Ann Coulter on the “gaps” in evolution
Ann Coulter is never one to shy away from stating the controversial, and this article of hers is no exception. She points out that, far from being a perfect theory, evolution does indeed have “gaps,” just as Rick Perry said it did.
I have a busy day ahead of me, and right now I can’t give the issue the time it deserves. Those of you who are in the sciences probably have a lot to say on the matter, and I’d be very interested in hearing it. But one thing I will say is that when last I studied evolution, which was a mild hobby of mine for a while (I read much of Steven Jay Gould, for example), it was clear that there were problems with it that still cried out for solutions, and there were lots of arguments within the field about how it actually worked. For example, I seem to remember that these guys had quite a row.
One of the controversies was about the relationship between science and religion. That’s certainly relevant to the discussion today about evolution. But it seems more and more that science has become a religion, and a rather rigid one at that—maybe not among so many of the actual scientists, some of whom can still entertain disagreement and argument—but among politicians of the liberal sect.
There are a vast number of fossils which qualify as “transitional” by any sane definition of the term. She has no idea what she is talking about. None. I have never heard a single creationist/IDer utter a single rational, informed critique of evolution. They do not have even a basic high-school understanding of the field they are attacking. Everything they attack is a straw man or an outright fantasy. The validity of natural selection does not depend on horses having evolved in North America, in particular.
People like Coulter are killing the Republican party, and badly screwing the country in the process. The economy matters. Liberty matters. Rights matter. The Constitution matters. BEATING OBAMA MATTERS. Hammering crazy stupid dead horses about evolution DOES NOT MATTER. It’s a stupid sideshow.
This is why Kim du Toit called the GOP the Stupid Party, and the Democrats the Evil Party. We keep shooting ourselves in the foot over utter nonsense.
This foolishness lets liberals paint all conservatives as ignorant, hyper-religious fools.
The geological record shows that species come and go. So either they derive by gradual change from other species, or they are somehow magically created, on a continuous basis, by some alien or god. The creation theory explains everything and therefore nothing; it cannot be disproved, it cannot be elaborated, and it leads nowhere.
The evolution theory is very weak because, in spite of the the magic attributed to the phrase “natural selection”, we understand very poorly how it occurs in practice. My favorite example: we don’t understand how a tree shrew could evolve to a blue whale in 63 million years via natural selection; we don’t even know how to do something like this by unnatural selection, namely selective breeding, in that time. But even if natural selection lacks the quantitative aspects of a real scientific theory, it is a least a pre-scientific theory. That is, we hope to elaborate on it more and more, as we understand biochemistry more and more, to eventually get to the point where it has real predictability and has become a real science.
Creationism leads nowhere. Evolution “theory” leads to further research and understanding.
Evolution theory was unfortunate: it became the subject of ideological and even political controverses from the very begining. This means it never was a pure science and always contained some ideological motivation behind its claims. Dawkins is no scientist, he is philosopher and propagandist, and evolution theory for him is only pretext for his anti-religious crusade.
Gould was a real scientist, the most authoritative expert in paleontology in his generation. In his dispute with Dawkins all facts support Gould, and his critique of Dawkins is devastating. But more important, this critique is devastating for Darwinism as it is taught in most Western colleges and schools. Up to now no evolution theory deserving such name exist, and it is even unclear if such theory is possible in principle.
Intelligent design is not science. It doesn’t apply the scientific method to test htypotheses. To the extent that darwin’s theory doesn’t supply a roadmap of evolution, it is incomplete, but not refuted. Living organisms’ cell structure is determined by DNA, which is heritable and subject to change. I suppose if you want to believe that an outside agency manipulates the changes, there is no way to prove the negative. But Coulter, for all her native wit and instincts, is missing the point. Darwin did well even though DNA was unknown at the time. The Creationist point of view has never been refined by its adherents, and likely never will be because it is first and foremost: dogma.
Some years ago, the late William Buckley convened a panel discussion on the subject of evolution. On the evolution side of the table were scientists, and the heads of the ACLU and Americans United for Separation of Church and State, an outfit more radical than the ACLU on the establishment thingy. I’ve dealt with both of them superficially.
So there’s more to this than science.
On the ID side were others claiming to be scientists. They knew their stuff. They could have taught a beginning class in evolution if they’d wanted to, which of course they did not.
Gould’s point is that the gradual change from one species to the next is understandable. We can comprehend it. We have a Cliff’s Notes version in front of us in stock breeding. Problem is, the fossil record does not support it. Gould referred to the slow-motion view as “Darwinian gradualism” or “Darwinian fundamentalism” and the latter not in a good way. I should say that Gould was one of the most well-known defenders of evolution up until his death.
If an amateur proponent of Darwinian gradualism had shown up at the Buckley seminar, the ID guys would have taken his lunch, wrapped it up neatly, put a pretty bow on it, waved it under his nose, and taken it away, grinning.
Gould and others refer to the picture the fossil record provides as “punctuated equilibrium”. Punk eek is millions and millions of years with no change in a, or many, species. Then a short–geologically speaking–period of rapid change with many of the old species gone and new showing up. Then more millions of years of equilibrium.
The first thing ID guys do is blow gradualists out of the stadium, and challenge punk eek guys on the mechanism of the punk (punctuation). Other than talking about continents joining or separating, or mountain ranges rising or falling, or mighty rivers suddenly separating populations of the same species, whose timing cannot be organized to fit the punk, the evolutionists are kind of lost.
I believe in evolution. But I am annoyed with the arrogance of the larger mouths in the discussion, and glad of whatever puzzles them.
Some years ago, a survey of large-animal paleontologists discovered they didn’t believe in the asteroid theory of dinosaur extinction. I don’t know who’s right on this, but the reaction of some was telling. If they publicly disagreed, Carl Sagan would get all over them and they’d be accused of calling for a nuclear winter.
Coulter is right to assert that the transition model of New World horses has been re-examined and not considered the slam-dunk it used to be. Don’t know which is right, but to insist nobody in the business questions it is foolish.
Ditto the white/black/spotted moth in England during the Industrial Revolution. Used to be the gold standard of examples. Now questioned. Again, don’t know who’s right, but the point is the usual examples held up as gospel for decades are showing signs of not proving what it used to be thought they proved. I suppose we’ll see.
Old book by G.R.R. Taylor, “Evolution’s Mysteries”. He was a science writer who, apparently, believed in evolution, but wrote to point out major problems. I expect they’ll be solved. Indeed, some may have been since the book came out years ago. The point is not to act as if the problems are all solved.
One thing evolutionists ought to do is not presume creationists are stupid. For example, the time-tested experiment of generating a resistent strain of bacteria in a Petri dish is supposed to show evolution. It does, in one sense, in that the end population is resistant to the antibiotic used in the experiment. But the creationists are quick to point out that this is CHOOSING that which already exists. Where did the few resistant individuals come from, to live through the first applicaton of antibiotic?
Mutation is poorly understood. So this example, if addressed by creationists, backs the evolutionists into the process of mutation. I think they win, but it’s an example of what is called a proof being something short of that.
Dan, you made usual mistake lumping together Creationism of Biblical literalists and Intelligent Design. ID is not alternative theory of evolution, it is scientific critique of existing theory. And Darwinism is not theory of evolution, it is a theory of race formation. It can say nothing about speciation and macroevolution. And it is a dogma, too. ID is known as long as Darwinism under name of Mivart problem (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._George_Jackson_Mivart). The problem became even more acute after Gould established “punctuated equilibrium” principle as the real cause of abcence (extreme rarity) of intermediate forms in fossil record. This wiped out 99% of time and 99,9% of material needed for speciation events and made a very small probability of such events in conventional Darwinism so small that it can occure only as miracle.
Sergey —
I also make the “mistake” of lumping together Creationism of Biblical literalists and Intelligent Design. I think they are pretty much the same people.
As far as their “impossibility” claims: all they do is postulate a certain bogus probabilistic model, and then claim an impossibility result with respect to that silly model. Evolutionists correctly point this out, but then they go on to pretend that they really understand how evolution happens. They act as if the “God did it” theory has been disproven, whereas the real problem with the “God did it” theory is that it cannot be disproven or in any way elaborated (as I commented above).
Full disclosure: I’m an engineer with an honors degree and I love science and math.
So, what’s true?
All the species today evolved over umpteen millions of years, or….
The world and everything in it was created about 4000 years BC.
When it comes to how to live my life or who to vote for in elections,
“Frankly, m’dear (or sir), I don’t give a damn.”
texexec
Right you are. As I said, there’s more to this than science. It’s a proxy for the culture wars.
The evolutionists will say that you can’t get medical advances, at least those involving vaccines and so forth, if you don’t believe in evolution. Given sufficient explanation, I guess that’s so. But the solution is for big pharma not to hire creationists.
retardo, I wont ax you to point out a vast number of transitional forms for all us neophytes, just one will do.
Sergey. There is a school of thought, or something, which presumes that the current situation as regards extant species was in some way a goal. Of blind evolution. Figure that. In other words, evolution had to keep trying until it came to…us. And our neighboring flora and fauna.
Wrongo.
It’s not a matter of throwing the dice (even one of which is a “dice”. Never say die.) until you get a six, which could take a long time if your luck was bad, or be first time if you were running lucky. No. You throw the dice and what you get is what you get.
So the use of probability theory has to be reined in here. Given enough time, practically anything can happen. But if whatever happens first is satisfactory, it takes considerably less time.
I have heard that something which will happen no more than one in 1×10 to the 300th is effectively impossible. That’s a lot of zeroes. I’m interested in the origin of life. How the most complicated molecule became alive. How that last atom or compound got jammed in there and made it a living, eating, excreting, reproducing organism.
Figure all the necessary elements–not many as it happens–and all their atoms or molecules on Earth prior to life bumping into each other so and so many times per second for how many hundreds of millions of years. And all the actual successes instantly destroyed by the environment–acid, heat, lightning.
Would that have as many as three hundred zeroes in the exponent?
Beyond my pay grade.
Zipper: “I wont ax you to point out a vast number of transitional forms for all us neophytes, just one will do.”
Homo Habilis is one.
Let me know if you need another.
For a wonderful book on Intelligent Design read
Signature in the Cell: DNA and and the Evidence for Intelligent Design by Stephen C. Meyer.
No, ID is not Creationism
Evidence of microevolution is common, macroevolution, not so much.
Evolution and ID both have serious shortcomings. But one can’t help to notice only evolutionist have sought to make it a societal taboo to be questioned or subjected to alternative ideas. And they have the gall to call any other ideas as coming from dogmatic fundamentalist.
I agree with SteveH. I wish those who hold to Darwin evolutionary theory would own up to the fact that it is a theory, and it does have some serious problems. They can still “believe”. It takes faith to believe in evolution, ID, or creationism. We’ll never be able to play back the video to see what really happened!
“So, what’s true?
All the species today evolved over umpteen millions of years, or….
The world and everything in it was created about 4000 years BC.”
The first is an attempt, flawed as it might be, to explain the fossil/geological record. The second is an act of faith.
“When it comes to how to live my life or who to vote for in elections,
“Frankly, m’dear (or sir), I don’t give a damn.””
Bingo.
Ann Coulter has defined herself as a polemicist, meaning that she sees what she does as advocating a position — more like a lawyer than, say, a scientist who we hope is more concerned with discovering the way things are whether we’d like them to be that way or not.
That may make her popular as a political writer but polemic in science is, well, bad form. If she limited her arguments to the arrogance and intolerance of too many of the advocates of evolution I would applaud her because she’s right about that even if I think she’s wrong about the science itself.
A few internet searches on any of the examples she gives can easily provide better information than she did (or I can in a comment), but I’ll settle for one point: As for the transitional forms question, the pre-human bipedal apes, or australopithecines, are the transitional forms between apes and humans.
We have thousands of fossils from hundreds of individuals of that genus. Anyone who wants to worry about the geology of fossil deposition rates is free to do so. And yet I suspect the presence of those fossils matter more to the evolution debate than the scarcity of any others.
Gould and Dawkins both had respectable scientific work under their belts earlier in their careers. Gould let his political worldview (and his tendency to self promotion) overshadow his own work to such a degree that his scientific reputation suffered (at least among other scientists, if not so much among fans of his books). Dawkins did a better job of keeping his politics separate from his work, but as his fame grew, he seems to have done less and less serious work and (perhaps from his own tendency to self promotion) become more an advocate of atheism than science which, strictly speaking, can’t take a position on matters supernatural.
Gould was famous for arguing science and religion should be seen as non-overlapping magisteria. That’s possible only if both sides agree on jurisdictional boundaries. But if Dawkins goes from saying science has not yet found a theory that requires a belief in the supernatural to saying there is no supernatural, he’s crossed that line.
By the same measure, it’s one thing to claim as a matter of faith that a Supreme Being is behind the creation of the Universe and that science as an empirical tool can tell us much about the process and history of that creation, even if it can’t disclose the nature or motives of such a Supreme Being. But to claim that something like the Big Bang isn’t how such a God created the universe, or that evolution isn’t how life came into being does more than cross that same line.
It says there is no such line. As a nonbeliever I’m willing to operate with those kinds of lines under a sort of truce between the natural and supernatural worldviews. I am not willing to be told that one-way violations of that line are fine, as long as the justification is ‘it’s a matter of faith’.
If Ann Coulter wants to appeal to faith and say there is more to the world than what the scientific method can address, fine. If she wants to say that too many scientists overstep the bounds of what science can properly tell us about the world, fine.
But if she wants to say the theory of evolution isn’t scientific, she had better read up on what science really is before doing so, because I’m not willing to take her claims on faith.
Sorry Steve. I think of ID as a pseudo-science-sounding loop-hole to reintroduce god, not for the sake of science, but for the sake of religion. ID attempts to disprove evolution by saying macro-evolution is too complex to have arisen spontaneously. So far as I know, unconvincingly. (Michael Behe’s bacteria flagella comes to mind).
Religious people have all along been denying evolution happened at all and have only relatively recently been dragged kicking and screaming into the realization that the earth’s species must have come about through genetic mutation but are now trying to assert that if we havent pin-pointed the exact molecular rearrangement of proteins that led to any particular change, we must drop science altogether and assume god was in the plan…which is what religiously motivated critics of evolution had been arguing since Darwin went public.
I like Ann Coulter but agree with others here that she’s not doing us any favors.
Seems to me that if an intelligent designer with a universe to run wanted to reduce his workload evolution would be a handy tool to use.
Harry.
If you line up the various homos, putting one above the other in a line, early to late, or vice versa, they look like a line with transitionals. Could be an artifact of the way the specimens are lined up on the poster board.
Way back, I was introduced to the candelabra theory, which says that various lines went paralell until some died out and some didn’t.
That some started later than others means….probably transitional.
But to prove transitional is difficult. All you can say for sure is that , HH for your example, stands between two other species in a sequence, sharing some features of each. Certainly could be transitional. Could also be convergent evolution.
As I say, I believe in evolution. Which is to say, I “believe” in it. I have faith that the lacunae will be filled in sometime. I have faith. Yes indeed. In the meantime, it pleases me to be the Advocatus Diaboli.
Rickbert:
Yet evolution is constantly used by the Left for just this rhetorical purpose – the Left constantly wraps its attacks on received morality in the cloak of scientific inevitability.
Evolution is used to undercut received moral notions such as the unique value of human life, and human free will (and therefore responsibility, justice, etc.).
There is an entire genre of modern journalism that could be describes as “dating tips for chimps” – all the nonsense about how “men aren’t programmed to be monogamous” and “men prefer women who look fertile” etc. – all of it asserting that we cannot rise above our simian ancestors.
None of it is scientific – most of the Left’s pseudo-science doesn’t pan out – but it borrows the mantle of scientific authority to discredit received morality.
You speak of when and where “crossing the line” is intellectually acceptable – here’s a good guide:
The tools of science are great for the research of physical reality.
They have NOTHING to say about morality and other non-physical, non-rational aspects of reality. Essential aspects of our humanity are not subject to scientific study or rational proof. (And since you describe yourself as a “nonbeliever” – I’d love to hear how you derive your moral values without recourse to Judeo-Christian notions… )
Whenever a left-winger uses science to promote a shift in morals or other political agenda, they have “crossed the line” – and usually their “science” turns out to be rubbish. Some recent examples:
– feminist assertions that all differences between the sexes are cultural, not inborn – DISPROVED
– assertions that gays are “born that way” – DISPROVED
– global warming – DISPROVED
– Neo
Lysenkoism is used colloquially to describe the manipulation or distortion of the scientific process as a way to reach a predetermined conclusion as dictated by an ideological bias, often related to social or political objectives
[you can include this with using schools, psycology area of medicine and, the church, and other things that the soviets USED as a means of control.. throw in using tax as a carrot and stick – a la fascist control of the means of production too]
its not like i never happened before
hey!
Anyone notice how many things i keep showing we are copygin from the soviets? free love, race games, eduation games, false arguments, lies as norm, public consumption messages vs private realities, redistribution of wealth, kangaroo courts, ignoring law when it suits, and on and on.. including the stalinist past and associations of the current regime and past members..
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism
the whole stuff is exactly like the global warming game too…
pretty much the same as obama and green and the others COPYING history…
now, if we only knew a long time ago they were doing this, how much easier woud it have been to say no, dont vote for tem, and so on?
ignorance is not a good counter to collectivisms predations
Lysenko was admitted into the hierarchy of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and was put in charge of agricultural affairs. He used his position to denounce biologists as “fly-lovers and people haters,” and to decry the “wreckers” in biology, who he claimed were trying to purposely disable the Soviet economy and cause it to fail. Furthermore, he denied the distinction between theoretical and applied biology.
same old moriarty… conspiracies of the right… etc
same old name calling, and same old ideas
if people werent so ignorant it wouldnt seem fresh, they would recognize it, and know what was coming.
i wonder..
when the war breaks out and holocaust II starts, will the survivors remember that i said this is the STATED plan and goal and that you could read it, and know decades ago… IF you just didnt disbelieve out of hand
woulid you believe they are trying to resurect him too!!!
calling the recent trend towards realizing there isnt a reset from mom to daughter and some information passes as neo lamarkian (which is nothing of the sort!)
It is often suggested that Lysenko’s success came solely from the desire in the USSR to assert that heredity had only a limited role in human development; that future generations, living under socialism, would be purged of their ‘bourgeois’ or ‘fascist’ instincts.
doesnt that sound familiar too?
that was probably why my family made sure i was well schooled in physics and my grandmother taught me the soviet style of research.. pencil and paper, and be quiet… 🙂
Climate change isn’t just a scientific question. It’s a moral, a religious, a cosmological question. It involves everything we are and what we have a right to do.
-Richard Cizik
There will be signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars, and on the earth distress among nations confused by the roaring of the sea and the waves. People will faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world, for the powers of the heavens will be shaken.
-Jesus cited in Luke 21:25-26
Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.
-attributed to Mark Twain (1835—1910)
The Chinese system of command and control government seems very attractive from afar.
Islington and Hackney CRAG Stops Trading Carbon.
“In October 1917, we parted with the old world, rejecting it once and for all. We are moving toward a new world, a world of Communism. We shall never turn off that road.” — Mikhail Gorbachev
.
“The threat of environmental crisis will be the ‘international disaster key’ that will unlock the New World Order.” — Mikhail Gorbachev, quoted in “A Special Report: The Wildlands Project Unleashes Its War On Mankind”, by Marilyn Brannan, Associate Editor, Monetary & Economic Review, 1996, p. 5
aint it funny that the majority of those on the side of the crisis of global warming want state slavery, totalitarianism, a second holocaust, and so on?
ha ha
here is the quote for holocaust II
.
“All the other large and small nationalities and peoples are destined to perish before long in the revolutionary world storm… these residual fragments of peoples always become fanatical standard-bearers of counter-revolution and remain so until their complete extirpation or loss of their national character… [A general war will] wipe out all these petty hidebound nations, down to their very names. The next world war will result in the disappearance from the face of the earth not only of reactionary classes and dynasties, but also of entire reactionary peoples. And that, too, is a step forward.” — Friedrich Engels, “The Magyar Struggle,” Neue Rhenische Zeitung, January 13, 1849
so that will tell you wahts coming as that is waht inspired hitler and stalin to start something then with no honor among theives thought they could trick their ‘friend’ and take it all.
“Every collectivist revolution rides in on a Trojan horse of ’emergency’. It was the tactic of Lenin, Hitler, and Mussolini. In the collectivist sweep over a dozen minor countries of Europe, it was the cry of men striving to get on horseback. And ’emergency’ became the justification of the subsequent steps. This technique of creating emergency is the greatest achievement that demagoguery attains.” — Herbert Hoover
and so we have cultural crisis, financial crisis, world crisis, health crisis, race crisis, etc…
Politicization of science
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politicization_of_science
The politicization of science is the manipulation of science for political gain. It occurs when government, business, or advocacy groups use legal or economic pressure to influence the findings of scientific research or the way it is disseminated, reported or interpreted. The politicization of science may also negatively affect academic and scientific freedom. Historically, groups have conducted various campaigns to promote their interests in defiance of scientific consensus, and in an effort to manipulate public policy
and for the last part and its true
i KNOW evolution is real… i worked out the math of how to go from one cell to many cells in a morphological solution that self organizes and grows and evolves to solve undirected taking cues from an environment.
been trying to put that stuff out.. but only today five years after working with a geneticsist who has no time to read the information theory and GA, and cellular automata, and tons of other things needed to understand it in details…
however, as of today, another group is doing similar combinations of biology and modeling…
too bad i lost… and he took me down with him
but he is old, and will retire, and loses nothing
me, i am not old, not young, but i lost everything.
oh.. with this are some wonderful side sciences stuff.
like HOW nature knows good from bad when good from bad cant be determined directly. ie, how does nature do beneificience sorting when its blind, has no mechanism for judgements but obviously has the right bias…
would anyone believe that its simple enough in principal to understand that a high school student can?
but a Phd cant…
and to work off of vanderluen… 🙂
yes… he would… he would not be inane as the left makes him out to be by distorting things
in fact… the idea that under this is a very simple set of rules and things and a structure imposing such.. and on and on in an amazing thing
(that thanks to my aspergers i can SEE… and model… and more… even the apergers man einstein was visual in his gedanken, like temple grandin… (and like temple grandin supports the kind of government that would have exterminated both))
of course average people dont belive that i can SEE equations with millions of variables as images in which i cant see the variables… but the images are abstractly correct!!!!!!!!!!!!!
too bad given our new socially engineered world, that i have to be erased… and cant participate as ramanujan did, and thousands of others
as rich pointed out so aptly, there is no place in the future for me to be…
of course everyones assumption will be he doesnt have such an answer…
assuming if i did, the really smart people would no be idiots and not see it.
nope… not true… so interested in themselves being it, they will stop all others from it, just so no one can have what they dont have. they are quite immature and emotionally stunted… (i earn my living making things work for them… so please dont tell me i am wrong, been doing simialr for 30 years now for different groups and so far, the phd academic is the worst)
not to mention that we dont want creative solutions… new paper out that shows that. we promote the zeitgeist of such, but then associate it with things like vomit whenit comes to reality of it
but i will give a clue
what you all call creativity, is my awarness
ie.. when i show you what i am aware of and you are not and others are not, and dont see until i show them
THATS what the entertained call creative
einstein made us aware that there was a simple formulea and gave it to us…
he is amazingly creative becaue his awareness could conceive of it, but others could not
[and for fun – I SAID FUN – my iq is 10 points higher than Einsteins… meaningless… but fun… ]
“It’s not a matter of throwing the dice (even one of which is a “dice”. Never say die.)”
Was that meant as a joke (i.e., as a setup so you could say “Never say die”)? Or are you serious?
“”Seems to me that if an intelligent designer with a universe to run wanted to reduce his workload evolution would be a handy tool to use.””
vanderleun
This highlights the point of who actually views religious scripture in the most literal and fundamentalist way. Evolutionist win hands down. It is a though they have no ability to read it for its connotation instead of its denotation. I think they are in fact uber sensitive to any idea of a transcended creator precisely because they are certain if “he” exist, he’d have to be a coggity and judgemental old guy who’d just as soon kill you as look at you.
Richard: “But to prove transitional is difficult. All you can say for sure is that , HH for your example, stands between two other species in a sequence, sharing some features of each. Certainly could be transitional. Could also be convergent evolution.”
I get what you mean Richard. HH might have been a successful evolutionary dead-end and not necessarily ancestral to H sapiens. I also think we agree though that generally speaking any critter is a transitional form of something. (Unless they happen to be a dead end that is…)
The soviets invented “free love”!?!
No wonder those who have to pay for sex hate the commies so much.
Would those happen to be free range prostitutes? That’s an important issue with me.
Excellent post Retardo, I’m with you 100%;
As a geologist evolution for me is not a theory but an axiom, although in Ann Coulter’s case I have to suspect that Darwin had the direction wrong; she is evolving INTO blue-green algae. Maybe even “perfected” blue-green algae (ref: her comment on Jews).
BTW, some controversies in science could benefit from an undergrad course in logic. For instance we are bombarded with the notion that an asteroid killed the dinosaurs even though as Neo noted; correlation is not causality, and there is no indication there were any dinosaurs alive at the time of the impact so there is also the little matter of proof. Add that it is impossible to determine what caused the collapse of an eco-system after 65 million years unless one’s time machine is in good working order and one gets something else besides a scientifically proven fact. Yet the revered Gould accepted this asteroid conjecture as proven fact.
Mark Twain’s observation on some scientific insights may have relevance here;
“In the space of one hundred and seventy-six years the Lower Mississippi has shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles. That is an average of a trifle over one mile and a third per year. Therefore, any calm person, who is not blind or idiotic, can see that in the old Oolitic Silurian Period, must a million years ago next November, the Lower Mississippi River was upward of one million three hundred thousand miles long, and stuck out over the Gulf of Mexico like a fishing-rod. And by the same token any person can see that seven hundred and forty-two years from now the Lower Mississippi will be only a mile and three-quarters long, and Cairo and New Orleans will have their streets joined together, and be plodding comfortably along under a single mayor and a mutual board of aldermen. There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact. “
A question for Harry The Extremist, does homo habilis represent a transition from australopithecus or paranthropus? To h. rudolfensis or h. ergaster or h. erectus? Please show your work.
And if, say to h. erectus, then what came between h. habilis and h. erectus?
To LAG: Im not sure what you want me to do for you here in the form of a website comment block. Is there a specific point concerning transitional forms that you would like me to address?
Ben David,
As I tend to endorse Coulter when she’s on about scientists behaving badly, I am also generally sympathetic to most of your post, especially on the observation that much of science journalism is, in a word, crap.
As it happens, where we part company is also where you invite me to explain myself further, so here goes:
First, I’ll take the liberty of expanding your question to: How do you derive your moral values without recourse to … Received Morals? I freely stipulate that if God exists, it’s quite reasonable to list Supreme Moral Authority as one of his Attributes. But I don’t accept that without Divine Authority there is therefore no morality, only that another foundation must be found. Just as my not believing I have an immortal soul doesn’t require me to deny the existence of the mind or the sense of self I possess that you may see as the animating principle of my corporal form. Yet I still need to account for my ‘mortal soul’.
If you have the time, I would recommend reading Larry Arnhart (Darwinian Conservatism, Darwinian Natural Right), especially if you are at all familiar with the theology of Natural Law, etc. In short, the idea is to try and build a foundation for moral principles ‘from the ground up’, on the assumption that while it might not be able to account for all Divine Mysteries of Revelation, it could do a decent job of explaining why standards of moral behavior are the way they are, much as studying aerodynamics could help us understand how birds fly (not by defying the laws of gravity, but by obeying them — very, very carefully!) Arnhart’s approach, in short, is to try and reconcile Darwin to philosophers like Aristotle, St. Thomas Aquinus, or Augustine. I may see it more a question of reconciling those gents to Darwin; tomato, tomahto.
… I’ve just gone and chopped off several more paragraphs where I expanded the analogy of morality having a kind of natural substrate, like flight has in physics. Too long. I’ll settle for recommending Arnhart. If the analogy doesn’t make sense then no point in filling the comment thread. If it does, pursuing Arnhart’s books listed above should be worth the candle. Cheers.
Keep in mind Im not claiming expertise in this area, but am perfectly willing to discuss the matter as well as I understand it.
We do know something for certain. The Left would never become capable of creating life. Unless they needed some cheap slaves.
LAG. What is the species intermediate between Peewee Herman and Hulk Hogan?
You can always redivide a distance. If species A is not at all similar to species Z, somebody’s bound to be asking “Where’s M, huh? Where’s M? Huh? Huh?”
So M shows up. And it’s “Where’s G. Huh? Seen G around?”
Interesting to read John Hawks. He has a blog on paleoanthropology, concentrating on genetics. Most interesting.
I’ll admit I skipped all the arguments to make this comment, primarily because I find it tedious without meaning insult to anyone.
Evolution is a fact, it is also a theory (meaning that all the evidence points to it being so probable that it can’t be disputed that species evolved, the disputable points being the mechanisms, and, no, irreducible complexity isn’t one). The same word describing two different things.
However spotty the fossil record is (looking at time and surface area, they’ve done very well finding the needle in a haystack) most transitionals are there. The move of Archeopteryx from direct lineage to a side shoot (that was argued about for years) is nothing, for example, as there are enough others to show the bird lineage. As well mammal from therapsid (monotreme, marsupial, or placental), or aquatic mammal from land mammal, or even the Panda’s thumb from precursor.
Most of evolutionary biology is portrayed in a less than honest way by it’s critics: “random chance” isn’t what natural selection means; “Darwinist” is like calling a geneticist a “Mendeleevist” or a engineer a “Newtonianist” simply and for the sole purpose of showing that if those three were wrong in some way the critic proves themselves right (a logical and temporal fallacy); and I’m sure all of you know more examples.
If you wonder about “beneficial mutation”, look up nylonase (I heard Medved shut up and change the subject with that one word) or “antibiotic resistant bacteria”. These are beneficial mutations. As for those of you that want to see those “new species” and “new transitions” now, in your lifetime? Get real, our lifetimes are too short except for watching bacterium and a few insects. And who knows how many “transitions have gone under the bulldozer.
There are a number of posts at “Dispatches from the Cultural Wars”, “Sandwalk”, even “The Panda’s Thumb” that cover these issues. Ignore the nastiness of the smug and read for content.
Rickbert,
Reconciling Darwin with moral questions is like reconciling Einstein or Newton with the same. Or worse yet, Heisenberg and Schroedinger (no way to do an umlaut). It’s nonsense masquerading as reasonable.
Darwin was not addressing that field of human knowledge, then or now.
Hey Richard, I was kind of thinking that was where LAG was leaning: H. habilis, H. heidelbergensis, etc all being individual species without being transitional to anything. I dont, though know if that is what he/she meant. The chain of development is in dispute and there are arguments as to who led to who and who was a dead end. Some would say that discredits evolution that we dont know, as you put it, which tabs exactly fits what slot. Still, there are no scientific alternatives to what we’ve been uncovering and that’s the whole point as far as what it is that gets taught as science.
The “science” of evolution is analogous to the “science” of AGW. It’s all about religion and/or government funding.
And…isn’t it interesting the most folks that believe in evolution also believe in AGW, and also believe homosexuality is “normal”, and also believe Keynesian economics.
Interest to note, all you self-righteous evolution as axiom and no proof needed guys—Retardo, Bob in VA—are in very good company. To wit:
“Another interesting facet of history is the connection between evolution and communism. With communism the struggle of “race” is replaced by the struggle of “class” as history is viewed as an evolutionary struggle.
Both Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were evolutionists before they encountered Darwin’s “The Origin of Species” – (Dec 12, 1859) Engels wrote to Marx: “Darwin who I am now reading, is splendid” (Morris 1989, 83 quoting Zirkle). Like Darwin, “Marx thought he had discovered the law of development. He saw history in stages, as the Darwinists saw geological strata and successive forms of life… In keeping with the feelings of the age, both Marx and Darwin made struggle the means of development” (Morris 1989, 83 quoting Borzin). “There was truth in Engel’s eulogy on Marx: ‘Just as Darwin had discovered the law of evolution in organic nature so Marx discovered the law of evolution in human history'” (Morris 1989, 83 quoting Himmelfarb).
“It is commonplace that Marx felt his own work to be the exact parallel of Darwin’s. He even wished to dedicate a portion of Das Kapital to the author of The Origin of Species” (Morris 1989, 83 quoting Barzum). Indeed, Marx wished to dedicate parts of his famous book to Darwin but “Darwin ‘declined the honor’ because, he wrote to Marx, he did not know the work, he did not believe that direct attacks on religion advanced the cause of free thought, and finally because he did not want to upset ‘some members of my family'” (Morris 1989, 83 quoting Jorafsky).
Other Soviet Communist leaders are evolutionists as well. Lenin, Trostsky, and Stalin were all atheistic evolutionists. A soviet think tank founded in 1963 developed a one-semester course in “Scientific Atheism” which was introduced in 1964. Also, a case can be made that Darwinism was influential in propagating communism in China.
Interestingly, according to Morris, Stephen Jay Gould of Harvard University, the co-founder of the punctuated equilibrium theory of evolution is a Marxist in philosophy, along with other distinguished Harvard evolutionary scientists and university professors across the country….”
It’s also interesting to note that the Soviets under communism were light years behind much of the rest of the devloped world when The Wall came down….or maybe they were a trasitional class???
And we won’t even get into Darwin’s influence on Margaret—eugenicist of the ages—Sanger.
If you have any openness at all, a great CD to watch is “Unlocking the Mystery of Life—The Scientific Case for Intelligent Design” put out by Illustra Media.
Stunning for those who are still able to be stunned by life….but not for the self-righteous axiomists.
There’s a wonderful exhibit at Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History on whales, dolphins, and porpoises. The main thing I learned was that new species of these animals are discovered all the time.
The exhibit has a diagram showing the profiles and relative sizes of these animals, and it’s pretty clear to me that there is some kind of orderly relationship among the varieties.
I can see how the fossil record would be quite incomplete of any group of animals.
“LAG. What is the species intermediate between Peewee Herman and Hulk Hogan?”
Bruce Willis. I’m lost after that. Yeah the concept of infinite transitions is another strawman by the Creationists. Ignorance isn’t appealing, willful ignorance is ugly, and outright dishonesty is shockingly hideous. See Gish and the Bombardier Beetle for the latter (yeah, it’s old but the dishonesty hasn’t stopped, I’ve seen recent quote-mining that would make a dishonest journalist blush).
Marx was an idiot with painful boils on his behind, and the sooner people stop referencing his ideas, the better off we’ll all be.
Remember phlogiston? Marxism belongs in the same shoebox in the closet of failed ideas.
And, Webutante, all of that would have meaning if the fossil record was created by Marx. Really, how can you cross economics and politics and arrive at biology. Conflating the two with the other is silly.
I was taught on how economic systems changed over time (feudalism, mercantilism, and capitalism, for example), so my Civics and History teachers must have been Marxists. I was also taught about how mountains rose and valleys formed, shallow seas left great plains, more Marxist ideas. How are you doing on that Marxist plate tectonics?
Stephen Gould’s father was a Marxist. He wasn’t. So into the sins of the father much?
Promethea….but Marx’s bad ideas—even with boils on his behind—-were greatly influenced by Darwin.
Ariel, you simply didn’t read the text in my first comment as you clearly didn’t understand what it said and totally convulted it. You can’t spar with a person who misses the point.
Good day.
Promethea,
I’d love to agree with you entirely, but from what I’ve read Marx did leave some ideas and tools that do help analyzing Capitalist systems (without leading to everything else that plagued the 20th Century as well the 21st) without leading to the Marxist conclusions.
You have to know that Marxism as politics (the Paris Commune, Lenin, Stalin, etc.) doesn’t mean all economic Marxist theory was wrong, just almost all. And especially when expressed as a political system.
I think what webutante is saying is that science is but the tip of the iceburg when it comes to darwinism. The huge part beneath the water is its accompanying social evolution that’s self destructive and has a history to prove it.
Ariel.
Infinite transitions, if by that you mean one slightly different species after another after another until you have a major difference between first and last is what Gould was referring to as “Darwinian gradualism”. Creationists may have glommed on to it because it’s so difficult to demonstrate that it discredits evolution, at least among those who cling to gradualism.
But it was the evolutionists who first described it, as they thought it was.
Problem with punk eek is two-fold. One is the absence of a likely mechanism. And when you figure the requirement is that a new species has to show up, all its parts in working order and coordinated with each other, without evidence of intervening experimentation–transition–you have a very difficult proposition to propose. Tough to make it intuitive.
Steve, I was ripping off Ambrose Bierce. I think. Possibly Mark Twain.
No, Webutante, I did. And I have read it before and before and before. That Marx drew anything from Darwin is a non-sequitur. Darwin wasn’t espousing economic theory but biology. That Marx drew something from it has everything to do with Marx and nothing to do with Darwin.
Next, will you blame Einstein for moral relativism because after all he showed time and space were relative concepts? Actually, moral relativism grew greatly after Einstein, thus Einstein is to blame. Especially true if anyone cited him as giving them the idea. Right?
And, no, Nietzsche would have hated Nazis, his whole work was against such an abomination. Just in case you wanted to throw that canard in too.
You weave things that are not related into an ugly cloth.
Darwin is about change in species over time, nothing more, nothing less. Nothing that others want to claim to give them authority, and nothing that others want to use to smear. And certainly not about politics, economics, or morality.
Not so much in Origin of Species, very much so in Descent of Man and frequently in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, as many of the emotions covered have distinct moral elements.
Of course, it’s easier to correct the error about what Darwin was addressing than to solve the question about what is and is not “nonsense masquerading as reasonable.”
As before, in lieu of overly long comment posts, I’ll defer to my previous reference to Larry Arnhart’s works in defense of the notion that Darwin and morality can at least reasonably be argued together (even if you are not yourself persuaded).
Richard Aubrey,
Sort of. The idea of gradualism hasn’t meant infinitesimal changes from species through species, but changes within a species that lead to a major change (the change being a movement of bones that eventually lead to the mammalian ear for example, which is well documented) leading to anew species. And an old species can coexist with a new species (no, the change doesn’t mean all the old becomes the new).
The problem with the fossil record is that it can’t incorporate all changes because of the factor of chance (that animal with that initial change has to die in a way that will result in a fossil, and then it has to be found, and 20 years later examined). The other problem is that the changes are not necessarily “gradual” but are in geological time. Gould, et al, posited punctuated equilibrium because it explained some periods in the fossil record but not all, nor was it meant to explain all. And they were talking about hundreds of thousands of years for change. That was considered quick.
When I hear people constantly bring up Darwin, I cringe, because Darwin’s voyage was 1831, his “Origin of Species” was published in 1859, and Mendel was 1865. So a lot of science has gone on past his time, it’s like going after engineering because of Newton (who was right but wrong). BTW. I have a ChE so pardon the previous use of Medeleev for Mendel.
When I wrote evolution is a fact it was because the history shows that species changed over time, period. No woolly mammoth with T. Rex, no Blue Whales swimming with Pliosaurs, no Giant Marsupials with trilobites. And you have to remember this was initially found by Creationist Geologists. The problem arose however that the Great Flood couldn’t explain the record…
Sorry, Harry The Extremist, I don’t want you to do anything for me. I just want to hear your answer. You raised the question. If you can’t find room enough here, send a link or give me the title of the journal article/monograph you find makes your argument in a compelling way.
And yest “there a specific point concerning transitional forms” I’d like you to address, and that is the one I asked. Where does homo habilis fit in? Does H. habilis mark the transition to later hominids from the australopithecus or the paranthropus line?
Does the line lead from h. habilis to h. rudolfensis or h. ergaster or h. erectus?
All I want you to do is draw the line–mark the beginning and the end points of the evolutionary line that contains h. habilis somewhere in the middle.
Or perhaps you’d like to admit that the fossil record is actually so fragmentary that it’s open to multiple interpretations.
Rickbert,
However, these arguments regarding evolution are solely about the “Origin of Species”. That Darwin went off in areas that are not quoted by today’s biologists, would be like arguing that today’s physicist’s should still be arguing about special relativity because Einstein didn’t accept quantum mechanics. They stand alone.
Leon Trots-Key,
the soviets were not the first to conceive of it, but were the first to implement it.
Alexandra Mikhailovna “Shura” Kollontai
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandra_Kollontai
Free Love (from wiki)
The term free love has been used to describe a social movement that rejects marriage, which is seen as a form of social bondage. The Free Love movement’s initial goal was to separate the state from sexual matters such as marriage, birth control, and adultery. It claimed that such issues were the concern of the people involved, and no one else.
Much of the free-love tradition is an offshoot of anarchism, and reflects a civil libertarian philosophy that seeks freedom from state regulation and church interference in personal relationships. According to this concept, the free unions of adults are legitimate relations which should be respected by all third parties whether they are emotional or sexual relations. In addition, some free-love writing has argued that both men and women have the right to sexual pleasure. In the Victorian era, this was a radical notion. Later, a new theme developed, linking free love with radical social change, and depicting it as a harbinger of a new anti-authoritarian, anti-repressive sensibility.
Many people in the early 19th century believed that marriage was an important aspect of life to “fulfill earthly human happiness.” Middle-class Americans wanted the home to be a place of stability in an uncertain world. This mentality created a vision on strongly defined gender roles, which led to the advancement of the free love movement.
LAG,
Yeah the lineage here is still in question. It’s only a few million years and of a very small population group, so there is still a lot of work. Yeah, it’s fragmentary, but a lot of the older ones aren’t as fragmentary by any means. The bush is still being worked out.
Just as an aside, H. sapiens sapiens reached a low point of about 2-3000 individuals during one ice age, a record after that would be scanty at best until the population grew sufficiently.
At least we know Neanderthal didn’t die out completely.
The gaps in evolution are irrelevant as the whole argument is false.
regardless of whether evolution exists, is valid, invalid, etc… has no bearing on an idea in which the idea of separation is not possible. ie. if all of reality is deity based (in whatever form or way that is in a reality), then ALL reality is that way, including any part of that reality you want to use and pretend is separate. “the bible is written by man” being the most common, as if mans creations are separate from the reality he is bound in or only exists in…
but let me hopefully make this more interesting…
look out upon the sea and you see waves…
big waves and small waves and all that foam… but waves…
waves are funny things, they are real, but not real. they move, but they dont move. all kinds of interesting things… and they are bound in the medium they exist in and can not leave or exist without it.
all of reality is waves. interference patterns have been generated in all kinds of ways and even with larger things like electrons..
everything exists, and doesn’t exist
it moves, but doesn’t move
it exists in something that is nothing
your thoughts as ideas apart from their electronic and chemical basis…
are real, and not real
can mean nothing or everything
and do change the motion of matter and material in ways that simple statistical causational newtonian reality cant do otherwise.
as for the argument for a god? against a god? well the answer is not going to be revealed directly in a reality that is created by such if such didn’t want such revealed. would it?
as for finding proof? well if all of everything is not proof enough, then no proof is enough. a corporeal old man zapping himself in and out would be perceived as even less proof of anything than the existence itself of everything.
the knowledge is not analyzable that way, nor is it any other way.
but a funny thing is that we feel it is real, though we easily distinguish that from most other fantasy entities,etc… why?
why is there 50 posts here and all trying to grasp this somehow, and choosing sides if its really like the Easter bunny..
i dont see anyone chasing hindus for believing in blue indras… or other stuff out there i wont take the space to describe
if living breathing loving and being capable of understanding it in such a way to take it apart and how its so magnificiently simple and complicated..
in truth… the SMARTER you are and the more experienced you are and the deeper your knowlege goes, the less you can simply brush aside an argument as primitive.
eating is primitive, want to stop that too?
how about music? jewelry? art? singing? dance? laughter? hair? walking? farming? pair bonding once we stood up?
the two arguments have noting to do with each other except for what they originally had to do with each other and to which the philosophers are forever and ever punked by!!!!
if you get to know an artist through their creations. and their creations show you awareness. and seeing someone ELSES awareness that exceeds yours is creative and creation. then if we find out how reality works we will understand the artist through his medium.
without religion there is no science as we know it or believe it or think it should be in any pure form without only material (physical based) goals.
there is no reason to investigate the world and learn and eat from the fruit of the tree of knowledge (to wax biblical)
leftists and socialists, and if you haven’t noticed most of these militant arguers are leftists and socialists (as a real atheist who wasn’t the anti-thesis of god loving, wouldn’t care), are dialectical materialists… they deny the existence of anything not real or physical, like self organization, self regulation, the invisible hand, a deity that can order something, etc..
so to them a deity worship is not just an issue of belief and personal action… its watching a resource that should be exploited (means of production), and who by believing in god, spends time, money and such that is a waste as far as dawkins and others see…
they think so little of other human beings that they see as lesser, that they dont really see the value in letting them believe things that cost the owners X dollars in productivity a year…
or havent you notice they put things in those terms. how can you lose what you dont own? how can the voluntary actions of someone cost X dollars of lost productivity, if someone isnt sitting there ticking off the dollars and cents that belongs to them based on which actions their cattle make… no?
you see.. the argument isnt about religion or god or darwin or that. its about who gets to have your labor, and so what can be done with that fruit that fuels the fantasy.. and the blindness that if your doing that to people, you have already destroyed that fantasy
someone like Dawkins is pragmatic and he believes wrongly that if you dont believe in god, that you will just work, and there will be more taxes and more taxes mean more money for research, etc…
you see, if it really was about proving or disproving gods existence, they would throw in the towel of they were honest and say neither side can do that… and then admit that what they want is your belief so that your actions (social engineering) are available for use.
and how people wear that idea and which ideas they hold they wear like a fashionable coat. as if buying a gucci bag makes you an elite… or walking in heels like monarchy does, or make up, or nail polish…
but it may make you think that you got a ticket on the bus. so that you then take on the same superior arrogant belief… and so, as Chesterton said… you stop believing in one thing, and start believing in anything, not nothing
before you get into an argument over something with someone, maybe you should figure out if they are arguing from belief, or arguing for some intent other than belief.
evolution will not prove or disprove god.
the deeper we go in reality the deeper the order and complexity and mixture of somethings and a whole lot of nothings makes things seem real. but outside the view of a concious mind, reality doesnt exist.
ergo the idea that creation became real in a week… look at it pedantically and claim genius for it… and you belittle it.. think deeply as to the nature we are discovering, not making, and reality comes into existence upon the first conscious mind.
think about it… they have it backwards
its not the creation of physical reality its the creation of mental reality that matches physical reality that makes real real. and all the deep thinking and consciousness and purpose to it.
and the lord said, let their be light (reason)
and the rest of it matches the epocs and the discovery of our reality… we wandered in the deserts… till we found domestication… there was a flood, but noah saved the domesticated farm animals.. there was providence..
but there was also awareness.
we became aware
the world was born
reality came into being
and technically “all that implies”
for the convincers on the no god side, its only a argument for a hyper reality… a way of not facing that real is not really real, but is not really unreal either. we are a part of things, but feel we are separate from it all…
if you can deny the truth of not knowing, you can accept the lie of knowing.
Ariel. As to your last, see Trinklein. I think he thinks he’s got a dog in that fight.
Just to be pissy, when ear bones move, when jaw bones slowly become ear bones, what we have is probably natural selection. Presumably it makes for better hearing. Okay. Why did it take so long to get started? Scores of millions of years of vertebrates got along without it, being selected either to live or die by hearing well or poorly. I guess there are two points here. One is that a creationist can always find something that needs answering that can’t be answered. That’s part of the game, and evolution obliges because there are gaps and the really, really convinced evolutionists insist there are none, or none that couint, leaving themselves open to problems. The other is that natural selection, if it’s all it’s advertised to be, wouldn’t have waited so long in this case, as in others. So we need to answer that.
I once asked a horse breeder what percentage of horses in the parimutuel class are allowed to breed. IOW, not be gelded, sold to riding academies, etc. I’ve forgotten what the exact answer was, but it was pretty small. This is like a hugely accelerated case of natural selection. But we’ve hit a wall. Horses aren’t going to get much faster no matter how few are bred. Not until a major mutation comes along. And a major mutation is going to look really weird and probably not be allowed to compete. Maybe be bred back into the larger population if not sterile.
The point is that gradualism, if it’s like parimutuel horsebreeding slowed down by orders of magnitude, may equally hit a wall in a species on its way to become something else.
The reason I asked about Pewee Herman and Hulk Hogan is that they’re both H. Sap, but if discovered buried in similar strata a million years from now would be considered different species. If in different strata due to geologic accident, one might be considered the ancestor of the other, considering skull conformation, tooth characteristics, so forth, and Bruce Willis a transitional form.
The original Neanderthal was originally thought to be, iirc, some kind of pituitary case. Not, as it turns out. But what happens when the only form you have really is a pituitary case?
Ariel, I understand the difficulties of dying so as to be discovered some years later. The difficulty applies equally to all species until some version of H started burying his dead friends. That doesn’t mean we can make assumptions in the absence of evidence, whatever the reason for not having the evidence. With most other species, we have so many more individuals, until it’s large raptors of the dino age and before. They’re kind of thin on the ground.
Thanks LAG for holding hte foots to
the the fire.
But i am under the impression that the fossil record is nearly complete.
And it shows one thing and one thing only
STASIS
I always find this debate quite fascinating. In my view there is no incompatibility between the concepts of evolution and divine creation.
Too often the focus of the discussion/debate/disagreement/raging-war is on how the two are mutually exclusive. They are not.
To put it simply, for creationists and proponents of intelligent design: why would God create a massively complex universe, but a static, simplistic life structure? It is not up to us to try to fit creation into our limited understanding by simplifying it, it is our obligation to wonder and try to comprehend the marvel of creation. Evolution is a pretty obvious part of this.
For those of a secular, scientific base, evolution makes perfect sense (even if there are gaps in the understanding), but its existence does not in any way answer the question of whether evolution is the result of incidental accident, or divine intent or otherwise intentional design. There is the “what?”, and then there is the “why?”
In fact the better question would be to ask what is the nature of God? I believe that God exists, but I am unsure exactly what God is. I don’t think he’s an old guy living in the clouds. He may be the Universe itself.
Who thinks God is an old guy living in the clouds?
Rathtyen, medieval scientists considered that they were unraveling the mechanisms of g-d. They no conflict between the two, although philosophers like Maimonides did tangle the question of faith versus reason.
ELC, apparently Ann Coulter believes G-d is an old man living in the clouds, indeed one can be sure that she spends time there herself.
“Who thinks God is an old guy living in the clouds?”
IMO the better question is who thinks there is a God? My answer is that we human are incapable of knowing the answer. Others will have their own answers.
Perhaps evolution and creation science aren’t so incongruous; oh shucks that would be childish wouldn’t it…
Who thinks God is an old guy living in the clouds?
Incongruous, that is, to smug literalists….
Sorry (typo); not so incongruous, that is, “except” to smug literalists…
Interesting how the pro-evo commenters come across as defenders of a faith, while the evo-skeptics come across as followers of science.
If the experiment is verifiable and repeatable, it’s science. If we cannot rerun the trial, it cannot be science. It is philosophy.
“If the experiment is verifiable and repeatable, it’s science. If we cannot rerun the trial, it cannot be science. It is philosophy.”
The decay of radioisotopes is not subject to philosophy. It can be measured with 99.99% certainty whether in the short term (a few hundred years) or the long term (millions to billions of years). To deny the planet is 4 billion (give or take a few hundred million) years old is silly. To deny life on the planet began billions of years ago is silly. To deny the similarities of all animal life as documented by embryology is silly.
Faith is faith. Reality is something all together different.
The most gaping gap in conventional Neodarwinian dogma is using probabilistic and statistical approaches where they actually do not apply. Not every random process can be described in terms of probability theory: there could be no mean value, no standard deviation and no way to describe the process in statistical terms at all. This is the case with many complex systems. It were not ID theorists who brought up a bogus probabilistic model to demonstrate impossibility of developing complex traits by random variation and selection: this bogus probabilistic model was implicit in the very notion of natural selection. But the number of possible gene combination in any species is many orders of magnitude bigger than the number of individuals in every generation of this species. (Actually, it is bigger than the number of elementary particles in Universe.) This means that every sample is not representative, so no statistical filter can sort them out and find selectively better combination. Mathematically, the simplistic definition of natural selection as used by Darwin and Dawkins is dead in water. It makes no sense at all.
The second gap, also resulting from mathematical naivety, is using differential equations to describe evolution of traits or gene frequencies. This automatically shackles us to deterministic picture of evolutionary development. But in complex systems the dynamics is governed not by equations or equalities, but by inequalities. This was called by Ashby “the principle of threshold reaction”. No complex system can exist without its homeostasis built upon this principle: it would be too unreliable to evolve to any reasonable level of complexity.
My list of conceptual fallacies of Darwinism is a quite long one, I published a book on this topic in my university as extension of my Ph.D. thesis. So now so-called “evolution theory” lies in ruins, and nobody knows how to replace it by something more mathematically literate.
Fossils are a fact. Beyond that, I’m wide open – and absorbing info. The commentary continues to change as time marches on.
It just bothers me to no end to think we have evolved from pond scum.
The main problem with Neo-Darwinism is that it is a hopelessly obsolete, rigid dogma incapable to assimilate new ideas from such fields as complex system theory, system analysis, chaos theory, cybernetics, complexity theory, molecular genetics, paleontology and other rapidly developing sciences. Its main conceptions are just the same as they were pre-WWII epoch. Everything had changed since these days, but it made no impression on true believers in Darwinism: they cling bitterly to notions scientifically discredited long ago.
The works of selective breeding (artificial selection) and of so-called natural selection are not just incomparable, they are aimed into opposite directions: the first is promotion and aggravation of abnormalities, the second is elimination of them. That is why selective breeding can change selected traits enormously, while natural selection is not accelerator, but the brake on evolution. Evolution occurs not because of natural selection, but because natural selection sometimes fails to stop it.
I’m a bit surprised that so many who see through the fraud of AGW, don’t see darwinism’s push using ridicule and claims of the improperly credentialed not fit to even discuss, as the very model AGW was built from.
I recommend everybody to read and understand the following short introduction to system theory by Ross Ashby:http://www.panarchy.org/ashby/adaptation.1960.html
It shows clearly the fallacy of Dawkins and his followers:
The stability belongs only to the combination; it cannot be related to the parts considered separately. This invalidates completely the cornerstone of Dawkins paradigm: the concept of selfish gene.
“Darwin is about change in species over time, nothing more, nothing less.”
Not true. This idea of general evolution belongs not to Darwin, but to Lamarck, and predates Darwin’s by several decades. The only new idea introduced by Darwin was that of natural selection as driving force of evolutionary change, and this idea turned out to be a wrong one.
Sergey
Your math is above my pay grade. I would say, however, that the example of stock breeding provides a–possibly false but enticing–short form of evolution that everybody can understand.
But, let’s get even more simplistic. My son is 6’5″ My DIL is 6’even. Her younger sister is also 6′ even and that gal’s hubby is 6’6″. My DIL’s older sister is 5’10” and that hubby is 6’1″ Height exists in all the families back a couple of generations, afaict from various family functions. All these folks are jocks ranging from high school all-conference to letters from colleges to scholarships, to one guy who pitched AA ball until his shoulder went bad.
Their kids are all bigger than average except for my granddaughter who is exactly on the 50th percentile for height and weight.
Assortative mating–big,smart, athletic people coming from all over and meeting, frequently in college and thence reproducing–might look like natural selection. And the results demonstrate a propensity for the traits to pass down the generations.
My father and my four blood uncles were bigger than average and all played HS and college football. I am 6’2″ and used to be in shape. Played HS football, college lax and judo. My sis is a bit bigger than average and was a top tennis and softball player forty-five years ago when athletics for women was hard to come by.
It would be difficult for many people to abandon the simplistic view of natural selection with this sort of thing in front of them. It may be unnatural selection, but its results are the same.
The most gaping gap in conventional Neodarwinian dogma is using probabilistic and statistical approaches where they actually do not apply. Not every random process can be described in terms of probability theory: there could be no mean value, no standard deviation and no way to describe the process in statistical terms at all.
been arguing with a geneticist (i am based in physics and information theory) that his tools are insufficient to tease out what he wants to know.
i figured out how things are incorporated and discorporated, and as i hope you concure, when processes are compressed, they remove as much order as they can to exploit it for the compression (or some data is cast out and changed to increase that order in a way that then allows more compresion)
given that this is the natural case, one cant use statistical analysis to decompress the data, in fact, due to this kind of organization which such is a form of data protection, they HAVE to work out what i refer to as the “tick tock”.
the geneticist knows i have something, but his academic behavior and academic bigotry and stuff get in the way and i can no longer afford the damage from such uncommitted but flickering moths.
i can tell you how its organized, and how incorporation and discorporation works, and simulate it iteratively on computer. i can show benifcience sorting and how that is selected. i can point out why we have telomeres, why there is gene dominance (not that it exists but what would cause it naturally – and its a symptom of incorporation discorporation). cancer becomes somthing else. and for the past 6 years or so, been blowing the doctor away by telling him years in advance what they will find with stem cells. that its going to be only a few switches to change it. how a cell can have as its next generation something different. how and why the genome has to be broken up that way… and even where and what real perception is (not the summation stunted perception our conciousness gets)…
and a whole lot more too..
[including the addressing!!!!! i figured out where its hidden!!! lets just say its a purloined letter]
all nothing but simple parts interacting in ways that produce mind blowing complexity, and that obscure the simple parts and the principals of operation they work by..
amazingly simple…
Mathematically, the simplistic definition of natural selection as used by Darwin and Dawkins is dead in water. It makes no sense at all.
no… it does… ONCE you figure it out..
they never figured anything out, they just mixed up (like all biologists seem to ahve to do) their data with the theories from that data… ie.. everytime these people write a paper, they first describe the data, the prior work and so on.. AND THEN they go piss in the well of thinking by dotting the whole thing with their theoretical musings that they dont bother to tie to anything and so on. ergo, everything can lead to global warming
but sergey… i CAN show you that it CAN work.
about the only thing correct that can be said about what you said, would be to limit it in time and scope.
ie… given what is generally known publicly about this and the math and all that… and then say your paragraph.
every every person i have ever met that was smart like me makes almost the same damn fool godlike crappy mistake.
ie… if i cant concieve of it then it must not be
wrong…
period… it is the fool that approaches science as a idea with a tape that runs out as every time in hundreds of years they had been fooled that the level of good living they had was the pinnicle of good living and there would be little else to work out
that is the uncreative person that does that. the one that doesnt realize that creativity is the perception of greater awarness in someone else NOT yourself. (Though you can predict what will be perceived as creative by pretending what someone hasnt thought of is an increased awareness)
however, your the reason why i cant bring my work forward.. your the reason why there arent as many better moustraps.
when the collective of not very creative chime in from their throne room, the limit is reached, and the X is Y, the others listen.
so when you walk in with the solution then what? do they look, do they trye to work it, do they even want to? no its a waste of time, the smart sergey has declared it so, we belive him, dont know you, and so begone..
the age of ramanujan dies with people like you.
soviet science was built and destroyed by the urge of the soviet man to want to be the new soviet man and like marx make these sweeping prognostications that then would be the essential and they woudl be hailed.
your doing it…
as you want to say you know rather than accept you dont know…
i know that there IS an answer, as i worked out that answer.
I also worked out a simpler answer to fermats last thereom, but no one will even look at it. why? because so many have tried and failed, no one can succeed…
your saving everyone a whole lot of thought and effort but doing no one a service.
the leap of point your trying to make to pseudologically close off the possibility is not logical as we first would have to accept that your the limit of mathematics… and that no mathematics can exceed your conception… which is the point… if they accept it, you feel validated that no mathermatics can exceed your conception – until it does.
by the way… i noticed that this attitude, also means you cant humble yourself and take the one down position to even discuss it with someone that has it.
ie… i have dangled this fruit more than once but since you have closed off all possibility of an answer, you cant be bothered with that fruit.
even though your probably one of the few here who could grasp it faster than even the geneticist and others here at the research hospital and college i work at. 🙂
shame.
There are very few traits in mammals (and other vertebrates) that actually follow the paradigm “one gene – one character” inherent to Darwinism. Height is one of them. Skin pigmentation is another. In short, there are around a dozen of traits by which human races and animal breeds differ from each other. But most traits that differ one species from another have a much more complex pattern of inheritance, depending on simultaneous change in dozens and hundreds of interacting genes. That is why many folks without knowledge in genetics make the same mistake which Darwin made, believing that geographical races are incipient species and that evolution within species somehow leads to speciation. It does not. The type of mutation involved, driving mechanisms and conditions – everything is different. That is why I asserted that Darwinism is not the theory of evolution (it is not even a theory of evolution, it is a theory of races formation).
Richard Aubrey Says: “LAG. What is the species intermediate between Peewee Herman and Hulk Hogan?”
I was trying to make two points. First, pointing to the fossil record as evidence of evolution is problematic even for experts, which Harry admits he is not.
You made the second for me, perhaps inadvertently. The answer to your question is Paul Krugman.
Seriously, I can rationalize absolutely any story I want for a given set of elements. If you don’t believe that I refer you to the Piltdown Man story. An honest scientist will confess he/she doesn’t know the complete story.
Unfortunately, evolution is becoming an area where reasoned discussion is less important than “belief” in the premise. Reminds me of climate discussions.
So now so-called “evolution theory” lies in ruins, and nobody knows how to replace it by something more mathematically literate.
not true… but its very abstract..
one one level its very simple
on another level it requires believing in things like suppositional states of information… ie.. as i have kept hinting in different places over years… it has to do with the fact that any point or thing has not one simple marxian kind of explanation…
everything is a supposition of all valid perspectives not one critical one.
darwin is not in ruins..
but what is in ruins is the religious worship of a model that was never stated as a model, and so never was adjusted, modified, or could even be used in any way shape or form predictively.
they think statistical black boxes are whad medicine and stuff is about. but i will say it and maybe somehow chaoticly the message will fly out.
we are in the dark ages of medicine and genetics, and i can point out that there ARE solutions to these things because i have a bunch of them in my basket.
but they are not going to be available as long as we move into ideological thinking and the stupid chest pufffing desease that comes from it as each skin cell of the body politic tries to prove they are a brain cell and can be promoted with knowing rather than existing. ok?
it would be better if people like you would show the current model is broken, rather than broken and we are doomed there is no other model and so on.. chicken little we dont need.
as long as researchers think in marxist terms and tons of them do. the answer will not be available. period. its the big infinite joke i know deep down and can even lay out why!!!!!!!!!!!!!
and as long as they exterminate either actualy or effectively in lifetime outcomes… they will never ever have it…
but if genetic medicine was really really to move to what it will be… then they will want to change the gene of one cell at the right time in a persons lineage to make an adjustment. 🙂
ie… when sarah is 9, the cell that later will branch and become cancer is at a single point. adjust that fork, and its done.
you dont adjust the whole genome, that just makes someone come out appearing like some superior average…
you want improvement beyond nature…
and that comes from tweaking lines so that each line can be something that it could not be if the base data was all the same!
hows that for peaches and apples?
oh… and guess what. when i see something that you see based on the way your putting. i know i am wrong, i ahve to be. math is more infinite than i or you can fathom or thing we have a grasp of. we live near zero, and cant even factor well… so give me a freaking break… not only that, but each form of math we cast into has pluses or minuses for solving or not solving things, but are all equivalent. when you can work out the answer in all of them or a lot of them casted from one to another like dancing frogs on lillie pads.
then you will start to see..
i am lucky… i am one of those genetic math freaks your theories say cant exist… my mind does NOT filter out stuff before it presents it to me like normal people (like you), and then makes it seem like it doesnt exist.. i see all that data in a way that i used to think others can see, but now i know they cant… not at all it seems..
i am the tall poppy to be cut down…
and i am cut down
as long as i am erased and those answers arent generally known, and incorporated.
then people like you, who are a much greater number of me, can pretend to be validated..
so there is a huge egotistical wall that exists that is almost impossible to get over to day now that we are the way we are.
ramanujan today would not have been invited anywhere, his letters would probably have been shredded, or worse, put in a crank folder in a filing cabinet in the office of someone like you.
while perpetual motion is well known not to be possible, there are tons of other things that are.
but with so many proclamations from even knoelegeable people like you.
the artifice of the source of knowlege being only from the guild is constructed… and self validated.
however small companies and small company research puts out 13 times the ip that research in academia does, and self funds it for the most part.
it appears from no where, and is free for the public who didnt have to payh for 100 boondoggles for votes in exchange for some minor nothing
The failures of theory of biological evolution are only part of a bigger picture: understanding of development of comlex systems in general requires a radical change in conceptual framework compared to, say, physics or engineering. Our usual mathematical methods (statistics and differential equations) are inadequate to this task. And there still is no adequate mathematics to describe all this. In time, probably, we may get better math methods, but just now we have only phylosophy to speculate about future of economic, social and climate systems. No hard science on all this still emerged, only some glimpses whose acceptance depends on ideology one follows.
sergey, the book ‘evolutionary dynamics’ by Martin Nowak might interest you. he presents a quantitative framework.
Martin Nowak’s framework apply only to the most simple cases of asexually reproducing organisms. Nothing new in it, while helpful to study antibiotic resistance and anty-virus immunity. This fits perfectly into Darwinian paradigm since all real difficulties began with sexual reproduction, speciation and macroevolution. Bacteria and viruses have no individual development, concept of species does not apply to them, and they lack any complex morphology to explain.
Richard Aubrey,
If you want to see a good case of a controlled genetic experiment look up “Russian domesticated Fox”. Granted all they did is force the characteristics out that normally weren’t “activated” (they believed the gene groups were there and set out to show it IIRC) so it’s not evolution. But the morphological changes are interesting. They did it under the noses of the Lysenkoists, too, which makes it even sweeter.
Piltdown (going on 100 years now) was corrected (but it took 40 years). There were politics and national pride involved in that one.
As for the changes resulting in the mammalian ear, they simply show how it came about in the group of reptiles that would become mammals. I can hear advantage in stretching both the range and intensity that the ear can detect.
The subject is too emotional. Silly, isn’t it, when all of modern biology (including all disciplines) makes no sense without it? If Darwin didn’t come up with it, someone else would have.
Sergey,
Wegener had predecessors too. So did Darwin. So what?
Lamarck believed if you kept stretching your neck, then had children, your children would have longer necks (oversimplified I realize). Not much to work with compared to Darwin, which is why Lamarck is a footnote. The whole universe that is genetics were unknown to both men, but genetics has buttressed Darwin’s original hypothesis.
The “one gene – one character” you say is inherent in Darwinism, thus showing Darwinism is wrong is a classic strawman. I haven’t seen that anywhere, but it may be an idea from a hundred years ago.
Darwin’s ideas were the foundation on which all else was built. Sorry, but evolutionary biology (aka modern biology) isn’t in ruins.
Ariel. I know about the foxes. Scientifically profitable if not economically profitable.
Point about the ear is that we had scores of millions of years of savage selection, in which hearing is vital, where the savage selection overlooked hearing. Sure, it’s an advantage. A terrific advantage. Why did the savage selection ignore such an advantage?
I don’t know. Point is, somebody who insists on the mechanical perfection of natural selection has a problem with this, since it didn’t work.
Perhaps somebody can tell us that the previous amphibians and reptiles had other senses, or other ways of sensing acoustic energy that made improving hearing irrelevant. And that the move toward mammals lost that and made what we think of as hearing more important and more subject to selection. Maybe somebody can tell us something, but for now we Have a Problem.
“One gene – one character” is the main assumption of Dawkin’s “selfish gene” concept and the focus of the Gould-Dawkins controversy. The fact is that Darwinian explanations are true only in cases when this paradigm is more or less reasonable approximation. If you read “Extended phenotype” (the most elaborate expounding of Dawkin’s theory) that should be obvious. And you are right that this is an idea from a hundred years ago. The problem with this is that individual genes are not visible to natural selection.
Evolution theory can not be founded on genetics, since the most restrictions on evolution change came not from genetics, but from development biology. Darwin was fortunate that he knew nothing about genetics. If he knew, his theory would never be proposed.
Aubrey, wasn’t the link Mike Tyson?
87 comments at last count. Much ado.
In the long run, we’re all dead. This all seems pointless fussing to me. Lots of angel-counting-on-needles. No one here has the answer. Endit.
just did a calculation for a researcher here that was curious as to the search circuit and how fast a finished group of them could work
BGI has 50,000 computers at 5 gigs.. and will have 1 exabyte of storage. to go through that, assuming one finished compare per clock (computers do worse than that, and the competitor that stole my work and went to china won an award for achieving that with FPGA gate arrays when i put a paper that changed a percentage increase into many orders of magnitude more!)
back of the envelope calculations give them about an hour to just scan the whole and note where there are matches…
50,000 of my machine, with off the shelf parts, no tricky anything (not even complicated), in a 1024, 100k configuration…
can go through 250,000 exabytes a second..
thats 250,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 compares a second…
one machine would do 51,200,000,000,000,000,000, and would be about the size of a desktop PC…
its cost would not be millions either…
and thats not the top speed either…
spending more you can get special chips off the shelf that would make it faster by a whole lot…
but then you have to play with liquid nitrogen
easier just to make some more lower end machines.
its also scalable… ie.. you can do different things and extend it depending on how you link up the chips..
so if one chip can only work with 256 byt long targets, two together could act as one chip, without loss of clock, but be a 512 byte target…
oh… if you extend the solution.. you have a new computational archetecture for doing super complicated things in near clock time…
(when someone asked me if i could extend it to do searches of graphics information in clock time, i worked it out… never thought it was possible)
i worked for many many companies since 1980 or so… fortune 10… insurance ratings… finance… modeling… engineering… now medical research.
so i am not claiming to invent the clapper..
Steven Jay Gould was a radical leftist (or Marxist), who had an ongoing fight with the sociobiologists.
This provides a good overview:
http://www.isteve.com/2002_Stephen_Jay_Gould_RIP.htm
sergey…
your wrong..
period.
when you dont have a solution, you cant claim there isnt one!!!!
you can only claim you know when you HAVE a solution… even if that solution si a proof that some other solution is not a solution
you have nothing, and nothing is not a proof of anuything.. no matter how much it seems so
i have a solution, it works, it explains it, and negates all that stuff you just spit out as to why there is nothing.
if tomorrow someone shows it all
then what?
right now here is the club your in
“Groups are out. Four-piece groups with guitars particularly are finished.”
– Dick Rowe, Decca Recording Company executive, 1962 (turning down The Beatles)
Nobel Prize winner Ivar Giaever told the 2008 Beijing Nobel Laureates Forum that the basic laws of nature were known, and scientists should concentrate on invention
you know, just before einstein did his thing, physicists said that all of physics was complete, nothing left to find out, just boring finishing up of some formuleas!!!!
heck… dont have the time, but i can find all kinds of people like you in nistory… many even more famous and distinguished…
but wrong… horrifically wrong…
as they claimed they knew a nothing
Incidentally, isn’t this similar to economics? Some have a Keynes-ish view that they understand all the variables and have the mechanisms defined, while others take the Hayek approach by admitting that we don’t know everything and can’t control it. It seems… hubristic to me to assume that we understand the myriad variables involved with biology and can account for every possible variation.
All we have are theories in the absence of omniscience. The science is *never* settled.
Richard Aubrey,
Likely because there are multiple approaches to the same problem or niche. Thus the Panda’s thumb.
Sergey,
You’re right, the whole body of geneticists have declared evolution dead through the science of genetics. I read it yesterday on a website. Still something nags at me…
Don,
Gould was a radical leftist, though he denied the Marxism of his father. What it has to do with Evolutionary theory is beyond me, but I don’t subscribe to everything is political, class, racial, ethnic, or gender. There are some groups that do, but I don’t belong to them.
Don Carlos,
Thanks for pointing out the elephant in the room. I bid you adieu.
Gould never was a Marxist, but rather follower of Hegel and cited dialectic matherialism as his phylosophy of knowledge and development. He was impressed by Russian scientific schools of paleontology and evolution (and rightly so). This is not the same as acceptance of Marxism.
I must agree with Gould that most of so-called sociobiology is a junk. It is a very simplistic application of Darwinian ortodoxy to humans, but our species have some unique qualities which exempt us from many rules applicable to other species. Domestication is a very special case of selection, and humans are the only self-domesticated species. It has nothing to do with Lysenkoism, but many Western people confuse non-genetical Russian school of evolution morphology by Severtzev and Shmalgausen with Lysenko. This smear was promoted by Theodosius Dobjansky, who has personal reasons for this disdain. But Gould knew better. Paleontology is morphology based and has nothing to do with genetics.
Art, I did not claim that there is no solution, only that I did not know one and can mathematically disprove validity of proposed solutions.
Considering any biological or evolutionary basis for behaviour suggests serious limits to social engineering. The left wants to create human behaviour according to their ideology, they don’t want limits placed by God or evolution.
Ariel.
Thing is, the panda’s thumb is kind of awkward. Selection is supposed to lead to perfection, or at least fairly evident utility.
But different is different from better vs. worse.
If a difference is no better and no worse, there’d be no selection for it or against it. You might get genetic drift, but most changes are said to be for the better. So if the jawbones change to earbones and it’s said to be better instead of merely different, and the jaw is less fleixible on account of losing some components to the ear, the whole must be more advantageous to the project of living long enough to reproduce. So, why wait so long? Not saying there isn’t an answer, but afaik, nobody’s offered one. Thus, a trumpeted example of natural selection provides a gap to be explained.
I would begin by saying that the left’s obsession with evolution has nothing to do with biology and everything to do with finding a weapon to intimidate and humiliate their opponents. That said: depending on the answer to the following question, there may be a way to defuse the left’s tactic. Do those disputing evolution, dispute at some micro level the mechanism behind the current theory? Or do they dispute that our ancestors may at some time have been other than human life? If the dispute is on the micro level, then the tactic can be defused by answering, “I believe life evolved on earth from simple to more complex; however, I do not believe random genetic mutation following by natural selection explains our history.” That sounds way less wacko than, “I don’t believe in evolution.” On the other hand, if most of those disputing evolution believe humans suddenly just existed through an act of God, then there is no really good reply. My guess is that people like Michael Medved really dispute on the micro level and accept non-human ancestry. However, I also guess the majority of those disputing evolution are evangelicals who reject on the my-ancestor-is-not-an-ape level
Art, I did not claim that there is no solution, only that I did not know one and can mathematically disprove validity of proposed solutions.
excellent… then i still have a chance… (hee hee)
its just they dont have the parts arranged right…
and that they are stuck on marxist dialecticals…
ie.. classes of cells, not individual cells that seem the same
in this way, they tend want to believe that all plumbers are the same, among a lot of other funky things that have to do more with how we think, and its quirkies than the actual problem!!!!
think of that for a bit.. the answer comes when we move our perpective and view, and rearange a bit
the best i ever said was that their work in measurments and such is very correct.. its their interpretations that suck…
take for instance the failure to note that if your interpretation requires a god view (meta view, view from above, a watcher, etc). then your wrong, as there is no such mechanism.
when i point this out showing the theory and how it evokes a review of below in some way to make a decision… and it has to be wrong… the statistical whatnots look at me with a blank stare
when i show and can prove that there are classes of problem that statistics cant give you the answer to… they dont believe me…
i point out that if i give them a real random series, and a pseudo random series (and i checked them with kolmogorov and smirnov stuff), can their statistical tools tell me which is the real one and which is the pseudo real?
of course not… both would come up as random, and would come up as random in K&S too.
for those that want to follwo sergey and me a bit…
Kolmogorov—Smirnov test
mathworld.wolfram.com/Kolmogorov-SmirnovTest.html
A goodness-of-fit test for any statistical distribution. The test relies on the fact that the value of the sample cumulative density function is asymptotically normally distributed.
but what frustrates me most
is that when THEY want something they pay me a lot to do it and get it working… but dont appreciate that i am the one doing that as theyg et all the credit.
but when I want something, they dont beleive that i am capable of it.
so you have a top geneticist, who has a senior applications engineer with 30 years experience, spaning insurance, finance, manufacturing, expert systems, medical, and more… and that person is volunteering to provide top level skills and resources for free… instead of 400 an hour consulting fee from Task Management…
its worthless and not worth their time
yet they will fight each other and act like lord of the flies for grant money to get the 400 an hour and not have enough to actually do the research.
not to mention all the stuff that i have which i have devloped in isolation given my freak math and high iq poodle jumping mind…
even worse sergey
i can do the hard math around making it work
i cant do the math describing the math 🙂
its a form of notation and things i was denied
i remember my first implementation of k&s… it was in the days when the vic 20 was important… i did it in assembler for the 6502 processor… and did some great work on pseudo random number generators… at the time i wanted to check the generator in the vic 20 as i was getting weird quirks in a galaxy collision program. what a bear that was as i needed to use the operating system to put the stuff into the computer then turn off the operating system as memory was underneath it sharing the same address… so you wrote a kind of wrapper operating system that would then get things going…
galaxy collisions modeled in 2.5K ram…
today that skill is dead, and though they talk about wanting it, they dont bother with anyone that actually iknows it..
its like someone lamenting a death of another
and they are standing right there yelling me me me.
oh.. i should point out that i dont see that 400 an hour
they CHARGE That for my services… i get only 45-90 of it if i am consulting with them. they get to pocket the 350 for nothing but connecting me and handling billing.
but when i wanted the money to do that for myself, the SBA 8a decided us white male oppressors cant have that.
so now i am working in a regular job, being slammed for being a oppressor by birth in an academic setting where they want what hey want, not what is best…
Selection is not the only force shaping evolution, nor even the leading force. And most of selection is aimed to prevent any change rather than promote it: selection is a very conservative factor. More important are trends, which canalize the development in certain direction, sometimes against all selective pressures. That is what paleontology (fossil record) shows. My friend, one of the leading researchers in Moscow Institute of Paleontology (he now reads lectures on evolution of tetrapodes in biological faculty of Moscow university) recently confessed to me that 35 years of studing fossil record made him believe in divine intervention, since no other explanation of this record in its entirety makes any sense.
well… as i said..
its one of those things that if you get it
you slap your head, of course, and so on
compared to einsteins theory
this stuff is EASY
but it does require one to abandone some cherished perspectives and just accept that the answer is what it IS not what one or the researchers want it to be.
Marxists always care more for what they want or it should be, not what it is… people who want to design everything have a really hard time accepting things as they are, even if as they are, is better.
As my freshman theology professor said, the point of Genesis is not that God created the world in seven days, the point is that God created the world. He can have used any process he wanted, including evolution. I find that for most people, evolution becomes Evolution anyway– some kind of force which creates and drives the world. Call your God anything you want.
Interesting discussion-related articled over at The Scientist, “Genetics Paper Retracted.”
Summary: “Due to statistical errors, a Science paper claiming that mutation is responsible for genetic variation is retracted.”
Enjoy.
God save the conservative cause from professional propagandists like Coulter. Dozens of independent lines of evidence confirm that organic diversity arose gradually through natural selection and lineage splitting (= speciation). The problem is that few laymen are willing to acquire the relevant facts, and theory, to appreciate this consilience of evidence.
Coulter puts her bank balance far above the well-being of the conservative cause, and therefore above the Nation.
Interesting that some here consider evolution to be a liberal plot. The “Extremist” tag after my name is because I consider myself a tea party conservative, which to even those who call themselves Republicans means Im some kind of whacko and according to many liberals “opposed to science”.
I consider myself an empiricist which means you got to convince me with evidence, not emotional narrative. This is why I can accept evolution as the best explanation for how life developed on this planet and not that god created the world in seven days, nor accept that it will be catastrophically over-heated unless we hand our lives and income to the government.
AGW has a number of faults, some of which includes the fact that so far its a science that isnt falsifiable. Another is that if you ask evolutionary biologist to show you the evidence, they dont make you file a FOI document and then threaten to destroy the evidence anyway. So there really isnt this tie between evolution and AGW but Ill bet all those opposed to both consider themselves to be religious.
I disagree with ridgerunners assessment of Coulter. Im sure she believes in what she’s saying. I just dont happen to agree with her on this point. Other than that I usually love her columns and think she looks hot in black.
Harry,
If she does believe what she writes about evolution, then she is intellectually lazy. Either she is too lazy to have examined the many lines of evidence, or she is attacking legitimate science for financial gain.
ridgerunner.
Or for fun. As has been stated by many, the theory of evolution has gaps–mostly lacunae in the fossil record and/or resulting logical problems–and pointing them out to evolutionists and demanding answers, and then watching, is kind of enjoyable. I think the left’s emphasis on evolution, instead of important issues, is a proxy for the culture war and I don’t mind seeing them red-faced and with steam coming out of their ears. Not that they haven’t earned it in spades, or anything.
And since I do believe in evolution, and have a passing acquaintance with it, they can’t dismiss me as a fundie.
Maybe I should get out more.
ridgerunner: “If she does believe what she writes about evolution, then she is intellectually lazy.”
In my mind, no lazier than those who accept AGW solely because it “sounds right.’
Richard Aubrey,
“Perhaps somebody can tell us that the previous amphibians and reptiles had other senses, or other ways of sensing acoustic energy that made improving hearing irrelevant. And that the move toward mammals lost that and made what we think of as hearing more important and more subject to selection. Maybe somebody can tell us something, but for now we Have a Problem.”
The columella (homologue of the mammalian stapes) was the single middle ear ossicle in the reptiles ancestral to mammals. Addition of the malleus and incus from bones previously functioning in upper and lower jaw articulation allowed amplification of the sound energy via lever action. More acute hearing in the early mammals may have been favored because of nocturnal activity (extrapolating from the habits of extant insectivores).
Harry,
Agreed, not lazier than that, but I would like to hold our side to a higher standard. I believe that a conservative political philosophy is strongly supported by an empirical examination of human nature and human history, so Coulter trying to caricature 150 years of investigation by tens of thousands of biologists strikes me as deeply offensive to conservative empiricism.
Harry. I get that.
My question is…why wait so long? If natural selection is focused like a laser on survival, and if nature red in tooth and claw is waiting for any laggard, we need an explanation of what held up the change for so many tens of millions of years.
The only one I can think of is that, reptiles being cold blooded, nocturnal insectivoring was not an option. Therefore, no pressure.
However, as we know from the History Channel, and from NatGeo, there were huge insects in those days, insects which would have provided a protein bonanza and which could have been reduced to possession during the day. In the meantime, the hunter, to avoid becoming the successfully hunted, would use hearing to keep track of surroundings while using sight to catch the half-meter dragonfly. Thus, an advantage for good hearing, a disadvantage for poor hearing, an advantage for better hearing. But for tens of millions of years…nada.
Needs an explanation.
@ Perfected democrat September 2nd, 2011 at 12:08 am. If your link was supposed to be some sort of answer to my question, you must have misunderstood my question. That’s okay: I can live with that.
Evolution proves that God does not exist. Now please pay more of your money to the government. Jesus would have wanted it that way.
Reptiles, both extinct and extant, have a kinetic cranium. This allows to swallow the prey a whole, without biting or gnawing it. No need for this, since energy demands of reptiles are very humble. A big snake can hunt once a month. So do crocodiles and big lizards (Komodo dragons). But mammals need to eat every day, and kinetic cranium is liability for them: it reduces ability to bite. So several jaw bones became redundant and can look for another job for them.
Ann Coulter and Rick Perry are wrong when they say that there are “gaps” in evolution theory. It all is a big gaping hole. There is no any coherent evolution theory today: Neo-Darwinian population genetics and fossil record tell two different stories, and these two narratives are incompatible. Either fossil record is ridiculosly incomplete, or genetics as we know it is ridiculosly incomplete. I chose the second possibility, and have very good reasons for that.
oh… my head hurts! So many words and still nothing.
If you would all show a little of that virtue called patience, you will find your answer soon enough. Until then, faith will hold you over.
Why is simple faith so unacceptable?
There are far greater things than us in this universe and so many other things, right here, that we can and need to address.
..just a random thought from a very tiny piece in the gift of life.
Sergey.
Looks as if a number of extinct reptiles, particularly carnivores, may have been warm-blooded. I understand even tuna are warm-blooded, although not as mammals understand it.
THERE ARE 4 REALMS:
1 science proves nothing; it only disproves.
2 faith needs no proof, by definition
3 science provides tools that can be applied, which is action, not proof.
4 politics is the arena where people argue about science, faith and action
EMPIRICISM
FAITH
PRACTICALITY
ARGUMENT
One realm is not more correct than another realm. One realm is not more noble than another realm. if we keep aware of the four realms, argument can become more clear and, from the clarity, benefits might arise.
Raptors most surely were warm-blooded, and they all lost kinetic craniums, exchanging them for mighty bite. But they had no need in good hearing, they were big and well armed. Small mammals (and they all were small initially) needed it much more, to avoid predators hunting at night.
“ELC Says:
September 2nd, 2011 at 8:48 pm
@ Perfected democrat September 2nd, 2011 at 12:08 am. If your link was supposed to be some sort of answer to my question, you must have misunderstood my question. That’s okay: I can live with that.”
I don’t think I did, actually I thought your “question” was a great “line”. Personally, I think this thread is great comic relief from the more pressing economic and geopolitical problems we debate at Neo’s site. I do think that both sides of the controversy, concerning the merits of the Genesis story, might have become a bit obsessed as literalists. When I ran across that link, mostly for amusement concerning this thread, I was struck that in a rudimentary, perhaps childlike, and very early historical context, the creation tale might actually not be so out of line with “evolution science”, ie. firmament, etc. Please note that I’m not a Christian, but an unperfected Jew, and probably essentially an unenthusiastic atheist, scientifically); in that context I do think Ann has a lot of evolution ahead of her before she finally rises to the status of a Perfected Jew. But that said, I love her sense of humor and work generally. In the context of biological evolution, I have to (seriously) wonder if there isn’t a greater miracle than a sense of humor.
Sergey.
Then, as now, there were large carnivores and small carnivores. Lions and tigers and shrews, leopards and bobcats and wolves and coyotes and badgers and otters and weasels. Some version a hundred million years ago. Carnivores are not sportsmen. They are businessmen. They’ll take carrion if they can get it, and they’ll take smaller carnivores if the fight doesn’t seem too tough. So a small carnivore needs to be careful of a large carnivore.
The smaller a body, the greater the surface area per unit of mass. So a smaller creature will lose heat faster than a large one, meaning needs to eat and/or heat more frequently, which means move, which means go into jeopardy.
Now, I’m sort of blowing smoke here, since we don’t actually know about the smaller dinos, carni or not, not enough to tell about warm blooded or not, their habits, their metabolisms. And since evolutionists can’t prove any of this, we have a gap.
All kind of fun.
Still, the gap is being narrowed, and the creationists have to be more creative. I guess that’s a good thing.l
As someone who is: a) a professional scientist who teaches, b) a theoretical chemist, and c) Roman Catholic active in my church, I have no problem with evolution.
But I must say that I’m appalled by the reliance on fossil record for argumentation. Hasn’t ANYONE heard of molecular biology? Work in DNA/genetics provides one interesting point…the genetic code is uniform over all known species (in general…there are some fine points here, too). With a sun as an energy source, evolution does become likely, consistent with thermodynamics (earth is not a completely closed system!).
Can’t go into details now, have to write three lectures for next week’s courses.
Maybe later…
Hi to Occam’s Beard…
What make wonder is this admixing of religion/atheism controversy to scientific debate on evolution. This is probably American cultural thing, since in Russia this stage was 100 years ago. My first teacher in genetics and evolution, N.V.Timofeev-Resovsky, a famous evolutionist, specialist in biophysics and founder of radiobology, was a devoted Christian, member of Russian Orthodox Church. And Russian immigrant Theodosius Dobzhansky, whose book “Genetics and the Origin of species” made him all-American celebrity, also belonged to Russian Orthodox Church. He wrote in his memo: “Does evolution doctrine contradict religious faith? No. It would be a major blunder to take the Scripture as textbook on elementary astronomy, geology, biology and anthropology. Conflicts – imagionary and unresolvable – can arise only if symbols are interpreted in a sense which was never intended. Creation is not an event that happened in 4004 year B.C., it is a process which started about 10 bln years ago and is going on until now.”
More exact quotation:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_in_Biology_Makes_Sense_Except_in_the_Light_of_Evolution
IN THE BEGINNING:
“Retardo Says:
September 1st, 2011 at 2:19 pm”
Exactly, probably…. I’m not as smart as most of the people here, though I did read Chardin’s Phenomenon of Man about 45 years ago, and was fairly mesmerized by it… however, that aside, for several months I’ve been attending the monthly first Thursday morning Denver Republican breakfasts, figuring I need to do “something”, non-postal, to help change the equation beyond bantering at this blog; figuring that the Obama Democrats have to be stopped, come hell or high water (would that be global warming and rising seas?), sorry for getting bogged down in comic relief again… So, the breakfast is begun with the Pledge of Allegiance, its allusion to the “old guy living in the clouds”, along with a non-sectarian “prayer”, all of which by today’s secular cultural standards is apparently quaint at best, though heart-warmingly sentimental. Should I be embarrassed for participating, considering its inextricable connection with the bottom line of “creation science (engineering)”, and short of cultural suicide, is there any way a self-respecting neocon can possibly win this particular implied game with the Evil Party? Also, it seem ironic that some of the Democrats (those paragons of humanist rationality) greatest allies (ie. muslims and liberation theologists) are cultural-religious groups easily as theologically simplistic and irrational as the creation science crowd, but one can almost hear the swoosh as it is quickly glossed over; something about ognitive dissonance, again…
… cognitive dissonance, again…, that is.
Funny. The current pope has mentioned evolution as a scientific theory that Catholics shouldn’t be afraid to learn about.
We were taught evolution in Catholic school. I can’t think of any former classmates who have a problem with the basic idea. ID is an interesting philosophy and I tend to agree with it. The only people who are angry are the militant non-believers who won’t accept differing views.
Gaps, my ass! There is a bigger problem:
FAUST
I HAVE, alas! Philosophy,
Medicine, Jurisprudence too,
And to my cost Theology,
With ardent labour, studied through.
And here I stand, with all my lore,
Poor fool, no wiser than before.
Magister, doctor styled, indeed,
Already these ten years I lead,
Up, down, across, and to and fro,
My pupils by the nose,–and learn,
That we in truth can nothing know!
The concept of evolution has been politicized because of religion. Aubrey and Sergey seem to have a bone to pick about it, Aubrey even apparently insinuating that dinosaurs were deaf. Sergey seems to have gone off on a dead-end mathematical tangent to deny evolution.
Consider why there is even a discipline of Intelligent Design; if the theory of evolution didn’t threaten the world view of certain religious types, they wouldn’t have had to invoke ID, which at best is a mirror of evolution with a Creator starting the ball rolling, and at worst is typified by the creationist museum that has humans and dinosaurs coexisting some 6000 years ago.
There is enough evidence, geological, including plate tectonics, stratigraphy and paleontology, biological; especially DNA sequences and physical/astronomical, that support the theory of evolution. Maybe not everything fits together, but Sergey and others can’t provide anything that absolutely refutes it.
Ann Coulter is a partisan, in this case pandering to a certain audience. For the most part, I’m in agreement with her, but not this. She hasn’t considered it enough, or cannot because of her biases.
I also object to both pro-science or anti-science people who lump questioners of either AGW or evolution into either religious or marxist fundamentalist camps. It’s laughable.
I happen to be an agnostic who accepts evolution but is heartily skeptical of human-caused global warming, especially as Al Gore conceives it and wants to deal with it.
As far as creation of the world and ramifications of that scenario, I can happily wait until judgement day, remembering Paul’s words “Now we see through a glass darkly, then we shall see face to face.” The effort the creationists put into trying to refute evolution isn’t worth it.
Opposing the designs of global-warming commissars is much more imperative.
Flask.
Wrong. Possibly wrong again, but I haven’t seen your earlier stuff.
I said that i believe in evolution, but I enjoy poking the more arrogant evolutionists. Part of the culture wars and why shouldn’t I have fun?
I didn’t say dinos were deaf. I said that if natural selection were such a big deal, why did it take so long to improve? IOW, something might be wrong with concept of natural selection as a never-failing road to perfection. A gap. Partly, or possibly, explained by the kinetic skull issue. Great fun.
Science isn’t going to defeat the AGW folks. They know better already. They’re liars.
Fair enough, Aubrey, you’re a devil’s advocate. However, evolution can actually never achieve perfection, especially considering the raw materials available. The jawbones becoming earbones is a good example. Different species evolve to take advantage of different ecological opportunities or in response to forcing by the environment; if an organ is adequate for survival, it likely won’t change.
I expect you use that phrase ironically to poke arrogant evolutionists in the eye.
I am sure I’m not wrong about politicization of evolution because of religion. Coulter doesn’t need to get involved if she is strictly a political commentator, or maybe she’s just having fun.
Flask
Adequate for survival doesn’t get it. Sooner or later, quoth the evolutionists, somebody’s going to have it, whatever it is, better. And, presuming it doesn’t get et up as an infant, die of being sick, lame, lazy, or clueless, whatever it has that’s better is going to allow it one more reproduction cycle.
So eons of eons without improvement need explanation.
So the competition was in other things like size or speed rather than hearing, if this new type of ear was any advantage at all. And whatever it is, it was not predestined, nor is it perfect. It does the job. Usually a bit better than what it replaced. That’s all the explanation necessary. Adequate for survival works fine, Aubrey.
It doesn’t go in any direction, there is supposedly a kind of standard rate of genetic mutation that may influence whether or not part of a species diverges from it’s ancestors or neighbors, but it doesn’t go in any special direction, except possibly towards saving energy if the animal can get away with it, like the eyes of cave-dwelling salamanders becoming vestigial – a disadvantage when the cave is eventually breached and seeing animals can get in.
Isolation seems to encourage new species to form, the fauna of the Galapagos is the classic example, but the dodo on Mauritius is probably the best example of evolution not having any foresight. The ancestors of the dodo had gained weight and lost flight and most of the canniness of birds that are preyed upon even occasionally. They were extinct 100 years after being discovered, because they were found by efficient predators that took full advantage of the easy source of food, basically walking refrigerators.
Those who speak about evolution theory either do not know what they are speaking about or are speaking about non-existing thing. The general notion that the life on the Earth is billions years old and that it was progressively changing and becoming more complex, and that new species are descendants of the older ones, more primitive, is not a theory: this is a fact, so overwhelmingly documented by fossil record that it is simply ridiculous to deny. The real question is what forces and mechanisms are responsible for this. And at the present level of our knowledge no answer can be given to this question. All proposed “theories” are inadequate. The most salient fact about evolution is that most of the time in the most of the places most of the species do not evolve at all. This is called stasis, and no reasonable explanation of this fact exists. Species are stable and not responsive to selective pressures, except for in the very rare and exclusive conditions. That is, so-called natural selection does not work, and even existence of this phenomenon can not be proved.
And when species do change, they do it so quickly that no traces of this transition are left in the fossil record, so we can only speculate about mechanisms of this revolutions but lack any hard evidence to study them scientifically. That is why all this field is doomed to be a subject of speculative philosophy rather than of trully scientific study or debate – till Kingdom come.
Flask.
Evolutionary theory does not allow for stability due to adequate. Mutations–or whatever they were called in earlier days–come along every so often. The differences, absent contingencies, must make a difference. Ask any evolutionist.
We do not know, about the dodos, whether any advantages in getting food in their isolation were selected for. According to evolutionary theory, there must have been, given sufficient time. AFAIK, nobody’s bothered to look. Whether they survived contact with the outside world is not the point.
However, certain characteristics have a biological or physiological price. See the antlers on the giant Irish elk. They would be selected against absent an environmental advantage. The dodos got slow and dumb due to lack of action, but there remains the question of whether they evolved against each other.
“Mutations—or whatever they were called in earlier days—come along every so often. The differences, absent contingencies, must make a difference. Ask any evolutionist.”
Not true. Gould was very resolute in rejection of effect of mutations on morphology of long-established forms, just as was Gaylord Simpson, Konrad Waddington and many other leading paleontologists. Only geneticists believe in this, but evolution includes lot of things beyond genetics. Mutant forms simply lack any advantages if only a single mutation occures, without many other changes happening simultaneously, and probability of such event is zero. Mutations are “tail”, not “head” of evolution: they follow morphologic and ecological adaptations which already occured due physiologic adaptation. Waddington called this “genetical assimilation of non-genetical change”. In a sense, Lamarck was right. Physiologic adaptation determines the direction for selection of genes which stabilize this new adaptive norm. But adaptation is not the only source or cause of change, evolution has inertia of its own and sometimes produces non-adaptive forms due this inertia. Irish elk is a classic illustration of channeling of evolution in non-adaptive direction.
See
Waddington C. H. 1942. Canalization of development and the inheritance of acquired characters. Nature 150:563-565.
Waddington, C. H. 1953. Genetic assimilation of an acquired character. Evolution 7: 118-126.
Waddington, C. H. 1953. Epigenetics and evolution. Symp. Soc. Exp. Biol 7:186-199.
Waddington, C. H. 1956. Genetic assimilation of the bithorax phenotype. Evolution 10: 1-13.
Waddington, C. H. 1961. Genetic assimilation. Advances Genet. 10: 257-290.
Waddington, C. H. 1974. A Catastrophe Theory of Evolution. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 231: 32-42.
Sergey
Antlers, as you know, are replenished each year. The larger, the greater a burden on the metabolism they are. The Irish Elk not only had these things, they had to support them–economically speaking, I mean–with blood supply which means more eating, which means difficulties in a marginal year, and more moving about which means more vulnerability to predators. Every damn’ year. Both of these would be negative selection pressures. What offset the negative selection pressures? Fighting predators? Fighting other males for sexual access? Display, ditto?
Just about every characteristic which has some kind of cost has been found to be useful, now or until very recently. Read a report on the appendix. Current thinking is that, after having a hellacious GI problem due to bad meat–half of what we ate in the last million years was probably stinking rotten–or bad water, the flora of the gut was vastly reduced and the appendix offered a fix, called in the report, a “reboot”, to be cute, I suppose. Considering the cost to survival of appendicitis prior to surgery and antibiotics, something had to have been making it useful enough to net out at least even. Ditto the Irish Elk and, presumably, a good many other puzzles.
Adaptation explains a lot. We will have to see some more evidence from the fossils – a lot more. The words of God will fit into the narrative once we figure things out. Our knowledge is short, (couple thousand years), but we finally have the equipment to measure the Earth on a scientific level. Let us not go back to playing hard rock records backwards to help the CHILDREN. Gore needs to tilt at something else.
So, what have we learnt?
I am a fool. check
The fossil record shows stasis. check
And after multimillions of fossils we are left with the mammalian earbones.
Iz that all you got???
*not reading all the comments; been there, done that, about as effective as talking basic biology with a pro-abort*
Generally, you can figure out that the person pontificating at you is treating science as a religion if they start talking about “the theory of evolution.” Inability to understand a difference between creationism and ID, or selective breeding and ‘absolutely random mutation’ is another hint. Has, obviously, no effect on the truth of what they say– but it tells you how much you can get out of a conversation.
About the only definition of “evolution” that I reject is the Dawkins form, which makes the utterly unscientific claim that, well, God couldn’t have done it.
I don’t care how God did it, only that he did; I only end up in the conversation because I hate it when folks make shoddy arguments, if I agree with their goal or not. Mischaracterization of the opposition, logical fallacies, bad science and simple factual errors just get to me…what the heck is the point of talking if you’re not going to bother with actual facts?!?! (Hm. Wait. That’s the same issue I have with my liberalism-as-religion friends….)
DarwinCatholic had a really nice post on the whole science-restricted-to-a-tool-for-atheism thing.
Here is a quote from a book by Douglas Dewar, written in 1931: Scientific men, theologians and laymen habitually proclaim that man’s derivation from a lower animal is a fact settled beyond dispute, or which is disputed only by ignorant cranks.
So the”you are a fool”defense of evolution has been going on for at least eighty years and probably since the nineteenth century.
I stumbled on his by accident, serendipity? Thoroughly enjoyed all the comments. I can’t add much save this. It seems that the first line of the King James Version is a mis-translation, and this is relevant as it leads to creationism as it is commonly perceived. Recall, “In the beginning God created…”, I am told by folks whom I believe to be knowledgeable that it should read, “At the beginning of God’s creating….”. Not much different, yet very much different in meaning as it sees creation as an ongoing process.
Folks will continue to believe or not believe in the Almighty, but this, at least to me, changes how we might view evolution, which, by the way, remains a theory, but one for which there is room as I see it.
The very first comment has one part with which I wholeheartedly agree, and that is a plea to fiscally conservative candidates to focus on what matters in the current political situation, a views on evolution don’t.
My mantra: I will enthusiastically support and vote for a yellow dog in order to be rid of Obama.
I decided to pop back in although I bid adieu on the second of Sept (life gets in the way):
So, after reading I find Sergey is a “believer” in Evolution, just not the current mechanisms. I’m simplifying for brevity.
I’ll give kudos to Richard Aubrey for skepticism but still with an open mind.
And jpintx, theory doesn’t mean what you think it does. In science, it’s a hypothesis (I use “a” because I pronounce the “h”) that has stood test after test to the point of having a very, very low probability of being wrong (in normal lay parlance it’s a law, though in science that’s usually a concept expressed easily in a formula, think Newton, Einstein, or Planck). Lay parlance on guess, hypothesis, theory, and law is one step down from the meaning in science. However, evolution is fact (no elephants, rhinos, or great apes in the Cretaceous for example), the mechanisms of Evolution are still under review. As Sergey would argue.
jpintx,
If you really want perspective, the two Genesis myths (nothing pejorative) are guesses, ID is a hypothesis (with logical problems of “argument from incredulity” and “god of the gaps”) that has only offered argument but no research and falsifiability (and assumes that disproving Evolution proves ID, another logical fallacy), and the theory called “Evolution”. This is an ordered degree of probability, with Genesis (both myths) as the lowest and Evolution as the highest. ID does not fall in the middle. All from evidence, and Sergey notwithstanding, buttressed by genetics. BTW, statistically, you start off with over 100 mutations (expected by cell divisions, each one having a very, very slight mistake). Not to worry, you’re still homo sapiens sapiens, but a long time ago…
Now for more fun: when the studies for mitochondrial DNA said that current humans are from one female, the creationists went hog wild about how Eve was proved, thus Genesis. But there was a problem….
Mitochondrial DNA is passed overwhelmingly through the female (no male product of a female passes it statistically). Get the drift? A few females would be expected (whether you use 40K or 80K for H. Sapiens Sapiens, because of the variability of female menarche and first pregnancy, use 16 then 30 in the calc), and at this point it’s only one (as best as can be determined, if it becomes two, damn Genesis is really screwed). So, Eve becomes a chimera…because, genetically, there were a bunch of Eves but only one genetically survived to this point.
I’m still working on the transgendered Eve (that rib was male) as well all the incest (you know, brother and sister, first cousins, etc. and if it wasn’t then no Adam and Eve)….Do any of you who take the Bible literally think of any of this? It’s a powerful philosophical document to me as an atheist (I obviously neglect G*d as the source), with all sorts of insight to the human condition, but really, incest?
would it be too much to ax for a link to these studies???
The mystery of the living organism resides in its form. Every part and every process, its entire structure, springs from that form.But what is this form, this principle of order from which the creature derives its life? To answer that question in a Christian key,one needs to recall the rudiments of metaphysical doctrine: the momentous claim that the creation is a theophany, and that every creature is by its nature ls a kind of effigy of the eternal Wisdom, as St. Bonaventure has declared. It follows, then, that what we have called the basic form of the organism can be nothing less than the manifestation of an eternal archetype subsisting in the Logos or Wisdom of God. In the final count, what shines through the form as the principle of order and the source of life is the logos itself.
Wolfgang Smith Cosmos and Transcdence
Richard Aubrey (all posts),
There is something you have to dissuade yourself in your arguments. Evolution is not, and has never been, about perfection. Never. Period.
It’s about an imperfect best fit to environmental niches, because the morphology has antecedents. We, as bipeds with muscles that are strained by bipedalism because our ancestors weren’t (really, why should bipeds suffer constant back trauma, shouldn’t those small, short, numerous muscles be larger, longer, and less numerous for perfection’s sake?), are a perfect example.
Hope you get this.
Sorry, but after “weren’t” in my post of 09/24 1915 hrs. should be “bipedal”.
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Good post in the Brussels Journal: The truth about Hungary. Three sentences jumped out that apply to this debate.
To extrapolate without being encumbered by the facts suits many needs.
Obviously, reality failed to conform to the needs of propaganda.
This way the truth is not what it is but what it is pretended to be.
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