Natural Science Forum / Biology / Paleontology / March 2005

I'm sorry, but my opinion is that it's long-winded, takes forever to
come to any sort of point (if indeed it ever does -- not sure), and is
full of non sequiturs. The point, if any, seems to come part-way
through, and just as he seems about to go into it in more detail, the
whole thing dissolves into vagueness.

The part where the point seems for a while to be emerging is here:

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Developmental paradigm for the history of life: In modern palaeontology,
biology and evolutionary theory, there is obviously no analogy between
the death of an individual organism and the extinction of species or
higher taxa. It is the modern conventional wisdom that extinctions are
viewed simply as extrinsic events, a sort of sudden cataclysms, i.e. of
catastrophic killing off of species or higher taxa. Even the Raup's
well-known sentence "Bad genes or bad luck?" represents only a "working
metaphore" and is meant in different way. "Bad genes" are assigned for
the description of the Darwinian model of selective extinctions, while
"bad luck" describes purely random causes (see e.g., RAUP 1981). In
contrast to the evolutionary paradigm, the apparent analogy between the
death of individuals and the extinctions of species or higher taxa can
be viewed as a developmental paradigm of the history of life.

It seems that the "evolution" of a given group, once set in process,
cannot be halted when it has reached an optimum, but must continue
inexorably, resulting in final group extinction. Similarly, once set in
motion, the developmental processes cannot be halted when they have
reached an optimum, but must continue untiringly, resulting in the
destruction and death of the individual organism. It seems that there is
a clear analogy. Both processes represent fundamentally a continuation
of the course of development. From this point of view, each new stage of
the so-called "evolution" is a realization of a plan that had been
present from the start.

Of course, if there are internal factors in extinctions, species and
higher taxa are not essentially immortal. Both the development of an
individual organism as well as "evolution" of a given taxon are
processes that are regulated by the interaction of internal and external
influences. People generally go through life without thinking about
death. Death becomes little more than impersonal statistics on the
evening news (PAPALIA & OLDS 1992). Sci-fi authors invariably picture
their imaginative future worlds as if mankind itself will live forever.
What is responsible for this denial of death? It is, at least partly,
the present-day evolutionary paradigm of accidental character of
extinctions as well as origins of species. We can argue that
"development" seems to be a much more suitable word than "evolution".
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I think the analogy is silly and without evidence. He's jumping from
evidence of "internal causes" of extinction, i.e. characters that make
extinction more likely, straight to some kind of orthogenesis and racial
senescence. If there's any sort of case for this, he's not making it.