(urth) The green man is a fake

[Jeff Wilson]

On 1/17/2011 7:21 AM, Lee Berman wrote:
>
>
>> Jeff Wilson: They [teeth] function, but they have marginal impact on selection at best.
>> particular features don't have to be advantageous , only that the overall incremental
>> change is positive.
>
> This makes sense using an ideal version of natural selection. In practice, there seems to
> be a maintenance factor involved. Meaning that if an organism's structure is neutral in
> regard to natural selection it will tend to accumulate negative mutations just in the
> course of not being maintained. Thus cave fish lose their eyes to become
> non-functioning bumps of tissue; not because a working eye is selected against by pitch
> dark but because deforming mutations are not selected against and pile up over the generations.
> Perhaps the same for the human appendix, baby toe, etc. The green man's teeth should be
> deformed.

Sexual selection? Crap teeth aren't sexy.

-- 
Jeff Wilson - jwilson at io.com
Computational Intelligence Laboratory - Texas A&M Texarkana
< http://www.tamut.edu/CIL >