Nature's expressions and patterns (Market Anthropology via The Reformed Broker)

Saturday, May 21, 2011

the Fringe Theory

It's an hour after midnight and I find myself appreciating the concept of punctuated equilibrium, and how wherever I seem to turn, I find the character of the cosmos expressed both blatantly and discretely in the markets and culture.

More evidence of nature's fractal expression in everything we touch.

Perhaps it's just because I am tired. Your mind finds the strangest attractions and corollaries in these moments of exhaustion. After a week of literally passing the bucket from one child, to another, to another - I have a moment of relative familial gastrointestinal stillness. Unfortunately for my better half - she's still in the thick of it assisting our daughter.

In any case, for those that need a quick refresher, the concept was brought to the forefront of scientific debate in 1972 by paleontologists Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould. The abstract thought being - a theory within evolutionary biology that believes that the majority of species originated in viable punctuations, rather than the gradual evolutionary process described by Darwin. As paleontologists, they argued that the fossil record was in fact void of evidence of gradualism as expressed by Darwin.

The theory proposed that adaptations leading to evolutionary change are made at the fringe of an organisms community where they can develop survival advantages in isolation; rather than the dominant mainstream population where interbreeding is rampant and geographic isolation impossible.

Clearly you see where this is headed...

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