Can I play? Can I play? Ooooo, goodie! Here's one for you. Is this the result of "intelligent design" or is it an evolutionary kludge?
Posted on 02/15/2003 4:18:25 PM PST by PatrickHenry
Ah. But can you do that for any arbitrary case?
There was another poster not too many months ago, who posited much the same thing as you do here, but he turned out to be unwilling to play the "design inference game" - would you like to play? It's very simple - I'll post pictures of various objects and artifacts, one at a time, and for each one, you infer whether or not it was designed (or, "the product of intelligence", if you like), and then defend that inference as best you can.
Ready to play? ;)
I asked you the questions about the completeness of the fossils because that was not mentioned in what you posted. I presumed, mistakenly obviously, that you knew the material you had posted and could answer the question quickly. Perhaps when I have some hours to kill, I can wade through the material in the links and garner the answer myself, since you do not seem to know.
Again, it seems you cannot address the issue of fins turning into legs and gills into lungs. Therefore, the problem still exists. One must just presume that these things occurred.
I asked you the questions about the completeness of the fossils because that was not mentioned in what you posted. I presumed, mistakenly obviously, that you knew the material you had posted and could answer the question quickly. Perhaps when I have some hours to kill, I can wade through the material in the links and garner the answer myself, since you do not seem to know.
Again, it seems you cannot address the issue of fins turning into legs and gills into lungs. Therefore, the problem still exists. One must just presume that these things occurred.
Most impressive, VadeRetro. Your powers are more formidable than I realized. By failing to answer the question you have single-handedly brought science to a halt. Darwin Central will not be pleased.
Your dodge is not in the evidence, but in your simple refusal to draw any inference at all therefrom:
... and I guess we're to assume that one descended from the previous one?
Given the kinds of evidence already set out, a reasonable person would assume that some sort of progression has occurred over time. This would not have to mean that one of those skulls is the exact parent of the next one, or even that any particular skull is anything but a dead end. That these species walked the earth in the order shown should support the inference that a trend existed over that time which led to the so-far current result. Maybe, if we had a time machine, we would note that some particular species is just a great-uncle, not a (so far missing) grandfather. Still, the great-uncle is a clue to what the trend was like in his time. He might look so much like his sibling, the grandfather, that it would in fact take a time-machine voyage to sort it out.
You made the pretense of demanding actual physical evidence. This is a joke, as I fully realized in advance. No physical evidence means anything in the face of refusal to make inferences from it.
Your post is replete with semantic dodges. Here's just another one.
Example 1 reptile birds. Ahh it's like Vert Morph class all over again! Archaeopteryx and it's 'evidence' has been refuted by many biologists. Dr. David Menton of Washington U School of Medicine correctly reminds us that Arch was actually a true bird, not a transition form.
The creationist bin game. Lump something in a bin, pretend the bin boundaries are magic and inviolable. But lots of creationists lump archaeopteryx into the "dinosaur" bin. How can someone not know a bird from a reptile, given that there's no confusing any modern bird with any modern reptile?
The answer, as one of the links provided already makes clear--do you have a clue which one?--is that as you go back in the fossil record toward the time when one form diverges from another, it gets harder and harder to assign specimens firmly to one bin versus the other.
Dromaeosaurid features of Archaeopteryx.
Avian features of Archaeopteryx.
Another of your Catch-22 games:
Also, aside from the very wishful, very unsubstantiated arboreal, and cursorial theories, there is no mention of how reptiles might have developed the ability to fly.
Actually, aside from the two most prominent theories, I wouldn't be surprised if there are others that just don't get as much ink. At any rate, you want to deny that there's "mention" where there has obviously been plenty. You want to say "No way!" when at least two ways remain in contention.
Example 4/5 legged whales, legged seacows. Once again the author calls his evidence "incontrovertible" and his modesty astounds me. That's an interesting diagram of the legged seacow too! I like the caption that says "white elements are partly conjectural. Oh that's convienent! The conjectural parts are the vertebrae, hand, feet, and tail! The most evolutionarily significant elements of a possible mammal/sea mammal transition.
Ignoring that it very clearly has most of its spine and it very clearly has legs. No modern sirenian has legs.
The most dishonest feature of your game is that you nowhere mention what is going on with your incredible levels of skepticism, your refusal to make any inference whatever from any data that indicate evolution. What is going on is religious horror, the fear of going to hell for rejecting what one has already accepted as divine revelation. You may try to deny this but nobody who quotes Gish and Menton on this stuff is a secular skeptic.
Even before Darwin and Russell published, enough evidence had accumulated to make many people suspect that some kind of evolution had occurred. Darwin and Russell compiled, clarified, and added more evidence to the pile, but their real contribution was in clarifying the mechanisms. They gave the first rough outlines of "why" and "how."
Now, almost all of the data you have been reviewing were unknown in Darwin's day. For all the evidence that they did have, there were a lot of holes. Darwin et al. fearlessly predicted based upon the already-outlined tree of life that certain kinds of "intermediates" would be found. Precambrian life of any sort, legged whales, legged sirenians, ape-human intermediates, etc. Other intermediates, amphibian-bird mixes for instance, violate the presumed evolutionary scenario and are not predicted.
This prediction is a certain kind of inference. Creationists who believed that God on certain days created certain "kinds" scoffed then and denied that such an inference from the then-available data was valid at all. They began to mockingly ask for "the missing link," which is exactly how you, who bill yourself as a scientist, opened the discussion.
The history since then has filled in gap after gap in the areas where evolution says the intermediates have to have existed. The people who will not make certain inferences because God will burn them in Hell for so doing still will not make them. Nevertheless, the ground under their feet has shrunk to nothing compared to the situation in 1859.
I'm curious though, how do you figure that someone who doesn't accept Darwin is ill-equipped to do vaccine immunology?
You misspelled "immunologist." I make misspellings, too, but there are words a budding immunologist shouldn't misspell and "immunologist" is one of them. You were profoundly ignorant of the relationship between theory and law in science. You only know the pig-ignorant "science" a YEC knows, which is not science at all. You are in fact militantly ignorant.
I think you're top-to-bottom bogus.
Eusthenopteron wasn't addressed on the Fish With Legs Site. My mistake. Eusthenopteron is known from thousands of specimens, many complete.
Panderichthys was addressed on the "Fish With Legs" Site.
Ichthyostega was addressed on the "Fish With Legs" Site.
I also have to ask, "Did you go here?"
Can I play? Can I play? Ooooo, goodie! Here's one for you. Is this the result of "intelligent design" or is it an evolutionary kludge?
The behavior of these creationoids is like (here comes a really mixed metaphor) people roaming around the tree of knowledge, the limbs of which are heavily laden with low-hanging fruit, freely available for the taking, yet they prefer to grub around in the dirt to feed on rat-droppings.
You've only quoted two sources so far, Gish and Menton. You've already blown it.
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