Denial of Evolution VI.

[Aqueous Id]

you apparently missed the point.
something must explain the gaps.

Today's gap is yesterday's Archaeopteryx, Ardipithecus, or tetrapod fish. Considering the explanations given, what do you say is lacking?

that "something" apparently isn't a mutation because lab tests on fruitflies shows it's not possible.

Fruitflies give a realtime evidence for evolution which is why they are a popular learning tool. I disagree that they show anything to be impossible. What do you mean?

it also must be able to produce males and females.

This is a good example of de facto gradualism of a specific trait. Sexual differentiation begins with the history of general cell specialization in pre-Cambrian organisms and is well explained. Sperm cells closely resemble primitive oocytes, and the chemical signaling at the moment of fertilization is a vestige of basic signaling that already established at the dawn of the Cambrian explosion. The primitive organisms capable of both sexual and asexual reproduction are the equivalent of transitional species for this trait.

it also must explain how some species never change. this probably rules out an evironmental cause.

Species do not change. They differentiate and diverge into separate niches. The parent species may go extinct, and it may or may not be the same pressure that selected in favor of the new species. What you really are asking is why don't all ancestral species become extinct, and that is well explained. It's because the ancestral niche never closed, and/or one or more new niches opened that were filled with adaptations so small they don't qualify as speciation. Most important is to recognize that the niche may close in one locale, causing a species to evolve there, ending the ancestor's existence in that local niche only. A prime example are Darwin's finches, most of which existed only on Galapagos, while the ancestors continue to thrive in South America in places where the habitat still supports them. (Here I'm referring to the closing of the South American niche for the mating pairs that found themselves stranded on Galapagos; it turns out there were about 14 new niches that opened which they filled.)

no, it almost has to be structurally related.

I don't know what you mean.

if THAT is true then you can infer that evolution can be reduced to an equation.

Genetics works like that, as do many other ways of analyzing data, but not something as complex as all of the interations in the natural world.

the species deviates around the "norm" until a certan molecular strucure is reached.

A certain molecular structure is reached with every succesful fertilization. The thing that is reached during speciation is a subjective determination that the phenotype has diverged sufficiently to be labeled a new species. But it's essentially just that, a label. Here is an example of what you are describing, as it applies to gradualism:

when this happens a "domino" effect takes places that transforms the species into something else.

It only takes one mutation to open a new branch of falling dominoes.

a molecular structure driven evolution model will explain ALL of evolutions anomalies, in my opinion.

I think there are real issues, which are at the leading edge of science, and there is general knowledge, which may or may not have serious anomalies to contend with. But explaining them, as I see it, begins with learning the science.

 

[leopold]

leopold
Yes, that was obvious. Did you know that we can now trace the DNA in the Mitochondria(inherited only from the mother)and say with near certainty that every human being on Earth today descended from a small number of females(possibly even just one female)from Africa(yes, we are all descended from black men and women)some 200,000 years ago. We didn't know that in 1983. We can trace traits back in time as well. Comparing DNA between species has opened up entirely new avenues of scientific investigation. The information is out there, go get it.

this doesn't appear to explain how recent advances in genetics overturns the committees conclusion.
in my opinion the only thing that would is to find the missing pieces since 1983.
these people were not stupid, they knew EXACTLY what they were looking at.
the gaps are indeed real, and in my opinion recent advances in genetics do not explain it.
the only other explanation is that the entire fossil record is wrong.

 

[CHRIS.Q]

Well, I do not believe in the Big Bang theory.
Because it does not meet ..............

 

[leopold]

Considering the explanations given, what do you say is lacking?

apparently the fossils are missing.
gould states essentially the same thing when he mentions "the jerkyness you see".
this is a problem throughout the fossil record, not one or two "branches".

Fruitflies give a realtime evidence for evolution which is why they are a popular learning tool. I disagree that they show anything to be impossible. What do you mean?

my fault, bad choice of words.
experiments on fruitflies has not shown mutations being the cause of diversity.

But explaining them, as I see it, begins with learning the science.

good point.
now all we need are objective teachers.

 

[Grumpy]

leopold

apparently the fossils are missing.
gould states essentially the same thing when he mentions "the jerkyness you see".
this is a problem throughout the fossil record, not one or two "branches".

There are gaps, but just like an old time movie, we have more than we need to see the picture. It is only a problem, in Gould's opinion, for the idea of gradualism. But that was before we understood the DNA evidence better and Gould was always way too far over the top about his pet theory, PE. Turns out he was way too far in front of the evidence and DNA cut that limb off behind him. Even great scientists make mistakes and get things wrong.

my fault, bad choice of words.
experiments on fruitflies has not shown mutations being the cause of diversity.

You haven't walked back your erroneous statement far enough, they certainly do show that genetic changes can lead to diversification. But even Fruit Flies are slow, evolution does not occur overnight.

The diagram above illustrates the difference between the two ideas. Both get to the same result, both are evolution, both can happen in different circumstances. And PE may simply be an appearance due to incomplete fossil evidence. Or, as Gould put it...

"...humans evolved from ape-like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism(gradual Natural Selection)or by some other yet to be discovered."(like PE)

good point.
now all we need are objective teachers.

We have those, what we need is students that don't think they already know it all and that are actually willing to learn. You can lead a jack ass to water...

this doesn't appear to explain how recent advances in genetics overturns the committees conclusion.

So, you want an explanation of 30+ years of advancement in a very complex subject in one post? To tell the truth I could care less if YOU ever get it, as long as those reading these posts see your dishonesty and idiocy on this subject. If YOU are interested simply Google "genetics evolution" and your browser will fill with information, if that is really your goal. A committee's obsolete(and erroneous)conclusion from 30 years ago is not going to cut it, given what we have learned in those 30 years, especially in genome research.

in my opinion the only thing that would is to find the missing pieces since 1983.

Do you think evolutionary biologists have done nothing in the last 30 years? We've made more progress in evolutionary science in the last 30 years than we did for the near 150 years prior. Your uninformed and thoughtless opinions are crap, you know. You simply have no clue what you are talking about, nor do you seem capable of learning anything.

these people were not stupid, they knew EXACTLY what they were looking at.

I didn't say they were stupid, but they did not have information that we do have today and they reached a conclusion that is simply wrong. New information does that sometimes, it's called Falsification.

the gaps are indeed real, and in my opinion recent advances in genetics do not explain it.
the only other explanation is that the entire fossil record is wrong.

Again, your ignorant and imbecilic opinions are crap. You don't know the first thing about what genetics has revealed in the last three decades and are unwilling to learn anything, but you have an opinion anyway. If you print out your opinion on paper it MIGHT be useful to wipe your butt(it depends on the quality of the paper). And the "entire fossil record" is just FACTS, facts are neither right nor wrong, they just are.

Grumpy

 

[billvon]

the gaps are indeed real . . . .

. . . and getting filled in all the time.

experiments on fruitflies has not shown mutations being the cause of diversity.

Actually they have. We've even seen new drosophila species arise as a result of simple mutations.

something must explain the gaps.

Yes! Most animals decay away to nothing. That's why there are so few fossils vs so many ancestors. (This is a good thing when you think of it, unless you like the idea of building your house atop millions of relatively intact dead animals.)

that "something" apparently isn't a mutation because lab tests on fruitflies shows it's not possible.

See above. Mutations produce new species of fruitflies. (And produce chihuahuas from wolves.)

it also must explain how some species never change. this probably rules out an evironmental cause.

?? An organism perfectly adapted to its environment will change very slowly, if ever.

the species deviates around the "norm" until a certan molecular strucure is reached.

Literally true; and that molecule is DNA.

when this happens a "domino" effect takes places that transforms the species into something else.

That domino effect is simple reproduction.

a molecular structure driven evolution model will explain ALL of evolutions anomalies, in my opinion.

We have such a model; the molecule is DNA.

 

[Aqueous Id]

apparently the fossils are missing.

I cited the three cases I gave you links to because they once were lost but now are found.

gould states essentially the same thing when he mentions "the jerkyness you see".
this is a problem throughout the fossil record, not one or two "branches".

Either Gould or Ayala (sometimes citing contradictions of Gould's) refutes this. The problem has to do with the reason that the specimens won't fossilize in the region where the ancestral group has a foothold because their new niche is in another locale. There are other reasons covering the cases where fossilization is hampered by the same crashing ecosystem which is causing the new traits to succeed.

my fault, bad choice of words.
experiments on fruitflies has not shown mutations being the cause of diversity.

Say that again? Artificially mutated fruit flies have bred new species of fruit flies - that's the headline I recall.

good point.
now all we need are objective teachers.

I think you're seeing reflex responses from folks who are accustomed to seeing the denial of hardcore creationists. You're raising the typical arguments from that crowd, so it wires the pro-science folks up.

 

[Russ_Watters]

Harping on "gaps" in the fossil record is like suggesting the gaps between the planets represent a flaw in our theory of gravity. It is a completely wrong way to view science: the whole point is that the theory is what connects the dots/fills the gaps. You don't have to fill very many before the theory is accepted as valid.

 

[spidergoat]

Every gap you fill in with a new discovery creates two more gaps. The gap criticism is disingenuous and reveals a basic ignorance of the subject.

 

[Aqueous Id]

The issue of gaps has been muddled.

Since we proposed punctuated equilibria to explain trends, it is infuriating to be quoted again and again by creationists—whether through design or stupidity, I do not know—as admitting that the fossil record includes no transitional forms. Transitional forms are generally lacking at the species level, but they are abundant between larger groups.

-Stephen J Gould, Discover, 1981

 

[Walter L. Wagner]

Did you know that we can now trace the DNA in the Mitochondria(inherited only from the mother)and say with near certainty that every human being on Earth today descended from a small number of females(possibly even just one female)from Africa(yes, we are all descended from black men and women)some 200,000 years ago. We didn't know that in 1983.

Actually, we knew that (mitochondrial inheritance via the female only) in 1970 and earlier, when I first studied biology at the University level. And we don't know that our ancestors were black. It could well be that black is an evolved trait since then, as well as white being an evolved trait. More study needs to be done on that. And we can trace that back to a single female, not a group of females (all who also had mothers).

 

[leopold]

To tell the truth I could care less if YOU ever get it, as long as those reading these posts see your dishonesty and idiocy on this subject.
Grumpy

i've posted a peer reviewed source that backs everything i've said.
all you have posted is basically your opinion.
you are the only one that stresses recent genetic advances overturns the committees findings, and furthermore you haven't posted a source to explain HOW it does.

 

[Fraggle Rocker]

. . . . it is infuriating to be quoted again and again by creationists—whether through design or stupidity, I do not know . . . .

Around 1983 Mrs. Fraggle and I attended a debate between a creationist and a real scientist, sponsored by CSICOP. It was obvious that the creationist knew he was lying. He had carefully sifted through the fossil record and displayed only fossils that appeared to support his thesis. He cited quotations only out of papers written for third-rate universities like Ambassador College (a school run by the Worldwide Church of God and shut down in 1997)--which had only been peer-reviewed by professors at those same universities.

He was a magnificent, persuasive speaker. As I have often lamented, most scientists are absolutely shitty communicators, especially with laymen.

From start to finish, it was obvious that he knew his material was fraudulent and would never convince a well-educated American, but these churches recruit people from the Bible Belt, most of whom are not well educated and in fact are biased toward the veracity of Biblical fairy tales. So the answer is: He was not stupid. He was doing this by design.

Of course this debate occurred in tony West Los Angeles, where most of the people have university degrees (many from nearby UCLA), so he didn't make any converts.

The creationist hierarchy has an agenda for reeling in the gullible and indoctrinating them with dogma that "disproves" science. The goal of this is not merely to get them to believe in creationism--which doesn't require much arm-twisting. Their goal is to get them to distrust science. This way when psychologists and biologists tell them that heterosexual children cannot be "recruited" to homosexuality, they will doubt them and subscribe to the church's agenda of discriminating against the millions of gay people (whom their own God created, apparently by mistake). When climate scientists tell them that we are at the end of an ice age and (despite our own ability or inability to affect it) we need to start preparing to move 75% of the world's largest cities 25 miles inland in the next 200 years, and completely evacuate Florida and Bangladesh, they will doubt them and subscribe to the church's agenda of building more churches, hiring more lobbyists, and campaigning against Muslims, instead of using that money to fund the world's largest relocation project. When economists tell them that the world will be more prosperous when women achieve parity with men in salary, promotions and responsibility, they will doubt them and subscribe to the church's agenda of keeping women in the nursery, the church and the kitchen, (Kinder, Kirche, Kuche, as the Germans put it) in order to preserve the phallocracy that supports organized religion far more strongly than women do.

And we don't know that our ancestors were black.

That's a very ephemeral characteristic that is apparently controlled by a very small number of genes. So we certainly can't tell the color of our ancestors before the diaspora out of Africa 50KYA, because we almost never find reliable DNA in fossils that old.

Nonetheless, this trait is so ephemeral that it changes very fast, and it does indeed appear to change in response to sunlight. As populations migrate north where they need more sunlight to produce Vitamin A, on the average their skin becomes lighter because the ones with the genes for darker skin die younger. And as they migrate south where they need more melanin to protect against skin cancer, on the average their skin becomes darker because the ones with the genes for lighter skin die younger.

Look at the very light-skinned Latvians and the very dark skinned Sinhalese, both descendants of Eastern Indo-European tribes, and separated only by three or four thousand years of migration in opposite directions.

So it is a reasonable assumption that our African ancestors were dark-skinned. Especially since the ancestors of all non-African people have been identified as San (or "Bushmen"), who at that time lived very close to the Equator. (The desertification of North Africa caused a massive southward migration and today the San live closer to the southern end of continent.)

 

[billvon]

i've posted a peer reviewed source that backs everything i've said.

Well, no, it doesn't. You posted your interpretation of a conference. It was not a peer reviewed source; it was a news report of a conference. In fact several people have posted quotes from one of the leaders of that conference who said "no, that interpretation is wrong." I believe his interpretation of the conference over yours.

all you have posted is basically your opinion.

And you have posted your opinion, one that one of the conference leaders says is incorrect.

 

[leopold]

Well, no, it doesn't.

well actually it does.
are you saying these scientists DID NOT say it was a clear no on accumulating small changes?
are you saying they DID NOT base that conclusion on the fossil record?
the counter argument of grumpy is NOT sourced.
and you talk of dogma?

 

[leopold]

The issue of gaps has been muddled.

Since we proposed punctuated equilibria to explain trends, it is infuriating to be quoted again and again by creationists—whether through design or stupidity, I do not know—as admitting that the fossil record includes no transitional forms. Transitional forms are generally lacking at the species level, but they are abundant between larger groups.

-Stephen J Gould, Discover, 1981

we are talking about a respected source aqueous, they aren't going to cloud the issue.

 

[Rav]

well actually it does.
are you saying these scientists DID NOT say it was a clear no on accumulating small changes?

It was only Roger Lewin who said that you idiot. He's the author of the opinion piece on that conference. The author who essentially (inadvertently or otherwise) invented a quote and falsely attributed it to Francisco Ayala, as detailed here. You need to read that. And you need to understand how the reality of fucking something like that up bears on the topic of quoting from that article as if it was the gospel truth regarding the attendees views on evolution. And this is only a single example, among many, that have been presented to you time and time again, over the years, of just how fucking absurd your position is.

The only way you're going to stop looking like a complete moron here is to stop typing.

 

[leopold]

You need to read that.

i have.

And you need to understand how the reality . . .

i won't get all philosophical.

edit:
this, ahem, "confession" can only be found on personal websites.
it DOES NOT appear in any issue of science that i am aware of.
makes sense.
dr. ayala moans and groans to authors of personal websites but not to science.

 

[leopold]

I think you're seeing reflex responses from folks who are accustomed to seeing the denial of hardcore creationists. You're raising the typical arguments from that crowd, so it wires the pro-science folks up.

i think you're one of the sanest mofo's in this thread.

 

[garbonzo]

You are implying that Christianity is synonymous with creationism whcih is not true, there are many christians that believe in evlolution. Actually the official stance of the largest christian denomination is that evolution is true.

As far as the equation, Evidence of Creatonism/Evidence of Creationism & Evidence of Evolution, this is indeed impossible to calculate.

Exactly; it is impossible. Also, I meant Christianity.

While there is plenty of evidence of evolution, there is no evidence of creationism so the equation has a zero in the numerator and is therefore undefined.

you mean denominator