No. It’s “giant leaps” as in “giant leaps”.

It is worth noting that the phrase “giant leaps” appears to have originated with the Physorg editors. It isn’t present in the abstract, nor does the abstract describe anything resembling “giant leaps.” (I don’t have access to the article itself, however).

I believe introns actually produce RNA transcripts and are implicated in gene regulation

Introns are part of the primary RNA transcript. They also may play a role in nonsense-mediated-decay (NMD), which is a mechanism by which certain aberrant mRNA’s are eliminated before being translated into protein. Mike Lynch thinks the early proliferation of introns may have been a coevolutionary byproduct of the development of an efficient NMD mechanism. See Lynch’s book, The Origins of Genomoic Architecture, pp 265-270.

Zachriel: It’s not “giant leaps” as normally construed. It’s speciation. In many cases, it takes an expert to identify the differences between closely related species.

PaV: It’s “giant leaps” as in “giant leaps”.

I assume that’s meant to clarify.

The study concerns speciation, not large changes in adaptive structures. My comment had nothing to do with adaptive radiations.

From the shocking title onward, Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini have set the cat among Darwin’s pigeons. In arguing why the operation of natural selection says nothing about the causal mechanisms underlying the evolution of coextensive traits in an organism, they take us to the conceptual fault line at the heart of Darwin’s theory. My prediction is that Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini’s book will raise hackles galore wherever the theory of natural selection is all too glibly misused, not only in studies of the ontogeny and phylogeny of biology, but also in those great overlapping disciplines of philosophy, psychology, linguistics, and behavior—in short, human nature. This book will set the agenda for years to come. It cannot be ignored if the study of evolution is to be honest with itself.” —Gabriel Dover, Professor of Evolutionary Genetics, Universities of Leicester and Cambridge, and author of Dear Mr. Darwin: Letters on the Evolution of Life and Human Nature

http://www.amazon.com/What-Dar.....038;sr=1-5

I believe introns actually produce RNA transcripts and are implicated in gene regulation. But the extremely large ones, especially the repeating ones, are very hard to understand. It’s possible that the long repeats play some structural/protective role. But this is pure speculation.

Zachriel [17]

No. It’s “giant leaps” as in “giant leaps”. You’re confusing adaptive radiations with singular events that produce new lineages. They’re just not the same.

PaV: Now the seeming “coup de grace”: it is an article reviewed at PhysOrg with the heading Evolution may take giant leaps.

It’s not “giant leaps” as normally construed. It’s speciation. In many cases, it takes an expert to identify the differences between closely related species. Anyone familar with how flowering plants or beetles speciate will be very comfortable with this finding. Small changes in sex organs can lead to reproductive isolation.

As Voice Coil points out above, it supports and is supported by Common Descent.

It is unclear to me whether your interpretation of the Orlando study (“This now means that the already tiny portion of “intermediate forms” that RM + NS produces in reduced in size”) is intended to support doubt of Darwin’s central insight: that organisms are related by common descent. Certainly that is the context within which the topic most often arises. If so, you must ignore the Pagel study.

The Pagel study, with its analysis of “the lengths of branches in the evolutionary trees of thousands of species within these groups” was conducted within the framework of common decent, which incorporates the claim that each pair of species has a LCA. Their methods are intelligible only within that framework. If you reject common descent, then you must ignore the Pagel study entirely rather than interpret its results as challgening to Darwinism.

Conversely, if you accept Pagel’s results, then you perforce accept the reality of common descent, and accept that all pairs of species have LCAs, regardless of the relative paucity of “intermediate forms.” Therefore you must accept that Orlando’s results have no bearing upon the reality of common descent.

The issues of gradualism and pan-adaptionism have otherwise been debated for decades within the context of evolutionary theory (see Gould’s The Structure of Evolutionary Theory for a good “summary.”)

Fair enough.

why on earth would you—supposedly a scientific thinker—make the presumption that what is true of the horse and zebra lineage is not true of others? What would your reasons be for justifying that this finding cannot be generalized? (Other than it’s an “inconvenient truth”?)

I said nothing about presuming that what is true of equids is not true of other clades, or cannot be generalized. I said that declaring that this finding is true for species generally isn’t remotely warranted on the basis a single study. Much more work needs to be done to determine how generalizable these findings are.

Therefore what IS warranted is further empirical work of this kind in other clades.

By comparison, 78% of the trees fit the simplest model in which new species emerge from single events, each rare but individually sufficient to cause speciation.

Man this looks like the hopeful monster theory.