Science a GoGo's Home Page Forums General Discussion General Science Discussion Forum Interesting paper on evolution.

"Distributed Robustness Versus Redundancy as Causes of Mutational Robustness" by Andreas Wagner.

http://www.santafe.edu/research/publications/wpabstract/200406018

Another one:

"Biological Evolution and Statistical Physics"

http://arxiv.org/abs/cond-mat/0101409

This is part of a larger paper on evidences for evolution. But this part is particularly interesting.

"29+ Evidences for Macroevolution"
"Prediction 2.2: Atavisms"

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/section2.html#atavisms

Scientists believe that human embryos go through a stage where they have tails, but that the tail disappears eventually. Creationists claim that human embryos never develop boney tails and that the embryos just "look like they have tails."

This is highly misleading, because 1) not all tails are necessarily boney, and 2) some humans are actually born with boney tails.

Anyway, this paper does an excellent job of laying out the facts, including whales that are born with legs. (I wonder, is a whale with legs still of the "same basic kind" as the other whales? Is a "human" with a tail of the "same basic kind" as the rest of us?)

Nice link, thanks for posting it.

If you've never read it, Thomas Malthus' paper, "AN ESSAY ON THE PRINCIPLE OF POPULATION" is very interesting.

http://socserv2.socsci.mcmaster.ca/~econ/ugcm/3ll3/malthus/popu.txt

Here's a description of the relation between Darwin and Malthus.
http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/history/malthus.html

Have book marked Malthus' paper to read when I have more time. It seems rather long and involved.