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To: Jim Noble
Let's see the data that supports random variation of complex multicellular organisms leading to speciation. Bring it on.

We're here to help: 29+ Evidences for Macroevolution. When you've digested that, let me know. We have more. Lots more.

19 posted on 02/21/2005 6:52:24 AM PST by PatrickHenry (<-- Click on my name. The List-O-Links for evolution threads is at my freeper homepage.)
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To: PatrickHenry
I clicked on the link you gave and thought it interesting that the first cited authority is Freemon & Herron. I have a copy by me as I type. It runs almost 800 pages. It doesn't get to speciation until page 583 (unless you count an earlier page and a half around page 100, where they at least make an attempt to confront Behe), and then ends its discussion of that topic on page 614. That's it; 32 pages about what we're really talking about here. (Nobody I am aware of is challenging adaptive change within a specific species.) And, of course that's a lot more than Darwin had to say.

This past week I picked up a copy of Speciation (Published 2004), by Coyne and Orr, while visiting Cornell. Chapter One of this book starts out with a quote from Origin and then says:

So begins The Origin of Species, whose title and first paragraph imply that Darwin will have much to say about speciation. Yet his magnum opus remains largely silent on the "mystery of mysteries," and the little it does say about this mystery is seen by most modern evolutionists as muddled or wrong.
You can read part of the introduction to Speciation at Amazon. It seems obvious to me from the introduction that Coyne and Orr will attempt to deal with just about every question I have and guys like you seem to ignore. They emphasize "an insistence on hypotheses that are testable," implying that a lot of what passes for "evolution" in not testable. In fact a page earlier, they have this sentence: "But given our almost complete ignorance of how these forms of selection [natural and sexual] give rise to new species, this conclusion was based more on intuition than data."

It will probably be several months before I work my way through the book. I'll have an open mind as I go through it. It will be open because I don't know the answers. But I can recognize arguments that are "muddled and wrong" or "based upon intuition," and I see many of those posted here at FR on this topic.

ML/NJ

38 posted on 02/21/2005 8:06:42 AM PST by ml/nj
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