In terms of total amount of evolutionary change, random genetic
> drift is the main mechanism of evolution, by far. Almost all
> evolutionary biologists know this.
> 
Doesn't that depend on how you measure evolutionary change?  At the 
sequence level, I would agree (well, until someone shows me some 
evidence to the contrary).

At the phenotypic level, I would expect selection to be more important. 
  But I've not seen any actual quantitative evidence, and it's not clear 
to me how to measure this.  Over a short evolutionary time span a 
statistic comparing Qst and Fst could be used, I suppose, but I haven't 
seen any statistic (something else on my list of things to work on!).

Bob

If the main mechanism was random genetic drift, wouldn't that suggest that
convergent evolution was not a viable concept?

-- 
Bob O'Hara

Dept. of Mathematics and Statistics
P.O. Box 4 (Yliopistonkatu 5)
FIN-00014 University of Helsinki
Finland
Telephone: +358-9-191 23743
Mobile: +358 50 599 0540
Fax:  +358-9-191 22 779
WWW:  http://www.RNI.Helsinki.FI/~boh/
Journal of Negative Results - EEB: http://www.jnr-eeb.org

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