SV: Did you hear this?

[Vidyasankar Sundaresan]

>I  know that this is not Indology -- but! Can you provide me with a living
>example of evolution? We hear so much about Darwinism and evolution, but is
>it not a case of evolution happened in the past, evolution will happen in
>the future, but evolution is not happening just now?!
>
>I am asking about evolved living entities, not microbes etc.

A question of time scales. Evolution would happen over tens
of thousands of years, but nobody has lived that long. It can
be seen as what is called a quasi-steady state approximation.
There is a long-term time dependence, but this is so slow that
one would not see changes in the short-term.

Also, there is no one universal view of evolution. What people
think about it today is approximately neo-Darwinian evolution,
not strict Darwinism. Some think evolution occurs through
accumulated changes. Others argue for jerky genetic mutations
and sudden breaks in speciation events. A few people are even
reconsidering Lamarckian evolution nowadays. See Science (the
journal), 7 April 2000, p. 38, and 30 Jun 2000, p. 2318.

Vidyasankar
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