{"id":39888,"date":"2011-04-21T01:39:19","date_gmt":"2011-04-21T09:39:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/gnxp\/?p=11078"},"modified":"2011-04-21T01:39:19","modified_gmt":"2011-04-21T09:39:19","slug":"the-court-jester-and-the-averaging-fallacy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/2011\/04\/21\/the-court-jester-and-the-averaging-fallacy\/","title":{"rendered":"The Court Jester and the averaging fallacy"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/gnxp\/files\/2011\/04\/363px-William_Merritt_Chase_Keying_up.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft size-full wp-image-11079\" title=\"363px-William_Merritt_Chase_Keying_up\" src=\"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/gnxp\/files\/2011\/04\/363px-William_Merritt_Chase_Keying_up.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"200\" height=\"330\" \/><\/a><i><b>The Pith:<\/b>Climatic and biological evolutionary pressures on an ecosystem complement at different scales. Neither is &#8220;dominant,&#8221; as that framing is not even wrong.<\/i><\/p>\n<p>Yesterday I <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/gnxp\/2011\/04\/evolutionary-pressures-within-and-without\/\">alluded<\/a> to the <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Court_Jester_Hypothesis\">Court Jester hypothesis<\/a> of evolutionary change, which is often contrasted with the <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Red_Queen_Hypothesis\">Red Queen hypothesis<\/a>. The main embarrassment for me as a person who fancies himself a fan of evolutionary process is that <strong>I hadn&#8217;t ever heard of the Court Jester Hypothesis before yesterday<\/strong>. Therefore I went back to the paper which outlined many of the basic ideas of the model in 2001, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.informaworld.com\/smpp\/content~db=all~content=a926266232\">Distinguishing the effects of the Red queen and Court Jester on Miocene mammal evolution in the northern Rocky Mountains<\/a>. To be fair, the hypothesis itself is a tightening of a range of ideas which were long in the air. I did know, for example, about the <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Turnover-pulse_hypothesis\">Turnover-pulse hypothesis<\/a>. These are all a set of models which emphasize the abiotic selective pressures on life forms, as opposed to the biotic ones. An abiotic pressure would be something like the <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Younger_Dryas\">Younger Dryas<\/a> cold snap. A biotic pressure might be an exotic invasive species spreading through the &#8230;<img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/feeds.feedburner.com\/~r\/GeneExpressionBlog\/~4\/ucWCloVSSZ0\" height=\"1\" width=\"1\"\/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Pith:Climatic and biological evolutionary pressures on an ecosystem complement at different scales. Neither is &#8220;dominant,&#8221; as that framing is not even wrong.<br \/>\nYesterday I alluded to the Court Jester hypothesis of evolutionary change, whi&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[456,7,204,4,1269,1270,1271,1272],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-39888","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-diversity","category-evolution","category-evolutionary-genetics","category-genetics","category-macroevolution","category-the-court-jester","category-the-red-queen","category-tree-of-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39888","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39888"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39888\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":39971,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39888\/revisions\/39971"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39888"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39888"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39888"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}