So, have you spend all day looking for a comic that integrates Red Queen evolutionary dynamics, commentary on the application of parsimony arguments in biology, and Newt Gingrich’s recent flip-flopping on Libya? No? Well, hopefully you’ll enjoy this anyway. For a more viewable image, see the original at Darwin Eats Cake.
URL for sharing: http://www.darwineatscake.com/?id=11
URL for hotlinking or embedding: http://www.darwineatscake.com/img/comic/11.jpg
For more on the flip-flop check out Think Progress or Weigel.
Van Valen, L (1973). A New Evolutionary Law Evolutionary Theory, 1, 1-30
I was browsing through the archives and came across this one, and I noticed an error in the comic.
Van Valen found the survivorship curves of the various taxa to be linear, not exponential. An exponential curve is what one would have expected to see if rates of extinction DID decrease over time.