I was listening to a lecture on Macroevolution. It's an iTunes U class from UC Berkeley, Bio 1B: General Biology - Spring 2008, by Feldman, Slatkin, & Resh. Why pay for college when you can listen for free? If all you want is to know about it and don't need the degree, it's great.
I'm not sure which Professor gave this lecture, it's number 24 in the series, and talks about how species change.
One concept that he was going over was vicariant events, where an established population is split by some geological or climatic event, and then the newly separated populations change over time to the point where they would not even interbreed with each other.
It struck me that this is like culture in America right now. Not sure what the event is, whether it's 9/11 or just the way life and technology are changing, but the conservative versus liberal divide in this country is almost like this vicariant event divergent evolution that was described in the lecture. Is it possible for mental differences to actually divide a people to the point that they are incompatible?
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