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I'm very impressed by the idea of Darwin as a wide-ranging empiricist who built his theory based on pyramids of observations from all around. It takes real, copious effort to not only spend a lifetime collecting and thinking about your own vast store of observations, but also to go through the catalogues of contemporaries and the annals of history to incorporate everything into some kind of overarching inductive theory. I'm wondering what kind of formidable summaries of observations it would take to unseat his theory... it seems that so far, his theory has only been refined by breakthroughs in genetics and understanding of DNA, and by punctuated equilibrium which upsets or at least contests his insistence that evolution will necessarily happen very slowly and gradually over time. The classification system of cladistics seems to put to rest disputes about how to catalogue different species based on a common ancestor. In this system, groups are demarcated by evolutionary novelties such as the amniotic egg. Given this type of distinction, it's easier to see where and how groups divide, as well as how vastly different organisms with regard to appearance/ morphology have certain commonalities.

I've been starting to think about how evolution could be applied to human societies. If small separated clusters of organisms can diverge to form different species, this could be analogous to subcultures/ countercultures splitting off from the mainstream and in a sense "evolving" into a different type of human being, if not genetically than at least culturally/ intellectually different. Paul or someone else in class Thursday suggested that perhaps Abe Lincoln prevented the speciation of the United States... he made us all "American" rather than the diversity of what might have developed under the confederation of separate states. Perhaps there are various ideologies that prevent evolution, such as various fundamentalisms, which be definition resist change. Also, groups like the Amish seem to be isolated both genetically and culturally from the rest of the human race. As Paul noted in class, a globalized, worldwide way of life such as modern capitalist society prevents variation, the kind which existed when different societies existed separately albeit contemporaneously on different continents.