Hi Guys

Thanks for posting that piece Mark. I've been reading Gould and Eldredge for years on their "baby" as well as a variety of outsiders who have minimised its significance. It's not a work the scale of Darwin - who anticipated some of its main points anyway - but it is a fair corrective to the Lyellian delusion that "uniformitarian" means "steady change", whereas real geological actualism looks to knowable and observable causes, with a variety of magnitudes.

I see a parallel, in the making, with Woese's recent statement that life didn't begin with a single common ancestor, and instead began with several. The media immediately trumpeted a contradiction with Darwin - who in actual fact hedged his bets and suggested several initial life forms, or maybe just one.

Based on my current reading of biogenesis scenarios, several independent beginnings is entirely possible since the precursors to current cellular life probably formed an interacting "ecosystem" of their own.

Adam