Fletis Humplebacker wrote:

"John Harshman"

Fletis Humplebacker wrote:


John Harshman wrote:


Fletis Humplebacker


"John Harshman


Fletis Humplebacker


That isn't in dispute, his reference is the geological record, not a
stop watch. The point is that it was, by all accounts I've seen so far,
sudden. Hense the term "explosion", which was contrary to the traditional
view of evolution.

Clearly there was something sudden going on, if your definition of
"sudden" includes periods of 5 million years.

It does geologically speaking. It would not be sudden if we were
talking about tax rebates.


Right. I'm asking you to keep this in mind. That definition of "sudden"
is not a big problem for standard Darwinian theory.

Sure it is. According to many or most of those who do this
professionally the suddeness is a big problem, hense the theories
that go beyond Darwinian thinking to accomodate it. I've posted
quotes that demonstrate it, your cognitive dissonance doesn't
make them disappear.

You have confused PE with the Cambrian explosion.

No, but the mother of all suddenness of life forms doesn't
make the case for slow gradual change. Or small incremental
ones for that matter.

As I have explained in several ways, the Cambrian explosion isn't as
sudden as you think,

I've addressed that misrepresentation a number of times now. At this
point you are deliberately misrepresenting me. That's a shame. I've
repeatedly said it was the scientific communities interpretation, I've not
addded or taken away from it.

But you (or rather your creationist web sites) have taken away nearly
everything. That's why there are all those holes (...) in the quotes.
This ends up confusing time immensely; the explosion is expanding and
contracting in time as needed to accomodate anything you like. One claim
you make is that most orders of invertebrates arose in the Cambrian
explosion, and I have shown that this doesn't apply to brachiopods. You
just ignore that.

nor does it have anything to do with speciation,
which is what Gould was talking about.

But let's try it your way. What do you think is the true history of
life? What was the Cambrian explosion, really? Go into some detail.

I've quoted that a number of times too.

No, you haven't. I want your own theory. Were all Cambrian species
separately created over the course of 53 million years? Why such a burst
of new "phyla" (if the word has any meaning for you, which it should
not) at that time, particularly? All you have said is that the record is
incompatible with evolution. But what *is* it compatible with? And why?

I can understand something like the environment favoring birds with
bigger beaks to dominate the breed. I don't think we need to see
such a transition in the fossil record to know it happens. The kinds of
macro-transformations of limbs changing from flippers to legs wouldn't
be so quick that it would leave no trace. I've seen nothing that suggests
a natural transformation like that would happen in 100,000 years.

Indeed it wouldn't. It would probably happen in many steps over millions
of years. And in fact we have transitional fossils for those
intermediate steps in whales, for example. We have good evidence from
both the fossil record and the genetics of living species for the
transformation. Whether it was natural is not something we can test.

Let us know when you come up with some evidence for the transitions.


Gingerich, P. D., M. ul Haq, I. S. Zalmout, I. H. Khan, and M. S.
Malkani. 2001. Origin of whales from early artiodactyls: Hands and feet
of Eocene Protocetidae from Pakistan. Science 293:2239-2242.

Good example of the type of circular reasoning I see so often for
those who make the evidence fit the theories.

Didn't read it, did you?

I read much of it and saw the same ole same ole. Here's a bone
that we think fits something in between so that proves a transitional
line, etc., etc.

When you say you "read much of it" does that mean that you actually
acquired the paper itself? Or does it mean you read a snippet or two
from some creationist site?

That finding was in fact predicted by evolutionary theory. If, as
phylogenetic analyses had previously found, whales are artiodactyls,
then we would expect early whales that still had feet to have
douoble-pulley astragali. Finding the astragalus confirms a prediction
of common descent.

http://www.trueorigin.org/ng_ap01.asp

It was half of a pulley-shaped anklebone, known as an astragalus, belonging
to another new species of whale. A Pakistani colleague found the other half.
When Gingerich fitted the two pieces together, he had a moment of humbling
recognition…. Here was an anklebone, from a four-legged whale dating back
to 47 million years, that closely resembled the homologous anklebone in an
artiodactyls. Suddenly he realized how closely whales are related to antelopes
(p. 31, emp. added).

“Well-preserved ankles of the earliest ancient whales are now needed to confirm
that the traits seen in the new skeletons are indeed inherited from early artiodactyls
and not a result of convergent evolution,” Rose said.

The Nature article is deceitful. The headline gives, and the conclusion takes
away. It starts out with “Almost like a whale: Fossils bridge gap between land
mammals and whales . . . . Fifty million years ago, two mammals roamed the
desert landscapes of what is now Pakistan. They looked a bit like dogs. They
were, in fact, land-living, four-legged whales. Their new-found fossils join other
famous missing links, such as the primitive bird Archaeopteryx, that show how
one group of animals evolved into another.” Then it proceeds to undermine
everything it just said. The fossils are not anything like whales except for alleged
similarities in ear bones and heel bones (of which neither has anything to do with
whale function), and there are other scientists who disagree strongly that this fossil
has anything to do with whales. The article glosses over tremendous anatomical
differences between the fossil and whales and yet assumes that these formidable
evolutionary changes must have occurred rapidly without leaving a trace in the
fossil record of hundreds of transitional forms that must have been required. The
opening paragraph lies about Archaeopteryx, which is not ancestral to birds (earlier
birds are found in the fossil record),

This is not actually true. If you think it is, name the earlier birds.
It's also irrelevant. Don't know what the article said, exactly (and it
wasn't the Gingerich et al. article being talked about here), but
Archaeopteryx is not generally claimed to be ancestral to birds. We
can't actually distinguish ancestors from close cousins. Archaeopteryx
is a transitional fossil, though.

You didn't read it did you? I quoted the relevent portion that did address
Gingerich's article.

You are mistaken. In fact what is being addressed is a news item in
Nature that refers to Gingerich. Gingerich's article itself is not being
addressed at all in the stuff you quoted, just a different article that
talks about Gingerich. You're reading tertiary sources!

I realize this comes from Bizarrekly but it's the first one I found, is
this not typical? I've heard it myself.
http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/diapsid...aeopteryx.html
It has long been accepted that Archaeopteryx was a transitional form between
birds and reptiles, and that it is the earliest known bird.

And so it is, which contradicts the claim in that article that "earlier
birds are found in the fossil record". By the way, the fact that
Archaeopteryx is transitional and is the oldest known bird doesn't mean
that it's ancestral to modern birds, just as your great aunt, if she
outlived your grandparents, would not therefore be your ancestor.

and it presents, in confident terms, a flimsy
observation that is highly disputed or irrelevant to this serious problem in the
evolutionists’ story. For shame, Nature!

For shame, creationist web site! Archaeopteryx is an ideal transitional
fossil. Creationists can't even agree on whether it's "just a bird" or
"just a dinosaur with faked feathers".

Again, I must remind you that "creationists" are various people.

Indeed they are. They all agree that evolution is wrong, but they can't
agree on just why. Hmmm...perhaps the conclusion is independent of the
"reasons".

The pictures on the Science page also stretch the truth, portraying Rodhocetus
as whale-like as possible. What they don’t tell you is that most of the bones are
inferred. Just a few fragments were found, and the rest is artistic license (See
Creation magazine, Sept-Nov 2001, pp. 10-14.)

Actually, quite a bit of Rodhocetus material has been found.

What the bones show are extinct animals who were perfectly adapted to their own
environment, without any desire or pressure to evolve into something else.

How you would tell this by looking at a skeleton, or even a whole
animal, is beyond me.

I suppose the same way that some can tell it evolved from something else.

Nope, there are in fact rigorous methods for doing that. Look up
"phylogenetic analysis".

The
crucial features the evolutionists are basing their stories on are just skeletal features
– teeth, ear cavities, and foot bones. What about all the other specialized features
of whales – sonar, spouts on the top of their heads, the ability to dive deep, and
much more, for which there is not a shred of evidence of transitional forms? The
only way you can arrange extinct animals into a family tree is with a prior commitment
to evolution. This is circular reasoning. Beaver have webbed feet, too; are they
evolving into dolphins? The fossil evidence shows a wide assortment of adapted
animals that appear abruptly then went extinct. The rest is storytelling. These articles
also highlight a reappearing difficulty for evolution, that the genetic/molecular family
trees do not match the morphological family trees.

My, that was a lot of verbiage. Did you read it, or just copy it?

Both.

Apparently there is no possible evidence for evolution. All this thing
does is present the Zeno's paradox of evolution: show them one
intermediate, and they'll complain that the intermediates between the
intermediates haven't been found.

"They" is a person but he brings up a good point, the animals are well
suited for their environment and circular reasoning makes the pieces
fit the tree.

There is no reason why intermediates should not be well suited for their
environments. In fact natural selection would require it. That doesn't
mean at all that they aren't transitional. Circular reasoning is not
involved. You need to look up "nested hierarchy".

Thewissen, J. G. M., E. M. Williams, L. J. Roe, and S. T. Hussain. 2001.
Skeletons of terrestrial cetaceans and the relationship of whales to
artiodactyls. Nature 413: 277-281.

...from the same page just prior to the above rebuttal.

You call that a rebuttal?

You call that a response?

No, I just call it a snide comment. My response was elsewhere.

Whale Ancestor Alleged 09/19/2001
“Everyone will agree that these animals are whales,” says an Ohio paleontologist
about a wolf-sized creature that probably only got wet walking across streams,
according to a report in Nature. But that may be wishful thinking. Molecular
analyses put very different creatures in the ancestral line of whales, and rival teams
see the hippopotamus as a more likely candidate.

That's a distortion. Nobody says that hippopotami are ancestral to
whales, merely that they are the closest living relatives of whales.
Hippos, by the way, are artiodactyls, making that theory fully
compatible with the fossil discoveries. No conflict here.

Apparently there is one with the Ohio paleontologist. I think the point
was that his reasoning is all too common.

You don't know what the paleontologist actually said there. It wasn't in
direct quotes, and science journalists are famous for screwing up this
sort of thing. Note that the Ohio professor is talking about agreement.
It's the (unnamed) science journalist who is talking about conflict, and
he's confused about its nature. The question was whether mesonychians
(an extinct group) is closely related to whales, and, if so, whether
they are artiodactyls. Nothing to do with whether the fossils being
discussed are actually whales. Some paleontologists used to think that
whales were not artiodactyls, but the astragali put paid to that notion.

Because cetaceans are so unlike any land mammal, with their legs as paddles
and their nostrils atop their heads, it has been immensely difficult to place them in
the evolutionary scheme of things . . . . “Rapid evolutionary change, be it molecular,
ecological or anatomical, is extremely difficult to reconstruct, and the speed with
which cetaceans took to the water may make their bones an unreliable guide to their
ancestry,” he says [evolutionary biologist Ulfur Arnason of the University of Lund in
Sweden]. Arnason believes the two camps will remain divided, at least for now.
“There’s no point trying to reach some sort of consensus based on compromise.
It has often been very difficult to reconcile morphological and molecular opinions,”
he says.

Presumably this was written before the whale astragali were found,
because it makes no sense after.

So you say. These are the types of comments that you should support
instead of asserting. How does the whale astragali reconstruct the
rapid evolutionary change?

Beg pardon? Whale astragali just sit there. They don't reconstruct
anything. What they do, however, is show us that early whales had the
diagnostic features of artiodactyls, in full accordance with the
molecular data. How rapid the transition was is another matter. We
really can't tell from the available fossils. All we can say is that
there are quite a few transitional fossils in various stages of changing
from terrestrial to fully aquatic. Again, this doesn't mean that all
those transitionals were not adapted just fine to their environments,
just as hippos, sea otters, penguins, sea lions, seals, and dugongs are
adapted to theirs, even though they aren't as fully aquatic as whales or
as fully terrestrial as horses.

Science Magazine also has a report with pictures of reconstructions of two of the
specimens. National Geographic, as expected, joined in the celebration of the
new fossil, but admits “Despite this evidence that cetaceans (whales, dolphins,
and porpoises) evolved from artiodactyls, substantial discrepancies remain,
Rose said. "If cetacaeans belong to artiodactyls," he said, "then similarities in the
cranial and dental morphologies of mesonychians and cetaceans must be the result
of convergent evolution or must have been lost in artiodactyls.

Not clear, since we don't know exactly what mesonychians were, and
whether or not they were artiodactyls.

Doesn't matter. We can paint them into the family tree anyway.

You have no clue about how phylogenetic analysis is done. It's not
arbitrary.

Shedlock, A. M., M. C. Milinkovitch, and N. Okada. 2000. SINE evolution,
missing data, and the origin of whales. Syst. Biol. 49:808-817.

Is the missing data still missing or did they fill it in with their beliefs ?

Just reading titles won't tell you much, though it will, if you look
hard enough, give you an excuse not to think. This paper shows that
hippos and whales are closest living relatives. Morphological and
molecular data are now in agreement. Why do you think that would be?

Circular reasoning?

Please read the paper, go through the reasoning, and tell me what part
of it is circular, because I'm having some trouble seeing it.

The problem I have with this sort of thinking is that the mammal is supposed
to not only survive but thrive in a competitive environment as it's leg's
slowly morph to flippers ( slowly even by PE standards ).

So what you're saying is that you can't, personally, imagine what
advantage intermediates would have. Since you can't imagine it, it can't
be true. Yet you have seen sea lions, I suppose.

Yes, and if they had any less of a flipper they would be out of luck
in the water and much too cumbersome on land.

How about penguins? How about sea otters? How about platypodes?

(Note: I'm not saying these are evolutionary intermediates, but they are
functionally intermediate, which answers your argument for functional
impossibility of the intermediate.)

That should do for a start. New fossils and new molecular analyses make
this conclusion stronger every year.

I'd rather base my conclusions on unbiased evidence.


We're not going to get anywhere if you say that all the scientific
literature is biased.

It's interesting that you interpreted my comment like that.
That pretty much sums things up.

I don't see another way to interpret it. You seem to be claiming that
all the literature I cited is biased (though without reading any of it
-- apparently you can sniff bias from a distance). Now, either I have
carefully chosen all the biased stuff out of the pool of literature, and
I can't imagine how you would know that, or it's all biased.

My guess is that you are assuming your creationist sites to be unbiased
representations of the literature, and since I don't conform to what
they say, I must be biased. Yes?

You are once again filtering all your information
through creationist web sites.

You've repeated that one a number of times too.

Seems to be true. I don't think you have read a single thing I've cited.

Do you think they're unbiased? Where is
the creationist research? Have you ever seen any, or heard of any?

I have a news flash for you. Many scientists are creationists, they
look at the same evidence that you do and sometimes write books
or otherwise contribute to a creationist site so that you can dismiss
them as irrelevent and biased.

I have a news flash for you. Almost no scientists are creationists.
Creationists don't do research. They don't publish any research. They
publish polemics on occasion, but that's hardly the same thing. If you
disagree, show me some scientific research (on a relevant subject) by a
creationist.

The creationists are trying to create the false impression that this is
a live controversy in science. You fell for it because you would like it
to be true. But find me the research.

[snip]


I don't recall you quoting anything that wasn't taken from a creationist
web site, but perhaps you did once or twice. Reading massaged snippets
of "secular" (read: scientific) sources does not constitute looking at
both sides. By the way, have you noticed that those web sites you keep
quoting also devote a great deal of effort to showing that the earth and
universe are 6000 years old and that most fossils were deposited by a
single, global flood? How can you possibly consider them to represent
real science? They're crackpots, even by your standards, aren't they?

No response?