Posted on 02/21/2005 4:03:29 AM PST by PatrickHenry
Nineteenth-century English social scientist Herbert Spencer made this prescient observation: "Those who cavalierly reject the Theory of Evolution, as not adequately supported by facts, seem quite to forget that their own theory is supported by no facts at all." Well over a century later nothing has changed. When I debate creationists, they present not one fact in favor of creation and instead demand "just one transitional fossil" that proves evolution. When I do offer evidence (for example, Ambulocetus natans, a transitional fossil between ancient land mammals and modern whales), they respond that there are now two gaps in the fossil record.
This is a clever debate retort, but it reveals a profound error that I call the Fossil Fallacy: the belief that a "single fossil"--one bit of data--constitutes proof of a multifarious process or historical sequence. In fact, proof is derived through a convergence of evidence from numerous lines of inquiry--multiple, independent inductions, all of which point to an unmistakable conclusion.
We know evolution happened not because of transitional fossils such as A. natans but because of the convergence of evidence from such diverse fields as geology, paleontology, biogeography, comparative anatomy and physiology, molecular biology, genetics, and many more. No single discovery from any of these fields denotes proof of evolution, but together they reveal that life evolved in a certain sequence by a particular process.
One of the finest compilations of evolutionary data and theory since Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species is Richard Dawkins's magnum opus, The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution (Houghton Mifflin, 2004)--688 pages of convergent science recounted with literary elegance. Dawkins traces numerous transitional fossils (what he calls "concestors," the last common ancestor shared by a set of species) from Homo sapiens back four billion years to the origin of heredity and the emergence of evolution. No single concestor proves that evolution happened, but together they reveal a majestic story of process over time.
Consider the tale of the dog. With so many breeds of dogs popular for so many thousands of years, one would think there would be an abundance of transitional fossils providing paleontologists with copious data from which to reconstruct their evolutionary ancestry. In fact, according to Jennifer A. Leonard, an evolutionary biologist then at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History, "the fossil record from wolves to dogs is pretty sparse." Then how do we know whence dogs evolved? In the November 22, 2002, Science, Leonard and her colleagues report that mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) data from early dog remains "strongly support the hypothesis that ancient American and Eurasian domestic dogs share a common origin from Old World gray wolves."
In the same issue, molecular biologist Peter Savolainen of the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm and his colleagues note that even though the fossil record is problematic, their study of mtDNA sequence variation among 654 domestic dogs from around the world "points to an origin of the domestic dog in East Asia" about 15,000 years before the present from a single gene pool of wolves.
Finally, anthropologist Brian Hare of Harvard University and his colleagues describe in this same issue the results of a study showing that domestic dogs are more skillful than wolves at using human signals to indicate the location of hidden food. Yet "dogs and wolves do not perform differently in a nonsocial memory task, ruling out the possibility that dogs outperform wolves in all human-guided tasks," they write. Therefore, "dogs' social-communicative skills with humans were acquired during the process of domestication."
No single fossil proves that dogs came from wolves, but archaeological, morphological, genetic and behavioral "fossils" converge to reveal the concestor of all dogs to be the East Asian wolf. The tale of human evolution is divulged in a similar manner (although here we do have an abundance of fossils), as it is for all concestors in the history of life. We know evolution happened because innumerable bits of data from myriad fields of science conjoin to paint a rich portrait of life's pilgrimage.
frgoff,
downs syndrome isn't a genetic mutation, it is a form of polyploidy of the chromosomes called "trisomy" - an error of cell division unrelated to the contents of the DNA itself.
That you would put forth Trisomy 21 (the chromosoamal abnormality causing the Downs Syndrome phenotype expression) as an example of "seemingly predictable mutations" is laughable, and goes a very long way towards utterly invalidating all else you stated in your post.
Not directed personally at you, PH, but all of you as a group.
Yep. The idea is to ping all those who differ, so they can be called every name in the book, including ridiculing God's name, plus reflecting the snobbery of the Evo masters who gain pleasure and satisfaction from their masterbation to the awe and delight of their audience. Most peculiar I must say.
no.
first I felt amusement.
then I felt pity.
now I feel disgust.
at no time have I felt love for them.
Please forgive me, your literalness.
are they permitted to use measures in nanometers to do so?
Downs Syndrome is a mutation and in certain cases it is heritable.
I have an answer..
Your premise is incorrect..
We still have apes because they, like us, evolved from a common ancestor..
Present apes, just like man, are seperate branches on the "tree" of evolution..
We both have a common ancestor, but at some distant point in time, we began to seperate from each other.. They went one way, we went another..
Eventually humans became a species distinct from the apes.. Smarter, more versatile, the ability to not only use tools, but create new tools.. Fire, Axe, Spear, Language, Religion, Society, Technology...
Since this is the premise of the posted article I suggest you go back and read it more thoroughly..
Actually I think the "fossile" record clearly shows evolution but I am willing to see the evidence in front of me. The point, however, was the invalidity of your question of whether one could see evolution happen since the timescale is beyond human lifetimes. I won't be sidetracked by your inability to stay up with the discussion
You are here.
no matter where you go in life...
last I checked, Trisomy-21 is not a genetic mutation (no alteration to the genetic information in the DNA) but is instead a variation of polyploidy through cell division error.
I could be mistaken, and invite you to prove that I am.
If you have reason to believe Trisomy-21 is indeed a mutation of the sequence of base-pairs in the genetic code of the P1 generation's gametogenitor cells, cite your sources.
Based on that, neither theory will ever be "proven". We cannot go back in time to observe the Garden of Eden nor can we directly observe the evolution of homo sapiens.
You accept the truth of the Bible based on your faith. I can see nothing wrong with that. Others accept the truth of evolution based on centuries of science and study of millions of years of fossil records. Then there are the "tweeners" - those of us who don't accept Genesis as a historical record of the Beginning and therefore lend credence to evolutionary theory.
Since theories are collections of facts, scientific theories are subject to change as new facts emerge. Instead of damning science for modifying evolutionary theory, perhaps we should give credit.
Creationists have little to rely on in this debate other than their faith and the Book of Genesis. Attempts to debunk evolution only expose gaps in the theory - the string of facts. That doesn't mean creationism may not be the truth; it means there are fewer facts with rather large gaps. Those gaps are filled with faith.
PH will you add me or switch me to your science ping list? I am still interested in the Evo list, sometimes I would just like a nice genteel scientific discussion.
Ah, no I won't retract it. From the site YOU pointed me to:
I suppose a creato admitting that they've learned something and they previously held a wrong belief was a bit much to hope for.
Unfortunately, it's impossible to know that a scientific theory is right.
Yes, that is true. Why are you quoting that correct statement to me? Scientific theories are merely the simplest natural explanations that fit the observed facts. They never can be anything more because science acknowledges that an observation could come along tomorrow that makes it necessary to modify any or all established theories. No theory about the physical universe is ever proven or even provable. If you want proof then study number-theory or geometry.
We behave as if scientific theories are true pending further data, and this assumption has allowed us to learn a great deal about the universe and to manipulate it in ways that pre-science civilizations could scarcely imagine.
Eventhough there are ST that are observable and provable. Again, ToE is not provable and has not been sufficiently shown to have happened, therefore it has to be taken on faith, just like any religion.
Repeating your error doesn't make you right. I invite you to disprove my contention that all the effects that science attributes to gravity actually result from the agency of innumerable very strong and tiny Invisible Pink Unicorns that push objects about by Unicorn Magic according to their whim (which happens at the moment and in recorded history luckily for us to correspond to a desire that objects with mass should accelerate towards each other with a force proportional to their mass and the inverse square of their distance). All that graviton stuff and bendy space stuff is just "unproven" and faith-based, like a religion. I think that we should pray to the Unicorns, because if we don't they might get angry with us and stop pushing things in such a helpful way...
I note that you completely failed to address the argument that ToE is supported by millions of data points and has numerous successful predictions under its belt. I suspect that this is because you don't understand the nature of science. The very best thing that you can say about a theory is that it agrees with the existing physical evidence, and that it has made successful predictions about new physical evidence.
All done.
What conclusion did you come to on this then?
How hard did you try to work it out? My betting is that the moment the apparent contradiction occurred to you (or more likely you read it on some creationist crapsite) you stopped thinking. Don't tell me that you've made a serious attempt to think about why the "direction" of evolutionary phenotypes might be different from one species to another, in different environments, in different eras, with different food requirements, different predation, etc etc etc
Or maybe you did try but couldn't work it out, and you think you (from a position of almost complete ignorance about evolutionary biology) have got a killer argument there that all those fools of professional biologists were too stupid to spot. Yeah, right. That particular fallacy even has a name, "The argument from personal ignorance".
This is just as ignorant and determinedly silly as the "why are there still apes?" non-argument that we get bombarded with. Can I suggest that before commenting further on matters biological and evolutionary you learn a little bit about what you are talking about?
T'ain't no such thing on these threads. No matter what the subject matter (cosmology, life on Mars or the Jovian moons, particle physics, whatnot), you'll find that it gores the ox of at least a handful of the Luddite Brigade on this forum.
The fact that you can't Observe evolution because of this magical timescale is the point.
At some birth one should have seen a significant change, but with such a ridiculous theory, who knows.
Give us a source for this info, please.
...Genesis, and every other dept of science who now is finally starting to admit ID. Biology is the only junk science still holding on to their religious credo of evolution.
It's really starting to crumble.
BTW, science increasingly discovers what Genesis teaches...
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