No actually the creationists exploit the flaws in the model you put forward.
>
> Obviously, the disapearance of some life forms
> "causes" not just speciation (i.e. disappearance of
> intermediary forms linking one species to another),
> but also the the growth of new life forms by the vitue
> of opening "living space" for that new form. For
> example, mammals probably woulnd not have much of a
> chance had the dinosaurs become extinct.
>
> But the new forms must first emerge i.e. start to
> exist before the natural selection creates more
> "lebensraum" for them. That is, mammals must have
> already existed before dinosours became extinct. So
> it is clear that extinction couldnot cause the mammals
> to come to existence, albeit it did cause the mammals
> to spread.
The creationists use the model of species pre-existing species they succeed to forward creationism. The importance of the punctuated equillibrium model is that it broke evolution out of the slow-change model that did not adequately account for speciation.
In fact it is not at all necessary or true that mammals must have existed as such before the extinction of dinosaurs, only that the common ancestor of mammals existed. The usually slow process of genetic change is speeded up rapidly if you isolate a small group of animals, then open a diverse habitat for them. A classic example of this are the Cichlid fish of the African Great Lakes. There are hundreds of species of fish (fewer now, sadly) with all sorts of shapes and adaptations and very little overlap from lake to lake. This is understood to be one of the most species-rich and most rapidly speciating assemblages on earth. What seems to have happened is that the Cichlid ancestors - smallish, adaptable, but not particularly dominant fish - were left to colonize the African Great Lakes as they formed and there they radiated into many species quickly.
>
> In reality, emergence of new life form and the
> extinction of the old ones are of course intertwined,
> as one life form is a part of th eenvironemtn of
> another. But an essential part of any scientific
> inquiry is to analytically separate what is
> intertwines to better understand how different forces
> operate. To that end, I offered was a theoretical
> model that does just that analytically separates these
> two processes.
I guess it's not that there are not two processes, but also a third - isolation. Think of it this way: the effect of human's bringing species all across the globe has been to threaten diversity with super-successful "invasive" species. For example, the introduction of the Nile Perch into the African Great Lakes helped drive many Cichlid species towards or into extinction. Isolation encouraged speciation until that population was re-integrated, at which point natural selection culled less-robust species.
Normally, mutation is a slow process, but iterate the process of isolation-speciation-culling and you increase the rate of change exponentially.
> I furthermre think you and others really missed the
> point of that argument. I was not arguing for the
> evolution (I think that is prety much accepted stuff,
> a few flat earth wingnuts notwithstanding) - I was
> arguing against the creationist argument against
> evolution, which is not the same thing. To reiterate,
> the argument was that creationist attacks on evolution
> and natural selection are a red herring, because what
> does the creationsit in is not the notion of natural
> selection, but that of self-organizing and
> self-improving matter. However, the latter has strong
> support in genetics where creationists do not stand a
> chance, so they use a red herring.
Yes, self-organizing matter is the essential idea, but you have to look into the manner of self-organization. The classic model of evolution (before punctuated equilibrium) was an incomplete model of self-organization.
> I would like to add that the evolution/creationism
> controversy is really a new iteration of an ancient
> debate, nah, mortal combat, between pantheists and
> belivers in a transcendent deity. It is a mortal
> combar rather than a mere debate, because these
> positions have fundamental implication for th
> eexistnecd of organozed religion and the priestly
> class. The raison d'etre of organized religion and
> the priestly class is to serve as an intermediary
> between this world and the deity that "transcends" i.e
> is remote from this world. Claiming that there is no
> transcendent deity undermines that raison d'etre. It
> is like with drug dealers, who needs them if the stuff
> grows in everyone's backyard?
I would characterize it as a battle between science - which asserts a radical skepticism as the first precept - and religion - which holds hierarchical causality as the first precept.
boddi