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Clams and brachiopods—ships that pass in the night
- Stephen Jay Gould, C. Bradford Calloway
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- Journal:
- Paleobiology / Volume 6 / Issue 4 / Fall 1980
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 08 February 2016, pp. 383-396
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The presumed geometry of clam and brachiopod clades (brachiopod declines matched closely by clam increases) has long served as primary data for the classic case of gradual replacement by competition in geological time. Agassiz invoked the geometric argument to assert the general superiority of clams, and it remains the standard textbook illustration today. Yet, like so many classic stories, it is not true. The supposed replacement of brachiopods by clams is not gradual and sequential. It is a product of one event: the Permian extinction (which affected brachiopods profoundly and clams relatively little). When Paleozoic and post-Paleozoic times are plotted separately, numbers of clam and brachiopod genera are positively correlated in each phase. Each group pursues its characteristic and different history in each phase—clams increasing, brachiopods holding their own. The Permian extinction simply reset the initial diversities. The two groups seem to track each other in each phase and a plot of brachiopod vs. clam residuals (each from their own within-phase regressions against time) yields significantly positive association. Some of this tracking may be an artifact of available rock volumes; we could, however, detect no effect of stage lengths. Passive extrapolation of microevolutionary theory into the vastness of geological time has often led paleontologists astray. Competitive interaction may rule in local populations, but differential response to mass extinctions (surely not a matter of conventional competition) may set the relative histories of large groups through geological time. Similarly, adaptive superiority in design cannot, in the usual sense of optimal engineering, have much to do with the macroevolutionary success of clams. The interesting question lies one step further back: what in the inherited Bauplan of a clam permits flexibility in design and why are other groups, however successful in their own domain, unable to alter their basic design.
Contributors
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- By Tod C. Aeby, Melanie D. Altizer, Ronan A. Bakker, Meghann E. Batten, Anita K. Blanchard, Brian Bond, Megan A. Brady, Saweda A. Bright, Ellen L. Brock, Amy Brown, Ashley Carroll, Jori S. Carter, Frances Casey, Weldon Chafe, David Chelmow, Jessica M. Ciaburri, Stephen A. Cohen, Adrianne M. Colton, PonJola Coney, Jennifer A. Cross, Julie Zemaitis DeCesare, Layson L. Denney, Megan L. Evans, Nicole S. Fanning, Tanaz R. Ferzandi, Katie P. Friday, Nancy D. Gaba, Rajiv B. Gala, Andrew Galffy, Adrienne L. Gentry, Edward J. Gill, Philippe Girerd, Meredith Gray, Amy Hempel, Audra Jolyn Hill, Chris J. Hong, Kathryn A. Houston, Patricia S. Huguelet, Warner K. Huh, Jordan Hylton, Christine R. Isaacs, Alison F. Jacoby, Isaiah M. Johnson, Nicole W. Karjane, Emily E. Landers, Susan M. Lanni, Eduardo Lara-Torre, Lee A. Learman, Nikola Alexander Letham, Rachel K. Love, Richard Scott Lucidi, Elisabeth McGaw, Kimberly Woods McMorrow, Christopher A. Manipula, Kirk J. Matthews, Michelle Meglin, Megan Metcalf, Sarah H. Milton, Gaby Moawad, Christopher Morosky, Lindsay H. Morrell, Elizabeth L. Munter, Erin L. Murata, Amanda B. Murchison, Nguyet A. Nguyen, Nan G. O’Connell, Tony Ogburn, K. Nathan Parthasarathy, Thomas C. Peng, Ashley Peterson, Sarah Peterson, John G. Pierce, Amber Price, Heidi J. Purcell, Ronald M. Ramus, Nicole Calloway Rankins, Fidelma B. Rigby, Amanda H. Ritter, Barbara L. Robinson, Danielle Roncari, Lisa Rubinsak, Jennifer Salcedo, Mary T. Sale, Peter F. Schnatz, John W. Seeds, Kathryn Shaia, Karen Shelton, Megan M. Shine, Haller J. Smith, Roger P. Smith, Nancy A. Sokkary, Reni A. Soon, Aparna Sridhar, Lilja Stefansson, Laurie S. Swaim, Chemen M. Tate, Hong-Thao Thieu, Meredith S. Thomas, L. Chesney Thompson, Tiffany Tonismae, Angela M. Tran, Breanna Walker, Alan G. Waxman, C. Nathan Webb, Valerie L. Williams, Sarah B. Wilson, Elizabeth M. Yoselevsky, Amy E. Young
- Edited by David Chelmow, Virginia Commonwealth University, Christine R. Isaacs, Virginia Commonwealth University, Ashley Carroll, Virginia Commonwealth University
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- Book:
- Acute Care and Emergency Gynecology
- Published online:
- 05 November 2014
- Print publication:
- 30 October 2014, pp ix-xiv
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3 - Wilde and the Dandyism of the Senses
- from Part I - Context
- Edited by Peter Raby, Homerton College, Cambridge
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- Book:
- The Cambridge Companion to Oscar Wilde
- Published online:
- 28 May 2006
- Print publication:
- 16 October 1997, pp 34-54
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Summary
THE POSE OF INTENSITY AND THE CULT OF AESTHETIC RESPONSE IN THE 1880s AND 1890s
When Oscar Wilde first rediscovered and began to write in Pen, Pencil and Poison' of the life and opinions of the Regency painter, belletrist, convicted forger and 'subtle and secret poisoner almost without rival', Thomas Griffiths Wainewright, he found revealed in the character of this artistic and intellectual dandy not only an aspect of his own nature and genius, but also, perhaps, the key to an essential quality of the Aesthetic and Decadent sensibility as it developed in England in the 1880s and 90s. That quality we might define as a Dandyism of the Senses - a self-consciously precious and highly fastidious discrimination brought to bear on both art and life. The dandy-aesthetes of the fin-de-siècle period above all honed their senses and cultivated the rarest of sensibilities; they made the perfection of the pose of exquisiteness their greatest aim and they directed all their languid energies towards nurturing a cult of aesthetic response that begins beyond ordinary notions of taste, that lies beyond mere considerations of fashion, and operates quite outside the dictates of all conventional canons of morality.
Wilde was perhaps the first to perceive that this very specific sensibility had been intriguingly foreshadowed by the ideas and opinions enshrined in Wainewright's precociously brilliant art-journalism of the early years of the nineteenth century; in particular in those essays in which the mercurial dandy-critic first adumbrated his own idiosyncratic version of a pose of exquisite sensibility and the notion of a cult of aesthetic response.