Posted on 04/02/2004 4:25:18 PM PST by PatrickHenry
Arlington, Va.—How land-living animals evolved from fish has long been a scientific puzzle. A key missing piece has been knowledge of how the fins of fish transformed into the arms and legs of our ancestors. In this week's issue of the journal Science, paleontologists Neil Shubin and Michael Coates from the University of Chicago and Ted Daeschler from the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, describe a remarkable fossil that bridges the gap between fish and amphibian and provides a glimpse of the structure and function changes from fin to limb.
The fossil, a 365-million-year-old arm bone, or humerus, shares features with primitive fish fins but also has characteristics of a true limb bone. Discovered near a highway roadside in north-central Penn., the bone is the earliest of its kind from any limbed animal.
"It has long been understood that the first four-legged creatures on land arose from the lobed-finned fishes in the Devonian Period," said Rich Lane, director of the National Science Foundation's (NSF) geology and paleontology program. "Through this work, we've learned that fish developed the ability to prop their bodies through modification of their fins, leading to the emergence of tetrapod limbs."
NSF, the independent federal agency that supports fundamental research and education across all fields of science and engineering, funded the research.
The bone's structure reveals an animal that had powerful forelimbs, with extensive areas for the attachment of muscles at the shoulder. "The size and extent of these muscles means that the humerus played a significant role in the support and movement of the animal," reported Shubin. "These muscles would have been important in propping the body up and pushing it off of the ground."
Interestingly, modern-day fish have smaller versions of the muscles. According to Coates, "When this humerus is compared to those of closely-related fish, it becomes clear that the ability to prop the body is more ancient than we previously thought. This means that many of the features we thought evolved to allow for life on land originally evolved in fish living in aquatic ecosystems."
The layered rock along the Clinton County, Penn., roadside were deposited by ancient stream systems that flowed during the Devonian Period, about 365 million years ago. Enclosed in the rocks is fossil evidence of an ecosystem teeming with plant and animal life. "We found a number of interesting fossils at the site," reported Daeschler, who uncovered the fossil in 1993. "But the significance of this specimen went unnoticed for several years because only a small portion of the bone was exposed and most of it lay encased in a brick-sized piece of red sandstone."
Not until three years ago, when Fred Mullison, the fossil preparator at the Academy of Natural Sciences, excavated the bone from the rock, did the importance of the new specimen become evident.
The work was also funded by a grant from the National Geographic Society.
Apparently, you failed to heed my advice about how it would be a mistake to answer my request by repeating old creationist canards. Sigh.
Okay, you asked for it...
My request to you was:
why don't you actually present a piece of this "blanket refutation" you allege exists in those math books, so that at the very least we can determine whether you, with all due respect, have the slightest clue what you're talking about. I await your mathematical disproof of evolution.Rather than actually present something in your own words, you chose to link to one of the many sites wherein creationism borders on becoming a parody of itself. Most of it consisted of empty chest-beating about how they have "destroyed" evolution (back in 1966! -- odd then that it's still going strong) using alleged arguments that the piece for the most part "forgets" to describe, instead relying on the usual tactic of "quote-mining" to try to convince the reader that, "these folks don't believe evolution, and so you shouldn't either!" Never mind that evidence and logical argument stuff, that's too tedious, don't'cha know...
The few times it *does* give a little sketchy info on the nature of the "disproofs" of evolution, unfortunately, it's laughably childish and just plain wrong.
So without further ado, let's shred some creationist canards about "mathematical disproofs" of evolution from that "WISTAR DESTROYS EVOLUTION" page that greenwolf linked, shall we?
1. "Dr. Martin Kaplan then set to work to lay plans for the 1966 Wistar Institute. It was the development of tremendously powerful digital computers that sparked the controversy. At last mathematicians were able to work out the probability of evolution ever having occurred. They discovered that, mathematically, life would neither have begun nor evolved by random action."
This one just kills me, the claim that "at last" mathematicians were "able to work out the probability" of evolution, because of "tremendously powerful digital computers" -- IN 1966! This is real knee-slapping stuff. In 1966 the most "tremendously powerful digital computer" would huff and puff doing routine payroll calculations. Even when I first started programming in 1974, the mainframe computers were real clunkers. And in any year a mathematician with a slide rule would have been able to do any calculation necessary to do probability calculations, no need to wait for the "tremendously powerful" (ROFL) computers of 1966. This is the sort of rhetorical (but nonsensical) puffery that is all too common in creationist screeds -- they're short on evidence, so they pad the piece with dramatic pronouncements, no matter how silly.
2. "For four days the Wistar convention continued, during which a key lecture was delivered by *M.P. Schutzenberger, a computer scientist, who explained that computers are large enough now [1966! - Ich.] to totally work out the mathematical probabilities of evolutionary theory—and they demonstrate that it is really fiction."
First, this is just a lie -- that's not what Schutzenberger's lecture claimed. The creationists who wrote that webpage have *drastically* overstated Schutzenberger's actual arguments. He made no claims of being able to "totally work out" mathematical probabilities of evolution, nor did he claim that "it is really fiction". Typical creationist tactic -- putting their own words into some authority's mouth.
Second, while Schutzenberger did some admirable pioneering work on this topic (and in 1966, that's about all that could be done with the computers available at the time and the early state of the field), he was clearly flat wrong on a number of basic points. For example, he said, "In fact if we try to simulate such a situation by making changes randomly at the typographic level (by letters or by blocks, the size of the unit does not really matter), on computer programs we find that we have no chance (i.e. less than 1/10^1000) even to see what the modified program would compute: it just jams." This is, in a word, ridiculous. Even in a highly structured language like C++ (a much more rigid domain than the plasticity of the genome), the number of possible character changes in a program which would *not* cause it to "jam" is more on the order of one in a thousand. I'd like to know what bodily orifice Schutzenberger pulled his bogus "1/10^1000" figure -- that's such an infinitismal figure that if it were true, programmers would be overjoyed. It would mean that typos while programming could not possibly introduce subtle bugs into a program, because the program would inevitably "jam" instead and alert them to the problem immediately!
Furthermore, there are plenty of genetic programming techniques which harness and produce productive results from the exact kind of "program evolution" that Schutzenberger declares impossible -- Avida, for one example. Score: Evolutionists 1, Schutzenberger 0.
3. "Murray Eden showed that it would be impossible for even a single ordered pair of genes to be produced by DNA mutations in the bacteria, E. coli,—with 5 billion years in which to produce it! His estimate was based on 5 trillion tons of the bacteria covering the planet to a depth of nearly an inch during that 5 billion years. He then explained that the genes of E. coli contain over a trillion (10^12) bits of data. That is the number 10 followed by 12 zeros."
Clearly, Murray Eden, who is described in creationist literature as a "Professor of Engineering", should keep his day job and not strive for a career in biology -- the genes of E. coli do not contain "over a trillion bits of data". The E. coli genome in fact contains only 4.60 million basepairs (9.2 million bits) of data. Eden has overstated the size of the genome by a mere 10,869,500% -- close enough for creationist work, I guess.
Need I point out that Eden is, not surprisingly, a creationist?
The author even screws up something as elementary as scientific notation. He says that the number 10^12 is "10 followed by 12 zeros". No, nice try. It's "10 followed by 11 zeros", or "1 followed by 12 zeros", take your pick.
If the creationists can't even get the easy stuff right (and any moderately bright high school student would have spotted the two errors listed above), can we trust them with the tougher stuff?
4. "Eden then showed the mathematical impossibility of protein forming by chance."
Fascinating, but since evolution doesn't claim or require that proteins "form by chance", that's rather a non sequitur, now, isn't it?
5. "He also reported on his extensive investigations into genetic data on hemoglobin (red blood cells). Hemoglobin has two chains, called alpha and beta. A minimum of 120 mutations would be required to convert alpha to beta. At least 34 of those changes require changeovers in 2 or 3 nucleotides. Yet, *Eden pointed out that, if a single nucleotide change occurs through mutation, the result ruins the blood and kills the organism!"
Again, Eden had better not quit his day job. Contrary to Eden's claim that a single mutation would "ruin the blood and kill the organism", in fact many mutational variations occur in the human population with no harmful effects at all -- see for example: DNA sequence variants in the G gamma-, A gamma-, delta- and beta-globin genes of man.
As for the claim that Eden allegedly announced the exact number of mutations it would require "to convert alpha to beta" at the 1966 meeting, I call bulls**t: DNA sequencing only became possible over a decade later, thanks to the invention of workable sequencing method by Frederick Sanger, which won him the Nobel Prize (his second!) in 1980.
6. "George Wald stood up and explained that he had done extensive research on hemoglobin also,—and discovered that if just ONE mutational change of any kind was made in it, the hemoglobin would not function properly. For example, the change of one amino acid out of 287 in hemoglobin causes sickle-cell anemia. "
Yes, a *specific* mutation in hemoglobin produces sickle-cell anemia, but that's hardly the same as proving that "one mutational change of any kind" would cause hemoglobin to "not function properly". Again, no techniques for actually exploring "mutational changes of any kind" even existed back in 1966. And as the above link shows, harmless mutations to hemoglobin have been found and cataloged, so any claim that mutational change "of any kind" would inevitably cause the hemoglobin to "not function properly" are quite obviously dead wrong.
And it's highly suspicious that the creationist website "summarizes" Wald's presentation instead of quoting him (even aside from the fact that they're putting claims into his mouth that would have been impossible for anyone to have made in 1966). Methinks the creationist is misrepresenting whatever Wald actually said in a creationist spin-cycle, then trying to lend it an air of authority by implying that Wald actually said it.
The website tries to imply that Wald is one of the "honest scientists" who has "rejected evolution" (so you should too!!!). But let's look at some of Wald's actual quotes, shall we?
[On evolution:] "We are the products of editing, rather than of authorship." -- George Wald (b. 1906), U.S. biochemist. “The Origin of Optical Activity,” vol. 69, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences (1957). By "editing" Wald was referring to natural selection.It's gross dishonesty of the worst sort for that creationist website to try to twist George Wald's work and try to present him as an opponent of evolution."It would be a poor thing to be an atom in a universe without physicists, and physicists are made of atoms. A physicist is an atom’s way of knowing about atoms." -- George Wald (b. 1906), U.S. biochemist. L.J. Henderson, The Fitness of the Environment, foreword (1959).
"For not all living creatures die. An amoeba, for example, need never die; it need not even, like certain generals, fade away. It just divides and becomes two new amoebas. In fact, death seems to have been a rather late invention in evolution. One can go a long way in evolution before encountering an authentic corpse. This is the journey that I would like to make with you. What I should like to do, of course, is to begin with the first living organism on this planet and then pursue evolution onward, asking the question: When did the first organism appear that cultivated the habit of dying? [huge snip] You see, every creature alive on the earth today represents an unbroken line of life that stretches back to the first primitive organism to appear on this planet; and that is about three billion years. That really is immortality. For if that line of life had ever broken, how could we be here? All that time, our germ plasm has been living the life of those singlecelled creatures, the protozoa, reproducing by simple division, and occasionally going through the process of syngamy -- the fusion of two cells to form one—in the act of sexual reproduction. All that time, that germ plasm has been making bodies and casting them off in the act of dying. If the germ plasm wants to swim in the ocean, it makes itself a fish; if the germ plasm wants to fly in the air, it makes itself a bird. If it wants to go to Harvard, it makes itself a man. The strangest thing of all is that the germ plasm that we carry around within us has done all those things." -- George Wald, "The Origin of Death", 1970
"Recombinant DNA technology [genetic engineering] faces our society with problems unprecedented not only the history of science, but of life on the Earth. It places in human hands the capacity to redesign living organisms, the products of some three billion years of evolution. [...] Up to now living organisms have evolved very slowly, and new forms have had plenty of time to settle in. Now whole proteins will be transposed overnight into wholly new associations, with consequences no one can foretell, either for the host organism or their neighbors." -- George Wald. "The Case Against Genetic Engineering." The Recombinant DNA Debate. Jackson and Stich, eds. p. 127, 128.
And that's the totality of the "mathematical arguments" contained in that linked web page. They're full of errors, misreprensentations, dishonesties, and logical flaws.
I asked you to present us with one of your alleged mathmematical arguments against evolution so that we could "determine whether you, with all due respect, have the slightest clue what you're talking about".
And now we have our answer.
Feel free to try again, if you think you can do better with your next attempt.
Correct, because evolution is not about "desires".
But rather that a paradigm of thought desires to extract tidbits of evidence to refute the existance of God.
Wrong. And how does your tidy little misconception deal with the existence of all those countless Christian evolutionists?
Once a person examines the facts objectively and not extrapolating out to a vague extreme, then real science may have a chance to find answers.
That's exactly how science has arrived at evolution. Thanks for your support.
How does the theorist not know that it is not a mutation ? After all the species became extinct.
Could we have that again in the form of a coherent thought?
There are many hazards to life even in the more stable present era. Radiation, harmful gasses from volcanic activity , for instance cyanide.
So?
So lets just cut the bull and get right to the point. Random chaos or God ?
Thanks for a wonderful example of the "fallacy of false dichotomy". There are many more possibilities than just those two, son. And evolution is not "random chaos" -- try to learn something about it before you attempt to critique it.
I choose God.
Feel free.
you choose random chaos.
No I don't.
Debate over , you lose.
How old are you, twelve?
Thanks for the honest admission of how creationists deal with the scientific evidence.
Wrong *again*.
1. To make a mathematical formula of any kind takes intelligence.
And this has *what* do with evolution, please? Evolution is not about the "making of mathematical formulas". It's about changes in organisms across generations. Where did you get the impression that it was about scribbling equations on the blackboard or something?
Show me a pattern in nature that is not complex ( fractals, DNA )
The rotation of the earth is a pattern in nature that is not complex. (Are you actually going anywhere with this?)
2. The simplest way to demonstrate statistical probability is to flip a coin. Heads or Tails ? only problem is it takes someone to flip the coin.
You're clearly unfamiliar with the natural random flipping of polar molecules in a gas (for just one example), which takes place just fine without "someone to flip the coin". Back to school with you.
3. First Law of Physics.
Nice noun phrase -- going anywhere with it?
Debate over , you lose
I revise my estimate downward: ten?
Again, what about it?
1st Law of debating: never answer a question that is designed to refract the point.
You might want to look up the definition of the word "refract" before you misuse it again.
But if I understand your mangled sentence, you appear to be saying that you intend to run away from any challenge to your position.
Mathematics cannot prove or disprove creation. Only faith can do that.
Faith can't do it either -- are you sure you understand the meaning of the word "prove"?
I have never been to Japan but I have faith it is there.
No, you have a great deal of evidence that it is there from multiple independent and verifiable sources, and thus concluding that Japan is there does not require "faith".
I have never seen an electron but I have faith an electron will deliver this message to your brain.
The photons feel left out.
Ask the creationists, they're always obsessing over them.
You could drive a battleship through the holes in evolutions missing links.
Oh really? Such as?
And this allegedly disproves evolution... how?
Something has to make "something " happen.
Even accepting that as a valid restatement of Newton's first law of motion (and it most certainly is not), this allegedly disproves evolution.... how?
From nothing, nothing comes.
Feel free to try to prove that.
In the meantime, I'm sure you'll be relieved to learn that evolution does not require "something from nothing", so your digression is irrelevant to the discussion.
Feel free to document this amazing assertion of yours.
You can tell that from the proof they have.(none)
Post #110 just sailed *right* over your head, *WHOOSH*, didn't it?
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