Appendix. Four Topics.
Posted: Thu Jan 31, 2013 7:26 pm
Appendix. Four Topics.
The preceding essays only lighted upon some topics which will be further expanded in this appendix. I removed these digressions, since they would only act to clutter up the main thematic material and pace of the articles. This author can think of four topics which need some marginal expansion. In book form, these would appear as long-ish footnotes. Here is their list for brevity. If the reader takes an interest in these marginal topics, material can be found in this appendix.
1) Young Earth Creationism.
2) Natural Limits of Hybridization.
3) Evidence for phylogeny in insects.
4) Contemporary Genetic Evolution
__1) Young Earth Creationism__
This is a digression that I would prefer not to waste my time writing. The basic argument goes like so: The earth is too young, and therefore there has not been enough time for evolution to take place on it. This argument is unabashedly primitive, and it is a pathological digression down a rabbit hole. The Young Earth Creationist then has to retro-actively explain the giant, multidisciplinary body of evidence for evolution -- that would be a task of unimaginable uphill work. This author cannot even imagine where a person would begin to do research in this direction. For these reasons, YECs who show a pretense to write serious articles do not submit research papers themselves, but spend their days harping on fine points within the real literature on aging rock layers through isotope decay. If the age of the earth at 4.75 billion years hinged completely on isotope decay, this author might consider the digression mildly interesting, except that there is far more evidence from a vast swathe of other disciplines. For the sake of brevity, and wasting more ink on this topic, this author will discuss ice cores.
Scientists extract layers of ice from ice sheets on Antarctica and Greenland. This is a serious, expensive, deep extraction process that produces large cylinders of ice with layers. These layers are visible to the human eye, and roughly about 1 centimeter in thickness. These layers correspond to winter and summer cycles, where the changes in seasonal temperatures produce slight meltings. Science is in possession of 150 thousand layers from Greenland, and 800 thousand layers from Antarctica.
At this point the reader can do some back-of-the-napkin calcs. If the layers are a centimeter thick, and there are 800 thousand of them, you are talking a total collection of ice exceeding a mile. That seems absurd. You would have to store these things in a giant freezer the size of basketball court. Silly, right? Niether silly nor absurd, that is exactly where they are stored, and the reader is invited to a photo of it.
We could visit the repository, go to isle H, row 4, and on shelf no.2 we could find the ice that formed in the year 27,000 BC. If we wanted, we could extract a bubble from this ice. The air from the bubble could be scrutinized in a lab to measure aspects of the earth's atmosphere during that year.
Scientists went ahead and extracted thousands of such bubbles, and this data was used to form a graph of how the atmosphere has changed over time. This graph has a conspicuous repeating pattern. These repeating patterns mark, precisely, when the Ice Ages occurred on earth. This climatology data is in exact agreement with the data from geology. This extreme coincidence between separated scientific disciplines, would have to be overcome by any would-be YEC.
This author is not trying to be tricky, and the words taken here should be accepted as they are written, not as a hint towards something else. I am not "getting at" something which I am not stating outright. I will write the following assertion, not with the strength of confidence, but with the force of impunity: The continent of Antarctica is at least 800 thousand years old. My impunity is justified by the evidence showing it. We have a freezer the size of basketball court that is stacked to the ceiling with evidence in support of that sentence being true. This evidence is corroborated by other disciplines not related to ice.
(This author makes no reference to isotope abundances in rocks. I have relied upon, nowhere here, on any so-called "uniformitarian assumption".)
I see no reason to continue wasting time and ink on this topic. If the reader wants to expand on the topic of a young earth, I would demand the reader present evidence and publish their assertions in journals in exactly the manner that was done in the science of ice cores.
___2) Natural Limits of Hybridization___
In part 6 of my Trending-away-creationism series, I asserted that experiments have turned up no evidence of a blocking mechanism in the cells of animals undergoing hybridization. That is not to say that hybridization has no limits in practical reality, that is, "out in the wild".
Darwin noted that two different species of sparrow, one from the British Isles, another from North America, when brought together in captivity will mate and produce offspring, and raise them to adulthood. (A reading of part 4 on evolution will show why this was important to Darwin's work.)
For thousands of years, male donkeys are known to mate with female horses, resulting in both a pregnancy and viable birth of a hybrid mule. The catch is that all mules are sterile. This is not a blocking mechanism. And since mules grow completely up to adulthood, we can blame their sterility only as a limit to hybridization. It is not a blocking mechanism in the cells or their inner dynamics.
The crux of the arguments are unaffected. No one has suggested that the lack of blocking mechanisms entails that anything and everything is possible. The sterility of mules could be leveraged as damaging evidence to creationist accounts, since it suggests that biochemistry can contain errors. Nay, it can contain non-lethal errors which can be carried to adulthood. Exactly those types of non-lethal errors which allow for mutations! Mutations would allow variation, and the reader can guess where this line of thinking is headed.
Speciation and diversification do not result from cross-breeding of species. No one has suggested that the mechanism of evolution is hybridizing among different natural kinds. Cross-breeding and laboratory hybridization are introduced only because there are creationists here and there making assertions about biology. Darwin devotes a chapter to hybridization of flowers and grasses -- but he does so only to illustrate the ongoing problem of species and variants. His intent was not an attack on creationism.
___3) Evidence for phylogeny in insects___
The number of insect species on earth, and their staggering diversity is breathtaking. Insect diversity in even a small section of equatorial rainforest is simply put, mind-boggling. The assertion then, that all insects that exist today all share a primordial common ancestor, comes across as patently absurd. The author fully sympathizes with this absurdity. However, when the data comes into the room and it is considered carefully, it is in full support of this phylogenic history for insects.
Biologists can state the following assumptions. The very first insect species lived some time in the early Devonian period (a little over 400 million years ago). It had a thorax, and an abdomen section, six legs, and probably some form of antennae. Biologists can even guess at the length of its genome, quite accurately in fact. Biologists have a name for these ancestral species. They call them LUCAs. Where LUCA acronyms Last Universal Common Ancestor.
The reader may be shocked at this point. How the hell could biologists know this? How could they even infer it? Stick with me and I will cover the Genetic evidence which shows how they do such. There is also Fossil evidence for these assumptions, but will not be covered in this appendix.
Biologists have sequenced the genomes of hundreds of thousands of insect species which exist today. Sequencing very clearly indicates how long the insect's genome is, counted in "base pairs". This data can be graphed along a distribution, where tall parts of the distribution indicate that many species share that genome length, and lower portions indicate there are only a few with that many base pairs in their genome. More clearly, you segregate a graph into buckets, and depending on the length of each insect's genome, you place that insect in the corresponding bucket. Some buckets will fill up while others will only get a few species. The shape of this bucket distribution then becomes a topic of discussion and interpretation.
What is the shape of the distribution? Is it flat? Is it completely random? Is there a noticeable pattern? There is a pattern, but lets first discuss what patterns could mean. The first guess would be that there is bell curve that is right-shifted. That is to say, the longer genome lengths are more plentiful in insects. The graph would first rise like a line, and then sharply plummet at some maximum length. The opposite of that would be a descending line, which would indicate that longer genomes are somehow harder to deal with inside the cells, and so the chances of them surviving to the present day are small. Right-shifted distributions would be in harmonious agreement with "bloat". Bloat is a statistical quirk seen in artificial evolution performed by Genetic Algorithms on a computer. Bloat is explained by the fact that longer genomes are statistically more plentiful than shorter ones, and that over time the longer ones will come to dominate the population. This could have happened in the real world just as easily.
So what does the actual distribution look like? There is a left-shifted bell curve, with a peak at 93 million base pairs. There are small bumps very far out to the right side; those are a few clusters of rare species who genome lengths are very long. Let's review superficially what this "means". The graph is showing the odds that a random insect plucked from the wild will have a genome length of some certain size. In the vast majority of cases, the insect you find outdoors will have a genome length at around 93 million base pairs.
In terms of evolution what is this telling us? First it shows that bloat did not happen in the wild through 400 million years. Whatever happened with insects, they did not "fall far from the tree" so-to-speak. When diversification first began to take off from the LUCA insect in the Devonian period, those progeny species were the results of mutations to a very small window of genome lengths. What you are essentially seeing in the graph is a tree with a thick middle trunk, and small speciating branches coming out from the sides. As would be expected from this, there should indeed be outliers with exaggerated genome lengths. Those do appear as expected in the graph. The trunk of the tree corresponds in a subtle way to the original primordial ancestor.
The wideness of the bell curve also indicates something profound. Biologists can perform the same procedure on a database of genome lengths taken from mammals. The "mammalian bell curve" (let's call it) is extremely narrow compared to the wide, yawning bell curve of insects. Again, phylogeny is the explanation. Mammals are a very young form of life on earth, and insects are very old, existing far prior to the dinosaurs. The fossil record agrees. Correspondingly, there has been more time for their diversification, and that is reflected in the wide variety of lengths in their genomes.
__4) Contemporary Versions of Genetic Evolution__
I can almost hear the belly-aching from the educated reader who has happened upon my articles. Grad students in genetics and biology are taking offense no doubt, of many things written above. In this part of the appendix I address these reasonable complaints. For the rest of you, this is a brief crash course in evolutionary genetics.
Our most up-to-date theory of evolution says that the process diversifies and prunes, diversifies and prunes. This process does not trend anywhere, it does not have intent, and it is not concerned with how fast, strong, beautiful, or smart an organism is during its life. Indeed, the planet earth has had 80% or more of its diverse species go extinct from the many prunings. Is the process completely random then, in some nihilistic sense? No. After three billion years of this process, a very recent branch has happened upon a hominid in the grasslands of eastern Africa -- humans. There was no intention nor direction towards this happening some day. The reader should have a rough idea of how long dinosaurs were around. The Stegosaurus went extinct at 150 million years ago (mya). The Tyranosaurus evolved at around 67 mya. The time span between Stegosaurus and Tyrannosaurus was longer than the time span between Tyranosaurus and today (2013 AD). The full time span of dinosaurs was 250 million years.
Why mention this? Because during the dinosauran epochs, evolution appears "stuck in a rut", whatever that means! Biologists will strongly deny this. Evolution never gets stuck because it is not going anywhere in the first place.
Classical Darwinism is a trait-centric view of evolution. It is a digression into population theories, with only marginal attention paid to symbiosis. Darwin supposed there was a speed to evolution that was incremental -- now referred to as "gradualism". Gradualism has been abandoned and overturned by evidence. Evolution proceeds in yawning time spans where not much happens, pot-marked with short, turbulent events of rapid change. The jargon for this: Punctuated Equilibrium.
Gene-centric evolution has replaced the classical paradigm. In this scenario, the central focus of selection is a short sub-sequence of the DNA strand, called a gene. This is an entirely different idea, since this theory demands that genes even within the same individual are competing to make copies of themselves. Symbiosis and "kin selection" are the central foci of this new paradigm. Evidence is accumulating in support of gene-centric evolution. Two items mentioned in passing: the human body is highly symbiotic with bacteria, and even our own cells contain a DNA line in the mitochondria that only inherited from the mother. The bacteria inside us outnumbers our cells by a 10-to-1 margin. Recently, writers have dubbed this inner ecosystem, the Human Microbiome.
Absolutely no one in the 19th century knew of these things -- that the human body itself is a carrier for species of bacteria, or that our bodies contain more than one DNA ancestral line. Consequently, the social Darwinists of the early 20th century (Herbert Spencer) did not understand these things either. It is unclear whether the bacteria in our bodies are helping us, or whether we are helping them propagate. It is unclear whether genes are acting on our behalf, or if we are acting on their "behalf." Social Darwinism, and the racism of NAZIsm were a symptom of Victorian notions of a Great Chain of Being, rather than anything in the science of biology. (In an ironic historical twist, Darwin himself was not a social Darwinist)
In the 1970s, Richard Dawkins published a popular science book titled The Selfish Gene. In it he unambiguously declares that humans are acting on the behalf of genes, and not the other way around. He asserts this as a master theory of all life everywhere, from the microscopic bacterium to the largest tree. When it comes to questions about the behaviors and traits of living organisms, the duplication and copying of genes is the foremost priority. Dawkins goes as far as naming organisms as "survival machines" meant to carry and propagate genes. Traditional racist notions of bigger, faster, stronger, smarter are eclipsed entirely by issues of longevity, fecundity, and copying fidelity. The competition amongst genes is not the kind of aggressive competition normally associated with masculinity. If cheating helps a gene propagate, it will be allowed. Consequently, hitchhiking, banding in a group, quid-pro-quo, stealing resources, parasitism, altruism, and self-sacrifice, are all fair game. Dawkins elaborates on each with examples from the wild.
I hope that this section of the appendix will quell any lingering complaints on the part of the reader.
The preceding essays only lighted upon some topics which will be further expanded in this appendix. I removed these digressions, since they would only act to clutter up the main thematic material and pace of the articles. This author can think of four topics which need some marginal expansion. In book form, these would appear as long-ish footnotes. Here is their list for brevity. If the reader takes an interest in these marginal topics, material can be found in this appendix.
1) Young Earth Creationism.
2) Natural Limits of Hybridization.
3) Evidence for phylogeny in insects.
4) Contemporary Genetic Evolution
__1) Young Earth Creationism__
This is a digression that I would prefer not to waste my time writing. The basic argument goes like so: The earth is too young, and therefore there has not been enough time for evolution to take place on it. This argument is unabashedly primitive, and it is a pathological digression down a rabbit hole. The Young Earth Creationist then has to retro-actively explain the giant, multidisciplinary body of evidence for evolution -- that would be a task of unimaginable uphill work. This author cannot even imagine where a person would begin to do research in this direction. For these reasons, YECs who show a pretense to write serious articles do not submit research papers themselves, but spend their days harping on fine points within the real literature on aging rock layers through isotope decay. If the age of the earth at 4.75 billion years hinged completely on isotope decay, this author might consider the digression mildly interesting, except that there is far more evidence from a vast swathe of other disciplines. For the sake of brevity, and wasting more ink on this topic, this author will discuss ice cores.
Scientists extract layers of ice from ice sheets on Antarctica and Greenland. This is a serious, expensive, deep extraction process that produces large cylinders of ice with layers. These layers are visible to the human eye, and roughly about 1 centimeter in thickness. These layers correspond to winter and summer cycles, where the changes in seasonal temperatures produce slight meltings. Science is in possession of 150 thousand layers from Greenland, and 800 thousand layers from Antarctica.
At this point the reader can do some back-of-the-napkin calcs. If the layers are a centimeter thick, and there are 800 thousand of them, you are talking a total collection of ice exceeding a mile. That seems absurd. You would have to store these things in a giant freezer the size of basketball court. Silly, right? Niether silly nor absurd, that is exactly where they are stored, and the reader is invited to a photo of it.
We could visit the repository, go to isle H, row 4, and on shelf no.2 we could find the ice that formed in the year 27,000 BC. If we wanted, we could extract a bubble from this ice. The air from the bubble could be scrutinized in a lab to measure aspects of the earth's atmosphere during that year.
Scientists went ahead and extracted thousands of such bubbles, and this data was used to form a graph of how the atmosphere has changed over time. This graph has a conspicuous repeating pattern. These repeating patterns mark, precisely, when the Ice Ages occurred on earth. This climatology data is in exact agreement with the data from geology. This extreme coincidence between separated scientific disciplines, would have to be overcome by any would-be YEC.
This author is not trying to be tricky, and the words taken here should be accepted as they are written, not as a hint towards something else. I am not "getting at" something which I am not stating outright. I will write the following assertion, not with the strength of confidence, but with the force of impunity: The continent of Antarctica is at least 800 thousand years old. My impunity is justified by the evidence showing it. We have a freezer the size of basketball court that is stacked to the ceiling with evidence in support of that sentence being true. This evidence is corroborated by other disciplines not related to ice.
(This author makes no reference to isotope abundances in rocks. I have relied upon, nowhere here, on any so-called "uniformitarian assumption".)
I see no reason to continue wasting time and ink on this topic. If the reader wants to expand on the topic of a young earth, I would demand the reader present evidence and publish their assertions in journals in exactly the manner that was done in the science of ice cores.
___2) Natural Limits of Hybridization___
In part 6 of my Trending-away-creationism series, I asserted that experiments have turned up no evidence of a blocking mechanism in the cells of animals undergoing hybridization. That is not to say that hybridization has no limits in practical reality, that is, "out in the wild".
Darwin noted that two different species of sparrow, one from the British Isles, another from North America, when brought together in captivity will mate and produce offspring, and raise them to adulthood. (A reading of part 4 on evolution will show why this was important to Darwin's work.)
For thousands of years, male donkeys are known to mate with female horses, resulting in both a pregnancy and viable birth of a hybrid mule. The catch is that all mules are sterile. This is not a blocking mechanism. And since mules grow completely up to adulthood, we can blame their sterility only as a limit to hybridization. It is not a blocking mechanism in the cells or their inner dynamics.
The crux of the arguments are unaffected. No one has suggested that the lack of blocking mechanisms entails that anything and everything is possible. The sterility of mules could be leveraged as damaging evidence to creationist accounts, since it suggests that biochemistry can contain errors. Nay, it can contain non-lethal errors which can be carried to adulthood. Exactly those types of non-lethal errors which allow for mutations! Mutations would allow variation, and the reader can guess where this line of thinking is headed.
Speciation and diversification do not result from cross-breeding of species. No one has suggested that the mechanism of evolution is hybridizing among different natural kinds. Cross-breeding and laboratory hybridization are introduced only because there are creationists here and there making assertions about biology. Darwin devotes a chapter to hybridization of flowers and grasses -- but he does so only to illustrate the ongoing problem of species and variants. His intent was not an attack on creationism.
___3) Evidence for phylogeny in insects___
The number of insect species on earth, and their staggering diversity is breathtaking. Insect diversity in even a small section of equatorial rainforest is simply put, mind-boggling. The assertion then, that all insects that exist today all share a primordial common ancestor, comes across as patently absurd. The author fully sympathizes with this absurdity. However, when the data comes into the room and it is considered carefully, it is in full support of this phylogenic history for insects.
Biologists can state the following assumptions. The very first insect species lived some time in the early Devonian period (a little over 400 million years ago). It had a thorax, and an abdomen section, six legs, and probably some form of antennae. Biologists can even guess at the length of its genome, quite accurately in fact. Biologists have a name for these ancestral species. They call them LUCAs. Where LUCA acronyms Last Universal Common Ancestor.
The reader may be shocked at this point. How the hell could biologists know this? How could they even infer it? Stick with me and I will cover the Genetic evidence which shows how they do such. There is also Fossil evidence for these assumptions, but will not be covered in this appendix.
Biologists have sequenced the genomes of hundreds of thousands of insect species which exist today. Sequencing very clearly indicates how long the insect's genome is, counted in "base pairs". This data can be graphed along a distribution, where tall parts of the distribution indicate that many species share that genome length, and lower portions indicate there are only a few with that many base pairs in their genome. More clearly, you segregate a graph into buckets, and depending on the length of each insect's genome, you place that insect in the corresponding bucket. Some buckets will fill up while others will only get a few species. The shape of this bucket distribution then becomes a topic of discussion and interpretation.
What is the shape of the distribution? Is it flat? Is it completely random? Is there a noticeable pattern? There is a pattern, but lets first discuss what patterns could mean. The first guess would be that there is bell curve that is right-shifted. That is to say, the longer genome lengths are more plentiful in insects. The graph would first rise like a line, and then sharply plummet at some maximum length. The opposite of that would be a descending line, which would indicate that longer genomes are somehow harder to deal with inside the cells, and so the chances of them surviving to the present day are small. Right-shifted distributions would be in harmonious agreement with "bloat". Bloat is a statistical quirk seen in artificial evolution performed by Genetic Algorithms on a computer. Bloat is explained by the fact that longer genomes are statistically more plentiful than shorter ones, and that over time the longer ones will come to dominate the population. This could have happened in the real world just as easily.
So what does the actual distribution look like? There is a left-shifted bell curve, with a peak at 93 million base pairs. There are small bumps very far out to the right side; those are a few clusters of rare species who genome lengths are very long. Let's review superficially what this "means". The graph is showing the odds that a random insect plucked from the wild will have a genome length of some certain size. In the vast majority of cases, the insect you find outdoors will have a genome length at around 93 million base pairs.
In terms of evolution what is this telling us? First it shows that bloat did not happen in the wild through 400 million years. Whatever happened with insects, they did not "fall far from the tree" so-to-speak. When diversification first began to take off from the LUCA insect in the Devonian period, those progeny species were the results of mutations to a very small window of genome lengths. What you are essentially seeing in the graph is a tree with a thick middle trunk, and small speciating branches coming out from the sides. As would be expected from this, there should indeed be outliers with exaggerated genome lengths. Those do appear as expected in the graph. The trunk of the tree corresponds in a subtle way to the original primordial ancestor.
The wideness of the bell curve also indicates something profound. Biologists can perform the same procedure on a database of genome lengths taken from mammals. The "mammalian bell curve" (let's call it) is extremely narrow compared to the wide, yawning bell curve of insects. Again, phylogeny is the explanation. Mammals are a very young form of life on earth, and insects are very old, existing far prior to the dinosaurs. The fossil record agrees. Correspondingly, there has been more time for their diversification, and that is reflected in the wide variety of lengths in their genomes.
__4) Contemporary Versions of Genetic Evolution__
I can almost hear the belly-aching from the educated reader who has happened upon my articles. Grad students in genetics and biology are taking offense no doubt, of many things written above. In this part of the appendix I address these reasonable complaints. For the rest of you, this is a brief crash course in evolutionary genetics.
Our most up-to-date theory of evolution says that the process diversifies and prunes, diversifies and prunes. This process does not trend anywhere, it does not have intent, and it is not concerned with how fast, strong, beautiful, or smart an organism is during its life. Indeed, the planet earth has had 80% or more of its diverse species go extinct from the many prunings. Is the process completely random then, in some nihilistic sense? No. After three billion years of this process, a very recent branch has happened upon a hominid in the grasslands of eastern Africa -- humans. There was no intention nor direction towards this happening some day. The reader should have a rough idea of how long dinosaurs were around. The Stegosaurus went extinct at 150 million years ago (mya). The Tyranosaurus evolved at around 67 mya. The time span between Stegosaurus and Tyrannosaurus was longer than the time span between Tyranosaurus and today (2013 AD). The full time span of dinosaurs was 250 million years.
Why mention this? Because during the dinosauran epochs, evolution appears "stuck in a rut", whatever that means! Biologists will strongly deny this. Evolution never gets stuck because it is not going anywhere in the first place.
Classical Darwinism is a trait-centric view of evolution. It is a digression into population theories, with only marginal attention paid to symbiosis. Darwin supposed there was a speed to evolution that was incremental -- now referred to as "gradualism". Gradualism has been abandoned and overturned by evidence. Evolution proceeds in yawning time spans where not much happens, pot-marked with short, turbulent events of rapid change. The jargon for this: Punctuated Equilibrium.
Gene-centric evolution has replaced the classical paradigm. In this scenario, the central focus of selection is a short sub-sequence of the DNA strand, called a gene. This is an entirely different idea, since this theory demands that genes even within the same individual are competing to make copies of themselves. Symbiosis and "kin selection" are the central foci of this new paradigm. Evidence is accumulating in support of gene-centric evolution. Two items mentioned in passing: the human body is highly symbiotic with bacteria, and even our own cells contain a DNA line in the mitochondria that only inherited from the mother. The bacteria inside us outnumbers our cells by a 10-to-1 margin. Recently, writers have dubbed this inner ecosystem, the Human Microbiome.
Absolutely no one in the 19th century knew of these things -- that the human body itself is a carrier for species of bacteria, or that our bodies contain more than one DNA ancestral line. Consequently, the social Darwinists of the early 20th century (Herbert Spencer) did not understand these things either. It is unclear whether the bacteria in our bodies are helping us, or whether we are helping them propagate. It is unclear whether genes are acting on our behalf, or if we are acting on their "behalf." Social Darwinism, and the racism of NAZIsm were a symptom of Victorian notions of a Great Chain of Being, rather than anything in the science of biology. (In an ironic historical twist, Darwin himself was not a social Darwinist)
In the 1970s, Richard Dawkins published a popular science book titled The Selfish Gene. In it he unambiguously declares that humans are acting on the behalf of genes, and not the other way around. He asserts this as a master theory of all life everywhere, from the microscopic bacterium to the largest tree. When it comes to questions about the behaviors and traits of living organisms, the duplication and copying of genes is the foremost priority. Dawkins goes as far as naming organisms as "survival machines" meant to carry and propagate genes. Traditional racist notions of bigger, faster, stronger, smarter are eclipsed entirely by issues of longevity, fecundity, and copying fidelity. The competition amongst genes is not the kind of aggressive competition normally associated with masculinity. If cheating helps a gene propagate, it will be allowed. Consequently, hitchhiking, banding in a group, quid-pro-quo, stealing resources, parasitism, altruism, and self-sacrifice, are all fair game. Dawkins elaborates on each with examples from the wild.
I hope that this section of the appendix will quell any lingering complaints on the part of the reader.
