[Paleopsych] is evolutionary change stockpiled?

[Joel Isaacson]

>From: HowlBloom at aol.com
>Reply-To: The new improved paleopsych list <paleopsych at paleopsych.org>
>To: paleopsych at paleopsych.org
>Subject: [Paleopsych] is evolutionary change stockpiled?
>Date: Mon, 22 Nov 2004 18:41:34 EST
>
>Greg Bear just sent me an amazing paper he delivered to the American
>Philosophical Society.  I've enclosed a copy below.
>
>The paper points out that evolution appears to occur in short bursts 
>followed
>by long periods of stability.  He points out that this is more meaningful
>than at first it seems.  Evolutionary changes, he says, are apparently 
>stored up
>but are kept from expressing themselves.  Then, when the right signal 
>comes,
>they come out of hiding and change the organism in which they've been 
>hiding.
>They don't just change one organism.  They make that change in a massive 
>crowd
>of organisms--and in crowds of crowds.
>
>In one of my papers, The Xerox Effect (see
>http://physicaplus.org.il/view_eng1.html), I've called the spontaneous and 
>simultaneous precipitation of
>protons, galaxies, and stars supersimultaneity and supersynchrony.  In 
>Greg's view,
>this supersimultaneity and supersychrony also occurs in the evolution of 
>life.
>
>But how does it work?  How do evolutionary changes stack up in storage?  Do
>they go through any sort of pretesting, any process of natural selection, 
>any
>tryouts in the obstacle course of the real world?  How do they do this if
>they're not expressed in bodyplans or bodychanges that can be put through 
>their
>paces to see if they work?

Is it possible that this stuff is stored in "junk DNA", awaiting some 
"unjunking" trigger?   -- Joel

>
>And, as Greg asks, when this host of changes comes out of hiding in a bunch
>of creatures simultaneously, what's the trigger that sets off the explosion 
>of
>change?  Howard