Tim Tyler  wrote:

> John Wilkins  wrote or quoted:
> > In article ,
> >  Tim Tyler  wrote:
> > > John Wilkins  wrote or quoted:
> 
> > > > This is what I don't get about species selection theory. 
> 
> [...]
> 
> > > > This overall developmental cycle is maintained by
selection on organisms
> > > > according to the properties of these traits. But there is nothing
> > > > analogous in species selection. There are no
developmental cycles in a
> > > > species.
> > > 
> > > No?
> > > 
> > > What about phylogeronty (species senescence) [...]
> > 
> > That has been pretty much abandoned (even by Darwin) since the 19thC. It
> > was a doctrine of the neo-lamarckians like Cope.
> 
> It certainly has not been abandoned by me.
> 
> Anyway, even if you reject phylogeronty, you *really* /ought/ to accept
> its sister - species infant mortality ;-)

Is that where you shouldn't lay a new species on its stomach?
> 
> Also - as I describe on http://alife.co.uk/misc/new_species/ - there are
> actually a raft of ways in which new species will typically differ
> from their parents - since the new species will rather often have been
> formed by geographic isolation on islands (or in lakes) - and island 
> habitats (and lake habits) differ systematically from other locations
> in many ways which will result in different selection pressures.
> 
> New siblings are often forced into competition with their parents -
> resulting in "divergent selection".

And none of this seems to me to have any connection with the idea that
species have a "life cycle" or "duration" programmed into their
structure.
> 
> Species senescence, species infant mortality, and systematically
> different selection pressures on young species - isn't this all
> indicative of the existence of developmental cycles in species?

It would be if they were real effects or processes. 
> 
> What grounds are there to assert that there are no species 
> developmental cycles?

On the grounds that, unlike a multicellular organism that is neither
colonial nor a biofilm, species do not share mechanisms among their
members that go to directly form larger than organismic structures.
There is no *development* in a species, nor any credible mechanism for
it.

I believe this is an inappropriate bit of analogy, one which goes
*waaayy* back, to the Greeks (of course), of drawing a parallel between
microcosms and macrocosms. A species is not a superorganism except in
some very specific and unusual circumstances, and certainly not in and
of itself qua species. IMO.
-- 
Dr John S. Wilkins, www.wilkins.id.au
"I never meet anyone who is not perplexed what to do with their
 children" --Charles Darwin to Syms Covington, February 22, 1857
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