Re: Stephen Jay Gould and Progress

Michael Lorrey (retroman@tpk.net)
Thu, 09 Jan 1997 17:51:12 -0500


Michael Butler wrote:
>
> My two cents:
>
> Mike,
> I read Robin's timeframe as billions of years, and his metric as something like "the
> centroid of the biomass". It looks to me as if your timeframe is tens
> of thousands of years, and your metric--well, what specifically *is*
> your metric?
>
Whats my English you mean....(I prefer to go around in circles).

What a deep and personal question....

Thinking further on it, if one were to use billions of years as a
metric, average size does tend toward the larger, even with tens of
millions of years, if you use major extinctions as reset points. This
metric would also be a good reference to answer the question why the
Martian "fossils" of bacteria are on average less than half the size of
Earth archaea, they are simply even more primitive, though the planetary
GM may have some structural influence on cell size.

Using less than a million years, one sees much more influence by
environmental factors rather than genetic, as there is not a lot of
drift in a million years or less.

-- 
TANSTAAFL!!!

Michael Lorrey ------------------------------------------------------------ President retroman@tpk.net Northstar Technologies Agent Lorrey@ThePentagon.com Inventor of the Lorrey Drive Silo_1013@ThePentagon.com

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