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.
See post #277 please.
I do not "lack premise", nor am I "making up" anything through "volume". If you actually think you can make a case than I am, you might want to try developing one of those "rebuttal" things you must have learn about in school.
Someone asked for evidence, so I turned on the Evidence Firehose. Not my fault if you guys don't know what to do about it.
Here are some (very few, considering how many there are) of your fellow Evol-Doers expressing doubt in their faith.
No, actually, it's a bunch of scientists (and in somecases, I'm using that term loosely) making various statements that for the most part don't "express doubt" in anything at all, much less "their faith", or even evolution if that's what you meant to say.
How that's supposed to prove anything at all, much less support your position against evolution, is rather baffling.
Also, highly relevant here are the following articles:
Quotations and Misquotations: Why What Antievolutionists Quote is Not Valid Evidence Against Evolution
Let's look at your selection of quotes one at a time, shall we?
Klein, Martin J., “Thermodynamics in Einstein’s Thought,” Science, vol. 157 (August 4, 1967), p. 509 Citing Albert Einstein: “Classical thermodynamics is the only physical theory of universal content concerning which I am convinced that, within the framework of its basic concepts, it will never be overthrown.”Sorry, but contrary to your claim, this is not an example of "Evol-Doers expressing doubt" in evolution. It is a statement of confidence in thermodynamics. If random quotes about other fields of science can be presented as some sort of vague "doubt" of evolution, then a random quote about science can equally be invoked as some sort of vague *support* of evolution -- or doubt about creationism, or support/doubt of alchemy, or just about anything.
Go look up the word "relevance" and please try again. This might also help: English 101 Online: Logical Arguments".
Asimov, Isaac, “In the Game of Energy and Thermodynamics You Can’t Even Break Even,” Smithsonian Institute Journal (June 1970), p. 6 “To express all this, we can say: ‘Energy can be transferred from one place to another, or transformed from one form to another, but it can be neither created nor destroyed.’ Or we can put it another way: ‘The total quantity of energy in the universe is constant.’ “ This law is considered the most powerful and most fundamental generalization about the universe that scientists have ever been able to make."Sorry, but contrary to your claim, this is not an example of "Evol-Doers expressing doubt" in evolution. It is a statement of confidence in thermodynamics (again).
Arp, H. C., G. Burbidge, F. Hoyle, J. V. Narlikar, and N. C. Wickramasinghe, “The Extragalactic Universe: An Alternative View,” Nature, vol. 346 (August 30, 1990), pp. 807-812. “Cosmology is unique in science in that it is a very large intellectual edifice based on a very few facts.”Sorry, but contrary to your claim, this is not an example of "Evol-Doers expressing doubt" in evolution. It is a statement expressing reservations about cosmology. Cosmology, the astute reader will notice, is not evolution.
Burbidge, Geoffrey, “Why Only One Big Bang?” Scientific American (February 1992), p. 120. “Big Bang cosmology is probably as widely believed as has been any theory of the universe in the history of Western civilization. It rests, however, on many untested, and in some cases untestable, assumptions. Indeed, big bang cosmology has become a bandwagon of thought that reflects faith as much as objective truth.” “This situation is particularly worrisome because there are good reasons to think the big bang model is seriously flawed.”Sorry, but contrary to your claim, this is not an example of "Evol-Doers expressing doubt" in evolution. It is a statement expressing reservations about cosmology (again). Cosmology, the astute reader will notice, is not evolution.
Darling, David, “On Creating Something from Nothing,” New Scientist, vol. 151 (September 14, 1996). p. 49 “What is a big deal—the biggest deal of all—is how you get something out of nothing.Sorry, but contrary to your claim, this is not an example of "Evol-Doers expressing doubt" in evolution. It is a statement expressing a philosophical musing. And as the first line in Darling's essay makes entirely clear, he's not just raising this as an alleged "problem" for materialism: "It's the simple questions that usually tax science the most. For instance, why should there be something instead of nothing? The Universe is so outrageously enormous and elaborate. Why did it-or God, if you prefer-go to all the bother?" I fail to see how this cosmological pondering "expresses doubt" in the biological field of evolution -- especially when the author considers it just as interesting a question for creationists as well.
Løvtrup, Søren, Darwinism: The Refutation of a Myth (New York: Croom Helm, 1987), 469 pp. p. 422 “I suppose that nobody will deny that it is a great misfortune if an entire branch of science becomes addicted to a false theory. But this is what has happened in biology: for a long time now people discuss evolutionary problems in a peculiar ‘Darwinian’ vocabulary—‘adaptation,’ ‘selection pressure,’ ‘natural selection,’ etc.—thereby believing that they contribute to the explanation of natural events. They do not, and the sooner this is discovered, the sooner we shall be able to make real progress in our understanding of evolution. “I believe that one day the Darwinian myth will be ranked the greatest deceit in the history of science”Sorry, but contrary to your claim, this is not an example of "Evol-Doers expressing doubt" in evolution.
Creationists are famous for taking quotes out of context. The reader will note that the above quote has been yanked out of context by the way that the creationist quote-miners have removed the lead-in sentence which immediately precedes the above passage. That lead-in sentence is: "Micromutations do occur, but the theory that these alone can account for evolutionary change is either falsified, or else it is an unfalsifiable, hence metaphysical, theory."
Lovtrup was *NOT*, as the creationist quote-miners would have you believe, expressing doubt in evolution *itself*, he was stating something that most evolutionary biologists would agree with -- that evolution proceeds due to the contributions of *several* processes, not just <pick one and only one>. The "Darwinian Myth" that Lovtrup speaks of is *not* (as the creationist quote-miners want you to infer) evolution itself, but only the "myth" that the accumulation of small gradual changes is the *only* way that evolution proceeds. This is made clear in the following passages FROM THE SAME BOOK:
"Indeed, the nature and the wealth of the corroborating evidence are such that the theory on the reality of evolution turns out to be one of the best substantiated theories in biology, perhaps in the natural sciences."I'm sorry, but wasn't Lovtrup being put forth as someone who allegedly "*expressed doubt*" in evolution? Nice try."It thus appears that all the objections against the macromutation theory may easily be met, and this is in itself perhaps the most compelling evidence in its favour." (p. 369)
(Sidebar: Lovtrup dumps on Darwin a lot in his book, but it's a bad rap. Lovtrup overstates how much Darwin relied on microvariance and natural selection -- they're a big part of Darwin's book, but not the *only* mechanisms he covered -- and Lovtrup also overstates how much modern evolutionary science relies on them and them alone. Part of the reason for his misunderstandings can be found in the introduction to his book, in which he admits that "Now and then I read literature dealing with evolution, but being an embryologist I did not think that evolution was of direct concern to me." This is not someone who has actually been heavily in the thick of the field his whole career, he's approaching it as a johny-come-lately, and he makes a number of newcomer's misunderstandings about it.)
Peters, R. H., “Tautology in Evolution and Ecology,” American Naturalist, vol. 110 (January/February 1976), p. 1 “I argue that the ‘theory of evolution’ does not make predictions, so far as ecology is concerned, but is instead a logical formula which can be used only to classify empericisms and to show the relationships which such a classification implies. The essence of the argument is that these ‘theories’ are actually tautologies and, as such, cannot make empirically testable predictions. They are not scientific theories at all.”Sorry, but contrary to your claim, this is not an example of "Evol-Doers expressing doubt" in evolution. This is yet another passage yanked out of its context. Peters is expressing his view that a) evolution makes few *ECOLOGICAL* predictions (ecology was his field, he would find it more useful if it did), and b) calling evolution a "theory" is somewhat of a misnomer (again, in Peters's view), and it should perhaps be labeled in another fashion.
Peters was *NOT* expressing doubt in evolution *itself*, only in its applicability to his own field and the way evolution itself is labeled. The labeling thing was enough of a pet peeve of his that as the title of his essay makes clear, he also wished to relabel parts of his *own* field as "tautologies" instead of "theories". And as JBS Haldane observed:
"The phrase 'survival of the fittest' is something of a tautology. So are most mathematical theorems. There is no harm in stating the truth in two different ways."Your next quote-mining nugget is:
Capra, Fritjof, The Web of Life (New York: Anchor Books, 1996), 347 pp. Dr. Capra is Director of the Center for Ecoliteracy, in Berkeley, California.p. 228 “It has been estimated that those chance errors occur at a rate of about one per several hundred million cells in each generation. This frequency does not seem to be sufficient to explain the evolution of the great diversity of life forms, given the well-known fact that most mutations are harmful and only very few result in useful variations.”** CREATIONIST DISHONESTY ALERT **
Sorry, but contrary to your claim, this is not an example of "Evol-Doers expressing doubt" in evolution. It is, in fact, a marvelous example of how dishonest creationists can be when they yank quotes out of context.
What's so incredibly dishonest about this out-of-context quote is that Capra was actually explaining how mutation rates *do* drive evolution at astonishing rates. The passage above was only the introductory paragraph, wherein he was saying that while it may *seem* (note his actual use of the phrase "does not seem") that the mutation rate isn't high enough, HE THEN GOES ON TO SHOW WHY IT IS.
In the *very next paragraph* after the quote-mined snippet above:
"Fast bacteria can divide about every twenty minutes, so that in principle several billion individual bacteria can be generated from a single cell in less than a day. Because of this enormous rate of reproduction, a single successful bacterial mutant can spread rapidly through its environment, and mutation is indeed an important evolutionary avenue for bacteria." (p. 228)He spends the rest of the chapter describing how recombination (sexual and otherwise) and DNA symbiosis kick the results of mutational novelty into overdrive. It's incredibly dishonest to present his introductory paragraph out of context in an attempt to falsely imply that he doubts the very thing he is instead actually explaining on that page.
This sort of disgusting behavior is unfortunately quite common among creationists, as biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky makes clear:
"Disagreements and clashes of opinion are rife among biologists, as they should be in a living and growing science. Antievolutionists mistake, or pretend to mistake, these disagreements as indications of dubiousness of the entire doctrine of evolution. Their favorite sport is stringing together quotations, carefully and sometimes expertly taken out of context, to show that nothing is really established or agreed upon among evolutionists. Some of my colleagues and myself have been amused and amazed to read ourselves quoted in a way showing that we are really antievolutionists under the skin."Your next quote-mine tripe is:
- Theodosius Dobzhansky (1900-1975),
Dr. Lee Spetner of Johns Hopkins University has written a fascinating book called, "Not By Chance: Shattering the Modern Theory about Evolution", that is a must read for anyone interested in scientific challenges to neo-Darwinian theory: "I have shown in my book that the broad sweep of evolution cannot be based on random mutations. I have shown it on both theoretical and experimental grounds. On theoretical grounds, I have shown that the probability is just too small for random mutations to lead to a new species. On experimental grounds, I have shown that there are no known random mutations that have added any genetic information to the organism. I go through a list of the best examples of mutations offered by evolutionists and show that each of them loses genetic information rather than gains it. One of the examples that where information is lost is the one often trotted out by evolutionists nowadays in an attempt to convince the public of the truth of evolution. That is the evolution of bacterial resistance to antibiotics." (This quote is from Dr. Spetner's own comments on Amazon.com about his book.)Sorry, but contrary to your claim, this is not an example of "Evol-Doers expressing doubt" in evolution -- since Spetner is not an "Evol-Doer".
Spetner is, on the other hand, a crank. I have dissected the deep flaws in his works in other posts, such as this one. Go to that post for the full treatment (Spetner makes too many errors to fully list here), but his primary screwup in a nutshell is:
Spetner can only make this silly claim by creating his *own*, idiosyncratic *personal* definition of "information", which sharply varies from the way that all other scientists and mathematicians measure information content. His defintion is stacked in a way as to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Furthermore, some of his examples even violate his own definition. [...] So how does Spetner manage to "see" increasing or decreasing information in a single "flip"? By eccentrically "redefining" information as "specificity". Specificity of/to *what*, you may ask? Well, to/of whatever Spetner wants it to mean for any particular case he's looking at... [...] Even worse, Spetner's personal definition of "losing information" often correlates to *increasing* complexity of function, which most people would intuitively consider to be an *increase* in genetic information.Spetner, in short, is a typical anti-evolutionary crank.
Wald, George, “The Origin of Life,” in The Physics and Chemistry of Life (Simon & Schuster, 1955), p. 9 “One has only to contemplate the magnitude of this task to concede that the spontaneous generation of a living organism is impossible. Yet here we are—as a result, I believe, of spontaneous generation.”Sorry, but contrary to your claim, this is not an example of "Evol-Doers expressing doubt" in evolution. See the Wald quotes I provided in post #131, for example -- wald had no doubts about evolution, nor does he express any above. He's rhetorically saying, "it sure seems impossible, and yet the evidence indicates that despite our intuition, it has happened nonetheless." Furthermore, he was speaking of abiogenesis, which is a *separate* field from evolution -- evolution is still just as valid whether the earliest life forms sprang forth spontaneously, or were poofed into existence by a god, or were seeded here from elsewhere in space, or designed and planted by advanced space aliens.
Crick, Francis, Life Itself: Its Origin and Nature (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1981) p. 51-2 “If a particular amino acid sequence was selected by chance, how rare an event would this be? “This is an easy exercise in combinatorials. Suppose the chain is about two hundred amino acids long; this is, if anything rather less than the average length of proteins of all types. Since we have just twenty possibilities at each place, the number of possibilities is twenty multiplied by itself some two hundred times. This is conveniently written 20200 and is approximately equal to 10260, that is, a one followed by 260 zeros. “ Moreover, we have only considered a polypeptide chain of rather modest length. Had we considered longer ones as well, the figure would have been even more immense. The great majority of sequences can never have been synthesized at all, at any time.” p. 88 “An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going.”Sorry, but contrary to your claim, this is not an example of "Evol-Doers expressing doubt" in evolution, for the same reasons I gave in the preceding entry from Wald.
Hoyle, Sir Fred, and Chandra Wickramasinghe, “Where Microbes Boldly Went,” New Scientist, vol. 91 (August 13, 1991), p. 415 “Precious little in the way of biochemical evolution could have happened on the Earth. It is easy to show that the two thousand or so enzymes that span the whole of life could not have evolved on the Earth. If one counts the number of trial assemblies of amino acids that are needed to give rise to the enzymes, the probability of their discovery by random shufflings turns out to be less than 1 in 10 to the power of 40,000.”
Sorry, but contrary to your claim, this is not an example of "Evol-Doers expressing doubt" in evolution -- because Hoyle is a creationist (just of the somewhat rare non-theistic variety).
Furthermore, his calculations happen to be dead wrong, as I'll detail in a post I'm about to write in response to another poster. I'll ping you to it.
Now how many of these folks did you quote to support your phone book of links?
Zero, zip, nada, zilch. Because unlike creationists, I know that one can not "support" a scientific position by mere quoting. Instead, I provided links to discussions of the *evidence*, and citations to the primary literature.
And how many of the folks did you quote who know - in their hearts, if they are honest - that the above statements and many more like them, are true?
In the way that you misunderstood/misrepresented those statements? Absolutely none of them.
Contrary to the impression that dishonest creationists try to give by their quote-mining projects, the actual amount of real doubt of evolution among biologists "in their heart of hearts" is practically non-existent. That's why creationists have to lie so much about it.
Wow, you sure got quiet after several people took you up on your request.
And please when you find it, wait a little while to make sure it isn't a hoax (like all the others before).
"All" the others before?
I just have to ask: Are you lying, or just grossly miseducated?
In the entire 100+ year history of hominid paleontology, there has been one (1) hoax. Against that, there have been many hundreds of authentic discoveries.
So again I ask -- just where do you get this nonsense? Do you make it up yourself, or do you just naively trust someone who does?
Until then you can bolster up each other with your empty briefcases.
If you can call the vast amount of evidence referenced in post #110 (and that's just a small taste of the total) an "empty briefcase", then you clearly have your eyes tightly closed.
The creationist motto in a nutshell...
One thing I have learned as a critical thinking person is humans know absolutelty nothing.
Please, speak for yourself, do not presume that the rest of us are equally lackign in knowledge.
All theories and scientific truths have been proven false all through history, we are currently at the same point again.
You're vastly mistaken.
We are just so smart we almost have everything figured out. The last sewntence was sarcasm.
Try an actual argument next time.
As I stated earlier, any scientist without an egenda would readily throw evolution out the window without proof.
And why would that be?
No it isn't, but you are invited to explain why you mistakenly think it is.
I also understand that life does not come from non-life,
Not usually, no, but that's hardly proof that rudimentary life can't come from non-life, given sufficient conditions. And there is much evidence to indicate that indeed, it has.
order does not come from disorder and without intelligent input,
Flat wrong. Many natural processes bring about order from disorder. Please learn some science.
not only can complexity not result from simplicity,
But it can. See my above advice.
things can tend to DEvolve, not evolve.
They tend to "DEvolve" or evolve depending upon the conditions they happen to be in. Evolution does happen, and it does produce results, regardless of your intuition about the "tendency" of "things".
Actually, what those of us who have actually done a great deal of work in these topics "know" is that you're wrong on that point. Order and complexity most certainly *can* and *do* happen "without intelligent input", although the application of intelligence is a good way to speed up the natural process (usually).
How to you get to Ape-to-Man, without Cosmology?
By evolution.
Evolution works, and is demonstrably true, whether or not any particular theory of cosmology turns out to be true or not.
Plus I just like to quote this line to Evol-Doers "very large intellectual edifice based on very few facts" I just kinda like the way it sounds as per the Evolution Postulation.
I'm sure you do, but that doesn't make it accurate, nor applicable to evolution itself, since that claim was made about cosmology, not evolution.
see above yadda yadda
Get some new material.
What came first to the scientists -- the "appearance" of the bone, or the "dating"? Dating is pretty subjective. I imagine the "appearance" affected the scientists' dating....
Hm? I don't see any Straw Man Fallacy there. Not even an Ad Hominem or Non Sequitur....
*That* is the philosophy and faith of evolutionists....
No it isn't -- snowflakes can form in conditions of increasing, decreasing, or static entropy.
Does heat increase or decrease in the formation of a snowflake?
Snowflakes can form under conditions of increasing, decreasing, or unchanging heat.
You knew that didn't you?
I know several things that you don't know.
Now let's see if we can drag you back on topic again -- snowflakes were pointed out to you in refutation to your false claim that "order does not come from disorder and without intelligent input". Snowflake formation brings order to disordered molecules "without intelligent input". So you were wrong. QED.
Rather than deal with that point, and revise your erroneous notions, you instead started pulling in red herrings about "increasing entropy", "heat decrease", and in a later post "equilibrium", NONE of which has any bearing on the fact that snowflake formation does indeed increase order "without intelligent input".
You were wrong. Deal with it.
Unborn children develop in complexity precisely because of intelligent design.
No they don't. No one needs to expend any brainpower to keep a fetus developing.
DNA anyone?
DNA is not "intelligent", and so again your claim (that "order does not come from disorder and without intelligent input") falls flat.
As to the first 4 quotes, cosmology directly effects evolution, because cosmology came first in your worldview, right? Now, how you will show that life developed on a lifeless rock is your problem, not mine.
This is just stupid -- like arguing that if Egyptians debated about the origins of stone, their pyramids would fall down.
Your question is so poorly formed that it's practically gibberish. Learn more science and you won't be asking such goofy questions. But to answer your apparent question, here's one example of many: Ring Species.
or maybe the proof that the principle of irreducible complexity is nonsense.
The "principle" is fine -- Darwin himself introduced the concept in 1859. What's "nonsense" is how creationists attempt to misuse. I composed a post on the many and varied problems with Behe's (and other creationists') misuse of "irreducible complexity") in this post, which is far too long to include here. It starts out looking at a probability calculation, but bear with it, it weaves examination of "irreducible complexity" throughout the analysis.
What is amazing is the dichotomy of Evol-Believers that simultaneously state that 'Evolution is going on all around us' and 'of course we can't show you because it is happening so slowly'[or quickly, but only intermittently.
Straw man -- no one says that, not in the way you misrepresent it.
I'd also like to see that lizard hatch from a bird egg.
Which lizard would that be? If you think evolution requires such a thing, you're incredibly misinformed (probably by yet another creationist website).
But would you settle for lizard teeth in chickens?
You misunderstood his post. See my prior post on the essay "You Are An Ape".
Thank you for the compliment.
Evolutionary biology strikes me as the polar opposite of that.
Your impression is mistaken.
Evolutionists strike me as the worst and the dimmest of what academia produces.
Please provide support for your claim. Name names, for example. For every example you can give (valid or not), I'll list two creationists with shoddy credentials or bogus claims.
Maybe people need to start calling evolution or evolutionary biology the knave of the sciences or the latrine orderly of the sciences.
Maybe you need to find something to actually support your position instead of resorting to casting vague insults in the hope that it might stick.
The choice is really easy. When you get somebody like Sir Fred Hoyle saying things like:
"The likelihood of the formation of life from inanimate matter is one to a number with 40,000 noughts after it... It is big enough to bury Darwin and the whole theory of Evolution. There was no primeval soup, neither on this planet nor on any other, and if the beginnings of life were not random, they must therefore have been the product of purposeful intelligence."
that's pretty much good enough for me.
And therein lies your key problem.
It's an extremely common one among creationists, unfortunately, so much so that it's very diagnostic of the class.
The problem is that rather than learning about the topic yourself and being able to form your own opinions about which arguments are valid and which are not, and what the evidence might indicate, you rely almost entirely on "whose pronouncements do I want to believe, because I have no means to judge their validity myself".
The pitfalls in this approach should be obvious.
Not the least of them is the tendency to accept those who say things which reinforce what you'd like to believe, and reject those who challenge it, lacking any other effective criteria for separating the sense from the nonsense.
It becomes a never-ending game of "argument by authority", or "my expert can beat up your expert". That's why creationists rely so heavily on "quote-mining" -- to them it's *all* just one guy's opinion versus another.
What they forget (or never truly realized in the first place) is that opinions are like a**holes: Everyone's got one. What actually matters is what the *evidence* indicates, because that's the "reality check" that every opinion needs to be measured against before it's an *informed* opinion, or an opinion that can objectively be determined to be on the right track -- or completely full of hot air.
But to creationists, they miss the fact that the scientific discussions and papers are examinations of the evidence, and they just see the *talk*. And what matters to them is who's talking in ways that can be waved around as "support" for creationism, and which talk has to be talked away by other talk. Like liberal "postmodernists", to them it's all about the "text", and not the underlying ideas. It's a war of words, not a search for the explanations which best match all the available evidence.
This mindset is probably related to (or born of) their reliance upon holy texts. Which religion they belong to depends upon which holy book they decide is "truth" and which holy books are "just books" (e.g. Torah, Old Testament, New Testament, Book of Mormon, Koran, etc.) And in all cases once a particular holy text is seized upon as Gospel(tm), it must be swallowed whole and pored over for whatever meaning can be extracted from the text. The text itself *is* the truth, not merely a discussion of truths to be found and examined elsewhere (e.g. physical evidence) as is the case for scientific publications. Is it coincidence that holy texts are often called The Word?
And so the literalist creationist often has difficulty realizing how to tackle scientific works, and falls back on the old habits: accepting certain texts as Gospel, and others as Heresy, depending upon which "prophet" (e.g. expert) they prefer to follow (or which prophet other prophets tell them are the "canonized" ones and which are the "heretics").
But I digress.
Getting back to Hoyle, are you sure you really want to follow him into his vision of the promised land? He believed that life on Earth was "seeded" by aliens, that evolutionary advancements on Earth were triggered by "genetic storms" (e.g. additional waves of life from space), that insects may well be as intelligent as mankind, and so on. Even the passage you quote above is from his book entitled, "Evolution from Space: A Theory of Cosmic Creationism", are you sure you want to sign onto that on the basis that his word is "pretty much good enough for you"?
He was a good astronomer, but a nutbar on biology.
Maybe you should choose your "experts" more carefully in the future.
In any case, regardless of his kookiness on this subject, his probability calculation is demonstrably flawed and bogus, no matter who made it. Anyone familiar with basic biology knows enough to laugh it off the stage (and almost everyone *has* -- I've found over a hundred scathing demolitions of Hoyle's "calculation" just on the web *alone*, and there are countless more in scientific publications and forums). In all honesty, the only people who take it at all seriously are creationists, which should tell you something right there.
His calculation model has so many flaws that it's hard to know where to start. It's getting late here and I need to get to bed, so I'll just give a brief overview of the range of errors he made, but I'll be glad to expand on any of them at great length if you want to see more detail.
1. He presumed to know something that no one knows: The minimal possible size of the most basic form of life possible.
2. His presumed size was way larger than basic life forms that are *known* to be able to live.
3. He presumed that only *one* configuration of that size would be viable. In fact, we know that mind-bogglingly vast numbers of homologous variants exist for any particular protein.
4. He presumed that such a minimal life form must form "all at once", entirely "from scratch", completely "at random" on every trial. All three are known to be false for organic processes.
5. He *vastly* underestimated the speed of chemical "trials".
6. He calculated based on *one* trial at a time across the entire Earth. Instead, chemical recombinations occur in parallel in truly vast numbers across the enormous expanse of this planet.
7. He presumed that the minimal form of viable life must have consisted of mechanisms like those which exist in *modern* organisms. This is like insisting that the Wright Brothers make a 747 as their first flying attempt, instead of a simple mechanism of wood and fabric.
8. He ignored huge amounts of research that had already been done revealing how life can build through a number of "baby steps" instead of "all or nothing".
Etc., etc., etc. (For a more realistic look at such calculations, see Lies, Damned Lies, Statistics, and Probability of Abiogenesis Calculations.)
In short, either through ignorance or dishonesty, Hoyle "stacked the deck" of his calculation to produce the absolutely worst case scenario possible. So of course the final result ended up as "fat chance". But since his calculation modeled a highly *artificial* scenario, it tells us little to nothing about the *real world* possibilities of the formation of life.
And yet, creationists have been eagerly gobbling it up for decades, *despite* being informed countless times of its fatal flaws. Why? Because they find its invalid results comforting -- so they don't look at it too deeply. Typical.
Did you know the source of the quote? No you didn't. Did you even know if it was an accurate quote when you copied it from a creationist website? No you didn't. Did you know what assumptions Hoyle was making on which he based his calculation? No you didn't. Did you check his math? No you didn't. Did you have any basis for deciding whether his assumptions were reasonable ones or accurately modeled physical processes? No you didn't. Did you bother to look on the web to see if there existed any rebuttals to his claim? No you didn't. Did you do any research to see if there were claims to the contrary? No you didn't. Have you bothered to read and understand the large amounts of evidence presented to you on this thread? No you didn't. Did you attempt any sort of rebuttal which dealt with that evidence head-on if you didn't want to accept where it led? No you didn't. Do you have any real background in evolutionary biology (reading creationist websites doesn't count)? No you don't.
Did of those failures stop you from blindly accepting Hoyle's comment just because you liked the sound of it without having any real reason to trust or any way to verify it? No they didn't.
Do you nonetheless feel smugly justified in using it as your cheap excuse for saying obnoxious, insulting things like the following to people who *have* done the sort of research, education, and hard work that you don't bother with?
The noise coming from the evolutionists rings pretty hollow by comparison.
Yes, I see that you do.
One of the clowns on your side posts the animated .gif of a dancing hamster whenever he feels an unsupported claim of victory has been made or any inferiority in the creo position has been vaguely hinted. He's manifesting what psychiatry calls "projection." It's you guys who are always claiming victory based on -- nothing.
The fin of an extinct fish is not proof or even evidence in support of Evolution.
You're making a point of missing the point. It's not just a fish fin, it's the forelimb of a tetrapod. It's the in-between thing.
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