Posted on 01/09/2009 10:28:39 PM PST by cacoethes_resipisco
15 EVOLUTIONARY GEMS Henry Gee, Rory Howlett and Philip Campbell*
A resource from Nature for those wishing to spread awareness of evidence for evolution by natural selection.
Gems from the fossil record 1 Land-living ancestors of whales 2 From water to land 3 The origin of feathers 4 The evolutionary history of teeth 5 The origin of the vertebrate skeleton
Gems from habitats 6 Natural selection in speciation 7 Natural selection in lizards 8 A case of co-evolution 9 Differential dispersal in wild birds 10 Selective survival in wild guppies 11 Evolutionary history matters
Gems from molecular processes 12 Darwin’s Galapagos finches 13 Microevolution meets macroevolution 14 Toxin resistance in snakes and clams 15 Variation versus stability
(Excerpt) Read more at saintjoe.edu ...
I am not at all a creationist but that statement is ridiculous.
If you have an alternative explanation that makes testable predictions and holds up to peer scrutiny, there are millions of dollars, not to mention a gold medal, waiting for you to collect them.
The reason none of the ID proponents have collected such wealth has nothing to do with the scientific community’s prejudices and everything to do with the fact that they have not produced such an explanation.
I don’t need an alternative explanation to call that statement ridiculous. That is arguing from silence, a logical fallacy. Bringing ID into it is a straw man.
Nuff said ... first visit to that site but after a quick peek, i would say its enough to make an evo sputter like Bawney Fwank on the Bill O’Reilley show.
When they discover that hot steamy pot of primordial bowl of soup and demonstrate when the collecting stopped and by what miracle then they can have a claim to legitimacy. Until then it is about the gold and who is who. The wealth you described was the greatest welfare legislation in the history of mankind. Yet not one of these will take responsibility for the result of their methodology.
Decade after decade young minds of mush are told they are animals and election 2008 we all can see the evidence of the doctrine. Be happy.
Placemarker
It seems to me you are demanding of your opposition something that Darwinists can never produce themselves. How exactly is the idea that we evolved from unicellular life solely through the mechanisms of random mutation and natural selection over millions of years testable, replicable, or verifiable?
Heck, I’ll make it easy on you. Show me one instance where we have witnessed in nature clear evidence that these mechanisms led to the development of truly new organisms. Please don’t respond with typical Darwinist red herrings like finches beaks changing slightly, or a fruitfly being mutated to grow a leg out of his forehead. I want evidence of Darwinian evolutionary processes producing true speciation as he predicted.
Apparently discussion was not the intended purpose of posting this thread. I challenged the opening premise of the article but cacoethes_resipisco wasn’t interested in why I challenged it. Instead he rebutted with a challenge to me to produce an analysis having no relation to my statement. That attitude is not representative of the true nature of scientific inquiry. That’s just an argumentative deflection.
Sorry if you felt I was short with you. The article noted an observbation: that pretty much all bioligists, paleontologists and others in the life sciences take it for granted that evolution over billions of years is, simply, a fact. You said “that’s ridiculous”. I assumed that if you had something to add, you would have done so. Do you have anything to add?
> How exactly is the idea that we evolved from unicellular
> life solely through the mechanisms of random mutation and
> natural selection over millions of years testable,
> replicable, or verifiable?
Common descent is falsifiable (the key criteria) on any number of grounds. If, for example, a bunny rabbit (or some similar mammal) appeared in a pre-Cambrian (or Cambrian, or Devonian) strata, that would be a huge challenge. It would require either that common descent was wrong or that bunny rabbits had developed time travel.
If bird-mammal transitionals were discovered, that would crush “Darwinism” utterly.
For a longer list: “Based on our standard phylogenetic tree, we may expect to find gill pouches or egg shells at some point in mammalian embryonic development (and we do). However, we never expect to find nipples, hair, or a middle-ear incus bone at any point in fish, amphibian, or reptilian embryos. Likewise, we might expect to find teeth in the mouths of some avian embryos (as we do), but we never expect to find bird-like beaks in eutherian mammal embryos (eutherians are placental mammals such as humans, cows, dogs, or rabbits). We may expect to find human embryos with tails (and we do; see Figure 2.3.1), but we never expect to find leg buds or developing limbs in the embryos of manta rays, eels, teleost fish, or sharks. Any such findings would be in direct contradiction to macroevolutionary theory (Gilbert 1997, esp. Ch. 23).”
As to your second point: there have been many speciation events observed, but let’s shortcut, since you’ll probably say “well, it’s still a mouse”. True, the 150 or so years that we’ve been looking, or even the few thousand since humans developed writing, isn’t enough time to see change of the kind of land mammal to whale, or even ape-like ancestor to human. On the other hand, once you admit that “micro”evolution exists, what mechanism do you think exists to keep it from becoming “macro”? If there is such a mechanism, what might it look like?
The article noted an observbation: that pretty much all bioligists, paleontologists and others in the life sciences take it for granted that evolution over billions of years is, simply, a fact. You said “that’s ridiculous”.
The opening statement, that I quoted to respond to, declared much more than that. It made a comparison between the speculative and assumptive arguments that make up the Theory of Evolution (however compelling those arguments might be) and the direct observational measurements that make up the basis of our knowledge of the physical mechanics of the solar system. It stated that both are equivalent proofs of fact. That is absurdly illogical and unscientific.
The reason I didn't extrapolate to begin with is that experience tells me that there is a low probability on threads of this nature that discussion is what is being sought after. In order to save myself some time and effort I simply entered a concise challenge to the opening premise of the article. Which is a logical place to begin a discussion of an article. By waiting for a response to that I was able to find out whether this thread was put here to stimulate a discussion or an egoistic clash of ideologies without wasting the effort of expanding on a point that might not be relevant to the thread's intended purpose.
That saves my time and yours doesn't it?
I’m sorry, but I find it hard to believe that finding a bunny rabbit in strata that is too low would be challenging at all for Darwinists. Most likely, they would say it the strata had eroded and the fossil had “washed down” from higher strata. Whether that could actually be determined or not, that is the stance I am sure they would take, since they have used that in the past to explain so-called “out of place” fossil others have brought up. So the fossil evidence, in my mind, can’t really be used to falsify common descent as you say, since Darwinists would simply “explain away” any anomalies.
I’m not sure what you mean about bird-mammal transitionals. Do you mean if we found “intermediate” forms showing birds evolved into mammals that would be the end of Darwinism? I think rather Darwinists would just put out some new theories to explain it, whilst hoping everyone would forget their old, wrong theories if they simply don’t talk about them. Kind of like they stopped talking about Piltdown man, and don’t use the old hoax charts of horse evolution much anymore.
The quote you posted about finding unexpected characteristics in embryo development is a bit of circular reasoning I think. First of all, it posits that these similar structures we see across different types of animals are evidence of evolution in the first place, which is not the only explanation. Secondly, it states that if we saw some features we don’t see in embryos, it could falsify Darwinism. Well, Darwinists used what they observed in embryos as part of the basis of their “phylogenetic tree” in the first place, so of course we won’t find evidence that doesn’t fit in the picture they have painted! Sorry, but I won’t take the bait on that one.
You are right, I would probably say “it’s still a mouse” to the events normally cited as speciation. If 6,000 odd years of recorded history is not long enough to observe macroevolution in progress, one could easily say that it is very convenient for the Darwinists that their pet theory is unobservable in the scale of human experience. I could similarly state that Santa Claus flies around the world every Christmas, but of course he is so fast we cannot see him or capture him on even the fastest cameras. Prove me wrong!
The mechanism I think exists which would prevent microevolution from becoming “macro”, as you say, is simple and readily observable. It’s the basic nature of all creatures who reproduce sexually, that they can only reproduce with like creatures. This is so simple a child can understand. A man and a monkey cannot bear offspring, no matter how hard they try. A horse and a donkey, on the other hand can produce offspring, though rarely viable. This demonstrates a basic law of nature, which was well understood before Darwin muddied the waters of science: Like kinds reproduce only with like kinds. Therefore, if microevolution, over millions of years, did produce say, a man from a monkey, then how would the new man reproduce? At some point, in order for it to be a true speciation event, the man would have to be so radically different from his forebears to constitute a new “kind”, and therefore be unable to reproduce with the monkeys. Unless lightning strikes twice and another monkey gave birth to a woman at the same time and general locality, that man would die childless. So it would happen in any case of macroevolution. Darwinists expect us to believe this type of ludicrous scenario happened not only once, but millions of times.
Now, I realize most true believers in Darwin will take issue with my reference to “kinds” of animals. Even pre-Darwin, biologists knew the old system of species was insufficient to explain phenomenon like hybridization they witnessed. Instead of formulating a more accurate system that would function as the term species was originally intended, they allowed Darwin to redefine species in terms which fit his theory. At this point, I think a farmer or dog breeder understands more about the true nature of species than most scientists, that is why I used the non-scientific term “kind”, since it is much clearer and specific than the way species is used nowadays.
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