Making Monkeys Out of Evolutionists

Thank you so much for your post!

I understand the distinction that is being made, but when abiogenesis and biogenesis are blended together seamlessly with cosmology and called evolution by the likes of NASA - it becomes a moot point to the public and that could be a problem for the evolutionists IMHO.

Admittedly, that's just my two cents, but doesn't it annoy you when you look at a brochure of a fully decked out car on sale for $n - only to find that the price is for the basic model and you have to pay extra for this and that ... and then some features that are pictured aren't actually available in this year's model?

everything discovered in the last 150 years of biology is consistent with it, particularly the existence of self-replicating molecules.

What self replicating molecules? There are chemical reactions, always have been, but that is nothing even close to life from inert matter. Biology has shown the total impossibility of abiogenesis. See my post#652 and let's see if you can refute it or at least give an alternative that fits the scientific facts.

Thank you so much for your post! In fact, I wish I could reach through this monitor and give you a big hug!

Evolution theory looks very different today than it did in Darwin's day.

That's exactly what I suspected and why I think that it either needs to be a repackaged and renamed by consensus - or Darwin needs a new set of clothes.

That's exactly what I suspected and why I think that it either needs to be a repackaged and renamed by consensus - or Darwin needs a new set of clothes.

Hmmm... New and Improved! The Theory of Evolution.

Darwin still stands tall, and by rights; he developed one of the most powerful theories of the last century.

Thank you so much for your replies! I'll wait for my email contributor to respond to your post #658, but wrt #659:

As I have mentioned before, I really don't want to get into arguing - for or against - generally or specifically - either side of the debate. But I am interested in the method of inquiry.

In that regard, I strongly believe it is a mistake for evolutionists to distance themselves from abiogenesis. It leaves the common person, like me, wondering why and that can't be good.

Absolutely, this is true. You may have heard of some of the renovations: Margulis' Symbiotic Theory, Gould's Punctuated Equilibrium, McClintoc's Adaptive Evolution, Developmental Canalization, Epigenetics.

The above, rather than show the truth of evolution shows quite well the desperation of evolutionists. Punctuated equilibrium for example is even more stupid than Darwinism. The reason is quite simple. Even IF (big if) it could ever be shown that mutations could turn an organism into a new species, it is totally ridiculous to say that a whole group would suddenly acquire all the mutations necessary for such a leap (else who would it mate with?). So, these theories are based on totally ridiculous and totally impossible assumptions and they just show the desperation of evolutionists, not the truth of evolution.

BTW - kindly also note that Lamarckism and horizontal gene transfer are not evolutionary processes. They are materialistic processes, but not evolutionary ones. Which shows both the desperation of evolutionists and my constant refrain that evolution is not about descent, it is about destroying Christianity.

Thank you for your post!

Newton will always stand tall in Physics, but the credit he receives concerning gravity theory is no longer all encompassing.

What are Protists?

They evolved from bacteria and represent the intermediate step in the evolution of the other three kingdoms. [Plants, animals, fungi. There are two kingdoms which occur before protists and three after.]

From this site.

Read it and understand it; I'm not going to do this on every thread.

Updating to a post-1960's view:

Updating to a post-1960's view:

2000 years worth of science down, 42 to go!

Anyway, a nice figure that shows the branching relationships. Thanks!

This is pure elitist nonsense.

Keep holding on to your ignorance as a mental shield from reality - it's infallible.

Vade, I was following your and Nebullis' posts on Protists and was quite curious how they would appear in the fossil record since they obviously do not have bones.

Along the way, on Discover.Org I found a very interesting article on the Cambrian Explosion: Biology's Big Bang (PDF). It is 50 pages long but it's a very engaging discussion of Intelligent Design and Evolution.

It comes down on the side of Intelligent Design and the path taken matches closely what I was trying to describe in #635 (that, IMHO, ID will always win in the eyes of the public because they know how to win.)

Thought y'all might like to take a peek.

Keep holding on to your ignorance as a mental shield from reality - it's infallible.

Jeez, don't you realize that insults prove nothing? Can't you deal with the facts?

Jeez, don't you realize that insults prove nothing? Can't you deal with the facts?

No insult - just the bare description of your online persona. I learned a long time ago that YOU don't pay attention to facts, that facts literally do not exist in your worldview, that you are incapable of admitting that you can make an error, and that you have one of the worst afflictions of Morton's Demon ever seen on FreeRepublic.

I was just pointing that out to the lurkers once again. Have a nice day!

Read it and understand it; I'm not going to do this on every thread.

Just because you folk have a 'classification' for it, does not mean it answers the question. The other members of the Euglenyata do not have animal features, they also have no eyes. Bacteria do not have eyes. Plants and animals are inherently different and say so stories are insufficient to explain this vast transformation. From your site:

The euglena is the only protist which is both plant and animal. It is also the only one that has an eye. You and the evolutionists can talk all you want, make all the trees you like, it does not solve the problem.

Five year olds can draw lines, and can even draw trees. It does not constitute proof of anything. What you need is to show how the vast differences between the three different kinds of simplest organisms were bridged. Many scientists do not believe that to be possible. Evolutionists seem to think that because something exists it is proof of evolution, it is not. There are many possible explanations including intelligent design. As Darwin said, unless the changes can be proven by gradual item by item change, then evolution is disproven. Let's see 'how' the change happened. We know that there are higher species than the archaea, the eukaryotes and the prokaryotes. What evolutionists have to show is how we got from there to a single 'tree'. That has not been shown. In fact the change from any single celled organism to a multi-cellular organism is such a great leap that it seems to be totally insurmountable.

You appear to be unaccquainted with the Discovery of Nothing Institute, where Jonathan (Icons of Evolution) Wells is a Senior fellow. Any seeming oscillation in that article before "coming down on the side" of Intelligent Design is a sham. The authors, Meyer in particular, are ID.

The Discovery Institute exists to scan real scientific articles for just the snippets they can use, and to put out urgent War Room-style rebuttals to press releases they fear might be seen as supporting evolution. (In the example shown, the subject of the study was flies, not shrimp.) They're a PR-for-ID house.

Thank you for your reply!

This is absolutely fascinating to me. Remember I am not arguing for either side - pro or con - detailed or general - but rather am interested in the method of the inquiry.

Above I said this about Intelligent Design theorists:

They don’t deny the good arguments – they embrace them! They very strongly eschew all forms of ideology. They appeal to common sense and avoid techno-lingo like the Bubonic plague.
To the jury [common people like me] they are objective, even-handed and sensible – they have the moral authority by leaps and bounds. If everything they said was flawed, they would still win because they know how to win! [And who wins at home always trumps who wins in other venues.]

In the PDF I linked, they vigorously embraced the fossil record, carefully avoided saying anything ugly about any person, and they made no claim who the designer might be. Their written words were presented as if they were a third party looking at the evidence objectively, even-handedly and sensibly.

Your reaction focused on the person and organization behind the document. You made an objective point (author and host did not disclose any prejudice:)

Any seeming oscillation in that article before "coming down on the side" of Intelligent Design is a sham. The authors, Meyer in particular, are ID. But the words whereby you formed the reply, and the title and first sentence of the article you linked - come across as personal attacks by an interested party and thus poison the valid argument.

To a juror (who is typically only half listening) it might even sound like sour grapes and thus add to the ID argument. Some might be thinking goose-gander and discount your valid argument for the same reason, i.e. the contrary author doesn't disclose prejudice either.

Icon of Obfuscation
Jonathan Wells' book Icons of Evolution
and why most of what it teaches about evolution is wrong

Jonathan Wells' book Icons of Evolution: Science or Myth? Why Much of What We Teach About Evolution Is Wrong (henceforth Icons) makes a travesty of the notion of honest scholarship.

Notice the operative words "obfuscation" "wrong" and "travesty." Jeepers, the poor juror hasn't even read one argument in the link!

IMHO, a juror's mind would be made up before the second paragraph. To go back to the "court of law" comparison, an attorney is ill-advised to badger a witness. Witnesses are impeached better with cold evidence than hot words.

Thank you so very much, Vade! This exchange is a great example supporting my reasoning of why Intelligent Design will win (they know how to.)

Their written words were presented as if they were a third party looking at the evidence objectively, even-handedly and sensibly.

Are appearances everything? They named their organization "Discovery Institute" as if they were interested in discovery rather than the repeal of same. They have never discovered anything except that the latest science article needs a rebuttal.

Perhaps, as you say, they wrote the article as if they were not the champions of ID, but someone wondering if those ID guys were onto something. Just three scientists at the (Ahem!) prestigious Discovery Institute examining the facts.

True, I did not write a rebuttal of the body of the article. I believe that my posts have thorougly anticipated the body of the article, as a serious reading of both shows.

Thus, your posting of that material was presumably intended to show me that you were correct: that an impartial jury such as the three sober scientists at the prestigious Discovery Institute would ultimately, reviewing all sources, be swayed by the ID theorists. It seemed relevant to mention who in fact was writing what. I'd seen that article before, but forgive me if it was some time ago and the irony in your original post was lost on me.

But let me challenge myself and save time. Can I show where, say Miller and Morton anticipate and destroy Meyer et al.? Yes.

From Meyer, et al:

To say that the fauna of the Cambrian period appeared in a geologically sudden manner also implies the absence of clear transitional intermediates connecting the complex Cambrian animals with those simpler living forms found in lower strata.

You've presumbably read Glenn R. Morton on phylum-level evolution. I'm going to show that Morton anticipates Meyer. The reverse is never true, despite a handwaving dismissal of "deep diverge" theory clustered among other strawmen late in the paper. Meyer dishonestly pretends Morton's arguments don't exist. The problem with that is that Morton neither invents nor distorts. Moving on:

Trilobites, a subphylum of Arthropoda, were highly complex animals whose thoraxes comprised three lobes or sections (a “medial axial ring” and two lateral “pleurae”). The bodies of trilobites were covered by an outer shield-like keratinized exoskeleton, the major piece of which, called a carapace, covered both the head and thorax of these animals. Like modern arthropods, trilobites grew by shedding their carapaces and these cast-off carapaces help to account for the abundance of trilobite fossils. The Chengjiang fauna also contains a number of fossils of now-extinct top-of-the-food-chain predators with exotic names such as Anomolocaris (up to six feet in length) (see Figure 3) which, together with spines on the lobopods (see Figure 4) indicate the presence of a complex food web and a diverse ecological community.

A clue to what's coming:

Look familiar? Know what it is? A Vendian animal called Spriggina. Morton mentions it and another thing which only he seems to know about. Resuming on Meyer:

A third feature of the Cambrian explosion (as well as the subsequent fossil record) bears mentioning. The major body plans that arise in the Cambrian period exhibit considerable morphological isolation from one another (or “disparity”) and then subsequent “stasis.” Though all Cambrian and subsequent animals fall clearly within one of a limited number of basic body plans,15 each of these body plans exhibit clear morphological differences (and, thus, disparity) from the others. The animal body plans (as represented in the fossil record) do not grade imperceptibly one into another, either at a given time or over the course of geological history. Instead, the body plans of the animals characterizing the separate phyla maintain their morphological isolation or disparity from all the other types of animals. They also exhibit a remarkable stability or “stasis” during their time on earth.16 After the major body plans arise in the Cambrian period they maintain their characteristics without any evidence of incremental alteration.

If you're impressed by that, you weren't paying attention when you read this. The tree structure is there; the bin structure obscures it.

Morton has a lovely counterexample as well:

There are a couple of cautions about the use of the term phyla. A phylum is assigned to a given creature based upon its having the shared characteristic body plan. Occasionally, however, different body plans are not assigned different phyla and this creates an appearance that phyla can't evolve. A case in point concerns a deep-sea sponge which is classed with the Porifera in spite of the fact that it has an entirely different body plan. Vacelet and Boury-Esnault (1995, p. 335) relate:

“Our results raise fundamental questions about the validity of characteristics used to distinguish the phyla of lower invertebrates. A sponge is defined as a ‘sedentary, filter-feeding metazoan which utilizes a single layer of flagellated cells (choanocytes) to pump a unidirectional water current through its body. Except for being sedentary, the cave Asbestopluma and presumably all Cladorhizidae lack these basic sponge attributes. In an extreme environment where active filter-feeding has a low yield, cladorhizids have developed a mode of life roughly similar to that of foraminiferans or cnidarians. Their feeding mechanism relies on passive capture of living prey and on transfer of nutrients into the body through intense cell migrations, the analogue of cytoplasmic streaming in foraminiferan pseudopodia. This may be compared to the emergence of macrophagy in abyssal tunicates, also accompanied by a reduction of the filtering system although in Cladorhizidae the result is more extreme, with a main body plan different from Porifera and resembling no other modern anatomical design.”
“Such a unique body plan would deserve recognition as a distinct phylum, if these animals were not so evidently close relatives of Porifera. Their siliceous spicules show clear similarities to several families of poecilosclerid Demospongiae.”

In cases like that above, the lack attribution of phylum rank for these 'sponges' hides the fact that the Porifera may very well have given rise to an independent phyla. The only real connection between the two groups are the spicules which act as evidence of common descent. If the Cladorhizid sponges were to lose the spicules, the connection between the two groups would be lost. Body plans are obviously more of a continuum and difficult to separate than the simplistic concept of phyla espoused by anti-evolutionists would imply.

Morton is all over Meyer. The reverse is definitely not true.

In short, what the Discovery bunch has done with their citations is quote/footnote science, painting a false picture with real citations. Moving on:

Note the jump in complexity required to build complex Cambrian animals starting from, say, sponges in the late Precambrian. As Figure 5 shows Cambrian animals required 50 or more different cell types to function, whereas sponges required only 5 cell types.

And where oh where does Meyer compare the information content of the newly zapped from nowhere arthropods to the newly-zapped from nowhere primitive chordates like Pikaia to the newly-zapped from nowhere primitive brachiopods, etc? Is it because it's about the same number? And what would that tell us?

As noted above, neo-Darwinism envisions minute changes in gene sequences accumulating very slowly as the result of random mutations. Empirically-derived estimates of mutation rates in extant organisms, suggest that the kind of large scale morphological changes that occurred in the Cambrian would have required far more time than the duration of the explosion.

If I can anticipate that a real scientist would say the "explosion" began before various organisms began exerimenting with hard body parts and thus had longer than the apparent duration of the "explosion" in the fossil record, why can't Meyer? I've seen it written all over the place, and yet Meyer not only forgets, he makes a bad argument by forgetting! (I'm sure the Lord will understand!)

He stated: “The case at present must remain inexplicable; and may be truly urged as a valid argument against the views here entertained.”27 Contrary to Darwin’s hope, however, in the 140 years since the publication of the Origin of Species, discoveries in paleontology have only made the puzzle of the Cambrian explosion more acute.

Really? Think about this. Darwin thought life appeared suddenly in the Cambrian with no precursors whatsoever, so far as the fossil record could show. It troubled him deeply, but based upon the evidence available to him he predicted that Precambrian fossils would be found. How the hell did he know that in 1859? Was he just lucky or did he have a theory telling him what had to be there?

Meyer lawyers the situation by counting species. We've found more Cambrian species than pre-Cambrian, so Darwin's deficit is bigger than ever and he's refuted thereby. OK, yeah! I'm feeling particularly stupid today . . .

And of course, nowhere that I notice does the Discovery comedy troupe acknowledge the existence of the interphyla evoluton of which Morton speaks. They mention Anomalocaris as a bizarre mystery animal. They even mention its lobopods, but without mentioning that those are features of a line of worms, nor do they mention Anomalocaris's arthropodish fore-limbs or its worm-like mouth. It's got features of true worms and true arthropods, a condition which Miller for one identifies as what you expect as you go back toward the origins of taxa. IOW, it's a transitional.

Does Meyer not know these things? Of course he knows these things! He thinks I don't know these things!

Another thing Miller says:

Figure 2. The effects of an incomplete fossil record on the reconstruction of evolutionary relationships. (A) This branching tree (phylogeny) represents the actual pattern of evolutionary relationships. (B) The actual preserved record of species in the fossil record might look something like this. (C) This branching tree represents a possible reconstruction of the evolutionary tree based on the fossil evidence. Note that the general pattern of relationships is preserved, but that errors have been made with regard to specific ancestor-descendant relationships.

It is incorrect to reconstruct the data in B with vertical parallel lines, which is the unfortunate effect of some taxonomy and the whole basis of Meyer et al.'s stupid argument.

In another precursor case, I used the "search" function. "No occurences of 'spriggina' were found in the document."

Skimming rapidly because I don't have all day, I come to another choice nugget. Ask yourself if this kind of argument has been anticipated and refuted:

As noted above, the preservation of numerous soft-bodied Cambrian animals, as well as Precambrian embryos and microorganisms (the latter dating from 3.5 billion years), undermines the plausibility of those versions of the artifact theory that invoke an extensive period of soft-bodied evolution as the reason for an absence of Precambrian transitional intermediates.

If exceptional preservation happened in the Ediacara Hills, the Burgess Shale, and a location in China, the absence of it in other places is proof of "sudden appearance." Is this true? (How smart do you have to be to unmask such a transparent deceit?)

Miller says this:

The discovery of new soft-bodied fossil localities is always met with great enthusiasm. These localities typically turn up new species with unusual morphologies, and new higher taxa are built from a few specimens! Such localities are also erratically and widely spaced in geologic time between which essentially no soft-bodied fossil record exists.
. . .
The great majority of fossil vertebrate species are represented by only very fragmentary remains, and many are described on the basis of single specimens or from single localities. Complete skeletons are exceptionally rare. For many fossil taxa, particularly small mammals, the only fossils are teeth and jaw fragments. If so many fossil vertebrate species are represented by single specimens, the number of completely unknown species must be enormous!

IOW, Meyer here simply lies to the ignorant about the state of the fossil record. This is part of the handwaving away of the "Deep Diverge" theory of the Cambrian explosion which, as he admits is "axiomatic," not just to someone with a "NeoDarwinist" point of view but to anyone with a brain.

I leave off here, as Meyer commences the usual "too complicated to evolve" absurdities. I can only take so much without getting deleted or suspended. In summary, I don't believe that Meyer doesn't know any better. A peer-reviewed paper can't get away with what he pulls. He has written for the Discovery Institute a paper with the appearance of a peer-reviewed product, although in retrospect I'd say I'm amazed if you truly couldn't spot the Luddite aspect of the arguments presented within it. It's a voyage of naysaying and undiscovery.

It's a voyage of naysaying and undiscovery.

Well said.

Also, I am finding Alamo-Girl's excuse for ignoring the content of posts a much too familiar pose.