Denial of Evolution VII (2015)

[leopold]

Apparently I read that wrong.
Where did you get your information?

i found an issue of science that contained the article and i posted the link here on the forums before i downloaded it.
the link no longer works but i did post a few excerpts from the issue. post 432
www.sciforums.com/threads/does-evolution-exsist.106025/page-22#post-2716879
the above post raised a shitstorm that rages to this day.

remember, this was published in 1983 or so.

the conclusion of this conference?
that small changes do not accumulate.

that's only the tip of the iceberg enmos.
there is also the fraudulent horseshit in connection with ayala and what he said.
the infamous alleged retraction.
this "retraction" is posted on arrowsmiths website "noanswersin genesis".
a number of people wrote to science concerning said article, none of them was ayala.
science did not post any errata or corrections to said article.

 

[Randwolf]

i found an issue of science that contained the article and i posted the link here on the forums before i downloaded it.
the link no longer works but i did post a few excerpts from the issue. post 432
www.sciforums.com/threads/does-evolution-exsist.106025/page-22#post-2716879
the above post raised a shitstorm that rages to this day.

remember, this was published in 1983 or so.

the conclusion of this conference?
that small changes do not accumulate.

that's only the tip of the iceberg enmos.
there is also the fraudulent horseshit in connection with ayala and what he said.
the infamous alleged retraction.
this "retraction" is posted on arrowsmiths website "noanswersin genesis".
a number of people wrote to science concerning said article, none of them was ayala.
science did not post any errata or corrections to said article.

Are you really gonna do this again leopold? This is about the 15th time now in the last 7-8 years. All that happens is fifty some people dig up references showing you that the quote was taken out of context, that it doesn't mean what you think it means and that it has been superseded in any event. However, you don't care. That ONE article is the be all end all for you and the subject of evolution.

PS - Enmos, you don't remember the last couple go-rounds on this with leopold? (Have fun - I feel for ya

 

[Dywyddyr]

Geez, I remember them, and they were ones I didn't get involved in.

 

[leopold]

Are you really gonna do this again leopold?

do what?
enmos asked for my source, i gave it to him.

 

[Bells]

you did?
well, what was your reaction when you found out you were lied to in high school bells?
your response to this post will tell me a lot about you.

I was actually taught evolution in high school. So I wasn't being lied to.

oh "scientific fact" what's a matter, scientific theory not a good enough word for you?

Unless you have scientific evidence that part of the brain evolved from something else that does not clearly indicate that we shared a common ancestor with certain types of worms, from around 600 million years ago? Yes? No?

So there was a big pond full of DNA which was created by chance... a worm crawled out of it that ALLAH we have brains.

I actually feel embarrassed for you. Because you will never be able to talk back this level of stupid.

 

[Cris]

Leopold,

So if humans were not the result of an evolutionary process, where did we come from? Can you show the data and proofs for your alternative to evolution?

 

[Cris]

So there was a big pond full of DNA which was created by chance... a worm crawled out of it that ALLAH we have brains.

Dave,

You say you believe in evolution, and by that I assume you believe that man evolved from lesser lifeforms. Your comment above seems to imply you do not agree with the process of mutations and how changes lead to other changes and so on.

You appear to be arguing from a creationist perspective, that man one day simply appeared, but you say you agree with an evolutionary process. Your statements are contradictory.

Can you explain more clearly your position on where man came from and any role a god might have played?

 

[GeoffP]

my aim here is not to "tear down evolution" but to point out some glaring irregularities.
for example:
i was led to believe lifes diversity was the result of accumulating changes.
they even had "transitional fossils" to "prove" it.
i now find out that that is not the case at all and furthermore these people KNEW they weren't spelling out the straight shit to our students.
this explains why the majority of US high school teachers are reluctant to teach evolution.
the charade that surrounds this particular situation smells even worse.

question:
hasn't communism always wanted to destroy religion?

Mostly, sure. So what?

leopold, getting a fossil to fossilize is fucking hard. How many fossils appear in the woods? Most fall apart; even deer eat deer antlers. Not every series - do you appreciate just how many series there are out there? - is going to be complete. Hell, we've barely found even a few percent of all the forms that probably ever existed - but the message is clear. Things descend with modification. Exactly what kind and when is another question - widespread microevolutionary stages, saltation; who cares? Only assholes and the utterly myopic can possibly think it's all only of one kind or another. We do have transitionals in a number of series. Does that mean microevolution only happened in those cases specifically? No. It's a system that does occur, and probably occurs very often. Evolution takes a leap once in a while, but a lot of it is probably microevolution running quickly.

The reason high schools in lots of places are hesitant is because of pressure from theists, who don't like having their articles contradicted. I didn't think it could possibly be so - and then I moved to an eastern state in the US. Let me tell you: it's fucking true. And these were educated, white-collar people. It. Was. Frightening. High school teachers, like most people, couldn't give two shits about their students. No, what they're scared of is pressure from the church groups. Those people control a lot of things in a community, man. You'd be amazed.

Anyway: does saltation occur? Sure. Why the hell wouldn't it? It just seems more probable, given what we know about genetic architecture, that microevolution and quantitative state are more common.

 

[James R]

I was led to believe lifes diversity was the result of accumulating changes.

What else could it be a result of?

they even had "transitional fossils" to "prove" it.
i now find out that that is not the case at all...

It is the case.

...and furthermore these people KNEW they weren't spelling out the straight shit to our students.

The Grand Scientific Conspiracy to Tell Lies to Kids exists only in your mind, leopold.

this explains why the majority of US high school teachers are reluctant to teach evolution.

Half of US high school teachers don't believe in evolution (if high school teachers are representative of the general US population). And far less than half actually understand it. And only a fraction of them of have actually studied it.

Some US high school teachers don't teach it because they think it conflicts with their religion. Some don't teach it because they are worried about backlash from parents and others who think that evolution conflicts with their religion. Some don't teach it because they just don't want the kind of heat that the subject seems to raise in religious America.

question:
hasn't communism always wanted to destroy religion?

Communism wants to create its own religion, in effect. Capitalism has its own kind of religion, too - a mythology about individual effort, the power of free markets yada yada yada. Ideologies are everywhere you look.

i found an issue of science that contained the article and i posted the link here on the forums before i downloaded it.

the conclusion of this conference?
that small changes do not accumulate.

That was not the conclusion of the conference. There was no doubt about the fact of evolution at the conference. There was merely a debate about gradualism vs. punctuated equilibrium, which was a hot topic of debate in biology back in 1983 or whenever it was. That argument has largely been sorted by now. And trust me: conferences about evolutionary biology always conclude that evolution is real, leopold. Those conferences wouldn't be held if scientists didn't think evolution was real.

there is also the fraudulent horseshit in connection with ayala and what he said.
the infamous alleged retraction.
this "retraction" is posted on arrowsmiths website "noanswersin genesis".

This was not a "alleged" retraction.

You only refuse to accept what Ayala himself wrote about his own prior words because it clashes with your religion. No other reason.

a number of people wrote to science concerning said article, none of them was ayala.
science did not post any errata or corrections to said article.

Science and Science both moved on with their lives. Evolution is still as real today as it was 30 years ago.

 

[leopold]

Leopold,

So if humans were not the result of an evolutionary process, where did we come from? Can you show the data and proofs for your alternative to evolution?

i don't have an alternative.
there are several possibilities though:
1. there actually may be a god.
2. we have misidentified, misaligned, or misinterpreted something.
3. life may be intimately related to quantuum physics.

the biggest problem i see is, how do sexes appear if species just "pop" into existence.

OTOH, there is more to this story than just the article.
specifically the matter of ayala and his alleged retraction.
this retraction does not appear in science nor does it appear that ayala ever contact science about said retraction.
but yet ayala allegedly contacts a personal website about it.
uh huh, go tell it to the mountain.

no, i do not have an answer for ANY of this cris.

 

[James R]

the biggest problem i see is, how do sexes appear if species just "pop" into existence.

Species don't just pop into existence.

Sex evolved, just like everything else.

 

[James R]

Reproducing a post from April, 2012, here:

Yeah, that's right leopold - keep digging that hole.....

The original article is:
Evolutionary theory under fire
R Lewin
Science 21 November 1980: 883-887. [DOI:10.1126/science.6107993]

....

The article is an account of a small meeting to discuss the extent to which the accumulation of gradual changes can account for large scale evolutionary change. The validity of the Theory of Evolution is in no way challenged by any material from the article. The only topic in question is the underlying mechanisms. Gould is a proponent of punctuated equilibrium and, thus, argues that the sudden bursts of morphological change brought about by PE accounts for the observed gaps in the fossil record. Gould does not suggest that the fossil record is poor evidence for evolution, and no quotation from this article, if used in context, can be used to argue that. The excerpt above from Buckaroo Banzai demonstrates this.

I will also reproduce this paragraph from the article:

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 in evolution. And the answer is punctuated equilibrium." Gould also sees gradual change as an important influence in evolutionary history: "The point is one of the relative frequency of one process as against the other," he explained with deliberate emphasis, betraying some frustration at having been repeatedly misunderstood on this particular issue.
p.884

Clearly Gould and Eldredge do not discount a role for gradualism in evolution. There are paragraphs of text after this one that further underscore some clear fossil evidence for the gradual accumulation of morphological changes.

If it is true that most evolutionary change follows the model of punctuated equilibrium, then there is the immediate problem of how to explain morphological trends that are frequently seen in the fossil record. A classic example of such a trend is the evolution of the modem horse, whose distant ancestor Hydracotherium was a three-toed creature no bigger than a dog. The fossil record shows an apparently steady "progress" through time, with gradual changes in body size and form leading eventually to the familiar Equus. Classical gradualism would explain such a trend in terms of a progressive expression of the forces of natural selection within a single lineage: a continuous evolutionary ladder would connect the ancestor Hydracotherium with the modem animal, Equus.

------------------

So, leopold, it has been unambiguously demonstrated to you that quotations by Gould from this article do not support the conclusion that he is arguing the fossil record is poor evidence for evolution. It has also been demonstrated that gradualism has a recognised place in the Theory of Evolution.

 

[leopold]

That was not the conclusion of the conference.

that WAS the conclusion james, and you KNOW it was.
oops, i forgot, your copy didn't come from jstor.

 

[davewhite04]

Dave,

You say you believe in evolution, and by that I assume you believe that man evolved from lesser lifeforms. Your comment above seems to imply you do not agree with the process of mutations and how changes lead to other changes and so on.

You appear to be arguing from a creationist perspective, that man one day simply appeared, but you say you agree with an evolutionary process. Your statements are contradictory.

Can you explain more clearly your position on where man came from and any role a god might have played?

Sure.

I believe evolution explains quite elegantly the diversity of life on Earth. I also believe evolution can speed up dramatically. I cannot explain with any level of certainty the origin of man to be honest.

I believe the Earth is at least 3.2billion years old, which is not what creationist believe, is it(genuine question)?

 

[davewhite04]

Unless you have scientific evidence that part of the brain evolved from something else that does not clearly indicate that we shared a common ancestor with certain types of worms, from around 600 million years ago? Yes? No?

Science doesn't sign a document and close a book, mass produce it and close the case on any scientific theory... there isn't, and never will be a scientific fact.

I actually feel embarrassed for you. Because you will never be able to talk back this level of stupid.

That's an answer? I don't feel embarrassed for people like you, I feel nothing.

 

[James R]

leopold's ongoing fixation with an article published in 1980 dates back at least to 2007 on sciforums.

Here's a page about leopold's infamous Ayala quote:

http://www.noanswersingenesis.org.au/another_creationist_out_of_context_quote.htm

Here's the quote leopold relies on as "disproof" of evolution. This is from an article published in Science back in 1980, titled "Evolutionary theory under fire".

"Thus went the verbal jostling, with the mood swinging perceptibly in favor of recognizing stasis as being a real phenomenon. Gabriel Dover, a geneticist from Cambridge University, England, felt atrongly enough to call species stasis 'The single most important feature of macroevolution.' 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.'"

Here's what Francisco Ayala said (in July 2001) about this quote from the article:

I don't know how Roger Lewin could have gotten in his notes the quotation he attributes to me. I presented a paper/lecture and spoke at various times from the floor, but I could not possibly have said (at least as a complete sentence) what Lewin attributes to me. In fact, I don't know what it means. How could small changes NOT accumulate! In any case, virtually all my evolutionary research papers evidence that small (genetic) changes do accumulate.

The paper that I presented at the conference reported by Lewin is virtually the same that I presented in 1982 in Cambridge, at a conference commemorating the 200 [sic] anniversary of Darwin's death. It deals with the claims of "punctuated equilibrium" and how microevolutionary change relates to macroevolution. (I provide experimental results showing how one can obtain in the laboratory, as a result of the accumulation of small genetic changes, morphological changes of the magnitude observed by paleontologists and presented as evidence of punctuated equilibrium.) The paper was published as part of the conference proceedings:

Ayala, F.J. 1983. Microevolution and macroevolution. In: D.S. Bendall, ed., Evolution from Molecules to Men (Cambridge University Press), pp. 387-402.

So, if leopold trusts Francisco Ayala, then he should trust him when he says that "small (genetic) changes do accumulate".

Enough said.

 

[James R]

leopold:

that WAS the conclusion james, and you KNOW it was.
oops, i forgot, your copy didn't come from jstor.

You know how this goes every time we do this dance, which you insist on replaying year after year (sometimes several times a year).

You tell lies. I correct you, often referring to our previous discussions of the exact same issue. You insist that your lies are true, against all evidence. Eventually, everybody gets sick of you and you're banned from sciforums for a while (again).

There's no reason to suppose that this time things will play out differently. After all, you've been doing this since 2007. It's a pity that instead of wasting your time on this, you didn't spend some of those 8 years learning something about science.

Anyway, I've now dredged the record a bit - not thoroughly, because that's difficult to do since the forum software update - and I have now put the old information on record once again so it is easily accessible when you bring this bullshit up again next month or next year or whenever.

 

[davewhite04]

leopold:....

Gotta love your tenacity James

 

[James R]

See also, here:

http://www.sciforums.com/threads/denial-of-evolution-vi.134919/page-26#post-3082560

Here's a quote from leopold's favorite Science article (the same one with the Ayala misquote):

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."

Eldredge was one of the scientists who proposed the theory of punctuated equilibrium.

It is worth noting once again that none of the biologists debating evolution at the conference reported in the article expressed any doubt that evolution is real, that evolution produces new species, and so on.

 

[James R]

Here are few more-recent threads in which leopold was taken to task over the Science article and on his views in general about evolution. leopold's intellectual dishonesty is evident throughout.

The most extensive recent discussion I can find is contained in the following mega-thread:

http://www.sciforums.com/threads/denial-of-evolution-vi.134919/ (June 2013)

My own posts on the matter seem to start about here, although many other members and moderators made contributions as good as or better than mine.

http://www.sciforums.com/threads/denial-of-evolution-vi.134919/page-26#post-3082558

Some other discussions of the same issue can be found here:

http://www.sciforums.com/threads/leopolds-evolution-diversion.141691/ (May 2014)
http://www.sciforums.com/threads/scientific-theories-and-reality.142057/ (July 2014)
http://www.sciforums.com/threads/denial-of-evolution-v.112778/ (May 2012)
http://www.sciforums.com/threads/views-on-evolution.112963/ (April 2011)
http://www.sciforums.com/threads/does-evolution-exsist.106025/ (January 2011)