Evolution Can't Explain Biotic Diversity (vainity)

Here I present a statistical argument against Macro-evolution. Several evolutionists attempt to refute it. I put their comments in color. This was BEFORE gore3000 started posting in blue, so I don't mean anything by using that color. Mine are in black..I stick with this even when we are quoting each other in our posts. I invite all concerned Freepers to evaluate the arguments presented.....

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And that brings Ahban to his main point..... If there have indeed been 1.25 million groups of critters diverse enough from all other groups of critters to be classified as their own FAMILY, then......

Since all or almost all of the METAZOANS (animals) first came on the scene at the Cambrian some 543 million years ago, there has been on average, a new FAMILY appear every 435 years. (543 million/1.25 million)

The advent of Man and our recent (since man appeared) climate swings constitute a situation where MORE EVOLUTION than the norm should occur. Man has initiated a large number of extinctions. There have been a lot of extinctions during this epoch. That should open the door for larger than normal amounts of evolution as various niches are left unoccupied or new ones created by man's activities.

Note that by a reasonable set of numbers, NEW FAMILIES should be appearing every 435 years. Yet we have never even witnessed a new animal SPECIES except by SUBTRACTION of information. By this I mean species splitting due to geography or loss of an intermediate subpopulation or some such thing as that.

WHY O WHY don't we see NEW FAMILES? Have we even seen any new FAMILES in the last 30,000 years? I don't mean newly discovered ones that have been around a long time, I mean the NEW FAMILIES that we should expect to find if evolution is still doing what its proponents claim it has been doing throughout biotic history. Where are they?

It is far more reasonable to conclude that the ID people are right. There are only so many ways you can shuffle the genes of a fly or an ape or whatever. There are only so many allowable gene combinations that work and there are only so many mutations that will produce viable offspring under any natural cirmcustances.

ID Proposes this: Living creatures live on islands of genetic possiblity. The gaps between family groups are too big to be crossed the once every 434 years the evidence suggests it would have to be, should evolution be responsible.

I hope that even if not all of you can agree that ID is the best explanation, that at least we are not unreasonable to question the evolutionary hypothesis. I for one just don't see how it can do what folks have claimed that it has done. And if it did, why has it stopped? Where are the new families that should be popping up every few centuries? We have not seen that kind of change. We are still piddling over whether the populations we see separating are even truly new SPECIES.

To: VadeRetro[vade]
I think you don't realize that the divergence which ultimately results in a new family doesn't make a new family right away. At first the difference is just variety level, then species, etc. You have to get way down the road before you can appreciate the importance of that fork in the road back there in time.[/vade]

I am allowing for that Vade. I am not asking you to show it to me in one animal generation. I am saying that within an OBSERVABLE time it should have happened. If evolution proceeds at the rate which biotic diversity suggests, it should happen at the FAMILY level at an observable rate (once every 435 years on average).

I realize that to some degree it is a matter of opinion where family lines are drawn, but the borders are still real. The line can be fuzzy, but any competent scientist can tell any member of the CANINE family from any member of the FELINE family, or any other mammal family. Please, you simply must concede that this is so.

Yes, the proposed difference must work its way through the VARIETY level, then the SPECIES level, and then the GENUS level before branching off into a new family. I am allowing for all that, but I am also trying to put some numbers to the problem to determine how long this progession, on average, takes.

Those numbers tell me the VAREITY-SPECIES-GENUS-NEW FAMILY progression should occur at least once every 435 years. This has not been observed, even though conditions have been more favorable than average since the advent of man for it to occur. Hence I conclude that even though evolution is at work producing new SPECIES via subtraction of info, SOMETHING ELSE must have also contributed to biotic diversty.

[vade]
Putting it another way, your model of the process smears the appearance of new taxons out evenly in time regardless of taxonomic level. You shouldn't do it that way. We know it's a tree structure. You don't see new big branches on a tree, only new little ones. You might as well ask why we don't see a new Kingdom every so often. In other words, you've found a sneaky way back to that creationist standby of "When have you ever seen a snake turn into a bird?"
[/vade]

Negative my virtual friend. I am calculating how often we should see a new MIDDLE SIZED BRANCH. It turns out it is about once every 435 years. Yet all we see are more tiny twigs. Why is that?

I did not ask about Kingdoms because they are rare events that could not be expected to occur within human history. We cannot glean any truth by my asking you for something that we could not reasonably-by the numbers, expect to occur anyway. I am trying to find the truth here, I think you may be too.

I am not asking you to explain why we don't see a snake turn into a bird- that is silly. The numbers don't suggest that can happen in any reasonable amount of time. But they do suggest that we should be seeing numerous new families appear. Where are they?

62 Posted on 05/14/2001 19:14:33 PDT by Ahban
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To: gore3000
This shows very clearly that different people have different genes in them while they are still human beings.

Yes. A species is a rather fuzzy thing with every member divergent from the species average. Hold that thought!

Take a small subgroup from that species and isolate it. It doesn't have nearly the gene pool of the parent population. Its average characteristics are already by random luck different from the species average at the time of separation.

Mutations in the small group will have a disproportionate effect compared to what they would have had in the big group. After all, if your population has twenty million members, a mutation affects only one twenty millionth of the population at first. If all you have is a breeding pair, a mutation in one affects half the population as soon as it happens.

In other words, the stage is set for the small group to diverge like crazy from the big group, especially if the environmental pressures on it are new and different in its new home.

64 Posted on 05/14/2001 19:19:43 PDT by VadeRetro
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To: Ahban
I am allowing for that Vade. I am not asking you to show it to me in one animal generation. I am saying that within an OBSERVABLE time is should have happened. If evolution proceeds at the rate which biotic diversity suggests, it should happen at the FAMILY level at an observable rate (once every 435 years on average).

You're simply repeating yourself and it's still wrong. You don't get a new family every 435 years. No new divergence is a family right away, ever. Your average is only correct in some strict statistical sense, as a man with his feet in the oven and his head in the freezer should feel comfortable on the average.

Interestingly, Vercingetorix gave you a different rebuttal than I did. Who's right? We both are. His point is that there are periods of explosive adaptive radiation in the punctuated equilibrium model, usually following an big extinction event. Various ecological niches get discovered or rediscovered in a hurry, then things settle down again for a long time. That's true, too, but so is my point.

Negative my virtual friend. I am calculating how often we should see a new MIDDLE SIZED BRANCH.

You never see a middle sized branch newly budding out. The new ones are all little. Some later become big ones, some never do. Some get to middle size and no bigger. Some die a-budding.

66 Posted on 05/14/2001 19:30:15 PDT by VadeRetro
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You have computed an average over time while ignoring the possibility of simultaneous development of multiple new families. Mass extinctions have been common throughout the 3.5 billion year history of life on this planet. The explosion of new life forms that adaptively radiate from the survivors produces new Families at a higher rate than would be expected during stable periods in climax ecosystems.

Not at all. First of all, the METAZOAN period is almost exclusively in the last 543 million years, not 3.5 billion. We don't not have as much time to work with as one might think, especially when confronted with the scale of diversity seen.

I do take that into account, but please observe from my posts and from the fossil and historical record that NOW SHOULD BE SUCH A TIME. That is, if new families originate due to mass extinctions and environmental stress, then we should be in the middle of a mini-BOOM of new families. The time since the advent of man (let's say 40K ago) has been one of HIGHER than AVERAGE EXTINCTION RATES. Why don't new families show up to fill these unoccupied niches?

WE are NOT in a stable period. Mankind is stressing the rest of the animal kingdom, and we left an ICE AGE only 15K ago. Where are the expected NEW FAMILIES?

What am I getting at with these stats? Evolution alone is not responsible. SOMEONE gave it a helping hand.

67 Posted on 05/14/2001 19:33:22 PDT by Ahban
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To: Ahban
From the last thread, to gore3k (and was it ever wasted on him . . .), a divergence that created a new genus BUT NOT RIGHT AWAY!(link to lemur fossils)

68 Posted on 05/14/2001 19:36:31 PDT by VadeRetro
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To: VadeRetro
(VADE)
You're simply repeating yourself and it's still wrong. You don't get a new family every 435 years. No new divergence is a family right away, ever. Your average is only correct in some strict statistical sense, as a man with his feet in the oven and his head in the freezer should feel comfortable on the average.(/VADE)

OK, I am going to try again. "No divergence is a family right away" you said. I agree. But 435 years is not "right away". Instead, it is how long, ON AVERAGE, it SHOULD take for a new family to appear. How did all of those families get here? Sure it happened slowly, but not SUPER SLOW. There are far too many families for that. Did it happen at a rate that we should be able to observe? If you crunch the numbers, YES! Has it been observed? NO!

The numbers don't add up Vade. You may complain it is only statistics, but statistics are very useful. I don't know a branch of science that does not use them. I find it disturbing that proponents of evolution are so resistant to the idea of subjecting the theory to numerical analysis. There has been a certain amount of change and it has happened within a certain amount of time. We can use that to get an expected RATE of CHANGE. Which brings me to...

If you look at my reply to him, you will see that I covered that. Heck, I even covered it in the orignal post #38. WE ARE NOT IN A STABLE PERIOD. We are in a period where EXTINCTION occurs at a much higher rate than the historical average. Mankind and the last ice age ending have put more stress than average on the animal kingdom in the last 12K. This should be one of those "explosive radiative" periods to which you refer. Perhaps not the biggest ever, but substantial. Where are the NEW FAMILIES?

You never see a middle sized branch newly budding out. The new ones are all little. Some later become big ones, some never do. Some get to middle size and no bigger. Some die a-budding.

And we are back to square one. I am not calculating how long it takes to begin budding, I am talking about how long it takes to go from BUD TO MIDDLE SIZED BRANCH. It turns out that it should happen once every 435 years. So this is a process we should be able to observe. It should not take millions of years, it should happen on average once every 435 years, yet we have never come close to seeing it.

If that average is meaningless because during some periods it can be longer between new families, remember that means there must be other times when it happens in a SHORTER period of time. We may not have had a WORLDWIDE cataclysim like that in recorded secular history, but there have been LOCAL or REGIONAL events that have produced conditions where new families should appear.

69 Posted on 05/14/2001 19:56:01 PDT by Ahban
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To: VadeRetro
You are proving my point. I show the biohistoric average of one new family every 435 years. I provide ample evidence that we are NOW in a time where radiative adaptation should be HIGHER than average- and even if it is not planet-wide, such conditions have occured in certain regions.

Your response is to show me a possible - based mostly on teeth - fossil example of two types of lemur who took 1 million years to diverge into a different GENUS!

Look at those data points! Except for a couple of questionable teeth, the new genus pops up suddenly on its own. But even if I concede that I am only conceding that you have given me an example of where evolution has produced a closely related genus over a period of 1 million years. If that is the best you can do, you might as well accept ID illumination right now.

You have got to show me EVOLUTION producing NEW FAMILIES in a matter of HUNDREDS of years. However it happened, evo or ID, it happended at such a rate that we should have expected mankind to produce new families of animals out of the domesticated wild ones thousands of years ago.

If making a new family was as trivial a matter as the numbers suggest, you should be able to give me MANY examples in recorded history where human domestication has done so.

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How many "new" niches are there today that weren't there at the extinction of the dinosaurs? Think about it.

19 Posted on 05/25/2001 23:04:32 PDT by wattsmag2
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To: Ahban

The alternative is that the evolutionary mechanisms that produced new types are no longer operating.

That's close to the right answer, IMHO. I would say that the evolutionary pressures that drive most diversification are not currently in play. (But they will be.)

There's another effect that's harder to quantify, even if we assume (as you do) that new species and families arise uniformly over time. Families are artificial, human-made categories that don't necessarily reflect any evolutionary principles. Of course taxonomists put the divisions between families where they found the most convenient morphological differences. Those kinds of differences each take a long time to occur in nature. In order for new families to arise within the taxonomic system we have saddled ourselves with, we will have to wait until a long enough time arises for a current family to bifurcate, which will take a new gross morphological difference, which will take a long time.

In order to test your "family counting" scheme, we'd have to wait for a significantly long time and then reassign the whole taxonomic scheme, starting with a blank slate. We'd choose entirely new families, based upon sets of morphological distinctions that are marginally more convenient than the set we chose before. What we'd likely see is that there would be more families (correcting for know extinctions, of course) than existed in the previous scheme, but that species we formerly pigeonholed into the same family would end up in different families (even without any changes to the species themselves). That sort of realignment is not going to happen, I'm sure. We have chosen our families, and we'll wait for them to bifurcate. The lack of new families tells us much more about human psychology than about evolution.

22 Posted on 05/26/2001 06:41:29 PDT by Physicist (sterner@sterner.hep.upenn.edu <mailto:sterner@sterner.hep.upenn.edu>)
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To: Physicist
Then why do the scientists in this article have no trouble assingning their find to a NEW FAMILY?

I can't agree with your assertion that the taxonomic system is an artificial construct. I mean, it is in the sense that humans invented it, but they did so to describe reality. Nature IS discontinueous. Organisms DO fall into groups that can be separated from all other groups by a set of common features.

Dogs and cats are in different families, but the same order. Still, people would have no trouble telling any dog from any cat. There are traits that apply to every member of the one, and none of the other. Nature is not a smooth continuim of one type into another. To me the fact that the taxonomic system DOES describe nature so well is a major challenge to the evolutionary paradigm.

What force of nature so efficiently eliminated all transitionals between families? The reason evolutionists hate the taxonomic system is that if evolution is true it should not work. The fact that it is still used today is a testament to how well it DOES describe nature.

23 Posted on 05/26/2001 07:11:55 PDT by Ahban
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To: Physicist All
and another thing....

Your idea states the common refrain that evolution DOES produce new families, but in spurts. Then you say we are not in a spurt but will be at some unspecified future time.

These are statements of faith on your part. They are not supported by current observation. To me, victory in this debate is not proving evolution false. As I have said, that is impossible to do via the scientific method with historical events. Evolution always seems to be happening somewhere else!

I will settle for a common realization that ID is just as rational an interpretation of the evidence as punk-eck. It all depends on your base assumptions (whether you are willing or unwilling to consider the possibility of a Divine Hand). Given that, no one will have an "intellectual" excuse to deny the Lordship of Jesus Christ. They can then decide whether they will accept or reject His claims on other grounds.

24 Posted on 05/26/2001 07:22:05 PDT by Ahban
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To: wattsmag2
How many "new" niches are there today that weren't there at the extinction of the dinosaurs? Think about it.

1) There was no such thing as DOMESTICATION back then. That is a great way for some members of a family to be separated from all others, then subjected to huge selection pressures for different traits. No domestic or potential domestic niches existed at the extinction of the dinosaurs.

Do you remember the "EDEN" series of SCIFI books by Harry Harrison? The premise was there was no asteroid strike to kill off the dinosaurs, and that an intelligent race of dinosaurs co-existed with early man. The whole series was super pro-evolution. The brain-dinos used breeding instead of tool technology. They had critters that were bred to be living dart guns (from monitor lizards). They had critters that were "living ships". They had warm blooded flat creatures that were "living cloaks" for warmth. They even had one whose eye lenses were made into a microscope! This kind of pablum ought to be possible if evolution alone produced all of the variety we see on Earth. Instead, domestic breeders will tell you that there is only so far you can go with certain traits.

2) There were no scientists trying to win a Nobel prize by using radiation to mutate new critters back then. That is a protected niche that was never filled.

3) Mankind is such an effective hunter that he makes massive changes to ecosystems in a short period of time. That opens up new niches that were not available back then. The way we break up natural areas for example, discriminates agaisnt large animals in favor of small ones.

4) There have been large scale natural disasters and climate shifts since 65mya. Some quite recently, at least in regions. That was not the last major natural disaster to strike Earth, just one of the largeset.

Since you seem to think all of the new familes were formed only after HUMONGEOUS disasters, I guess you believe that at such times a new family is created every 4.35 years. Maybe even .435 years. I mean, once every 435 years is the average.

If the average is misleading because it all happens at once after a big disaster, then does it happen 100 times as fast at those points? 1,00 times? More? How would such an event in the fossil record be distinguishable from a miracle?

We are back to taking Evolution on pure faith again. This proves my point that ID is just as rational. The only diference is whether one is willing to acknowledge the possiblity that God had an active role after" the beginning".

I agree with you on many of your points. Yes, the exponential growth rate is only a component of the question. As you also pointed out, extinction rates, ecological niches, birth rates, major disasters, and other factors must be included.

And yes, as I fully expect that human influence to open up new ecological niches that animals will evolve into. Rats in the city are a prime example.

There probably haven't been any new families of animals evolving in thousands and thousands of years.

Quite likely. Then throw in that the Linnaean system was created in 1757 based upon the way things looked 245 years ago. Then consider that divergence isn't sudden. Throw in that higher taxons are arbitrary, based upon the retrospectively considered importance of evolved traits.

Obviously, it would depend upon the birth rate.

For slow birth rates with the larger animals, I would expect a new family to emerge in about 100,000 years.

Actually, it should be a function of the number of generations, and not specifically time.

That is a really big EXCEPT---the prime initiator!

Sure, it's an infinite difference, but what science needs to ask is whether evolution as currently taught can explain everything that has happened since, depending on your point of view, one second after (1) creation; or (2) the appearance of the first thing that can be called life. I would argue that the theory of evolution comes up short.

My training and most of my work career has been in the fields of chemistry and chemical engineering. The theory of evolution kind of looks okay at the macro level, but at the level of chemistry it sure seems to fall apart.

In other words, one doesn't need God to poke holes in the theory of evolution. It's not an issue of theology but rather of science.

Genesis in particular and the Bible in general contains prescientific (as opposed to nonscientific)language which is often poetic and lyrical. Who can ignore the awe inspiring phrase "And God said, 'Let there be light, and there was light.'" Although vegetation could be sustained by such a light, the Hebrew text (unlike the English translation)does not exclude the possibility that the sun was in fact made to appear on the fourth day(Hebrew asah=reveal in hundreds of places in the Old Testament).
Moreover, given the inorganic constituents of the human body, I think "dust" is an apt description, not only of our physical nature but also as a reminder of our own humble origins.
Indeed, despite the nontechnical nature of the Bible, there are several concepts expressed by the human authors which presage modern scientific discovery that should be aknowledged: The First and Second Laws of Thermodynamics, Life producing after its kind, water returns to its source (evaporation), the earth is round and hangs in space unsupported, life depends on blood, and disease can spread by physical contact. Regards.

Evolution is the study of how living animals change over time.

How living animals were originally created is not part of that specific field of study.

You are correct in stating that the origin of first life would be a chemistry and/or theology field of study.

Of course it can't. Evolution never explains anything that they require Creation to explain to be considered scientific. Michael Behe wrote a whole book about it.

Read _Darwin's Black Box_

the validity of evolution matter one way or another?

To: Nebullis

I suspect the AAAS would like to update the Declaration of Independence to better reflect their view of what should be the foundation of American liberty to:

We hold these outlooks to be best, that all men are evolved, that they are endowed by accident with certain conditional allowances to be determined by us.

America is based on the assumption of God's existence. Throw that out we become just as much of a Hell on earth as was the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany.

114 posted on 11/08/2002 8:32 AM PST by Tribune7

There are probably new families evolving deep in untouched forests, under the ocean, or in jungles, but it's impossible to tell because we haven't catalogued every living being on the planet yet. You won't see a new family of animal evolving in your backyard because you mow it every week.

Let me get this straight. You are stating that things don't evolve because things change? More precisely, because they change too fast?

We have an objective definition of "species" (even though it doesn't always work, e.g. the various species of bears, which are apparently able to produce viable offspring between them).

The ability to produce viable offspring is the only objective criteria for species. If these bears can do as you say then they are one species just like dogs and wolves are the same species in spite of the apparently large differences between them.

It should not be obvious on any given day that a new family has emerged, but looking back over 435 years it should be clear-

I think we really do not even have to do that. If evolution is happening all the time then there should be species 'in the middle' at any given point in time - such as right now. There are no such species between families right now. Therefore this is a strong disproof of evolution. The excuses of evolutionists for not finding this in the millions of living species just does not wash.

my family definition: A family is a group of related species, morphologically similiar, who share a set of physical characteristics, which are not posessed in total by any other group.

For the felines for example, they would be placental carnivore mammals that have retractable claws. If I cared to I could find a few more defining traits of the cat family.

I see Creationism as a major subset of ID. Even Theistic Evolution can be considered ID. Creationism I define as that subset if ID that maintains that the Designer intervened at least once in creation after the initial creation event.

Thank you for your input.

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