Denial of Evolution VI.

[Randwolf]

At what point do weasels show up in the fossil record? Class Mammalia, order Carnivora, family Mustelidae. They've been quite successful and can be found almost everywhere. Gluttons/wolverines terrorize the arctic and subarctic ecosystems, stoats/ermines were introduced into New Zealand by humans and, apparently, something similar has happened on SciForums.

OK. Which human, exactly, introduced stoats to Sci? We should find out and ban them...

 

[Trippy]

dr. ayala and his quote is entirely irrelevant to this discussion and my request.
the discussion is about the conclusion reached by the conference of 50 scientists and my request has NOTHING to do with dr. ayala.

And as has been explained to you repeatedly and demonstrated with emperical evidence, their conclusions were based on INCOMPLETE INFORMATION.

It's no different to the declaration in the 1800s (I forget exactly when) that there was nothing left to learn.

 

[Trippy]

At what point do weasels show up in the fossil record? Class Mammalia, order Carnivora, family Mustelidae. They've been quite successful and can be found almost everywhere. Gluttons/wolverines terrorize the arctic and subarctic ecosystems, stoats/ermines were introduced into New Zealand by humans and, apparently, something similar has happened on SciForums.

Weasles are weasily wecognized, but stoats are stoatally different.

 

[leopold]

It's no different to the declaration in the 1800s (I forget exactly when) that there was nothing left to learn.

made by 50 people with phd's in education no doubt.

 

[AlexG]

leopold is pounding hard on the argument by authority, even though authority didn't make the argument.

 

[Randwolf]

leopold is pounding hard on the argument by authority, even though authority didn't make the argument.

Leopold's theme song...

I fight authority, Authority always wins
Well, I fight authority, Authority always wins
Well, I've been doing it since I was a young kid
I come out grinnin'
Well, I fight authority, Authority always wins​

 

[Aqueous Id]

the environment might not even be a factor in evolution, it only appears to be.
aqueous mentioned chameleons in this regard.
but what if molecular evolution just happened to produce such an organism?
you know, the entire theory could be wrong, not in the sense of unnatural but more along the lines of chemical limits.

For the same reasons that artificial selection affects the gene pool, so does natural selection - and chemistry sustains both scenarios.

 

[gmilam]

if evolution is environment based then it's IMPOSSIBLE to predict the outcome.
if it's solely molecular based with no influence from the environment then it could possibly be predicted.

Evolution isn't environment "based" per se. Natural selection is environment based. As in, does this mutation help or hinder survival in this environment?

you are forgetting the rules of chemistry.
atoms just don't slop together any ol' way.
they must be joined in specific quantities and form specific patterns.
a misfolded protein could result in death or disease or might not be noticeable.

Right, mutations in the DNA might be helpful, harmful or neutral.

the environment might not even be a factor in evolution, it only appears to be.

Except that the mutation has to survive in the environment it occurs in.

That's what evolution is, mutations at the DNA level that are not intrinsically harmful to the life form are then filtered through natural selection via the environment.

aqueous mentioned chameleons in this regard.
but what if molecular evolution just happened to produce such an organism?

It did, and luckily the mutation was beneficial for the chameleon. In the Antarctic, the ability to change colors might not be as useful.

 

[billvon]

if evolution is environment based then it's IMPOSSIBLE to predict the outcome.
if it's solely molecular based with no influence from the environment then it could possibly be predicted.

It is environmentally based (that's what drives selection.)
It is molecularly based (that's what DNA is.)
The two are not in opposition.

they must be joined in specific quantities and form specific patterns.

Exactly.

a misfolded protein could result in death or disease or might not be noticeable.

Also true.

aqueous mentioned chameleons in this regard.
but what if molecular evolution just happened to produce such an organism?

That's what happened.

 

[James R]

leopold,

You refer to quotes you claim have been altered by the Grand Scientific Conspiracy.

The article you refer to is "Evolutionary Theory Under Fire", in Science, Vol. 210, page 883 (1980).

Let's compare:

The absence of transitional forms be- tween established species has tradition- ally been explained as a fault of an im- perfect record, an argument first advanced by Charles Darwin. The accumulation of sediments and the entrapment and fossilization of animal bones is, at best, a capricious process: as a result, geologists are familiar with the difficulties of reconstructing past events. According to the traditional position, therefore, if sedimentation and fossilization did indeed encapsulate a complete record of prehistory, then it would reveal the postulated transitional organisms. But it isn't and it doesn't.

The absence of transitional forms between established species has traditionally been explained as a fault of an imperfect record, an argument first advanced by Charles Darwin. The accumulation of sediments and the entrapment and fossilization of animal bones is, at best, a capricious process: as a result, geologists are familiar with the difficulties of reconstructing past events. According to the traditional position, therefore, if sedimentation and fossilization did indeed encapsulate a complete record of prehistory, then it would reveal the postulated transitional organisms. But it isn't and it doesn't.

Identical.

"Certainly the record is poor," admitted Gould, "but the jerkiness you see is not the result of gaps, it is the consequence of the jerky mode of evolutionary change." To the evident frustration of many people at the meeting, a large proportion of the contributions were characterized more by description and assertion than by the presentation of data.

"Certainly the record is poor," admitted Gould, "but the jerkiness you see is not the result of gaps, it is the consequence of the jerky mode of evolutionary change." To the evident frustration of many people at the meeting, a large proportion of the contributions were characterized more by description and assertion than by the presentation of data.

Identical.

In a generous admission Francisco Ayala, a major figure in propounding the Modern Synthesis in the United States, said: "We would not have predicted stasis from population genetics, but I am now convinced from 884 what the paleontologists say that small changes do not accumulate."

In a generous admission Francisco Ayala, a major figure in propounding the Modern Synthesis in the United States, said: "We would not have predicted stasis from population genetics, but I am now convinced from what the paleontologists say that small changes do not accumulate."

OOH! OOH! Look! A discrepancy! Evidence of the Grand Scientific Conspiracy at work!

Let's hear what leopold has to say about this:

specifically it was the ayala quote.
in my version he makes reference to 884.
on page 884 is a graphic that he probably based is quote on.
your version does not make the 884 reference.

Could it be that the Evil Scientists have taken out this important reference to "884", removing it from Ayala's quote?

Well, strangely enough, here's what I find in the layout of the original article. The Ayala quote appears on page 884. The article is layed out in 3 columns of text. The split between columns 1 and 2 occurs after the words "I am now convinced from" in the Ayala quote. And, just below those words, there's a page number, for page (yes, you guessed it) 884.

So, could it be that this is actually leopold's cut-and-paste error, and not an excision of the "884" by the Evil Scientists after all?

In other words, if it is not already blindingly obvious, leopold cut and pasted from the article and inadvertently included the page number in the quote he copied. The page number is not part of the quote. The quote simply happens to appear on page 884 of the article.

So much for leopold's cries that the article has been doctored to remove important material or to hide quotes.

leopold: will you now admit that none of the quotes has been doctored, and that this was entirely your mistake, so we can take this particular issue off the table?

 

[James R]

Here's another quote from leopold's favorite article of the moment (which was written by Roger Lewin, incidentally):

The basis of speciation theory is that a new species should arise from parental stock, probably delimited as a small isolated population. The notion of small populations is important in the gradualist model too [comparing the punctuated equilibrium model], where speciation is allowed for through the steady accumulation of genetic change within a limited number of organisms that are geographically separated from the stabilizing gene flow of the main population. Eventually the isolated population might attain sufficient genetic distance from the parental stock as to be reproductively isolated: hence the establishment of a new species.

The material in square brackets is my addition.

And, a little further down:

As with other issues in evolutionary biology, no one should be dogmatic about the mechanisms of speciation. Elizabeth Vrba put it this way: "Speciation has to do with isolation, and there are probably many ways by which this can come about."

On the question of punctuated equilibrium vs gradualism itself, the article has this to say:

The resolution of this apparent conflict is this. Species do indeed have a capacity to undergo minor modifications in their physical and other characteristics, but this is limited and with a longer perspective it is reflected in an oscillation about a mean: to a paleontologist looking at the fossil record, this shows up as stasis.

The troubling specter of "instant" speciation is again a product of misunderstandings over scale. What is an instant to a paleontologist is an unimaginable tract of time to either an ecologist or a population geneticist. "I'd be happy to see speciation taking place over, say, 50,000 years," said Gould, "but that is an instant compared with the 5 or 10 million years that most species exist."

And that is one of the points that leopold needs to get to grips with.

The article goes on...

However, even the most ardent punctuationists do not dismiss gradual change as a force in evolution. "We are not saying that population genetics is irrelevant," said Eldredge, countering accusations of monotheism; "The question is over what process is most important in bringing about the major changes we see in evolution. And the answer is punctuated equilibrium."

Importantly, note again that neither Eldredge nor Gould, nor, indeed, anybody at this conference, was claiming that evolution does not occur, or that it does not result in speciation.

 

[James R]

leopold:

In response to your reply to me:

origin of new species.
it's basically variations of the same theme.

I don't know what you mean by that.

Do you think human beings are "variations on the same theme" as chimpanzees, for example? We share 99% of our genes, after all. Is this species difference just a "variation on the same theme"?

personally i would call this microevolution.

Speciation is now microevolution?

Ok, then what is macroevolution?

macroevolution is the accumulations of of these changes to create a different genome.
this is what the scientists said does not happen. *

Again, I'm not sure what you mean by "a different genome".

You have a different genome to your mother or father, for example. Does that mean you've undergone "macroevolution"?

Does the 1% difference between chimpanzee and human DNA make human DNA a "different genome" from chimp DNA? Is that 1% change a "macro" change or a "micro" change, then?

You share 99% of your DNA with a chimp. You share more than 50% of your DNA with a mouse. These are facts.

What would a "different genome" look like?

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).

The debate between gradualism and punctuated equilibrium is just an argument about the time scale over which speciation takes place, on average. That debate is largely dead among biologists now, with the punctuated equilibrium proposal having been essentially absorbed into standard evolutionary theory.

actually the important thing is their conclusion and why they concluded it.
why did they conclude it was a clear no?

The debate concerned whether the same mechanisms that drive adaptation within a species can be used to explain speciation. The answer to that was "a clear No". As can be seen in the quotes I posted in a previous post (above), they agreed that speciation requires genetic isolation of some kind, which is the opposite of "business as usual" in a group of organisms that are interbreeding.

But the conference also concluded that macro- and micro-evolution can "probably been seen as a continuum with a notable overlap". That's on the first page of the article.

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.

Nobody "kept mum" about the so-called "gaps" in the fossil record. Why do you think they held this meeting in the first place? It's no secret that the fossil record is patchy and incomplete. It's also well understood why that is the case.

they have apparently waited long enough to state the fossils do not exist, they will not be found.

But transitional fossils have been found. There are many very famous examples. Consider, for example, sequences of fossils showing the evolution of horses, or whales, or even human beings.

It's perverse to claim that there are no transitional fossils. A 2 minute search on google will find hundreds of examples.

this is another problem with this discussion.
you, and others, just can not accept the facts.
nothing will be solved this way.

What facts am I not acceptiing?

You're the one who seems to be in denial about a whole bunch of things. The existence of transitional fossils is the tip of the iceberg.

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!

Modern Creationists are unscientific believers in religious fables. They have never had any impact at all on the progress of science. Why would anybody of a scientific mind be remotely worried about anything a Creationist has to say about evolution? Certainly not for any possible impact on science. They only concern lies in their ability to mislead the general public. Look what it's done to you.

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'm not clouding the issue. You're avoiding it.

You accept that you're different from your parents, and that your children are/will be different from you. So how are you not "transitional"?

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.

It is not unavailable. I downloaded it from jstor just yesterday, and could easily do so today too.

Don't tell lies, leopold. They make you look silly.

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.

You really think there are people who believe evolution is true who would be worried about a 30 year old debate among evolutionists to hash out some then-current issues in evolutionary theory?

Why?

Nothing in that article refutes evolution. Nothing begins to question it.

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.

I know you'll do the honorable thing now and retract this claim of yours. Won't you?

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.

I had no trouble downloading it. The problem must be at your end. Either that, or it's a temporary glitch that's now resolved.

 

[James R]

more...

strange that up until 1983 there were so few that these scientists had to reach the conclusion they did and now they seem to be finding LOTS of them.

all throughout this thread it has been stated over and over how rare they are, how difficult to find them.
now all of a sudden they seem to be falling out of the sky.

do ANY of you see a problem with this?

One minute you claim there are no transitional fossils. Then, when a whole list is provided for you, you say "I think those are all fraudulent, made up by Evil Scientists to provide support for the holes in their Theory of Evolution."

Tell me: what evidence would convince you of evolution, leopold?

You seem willing to go to any lengths, even making up implausible conspiracy theories, to deny the simple truth of evidence put in front of you.

I mean, what are the chances of literally thousands of biologists all being in on your grand conspiracy to invent transitional fossils? Don't you think that somebody would have blown the whistle by now?

Even your Creationist friends aren't claiming that all the transitional fossils are fakes.

james
which one of your mods edited this post?
http://www.sciforums.com/showthread...ution-exsist&p=2716879&viewfull=1#post2716879

None of them. You edited it yourself.

 

[leopold]

leopold,

You refer to quotes you claim have been altered by the Grand Scientific Conspiracy.

yes, i claimed that the article RAV posted was edited. on page 8 post 141.
the issue was raised a few times after that until page 11 post 205 where i mentioned it might not mean a lot.

leopold: will you now admit that none of the quotes has been doctored, and that this was entirely your mistake, so we can take this particular issue off the table?

if it was a copy/paste error then the page number would have been before or after the quote, not in the middle.

 

[leopold]

. . . (which was written by Roger Lewin, incidentally):

correct.
published in a respected peer reviewed source.

besides, who's doubting speciation?

 

[leopold]

The debate concerned whether the same mechanisms that drive adaptation within a species can be used to explain speciation. The answer to that was "a clear No". As can be seen in the quotes I posted in a previous post (above), they agreed that speciation requires genetic isolation of some kind, which is the opposite of "business as usual" in a group of organisms that are interbreeding.

the debate was whether the process of microevolution can be extrapolated to macroevolution.
definition of macroevolution:
http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/article/0_0_0/evoscales_04
their conclusion was a clear no.
how did they conclude this james?

Nobody "kept mum" about the so-called "gaps" in the fossil record. Why do you think they held this meeting in the first place? It's no secret that the fossil record is patchy and incomplete. It's also well understood why that is the case.

they aren't "so called".
the piece specifically addresses this.

I know you'll do the honorable thing now and retract this claim of yours. Won't you?

no *, because i have demonstrated they are indeed different.
let me point out AGAIN it might be a minor thing.

* edit
retracted.
i found out that i could very well have included the page number inside the quote rather than the ends.

 

[Rav]

if it was a copy/paste error then the page number would have been before or after the quote, not in the middle.

Every time you speak, you're wrong about something. If only you didn't feel the need to defend such an absurd position you'd probably manage to be right about a few things here and there, just like the rest of us. But I guess this is just the damage that creationists do to what might otherwise be intellectually healthy individuals. Such a shame. And I really mean that.

Anyway, just to help James put this one small thing to rest:

[video=vimeo;69369869]https://vimeo.com/69369869[/video]

 

[Aqueous Id]

the debate was whether the process of microevolution can be extrapolated to macroevolution..

There is a more fundamental misunderstanding in play here. The genetic isolation JamesR referred to is what defines speciation - the divergent group is no longer breeding within the ancestral group, as most remarkably evident in the case of Darwin's finches. Nothing better illustrates this than the stranding of the first finch on the Galapagos and the emergence of the many new forms that will not interbreed, each adapted to a particular food source for which there was evidently no competition. In parallel to this were the adaptations of the terrestrial iguana to the most unusual of survival traits - diving for seaweed. Additionally Galapagos turtles had adapted to conditions local to the particular island they inhabited (long vs short neck to subsist on short vs tall plants). Is this microevolution or macroevolution? Before you consider that, answer this: are Darwin's finches a case of gradualism or punctuated equilibrium? They are new species, and the key to understanding evolution by natural selection. Once we have this viable mechanism in place to explain what happened on Galapagos, does it really matter what Gould, Ayala or Lewin have added to the mix? Has anything they said really changed our understanding that evolution, as Darwin explained it, is fundamentally correct? The rest is details - details which naturalists will continue to pursue for the advancement of science. But that will never overturn what happened on Galapagos. What creationists will call a conspiracy is the mere act of students the world over encountering this shrine of natural history and walking away from it completely smitten by the overwhelming evidence. And this is just the gateway. Beyond lies a world of technical description that completely dovetails with this, and between all the life and physical sciences. The jigsaw puzzle is too nearly complete to point to a few outlying pieces not yet put in place. It's a work in progress, and none of the technical discussion between scientists will ever undo what's already been accomplished. After all, who can argue against the weight of evidence? The folks who agree are not engaging in conspiracy, just common sense and valid logic. After all, Galapagos is a bell that can't be unrung, not matter how stridently the creationists pretend that it can.

 

[wellwisher]

If you look at the evolution of life on earth, life evolved in water. Water is a critical part of life as we know it. Experiments have been performed, with a wide range of solvents, to see if there was a possible substituted for water, but none could sustain life. Logically this indicates that water is more than an inert solvent, or else any inert solvent would work. As such, life on earth is very much dependent on interactions with water, which no other solvent was able to provide.

Since life evolved in water, and since water was always the majority of the molecules within life (90% today), and since water is highly self assembling and can form hydrogen bonds and/or van der Waals interactions with any organic compound, natural selection at the nano-scale of the molecular level, would mean that which is best able to conform to the constraints of water. Water is the molecular environment in which the organics molecules of life all need to live and compete.

For example, beta DNA, which is the most common form of DNA used by life has the highest degree of hydration; natural selection of DNA in water, resulted in the DNA with the most chemically bound water.

Proteins have hydrophilic moieties out and hydrophobic moieties inside because this conforms to the constraints set by water. Natural selection in water, at the molecular scale, will also push proteins into unique folds. How does existing evolutionary theory take into consideration the molecular conformity to water, which is the basis for natural selection at the nano-scale?

I picture evolution having two parallel paths. The skeleton of evolution conforms to the push/pull of water, which set the law right from the very beginning, before there was life, as to how life would need to develop; nano-scale scaffolding. It is not coincidence that water, proteins and DNA all use hydrogen bonds; water set the path for nano-scale selection.

 

[wellwisher]

fter all, Galapagos is a bell that can't be unrung, not matter how stridently the creationists pretend that it can.

In another post, I talked about Yellow Stone National Park in the USA, and the huge million plus acre forest fire, years back, and how in a few short years after, different life appears to take over the burnt forest. Now Yellowstone is totally different being more meadows and small trees and the life that supports. It is no longer old world forest.

In Galapagos, life was stuck in place. What Darwin defined from his observation, was true, but would not have been the inference he would have concluded had he visited Yellowstone, which was all about extremely rapid change. He would have said life can totally change an ecosystem, in a few decades, by means of migrations, therefore life may not always evolve in place, like in Galapagos. His historical conclusion was based on a partial data set (one extreme circumstance) and would have been better, if he had visited both environments.

As an analogy, it would be like drawing a conclusion about New England, from only living there in the winter, instead of the winter and summer. There is no balance when you are one sided, in world of two sides.

Species become extinct all the time. This creates a void and new thing move in and/or move out. Sometimes natural selection is done by the consciousness of the animal; migrates to where the weather suits his clothes.