Denial of Evolution VI.

[leopold]

there are 2 things you can state for certain about the record.
1. it implies a beginning (cambrian explosion)
2. it shows increasing complexity from oldest to youngest.

 

[Grumpy]

leopold

there are 2 things you can state for certain about the record.
1. it implies a beginning (cambrian explosion)
2. it shows increasing complexity from oldest to youngest.

The oldest fossils are stromatolites in Australia from nearly 3.5 billion years ago. You can still see growing, living examples of the same type in Shark Bay. The Cambrian "explosion" lasted about 60 million years starting about 550 million years ago. There was a three billion year history of life before body parts of complex creatures that could be fossilized appeared in the Cambrian. The White Cliffs of Dover is the remains of millions of years of plankton bodies accumulating into limestone thousands of feet thick. Petroleum is the sludge of the organic soup that was the early ocean, buried under sediment , heated and compress to form petrochemicals we burn in our cars. Life did not begin in the Cambrian, hard body parts began in the Cambrian, prior to that the most sophisticated lifeforms were jellyfish.

Grumpy

 

[exchemist]

leopold



The oldest fossils are stromatolites in Australia from nearly 3.5 billion years ago. You can still see growing, living examples of the same type in Shark Bay. The Cambrian "explosion" lasted about 60 million years starting about 550 million years ago. There was a three billion year history of life before body parts of complex creatures that could be fossilized appeared in the Cambrian. The White Cliffs of Dover is the remains of millions of years of plankton bodies accumulating into limestone thousands of feet thick. Petroleum is the sludge of the organic soup that was the early ocean, buried under sediment , heated and compress to form petrochemicals we burn in our cars. Life did not begin in the Cambrian, hard body parts began in the Cambrian, prior to that the most sophisticated lifeforms were jellyfish.

Grumpy

Hear hear. This point about the extensiveness of Precambrian life cannot be made often enough, especially when creationists or their fellow travellers are around.

I've always understood "Cambrian Radiation" to be a more accurate description of what seems to have happened. But the old term "explosion" is firmly planted in popular science because it seems catchier and more dramatic. 60m years is the same order of time as between the present and the end of the dinosaurs!!

 

[origin]

there are 2 things you can state for certain about the record.
1. it implies a beginning (cambrian explosion)
2. it shows increasing complexity from oldest to youngest.

The only problem I have with this is everything.

Calling the cambrian 'explosion' a begining is completely arbitrary.

Statement 2 is bogus too. Do you think that dinosaurs were less complex than animals today?

 

[leopold]

And my assertion is that you - you yourself, right now - cannot define macroevolution in any way that both aligns with physical reality and supports your objections to evolutionary theory.

both of these words, microevolution and macroevolution, must have come from the scientific community because they were published in a respected science source geared toward the scientific community, not the layman.
in my opinion macroevolution is the result of the process of microevolution.

 

[billvon]

both of these words, microevolution and macroevolution, must have come from the scientific community because . . .

So like Ice said, you cannot define macroevolution in any way that both aligns with physical reality and supports your objections to evolutionary theory.

 

[leopold]

origin, trippy,
i found the link but, SURPRISE!!rolleyes, it's dead.
http://disputatio.com/articles/006-1.pdf
maybe you can contact the site for the PDF or where to find it.
i really dread the thought of searching my archived stuff for it.

you know, it's funny.
both of these links, the one to science and this one, worked when i first posted them here.

 

[James R]

leopold:

that is what the article implies, yes.
it specifically states it is a clear no that the process of microevolution cannot be applied to macroevolution.

No, I don't think so.

For example, from the article:

"No one questions that, overall, the [fossil] record reflects a steady increase in the diversity and complexity of species, with the origin of new species and the extinction of established ones punctuating the passage of time."​

The emphasis is mine. The origin of new species is precisely what macroevolution is supposed to be, isn't it? So, nobody at that conference back in 1980 was disputing that macroevolution occurs. What they were arguing about was exactly how it occurs - not in the sense of disputing the evolutionary process itself but in the way that that process plays out over time. The argument was about gradualism vs punctuated equilibrium, which was at that time a reasonably new suggestion.

Since then, the two views have come together so that there's no real dispute about this any more among biologists, at least as far as I am aware.

The important point, for your purposes, though, is that nobody at this conference said "macroevolution doesn't happen" or "macroevolution can't be explained by standard evolutionary mechanisms".

actually i would like an explanation.
why do these scientists imply that so few transitional fossils exist that their conclusion must be NO but yet we are led to believe we have scads of them?
answer?
clever.
EVERY fossil is a transitional fossil.
can you see through that smog james?

We have scads more really nice examples here in 2013 than we had back in 1980, that's for sure. Do you really think paleoentologists have been sitting on their hands for 30 years?

But you're right. In a very real sense, every fossil is a transitional fossil. If you die and happen to be fossilised, then you're an obvious transitional fossil between your parents and your children, for example. The same can be said of any fossil.

i'm not trying to "debunk" anything.

i honestly feel that this is the reason the thread was renamed.
you, or somebody, was afraid it would attract "like minded people" that had something to say, and it was just starting to do that.

I didn't rename or alter this thread in any way. I wasn't even here when it started, and I missed 2 weeks of its discussion. I'm coming into it only now.

you are right and wrong.
i did indeed find this issue on a creationist site but was far from well known.
i used 2 different search engines and tried at least 50 different phrases before i found it.
the issue itself was apparently hacked because jstor says the issue is UNAVAILABLE.
can you see through that smog james?

Do you think there's a conspiracy by the evolutionary "establishment" to hide this smoking gun of an article, leopold?

Do you think this is the article the evolutionists don't want us to see?

I know you have claimed that the "quotes don't match", but you haven't actually documented that claim with examples anywhere, as far as I can see.

Out of interest, I haved tracked down the original article myself, since I have access to peer-reviewed databases that probably contain it. I now have a complete copy of the paper, downloaded from the jstor database (where you said, I think, that it can't be found).

Please post one or two examples of the discrepancies you claim are there, so we can see the evil plot unfolding before us. I'll compare to the article I just downloaded.

 

[EinsteinHimself]

Personally I believe between multiple intelligences, the increasing amount of crazy beliefs, and "know it alls"; we have reached a human point of divergent vs. convergent evolution.

I could just be drunk tho.

 

[Trippy]

origin, trippy,
i found the link but, SURPRISE!!rolleyes, it's dead.
http://disputatio.com/articles/006-1.pdf
maybe you can contact the site for the PDF or where to find it.
i really dread the thought of searching my archived stuff for it.

you know, it's funny.
both of these links, the one to science and this one, worked when i first posted them here.

As an alternative you could just give us the name of the article and its author(s) so we can look it up for ourselves (kinda the whole point of citations in the first place)...

 

[Fraggle Rocker]

I didn't rename or alter this thread in any way. I wasn't even here when it started, and I missed 2 weeks of its discussion. I'm coming into it only now.

It was I who alerted the two moderators, resulting in this thread being moved to the Biology board and being retitled.

As I recall, long ago (before I was a moderator) you and the other admins and moderators decided to allow one and only one discussion of evolution denialism on SciForums. Rather than relegating it to the Pseudoscience and Crackpottery boards (which IIRC didn't exist yet), you set it up in Biology, with the standardized title "Denial of Evolution," where all the denialist crackpots could easily find it, and where the rest of us could easily ignore it. The thread became long and unwieldy so we had "Denial of Evolution II," "Denial of Evolution III," etc.

Somehow this new thread slipped under the radar until it comprised several pages of utter bullshit on one of the respectable subforums. Since "Denial of Evolution V" had been dormant for several months, the Biology moderator decided to simply archive it and create "Denial of Evolution VI," originally consisting of this thread in its entirety.

Both the retitling of this thread and its relocation to Biology are standard SciForums policy. Anyone who doesn't like it is free to visit the zillions of websites where anti-scientists are tolerated, or at least humored.

We have higher standards here.

 

[leopold]

leopold:



No, I don't think so.

For example, from the article:

"No one questions that, overall, the [fossil] record reflects a steady increase in the diversity and complexity of species, with the origin of new species and the extinction of established ones punctuating the passage of time."​

The emphasis is mine. The origin of new species is precisely what macroevolution is supposed to be, isn't it? So, nobody at that conference back in 1980 was disputing that macroevolution occurs.

origin of new species.
it's basically variations of the same theme.
personally i would call this microevolution.
macroevolution is the accumulations of of these changes to create a different genome.
this is what the scientists said does not happen. *
i understand what they were unsure about but can't put it in words.
they were unsure about how much of one (microevolution) can be applied to the other (macroevolution).
aqueous mentioned that one of the problems in regards to the overall discussion is lack of definitions.

What they were arguing about was exactly how it occurs - not in the sense of disputing the evolutionary process itself but in the way that that process plays out over time. The argument was about gradualism vs punctuated equilibrium, which was at that time a reasonably new suggestion.

yes, they did propose various mechanisms to explain their conclusions.
they also provided various real world examples to illustrate the points they made.

The important point, for your purposes, though, is that nobody at this conference said "macroevolution doesn't happen" or "macroevolution can't be explained by standard evolutionary mechanisms".

actually the important thing is their conclusion and why they concluded it.
why did they conclude it was a clear no?
the people that specialize in this stuff has known for a long time the transitional fossils was not being found but kept mum about it, and for a good reason.
they, like darwin, expected them to be found but knew the difficulties in finding them.
they have apparently waited long enough to state the fossils do not exist, they will not be found.

We have scads more really nice examples here in 2013 than we had back in 1980, that's for sure. Do you really think paleoentologists have been sitting on their hands for 30 years?

this is another problem with this discussion.
you, and others, just can not accept the facts.
nothing will be solved this way.
i think you, and others, are afraid of the implications of this or afraid that creationists will jump all over it and say SEE! SEE!

But you're right. In a very real sense, every fossil is a transitional fossil. If you die and happen to be fossilised, then you're an obvious transitional fossil between your parents and your children, for example. The same can be said of any fossil.

don't cloud the issue like this james.
you know full well what these scientists regard as a transitional fossil, vis aqueous and his definitions.

I didn't rename or alter this thread in any way. I wasn't even here when it started, and I missed 2 weeks of its discussion. I'm coming into it only now.

trippy explained it in an earlier post.
i doubt if you were involved in any way.

Do you think there's a conspiracy by the evolutionary "establishment" to hide this smoking gun of an article, leopold?

there is a reason it's stored at jstor but jstor decided to make it unavailable.

Do you think this is the article the evolutionists don't want us to see?

yes, some of them.
you know the kind, it's my way or the highway.

I know you have claimed that the "quotes don't match", but you haven't actually documented that claim with examples anywhere, as far as I can see.

actually i have, in this very thread.

Out of interest, I haved tracked down the original article myself, since I have access to peer-reviewed databases that probably contain it. I now have a complete copy of the paper, downloaded from the jstor database (where you said, I think, that it can't be found).

i didn't say it couldn't be found at jstor.
i said jstor has made the issue unavailable even though it is stored there.
that is what the jstor site said when i visited it about a week ago.

Please post one or two examples of the discrepancies you claim are there, so we can see the evil plot unfolding before us. I'll compare to the article I just downloaded.

i have already pointed out the differences in the texts in this thread, and i also mentioned it might be a minor thing.

edit:
posts 201, 205, and 212.
remember, this is a comparison of the quotes i lifted from the issue to those provided by RAV.

*edit:
at the risk to some, a clear, NO.

 

[Dinosaur]

Origin: Mammals are more complex than reptiles or dinosaurs.

Statement 2 is bogus too. Do you think that dinosaurs were less complex than animals today?

They are warm blooded rather than cold blooded. They seem to have a higher level of consciousness or self awareness.

BTW: Dinosaurs existed for about 150 million years & the last of them seemed no smarter than the early ones. Intelligence seems to be an evolutionary fluke rather than an inevitability.

 

[leopold]

As an alternative you could just give us the name of the article and its author(s) so we can look it up for ourselves (kinda the whole point of citations in the first place)...

i would have done that if i knew what it was.
but i will start the cd-r search tonight, wish me luck that it will be the first one i check.

 

[origin]

Origin: Mammals are more complex than reptiles or dinosaurs.

What is your evidence that mammals are more complex than dinosaurs?

They are warm blooded rather than cold blooded.

Dinosaurs were probably also warm blooded.

They seem to have a higher level of consciousness or self awareness.

I would love to see some evidence of that statement!

BTW: Dinosaurs existed for about 150 million years & the last of them seemed no smarter than the early ones. Intelligence seems to be an evolutionary fluke rather than an inevitability.

Bigger brains does not mean more complex - it means bigger brain. You can talk about brain size but not intelligence anyway. Birds (which are direct descendents of dinosaurs) have tiny brains but can show amazing intelligence. Link Link

 

[Randwolf]

@Leopold

I've read a few of your posts and it seems you're trying to use absence of sufficient "transitional" fossils to "prove" that evolution theory is wrong, correct?

By the way, I haven't read the whole thread and didn't see what definition of "species" you're working with. What makes one species different from another to you? Morphology? Behavior? Genetics? Interbreeding? Some combination thereof?


Let's start with genetics:

http://www.genomenewsnetwork.org/articles/04_00/island_mice.shtml

It normally takes thousands to millions of years for one species of animal to diverge to become two. On Madeira, one species may have evolved into six in the space of just 500 years.

Britton-Davidian, an evolutionary biologist at Université Montpellier II in Montpellier, France, showed that populations of Maderian mice have between 22 and 30 chromosomes, even though their ancestors, who first arrived with the Portugese in the 15th century, had 40.​

Are these mice populations different "species"? If so, where are the "transitional" fossils? Oh yeah, fossilization takes more than six hundred years... So by your logic this evolution simply must not have occurred, right?



How about morphology?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peppered_moth

The evolution of the peppered moth over the last two hundred years has been studied in detail. At the start of this period, the vast majority of peppered moths had light coloured wing patterns which effectively camouflaged them against the light-coloured trees and lichens upon which they rested. However, due to widespread pollution during the Industrial Revolution in England, many of the lichens died out, and the trees which peppered moths rested on became blackened by soot, causing most of the light-coloured moths, or typica, to die off due to predation. At the same time, the dark-coloured, or melanic, moths, carbonaria, flourished because they could hide on the darkened trees.

Since then, with improved environmental standards, light-coloured peppered moths have again become common, and the dramatic change in the peppered moth's population has remained a subject of much interest and study. This has led to the coining of the term "industrial melanism" to refer to the genetic darkening of species in response to pollutants. As a result of the relatively simple and easy-to-understand circumstances of the adaptation, the peppered moth has become a common example used in explaining or demonstrating natural selection to laypeople and classroom students.​

By my definition this does not represent speciation but certainly demonstrates evolution and adaptation. Do you agree? If so, how do you explain the lack of "transitional" fossils?


Here's another very contemporary example involving both external and internal morphology as well as social behavior:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/04/080417112433.htm

Apr. 18, 2008 — In 1971, biologists moved five adult pairs of Italian wall lizards from their home island of Pod Kopiste, in the South Adriatic Sea, to the neighboring island of Pod Mrcaru. Now, an international team of researchers has shown that introducing these small, green-backed lizards, Podarcis sicula, to a new environment caused them to undergo rapid and large-scale evolutionary changes.

“Striking differences in head size and shape, increased bite strength and the development of new structures in the lizard’s digestive tracts were noted after only 36 years, which is an extremely short time scale,” says Duncan Irschick, a professor of biology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. “These physical changes have occurred side-by-side with dramatic changes in population density and social structure.”​

Leopold, do you agree that this represents "rapid and large-scale evolutionary changes"? If so, where are the "transitional" fossils you need for proof?



Interbreeding? Leopold will undoubtably refuse to accept these examples as evidence of "evolution" because the referenced populations may still interbreed, right? Don't like to generalize evolution from allopatric speciation?

Well, we may have to go back a bit further but still only a blink of the eye compared to the history of life on the planet...

http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/news/090301_cichlidspeciation

The physics of light affects not just how blue water looks to us, but how the animals living in the world's oceans, lakes, and rivers are able to find food and each other — and this, in turn, can impact their evolution. Natural selection favors traits that perform well in local environmental conditions. Many fish species, for example, have evolved vision that is specifically tuned to see well in the sort of light available where they live. But even beyond simple adaptation, the physics of light can lead to speciation. In fact, biologists recently demonstrated that the light penetrating to different depths of Africa's Lake Victoria seems to have played a role in promoting a massive evolutionary radiation. More than 500 species of often brightly colored cichlid fish have evolved there in just a few hundred thousand years!

To understand how the physics of light can promote speciation, picture a lake...

...

Although the scenario described above is a hypothetical one based on evolutionary theory, biologists have now discovered strong evidence that this process has actually occurred in the cichlid fish of Lake Victoria. They've observed, along with other lines of evidence, many neighboring species pairs in which the surface-dwellers tend to be blue and blue-light-sensitive, while the deeper fish tend to be red and red-light-sensitive. Biologists are particularly excited about this discovery because it may represent an unusual mode of speciation. The sort of speciation that is easiest to gather evidence about is allopatric speciation — speciation that occurs partly through geographic isolation of the emerging species. In contrast, these cichlid species may have evolved without any physical separation at all.​

(Emphasis mine)

Which facets of true evolution does this example not illustrate, hmmmm leopold? But again, where are the "transitional" fossils?



I also seem to recall an issue with the ability of evolution to "predict" anything. Keep in mind that speciation often involves many mutations leading up to significant change, there is no one "defining" event.

http://phys.org/news202970888.html#jCp

The yellow-bellied three-toed skink (Saiphos equalis) is one of only three reptiles known to have different methods of reproduction in different places. In the coastal areas of New South Wales (NSW), near Sydney, Australia, the skink lays eggs, while in the northern highlands of NSW, it tends to favor giving birth to live young. Scientists say we are witnessing evolution in action, with the skink half-way in its transformation from an egg-layer to a bearer of live young.​

Here is a prediction for you: These populations will continue to differentiate to the point where they are completely different species.

Do you think that is probable Leopold? It's happened before...

(From the same article)

Live birth is known to have evolved 132 times among animals with a backbone, 98 of these in reptiles, which Stewart said suggests that while it seems a complex transition, “it’s looking like it might be much simpler in some cases than we thought.” Two other species of reptiles are known to use both types of reproduction: a European lizard and another species of skink.​

Does this represent an example of evolution? Are we watching speciation in action? If so, where are the "transitional" fossils necessary to prove it?



Here's another prognostication: Leopold will continue to deny, deny, deny without any logical refutation. He will stick to his myopic and deluded viewpoint no matter what evidence is presented.

 

[Randwolf]

Further...

Huffington Post
Animals & Evolution: Field Museum Specimens Reveal Rapid Changes In Modern-Day Creatures (VIDEO)
Posted: 06/25/2013 7:54 am EDT | Updated: 06/25/2013 8:40 am EDT

Living things adapt and evolve -- all the time. In fact, the animals we see scurrying around in our backyards are much different than they were many years ago.

But what are some shocking changes we can pinpoint? Examples, and even some mysteries, are hidden in robust collections of preserved creatures from years past to the present, like the library at The Field Museum in Chicago.

"We're the libraries of the material that will allow you to test various hypotheses about how life has changed overtime, or how it might change going forward," Bill Stanley, the museum's mammals collection manager, told The Huffington Post.

From dolphins to deer mice, he pulled back the collection's curtains to reveal how modern-day species are changing over time.​

 

[Fraggle Rocker]

the people that specialize in this stuff has known for a long time the transitional fossils was not being found but kept mum about it, and for a good reason.
they, like darwin, expected them to be found but knew the difficulties in finding them. they have apparently waited long enough to state the fossils do not exist, they will not be found.

There is so much bullshit in your posts that it makes my nose hurt to read them. But you keep harping on this one gigantic turd.

There is a very good reason that we find so few fossils of transitional species. The reason is that it's amazing that there are any fossils at all! The conditions that allow fossilization of organic tissue are very specific and very rare, and they have to be maintained for tens of thousands of years before the process is complete. Scavengers, detritivores, rain and runoff probably destroy 99.99999% of dead organisms--without bringing in earth movement, being stepped on by an animal, or a plant sprouting from the soil underneath and poking through the body.

Scavengers and detritivores are nature's little recycling squad. They convert dead tissue into live tissue by eating it. Otherwise all those organic compounds would sink into the ground and go to waste, perhaps turning up as coal and petroleum a hundred million years later.

There aren't very many individuals of transitional species, for the obvious reason that they are transitional. Duh? So for even one of those individuals to be preserved as a fossil is an astounding event.

 

[AlexG]

What I find interesting is that leopold has never provided any substantiation for any of his claims. The articles have always been 'hacked' or there's a cover up, and he can never find his copies of the 'original'.

 

[Trippy]

It was I who alerted the two moderators, resulting in this thread being moved to the Biology board and being retitled.

As I recall, long ago (before I was a moderator) you and the other admins and moderators decided to allow one and only one discussion of evolution denialism on SciForums. Rather than relegating it to the Pseudoscience and Crackpottery boards (which IIRC didn't exist yet), you set it up in Biology, with the standardized title "Denial of Evolution," where all the denialist crackpots could easily find it, and where the rest of us could easily ignore it. The thread became long and unwieldy so we had "Denial of Evolution II," "Denial of Evolution III," etc.

Somehow this new thread slipped under the radar until it comprised several pages of utter bullshit on one of the respectable subforums. Since "Denial of Evolution V" had been dormant for several months, the Biology moderator decided to simply archive it and create "Denial of Evolution VI," originally consisting of this thread in its entirety.

Both the retitling of this thread and its relocation to Biology are standard SciForums policy. Anyone who doesn't like it is free to visit the zillions of websites where anti-scientists are tolerated, or at least humored.

We have higher standards here.

Not quite.

I had been aware of the thread and keeping half an eye on it. The thread (in my opinion at least) started out reasonably enough and then got derailed at a later date. I renamed the thread and then moved it to B&G after you mentioned it to me.