I'm now A Wiggly Worm. Woohoo!
There's some interesting back and forth at The Panda's Thumb about the TTLB ecosystem rankings, and whether the "progress" that higher rankings in TTLB represent is antithetical to the proper understanding of the evolutionary relationship of organisms. I think that some of the people, in order to deny teleology in evolution, are bending over backward too far in denying that there's anything interesting going on at all in terms of complexity and specialization over time. There's a pretty strong sense in which organism A is "more evolved" than organism B if organism A could be the decendant of organism B, but not vice-versa, and I think that sense carries over to organisms C and D where C is a descendant of A that shares the features that make A later than B and D is a descendant of B that lacks those features, even if C and D are both equally removed in time from A and B. Evolution is a tree, not a field of grass, and time's arrow is stamped all over organisms if you know how to look. That doesn't mean that more evolved is somehow better in some moral sense, or even in terms of fitness, any more than having a lot of inbound links (the measure in TLBB rankings) makes a blog better or even more "fit" in the blogosphere.
Posted by joshua at April 6, 2004 12:52 AMThat may all be right, but TTLB at least has one problem. It has marsupials above rodents, which was what scientists once thought, but it doesn't fit the current classificatory scheme.
Posted by: Jeremy Pierce at April 15, 2004 01:56 PM