In his first Ulam lecture, last night, Lewontin demonstrated the value
of a liberal education at Harvard and Columbia and of a lifetime devoted
to deep thinking about the problems of evolution. He argued that the
idea of struggle for survival came from a socio-economic history of
self-made men and a literature of determined behavior overcoming random
forces. A question from the audience prompted him to examine the
sources of his own interpretation of evolution in the success of quantum
mechanics, an educated family, and a sexist culture.
He denounces the picture of evolution with lower creatures leading up to
the supreme achievement of homo sapiens sapiens. But he keeps the idea
of creatures evolving to fill niches and focuses on the difficulty of
evolving against a gradient from one branch of the evolutionary tree to
another. And he names several of the empty niches such as leaf eating
birds (one bird exception, many insect examples) and wing sprouting
vertebrates (angels sprout vs bats and birds adapt forelimbs, yet
insects have multiple wings and many legs).
He mentioned Karl Sims project at Thinking Machines
http://web.genarts.com/karl/evolved-virtual-creatures.htmlwhich evolved creatures that came up with all of the known methods of
organic locomotion and then some.
The 2nd lecture, tonight, promises to show that the niches evolve too.
I'm looking forward to it.
-Roger
Locked
