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Posted: Sun Feb 19, 2006 12:07 pm
by BGoodForGoodSake
aa118816 wrote:Your arguments ar painfully circular. Your reading of evidence sounds like the talking points of the National Center for Selling Evolution. It is very simple, macroevolution cannot be extrapolated from microevolution at this time. Perhaps in the future it will be. Also, you referenced spontaneous generation as a proof for evolution??? The research in this field has continually shown how it is mathematically impossible.

Dan
I didn't reference spontaneous generation as proof for evolution.
I am trying to focus on experiments and the data itself.

Lets say for instance we have cat and dogs.

I propose at one point a single lineage became two.
At first there was very little difference between them, but because they are genetically isolated changes can begin to accumulate. Eventually you have morphologically distinct populations. Would this suffice as an example of macroevolution.

If so then we can begin to analyze it it more detail and look at the data available to us.

Posted: Sun Feb 19, 2006 2:08 pm
by Wall-dog
The Cambrian explosion produced fully developed phyla, as evidenced by Doctor Wells:
Darwin knew the fossil record failed to support his tree [of life]. He acknowledged that major groups of animals - he called them divisions, now they're called phyla - appear suddenly in the fossil record.... His theory predicts a long history of gradual divergence from a common ancestor, with the differences slowly becomming bigger and bigger until you get to the major differences we have now. The fossil evidence, even in his day, showed the opposite: the rapid appearance of phylum-level differences in what's called the 'Cambrian explosion.' Darwin believed that future fossil discoveries would vindicate his theory - but that hasn't happened. Actually, fossil discoveries over the last hundred and fifty years have turned his tree upside down by showing the Cambrian explosion was even more abrupt and extensive than scientists once thought.... This is absolutely contrary to Darwin's Tree of Life. These animals, which are so fundamentally different in their body plans, appear fully developed, all of a sudden, in what paleontologists have called the single most spectacular phenomenon of the fossil record.
I'll grant you that the Cambrian doesn't bring out the species we see today, but it did bring out far more than worms.

http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/cambrian/camblife.html
Almost every metazoan phylum with hard parts, and many that lack hard parts, made its first appearance in the Cambrian. The only modern phylum with an adequate fossil record to appear after the Cambrian was the phylum Bryozoa, which is not known before the early Ordovician. A few mineralized animal fossils, including sponge spicules and probable worm tubes, are known from the Vendian period immediately preceding the Cambrian. Some of the odd fossils of the "Ediacara biota" from the Vendian may also have been animals in or near living phyla, although this remains a somewhat controversial topic. However, the Cambrian was nonetheless a time of great evolutionary innovation, with many major groups of organisms appearing within a span of only forty million years. Trace fossils made by animals also show increased diversity in Cambrian rocks, showing that the animals of the Cambrian were developing new ecological niches and strategies -- such as active hunting, burrowing deeply into sediment, and making complex branching burrows.
The Berkeley article I just quoted tries to call the Cambrian period evolutionary, but as Dr. Wells illustrated, that just isn't the case. These were not worm-like creatures. They were fully formed phyla.

Dr. Wells:
Imagine yourself on the goal line of a football field. That line represents the first fossil, a microscopic, single-celled organism. Now start marching down the field. You pass the twenty-yard line, the forty-yard line, you pass mid field, and you're approaching the other goal line. All you've seen this entire time are these microscopic, single-celled organisms.

You come to the sixteen-yard line on the far end of the field and now you see these sponges and maybe some jellyfish and worms. Then - boom! - in the space of a single stride, all these other forms of animals suddenly appear. As one evolutionary scientist said, the major animal groups 'appear in the fossil record as Athena did from the head of Zeus - full blown and raring to go.'

Now, nobody can call that a branching tree! Some paleontoligists, even though they my think Darwin's overall theory is correct, call it a lawn rather than a tree, because you have these separate blades of grass sprouting up. One paleontologist in China says it actually stands Darwin's tree on its head, because the major groups of animals - instead of coming last, at the top of the tree - come first, when animals make their first appearance.

Either way, the result is the same: the Cambrian explosion has uprooted Darwin's tree.
An image of evolution that does fit the fossil record would be one of a guided micro-evolutionary model, where a designer created the major phyla and used evolution as a tool to forward species. That model however utilizes intelligence and the theory of evolution clearly calls for an unintelligent system.

As for the molecular evidence you use to try to show a common ancestor prior to the Cambrian, Dr. Wells discusses this as well:
You can't get molecular evidence from the fossils themselves; all of it comes from living organisms. You take a molecule that's basic to life - say ribosomal RNA - and you examine it in a starfish, and then you study its equivalent in a snale, a worm, and a frog. You're looking for similarities. If you compare this one molecule across different categories of animal body plans and find similarities, and if you make the assumption that they came from a common ancestor, then you can construct a theoretical evolutionary tree.

But there are too many problems with this. If you compare this molecular tree with a tree based on anatomy, you get a different tree. You can examine another molecule and come up with another tree altogether. In fact, if you give one molecule to two different laboratories, you can get two different trees. There's no consistency, including with the dating. It's all over the board. Based on this, I think it's reasonable for me, as a scientist, to say that maybe we should question our assumption that this common ancestor exists.

Of course, descent from a common ancestor is true at some levels. Nobody denies that. For example, we can trace generations of fruit flies to a common ancestor. Within a single species, common ancestry has been observed directly. And it's possible that all cats - tigers, lions, and so on - descended from a common ancestor. While that's not a fact, it might be a reasonable inference based on interbreeding.

So as we go up these different levels in the taxonomic hierarchy - species, genus, family, order, class - common ancestory is certainly true at the species level, but is it true at higher levels? It becomes an increasingly uncertain inference the higher we go in the taxonomic hierarchy. When you get to the phyla, the major animal groups, it's a very, very shaky hypothesis. In fact, I would say it's disconfirmed. The evidence just doesn't support it.
He was talking about the red letters you posted earlier...

I agree with you that creatures with a common ancestor would likely follow similar developmental routes, but when you look at different embryos of different species you don't see that. The embryos you see compared are not early-stage embryos but rather embryos in the middle of their developmental stages. Earlier on they don't look similar at all.

Wells:
Remember Darwin claimed that because the embrios are most similar in their early stages, this is evidence of common ancestry. He thought that the early stage showed what the common ancestor looked like - sort of like a fish.

But embryologists talk about the 'developmental hourglass,' which refers to the shape of an hourglass, with its width representing the measure of difference. You see, vertebrate embryos start out looking very different in the early cell division stages. The cell divisions in a mammal, for example, are radically different from those in any of the other classes. There's no possible way you could mix them up. In fact, it's extremely different within classes. The patterns are all over the place.

Then at the midpoint - which is what Haeckel claimed in his drawings was the early stage - the embryos become more similar though nowhere near as much as Haeckel claimed. Then they become very different again.
The use of molecular evidence is back-peddling too. Also from Wells:
As I said, it's just false that embryos are most similar in their earliest development. Of course, some Darwinists try to get around Haeckel's problems by changing their tune. They use evolutionary theory to try to explain why the differences in the embryos are there. They can get quite elaborate.

But that's doing the same thing that the theory-savers were doing with the Cambrian explosion. What was supposed to be primary evidence for Darwin's theory - the fossil or embryo evidence - turns out to be false, so they immediately say, well, we know the theory's true, so let's use the theory to explain why the evidence doesn't fit.

But then, where's the evidence for the theory? That's what I'd like to know. Why should I accept the theory as being true at all?
Similarities in design are often used as 'evidence' for evolution, including in your posts. Sadly though similarities prove nothing. Wells:
The explanation can go either way: design or descent with modification.
And:
Actually, these homologies were described by Darwin's predecessors - and they were not evolutionists. Richard Owen, who was the most famous anatomist of Darwin's time, said they pointed to a common archetype or design, not toward descent with modification.
More on common developmental pathways and similar genes (from Wells):
One is called 'common developmental pathways,' which means if you have two different animals with homologous features and you trace them back to the embryo, they would come from similar cells and processes. This happens to be mostly untrue.

I mentioned frogs earlier. There are some frogs that develop like frogs and other frogs that develop like birds, but they all look pretty much the same when they come out the other end. They're frogs. So the developmental pathway explanation is false - I don't think anybody who studies development and takes it seriously.

A more common explanation nowadays is that homologies come from similar genes. In other words, the reason two features are homologous in two different animals would be that they're programmed by similar genes in the embryo. But it turns out this doesn't work very well either. We know some cases where you have similar features that come from different genes, but we have lots and lots of cases where we have similar genes that give rise to very different features.
My favorite Wells illustration about the folly of genetic similarities as proof of evolution comes when he is asked about Mankind sharing 98 or 99% of our genes with apes:
If you assume, as neo-Darwinism does, that we are products of our genes, then you're saying that the dramatic differences between us and chimpanzees are due to two percent of our genes. The problem is that the so-called body-building genes are in the ninety-eight percent. The two percent of genes that are different are really rather trivial genes that have little to do with anatomy. So the supposed similarity of human and chimpanzee DNA is a problem for neo-Darwinism right there.
The biggest problem with the theory of evolution though is in the fossil record. Fossils, while problematic for usage in proving theories, are never-the-less useful to disprove theories. Theories should at least be verified as plausible within the fossil record. Dr. Michael Denton, in his book 'Evolution: A Theory in Crisis,' illustrates the fossil record's debunking of evolution:
The univeral experience of palentology... [is that] while the rocks have continually yielded new and exciting and even bizarre forms of life...what they have never yielded is any of Darwin's myriads of transitional forms. Despite the tremendous increase in geological activity in every corner of the globe and despite the discovery of many strange and hitherto unknown forms, the infinitude of connecting links has still not been discovered and the fossil record is about as discontinuous as it was when Darwin was writing the Origin. The intermediates have remained as elusive as ever and their absence remains, a century later, one of the most striking characteristics of the fossil record.
Denton concludes that the fossil record "provides a tremendous challenge to the notion of organic evolution."

Posted: Sun Feb 19, 2006 9:15 pm
by sandy_mcd
Wall-dog wrote:Could you go into more detail on how the Cambrian Explosion fits within an evolutionary model?
How about, no competition? When life first developed (or was created), there was a whole empty planet to expand in. Every niche was available. Isn't it likely that life would expand quickly and develop new types to take advantage of all the world had to offer? The same would be true after mass extinctions - when a large number of species are wiped out, it would open new habitats for the lucky survivors which had previously not competed well. And I am not even an amateur biologist.
Also, you need some way of quantifying how much life changes. What is the difference between members of one phylum today compared to differences between members of different phyla back in the time of the Cambrian? [Here's a good place for Bgood to post pictures of some of some Cambrian lifeforms and present day creatures - I had some pictures a few weeks ago but lost them in one of frequent browser lockups.]

Posted: Sun Feb 19, 2006 9:30 pm
by sandy_mcd
August wrote:Do you [Bgood] mean that if there is proof of genetic limits, that evolution will be shown to be wrong?
Yes. If you can show that there is some general limit to genetic variation, i.e., the existence of kinds of life that can only vary within limits for each kind, you are essentially guaranteed a Nobel prize.

Posted: Sun Feb 19, 2006 9:40 pm
by sandy_mcd
August wrote:...Therefore you have to account for when life begins and non-life ends, so that you can describe how life works so as to establish the characteristics of the first in the series. ... The origin of life is the first of a series. The terms of reference for the first in a series can never be totally irrelevant in establishing a sequence or series if you establish that no such first term of the series could exist when constrained by the same terms of reference.
Do you
1) agree that life exists now and has for some time in the past?
2) agree that lifeforms have changed over time?

If so, then you can study these changes. That is what evolution examines. It is not even dependent on life starting from nonlife or being created. If the earth had no beginning and had existed forever, then evolution as a field of study is possible as long as the two conditions above are met. [And others of course, such that there be at least one intelligence to do the studies.]

Posted: Mon Feb 20, 2006 7:29 am
by August
sandy_mcd wrote:Do you
1) agree that life exists now and has for some time in the past?
2) agree that lifeforms have changed over time?

If so, then you can study these changes. That is what evolution examines. It is not even dependent on life starting from nonlife or being created. If the earth had no beginning and had existed forever, then evolution as a field of study is possible as long as the two conditions above are met. [And others of course, such that there be at least one intelligence to do the studies.]
If you assume that life existed, it is taken to be axiomatic. However, you cannot seperate the first in the series from the rest of the series. The quote you provided from the college professor demonstrated that. The terms of reference cannot be different for the first in the series than it is for the rest. Evolution is an origins science. The first in the series had to come about by the same mechanisms as the successive. For example, the most primitive life form needs around 100 proteins to function. How did it get from 90 proteins to 100 proteins? You cannot assume a first life form for changes to act on unless it contains the elements needed, i.e. DNA, RNA and proteins, and without assuming that the mechanisms at work necessarily existed. How can you assume that the evolutionary mechanisms are at work in successive generations, but they are not present or workable during the first? For you to logically make those assumptions, they must be proven to have existed, otherwise you are begging the question.

Posted: Mon Feb 20, 2006 7:43 am
by August
sandy_mcd wrote:
August wrote:Do you [Bgood] mean that if there is proof of genetic limits, that evolution will be shown to be wrong?
Yes. If you can show that there is some general limit to genetic variation, i.e., the existence of kinds of life that can only vary within limits for each kind, you are essentially guaranteed a Nobel prize.
I think you are both mistaken. There has long been an admission of genetic limits, ever since Huxley published "The Modern Synthesis"

“Evolution: The Modern Synthesis.” Julian Huxley
“Evolution is thus seen as a series of blind alleys. Some are extremely short - those leading to new genera and species that either remain stable or become extinct. Others are longer - the lines of adaptive radiation within a group such as a class or subclass, which run for tens of millions of years before coming up against their terminal blank wall. Others are still longer - the lines that have in the past led to the development of the major phyla and their highest representatives; their course is to be reckoned not in tens but in hundreds of millions years. But all in the long run have terminated blindly. That of the echinoderms, for instance, reached its climax before the end of the Mesozoic. For the arthropods, represented by their highest group, the insects, the full stop seems to have come in the early Cenozoic: even the ants and bees have made no advance since the Oligocene. For the birds, the Miocene marked the end; for the mammals, the Pliocene.”

and from Pierre Grasse...

“Facts are facts; no new broad organizational plan has appeared for several hundred million years, and for an equally long period of time numerous species, animal as well as plant, have ceased evolving… At best, present evolutionary phenomena are simply slight changes of genotypes within populations, or substitution of an allele with a new one.” (Grasse, The Evolution of Living Organisms, page 84.)

If this is not the result of genetic limits, what is it the result of? Even though evolution supposedly manifests at the macroscopic level, the variation has to happen at the molecular level.

Also, why is evolution irreversible? No mammal has ever evolved into a reptile, or reptile to amphibian etc.

Posted: Mon Feb 20, 2006 9:16 am
by BGoodForGoodSake
August wrote: If this is not the result of genetic limits, what is it the result of? Even though evolution supposedly manifests at the macroscopic level, the variation has to happen at the molecular level.

Also, why is evolution irreversible? No mammal has ever evolved into a reptile, or reptile to amphibian etc.
Once a foundation is layed it is very dificult to change the foundations without disrupting the structure.

Cells for instances have changed very little since the first multicellular life. Once the molecular chemistry of life has been estabilished as a foundation for multicellular life any changes to such foundation would be exceedingly difficult.

In contrast for single celled life there is a great variety to the chemical pathways which can exist.

The same goes with body plans.

Once the nerve is either dorsal or ventral the pattern of an organisms is set, any additions to the system are based on this original foundation. A ventral spine on a human or reptile would be fatal.

In contrast a ventral nerve on a worm like creature is optional.

There are parallels in the modern world. When innovation first happens there is an explosion of concepts and products using the innovation, eventually however the best models are favored over the rest and further changes are less drastic on more minute in detail, untill you have a mature market.

For example the automobile industry, at first you have a single innovator, then there were many competitors who came onto the scene. Eventually there were about 8 or 9 major companies in the U.S. Classes of cars were defined and marketed. And finally the development and gradual improvement of features over time.

The only difference here is that in the human industry development is much faster due to the transferability of innovation.

Posted: Mon Feb 20, 2006 11:09 am
by thereal
Wall-dog wrote:
The Cambrian explosion produced fully developed phyla, as evidenced by Doctor Wells:

Quote:
Darwin knew the fossil record failed to support his tree [of life]. He acknowledged that major groups of animals - he called them divisions, now they're called phyla - appear suddenly in the fossil record.... His theory predicts a long history of gradual divergence from a common ancestor, with the differences slowly becomming bigger and bigger until you get to the major differences we have now. The fossil evidence, even in his day, showed the opposite: the rapid appearance of phylum-level differences in what's called the 'Cambrian explosion.' Darwin believed that future fossil discoveries would vindicate his theory - but that hasn't happened. Actually, fossil discoveries over the last hundred and fifty years have turned his tree upside down by showing the Cambrian explosion was even more abrupt and extensive than scientists once thought.... This is absolutely contrary to Darwin's Tree of Life. These animals, which are so fundamentally different in their body plans, appear fully developed, all of a sudden, in what paleontologists have called the single most spectacular phenomenon of the fossil record.


I'll grant you that the Cambrian doesn't bring out the species we see today, but it did bring out far more than worms.

http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/cambrian/camblife.html

Quote:
Almost every metazoan phylum with hard parts, and many that lack hard parts, made its first appearance in the Cambrian. The only modern phylum with an adequate fossil record to appear after the Cambrian was the phylum Bryozoa, which is not known before the early Ordovician. A few mineralized animal fossils, including sponge spicules and probable worm tubes, are known from the Vendian period immediately preceding the Cambrian. Some of the odd fossils of the "Ediacara biota" from the Vendian may also have been animals in or near living phyla, although this remains a somewhat controversial topic. However, the Cambrian was nonetheless a time of great evolutionary innovation, with many major groups of organisms appearing within a span of only forty million years. Trace fossils made by animals also show increased diversity in Cambrian rocks, showing that the animals of the Cambrian were developing new ecological niches and strategies -- such as active hunting, burrowing deeply into sediment, and making complex branching burrows.


The Berkeley article I just quoted tries to call the Cambrian period evolutionary, but as Dr. Wells illustrated, that just isn't the case. These were not worm-like creatures. They were fully formed phyla.

Dr. Wells:

Quote:
Imagine yourself on the goal line of a football field. That line represents the first fossil, a microscopic, single-celled organism. Now start marching down the field. You pass the twenty-yard line, the forty-yard line, you pass mid field, and you're approaching the other goal line. All you've seen this entire time are these microscopic, single-celled organisms.

You come to the sixteen-yard line on the far end of the field and now you see these sponges and maybe some jellyfish and worms. Then - boom! - in the space of a single stride, all these other forms of animals suddenly appear. As one evolutionary scientist said, the major animal groups 'appear in the fossil record as Athena did from the head of Zeus - full blown and raring to go.'

Now, nobody can call that a branching tree! Some paleontoligists, even though they my think Darwin's overall theory is correct, call it a lawn rather than a tree, because you have these separate blades of grass sprouting up. One paleontologist in China says it actually stands Darwin's tree on its head, because the major groups of animals - instead of coming last, at the top of the tree - come first, when animals make their first appearance.

Either way, the result is the same: the Cambrian explosion has uprooted Darwin's tree.


An image of evolution that does fit the fossil record would be one of a guided micro-evolutionary model, where a designer created the major phyla and used evolution as a tool to forward species. That model however utilizes intelligence and the theory of evolution clearly calls for an unintelligent system.

As for the molecular evidence you use to try to show a common ancestor prior to the Cambrian, Dr. Wells discusses this as well:

Quote:
You can't get molecular evidence from the fossils themselves; all of it comes from living organisms. You take a molecule that's basic to life - say ribosomal RNA - and you examine it in a starfish, and then you study its equivalent in a snale, a worm, and a frog. You're looking for similarities. If you compare this one molecule across different categories of animal body plans and find similarities, and if you make the assumption that they came from a common ancestor, then you can construct a theoretical evolutionary tree.

But there are too many problems with this. If you compare this molecular tree with a tree based on anatomy, you get a different tree. You can examine another molecule and come up with another tree altogether. In fact, if you give one molecule to two different laboratories, you can get two different trees. There's no consistency, including with the dating. It's all over the board. Based on this, I think it's reasonable for me, as a scientist, to say that maybe we should question our assumption that this common ancestor exists.

Of course, descent from a common ancestor is true at some levels. Nobody denies that. For example, we can trace generations of fruit flies to a common ancestor. Within a single species, common ancestry has been observed directly. And it's possible that all cats - tigers, lions, and so on - descended from a common ancestor. While that's not a fact, it might be a reasonable inference based on interbreeding.

So as we go up these different levels in the taxonomic hierarchy - species, genus, family, order, class - common ancestory is certainly true at the species level, but is it true at higher levels? It becomes an increasingly uncertain inference the higher we go in the taxonomic hierarchy. When you get to the phyla, the major animal groups, it's a very, very shaky hypothesis. In fact, I would say it's disconfirmed. The evidence just doesn't support it.


He was talking about the red letters you posted earlier...

I agree with you that creatures with a common ancestor would likely follow similar developmental routes, but when you look at different embryos of different species you don't see that. The embryos you see compared are not early-stage embryos but rather embryos in the middle of their developmental stages. Earlier on they don't look similar at all.

Wells:

Quote:
Remember Darwin claimed that because the embrios are most similar in their early stages, this is evidence of common ancestry. He thought that the early stage showed what the common ancestor looked like - sort of like a fish.

But embryologists talk about the 'developmental hourglass,' which refers to the shape of an hourglass, with its width representing the measure of difference. You see, vertebrate embryos start out looking very different in the early cell division stages. The cell divisions in a mammal, for example, are radically different from those in any of the other classes. There's no possible way you could mix them up. In fact, it's extremely different within classes. The patterns are all over the place.

Then at the midpoint - which is what Haeckel claimed in his drawings was the early stage - the embryos become more similar though nowhere near as much as Haeckel claimed. Then they become very different again.


The use of molecular evidence is back-peddling too. Also from Wells:

Quote:
As I said, it's just false that embryos are most similar in their earliest development. Of course, some Darwinists try to get around Haeckel's problems by changing their tune. They use evolutionary theory to try to explain why the differences in the embryos are there. They can get quite elaborate.

But that's doing the same thing that the theory-savers were doing with the Cambrian explosion. What was supposed to be primary evidence for Darwin's theory - the fossil or embryo evidence - turns out to be false, so they immediately say, well, we know the theory's true, so let's use the theory to explain why the evidence doesn't fit.

But then, where's the evidence for the theory? That's what I'd like to know. Why should I accept the theory as being true at all?


Similarities in design are often used as 'evidence' for evolution, including in your posts. Sadly though similarities prove nothing. Wells:

Quote:
The explanation can go either way: design or descent with modification.


And:

Quote:
Actually, these homologies were described by Darwin's predecessors - and they were not evolutionists. Richard Owen, who was the most famous anatomist of Darwin's time, said they pointed to a common archetype or design, not toward descent with modification.


More on common developmental pathways and similar genes (from Wells):

Quote:
One is called 'common developmental pathways,' which means if you have two different animals with homologous features and you trace them back to the embryo, they would come from similar cells and processes. This happens to be mostly untrue.

I mentioned frogs earlier. There are some frogs that develop like frogs and other frogs that develop like birds, but they all look pretty much the same when they come out the other end. They're frogs. So the developmental pathway explanation is false - I don't think anybody who studies development and takes it seriously.

A more common explanation nowadays is that homologies come from similar genes. In other words, the reason two features are homologous in two different animals would be that they're programmed by similar genes in the embryo. But it turns out this doesn't work very well either. We know some cases where you have similar features that come from different genes, but we have lots and lots of cases where we have similar genes that give rise to very different features.


My favorite Wells illustration about the folly of genetic similarities as proof of evolution comes when he is asked about Mankind sharing 98 or 99% of our genes with apes:

Quote:
If you assume, as neo-Darwinism does, that we are products of our genes, then you're saying that the dramatic differences between us and chimpanzees are due to two percent of our genes. The problem is that the so-called body-building genes are in the ninety-eight percent. The two percent of genes that are different are really rather trivial genes that have little to do with anatomy. So the supposed similarity of human and chimpanzee DNA is a problem for neo-Darwinism right there.


The biggest problem with the theory of evolution though is in the fossil record. Fossils, while problematic for usage in proving theories, are never-the-less useful to disprove theories. Theories should at least be verified as plausible within the fossil record. Dr. Michael Denton, in his book 'Evolution: A Theory in Crisis,' illustrates the fossil record's debunking of evolution:

Quote:
The univeral experience of palentology... [is that] while the rocks have continually yielded new and exciting and even bizarre forms of life...what they have never yielded is any of Darwin's myriads of transitional forms. Despite the tremendous increase in geological activity in every corner of the globe and despite the discovery of many strange and hitherto unknown forms, the infinitude of connecting links has still not been discovered and the fossil record is about as discontinuous as it was when Darwin was writing the Origin. The intermediates have remained as elusive as ever and their absence remains, a century later, one of the most striking characteristics of the fossil record.


Denton concludes that the fossil record "provides a tremendous challenge to the notion of organic evolution."
I know that Wells is probably not directing his writing towards those in academia, but does he provide citations for any of the claims he is making? Without any citations to back up his claims, how are any of his statements justifiable? Maybe he is just assuming that people will take him at his word, but to not reference studies and then go ahead and discuss their implications strips his argument of all credibility.

Posted: Mon Feb 20, 2006 12:44 pm
by sandy_mcd
August wrote:[I think you are both mistaken. There has long been an admission of genetic limits, ever since Huxley published "The Modern Synthesis"
I wasn't very clear. I meant limits from an initial position.
1) evoview - life started with one (or a few) simple systems and evolved from that to all the plants, animal, etc we see today. Examples: cats and canaries and redwoods and slimemold etc all had a common ancestor.
2) idview - life started with the creation of a number (1,000's to 100,000's?) of kinds which can only vary within the genetic limits of the original kind. Examples: lions and tigers and servals and snow leopards and ocelots etc all evolved from a common ancestor C; wolves and coyotes and dingos and dogs etc all evolved from a common ancestor D. C and D have no common ancestor and all their subsequent progeny have no more genetic information than the originals.
[Bgood has already covered other areas.]

Posted: Mon Feb 20, 2006 1:56 pm
by sandy_mcd
August wrote:The origin of life is the first of a series. The terms of reference for the first in a series can never be totally irrelevant in establishing a sequence or series if you establish that no such first term of the series could exist when constrained by the same terms of reference.
Are you saying 1), or 2), or both 1) and 2)?
1) we have to know how life originated from non-life in order to study its subsequent development
2) we have to know it is possible for life to have originated from non-life in order to study its subsequent development
August wrote:Stop equivocating evolution with other scientific areas to make it appear to be valid science. It must stand on it's own, not continuously compared to other areas which bear no relevance
They are not perfect analogies, but I think analogies are very useful for furthering understanding for people like me. The analogy between water flow and electrical flow is not perfect either but it makes understanding some electrical concepts easier. So at the risk of further annoyance, what is false about this analogy?
http://www.answers.com/geology&r=67 wrote:geology: 1. The scientific study of the origin, history, and structure of the earth.
Geologists (or at least early ones) had no idea of how the earth originated; even today there is no doubt some uncertainty or disagreement about what the early earth was like. So, making an analogy with evolution, geologists cannot study the earth today because they are not sure what the early or initial earth condition (the first in a series) was. Therefore from a philosophical viewpoint, in order to study the current earth, it is first necessary to know what it was like originally. But from a scientific standpoint, the opposite is true - in order to learn anything about the early earth, it is first necessary to have a pretty good understanding of what it is like today and how it has changed recently.

Posted: Mon Feb 20, 2006 5:21 pm
by Wall-dog
I know that Wells is probably not directing his writing towards those in academia, but does he provide citations for any of the claims he is making? Without any citations to back up his claims, how are any of his statements justifiable? Maybe he is just assuming that people will take him at his word, but to not reference studies and then go ahead and discuss their implications strips his argument of all credibility.
As a matter of fact he does. His book 'Icons of Evolution' has an extensive bibliography.

Posted: Mon Feb 20, 2006 5:31 pm
by AttentionKMartShoppers
sandy_mcd wrote:
August wrote:[I think you are both mistaken. There has long been an admission of genetic limits, ever since Huxley published "The Modern Synthesis"
I wasn't very clear. I meant limits from an initial position.
1) evoview - life started with one (or a few) simple systems and evolved from that to all the plants, animal, etc we see today. Examples: cats and canaries and redwoods and slimemold etc all had a common ancestor.
2) idview - life started with the creation of a number (1,000's to 100,000's?) of kinds which can only vary within the genetic limits of the original kind. Examples: lions and tigers and servals and snow leopards and ocelots etc all evolved from a common ancestor C; wolves and coyotes and dingos and dogs etc all evolved from a common ancestor D. C and D have no common ancestor and all their subsequent progeny have no more genetic information than the originals.
[Bgood has already covered other areas.]
Uh, ID holds to common descent I believe. A certain person here should know-Dembski told him so...after he was banned.

Once again, equivocation between ID and creationism. Thank you ignorance.

P.S.

The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated

Posted: Tue Feb 21, 2006 10:17 am
by Zenith
August wrote:
Zenith wrote:astronomy, archeology, and quantum physics use experimentation as much as any other science. its just that its a little different. its more of a process of trial and error, where it is easy for someone to prove that you are doing something wrong and correct them. astronomy is tied closely with physics, which is proven by mathematics, but they experiment with mathematical realities and how accurately they portray the universe. they make hypotheses concerning a certain aspect of the universe as shown by a mathematical theory and then they prove it by observing it in space.
You somewhat misrepresent what I said. I did not say that they do not use experimentation, I said that they did not rely on it as much as other scientific endeavors. As you pointed out, experimentation in those sciences have more to do with mathematical modelling and/or the inference of hypothesis. Sticking to the topic for a second, what about higher order sciences, like extra-sensory perception or human consciousness studies? Are those valid areas for scientific study? They follow the same method....lso, is it your position that all phenomena submit to necessarily naturalistic explanations?
i'm sorry about the misinterpretation. those sciences don't use as much experimentation in the traditional sense. but they still rely on experimentation just as much, only that it is a different kind. developing mathematical equations is as much experimentation as growing different crops to determine their nutrient efficiency. it is still possible to develop a mathematical theory that appears correct, but could have some flaw in how it relates to the real world. that is why physics is a constantly changing science, especially quantum physics.

i know that human consciousness is a study, and one that i am particularly interested in. but about extra-sensory perception i am not sure. there doesn't really seem to be any evidence in favor of that kind of thing.

everything must be caused by a physical force because if it isn't, it doesn't affect our universe. if it affects our universe, then it creates evidence of itself in the universe that we are able to observe. we might not be advanced enough to see all of it, but we are still able to become advanced enough. the fact is that there can be no inherent difference between physical and supernatural forces because they both can affect this world and therefore they both have a physical presence. be it gravity, electromagnetism, god, light, matter, they all cause the universe to change in certain ways and that means that they are physical--they can be observed and explained in physical terms. non-physical things are ideas and relations and interactions between physical things.
August wrote:
archeology is just the process of finding, digging up, and reorganizing fossil remains. there is a lot of experimentation in all of these things. any of them can and have been done wrong, so we have to figure out how to do them better. thats experimentation.
You cannot recreate the exact environment around any of these, so to say that you experiment is painting experimentation with a pretty broad brush. While I don't deny that they do try to confirm and document their observations, it is not necessary to perform experiments to have a valid scientific theory.
you misunderstand me. their experimentation is not in trying to make up stories to explain the presence or position of the bones, but in finding and retrieving those bones and determining their relation to the surrounding area. there are so many measurable variables in this study that can reveal actual interactions. they experiment with how best to observe what they can.
August wrote:You also did not answer my question, so I will assume that either you missed it, or you did not understand it, so I will elaborate a bit. My question was:
How can you prove that definition of science to be true by experimentation?
If this definition of science, in the form of physical reductionism and methodological materialism is true, can you point to any experiments which show this to be the case? Please note, I am not asking for an apparent success story in the application of the method, I am asking for experimental proof of this foundational underpinning of the scientific method as an absolute, meaning it must work in all cases, always.
if something affects our universe, no matter how miniscule that effect is, it leaves some kind of a mark behind. an effect can reveal the cause and every effect has a cause. every cause leaves behind an effect that we are able to observe. the supernatural is explained as having no physical presence. having no physical presence, it cannot have an effect on our universe. if it doesn't have an effect in our universe, it cannot be the cause of anything. if there is no possible observable effects of something, then it doesn't exist. i'm not saying that if we don't find any effects of it, it doesn't exist, but rather that there can be no such thing as a supernatural and that anything is labelled such is better explained as a physical force. that is what naturalism says. i don't really know what you were asking, but that is what i believe.
August wrote:
macroevolution can be proven by solid logic with the evidence at hand. in the past, things such as this have not needed to be able to be disproven because so many people are able to agree with it.
What evidence would that be? And please show what laws of logic you use. Is it your position that the majority position is necessarily the right one?
the evidence is in genetics. recombination of genes allows for a wide variety of change within just one genotype. mistakes in the copying (mutations) allow for even more diversity. thus, change occurs every generation, and each new organism is different from any other. there is no 'new material' that is created, it is just reorganization of amino patterns. all cells are made of different patterns of the same fundamental molecules but the organization and the amount are what makes the difference between a bear and a butterfly. so each new organism is an evolutionary change. i am an evolutionary change from my parents because i have a combination of their reorganized genes (with maybe a few small mistakes in the copying). change occurs in each generation.
August wrote:
i think there actually is one thing which, if proven wrong, could disprove evolution. the fact that all organisms change. if you could prove that there is a limit to the amount of change the genes of a type of organism go through as they are passed from generation to generation, then you could disprove evolution. if you could prove that there is a force which keeps genes from deviating too much from the norm over a period of several million years, then you could prove evolution is false.
Ok, I just want to make sure that I understand what you are saying...Do you mean that if there is proof of genetic limits, that evolution will be shown to be wrong? I want to expand on this, but I want to make sure that I understand you first.
yes, to some extent. if an organism becomes so balanced with its ecosystem that there is no more drastic population change, then its genes get passed on with little change. this is shown by the unchanged existence of insects and sharks and some reptiles. they fit so well into their niches that there are no (or few) environmental factors which prevent a large amount of them from reproducing.

i don't really know if we can disprove evolution without taking the time and effort to. the only way i can think of would be to observe many different types of organisms in many different environments over the course of hundreds to thousands of years. it just takes that long. or, perhaps if we created a contained environment and made it such that it would be the best environment to make certain organisms evolve, we could observe if it happens, or how it happens. that might be our best bet, as it would take less (relatively) time.

after thinking about it for a while, i honestly can't say that evolution might be false. it might be inaccurate, but i don't think the idea is untrue. its like trying to disprove god. to me, both god and evolution are not actual things or entities, but the collective interactions of everything--everything. evolution is a tool of creation, as i have said a few times before. i do think that most people, including many scientists, have an unclear or skewed perspective on evolution and perhaps this is why so many people don't agree with it. when i think of evolution, i don't think of theories or scientists talking about their ideas of evolution, i think of interactions in the world around me that i have observed first hand.
August wrote:
the real problem with the ability to prove or disprove evolution is that it could take millions of years. the process is so incredibly slow that we arent able to observe it in full action, we can only find clues and glimpses.
Yes, that is right. What opponents of evolution take exception to is the amount of filling in that happens between the glimpses and how the clues are interpreted. Experiments performed on organisms with a short lifecycle, such as Drosphilia, shows no proof for macroevolution. This is what lead leading evolutionary biologists such as Dobzhansky to say that the application of experimental processes to macroevolution is all but impossible.
i beg to differ. we are all made of cells and these cells all have similar basic processes. the short lifecycle only means that evolution can occur faster because gene recombination is more often. yes, there is a lot of filling in between the glimpses that we see (i assume you are talking about fossils). but this agrees with the theory of evolution in that it takes a lot of time for organisms to change. there is a lot of filling in to do between animals that we see, but there was a lot of time between them that we haven't observed.
August wrote:
once you get into the intracacies of biological science you will know the answers to these questions. but its so incredibly complicated that i only know it works, not how. i've met a few of these people (i live near the university of florida) and they know so much about these things, about how everything interacts with each other or how we can gleam so much information about the environment from just a little piece of rock or dirt.
You seem to accuse me of being too stupid or uninformed to know that the problem of the natural origin of life has been solved. Why don't you provide some references from these very clever friends of yours, instead of asserting and reasoning in circles.
i'm sorry if i seemed condescending, i did not mean to be. but a lot of people think that scientists, particularly biologists and astronomers, make too many guesses in making a theory. they think this because they don't know how much information can be attained from the presence of one molecule, or the specific frequency and direction of an electromagnetic wave. i don't mean that they are ignorant, just that there is always information that someone doesn't know.

i was trying to imply that biologists are not as nearly philosophical about their job as you make them out to be. they don't always think about the origin of life, or about the rammifications of evolution. they observe life, and they record the circumstances of that observation. there is no philosophy in that. if you read through their experiements you can see the raw data and how they interpret it, and you can see if they put a bias into their conclusions or not. this is why theories are constantly being attacked and disproven.

a theory can be very reliable even if one or more of the axioms is unkown. you know why? because it is consistent with our observations of the world around us.
August wrote:
the only axiom i see that evolution depends on is that organisms change.
So according to you the theory of evolution includes the origin of life, since it is not taken to be axiomatic? But Bgood argues differently, he says it does not include the origin of life. If it is not included, but necessary for the ToE to work, i.e. organisms must exist before they can change, it is axiomatic.
i don't see whay you're trying to get at here. the origin of life doesn't need to be axiomatic, it is a given. we know that there is life, it doesn't matter if it started or not. you're saying that the origin of life must be part of evolution because i don't take for granted that life began? well i [/i]don't[/i] take the origin of life for granted. we don't know that there was a real beginning to life. we don't even know if the term 'life' can be confined to just cells.

i would not include the origin of life with evolution because it is not the spreading of genes, it is the development of genes. but at the same time, i could say that it is included because what is the development of genes but the evolution of collective molecules? i think that life developed because these basic molecular building blocks came together through natural processes (which i do not distinguish from god, because god is in everything) and because of their organisation, they were able to replicate. i don't believe in a sudden change from colletive molecules to life, i think the transition is only from simple to more complicated.

Posted: Tue Feb 21, 2006 10:37 am
by Zenith
August wrote:If this is not the result of genetic limits, what is it the result of? Even though evolution supposedly manifests at the macroscopic level, the variation has to happen at the molecular level.

Also, why is evolution irreversible? No mammal has ever evolved into a reptile, or reptile to amphibian etc.
i know it may sound like i'm making stuff up just to prove evolution right, but i really believe this stuff and i have for a while.

the fact that we don't observe organisms to be evolving now is due to a couple of things.

first of all, the world is pretty much completely populated now (by living things). everything is surviving because it fits into its own niche and lives in moderate equalibrium with its environment. because of this, there is no large amount of extinction anywhere and there are no/few unbalanced predator/prey relationships. this means that change in the dna of an organism has more of a chance of being detrimental to that organism's survivability. so the ones that change will usually die and not pass on their genes and the ones that do not change have a better chance of remaining in equalibrium.

another reason is that we haven't been around for long enough to see any major changes. the climate of the world has been pretty stable and there have been no worldwide natural disasters. everything seems to be in an equilibrium right now. (naturally, though humans change the environment of other animals a lot, and we are starting to see the effects of that). the rate of change in genes is dependant on the rate at which that organisms reproduces, so it takes a long time for many more complex animals to change, and that is only when their environment allows for it.

as for reverse evolution, that doesn't occur because evolution is dependant on the interaction of the organism with its environment. mammals evolved from reptiles to fill a different niche than reptiles. but because reptiles still remain in their niche, mammals will not change back. you cannot just look at an animal and see how it could adapt or evolve; you have to look at its environment and all the factors that affect its life and ability to reproduce.