themadhair
Patron Meritorious
This figure was derived independently of biology. Essentially you have a maximum age given by the sun, and this uses main-sequence fitting to put a limit on this of around 5 billion years. You also have a minimum regarding the oldest rocks, namely that if you have a rock of over 4 billion years then that is a minimum figure for the age of the earth. By refining these maximum and minimum ages the 4.57 billion years is arrived at. There is absolutely no biology involved in this whatsoever. It may be worth pointing out that, prior to the discovery of nuclear fusion, Lord Kelvin’s calculations involving the sun were taken to be the potential maximum – and the contradiction between this age and that required by both evolutionary theory and geology was apparent.Current theory holds the age of the earth to be about 4.5 billion years.
Your math ignore extremely short-generation organisms such as bacteria. When trying to do a rough calculation like this it would be better to restrict yourself to a class like mammals or some such.Simple math given those figures would predict a new species on average every 350 years.
To take an example, all mammals can be traced from the remnants of this extinction event.It follows that all living species today "evolved" from the survivors of that disaster.
Conceptual fail. The flaw here is to assume that ‘evolution rates’ (whatever that is supposed to mean) is somehow relatively constant. The wiki page is a decent place to start on mammals:That means 1,000,000 species survived.
Over the next 65,000,000 years, that one million evolved into the modern 10 million. That's one new species an average of every 7 years or so over that 65,000,000 years.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_mammals
This article does a good job explaining the current gaps in knowledge so it would be a good place for you to start.
Gould already covered this.I would speculate that evolution is governed by a kind of "chaos theory", by chaos mathematics.
If you reading of evolutionary theory gives you this impression then you are probably reading crap sources. Had to be said. The ‘linearity’ is one of the most profound and common misconceptions of evolution that does the rounds.…rather than any neat orderly linear process.
No. See the work of Kerins who did a good job on this. I’d dig out a reference but I have to leave in about ten minutes. The plethora of ‘design mistakes’ show the lack of a goal in evolutionary processes.Furthermore, rather than relying on random mutation for the emergence of new species (along with selection); could it be that life itself "selects" what it will change into?
Wot??? You do realise that change is gradual with various genes and novel features being exchanged throughout the population? And that only when you get separation (whether geographical, or in sexual routine, etc.) do you actually get speciation? Every single human being is different. If you took a group of humans and kept them in isolation for long enough they would eventually lose the ability to interbreed with the rest of the human population. It is simply a question of whether two creatures have a sufficient number of genetic or behavioural differences that prevent interbreeding. Dogs were isolated from wolves and now wolves and dogs cannot interbreed.Enough individuals morph at about the same time to ensure a viable breeding population of the new form?