not one of the philosophers we've covered have even mentioned natural selection, evolution or mutability. Not one seems to have ever taken a biology class within the last 150 years. Granted, philosophers before then wouldn't have even heard of Darwin (except perhaps for he accomplishments of Erasmus Darwin), but there's no excuse for more recent ones. Even before the theory of natural selection was formalized, the vast majority of the biologically minded community acknowledged that humans are in fact animals and that no species is immutable. Apparently nobody told the ethical theorists. Even today in class, my prof said that human nature was human nature and that it was universal across the species.
OK, here's a new ethical theory for you, it has two assumptions: 1. human beings came to their current state through the process of evolution by natural selection. 2. If there is such a thing as justice, then it is subjective (ie. one group argues that each person is autonomous with equal rights and another argues that people are variably dependant and have the equal right to have their dependancy accomodated). "Moral action is that which is in accordance with those which produced that which is viewed as human nature or changes what human nature is for a significant proportion of the population." This theory is univeralizable (throughout all life), consequentialist, and can serve as an umbrella theory under which all the other theories which my ethics class has covered.
It is universalizable across all life becaue it has all reached a current state through a process of evolution. If an organism is capable of behavior, then we shall arbitrarily say that its behavior can be deemed either beneficial/ moral, detrimental/ imoral or neutral. For much of the animal kingdom, we shall say that the range of potential behaviors is genetically hard wired (to apply to humans you can either change all occurances of the word gene to idea, belief or code of action, and any word synonymous with inherited to learned, or you can leave it as is, depending on you views of human developement). An organism is therefore obligated to conduct itself in those behaviors which increase the fitness of its gene line and those behaviors which are utilized to that end. A behavior that inhibits the reproduction of that organism will not be passed on to the next generation and thus the proportion of individuals with that trait will remain very close to 0 (its distance from zero depending on the liklihood of mutation wich results in the production of those inhibitory behaviors). Likewise, behaviors which improve evolutionary fitness will increase in proportion within the population. The developement of a novel behavior which does not affect the likelihood that the gene which controls it will get passed on will be subject to genetic drift. There would be an accumulation of novel characters which are not necssarilty shared by the entire population nor all in one sect, if the rate of mutation to produce these behaviors is greater than their random elimination through serendipitious death, non reproduction or reverse mutation. The other factor that would affect the accumulation of those characters which do not affect reproductive success is linkage. The likage/ closeness of two genes is an expression of the probablility that in a random sample of progeny from a single set of parents, individuals that inherit one character will also inherit another without necessarilty a causal relationship. If a completely neutral gene is likely do be inherited with a detrimental one, then it will likely be eradicated from the population. The converse is also true (linkage to a beneficial gene increases the carrying proportion of the population).
It is important to noe here that the affect a behavior has on fitness is entirely situationally dependant. On its own, anything becomes nuetral because it serves no direct purpose (digestion is meaningless without absorbtion, copulation is meaningless without gestation). An act can be beneficial in one situation but nuetral or detrimental in another dependig on a change in the environment (including social environment). The value of any behavior can switch to any other value depending on the situation. In the human world, flying would be considered by most to be morally nuetral. It becomes evil if you purposely crash it into a couple of builings and admirable if you fly air drop supplies for the hungry.
Humans are particularly interesting creatures because of the complexity and placticity of our behaviors, of which, one behavior is reasoning. Reasoning ability opens range of behavior even wider because we have the ability to construct tools to manifest our ideas, desires and feelings. We as human beings are not physiologically capable of completely independant powered flight, yet it is clearly within the range of our abilities to achieve flight through our natural tool use and reasoning. The act of reasoning itself one could argue is evolutionarily nuetral, but it is the impementation of that reasoning through our mechanations which affect our success (dolphins could be capable of reasoning but we'd never know it because they don't visibly do anything with it). In this way we are contrained by the limitations of our mechanations and the sum of the mechanations of previous generations. Therefore we cannot actually act outside the limits of our natures since we have it within our natures to achieve anything given time and resourses. Thus it is completely meaningless to say that acting in dischord with our nature is immoral since it is an impossible condition.
Ok, so no that I've explained alot of the biological background, I can actually get into the syntax of the theory itself. Since it is not possible to act outside the limitations of ones nature, it is possible to not act in accordance with those behaviors which increase or maintain genetic fitness or contradict those that developed the current condition of the species.
You know what, I'm actually getting bored of writing this, as I'm sure you're bored of reading this. Ok, it boils down to there is no objective good or evil act, its all situational; a group can feel threatened by a suddenly successful group and intentionally suppress it as a way of maintaining their success or they can join the new group; people when you get down to it, really aren't that bright.

The Enemy list

Throughout my brief life I seem to have had alot of enemies, nemecies and people I just plain didn't like. Many have commented that I must have a list of people that I'm enemies with a mile long. The other day I tried to actually think of the names on that list but very few came to me. As a matter of fact, only a few of the big ones or the more recent ones came tomind: Anna Lisa Dockman, Daniel Panosh, Richard Sander, Penrose (we only ever called him by his last name). There are certainly others that I can remember, but who's names I've forgotten. The kid in second through fifth grade that ritualistically embarresed and bullied me, that kid in fifth and sixth grade that thought I was his friend, but was really, really annoying (I have a piece of graphite perminantly in my thumb thanks to him), his other friend who pestered me to the point where a teacher dropped the F bomb yelling at him. In junior high there was the kid who sat next to me in band opposite Daniel Panosh, who constantly ridiculed me about my clothing, my weight, and on several occasions tried to cut me. In early high school pretty much hated everybody; the guy that never called me by any name other than Timmy, the majority of the brass section in the band, and pretty much any guy not labeled as a nerd, and even some that were.
I think that what I need is somebody to be my arch nemesis. A rivle who will chalange the limits of my malice and contempt, and with whom I can have such a bitter rivalry that anybody that knows of either of us will recognize our loathsome contempt for each other. Having an enemy can push a person to great things, motivated by hate, the most powerful emotion of all. I do some of my best work when I'm trying to vanquish another. Even Proffessor Membrane on the show 'Invader Zim' had a foe in Santa Clause; "From this day forward, I shall devote a small portion of my life to destroying Santa!!!"

Rage Time

Yesterday, either Allan or Joel brought up an interesting question; how much time you you say you spend enraged? For the purpose of discussion, we made rage to include angry frustration and bad moods that include mental images of hurting others or overpowering other (even if only to get rid of them). Joel responded that 15-20% of his time was spent in such a condition (this is including all that time spent sleeping). This means that practically a third of his waking time is spent in an extremely foul mood. Allans responce also seemed high at 5%, though much lower than Joel's. Allan has always outwardly presented himself as a stoic, emotionless zen master. I guess he just bottles it up. I'll have to remember to stay on his good side. As for me, I really don't know. My mood is highly dependant on ambient temperature and light and CO2 levels. The warmer it is (within reason) generally the happier I am. The converse is also true. This does not necessarily mean that I go strait into rage when it gets below freezing. Actually, I just get sluggish and go into periods of metabolic torpor. Thought there is set of ballance points where it is warm enough for me to get my blood up. Generally this is the temperature that I'm at when I'm lightly bundled in one of the halls of V-wing. With thousands of people around me struggling in one direction like some anatomical macrocosm, consuming all the O2 and acting like complete idiots, I am prone to visions of massive sweeping motions that hurtle people into the snow, or into adjacent lecture theaters. Sauron at the very start of Fellowship used such swings. Another time when I "feel" rage, or as I prefer, the wrathful power of provedence, is in any dance club or bar in which the average age of attendees is below 21. Clearly these people are wastes of oxygen and ought to be eliminated from my path like insects beneath my heel. But then I getting carried away.

The Purity Test

Well, it seems to be the popular thing right now to take the purity test. There are many different versions of the purity test. In this one, a high score means that you are more pure/ wholesome etc. In otherwords, the the lower the score, the more things that you've done in that catagory. Once again, for clarification, gayness of 100% means that you've never done anything gay. I reiterate this because I know that somebody (e-hem, Don) is going to leave a comment completely to the contrary to what I have just established. He does this because he knows that I'm a homophobe. I've also tried to include the scores for my room-mates for comparison as well as the average.
Category _____ ME Allan Joel Average

Self-Love _____ 55% 23.3% 46.7% 65%


Shamelessness 95.2% 71.4% 73.8% 79.3%


Sex Drive _____ 92.1% 92.1% 32.4% 77.6%


Straightness _ _ 87.5% 89.3% 3.6% 44.8%


Gayness _____ 100% 92.9% 89.3% 83.5%

Fucking Sick _ 97.3% 94.7% 84.1% 89.9%


You are _ 85.42% pure 77.2% 57.29% 72.6%

A couple of interesting things occur to me right away. First of all, despite the fact that I don't have a girlfriend, I still scored more pure on the self love catagory than Joel who is (at least amongst us nerds) the most womanizing guy around. Also, Allan didn't post his average, so I decidd to calculate it for him. Also, Allan's gayness and straitnes are pretty close to equal, in fact, I'm sure that if one were to run statistical analysis, the two would be indistinguishable.
Well, it seems like I'm the purest guy in the house, which isn't really saying a whole lot. I'm not really sure if this whole purity thing is good or bad, especially since I was pretty liberal with my answers, trying to depress my score. oh well.

Reunite Gondwanaland!!!

The University of Alberta Students Union is quite possibly the most useless organization on campus. The only function that the SU has served lately seems to have been to fight the provincial government over the amount of subsidies that the university receives. Freeze the Fees is their slogan. This refers to the desire to stop current rise in tuition. Since 1990, tuition, they claim, has risen over 200 percent. The SU points out that Alberta is currently in one of the largest budget surpluses ever and that only a small fraction of that surplus would be necessary to maintain tuition costs for the next several years.
So what has the SU done to actually fight rising tuition costs? They've given out free hamburgers and soda to passing students in order to get them to sign petitions and pre-typed letters to legislature. A couple of times, the SU has organized a march on the parliament building and staged "theatrical" protests on the steps of the provincial government building.
What has this accomplished? Absolutely nothing! Not only did the SU completely fail in its attempt to fight bill 43, the bill which removes tuition caps for universities, but they continue to fail in every single attempt to make a politician (students for the most part too) care about keeping tuition the same. The SU is going about this issue in entirely the wrong way. They might as well be screaming "Reunite Gondwanaland" infront of the United Nations building. Reuniting the southern continents is both physically and politically impossible. Anybody That knows what the issue is would laugh, even if it did seem like a good idea. Politicians don't care about the rants of a few young university students, they care about the voters. I've said it before, but I'll say it again. If the student union were to put as much effort into backing candidates that support their cause and convince students to go to the poles and vote out the current administration, then some change will be seen. People will act if they're afraid of losing their jobs. Student's parents and the parents of prospective students, if they vote would probably be able to make a huge impact.
I hate people who say "fight the system." No, the system is there for a reason, it's a good system. It's changeable but it takes time and effort; so that people wont just fiddle with it every time there is a small, but upset group. Unlike a lot of situations where the squeaky weal gets the grease, the politicians will normally just say that the squeak of students isn't loud enough to be worth the grease. However, if a couple of current leaders of state are replaced, the remaining individuals would be able to clearly see that they are not immune from lay offs.
Voter turn out is absolutely appalling. Old people make up the vast majority of voters, and let me tell you, they don't care about student tuition, unless their grandkids are hitting them up for money. There are approximately 30 thousand students and professors at the U of A. Each of those students has two parents. If half of those people are even eligible to vote, and a tenth of those actually show up to the poles, then that is nearly 5000 votes agains increased tuition. Granted, that isn't very many people, but Alberta has just about the lowest average age of the population, so that some octogenarian won't be skewing the vote. Consider also the 1400 voting parents of students that will be entering university next year. With such low normal voter tern out, over 6000 people voting the same way on a particular issue will has a tremendous impact.

Tuition

Being an American student in Canada can be hard for some reasons that may not seem appartent at first. Beyond the constant jabs at my country's leader and frequent remarks about American stereotypes I have to deal with my tuition. Being a foreigner, I pay more than twice as much as other students in the same classes which means that my tuition this semester cost me $ 6,883.69 CAD. Of course, now that the tuition cap has been eliminated by the province of Alberta the student's union has been holding feeble protests against a 5.5% rise in tuition. How would they feel about a 125% rise? The stressful part of this is not the actual amount that I'm paying for tuition. In fact, this is still a bit less that I would pay at a comparable university in California as a local. The stressful part is deciding when to pay my tuition. Currency exchange rates have not been in my favor. The U.S. economy has been abismal practically since Bush took office. As a result, the value of the U.S. dollar has plumeted. When I first came to Canada, the Canadian dollar traded for 65 cents U.S. Now it is trading at 77 cents U.S. This means that on approximately $10,000 CAD in tuition for one year, I have lost an equivalent of $1,200 US just by inflation. For a student with no income this is a HUGE chunk of change. In September the Canadian dollar was at practically a 20 year high of 75 cents on the US dollar. I thought that this was too high and that the canadian dollar would be affected the US and would eventually depreciate in value. As a result I only paid $6000 of my tuition (just a little more than the first semester's total) hoping that the CAD would fall in time for me to pay the next semester. But instead the CAD continued to rise reaching recently over 78 cents. Since I only have until January 30 to pay this semester's tuition, I was feeling the pressure to get the lowest possible exchange rate in a short period of time. As a result, when the canadian dollar dropped just a little, back down to 76.9 I resolved to pay. Hoping that it would continue to drop I waited a day to see how the Canadian dollar was going. When I went back up to 77.07 I felt that this was a bad trend and paid my tuition on the spot.
Of course, not 2 hours later, my room mate Joel informs me that the Bank of Canada will deciding next week whether or not to drop interest rates in order to inflate the Canadian dollar. If they don't the CAD may continue to soar up to 90 cents, but if they do ( which I feel is more likely) then dollar will plumet and make me kick my self in the pants for paying too early.

Wikipedia

Yesterday I was introduced to the open source encyclopedia called Wikipedia. In this encyclopedia, anybody can contribute information and anybody can edit the site. There are of course graffiti controls and your contribution may not stay very long, but that's at least quality control. I have taken it upon myself to enrich the paleontology section of the site and encourage other people that I know to do the same for their respective fields. For example, last night I corrected some rather dated information that stated that Al Romer currently had the definitive book on vertebrate paleontology and I made it to say that the currently better book is by Robert Carroll (mostly because his text is more recent and because he's coming out with a second edition which Romer (deceased) cannot). Of course, my html skills are abysmal so my contributions thus far are minor.

Paper Tigers

I'm taking a philosophy course on ethics and the first thing that I notice about the subject is that the conflicts between people seem primarily to be fabricated from misunderstanding of what the other is saying and the seemingly innate desire to prove one's philosophical opponent wrong. I'll draw an example from another field which I am more familiar. Dr.'s Stephen J. Gould and Nile Eldrich published together on the topic of punctuated equilibrium which states that evolution is characterized by long periods of stasis with periodic rapid jumps in evolution, in which a peripheral isolate is separated from the main population under slightly different conditions and eventually replaces the parent population when conditions change to favor the isolated new species. Many people (especially young earth creationists) have latched onto this as the theory that disproves Darwinian gradual evolution. Actually, punctuated equilibrium is predicted by population genetics which relies on the principal of evolution by natural selection. The argument that Gould and Eldridge had with other evolutionary biologists was the significance and relative quantities of evolutionary transisions that occur suddenly as the result of the introduction of a peripheral isolate or via what's known as non alosteric evolution (by which the main parent population changes into a distinct species from its ancestors gradually). People have trumped up the argument so much that they seem to feel that the two processes are mutually exclusive and therefore one of them is completely wrong. Then again, people wouldn't sell as many books if all that they said was that a compomise must be made between the views on the significance of the various processes.
'Ethical' philosophers do something similar by constructing definitions or implications for a principal introduced by a colleague and then 'disprove' their argument on the basis of the new definition. For example, today in class we discussed ethical relativism, particularly cultural relativism. The argument goes as such: the relativist says "We should not judge other cultures out of respect for their right to their beliefs, largely because we cannot understand the inticasies of that culture enough to pass absolute moral judgment."
To which the philosopher we were studying would respond "you don't actually respect their culture because respect implies some sort of a positive judgment and if we aren't allowed to make negative judgment then any positive judgment is worthless. Furthermore, if we cannot judge others, the can they judge us? Can we even judge ourselves?"
"Ok then, we should tolerate the other culture's moral views if you want to put so fine a point on it. If we do not understand the system of beliefs which those people draw their morals from, and the ranking of their values, then we cannot state that they are morally wrong, especially if their argument would still be logically correct. As for foreigners judging us, we listen to what foreigners have to say all the time. We only really acknowledge them when they are pointing out a hypocrisy or contradiction in our system of beliefs. And as for judging ourselves, everybody has a unique system of beliefs, they aren't beliefs that are all exclusive to any individual but rather a unique ordering of the value of each value."
"Aha! Then you admit that your original statement is completely wrong! Cultures can pass judgment on one another and you even said that we all have the same values!"
"No, I said that we have different permutations of the values that we give to ethical statements of should or aught, besides a lot of it is entirely circumstantial!"
"But people still have a universal system, I win."
"What!? That universal system is logic, which can be used on ethical statements. The statements that make up that logical system are personal or shared within a culture. I could stay a should b. a then ethically b. It doesn't mean that the ethical decisions that one comes to or the system of actions is in any way universal."
"But you still stay that EVERYBODY SHOULD use logic. That in itself is an objective ethical statement.
"Fine! That's the only one! Are you happy!? Besides, how would be even know if we should use logic? After all, we're had to use logic to come to that conclusion. In any case, this argument SHOULD have been over ages ago, because clearly neither of us ever agreed on what we were even talking about; you were saying that there exists universal truths about morals while I was saying that one's ethical decisions and code of action are dependent on the value ranking of ethical statements, the actual order of which is dependent on culture or individual. We obviously have different opinions on what's more important in a discussion of ethics. But I wont hold that against you since I'm a relativist and I'll 'tolerate' your opinion because I'm sure that in your own head, it makes logical sense, logic being the only objective ethic which I will hold onto since I can't even think of how to argue without it!"
"Ok then, I win."
"Fine, if that's what you want to believe."