On Tue, 29 Sep 1998, Ward Nicholson wrote:

> (continued from first part...)

Ward, thank you for this thoughtful response to Amadeus, which
states my position much better than I was managing to do.  I had
composed a facetious *reductio* argument to the effect that,
since our ancestors were bacteria for 3 *billion* years before
the Cambrian explosion, perhaps we should be trying to
reconstruct something along the lines of "ProkaryoThin."

> Your conception of evolution seems to be of a process that is
> additive--that is, one newly evolved trait gets piled on top of previous
> traits which are retained with the same level of efficiency in functioning
> they previously had, with no trade-offs involved. But evolution doesn't
> work that way. There are two reasons for this.

I believe that the fact that evolution doesn't work this way also
explains divergent microevolution, or optimization to a specific
niche.  This is why I am suspicious of quick generalizations from
the Inuit or other relatively isolated breeding populations.

Todd Moody
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