Posted on 10/15/2005 3:44:16 AM PDT by PatrickHenry
A paleontologist testified in the Dover school board trial about how fossils connect species.
The ancestor of the whale and its first cousin the hippopotamus walked the Earth for 40 million years, munching on plants, before dying out in the ice ages.
Known as the anthracotheres, it became extinct 50 to 60 million years ago, but not before its evolutionary tree diverged — the whale forging into the oceans, the hippopotamus to the African swamps.
Kevin Padian, a University of California-Berkeley paleontologist, told the story of the whale’s journey, along with the travels of its closest living relative, in U.S. Middle District Court Friday to illustrate how the fossil record connects us to our past.
In the First Amendment lawsuit over Dover Area High School’s intelligent design policy, Padian was the plaintiffs’ final science expert to testify. The defense will begin to present its side Monday.
Padian’s testimony was essentially a response to intelligent-design proponents’ claims that paleontology does not account for missing links and the fossil record belies evolutionary theory.
“The problem is that there are no clear transitional fossils linking land mammals to whales,” the pro-intelligent-design textbook “Of Pandas and People” states.
“How many intermediates do you need to suggest relationships?” Padian wondered.
He pointed to numerous transitional fossils as he traced the lineage of the whale to its early ancestors, a group of cloven-hoofed mammals of a group named cetartiodactyla, illustrating the gradual changes of features along the way.
“We think the transitions are pretty good,” he said.
One of Padian’s concerns with intelligent design — the idea that life’s complexities demand an intelligent designer — is that it shuts down the search for answers, he said. “It worries me that students would be told that you can’t get from A to B with natural causes,” he said.
One of the complaints of 11 parents suing the school district is that, after Dover biology students are told about intelligent design, they are referred to “Pandas,” which is housed in the high school library.
While the connection between the whale and hippopotamus is recent, Padian said some of the fossils linking whales to land-dwelling mammals go back to the Civil War but were ignored by the authors of “Pandas.”
The curator of Berkeley’s Museum of Paleontology and author of the “Encyclopedia of Dinosaurs” also testified to the evolutionary link between dinosaurs and birds.
“Pandas” states, “Intelligent design means that various forms of life began abruptly through an intelligent agent, with their distinctive features already intact — fish with fins and scales, birds with feathers, beaks, and wings, etc.”
But Padian, at times affectionately, showed numerous pictures and diagrams of different reptiles evolving from ones possessing scales to ones possessing feathers.
Of a fossil of an archaeopteryx found in the 1860s, Padian said, “Now this is a beautiful critter.”
He also criticized the book’s assertions on homology — the study of similar characteristics of living organisms used to explain their relationships to other organisms.
As he cross-examined Padian, Dover’s attorney Robert Muise brought up one of science’s most ardent evolutionists in raising questions about the fossil record.
Muise asked Padian about the late Stephen Jay Gould’s theory of punctuated equilibrium, the idea that rather than Darwin’s characterization of evolution as slow and gradual change, it may be better described as taking place in fits and starts.
Gould offered the idea as an explanation for the patterns found in the fossil record, which shows abrupt appearances of new species, followed by long stagnant periods with little change.
While “Pandas” argues that intelligent-design proponents consider punctuated equilibrium unprovable, Padian said Gould offered the theory as an explanation to gaps in the fossil record.
“Is natural selection responsible for punctuated equilibrium?” Muise asked at one point.
“That’s a great question,” Padian said. While it may raise questions about the mechanism of evolution, he answered, it doesn’t contradict the idea of common descent.
But the thing that I have said many times(and I think they truly do not get) is that even a heathen Wolf can see that cosmo-evo is nothing
Wolf
1. Ice cores don't have annual rings, they have layers. Those individual layers are evidence of yearly cycles of snow deposition. Taken in groups, those layers provide evidence of extremely long periods of time and hold records indicating long-term climatological changes.
2. Trees have annual rings. Those individual rings are evidence of yearly cycles of growth and dormancy. Taken in groups, those rings provide evidence of extremely long periods of time and hold records of long-term climatological shift as well as local events such as fire and drought. These punctuating events allow a scientist to accurately synchronize the rings from a relatively recent tree to an older tree. This allows the ring-counting dating method to progress even farther back in time.
If you have difficulty comprehending and keeping distinct these two sources of information, it does not surprise me that you are susceptible to the fallacies put forth by the YEC crowd.
so?
each side of a tetrahedron (D4) is flat, so it fits the statement
something just occured to me...
do trees growing within a degree or two latitude of the equator have growth rings? If yes, why? If yes, do they appear different (less distinct?) than the rings of trees in the temperate latitudes?
a problem with the term "irreducible complexity"
it seems a bastardization of a valid engineering concept properly called "irreducible simplicity"
In a well-designed machine:
1. there are present the smallest possible number of components to accomplish the design objective
2. each component is required for the machine to function
3. each component is specialized for function within the machine, and poorly suited for use elsewhere outside of the machine
*Engineering for reality is more complex. For one example: in the theoretical extreme, the machine and all its parts are suited for one application and a single use. In reality, durable repeat function is desirable, so components tend to be made to be more robust than the absolute extreme simplified form would allow. As another example, also stemming from desirable durability, the requirements of maintenance often cause the engineer to include far more parts (fasteners, pins, access ports, etc...) than the design purpose of the machine itself requires.*
The ID crowd seem to have deliberately parasitized a legitimate engineering ethos and warped it for their own ends.
The classic "illustration" they use, the mousetrap, is a good indicator of what I mean.
A spring-jaw mousetrap is indeed a nearly perfectly simplified piece of engineering. Each component is required, no extra components exist, each component is poorly suited to other applications. It is an elegant example of irreducible simplicity.
However... the IDers disingenuously call it irreducibly COMPLEX, and then dance semantic jigs to imply that biological systems display the same characteristics as a deliberately engineered and aggressively simplified mechanical device.
It seems to me that we have had enough of this nonsense.
It is time to slap them with the real and valid concept: Irreducible SIMPLICITY.
While biological features and systems are complex, and while it may be very difficult (or impossible) for random mutation and selective-pressure driven population changes to explain how such features and systems could directly evolve from simpler components, it seems to me that the ToE *can* explain such systems as irreducibly SIMPLIFIED results of evolutionary processes.
Looking at parasitism, symbiosis, and cellular organelles is instructive. Multifunctional features and organisms gradually (as populations) lose features and complexities needed for independent function as they become more specialized for interdependent function. Some features become adapted and combined during the simplification process.
I'm not a biologist, so I turn this over to the Big Dogs for a full flesh-out.
I'm tired of hearing this "irreducible complexity" bullpiuckey.
funny how that works, ain't it?
Essentially the crushing DNA evidence coming in over the last few years appears to have shocked the scientific ID luminaries such as Behe, Denton, and Dembski. If they ever honestly believed in special creation of "kinds" they cannot have expected the molecular evidence to so completely refute it. So they have redrawn the ID map in Behe's case to "Somewhere, somehow, the Designer did something though Behe cannot say what or how", and in Denton's case reversed the claim from "Evolution is so unlikely that a Designer must have intervened at every stage" to "Evolution is so likely that the Designer must have set up the Goldilocks universe to make it that likely". Dembski is largely silent on the issue, but has publicly admitted that the evidence supports common descent. This must have been a bitter pill for them to swallow. Had the molecular evidence come out differently they would have been declaring "I told you so" to the scientific world and collecting their Nobel Laurels. Curiously however they have not shut down the Discovery Institute in their embarassment.
Why was this thread moved to the Blogger forum?
Ergo, the annual layers could be ~ 5.5 ft thick, adding up to just 48 layers.
Just to assume that 268 ft of ice have to represent 200 years at any place in Greenland (not the tiniest of islands)seems to be illogical.
"Yeah, I read Plato. I wasn't impressed."
I'm certain that's true.
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It seems to be almost personal doesn't it?
Well, it's flat up until you fall into one of the engraved numbers.
well, okay then. glad that's settled
That's not fair. You did the arithmetic Rather than jump to conclusions.
Every time "Havoc" posts, the thread moves one step closer to the garbage can.
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