View Single Post
  #6  
Old 10-01-2007, 03:29 AM
Metric Metric is offline
Senior Member
 
Join Date: Oct 2005
Posts: 1,178
Default Re: Dis \'n Dat with Freeman Dyson

[ QUOTE ]
I thought that Dawkins nailed Dyson pretty well in this exchange:

http://www.edge.org/documents/life/life_index.html#dd

[/ QUOTE ]

Having no formal education in evolution, I was struck by this quote of Dyson: "Species once established evolve very little, and the big steps in evolution mostly occur at speciation events when new species appear with new adaptations. The reason for this is that the rate of evolution of a population is roughly proportional to the inverse square root of the population size."

I had never heard of this "inverse square root" law before. However, it occurs to me that this is probably quite a general principle. Does this explain, for example, why long-term monopolies are extremely unlikely in a truly free market?
Reply With Quote