George wrote:
"John Wilkins" wrote in message
...

I think we should return western civilisation to its Ilamic Arab roots at
Toledo, myself. They worked in harmony between religions, in common
scholarship, with an eye to the truth, until some ill-mannered quandam
crusader reintroduced Christian barbarity.



What a hoot! You actually hold a degree?

We have only to look at Islamic fundamentalist states and movements to
discover that the Koran allows for all sorts of barbarities. A lot of which
were committed on populations in north Africa on the way to Toledo, if you
take your blinders off.

Pragmatism, not religion, led to tolerance. Dead goldsmiths make little
jewelry.


It's true. Irony does not work on Usenet...

You can find good and bad aspects of any historical movement. I chose Toledo
because it was the source of the great revival of classical learning that
resulted in the Renaissance, and the rediscovery of Aristotle's Historia
Animalium, translated by Michael Scot at Toledo, was the intermediary from
which modern biology developed, as it abandoned the Etymologia tradition of
using nature purely as a source of moral tales, which had been the Christian
tradition of "natural history" since the 2nd century CE.

The University of Toledo was critical to the development of modern western
scholarship. Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas both got going from the
distribution of Avicenna's (Ibn Sina) work on Aristotle and commentaries. The
Summa Theologiae is a sustained response to this. And at that time and place
the Caliph allowed a cosmopolitan and open tolerant society. This was in the
eleventh century, when most of Europe was intolerant and barbaric.

--
John S. Wilkins, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Biohumanities Project
University of Queensland - Blog: evolvethought.blogspot.com
"Darwin's theory has no more to do with philosophy than any other
hypothesis in natural science." Tractatus 4.1122

John Harshman wrote:
Fletis Humplebacker wrote:

Wrong. I've advocated all along at looking at the real data and
you can't avoid the philosophical aspects of evolution since
it is often driven by a philosophical approach.

Can you back that up?

Yes, I've given a few examples of evolutionist filling in the gaps
when the evidence didn't quite support it. That goes back to Darwin.


You have given no such examples, nor have you shown that any of this, if
it exists, is driven by some philosophical approach.


Sure I have. Darwinian Evolution predicts gradual change over long
periods, the fossil record says otherwise so for many people we have
ideology over scientific evidence. In talking to you, you refuse to accept
what the leaders in the field have to say because they are posted
on religious sites. You are putting your ideology over facts.

STEPHEN J. GOULD, HARVARD, "The Cambrian Explosion occurred
in a geological moment, and we have reason to think that all major
anatomical designs may have made their evolutionary appearance at
that time. ...not only the phylum Chordata itself, but also all its major
divisions, arose within the Cambrian Explosion. So much for chordate
uniqueness... Contrary to Darwin's expectation that new data would
reveal gradualistic continuity with slow and steady expansion, all major
discoveries of the past century have only heightened the massiveness
and geological abruptness of this formative event..." Nature, Vol.377,
26 10/95, p.682

Preston Cloud & Martin F. Glaessner, "Ever since Darwin, the geologically
abrupt appearance and rapid diversification of early animal life have fascinated
biologist and students of Earth history alike....This interval, plus Early Cambrian,
was the time during which metazoan life diversified into nearly all of the major
phyla and most of the invertebrate classes and orders subsequently known."
Science, Aug.27, 1982

RICHARD Monastersky, Earth Science Ed., Science News, "The remarkably
complex forms of animals we see today suddenly appeared. ...This moment,
right at the start of the Earth's Cambrian Period...marks the evolutionary
explosion that filled the seas with the earth's first complex creatures. ...‘This
is Genesis material,’ gushed one researcher. ...demonstrates that the large
animal phyla of today were present already in the early Cambrian and that
they were as distinct from each other as they are today...a menagerie of clam
cousins, sponges, segmented worms, and other invertevrates that would seem
vaguely familiar to any scuba diver." Discover, p.40, 4/93

Richard Dawkins, Cambridge, "And we find many of them already in an advanced
state of evolution, the very first time they appear. It is as though they were just
planted there, without any evolutionary history. Needless to say, this appearance
of sudden planting has delighted creationists. ...the only alternative explanation of
the sudden appearance of so many complex animal types in the Cambrian era is
divine creation...", The Blind Watchmaker, 1986, p229-230


What makes you think the Cambrian explosion is at odds with Darwinian
theory? Your problem is that you get all your information from
creationist web sites.

Not exclusively, in fact I've quoted from evolutionists many times.

Almost exclusively quote mines taken from creationist web sites.

Call them whatever you want, it doesn't change the significance of the
meanings. It isn't hard to figure out why they aren't prominent on evolutionist
sites.


Conspiracy again? You don't understand the meanings, as Steven J. Gould
has specifically pointed out to you and other creationists.


I posted many more than just that particular comment by Gould.
If someone doesn't buy the spin it doesn't mean that they didn't
understand the comment.


Yes it is at odds, how can you deny it? The evolutionist community
admits it. Are you ignoring all the quotes that you don't like?

The quotes you are talking about generally have nothing to do with the
Cambrian explosion. They are pretty much all talking about stasis and
punctuation among similar species throughout the history of life.

Some distinctly mentioned evolution in general. I understand that the fossil
record of smooth transitions within a species is rare but not unknown. Gaps
within a species isn't evidence of transitions between species.


That made no sense at all. We're talking about smooth transitions
*between* species, not within them. They are rare but not unknown. More
important, they have nothing to do with the reality of common descent.


You keep falling back on "similar species" as evidence of
transitions. I haven't seen any evidence of one species
changing to another. I'll requote:

Richard Dawkins, Cambridge, "And we find many of them already in an
advanced state of evolution, the very first time they appear."


Which looks an awful lot like an ideological way of looking
at it.


Is it your view that every species was separately created during the
past 500+ million years?

Not in the strict sense of the word species. I agree that a species
diversifies over time due to the environment they are in. Humans
that are separated change too but that doesn't prove that they came
from apes.


Could you be more specific? How do you recognize separately created
kinds, and distinguish them from species that are related through common
descent? How, for example, did you determine that humans and apes are
not related?


I don't assume that the relation between species exists. Men and
apes aren't the same species, positing that they are related is an
ideological statement.


http://www.origins.org/articles/john...hofdarwin.html
The reason the theory of evolution is so controversial is that it is the main
scientific prop for scientific naturalism. Students first learn that "evolution
is a fact," and then they gradually learn more and more about what that
"fact" means. It means that all living things are the product of mindless
material forces such as chemical laws, natural selection, and random
variation. So God is totally out of the picture, and humans (like everything
else) are the accidental product of a purposeless universe. Do you wonder
why a lot of people suspect that these claims go far beyond the available
evidence?

What makes you think that anyone is teaching that last bit to any students?

I didn't just fall of of the tunip truck on the way into town. Why do you
suppose there is a ID movement regarding public education?

Well, that information is contained in the Wedge document.

http://wiki.cotch.net/index.php/Wedge_document

The purpose is to restore western civilization to its Christian roots.

God forbid.


Not a big fan of the First Amendment, are you?


You lost me there. What's the relevance of the first Amendment?


Nothing to do with science, you will note. It's all about supposed
cultural benefits, motivated by religion. And science doesn't teach that
the universe is purposeless or that god is out of the picture.


Very true, the problem is that's the way science is erroneously
presented, hence the movement. They are not anti-science. They
are against the 'materialism is the only answer possible' crowd,
who unfortunantly has the reigns in public education.


I have asked you for evidence of this assertion, and you responded with
irrelevancies, then repeated your assertion. No wonder creationism isn't
considered intellectually respectable.


I quoted right out of my science book, you must have mentally
filtered it out and respond with an insult. No wonder some people
can recognize denial when they see it.


It merely
tries to find testable explanations of past events. God, because of the
vagueness of the concept, is nearly impossible to investigate. You might
as well complain about the atheism of chemistry or physics.

Chemistry? No, I don't see that but philosophy does find it's way
into physics as well when we discuss origins. Many, many theories
abound and are no doubt taught in class. Anything but God.
True, 'god' is vague except within a religion, which is why the
ID supporters use the term Intelligent Designer. That does not
imply any particular religious connotation.


Wink wink, nudge nudge.


I see, so you can't be Jewish, Hindu, Muslim or make up your own
interpretation and believe in an Intelligent Designer? Wink wink indeed.


And I repeat: find me anyone who is teaching, in a biology course
anywhere, that humans are the accidental product of a purposeless
universe.

Probably most do by implication, maybe some outright. Believe it
or not I went to school. When one is taught that life formed by
chemical reactions, maybe triggered by lightening and crawled out
of the mud, all on it's own somehow, what do you suppose the message
is? Science can't say for certain that it's all natural (or supernatural)
but look at how hard people fight at the slightest hint of the G word.
Tell me people aren't conditioned.


In other words, you can't support your claim. Noted.


In other words, you can't respond directly to it. Noted. If you
were right there would be no response to the schools by the
IDers. I'll let any reader decide who is in denial.



Find a biology text that says this. Anything other than an
unsupported claim from a creationist web site.

I'll quote you from my old college book I have right here,
"Fundamentals of Physical Science" page 571:

"Today the nature of life no longer seems as penetrable as it once
did, and the transition from lifeless matter to living matter, though
still hardly an open book, nevertheless seems more to be an
inevitable sequel to to the physical and chemical conditions that
prevailed on the earth some billions of years ago than a supernatural
event".


Notice: no mention of a purposeless universe or the nonexistence of god.
A natural origin of life is quite a different thing.


Please explain how a natural origin can have any purpose.
Or how supernatural events being unlikely does not mean
that no god was involved. Science can't know that because
there's no evidence of it. So explain how thqat doesn't go
beyond scientific claims. Are you a politician?


If the Academy meant to teach scientific investigation, rather than to inculcate
a belief system, it would encourage students to think about why, if natural
selection has been continuously active in creating, the observed examples
involve very limited back-and-forth variation that doesn't seem to be going
anywhere. But skepticism of that kind might spread and threaten the whole
system of naturalistic belief. Why is the fossil record overall so difficult to
reconcile with the steady process of gradual transformation predicted by the
neo-Darwinian theory?

Simple: because neo-Darwinian theory doesn't predict a steady process of
gradual transformation.

I suppose it depends on how you define gradual, but the concept
seems to refer to gradual overall change over time in sporatic bursts.

Exactly. "Gradual" to a population geneticist means a few thousand
generations at most, which is much too short a time to register in the
fossil record.

Hmmm. Consider me skeptical on that one.


What, exactly, are you skeptical about here?

What you said. A few thousand generations won't show up in the
fossil record at all?


It would take exceptional conditions to produce a change,
under selection, that was slow enough to observe, or a preserved
sequence with stratigraphic control precise enough, to observe.


First you say Darwinian doesn't predict smooth transitions and now
you're saying they can't be found anyway. That's covering your bases
pretty well.


I'll try to be clear. Evolution as currently understood does predict
smooth transitions, but it predicts those transitions to happen quickly
in geological terms, such that it would be unlikely (given the nature of
the fossil record) for many of them to be preserved. It's an obvious
effect of the incompleteness of the record and the episodic nature of
change.


So it's too quick to even be recorded so any biological gaps between
species are asserted as being there, and perfectly natural.
No ideology there!



There's lots of theories out there but no evidence that natural
forces are the primary cause. It doesn't seem likely to me, it
doesn't seem likely to many, and yes, that includes educated
folks, they aren't all Bible thumping inbred hayseeds.

The evidence that natural processes (or whatever processes there may be)
are the causes of evolution is just not obtainable from the fossil
record. You need to look elsewhere.

I didn't limit my comment to fossil evidence.


OK.


We can observe processes happening
in the present,

No one disputes that.


Well, some creationists do. But I'll accept that you don't.


I haven't seen any creationist make those claims. The
terms micro and macro evolution are used to draw the
distinction.



and we can look within the genome to infer past
processes. So far, we don't find anything other than mutation,
selection, drift, etc., though there are quite a few bizarre wrinkles.
Perhaps all the processes you suppose, whatever they may be, happened
only in the distant past and are not operating now. But why should that be?

I don't agree that changes within a species is evidence they can
become a different species. Unless you use the term species
in a narrow sense.


I'm not talking just about changes within a species. I'm talking about
differences between species too. There is no sign of any processes other
than the ones we know about already. Though I'm not sure what
creationist processes there would be, or how you would recognize them.


The processes are adaptability, or survival of the fittest. Bigger, faster,
more or less colorful, etc. but no sign of becoming anything but what
they basically were. That's all the creationist can recognize because
that's all there is as far as we know.



http://cogweb.ucla.edu/ep/Evolution.html
Gradualism. All the way back to Darwin, the notion that changes accrue
gradually over long periods of time has been a central proposition of
evolutionary theory. As Ernst Mayr put it in Animal Species and Evolution
(1963), "all evolution is due to the accumulation of small genetic changes" (p. 586).

In contrast, the fossil record suggests long periods of stasis followed by brief
periods of rapid change - what Niles Eldredge and Stephen J. Gould dubbed
punctuated equilibrium. This data has sometimes been taken as evidence
against the neo-Darwinian model by people who believe the order of nature is
due to the intentional act or acts of a supernatural being. Within the scientific
tradition, the relative lack of continuous change in the fossil record is interpreted
as evidence that speciation events have typically taken place in small populations
over relatively short periods of time.

As you suggested above, all this is due to a confusion over timescales
and the meaning of "gradual". Even to Eldredge and Gould, "brief periods
of rapid change" encompassed thousands of years. In fact, one of the
main problems of the fossil record is figuring out why change is so
slow, when natural selection is capable of driving change much, much
faster than we observe there.

I think about that almost every time I purchase groceries.


I notice you often resort to inane quips. Do they help you avoid
thinking about this sort of thing?


I haven't exactly avoided it so far. You think it's natural, I don't.
That doesn't mean that you thought about it and I didn't.



How would the theory fare if we did not assume at
the start that nature had to do its own creating, so a naturalistic creation
mechanism simply has to exist regardless of the evidence? These are the
kinds of questions the Darwinists don't want to encourage students to ask.

True, because they're stupid "Have you stopped beating your wife?" sorts
of questions.

Not so fast there. I think we both went to school. I definitely got
the idea that only natural means were at play for the creation
of life, it's transformation and the universe. I understand not teaching
any religious interpretations but science cannot honestly make those
claims.

As for the universe, you'll have to check with somebody else. I only
deal with biology, with a little geology on the side. Natural processes
are all we can profitably investigate, and so we do. This has nothing to
do with a "purposeless universe". But that's theology, not biology.
Since a great many Christians have no problem with a natural course of
evolution, or even a natural origin of life, that much must be clear.


Evolution is subject to interpretation, so is religion, including
Christianity. But no Christian would attribute life to natural causes.


Plenty of them do, in fact.


I've never once heard that and I've heard one extreme of Christianity
to the other. I don't think you can support that.


Many Christians believe that god operates
through natural causes.


That's a contradiction.


Perhaps you would not consider them real
Christians. Read Kenneth Miller's book Finding Darwin's God, for example.


If you paraphrased it accurately I would have problems with it.


Changing the subject for a minute, how old do you think the earth and
universe are?

According to the oracles of Zoaraster....just kidding. I am an older
earther. I do believe in evolution to some extent but don't see the
evidence for macro-evolution. If I ever do see it I'll need even
more convincing that it was a natural outcome of the existence of
matter. For me, the odds are too great.

There are many separable questions here. There is no good way to
demonstrate that only natural causes were operating in the evolution of
life, so I won't try. Let's concentrate on what I can show, and that's
common descent. That much is clear: all life is descended from common
ancestors. There is some weird hanky-panky going on at the bottom of the
tree (among all those gene-exchanging bacteria), but nearer the top,
it's simpler. All animals (Metazoa), for example, are descended from a
single common ancestor, and we know many of the details of this tree of
descent. We can't rule out that some of the mutations during that long
history were directly caused by divine intervention. (How could we?) But
the history itself is clear.


Well, I can't buy the macro-mutation thing. But like life itself, too many
things need to happen concurently for anything to function. Most
mutations are detrimental, not helpful. and things like limbs turning
into flippers is too much a stretch for me. At some point the legs are
going to be less than efficient as legs and the creature needs to
survive for thousands of generations in a dog eat dog world.


I don't like macromutations either. But your other assertions are wrong.
Most mutations are in fact neutral, neither helpful nor harmful.


I'm more familiar with the human species and haven't seen
more beneficial mutations compared to helpful ones.


Limbs
did turn into flippers, and there is excellent documentation from
genetic data for this.


Genetic data reveals former forms of a limb?


Exactly how that happened is another question.
But there is no reason to suppose that intermediates would be less than
efficient.


It defies logic.


Clearly, sea lion flippers are intermediate between dog legs
and dolphin flippers.


I like the way that you say clearly. Are sea lions on their way
to being dogs or dolphins or are they stuck in the intermediate
stage being happy with their limbs just the way they are?


But do sea lions have any problem surviving? There
are all manner of functional intermediates in the world today, despite
what you may believe.


Let's say that was true for the sake of argument. Up to and including
the halfway point between the dolfin or dog and the sea lion how did
the critter excel in it's environment?



We don't know every single branch in that big tree, but we know some
beyond doubt. One of the best known, and perhaps most interesting to
you, is the relationship of humans and their various primate cousins.

Are you fanning the flames?


Just stating facts. If you don't want to believe it, you need to find a
way to ignore all the evidence.


What evidence?


You may not like that, but the genetic evidence is overwhelming. I could
show you gene after gene that gives the same result.

Chimps have 48 chromosomes and humans have 46, I believe.
Does your record show how the change occurred?


Indeed it does, very nicely. Two ape chromosomes fused into one human
chromosome, which still retains a sequence resembling a pair of
telomeres, the stuff that's on the end of a chromosome, right at the join.

Here's a pretty good description of the evidence:
http://www.gate.net/~rwms/hum_ape_chrom.html


I'll look into it.



And I couldn't show
you a single gene that gives a different result. If you want, I could
start showing you the actual data, though you would need a bit of
education before you could understand it.

I appreciate that, I got me a ride set up to the big city libery on the next
hay wagon out. Just picture Jed Clampet looking at the cement pond
for the first time.


Buried in that aw shucks stuff, was there a serious request for data?


You betcha.

"Fletis Humplebacker" wrote in message
...
John Harshman wrote:
Fletis Humplebacker wrote:

Wrong. I've advocated all along at looking at the real data and
you can't avoid the philosophical aspects of evolution since
it is often driven by a philosophical approach.

Can you back that up?

Yes, I've given a few examples of evolutionist filling in the gaps
when the evidence didn't quite support it. That goes back to Darwin.


You have given no such examples, nor have you shown that any of this, if
it exists, is driven by some philosophical approach.


Sure I have. Darwinian Evolution predicts gradual change over long
periods, the fossil record says otherwise so for many people we have
ideology over scientific evidence. In talking to you, you refuse to accept
what the leaders in the field have to say because they are posted
on religious sites. You are putting your ideology over facts.

STEPHEN J. GOULD, HARVARD, "The Cambrian Explosion occurred
in a geological moment, and we have reason to think that all major
anatomical designs may have made their evolutionary appearance at
that time. ...not only the phylum Chordata itself, but also all its major
divisions, arose within the Cambrian Explosion. So much for chordate
uniqueness... Contrary to Darwin's expectation that new data would
reveal gradualistic continuity with slow and steady expansion, all major
discoveries of the past century have only heightened the massiveness
and geological abruptness of this formative event..." Nature, Vol.377,
26 10/95, p.682

Preston Cloud & Martin F. Glaessner, "Ever since Darwin, the geologically
abrupt appearance and rapid diversification of early animal life have
fascinated
biologist and students of Earth history alike....This interval, plus Early
Cambrian,
was the time during which metazoan life diversified into nearly all of the
major
phyla and most of the invertebrate classes and orders subsequently known."
Science, Aug.27, 1982

RICHARD Monastersky, Earth Science Ed., Science News, "The remarkably
complex forms of animals we see today suddenly appeared. ...This moment,
right at the start of the Earth's Cambrian Period...marks the evolutionary
explosion that filled the seas with the earth's first complex creatures.
...‘This
is Genesis material,’ gushed one researcher. ...demonstrates that the
large
animal phyla of today were present already in the early Cambrian and that
they were as distinct from each other as they are today...a menagerie of
clam
cousins, sponges, segmented worms, and other invertevrates that would seem
vaguely familiar to any scuba diver." Discover, p.40, 4/93

Richard Dawkins, Cambridge, "And we find many of them already in an
advanced
state of evolution, the very first time they appear. It is as though they
were just
planted there, without any evolutionary history. Needless to say, this
appearance
of sudden planting has delighted creationists. ...the only alternative
explanation of
the sudden appearance of so many complex animal types in the Cambrian era
is
divine creation...", The Blind Watchmaker, 1986, p229-230


What makes you think the Cambrian explosion is at odds with Darwinian
theory? Your problem is that you get all your information from
creationist web sites.

Not exclusively, in fact I've quoted from evolutionists many times.

Almost exclusively quote mines taken from creationist web sites.

Call them whatever you want, it doesn't change the significance of the
meanings. It isn't hard to figure out why they aren't prominent on
evolutionist
sites.


Conspiracy again? You don't understand the meanings, as Steven J. Gould
has specifically pointed out to you and other creationists.


I posted many more than just that particular comment by Gould.
If someone doesn't buy the spin it doesn't mean that they didn't
understand the comment.


Yes it is at odds, how can you deny it? The evolutionist community
admits it. Are you ignoring all the quotes that you don't like?

The quotes you are talking about generally have nothing to do with the
Cambrian explosion. They are pretty much all talking about stasis and
punctuation among similar species throughout the history of life.

Some distinctly mentioned evolution in general. I understand that the
fossil
record of smooth transitions within a species is rare but not unknown.
Gaps
within a species isn't evidence of transitions between species.


That made no sense at all. We're talking about smooth transitions
*between* species, not within them. They are rare but not unknown. More
important, they have nothing to do with the reality of common descent.


You keep falling back on "similar species" as evidence of
transitions. I haven't seen any evidence of one species
changing to another. I'll requote:

Richard Dawkins, Cambridge, "And we find many of them already in an
advanced state of evolution, the very first time they appear."


Which looks an awful lot like an ideological way of looking
at it.


Is it your view that every species was separately created during the
past 500+ million years?

Not in the strict sense of the word species. I agree that a species
diversifies over time due to the environment they are in. Humans
that are separated change too but that doesn't prove that they came
from apes.


Could you be more specific? How do you recognize separately created
kinds, and distinguish them from species that are related through common
descent? How, for example, did you determine that humans and apes are
not related?


I don't assume that the relation between species exists. Men and
apes aren't the same species, positing that they are related is an
ideological statement.


http://www.origins.org/articles/john...hofdarwin.html
The reason the theory of evolution is so controversial is that it is
the main
scientific prop for scientific naturalism. Students first learn that
"evolution
is a fact," and then they gradually learn more and more about what
that
"fact" means. It means that all living things are the product of
mindless
material forces such as chemical laws, natural selection, and random
variation. So God is totally out of the picture, and humans (like
everything
else) are the accidental product of a purposeless universe. Do you
wonder
why a lot of people suspect that these claims go far beyond the
available
evidence?

What makes you think that anyone is teaching that last bit to any
students?

I didn't just fall of of the tunip truck on the way into town. Why do
you
suppose there is a ID movement regarding public education?

Well, that information is contained in the Wedge document.

http://wiki.cotch.net/index.php/Wedge_document

The purpose is to restore western civilization to its Christian roots.

God forbid.


Not a big fan of the First Amendment, are you?


You lost me there. What's the relevance of the first Amendment?


Nothing to do with science, you will note. It's all about supposed
cultural benefits, motivated by religion. And science doesn't teach that
the universe is purposeless or that god is out of the picture.


Very true, the problem is that's the way science is erroneously
presented, hence the movement. They are not anti-science. They
are against the 'materialism is the only answer possible' crowd,
who unfortunantly has the reigns in public education.


I have asked you for evidence of this assertion, and you responded with
irrelevancies, then repeated your assertion. No wonder creationism isn't
considered intellectually respectable.


I quoted right out of my science book, you must have mentally
filtered it out and respond with an insult. No wonder some people
can recognize denial when they see it.


It merely
tries to find testable explanations of past events. God, because of the
vagueness of the concept, is nearly impossible to investigate. You might
as well complain about the atheism of chemistry or physics.

Chemistry? No, I don't see that but philosophy does find it's way
into physics as well when we discuss origins. Many, many theories
abound and are no doubt taught in class. Anything but God.
True, 'god' is vague except within a religion, which is why the
ID supporters use the term Intelligent Designer. That does not
imply any particular religious connotation.


Wink wink, nudge nudge.


I see, so you can't be Jewish, Hindu, Muslim or make up your own
interpretation and believe in an Intelligent Designer? Wink wink indeed.


And I repeat: find me anyone who is teaching, in a biology course
anywhere, that humans are the accidental product of a purposeless
universe.

Probably most do by implication, maybe some outright. Believe it
or not I went to school. When one is taught that life formed by
chemical reactions, maybe triggered by lightening and crawled out
of the mud, all on it's own somehow, what do you suppose the message
is? Science can't say for certain that it's all natural (or supernatural)
but look at how hard people fight at the slightest hint of the G word.
Tell me people aren't conditioned.


In other words, you can't support your claim. Noted.


In other words, you can't respond directly to it. Noted. If you
were right there would be no response to the schools by the
IDers. I'll let any reader decide who is in denial.



Find a biology text that says this. Anything other than an
unsupported claim from a creationist web site.

I'll quote you from my old college book I have right here,
"Fundamentals of Physical Science" page 571:

"Today the nature of life no longer seems as penetrable as it once
did, and the transition from lifeless matter to living matter, though
still hardly an open book, nevertheless seems more to be an
inevitable sequel to to the physical and chemical conditions that
prevailed on the earth some billions of years ago than a supernatural
event".


Notice: no mention of a purposeless universe or the nonexistence of god.
A natural origin of life is quite a different thing.


Please explain how a natural origin can have any purpose.
Or how supernatural events being unlikely does not mean
that no god was involved. Science can't know that because
there's no evidence of it. So explain how thqat doesn't go
beyond scientific claims. Are you a politician?


If the Academy meant to teach scientific investigation, rather than
to inculcate
a belief system, it would encourage students to think about why, if
natural
selection has been continuously active in creating, the observed
examples
involve very limited back-and-forth variation that doesn't seem to be
going
anywhere. But skepticism of that kind might spread and threaten the
whole
system of naturalistic belief. Why is the fossil record overall so
difficult to
reconcile with the steady process of gradual transformation predicted
by the
neo-Darwinian theory?

Simple: because neo-Darwinian theory doesn't predict a steady process
of
gradual transformation.

I suppose it depends on how you define gradual, but the concept
seems to refer to gradual overall change over time in sporatic bursts.

Exactly. "Gradual" to a population geneticist means a few thousand
generations at most, which is much too short a time to register in the
fossil record.

Hmmm. Consider me skeptical on that one.


What, exactly, are you skeptical about here?

What you said. A few thousand generations won't show up in the
fossil record at all?


It would take exceptional conditions to produce a change,
under selection, that was slow enough to observe, or a preserved
sequence with stratigraphic control precise enough, to observe.


First you say Darwinian doesn't predict smooth transitions and now
you're saying they can't be found anyway. That's covering your bases
pretty well.


I'll try to be clear. Evolution as currently understood does predict
smooth transitions, but it predicts those transitions to happen quickly
in geological terms, such that it would be unlikely (given the nature of
the fossil record) for many of them to be preserved. It's an obvious
effect of the incompleteness of the record and the episodic nature of
change.


So it's too quick to even be recorded so any biological gaps between
species are asserted as being there, and perfectly natural.
No ideology there!



There's lots of theories out there but no evidence that natural
forces are the primary cause. It doesn't seem likely to me, it
doesn't seem likely to many, and yes, that includes educated
folks, they aren't all Bible thumping inbred hayseeds.

The evidence that natural processes (or whatever processes there may be)
are the causes of evolution is just not obtainable from the fossil
record. You need to look elsewhere.

I didn't limit my comment to fossil evidence.


OK.


We can observe processes happening
in the present,

No one disputes that.


Well, some creationists do. But I'll accept that you don't.


I haven't seen any creationist make those claims. The
terms micro and macro evolution are used to draw the
distinction.



and we can look within the genome to infer past
processes. So far, we don't find anything other than mutation,
selection, drift, etc., though there are quite a few bizarre wrinkles.
Perhaps all the processes you suppose, whatever they may be, happened
only in the distant past and are not operating now. But why should that
be?

I don't agree that changes within a species is evidence they can
become a different species. Unless you use the term species
in a narrow sense.


I'm not talking just about changes within a species. I'm talking about
differences between species too. There is no sign of any processes other
than the ones we know about already. Though I'm not sure what
creationist processes there would be, or how you would recognize them.


The processes are adaptability, or survival of the fittest. Bigger,
faster,
more or less colorful, etc. but no sign of becoming anything but what
they basically were. That's all the creationist can recognize because
that's all there is as far as we know.



http://cogweb.ucla.edu/ep/Evolution.html
Gradualism. All the way back to Darwin, the notion that changes accrue
gradually over long periods of time has been a central proposition of
evolutionary theory. As Ernst Mayr put it in Animal Species and
Evolution
(1963), "all evolution is due to the accumulation of small genetic
changes" (p. 586).

In contrast, the fossil record suggests long periods of stasis followed
by brief
periods of rapid change - what Niles Eldredge and Stephen J. Gould
dubbed
punctuated equilibrium. This data has sometimes been taken as evidence
against the neo-Darwinian model by people who believe the order of
nature is
due to the intentional act or acts of a supernatural being. Within the
scientific
tradition, the relative lack of continuous change in the fossil record
is interpreted
as evidence that speciation events have typically taken place in small
populations
over relatively short periods of time.

As you suggested above, all this is due to a confusion over timescales
and the meaning of "gradual". Even to Eldredge and Gould, "brief periods
of rapid change" encompassed thousands of years. In fact, one of the
main problems of the fossil record is figuring out why change is so
slow, when natural selection is capable of driving change much, much
faster than we observe there.

I think about that almost every time I purchase groceries.


I notice you often resort to inane quips. Do they help you avoid
thinking about this sort of thing?


I haven't exactly avoided it so far. You think it's natural, I don't.
That doesn't mean that you thought about it and I didn't.



How would the theory fare if we did not assume at
the start that nature had to do its own creating, so a naturalistic
creation
mechanism simply has to exist regardless of the evidence? These are
the
kinds of questions the Darwinists don't want to encourage students to
ask.

True, because they're stupid "Have you stopped beating your wife?"
sorts
of questions.

Not so fast there. I think we both went to school. I definitely got
the idea that only natural means were at play for the creation
of life, it's transformation and the universe. I understand not
teaching
any religious interpretations but science cannot honestly make those
claims.

As for the universe, you'll have to check with somebody else. I only
deal with biology, with a little geology on the side. Natural processes
are all we can profitably investigate, and so we do. This has nothing to
do with a "purposeless universe". But that's theology, not biology.
Since a great many Christians have no problem with a natural course of
evolution, or even a natural origin of life, that much must be clear.


Evolution is subject to interpretation, so is religion, including
Christianity. But no Christian would attribute life to natural causes.


Plenty of them do, in fact.


I've never once heard that and I've heard one extreme of Christianity
to the other. I don't think you can support that.


Many Christians believe that god operates
through natural causes.


That's a contradiction.


Perhaps you would not consider them real
Christians. Read Kenneth Miller's book Finding Darwin's God, for example.


If you paraphrased it accurately I would have problems with it.


Changing the subject for a minute, how old do you think the earth and
universe are?

According to the oracles of Zoaraster....just kidding. I am an older
earther. I do believe in evolution to some extent but don't see the
evidence for macro-evolution. If I ever do see it I'll need even
more convincing that it was a natural outcome of the existence of
matter. For me, the odds are too great.

There are many separable questions here. There is no good way to
demonstrate that only natural causes were operating in the evolution of
life, so I won't try. Let's concentrate on what I can show, and that's
common descent. That much is clear: all life is descended from common
ancestors. There is some weird hanky-panky going on at the bottom of the
tree (among all those gene-exchanging bacteria), but nearer the top,
it's simpler. All animals (Metazoa), for example, are descended from a
single common ancestor, and we know many of the details of this tree of
descent. We can't rule out that some of the mutations during that long
history were directly caused by divine intervention. (How could we?) But
the history itself is clear.


Well, I can't buy the macro-mutation thing. But like life itself, too
many
things need to happen concurently for anything to function. Most
mutations are detrimental, not helpful. and things like limbs turning
into flippers is too much a stretch for me. At some point the legs are
going to be less than efficient as legs and the creature needs to
survive for thousands of generations in a dog eat dog world.


I don't like macromutations either. But your other assertions are wrong.
Most mutations are in fact neutral, neither helpful nor harmful.


I'm more familiar with the human species and haven't seen
more beneficial mutations compared to helpful ones.


Limbs
did turn into flippers, and there is excellent documentation from
genetic data for this.


Genetic data reveals former forms of a limb?


Exactly how that happened is another question.
But there is no reason to suppose that intermediates would be less than
efficient.


It defies logic.


Clearly, sea lion flippers are intermediate between dog legs
and dolphin flippers.


I like the way that you say clearly. Are sea lions on their way
to being dogs or dolphins or are they stuck in the intermediate
stage being happy with their limbs just the way they are?


But do sea lions have any problem surviving? There
are all manner of functional intermediates in the world today, despite
what you may believe.


Let's say that was true for the sake of argument. Up to and including
the halfway point between the dolfin or dog and the sea lion how did
the critter excel in it's environment?



We don't know every single branch in that big tree, but we know some
beyond doubt. One of the best known, and perhaps most interesting to
you, is the relationship of humans and their various primate cousins.

Are you fanning the flames?


Just stating facts. If you don't want to believe it, you need to find a
way to ignore all the evidence.


What evidence?


You may not like that, but the genetic evidence is overwhelming. I could
show you gene after gene that gives the same result.

Chimps have 48 chromosomes and humans have 46, I believe.
Does your record show how the change occurred?


Indeed it does, very nicely. Two ape chromosomes fused into one human
chromosome, which still retains a sequence resembling a pair of
telomeres, the stuff that's on the end of a chromosome, right at the
join.

Here's a pretty good description of the evidence:
http://www.gate.net/~rwms/hum_ape_chrom.html


I'll look into it.



And I couldn't show
you a single gene that gives a different result. If you want, I could
start showing you the actual data, though you would need a bit of
education before you could understand it.

I appreciate that, I got me a ride set up to the big city libery on the
next
hay wagon out. Just picture Jed Clampet looking at the cement pond
for the first time.


Buried in that aw shucks stuff, was there a serious request for data?


You betcha.

Fletis Humplebacker wrote:

John Harshman wrote:

Fletis Humplebacker wrote:


Wrong. I've advocated all along at looking at the real data and
you can't avoid the philosophical aspects of evolution since
it is often driven by a philosophical approach.

Can you back that up?

Yes, I've given a few examples of evolutionist filling in the gaps
when the evidence didn't quite support it. That goes back to Darwin.

You have given no such examples, nor have you shown that any of this, if
it exists, is driven by some philosophical approach.

Sure I have. Darwinian Evolution predicts gradual change over long
periods, the fossil record says otherwise so for many people we have
ideology over scientific evidence. In talking to you, you refuse to accept
what the leaders in the field have to say because they are posted
on religious sites. You are putting your ideology over facts.

No, I refuse to accept your interpretation of what they say because it's
wrong, which you could see if you read the entire documents those little
quote mines are taken from. Darwinian evolution predicts gradual change,
true, but the long periods are only with respect to human lifetimes, not
geological eras.

STEPHEN J. GOULD, HARVARD, "The Cambrian Explosion occurred
in a geological moment, and we have reason to think that all major
anatomical designs may have made their evolutionary appearance at
that time. ...not only the phylum Chordata itself, but also all its major
divisions, arose within the Cambrian Explosion. So much for chordate
uniqueness... Contrary to Darwin's expectation that new data would
reveal gradualistic continuity with slow and steady expansion, all major
discoveries of the past century have only heightened the massiveness
and geological abruptness of this formative event..." Nature, Vol.377,
26 10/95, p.682

Gould had an axe to grind. You are right about one thing, that people
tend to interpret data to fit their theories. That's why science is a
social effort and can't depend on one person. Others have shown how
Gould misinterpreted some of what he saw. The Cambrian explosion may
have spawned most phyla, though we can't tell this from the fossil
record, and there are some phyla that clearly did not originate then.
Chordates and the major divisions of Cephalochordata, Urochordata, and
Vertebrata (or at least their stem groups) may well have originated in
the explosion. The explosion may have lasted as little as 5 million
years. But do you have any real idea how long 5 million years is?

Do you ever wonder, by the way, what used to be in the the ellipses in
all these quotes you get from creationist sites?

Preston Cloud & Martin F. Glaessner, "Ever since Darwin, the geologically
abrupt appearance and rapid diversification of early animal life have fascinated
biologist and students of Earth history alike....This interval, plus Early Cambrian,
was the time during which metazoan life diversified into nearly all of the major
phyla and most of the invertebrate classes and orders subsequently known."
Science, Aug.27, 1982

What do you think Cloud and Glaessner meant by "this interval"? They
clearly aren't talking about the Cambrian explosion, because they say
"plus Early Cambrian". I don't know what they mean, but most classes
don't come along until the Ordovician or later, and most orders not
until the late Paleozoic. Also note that they are talking here about
just those phyla with good fossil records.

RICHARD Monastersky, Earth Science Ed., Science News, "The remarkably
complex forms of animals we see today suddenly appeared. ...This moment,
right at the start of the Earth's Cambrian Period...marks the evolutionary
explosion that filled the seas with the earth's first complex creatures. ...‘This
is Genesis material,’ gushed one researcher. ...demonstrates that the large
animal phyla of today were present already in the early Cambrian and that
they were as distinct from each other as they are today...a menagerie of clam
cousins, sponges, segmented worms, and other invertevrates that would seem
vaguely familiar to any scuba diver." Discover, p.40, 4/93

You did this one before. I guess that was before the newest radiometric
dates showed that most of the Early Cambrian came before the Cambrian
explosion. And look at all the ellipses here. If you do this with the
bible, you can come up with stuff like "Luke...I am...your father."
Quote mining is bad practice, especially when you have to stitch
together sentence fragments.

Richard Dawkins, Cambridge, "And we find many of them already in an advanced
state of evolution, the very first time they appear. It is as though they were just
planted there, without any evolutionary history. Needless to say, this appearance
of sudden planting has delighted creationists. ...the only alternative explanation of
the sudden appearance of so many complex animal types in the Cambrian era is
divine creation...", The Blind Watchmaker, 1986, p229-230

I wonder what Dawkins really said.

What makes you think the Cambrian explosion is at odds with Darwinian
theory? Your problem is that you get all your information from
creationist web sites.

Not exclusively, in fact I've quoted from evolutionists many times.

Almost exclusively quote mines taken from creationist web sites.

Call them whatever you want, it doesn't change the significance of the
meanings. It isn't hard to figure out why they aren't prominent on evolutionist
sites.

Conspiracy again? You don't understand the meanings, as Steven J. Gould
has specifically pointed out to you and other creationists.

I posted many more than just that particular comment by Gould.
If someone doesn't buy the spin it doesn't mean that they didn't
understand the comment.

Whose spin should you buy, if not the author's? Opinions of the state of
science formed by reading carefully selected, mined quotes (especially
the ones full of suspicious deletions) surrounded by creationist
interpretation, are not reliable. You need to read the actual writings
of these authors, in full.

As a start, the Quote Mine Project can help you with some of them:
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/quotes/mine/author.html

Yes it is at odds, how can you deny it? The evolutionist community
admits it. Are you ignoring all the quotes that you don't like?

The quotes you are talking about generally have nothing to do with the
Cambrian explosion. They are pretty much all talking about stasis and
punctuation among similar species throughout the history of life.

Some distinctly mentioned evolution in general. I understand that the fossil
record of smooth transitions within a species is rare but not unknown. Gaps
within a species isn't evidence of transitions between species.

That made no sense at all. We're talking about smooth transitions
*between* species, not within them. They are rare but not unknown. More
important, they have nothing to do with the reality of common descent.

You keep falling back on "similar species" as evidence of
transitions. I haven't seen any evidence of one species
changing to another. I'll requote:

Richard Dawkins, Cambridge, "And we find many of them already in an
advanced state of evolution, the very first time they appear."

Which looks an awful lot like an ideological way of looking
at it.

You seem to freely wander between subspecies and phyla without realizing
it. Let's take trilobites. The first trilobites already appear with all
the characteristics of the class, though subsequently species appear in
close temporal (and often spatial) relationships with similar species.
However, these trilobites are distinguished partly by a mineralized
skeleton that makes preservation easy. We have a few clues to
non-mineralized forms in cases of exceptional preservation. One such is
Naraoia. Interestingly, Naraoia does not display *all* the
characteristics of a trilobite, though it has most of them. It's a
transitional fossil. Other transitional fossils embed trilobites within
arthropods, and arthropods within a larger group of "lobopods".
Anomalocaris is a particularly intriguing transitional form, with one
pair of jointed limbs only.

Before that, there are some Precambrian fossils that suggest arthropod
relationships, notably Kimberella, Spriggina, and Parvancorina, though
preservation is not detailed enough to be clear. Fossil tracks that look
like arthropod trails are preserved from the Lat Precambrian, and
increase in size, frequency, and complexity as the Cambrian explosion
approaches. All this is evidence for the existence of trilobites and/or
their ancestors before the explosion.

Is it your view that every species was separately created during the
past 500+ million years?

Not in the strict sense of the word species. I agree that a species
diversifies over time due to the environment they are in. Humans
that are separated change too but that doesn't prove that they came

from apes.

Could you be more specific? How do you recognize separately created
kinds, and distinguish them from species that are related through common
descent? How, for example, did you determine that humans and apes are
not related?

I don't assume that the relation between species exists. Men and
apes aren't the same species, positing that they are related is an
ideological statement.

Communication is being hindered by your use of multiple meanings for
words. You agree that species were not created separately, but then you
claim that being separate species is evidence for separate creation.
Again: how would you determine whether two organisms are or are not
related through a common ancestor? How are you able to apply this to
determine that humans and apes are not related?

http://www.origins.org/articles/john...hofdarwin.html
The reason the theory of evolution is so controversial is that it is the main
scientific prop for scientific naturalism. Students first learn that "evolution
is a fact," and then they gradually learn more and more about what that
"fact" means. It means that all living things are the product of mindless
material forces such as chemical laws, natural selection, and random
variation. So God is totally out of the picture, and humans (like everything
else) are the accidental product of a purposeless universe. Do you wonder
why a lot of people suspect that these claims go far beyond the available
evidence?

What makes you think that anyone is teaching that last bit to any students?

I didn't just fall of of the tunip truck on the way into town. Why do you
suppose there is a ID movement regarding public education?

Well, that information is contained in the Wedge document.

http://wiki.cotch.net/index.php/Wedge_document

The purpose is to restore western civilization to its Christian roots.

God forbid.

Not a big fan of the First Amendment, are you?

You lost me there. What's the relevance of the first Amendment?

Restoring western civilization to its (supposed) Christian roots would
require some form of establishment of religion.

Nothing to do with science, you will note. It's all about supposed
cultural benefits, motivated by religion. And science doesn't teach that
the universe is purposeless or that god is out of the picture.

Very true, the problem is that's the way science is erroneously
presented, hence the movement. They are not anti-science. They
are against the 'materialism is the only answer possible' crowd,
who unfortunantly has the reigns in public education.

I have asked you for evidence of this assertion, and you responded with
irrelevancies, then repeated your assertion. No wonder creationism isn't
considered intellectually respectable.

I quoted right out of my science book, you must have mentally
filtered it out and respond with an insult. No wonder some people
can recognize denial when they see it.

You quoted something that says nothing about what you claimed. Merely
supposing that life originated by natural processes does not deny the
existence of god or posit a purposeless universe.

It merely
tries to find testable explanations of past events. God, because of the
vagueness of the concept, is nearly impossible to investigate. You might
as well complain about the atheism of chemistry or physics.

Chemistry? No, I don't see that but philosophy does find it's way
into physics as well when we discuss origins. Many, many theories
abound and are no doubt taught in class. Anything but God.
True, 'god' is vague except within a religion, which is why the
ID supporters use the term Intelligent Designer. That does not
imply any particular religious connotation.

Wink wink, nudge nudge.

I see, so you can't be Jewish, Hindu, Muslim or make up your own
interpretation and believe in an Intelligent Designer? Wink wink indeed.

You could. But the ID movement seems to consist entirely of conservative
Christians (assuming you agree that Moonies count as Christians).

And I repeat: find me anyone who is teaching, in a biology course
anywhere, that humans are the accidental product of a purposeless
universe.

Probably most do by implication, maybe some outright. Believe it
or not I went to school. When one is taught that life formed by
chemical reactions, maybe triggered by lightening and crawled out
of the mud, all on it's own somehow, what do you suppose the message
is? Science can't say for certain that it's all natural (or supernatural)
but look at how hard people fight at the slightest hint of the G word.
Tell me people aren't conditioned.

In other words, you can't support your claim. Noted.

In other words, you can't respond directly to it. Noted. If you
were right there would be no response to the schools by the
IDers. I'll let any reader decide who is in denial.

Fair enough, assuming there are any readers.

Find a biology text that says this. Anything other than an
unsupported claim from a creationist web site.

I'll quote you from my old college book I have right here,
"Fundamentals of Physical Science" page 571:

"Today the nature of life no longer seems as penetrable as it once
did, and the transition from lifeless matter to living matter, though
still hardly an open book, nevertheless seems more to be an
inevitable sequel to to the physical and chemical conditions that
prevailed on the earth some billions of years ago than a supernatural
event".

Notice: no mention of a purposeless universe or the nonexistence of god.
A natural origin of life is quite a different thing.

Please explain how a natural origin can have any purpose.
Or how supernatural events being unlikely does not mean
that no god was involved. Science can't know that because
there's no evidence of it. So explain how thqat doesn't go
beyond scientific claims. Are you a politician?

Nope, nor a theologian. You want to talk to a Christian who believes
this, or read a book by one. I've already recommended such a book, but
there are plenty more. I'll just say that since there is a substantial
body of theology contradicting your claims, and plenty of Christians who
believe both in god and a natural origin of life, there must be
something wrong with your belief in that regard.

If the Academy meant to teach scientific investigation, rather than to inculcate
a belief system, it would encourage students to think about why, if natural
selection has been continuously active in creating, the observed examples
involve very limited back-and-forth variation that doesn't seem to be going
anywhere. But skepticism of that kind might spread and threaten the whole
system of naturalistic belief. Why is the fossil record overall so difficult to
reconcile with the steady process of gradual transformation predicted by the
neo-Darwinian theory?

Simple: because neo-Darwinian theory doesn't predict a steady process of
gradual transformation.

I suppose it depends on how you define gradual, but the concept
seems to refer to gradual overall change over time in sporatic bursts.

Exactly. "Gradual" to a population geneticist means a few thousand
generations at most, which is much too short a time to register in the
fossil record.

Hmmm. Consider me skeptical on that one.

What, exactly, are you skeptical about here?

What you said. A few thousand generations won't show up in the
fossil record at all?

Yes. Deposition is highly episodic, and so is preservation. The
time-resolution that's possible in the record gets worse as we go back.
One of the best-studied intervals is the K-T boundary, 65 million years
ago, and it's very difficult even there to detect a difference in time
of less than 100,000 years.

It would take exceptional conditions to produce a change,
under selection, that was slow enough to observe, or a preserved
sequence with stratigraphic control precise enough, to observe.

First you say Darwinian doesn't predict smooth transitions and now
you're saying they can't be found anyway. That's covering your bases
pretty well.

I'll try to be clear. Evolution as currently understood does predict
smooth transitions, but it predicts those transitions to happen quickly
in geological terms, such that it would be unlikely (given the nature of
the fossil record) for many of them to be preserved. It's an obvious
effect of the incompleteness of the record and the episodic nature of
change.

So it's too quick to even be recorded so any biological gaps between
species are asserted as being there, and perfectly natural.
No ideology there!

This is merely based on what we know of natural selection, by observing
events in real time, plus what we know of sedimentation, ditto. There is
a whole field, taphonomy, devoted to questions like this. All Eldredge
and Gould did was put the two together for the first time.

There's lots of theories out there but no evidence that natural
forces are the primary cause. It doesn't seem likely to me, it
doesn't seem likely to many, and yes, that includes educated
folks, they aren't all Bible thumping inbred hayseeds.

The evidence that natural processes (or whatever processes there may be)
are the causes of evolution is just not obtainable from the fossil
record. You need to look elsewhere.

I didn't limit my comment to fossil evidence.

OK.

We can observe processes happening
in the present,

No one disputes that.


Well, some creationists do. But I'll accept that you don't.

I haven't seen any creationist make those claims. The
terms micro and macro evolution are used to draw the
distinction.

Creationists often dispute any sort of evolution by reflex. Consider the
common creationist attempts to dismiss the peppered moth story as
incorrect, when it's actually just a very simple example of
microevolution. But this is an irrelevant digression.

and we can look within the genome to infer past
processes. So far, we don't find anything other than mutation,
selection, drift, etc., though there are quite a few bizarre wrinkles.
Perhaps all the processes you suppose, whatever they may be, happened
only in the distant past and are not operating now. But why should that be?

I don't agree that changes within a species is evidence they can
become a different species. Unless you use the term species
in a narrow sense.

I'm not talking just about changes within a species. I'm talking about
differences between species too. There is no sign of any processes other
than the ones we know about already. Though I'm not sure what
creationist processes there would be, or how you would recognize them.

The processes are adaptability, or survival of the fittest. Bigger, faster,
more or less colorful, etc. but no sign of becoming anything but what
they basically were. That's all the creationist can recognize because
that's all there is as far as we know.

The problem here is that "what they basically were" is meaningless.
Little differences can add up to big differences. I don't know where you
would draw the line between still being "what they basically were" and
something new, but whatever it is, there is good evidence for that line
being crossed. Human evolution is a simple example. Keep reading; it's
at the end of this post.

http://cogweb.ucla.edu/ep/Evolution.html
Gradualism. All the way back to Darwin, the notion that changes accrue
gradually over long periods of time has been a central proposition of
evolutionary theory. As Ernst Mayr put it in Animal Species and Evolution
(1963), "all evolution is due to the accumulation of small genetic changes" (p. 586).

In contrast, the fossil record suggests long periods of stasis followed by brief
periods of rapid change - what Niles Eldredge and Stephen J. Gould dubbed
punctuated equilibrium. This data has sometimes been taken as evidence
against the neo-Darwinian model by people who believe the order of nature is
due to the intentional act or acts of a supernatural being. Within the scientific
tradition, the relative lack of continuous change in the fossil record is interpreted
as evidence that speciation events have typically taken place in small populations
over relatively short periods of time.

As you suggested above, all this is due to a confusion over timescales
and the meaning of "gradual". Even to Eldredge and Gould, "brief periods
of rapid change" encompassed thousands of years. In fact, one of the
main problems of the fossil record is figuring out why change is so
slow, when natural selection is capable of driving change much, much
faster than we observe there.

I think about that almost every time I purchase groceries.

I notice you often resort to inane quips. Do they help you avoid
thinking about this sort of thing?

I haven't exactly avoided it so far. You think it's natural, I don't.
That doesn't mean that you thought about it and I didn't.

You don't wonder why change is so slow. You claim it can't happen at
all. Different thing.

How would the theory fare if we did not assume at
the start that nature had to do its own creating, so a naturalistic creation
mechanism simply has to exist regardless of the evidence? These are the
kinds of questions the Darwinists don't want to encourage students to ask.

True, because they're stupid "Have you stopped beating your wife?" sorts
of questions.

Not so fast there. I think we both went to school. I definitely got
the idea that only natural means were at play for the creation
of life, it's transformation and the universe. I understand not teaching
any religious interpretations but science cannot honestly make those
claims.

As for the universe, you'll have to check with somebody else. I only
deal with biology, with a little geology on the side. Natural processes
are all we can profitably investigate, and so we do. This has nothing to
do with a "purposeless universe". But that's theology, not biology.
Since a great many Christians have no problem with a natural course of
evolution, or even a natural origin of life, that much must be clear.

Evolution is subject to interpretation, so is religion, including
Christianity. But no Christian would attribute life to natural causes.

Plenty of them do, in fact.

I've never once heard that and I've heard one extreme of Christianity
to the other. I don't think you can support that.

Read Kenneth Miller's book.

Many Christians believe that god operates
through natural causes.

That's a contradiction.

Take it up with them.

Perhaps you would not consider them real
Christians. Read Kenneth Miller's book Finding Darwin's God, for example.

If you paraphrased it accurately I would have problems with it.

Not at issue. You said that there were no such Christians. You can
either accept that there are such Christians, or you can redefine
"Christian" so as to exclude such people. Pick one.

Changing the subject for a minute, how old do you think the earth and
universe are?

According to the oracles of Zoaraster....just kidding. I am an older
earther. I do believe in evolution to some extent but don't see the
evidence for macro-evolution. If I ever do see it I'll need even
more convincing that it was a natural outcome of the existence of
matter. For me, the odds are too great.

There are many separable questions here. There is no good way to
demonstrate that only natural causes were operating in the evolution of
life, so I won't try. Let's concentrate on what I can show, and that's
common descent. That much is clear: all life is descended from common
ancestors. There is some weird hanky-panky going on at the bottom of the
tree (among all those gene-exchanging bacteria), but nearer the top,
it's simpler. All animals (Metazoa), for example, are descended from a
single common ancestor, and we know many of the details of this tree of
descent. We can't rule out that some of the mutations during that long
history were directly caused by divine intervention. (How could we?) But
the history itself is clear.

Well, I can't buy the macro-mutation thing. But like life itself, too many
things need to happen concurently for anything to function. Most
mutations are detrimental, not helpful. and things like limbs turning
into flippers is too much a stretch for me. At some point the legs are
going to be less than efficient as legs and the creature needs to
survive for thousands of generations in a dog eat dog world.

I don't like macromutations either. But your other assertions are wrong.
Most mutations are in fact neutral, neither helpful nor harmful.

I'm more familiar with the human species and haven't seen
more beneficial mutations compared to helpful ones.

Those are the same thing. What did you actually mean? At any rate, most
mutations are visible only if you look inside the genome. They have no
phenotypic effects.

Limbs
did turn into flippers, and there is excellent documentation from
genetic data for this.

Genetic data reveals former forms of a limb?

No. It reveals relationships of common descent. If an animal with
flippers and an animal with limbs are related by common descent, then
either flippers turned into limbs, or limbs into flippers. Greater
sampling of species can reveal which was which, and it turns out to be
the latter. This is supported by fossil evidence too, as it happens.

Exactly how that happened is another question.
But there is no reason to suppose that intermediates would be less than
efficient.

It defies logic.

Why?

Clearly, sea lion flippers are intermediate between dog legs
and dolphin flippers.

I like the way that you say clearly. Are sea lions on their way
to being dogs or dolphins or are they stuck in the intermediate
stage being happy with their limbs just the way they are?

Who knows? They work fine as it is, but they might return to the land or
become even more aquatic, given a change in conditions. But aren't their
legs intermediate? They work as legs, just barely, on those occasions
when the animals venture onto shore. They work well as flippers in the
ocean, though not as well as the fins of dolphins. What is that other
than intermediate?

But do sea lions have any problem surviving? There
are all manner of functional intermediates in the world today, despite
what you may believe.

Let's say that was true for the sake of argument. Up to and including
the halfway point between the dolfin or dog and the sea lion how did
the critter excel in it's environment?

This is known as the Zeno strategy. For every intermediate I bring up,
you can talk about the gap between the intermediates. Every new
intermediate creates two more gaps. Apparently, the only evidence that
you would believe would be a movie showing one animal morphing into
another. This will not be forthcoming, but you should ask yourself why
you make such unreasonable demands, far beyond what you would expect in
any other case.

We don't know every single branch in that big tree, but we know some
beyond doubt. One of the best known, and perhaps most interesting to
you, is the relationship of humans and their various primate cousins.

Are you fanning the flames?

Just stating facts. If you don't want to believe it, you need to find a
way to ignore all the evidence.

What evidence?

See below for a small sample.

You may not like that, but the genetic evidence is overwhelming. I could
show you gene after gene that gives the same result.

Chimps have 48 chromosomes and humans have 46, I believe.
Does your record show how the change occurred?

Indeed it does, very nicely. Two ape chromosomes fused into one human
chromosome, which still retains a sequence resembling a pair of
telomeres, the stuff that's on the end of a chromosome, right at the join.

Here's a pretty good description of the evidence:
http://www.gate.net/~rwms/hum_ape_chrom.html

I'll look into it.

And I couldn't show
you a single gene that gives a different result. If you want, I could
start showing you the actual data, though you would need a bit of
education before you could understand it.

I appreciate that, I got me a ride set up to the big city libery on the next
hay wagon out. Just picture Jed Clampet looking at the cement pond
for the first time.


Buried in that aw shucks stuff, was there a serious request for data?

You betcha.

Here you go.

[You need to view this in a font in which all the characters take up the
same amount of room. If you view it in a proportionally-spaced font,
both the tree and the DNA sequence will fail to line up properly.]

Evidence for human relationships to the other apes.

But first, a primer on DNA and how it can be used to understand
phylogenetic relationships. If you understand
this already, skip ahead to "Here is a set of DNA sequences" below the
dotted line.

DNA is double helix, each half being a twisted string of chemicals,
called bases or nucleotides, on a backbone. The bases come in four
flavors, each with a slightly different chemical formula, which can be
represented as single letters: A, C, G, or T, from the first letters of
each chemical's name. Because each of the two strings completely
determines the other one, we can ignore one of them, and because of
DNA's beads-on-a-string structure, we can completely describe a given
gene by a linear sequence of the four bases. So if I tell you that the
DNA sequence in some gene in some species is AAGAAGCTAGTGTAAGA, I have
completely described that particular part of the DNA molecule.

Different species have slightly different sequences, and when we line up
the corresponding sequences from different species, the patterns of
bases (letters) at each position (or site) in the sequence can tell us
about their relationships. Consider a set of 5 species. At any
particular position in the sequence each species has either A, C, G, or
T. For my purposes I don't care about the particular bases, only about
the patterns of similarity, so I'm going to use a different symbolism to
describe those patterns. I'll use lower case letters to represent
identical bases. So if I say a position has pattern xxxyy, I mean that
the first three species have one base and the last two have another. The
real bases could be TTTCC, GGGAA, or any other combination. There
are many possible patterns: xxxxx, xyzyz, xyxyy, etc. But only a few of
them can be used to determine relationships. It should be obvious that
xxxxx, all bases the same, tells us nothing. If only one base differs,
such as xyxxx, that also tells us nothing except that one species is
different from all the rest; but we already knew it was a separate
species. The only patterns that make a claim of relationships are those
in which two species have one base, and the other three have another:
xxyyy, xyxyx, xxyxy, and so on. (Actually, patterns like xxyzz tell us
something too, just not enough for my current purposes.) Why is this?
Because such patterns split the species into two groups, implying a tree
that looks something like this:

y x If all the species on the left have state y, and
\ / all the species on the right have state x, then
\ / somewhere in the middle (the branch marked *),
y__\_____/ there must have been a change in that site --
/ * \ a mutation -- either from y to x or x to y
/ \ (we can't tell which from this information).
/ \
y x

A little further note: the patterns that I represent in rows above
(xxyyy, etc.) are shown in columns in the DNA sequences below. That is,
in the sequences below, you read across to find the sequence in a single
species, but you read down to read the contents of a single site in five
species. So the first column of the sequence, reading down, would be
AAGAG, which is an xxyxy pattern.

-------------------------------------------------------

Here is a set of DNA sequences. They come from two genes named
ND4 and ND5. If you put them together, they total 694 nucleotides. But
most of those nucleotides either are identical among all the species
here, or they differ in only one species. Those are uninformative about
relationships, so I have removed them, leaving 76 nucleotides that make
some claim. I'll let you look at them for a while.

[ 10 20 30 40 50]
[ . . . . .]
+ 1 2++ 3 11 +4 3 ++ 52+1 2615+4 14+ 3 3+6+
gibbon ACCGCCCCCA TCCCCTCCCT CAAGTCCTAT CCAATCTACT GTACTTTGCC
orangutan ACCACTCCCA CCCTTCCTCC TAAGACTCAC ACAACTCGCC ACACCTCGTC
human GTCATCATCC TTCTTTTTTT AGGAATTTCC TCTCTCCGTC ACGCTCTACT
chimpanzee ATTACCATTC CTTTTTTCCC CGGATTCTCC CTTCTTCATT ATGTCTCATT
gorilla GTTGTTATTA CCTCCCTTTC AAGAACCCCT TTCACCTATC GCGTCCCACT

[ 60 70 ]
[ . . ]
+++ +++1 + + 2 + +++
gibbon CCTACAGCCC AGCCAAACGA CACTAA
orangutan CCTACCGCCT AGCCATTTCA CACTAA
human CCCCTTATTT TCTTGTCCGG TGACCG
chimpanzee TTCCTCATTT TCTTACTCAG TGACCG
gorilla TTCCTTATTC TTTCGCCTAG TGATTA

I've marked with a plus sign all those sites at which gibbon and
orangutan match each other, and the three African apes (including
humans) have a different base but match each other. (That's the xxyyy
pattern mentioned above) These sites all support a relationship among
the African apes, exclusive of gibbon and orangutan. You will note there
are quite a lot of them, 23 to be exact. The sites I have marked with
numbers from 1-6 contradict this relationship. (Sites without numbers
don't have anything to say about this particular question.) We expect a
certain amount of this because sometimes the same mutation will happen
twice in different lineages; we call that homoplasy. However you will
note that there are fewer of these sites, only 22 of them, and more
importantly they contradict each other. Each number stands for a
different hypothesis of relationships; for example, number one is for
sites that support a relationship between gibbons and gorillas, and
number two is for sites that support a relationship between orangutans
and gorillas (all exclusive of the rest). One and two can't be true at
the same time. So we have to consider each competing hypothesis
separately. If you do that it comes out this way:

hypothesis sites supporting pattern
African apes (+) 23 xxyyy
gibbon+gorilla (1) 6 xyyyx
orangutan+gorilla (2) 4 xyxxy
gibbon+human (3) 4 xyxyy
gibbon+chimp (4) 3 xyyxy
orangutan+human (5) 2 xyyxx
orangutan+chimp (6) 2 xyxyx

I think we can see that the African ape hypothesis is way out front, and
the others can be attributed to random homoplasy. This result would be
very difficult to explain by chance.

Let's try a statistical test just to be sure. Let's suppose, as our null
hypothesis, that the sequences are randomized with respect to phylogeny
(perhaps because there is no phylogeny) and that apparent support for
African apes is merely a chance fluctuation. And let's try a chi-square
test. (I'm not going to explain chi-square tests here; just understand
that it's a statistical test that tells us the probability that we would
see the patterns we see if sequence differences were random.) Here it is:

hypothesis obs. exp. (obs.-exp)^2/exp.
African apes (+) 23 6.29 44.4
gibbon+gorilla (1) 6 6.29 0.0
orangutan+gorilla (2) 4 6.29 0.8
gibbon+human (3) 4 6.29 0.8
gibbon+chimp (4) 3 6.29 1.7
orangutan+human (5) 2 6.29 2.9
orangutan+chimp (6) 2 6.29 2.9
sum 44 44 53.7*

(*This column is rounded, so it doesn't quite add up here.)

These are all the possible hypotheses of relationship, and the observed
number of sites supporting them. Expected values would be equal, or the
sum/7. The important column is the third one, which is a measure of the
"strain" between the observed and expected values. The larger the sum of
this column ("the sum of squares"), the greater the strain. There are 6
degrees of freedom (meaning that if we know 6 of the observations, we
automatically know the 7th), and the sum of squares is 53.7. That last
number gets compared to a chi-square distribution to come up with a P value.

It happens that P, or the probability of this amount of asymmetry in the
distribution arising by chance, is very low. When I tried it in Excel, I
got P=8.55*10^-10, or 0.000000000855. That's pretty close to zero, and
chance can be ruled out with great confidence.

Having ruled out chance, now the question is how you account for the
pattern we see. I account for it by supposing that the null hypothesis
is just plain wrong, and that there is a phylogeny, and that the
phylogeny involves the African apes, including humans, being related by
a common ancestor more recent than their common ancestor with orangutans
or gibbons. How about you?

By itself, this is pretty good evidence for the African ape connection.
But if I did this little exercise with any other gene I would get the
same result too. (If you don't believe me I would be glad to do that.)
Why? I say it's because all the genes evolved on the same tree, the true
tree of evolutionary relationships. That's the multiple nested hierarchy
for you.

So what's your alternative explanation for all this? You say...what?
It's because of a necessary similarity between similar organisms? But
out of these 76 sites with informative differences, only 18 involve
differences that change the amino acid composition of the protein; the
rest can have no effect on phenotype. Further, many of those amino acid
changes are to similar amino acids that have no real effect on protein
function. In fact, ND4 and ND5 do exactly the same thing in all
organisms. These nested similarities have nothing to do with function,
so similar design is not a credible explanation.

God did it that way because he felt like it? Fine, but this explains any
possible result. It's not science. We have to ask why god just happened
to feel like doing it in a way that matches the unique expectations of
common descent.

By the way, if you want to see the full data set I pulled this from, go
he

http://www.treebase.org/treebase/console.html

Then search on Author, keyword Hayasaka. Click Submit. You will find
Hayasaka, Kenji. Then click on Search. This brings up one study, in the
frame at middle left. Click on Matrix Fig. 1 to download the sequences.
You can also use this site to view their tree. The publication from
which all this was drawn is Hayasaka, K., T. Gojobori, and S. Horai.
1988. Molecular phylogeny and evolution of primate mitochondrial DNA.
Mol. Biol. Evol., 5:626-644.

"Fletis Humplebacker" wrote in message
...
John Harshman wrote:
Fletis Humplebacker wrote:
Not in the strict sense of the word species. I agree that a species
diversifies over time due to the environment they are in. Humans

What happens when the environment changes? Some examples:
1. When photosynthetic organisms developed (I am avoiding the word
"evolution"), they started consuming CO2 and releasing O2, which was toxic
to many organisms (still is to some, such as methanophiles). It took a long
time for the atmosphere to change from reducing to oxidizing.
2. Continents move, choking off warm currents and leading to an ice age, in
near-polar areas. This sort of thing has happened repeatedly, Antarctica is
in an ice age now. Sea level changes occur everywhere as large amounts of
water are sequestered as ice. These events cause a lot of stress on
organisms, especially the ones that aren't mobile enough to follow the
environment to which they are adapted. Species become extinct, new ones
arise to fill the ecological niches. When the ice age ends, the process
reverses, but in many cases, the old species do not reappear.

There are many more examples that I know less about. New diseases arise,
as bird flu is doing now. Some are local, like the Grand Canyon eroding a
deep barrier, resulting in different flora on the rims. Others operate on a
larger scale: the strait between the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic has
opened and closed repeatedly. This has resulted in large changes in
salinity in the Med. There is a lot of geological evidence as well as
fossil evidence for these events and their consequences. The Black Sea is
the remnant of a much larger body of water which was released in a great
flood downstream - probably the actual event recorded as Noah's flood.

Some organisms adapted, many others became extinct, creating ecological
niches, which often got filled by new species. Evolution provides a
straightforward explanation for all this. ID can only assert that it is too
complicated to understand, that there is missing fossil evidence and must
have required divine intervention. If it is fourth down, punt.

that are separated change too but that doesn't prove that they came
from apes.
snip

Chemistry? No, I don't see that but philosophy does find it's way
into physics as well when we discuss origins. Many, many theories
abound and are no doubt taught in class. Anything but God.
True, 'god' is vague except within a religion, which is why the
ID supporters use the term Intelligent Designer. That does not
imply any particular religious connotation.

snip
Probably most do by implication, maybe some outright. Believe it
or not I went to school. When one is taught that life formed by
chemical reactions, maybe triggered by lightening and crawled out
of the mud, all on it's own somehow, what do you suppose the message
is? Science can't say for certain that it's all natural (or supernatural)
but look at how hard people fight at the slightest hint of the G word.
Tell me people aren't conditioned.

Science is the study of things that exist in nature, and leave interrelated
observations, and the effort to create a widely applicable intellectual
framework to explain how these things happen. You keep trying to expand it
to include a designer, even though nature does not have examples that do not
fit into the scientific framework (whether you believe it or not).

snip

What you said. A few thousand generations won't show up in the
fossil record at all?

I already illustrated how sparse the fossil record is, maybe 1 fossil per
10^17 organisms. (Suppose I am off by a factor of a million. Then it is 1
fossil per 10^11 organisms.)

Steve

Fletis Humplebacker wrote:

[snip: long discourse between John Harshman (as Salviati) and Fletis
Humplebacker (as Simplicio), in which Simplicio keeps demanding and
ignoring evidence, and contributes little more than empty sophistry.]

Evolution is subject to interpretation, so is religion, including
Christianity. But no Christian would attribute life to natural causes.

Utterly wrong.

Catholics are permitted to do so, and they constitute about half of
Christians today. I refer you to the encyclical of Pope Pius XII in 1950
(Humani Generis), and to Pope John Paul II's address to the Pontifical
Academy of Sciences on 22 October 1996 on the origin of life and
evolution. Neither of these popes saw any conflict between evolution
(including of humans) and their particular dogma. They considered only
what they termed the "soul" - whatever that might be - to have been
definitely created; all else is in the realm of science.

FWIW, rejection of evolution is widespread only in parts of the US,
particularly those with recently evolved (but fairly primitive)
religions. In the rest of the world, ID and creationism and their
adherents are rarities which are viewed with incredulity.

Best Regards,
John.

"John Wilkins" wrote in message
...
George wrote:
"John Wilkins" wrote in message
...


The University of Toledo was critical to the development of modern western
scholarship. Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas both got going from the
distribution of Avicenna's (Ibn Sina) work on Aristotle and commentaries.
The Summa Theologiae is a sustained response to this.

We have a winner!

Tell the man what he's won, Bob.

Aardvark J. Bandersnatch, MP, LP, BLT, ETC. wrote:
"John Wilkins" wrote in message
...

George wrote:

"John Wilkins" wrote in message
...


The University of Toledo was critical to the development of modern western
scholarship. Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas both got going from the
distribution of Avicenna's (Ibn Sina) work on Aristotle and commentaries.
The Summa Theologiae is a sustained response to this.


We have a winner!

Tell the man what he's won, Bob.


*Please* let it be the Porsche! *Please* let it be the Porsche!

--
John S. Wilkins, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Biohumanities Project
University of Queensland - Blog: evolvethought.blogspot.com
"Darwin's theory has no more to do with philosophy than any other
hypothesis in natural science." Tractatus 4.1122

John Shakespeare wrote:
Fletis Humplebacker wrote:

[snip: long discourse between John Harshman (as Salviati) and Fletis
Humplebacker (as Simplicio), in which Simplicio keeps demanding and
ignoring evidence, and contributes little more than empty sophistry.]

Evolution is subject to interpretation, so is religion, including
Christianity. But no Christian would attribute life to natural causes.

Utterly wrong.

Catholics are permitted to do so, and they constitute about half of
Christians today. I refer you to the encyclical of Pope Pius XII in 1950
(Humani Generis), and to Pope John Paul II's address to the Pontifical
Academy of Sciences on 22 October 1996 on the origin of life and
evolution. Neither of these popes saw any conflict between evolution
(including of humans) and their particular dogma. They considered only
what they termed the "soul" - whatever that might be - to have been
definitely created; all else is in the realm of science.

FWIW, rejection of evolution is widespread only in parts of the US,
particularly those with recently evolved (but fairly primitive)
religions. In the rest of the world, ID and creationism and their
adherents are rarities which are viewed with incredulity.

While I think IDism and Creationism are both laughable, evidently many
more in this country don't share my ideas. A recent poll showed that
about 51% of U.S. citizens (I have no idea at all what the poll
parameters were)did NOT believe in evolution.

A massive failure of the science education in the lower grades, I'd
say, largely thanks to the True Believers who can't tell the difference
between fact supported scientific theory (they always, or almost
always, founder on the word "theory") and religious belief.

"Charlie Self" wrote in message
ups.com...


A massive failure of the science education in the lower grades, I'd
say, largely thanks to the True Believers who can't tell the difference
between fact supported scientific theory (they always, or almost
always, founder on the word "theory") and religious belief.


I generally like your posts Charlie but this is a rub. Go ahead and take a
shot at those with a belief that differs from yours, if that's what makes
you feel fulfilled, but it's just a shot. The fact (a word that those who
enjoy deriding others with a belief love to use...) of the matter is that
there is no "fact" which unsubstantiated a creation or ID. Science does not
pretend to have any such fact. There is no "fact supported by scientific
theory". That, all by itself is a contradiction. Your belief may differ
from mine and others like me, but your belief is equally unproven -
substantiated only by "scientific theory". My point - you suffer the same
condition as those who you deride simply because you dislike their choice of
faith.

--

-Mike-

"Mike Marlow" wrote in message
...

"Charlie Self" wrote in message
ups.com...


A massive failure of the science education in the lower grades, I'd
say, largely thanks to the True Believers who can't tell the difference
between fact supported scientific theory (they always, or almost
always, founder on the word "theory") and religious belief.


I generally like your posts Charlie but this is a rub. Go ahead and take
a
shot at those with a belief that differs from yours, if that's what makes
you feel fulfilled, but it's just a shot. The fact (a word that those who
enjoy deriding others with a belief love to use...) of the matter is that
there is no "fact" which refutes a creation or ID. Science does not
pretend to have any such fact.

Editor's Note: Please excuse the brain fart on behalf of the author. Our
editorial staff is taking license to make the required edits in order to
maintain a consistency between the original comments and the author's reply.
(Also an edit above to correct a hasty acceptance of a spell checker
suggestion which proved to be the wrong word completely!)


Strike: There is no "fact supported by scientific theory". That, all by
itself is a contradiction.

And Insert: Science does not attempt to disprove creation, ID or a god in
its pursuit. There is nothing about evolution for example, that refutes a
creation. Nor does science suggest there is. Likewise, a belief in the
aforementioned does not necessarily refute evolution or other scientific
theories. There are scientists and non-scientists who project their own
personal beliefs or desires into the realm of scientific understanding, and
who suggest there could be no creation, but these opinions are fully
unsupported by scientific fact.

Also insert: I would ask how "True Believers" could have brought about the
massive failure of science education in the lower grades, when all mention
of anything close to creation has been striken from the public schools in
favor of teaching scientific theories as fact, for decades? Note: I don't
have a hang up with the word theory until the theory becomes presented as
fact.

Final insert: That was as much editing as the original piece...

Your belief may differ
from mine and others like me, but your belief is equally unproven -
substantiated only by "scientific theory". My point - you suffer the same
condition as those who you deride simply because you dislike their choice
of
faith.

--

-Mike-

John Harshman wrote:
Fletis Humplebacker wrote:

It's time to whittle the posts down for the sake of brevity,
you are already at 43k.


Sure I have. Darwinian Evolution predicts gradual change over long
periods, the fossil record says otherwise so for many people we have
ideology over scientific evidence. In talking to you, you refuse to accept
what the leaders in the field have to say because they are posted
on religious sites. You are putting your ideology over facts.


No, I refuse to accept your interpretation of what they say because it's
wrong, which you could see if you read the entire documents those little
quote mines are taken from.



I have read similar comments elsewhere. I had just posted some below...


Darwinian evolution predicts gradual change,
true, but the long periods are only with respect to human lifetimes, not
geological eras.


So when the experts in the field say lifeform appearances
are sudden we should discount their words? I think they
are aware of the time frames involved.



STEPHEN J. GOULD, HARVARD, "The Cambrian Explosion occurred
in a geological moment, and we have reason to think that all major
anatomical designs may have made their evolutionary appearance at
that time. ...not only the phylum Chordata itself, but also all its major
divisions, arose within the Cambrian Explosion. So much for chordate
uniqueness... Contrary to Darwin's expectation that new data would
reveal gradualistic continuity with slow and steady expansion, all major
discoveries of the past century have only heightened the massiveness
and geological abruptness of this formative event..." Nature, Vol.377,
26 10/95, p.682


Gould had an axe to grind. You are right about one thing, that people
tend to interpret data to fit their theories. That's why science is a
social effort and can't depend on one person. Others have shown how
Gould misinterpreted some of what he saw. The Cambrian explosion may
have spawned most phyla, though we can't tell this from the fossil
record,


You know, you are constantly telling me to believe you and not my
lying eyes. You want to discount comments if they are quoted on
creationist sites then argue with them even if they aren't. You believe
that you know more about the fossil records than Gould did, that's fine
with me but don't expect me to come aboard that easily. I have
difficulties with his theory of how things happened but not with his
observations on what did happen. I've seen no evidence that his research
was sloppy.


and there are some phyla that clearly did not originate then.
Chordates and the major divisions of Cephalochordata, Urochordata, and
Vertebrata (or at least their stem groups) may well have originated in
the explosion. The explosion may have lasted as little as 5 million
years. But do you have any real idea how long 5 million years is?

Do you ever wonder, by the way, what used to be in the the ellipses in
all these quotes you get from creationist sites?


It would be difficult to believe that his words mean something other
than what was posted. If that's your claim why take issue with Gould?
You do cover your bases.


Preston Cloud & Martin F. Glaessner, "Ever since Darwin, the geologically
abrupt appearance and rapid diversification of early animal life have fascinated
biologist and students of Earth history alike....This interval, plus Early Cambrian,
was the time during which metazoan life diversified into nearly all of the major
phyla and most of the invertebrate classes and orders subsequently known."
Science, Aug.27, 1982


What do you think Cloud and Glaessner meant by "this interval"? They
clearly aren't talking about the Cambrian explosion, because they say
"plus Early Cambrian".


It's clear to me that they are talking about the abrupt timespan of
appearance and diversification of life, which includes the early Cambrian
period.

I don't know what they mean, but most classes
don't come along until the Ordovician or later, and most orders not
until the late Paleozoic. Also note that they are talking here about
just those phyla with good fossil records.


That's your belief but that isn't what they said. There's no mention
of fossil record quality, but "all of the major phyla and most of the
invertebrate classes and orders subsequently known."



RICHARD Monastersky, Earth Science Ed., Science News, "The remarkably
complex forms of animals we see today suddenly appeared. ...This moment,
right at the start of the Earth's Cambrian Period...marks the evolutionary
explosion that filled the seas with the earth's first complex creatures. ...‘This
is Genesis material,’ gushed one researcher. ...demonstrates that the large
animal phyla of today were present already in the early Cambrian and that
they were as distinct from each other as they are today...a menagerie of clam
cousins, sponges, segmented worms, and other invertevrates that would seem
vaguely familiar to any scuba diver." Discover, p.40, 4/93


You did this one before. I guess that was before the newest radiometric
dates showed that most of the Early Cambrian came before the Cambrian
explosion. And look at all the ellipses here. If you do this with the
bible, you can come up with stuff like "Luke...I am...your father."
Quote mining is bad practice, especially when you have to stitch
together sentence fragments.


That's not an honest response. If the biblical reference, is given, like the above,
the verse(s) can be referenced. Your claim is that they misrepresented the
author's intent by devious editing, as if the commments would take on a
different meaning with clarification. Even so the author was wrong anyway.

I see a pattern here that's clearer than the fossil record.



Richard Dawkins, Cambridge, "And we find many of them already in an advanced
state of evolution, the very first time they appear. It is as though they were just
planted there, without any evolutionary history. Needless to say, this appearance
of sudden planting has delighted creationists. ...the only alternative explanation of
the sudden appearance of so many complex animal types in the Cambrian era is
divine creation...", The Blind Watchmaker, 1986, p229-230


I wonder what Dawkins really said.


See ya.

Mike Marlow wrote:
"Charlie Self" wrote in message
ups.com...


A massive failure of the science education in the lower grades, I'd
say, largely thanks to the True Believers who can't tell the difference
between fact supported scientific theory (they always, or almost
always, founder on the word "theory") and religious belief.


I generally like your posts Charlie but this is a rub. Go ahead and take a
shot at those with a belief that differs from yours, if that's what makes
you feel fulfilled, but it's just a shot. The fact (a word that those who
enjoy deriding others with a belief love to use...) of the matter is that
there is no "fact" which unsubstantiated a creation or ID. Science does not
pretend to have any such fact. There is no "fact supported by scientific
theory". That, all by itself is a contradiction. Your belief may differ
from mine and others like me, but your belief is equally unproven -
substantiated only by "scientific theory". My point - you suffer the same
condition as those who you deride simply because you dislike their choice of
faith.

Mike,
Sorry if it rubs your feelings, but all the BS about IDism and
creationism is getting on my nerves. I'm not apologizing for my
understanding that they are no more than myths, while evolution is
factually based. I'd say you need two things: an understanding of what
a scientific theory really is, and a course in comparative religions.

"Charlie Self" wrote in message
oups.com...

Mike Marlow wrote:
"Charlie Self" wrote in message
ups.com...


A massive failure of the science education in the lower grades, I'd
say, largely thanks to the True Believers who can't tell the
difference
between fact supported scientific theory (they always, or almost
always, founder on the word "theory") and religious belief.


I generally like your posts Charlie but this is a rub. Go ahead and
take a
shot at those with a belief that differs from yours, if that's what
makes
you feel fulfilled, but it's just a shot. The fact (a word that those
who
enjoy deriding others with a belief love to use...) of the matter is
that
there is no "fact" which unsubstantiated a creation or ID. Science does
not
pretend to have any such fact. There is no "fact supported by
scientific
theory". That, all by itself is a contradiction. Your belief may
differ
from mine and others like me, but your belief is equally unproven -
substantiated only by "scientific theory". My point - you suffer the
same
condition as those who you deride simply because you dislike their
choice of
faith.

Mike,
Sorry if it rubs your feelings, but all the BS about IDism and
creationism is getting on my nerves. I'm not apologizing for my
understanding that they are no more than myths, while evolution is
factually based. I'd say you need two things: an understanding of what
a scientific theory really is, and a course in comparative religions.


I have both.

Don't go down a wrong road Charlie - I don't disbelieve evolution, nor am I
in any way anti-science. In fact, I'm not even content with the teachings
of my faith that I grew up with, or that I've experienced throughout a more
questioning adulthood. From that perspective, I'm more (much more) of a
philosophical questioner than I am a head with a hinge on it that someone is
free to simply open and pour their stuff into. Like you, I don't apologize
for my understanding that evolution-only believers are zealots anxious to
believe in something, even if it means taking what is known beyond what the
facts show. I'm fine with that - it's just a different kind of faith, and
to each his own.

I find it disappointing that I have to agree with the ID stuff getting on
your nerves. I agree from the perspective that unfortunately, a very small
minority of Christian believers with a very strict definition of things (I'm
speaking of young earth creationists which differ greatly from the majority
of Christianity) are causing the body of believers to be painted with their
brush because of their vocal position. While I don't diminish their faith,
I do wish they would go about exercising it in a different way. But then
again, I wish the evolution-only advocates would exercise their faith in a
different way too.

--

-Mike-

Fletis Humplebacker wrote:

John Harshman wrote:

Fletis Humplebacker wrote:
[snip]

Darwinian evolution predicts gradual change,
true, but the long periods are only with respect to human lifetimes, not
geological eras.

So when the experts in the field say lifeform appearances
are sudden we should discount their words? I think they
are aware of the time frames involved.

We shouldn't discount their words. We should understand what they mean:
sudden in geological terms. Look below at your Gould quote: "in a
geological moment", by which, if you read the whole quote, you will see
that he means a minimum of 5 million years.

STEPHEN J. GOULD, HARVARD, "The Cambrian Explosion occurred
in a geological moment, and we have reason to think that all major
anatomical designs may have made their evolutionary appearance at
that time. ...not only the phylum Chordata itself, but also all its major
divisions, arose within the Cambrian Explosion. So much for chordate
uniqueness... Contrary to Darwin's expectation that new data would
reveal gradualistic continuity with slow and steady expansion, all major
discoveries of the past century have only heightened the massiveness
and geological abruptness of this formative event..." Nature, Vol.377,
26 10/95, p.682

Gould had an axe to grind. You are right about one thing, that people
tend to interpret data to fit their theories. That's why science is a
social effort and can't depend on one person. Others have shown how
Gould misinterpreted some of what he saw. The Cambrian explosion may
have spawned most phyla, though we can't tell this from the fossil
record,

You know, you are constantly telling me to believe you and not my
lying eyes. You want to discount comments if they are quoted on
creationist sites then argue with them even if they aren't. You believe
that you know more about the fossil records than Gould did, that's fine
with me but don't expect me to come aboard that easily.

I do know more than Gould did at the time he wrote that. There are new
discoveries every day, and ten years can make a lot of difference. But
you are picking out little fragments of Gould that distort his meaning,
and lots of paleontologists disagree with even his real meaning.

I have
difficulties with his theory of how things happened but not with his
observations on what did happen. I've seen no evidence that his research
was sloppy.

So you pick what you like and throw away what you don't. And Gould
actually did no research on the Cambrian explosion. He wrote a popular
book, and in his early years he did some simulations that bear on the
question, but that's it.

and there are some phyla that clearly did not originate then.
Chordates and the major divisions of Cephalochordata, Urochordata, and
Vertebrata (or at least their stem groups) may well have originated in
the explosion. The explosion may have lasted as little as 5 million
years. But do you have any real idea how long 5 million years is?

Do you ever wonder, by the way, what used to be in the the ellipses in
all these quotes you get from creationist sites?

It would be difficult to believe that his words mean something other
than what was posted. If that's your claim why take issue with Gould?
You do cover your bases.

There are multiple levels. Gould was wrong about many things, and you
(or the creationist sites you pull these highly trimmed quotes from)
distort Gould's meaning.

Preston Cloud & Martin F. Glaessner, "Ever since Darwin, the geologically
abrupt appearance and rapid diversification of early animal life have fascinated
biologist and students of Earth history alike....This interval, plus Early Cambrian,
was the time during which metazoan life diversified into nearly all of the major
phyla and most of the invertebrate classes and orders subsequently known."
Science, Aug.27, 1982

What do you think Cloud and Glaessner meant by "this interval"? They
clearly aren't talking about the Cambrian explosion, because they say
"plus Early Cambrian".

It's clear to me that they are talking about the abrupt timespan of
appearance and diversification of life, which includes the early Cambrian
period.

The Early Cambrian alone is about 25 million years long. Add some other
unspecified period to that and how abrupt is it?

I don't know what they mean, but most classes
don't come along until the Ordovician or later, and most orders not
until the late Paleozoic. Also note that they are talking here about
just those phyla with good fossil records.

That's your belief but that isn't what they said. There's no mention
of fossil record quality, but "all of the major phyla and most of the
invertebrate classes and orders subsequently known."

We don't know what they're talking about because the quote doesn't tell
us. But I do know when, according to the fossil record, most
invertebrate classes and orders arose. And it's not in the Cambrian. I
can't find a single source on the web for this (though there are clues
for individual groups here and there). You might want to check out this
book: M. J. Benton (ed). 1993. The Fossil Record 2. Chapman & Hall, London.

RICHARD Monastersky, Earth Science Ed., Science News, "The remarkably
complex forms of animals we see today suddenly appeared. ...This moment,
right at the start of the Earth's Cambrian Period...marks the evolutionary
explosion that filled the seas with the earth's first complex creatures. ...‘This
is Genesis material,’ gushed one researcher. ...demonstrates that the large
animal phyla of today were present already in the early Cambrian and that
they were as distinct from each other as they are today...a menagerie of clam
cousins, sponges, segmented worms, and other invertevrates that would seem
vaguely familiar to any scuba diver." Discover, p.40, 4/93

You did this one before. I guess that was before the newest radiometric
dates showed that most of the Early Cambrian came before the Cambrian
explosion. And look at all the ellipses here. If you do this with the
bible, you can come up with stuff like "Luke...I am...your father."
Quote mining is bad practice, especially when you have to stitch
together sentence fragments.

That's not an honest response. If the biblical reference, is given, like the above,
the verse(s) can be referenced. Your claim is that they misrepresented the
author's intent by devious editing, as if the commments would take on a
different meaning with clarification. Even so the author was wrong anyway.

I see a pattern here that's clearer than the fossil record.

All I can say is read the actual articles, not the mined quotes. And
read some recent paleontology. There are genuine controversies in
research on the Cambrian explosion, but you haven't touched on any of
them yet.

Richard Dawkins, Cambridge, "And we find many of them already in an advanced
state of evolution, the very first time they appear. It is as though they were just
planted there, without any evolutionary history. Needless to say, this appearance
of sudden planting has delighted creationists. ...the only alternative explanation of
the sudden appearance of so many complex animal types in the Cambrian era is
divine creation...", The Blind Watchmaker, 1986, p229-230


I wonder what Dawkins really said.



See ya.

Mike Marlow wrote:

"Charlie Self" wrote in message
ups.com...


A massive failure of the science education in the lower grades, I'd
say, largely thanks to the True Believers who can't tell the difference
between fact supported scientific theory (they always, or almost
always, founder on the word "theory") and religious belief.



I generally like your posts Charlie but this is a rub. Go ahead and take a
shot at those with a belief that differs from yours, if that's what makes
you feel fulfilled, but it's just a shot. The fact (a word that those who
enjoy deriding others with a belief love to use...) of the matter is that
there is no "fact" which unsubstantiated a creation or ID. Science does not
pretend to have any such fact.

That depends on what you mean by "creation" and "ID". Science can
certainly falsify (quite easily) the notion that species were created
separately, or that phyla were created separately in the Cambrian
explosion, and that sort of thing. If, on the other hand, you suppose
that god intervened at various points during evolution to introduce
crucial new mutations, there is nothing to falsify that.

There is no "fact supported by scientific
theory". That, all by itself is a contradiction. Your belief may differ
from mine and others like me, but your belief is equally unproven -
substantiated only by "scientific theory". My point - you suffer the same
condition as those who you deride simply because you dislike their choice of
faith.

"John Harshman" wrote in message
t...
Mike Marlow wrote:

I generally like your posts Charlie but this is a rub. Go ahead and
take a
shot at those with a belief that differs from yours, if that's what
makes
you feel fulfilled, but it's just a shot. The fact (a word that those
who
enjoy deriding others with a belief love to use...) of the matter is
that
there is no "fact" which unsubstantiated a creation or ID. Science does
not
pretend to have any such fact.

That depends on what you mean by "creation" and "ID". Science can
certainly falsify (quite easily) the notion that species were created
separately, or that phyla were created separately in the Cambrian
explosion, and that sort of thing. If, on the other hand, you suppose
that god intervened at various points during evolution to introduce
crucial new mutations, there is nothing to falsify that.


Ahhhh... I can't suggest anything to you. The best that I can do is to
state that I believe that God was the creator - how and when and why, I have
no clue. Could have been done over millennium, could have been done all at
once, could have been done in 6 days or 6 seconds or whatever. Just don't
know. I simply see an order to the universe that I attribute to God and an
intelligent design.
--

-Mike-

Mike Marlow wrote:

"John Harshman" wrote in message
t...

Mike Marlow wrote:


I generally like your posts Charlie but this is a rub. Go ahead and

take a

shot at those with a belief that differs from yours, if that's what

makes

you feel fulfilled, but it's just a shot. The fact (a word that those

who

enjoy deriding others with a belief love to use...) of the matter is

that

there is no "fact" which unsubstantiated a creation or ID. Science does

not

pretend to have any such fact.

That depends on what you mean by "creation" and "ID". Science can
certainly falsify (quite easily) the notion that species were created
separately, or that phyla were created separately in the Cambrian
explosion, and that sort of thing. If, on the other hand, you suppose
that god intervened at various points during evolution to introduce
crucial new mutations, there is nothing to falsify that.



Ahhhh... I can't suggest anything to you. The best that I can do is to
state that I believe that God was the creator - how and when and why, I have
no clue. Could have been done over millennium, could have been done all at
once, could have been done in 6 days or 6 seconds or whatever. Just don't
know. I simply see an order to the universe that I attribute to God and an
intelligent design.

No problem. I can't tell you whether god was the creator, but I can tell
you how and (for some senses of the word) why. Clearly it was not done
is 6 days or 6 seconds, but over billions of years. And with regard to
life, it all comes from a common ancestor somewhere around 4 billion
years ago.

"John Harshman"
Fletis Humplebacker wrote:
John Harshman wrote:
Fletis Humplebacker wrote:
[snip]

Darwinian evolution predicts gradual change,
true, but the long periods are only with respect to human lifetimes, not
geological eras.

So when the experts in the field say lifeform appearances
are sudden we should discount their words? I think they
are aware of the time frames involved.


We shouldn't discount their words. We should understand what they mean:
sudden in geological terms. Look below at your Gould quote: "in a
geological moment", by which, if you read the whole quote, you will see
that he means a minimum of 5 million years.


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.



STEPHEN J. GOULD, HARVARD, "The Cambrian Explosion occurred
in a geological moment, and we have reason to think that all major
anatomical designs may have made their evolutionary appearance at
that time. ...not only the phylum Chordata itself, but also all its major
divisions, arose within the Cambrian Explosion. So much for chordate
uniqueness... Contrary to Darwin's expectation that new data would
reveal gradualistic continuity with slow and steady expansion, all major
discoveries of the past century have only heightened the massiveness
and geological abruptness of this formative event..." Nature, Vol.377,
26 10/95, p.682

Gould had an axe to grind. You are right about one thing, that people
tend to interpret data to fit their theories. That's why science is a
social effort and can't depend on one person. Others have shown how
Gould misinterpreted some of what he saw. The Cambrian explosion may
have spawned most phyla, though we can't tell this from the fossil
record,


You know, you are constantly telling me to believe you and not my
lying eyes. You want to discount comments if they are quoted on
creationist sites then argue with them even if they aren't. You believe
that you know more about the fossil records than Gould did, that's fine
with me but don't expect me to come aboard that easily.


I do know more than Gould did at the time he wrote that. There are new
discoveries every day, and ten years can make a lot of difference. But
you are picking out little fragments of Gould that distort his meaning,
and lots of paleontologists disagree with even his real meaning.


And what did I distort? And no one suggested that evolutionists were
harmonious, in fact my point has been just the opposite.


I have
difficulties with his theory of how things happened but not with his
observations on what did happen. I've seen no evidence that his research
was sloppy.


So you pick what you like and throw away what you don't.


I thought that's what you were doing? I never took issue with what he
found, only his theory of why it was. Those are two separate things.


And Gould
actually did no research on the Cambrian explosion. He wrote a popular
book, and in his early years he did some simulations that bear on the
question, but that's it.


No research? That's hard to believe. surely he must have realized
it would be read by his peers. Not that I didn't believe you but I
looked into it and you are downplaying his research and role within
the scientific community.

http://www.arn.org/docs2/news/gouldobituary052702.htmn

Noting that in graduate school Dr. Gould dodged bullets and drug runners
to collect specimens of Cerion and their fossils, Dr. Sally Walker, who studies
Cerion at the University of Georgia, once said, "That guy can drive down the left
side of the road," which is required in the Bahamas, "then jump out the door and
find Cerion when we can't even see it."


March, Harvard University Press published what Dr. Gould described as his magnum
opus, "The Structure of Evolutionary Theory." The book, on which he toiled for decades,
lays out his vision for synthesizing Darwin's original ideas and his own major contributions
to macroevolutionary theory.
"It is a heavyweight work," wrote Dr. Mark Ridley, an evolutionary biologist at University
of Oxford in England. And despite sometimes "almost pathological logorrhea" at 1,433
pages, Dr. Ridley went on, "it is still a magnificent summary of a quarter-century of influential
thinking and a major publishing event in evolutionary biology."


and there are some phyla that clearly did not originate then.
Chordates and the major divisions of Cephalochordata, Urochordata, and
Vertebrata (or at least their stem groups) may well have originated in
the explosion. The explosion may have lasted as little as 5 million
years. But do you have any real idea how long 5 million years is?

Do you ever wonder, by the way, what used to be in the the ellipses in
all these quotes you get from creationist sites?

It would be difficult to believe that his words mean something other
than what was posted. If that's your claim why take issue with Gould?
You do cover your bases.


There are multiple levels. Gould was wrong about many things, and you
(or the creationist sites you pull these highly trimmed quotes from)
distort Gould's meaning.


Usually when you quote someone you quote the relevant material. Disliking
where they came from doesn't make them go away. His quotes are entirely
consistent with what I've read of him and is consistent with his reasoning
for coming up with Punctuated Equalibrium.


Preston Cloud & Martin F. Glaessner, "Ever since Darwin, the geologically
abrupt appearance and rapid diversification of early animal life have fascinated
biologist and students of Earth history alike....This interval, plus Early Cambrian,
was the time during which metazoan life diversified into nearly all of the major
phyla and most of the invertebrate classes and orders subsequently known."
Science, Aug.27, 1982

What do you think Cloud and Glaessner meant by "this interval"? They
clearly aren't talking about the Cambrian explosion, because they say
"plus Early Cambrian".

It's clear to me that they are talking about the abrupt timespan of
appearance and diversification of life, which includes the early Cambrian
period.


The Early Cambrian alone is about 25 million years long. Add some other
unspecified period to that and how abrupt is it?


Yes, according to everyone else that I've read. The words Cambrian Explosion
comes to mind.


I don't know what they mean, but most classes
don't come along until the Ordovician or later, and most orders not
until the late Paleozoic. Also note that they are talking here about
just those phyla with good fossil records.


That's your belief but that isn't what they said. There's no mention
of fossil record quality, but "all of the major phyla and most of the
invertebrate classes and orders subsequently known."


We don't know what they're talking about because the quote doesn't tell
us.


Yes it does.

"Ever since Darwin, the geologically abrupt appearance and rapid
diversification of early animal life have fascinated biologist and students
of Earth history alike..."



But I do know when, according to the fossil record, most
invertebrate classes and orders arose. And it's not in the Cambrian. I
can't find a single source on the web for this (though there are clues
for individual groups here and there). You might want to check out this
book: M. J. Benton (ed). 1993. The Fossil Record 2. Chapman & Hall, London.


1993? Ten year old stuff is too old but a 12 year old book will do? I'm
not buying into it since it contradicts everything I've read and I don't have the
time or opportunity to excavate fossils for myself.


RICHARD Monastersky, Earth Science Ed., Science News, "The remarkably
complex forms of animals we see today suddenly appeared. ...This moment,
right at the start of the Earth's Cambrian Period...marks the evolutionary
explosion that filled the seas with the earth's first complex creatures. ...‘This
is Genesis material,’ gushed one researcher. ...demonstrates that the large
animal phyla of today were present already in the early Cambrian and that
they were as distinct from each other as they are today...a menagerie of clam
cousins, sponges, segmented worms, and other invertevrates that would seem
vaguely familiar to any scuba diver." Discover, p.40, 4/93

You did this one before. I guess that was before the newest radiometric
dates showed that most of the Early Cambrian came before the Cambrian
explosion. And look at all the ellipses here. If you do this with the
bible, you can come up with stuff like "Luke...I am...your father."
Quote mining is bad practice, especially when you have to stitch
together sentence fragments.

That's not an honest response. If the biblical reference, is given, like the above,
the verse(s) can be referenced. Your claim is that they misrepresented the
author's intent by devious editing, as if the commments would take on a
different meaning with clarification. Even so the author was wrong anyway.

I see a pattern here that's clearer than the fossil record.


All I can say is read the actual articles, not the mined quotes.


Minimizing them by calling them mined quotes doesn't improve your case.


And
read some recent paleontology. There are genuine controversies in
research on the Cambrian explosion, but you haven't touched on any of
them yet.


A fossil fight would be an interesting read but the general consensus is
as that alot happened in a geologically short time span and it defies
the traditional evolution model.

It requires creative thinking to try to explain it, the controversies don't make
the problem less of a problem.

If you don't do an intelligent design, you'll build an unintelligent project?

Maybe we need a committee to decide whether a set of plans are worthy of an
"intelligent design" stamp??


mac

Please remove splinters before emailing

Fletis Humplebacker wrote:

"John Harshman"

Fletis Humplebacker wrote:

John Harshman wrote:

Fletis Humplebacker wrote:

[snip]


Darwinian evolution predicts gradual change,
true, but the long periods are only with respect to human lifetimes, not
geological eras.

So when the experts in the field say lifeform appearances
are sudden we should discount their words? I think they
are aware of the time frames involved.

We shouldn't discount their words. We should understand what they mean:
sudden in geological terms. Look below at your Gould quote: "in a
geological moment", by which, if you read the whole quote, you will see
that he means a minimum of 5 million years.

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. Exactly what was sudden is
a matter of contention. The traditional view of evolution you refer to
is not necessarily Darwin's, since he said that evolution was probably
not constant in rate but proceeded in bursts interspersed with long
periods of stasis. Again, these bursts could take 100,000 years or more.
Some of this "traditional" view is Gould's strawman, as he needed to
make his theory of PE appear revolutionary. Some of it was due to the
mistaken impression of many paleontologists about what the consequences
of natural selection ought to be in the fossil record, which was
essentially a misunderstanding of time scales. In order to see a gradual
trend, sustained over a million years or more, natural selection by
itself won't do it. Any strength of selection capable of moving a
population's characteristics would operate much too quickly. What you
would need is an environment changing at just the right rate so that the
population optimum, the target of selection, would move smoothly over
that time. Natural selection would just be keeping up. Also, it was only
comparatively recently that the highly episodic nature of deposition was
fully appreciated.

STEPHEN J. GOULD, HARVARD, "The Cambrian Explosion occurred
in a geological moment, and we have reason to think that all major
anatomical designs may have made their evolutionary appearance at
that time. ...not only the phylum Chordata itself, but also all its major
divisions, arose within the Cambrian Explosion. So much for chordate
uniqueness... Contrary to Darwin's expectation that new data would
reveal gradualistic continuity with slow and steady expansion, all major
discoveries of the past century have only heightened the massiveness
and geological abruptness of this formative event..." Nature, Vol.377,
26 10/95, p.682

Gould had an axe to grind. You are right about one thing, that people
tend to interpret data to fit their theories. That's why science is a
social effort and can't depend on one person. Others have shown how
Gould misinterpreted some of what he saw. The Cambrian explosion may
have spawned most phyla, though we can't tell this from the fossil
record,

You know, you are constantly telling me to believe you and not my
lying eyes. You want to discount comments if they are quoted on
creationist sites then argue with them even if they aren't. You believe
that you know more about the fossil records than Gould did, that's fine
with me but don't expect me to come aboard that easily.

I do know more than Gould did at the time he wrote that. There are new
discoveries every day, and ten years can make a lot of difference. But
you are picking out little fragments of Gould that distort his meaning,
and lots of paleontologists disagree with even his real meaning.

And what did I distort? And no one suggested that evolutionists were
harmonious, in fact my point has been just the opposite.

I'm not sure you have a point at all. You are of course not the
distorter; whoever mined the quote did that, and you are just passing on
the misunderstanding.

I have
difficulties with his theory of how things happened but not with his
observations on what did happen. I've seen no evidence that his research
was sloppy.

So you pick what you like and throw away what you don't.

I thought that's what you were doing? I never took issue with what he
found, only his theory of why it was. Those are two separate things.

You have no clear idea what he found, because you have never read
anything he wrote except these little snippets. You have no basis to
accept or reject anything he said.

And Gould
actually did no research on the Cambrian explosion. He wrote a popular
book, and in his early years he did some simulations that bear on the
question, but that's it.

No research?

No research *on the Cambrian explosion*.

That's hard to believe. surely he must have realized
it would be read by his peers. Not that I didn't believe you but I
looked into it and you are downplaying his research and role within
the scientific community.

Not at all. He was an important paleontologist and evolutionary
theorist. But he did no research on the Cambrian explosion.

http://www.arn.org/docs2/news/gouldobituary052702.htmn

Noting that in graduate school Dr. Gould dodged bullets and drug runners
to collect specimens of Cerion and their fossils, Dr. Sally Walker, who studies
Cerion at the University of Georgia, once said, "That guy can drive down the left
side of the road," which is required in the Bahamas, "then jump out the door and
find Cerion when we can't even see it."

Note: Cerion is a genus of land snails. Gould was working with
Quaternary (very recent) fossils here. Nothing to do with the Cambrian.

March, Harvard University Press published what Dr. Gould described as his magnum
opus, "The Structure of Evolutionary Theory." The book, on which he toiled for decades,
lays out his vision for synthesizing Darwin's original ideas and his own major contributions
to macroevolutionary theory.
"It is a heavyweight work," wrote Dr. Mark Ridley, an evolutionary biologist at University
of Oxford in England. And despite sometimes "almost pathological logorrhea" at 1,433
pages, Dr. Ridley went on, "it is still a magnificent summary of a quarter-century of influential
thinking and a major publishing event in evolutionary biology."

Agreed. And irrelevant to the point. The book does cover the Cambrian
explosion. Nobody ever said Gould didn't think and write about the
research that others had done on the subject. But he did none of his own.

[snip]

Usually when you quote someone you quote the relevant material. Disliking
where they came from doesn't make them go away. His quotes are entirely
consistent with what I've read of him and is consistent with his reasoning
for coming up with Punctuated Equalibrium.

I doubt you understand or know his reasoning, since all you have ever
read was these trimmed snippets. Have you ever read any full article,
paper, or book that Gould wrote? I have. Don't all the ellipses make you
just the least bit suspicious?

Preston Cloud & Martin F. Glaessner, "Ever since Darwin, the geologically
abrupt appearance and rapid diversification of early animal life have fascinated
biologist and students of Earth history alike....This interval, plus Early Cambrian,
was the time during which metazoan life diversified into nearly all of the major
phyla and most of the invertebrate classes and orders subsequently known."
Science, Aug.27, 1982

What do you think Cloud and Glaessner meant by "this interval"? They
clearly aren't talking about the Cambrian explosion, because they say
"plus Early Cambrian".

It's clear to me that they are talking about the abrupt timespan of
appearance and diversification of life, which includes the early Cambrian
period.

The Early Cambrian alone is about 25 million years long. Add some other
unspecified period to that and how abrupt is it?

Yes, according to everyone else that I've read. The words Cambrian Explosion
comes to mind.

You are being highly flexible about time here. The Cambrian explosion is
a short period. But Cloud and Glaessner obviously were not talking about
that, but about some unspecified longer period. If you want to encompass
most of the first clear appearances of phyla with good fossil records,
that short period is good enough. If you want to encompass all the
phyla, it's not. If you want to encompass most classes, you need longer
still, and if you want to encompass most orders, you will need to
enlarge that to the entire Paleozoic.

I don't know what they mean, but most classes
don't come along until the Ordovician or later, and most orders not
until the late Paleozoic. Also note that they are talking here about
just those phyla with good fossil records.

That's your belief but that isn't what they said. There's no mention
of fossil record quality, but "all of the major phyla and most of the
invertebrate classes and orders subsequently known."

We don't know what they're talking about because the quote doesn't tell
us.

Yes it does.

"Ever since Darwin, the geologically abrupt appearance and rapid
diversification of early animal life have fascinated biologist and students
of Earth history alike..."

Yes, that's clear up to a point. I'm trying to figure out what "this
period" means, and I can't.

But I do know when, according to the fossil record, most
invertebrate classes and orders arose. And it's not in the Cambrian. I
can't find a single source on the web for this (though there are clues
for individual groups here and there). You might want to check out this
book: M. J. Benton (ed). 1993. The Fossil Record 2. Chapman & Hall, London.

1993? Ten year old stuff is too old but a 12 year old book will do? I'm
not buying into it since it contradicts everything I've read and I don't have the
time or opportunity to excavate fossils for myself.

The reason you think it contradicts what you have read is that you don't
understand what you have read. The creationist sites you frequent do a
good job of obscuring the meanings of the stuff they quote, so not all
the blame belongs to you. And I'm not sure you have any clear idea of
the difference between a phylum and an order anyway.

He
www.encyclopediaofgeology.com/samples/026-2.pdf

This pdf has a diagram showing the stratigraphic ranges of the 26
traditional orders of brachiopods. If you will look, you will see that
13 of them, or just half, originate some time in the Cambrian. Now, the
Cambrian is 53 million years long, and the explosion is just a small
part of that. A couple of those orders originated before the explosion,
and several after it. But never mind, take the whole Cambrian. You will
see that the other half arose at various times through the rest of the
Paleozoic, and one even in the Triassic. And that's about the best case
you're going to get, because most brachiopods became extinct at the end
of the Permian, giving them little opportunity to give rise to new
orders. I don't think you could find another phylum with anywhere near
so large a proportion of ordinal first appearances during the Cambrian.

But this stuff isn't so easy to find on the web, and I was lucky to get
that one.

By the way, you have consistently dodged this question: What is a
phylum, or a class, or an order to you? If you think all species are
separately created, higher taxonomic groups must merely be arbitrary
assemblages of species. Why even talk about them?

[snip]

A fossil fight would be an interesting read but the general consensus is
as that alot happened in a geologically short time span and it defies
the traditional evolution model.

How do you know what the general consensus is? You have never read
anything except what some creationist web sites tell you. You think they
don't have an agenda here?

Mike Marlow wrote:

Your belief may differ from
mine and others like me, but your belief is equally unproven -
substantiated only by "scientific theory".


Mike, as long as you can't differentiate between a "scientific theory"
and a "belief", you're not likely to get much respect from people who
know the difference.

Our species seems to have an innate need to feel superior to the rest of
life forms - perhaps it's a natural corollary to intelligence - I don't
know. But it sure has screwed up a lot of minds.

Mike Marlow wrote:


I simply see an order to the
universe that I attribute to God and an intelligent design.

Aye, there's the rub (sorry, WIll).

Claiming that there is order in the universe is akin to one mayfly
commenting to another how great it is that the world is always warm and
moist.

Two factors account for this.

One, the chaos takes place on such a gigantic time scale that we really
are only mayflies.

And two, if we evolved to fit this planet, it's understandable that some
would believe instead that the planet evolved (using the word loosely)
to fit us.

Hopefully, no asteroid will hit the planet during our life spans, but if
it did I could say "See?" as we were snuffed out of existence :-).

"John Wilkins" wrote in message
...
Aardvark J. Bandersnatch, MP, LP, BLT, ETC. wrote:
"John Wilkins" wrote in message
...

George wrote:

"John Wilkins" wrote in message
...


The University of Toledo was critical to the development of modern
western scholarship. Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas both got going
from the distribution of Avicenna's (Ibn Sina) work on Aristotle and
commentaries. The Summa Theologiae is a sustained response to this.


We have a winner!

Tell the man what he's won, Bob.


*Please* let it be the Porsche! *Please* let it be the Porsche!

Oh lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes-Benz!
My friends all drive Porsches, I must make amends.
I worked hard all my lifetime, got no help from my friends.
Oh lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes-Benz.

On Wed, 26 Oct 2005 15:01:44 -0700, Larry Blanchard
wrote:

Mike Marlow wrote:


I simply see an order to the
universe that I attribute to God and an intelligent design.

Aye, there's the rub (sorry, WIll).

Claiming that there is order in the universe is akin to one mayfly
commenting to another how great it is that the world is always warm and
moist.

Two factors account for this.

One, the chaos takes place on such a gigantic time scale that we really
are only mayflies.

And two, if we evolved to fit this planet, it's understandable that some
would believe instead that the planet evolved (using the word loosely)
to fit us.

there's a name for this. it's called the weak anthropic principle.
fascinating stuff. look it up.

Well if all this (life, the Universe and everything) is the result of
Intelligent Design, then God help us....

"Larry Blanchard" wrote in message
...
Mike Marlow wrote:

Your belief may differ from
mine and others like me, but your belief is equally unproven -
substantiated only by "scientific theory".


Mike, as long as you can't differentiate between a "scientific theory"
and a "belief", you're not likely to get much respect from people who
know the difference.

I can make that differentiation very well Larry.


--

-Mike-

"Larry Blanchard" wrote in message
...
Mike Marlow wrote:


I simply see an order to the
universe that I attribute to God and an intelligent design.

Aye, there's the rub (sorry, WIll).

Claiming that there is order in the universe is akin to one mayfly
commenting to another how great it is that the world is always warm and
moist.


Well, if there's no order then all of the laws, principles and rules that we
live by, think by, deduce by, etc. are meaningless. So much for the second
law of thermodynamics I guess. Damn, and I just love it when everyone
quotes that law. Pity the mathematician - poor fellow spent his life
believing in absolutes that maybe aren't.

--

-Mike-

Mike Marlow wrote:

I find it disappointing that I have to agree with the ID stuff getting on
your nerves. I agree from the perspective that unfortunately, a very small
minority of Christian believers with a very strict definition of things (I'm
speaking of young earth creationists which differ greatly from the majority
of Christianity) are causing the body of believers to be painted with their
brush because of their vocal position. While I don't diminish their faith,
I do wish they would go about exercising it in a different way. But then
again, I wish the evolution-only advocates would exercise their faith in a
different way too.


I don't diminish their beliefs, either, but I live in the heart of SB
country, and at times it's a royal PITA. At one point in my life, I was
a Baptist, though not SB. My wife is an SB.

I have no problem with any of it, until they start trying to force
their beliefs on me, and the rest of the world, as fact.

Evolution is not a faith. If you were as scientifically based as you
state, you'd never even make such a claim.

"Charlie Self" wrote in message
ups.com...


I don't diminish their beliefs, either, but I live in the heart of SB
country, and at times it's a royal PITA. At one point in my life, I was
a Baptist, though not SB. My wife is an SB.

I have no problem with any of it, until they start trying to force
their beliefs on me, and the rest of the world, as fact.

Evolution is not a faith. If you were as scientifically based as you
state, you'd never even make such a claim.


My use of the word faith in the context was not relative to evolution as a
study, but to those who find it easy to put a trust in things unseen,
unproven and quite speculative in the natural world and the theories that
attempt to understand it. Clearly a number of the theories of the past have
been ill founded as they have been superseded over time. Yet, they gained a
certain following - an acceptance of sorts. For those, there is a
considerable amount of faith required. Trust if you will. Not so different
from the faith of those who believe in the spiritual things. I only use the
term faith to indicate that in many ways there is a greater similarity
between the trust one puts in the scientific realm and the trust others put
in the spiritual realm.

--

-Mike-

"Charlie Self" wrote in message
ups.com...

Mike Marlow wrote:

I find it disappointing that I have to agree with the ID stuff getting
on
your nerves. I agree from the perspective that unfortunately, a very
small
minority of Christian believers with a very strict definition of things
(I'm
speaking of young earth creationists which differ greatly from the
majority
of Christianity) are causing the body of believers to be painted with
their
brush because of their vocal position. While I don't diminish their
faith,
I do wish they would go about exercising it in a different way. But
then
again, I wish the evolution-only advocates would exercise their faith in
a
different way too.



Evolution is not a faith. If you were as scientifically based as you
state, you'd never even make such a claim.


Correct - and I did not call evolution a faith. I referred to
evolution-only. That position requires as much faith as a creation faith.
It's the old argument of the starting point.

--

-Mike-

John Harshman wrote:
Fletis Humplebacker wrote:

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.


Exactly what was sudden is
a matter of contention. The traditional view of evolution you refer to
is not necessarily Darwin's, since he said that evolution was probably
not constant in rate but proceeded in bursts interspersed with long
periods of stasis. Again, these bursts could take 100,000 years or more.
Some of this "traditional" view is Gould's strawman, as he needed to
make his theory of PE appear revolutionary. Some of it was due to the
mistaken impression of many paleontologists about what the consequences
of natural selection ought to be in the fossil record, which was
essentially a misunderstanding of time scales. In order to see a gradual
trend, sustained over a million years or more, natural selection by
itself won't do it. Any strength of selection capable of moving a
population's characteristics would operate much too quickly. What you
would need is an environment changing at just the right rate so that the
population optimum, the target of selection, would move smoothly over
that time. Natural selection would just be keeping up. Also, it was only
comparatively recently that the highly episodic nature of deposition was
fully appreciated.



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.


STEPHEN J. GOULD, HARVARD, "The Cambrian Explosion occurred
in a geological moment, and we have reason to think that all major
anatomical designs may have made their evolutionary appearance at
that time. ...not only the phylum Chordata itself, but also all its major
divisions, arose within the Cambrian Explosion. So much for chordate
uniqueness... Contrary to Darwin's expectation that new data would
reveal gradualistic continuity with slow and steady expansion, all major
discoveries of the past century have only heightened the massiveness
and geological abruptness of this formative event..." Nature, Vol.377,
26 10/95, p.682

Gould had an axe to grind. You are right about one thing, that people
tend to interpret data to fit their theories. That's why science is a
social effort and can't depend on one person. Others have shown how
Gould misinterpreted some of what he saw. The Cambrian explosion may
have spawned most phyla, though we can't tell this from the fossil
record,

You know, you are constantly telling me to believe you and not my
lying eyes. You want to discount comments if they are quoted on
creationist sites then argue with them even if they aren't. You believe
that you know more about the fossil records than Gould did, that's fine
with me but don't expect me to come aboard that easily.

I do know more than Gould did at the time he wrote that. There are new
discoveries every day, and ten years can make a lot of difference. But
you are picking out little fragments of Gould that distort his meaning,
and lots of paleontologists disagree with even his real meaning.

And what did I distort? And no one suggested that evolutionists were
harmonious, in fact my point has been just the opposite.


I'm not sure you have a point at all.

Apparently I do because you are saying one thing and some
prominant evolutionists are saying another.


You are of course not the
distorter; whoever mined the quote did that, and you are just passing on
the misunderstanding.


There's no misunderstanding if everyone else understands it.
Calling something a misunderstanding doesn't make it one. I've
challenged you to show how their words are being misrepresented.



I have
difficulties with his theory of how things happened but not with his
observations on what did happen. I've seen no evidence that his research
was sloppy.

So you pick what you like and throw away what you don't.

I thought that's what you were doing? I never took issue with what he
found, only his theory of why it was. Those are two separate things.


You have no clear idea what he found, because you have never read
anything he wrote except these little snippets. You have no basis to
accept or reject anything he said.


To the contrary, you are the one dismissing his words as a
misrepresentation. I'm calling your bluff.


And Gould
actually did no research on the Cambrian explosion. He wrote a popular
book, and in his early years he did some simulations that bear on the
question, but that's it.

No research?


No research *on the Cambrian explosion*.


That's hard to believe. surely he must have realized
it would be read by his peers. Not that I didn't believe you but I
looked into it and you are downplaying his research and role within
the scientific community.


Not at all. He was an important paleontologist and evolutionary
theorist. But he did no research on the Cambrian explosion.


I understand that's your belief but he wrote a book on the Burgess
Shale, among others so it's difficult to believe that he did no research
on the Cambrian. I'm skeptical on that claim too.


http://www.arn.org/docs2/news/gouldobituary052702.htmn

Noting that in graduate school Dr. Gould dodged bullets and drug runners
to collect specimens of Cerion and their fossils, Dr. Sally Walker, who studies
Cerion at the University of Georgia, once said, "That guy can drive down the left
side of the road," which is required in the Bahamas, "then jump out the door and
find Cerion when we can't even see it."


Note: Cerion is a genus of land snails. Gould was working with
Quaternary (very recent) fossils here. Nothing to do with the Cambrian.


I think it was the Bahamas where most of his research on those were,
but the point is that he was familiar with fossils, wrote books and
was well known for his theory of the Cambrian Explosion so I can't buy
that he did no research on it.



March, Harvard University Press published what Dr. Gould described as his magnum
opus, "The Structure of Evolutionary Theory." The book, on which he toiled for decades,
lays out his vision for synthesizing Darwin's original ideas and his own major contributions
to macroevolutionary theory.
"It is a heavyweight work," wrote Dr. Mark Ridley, an evolutionary biologist at University
of Oxford in England. And despite sometimes "almost pathological logorrhea" at 1,433
pages, Dr. Ridley went on, "it is still a magnificent summary of a quarter-century of influential
thinking and a major publishing event in evolutionary biology."


Agreed. And irrelevant to the point. The book does cover the Cambrian
explosion. Nobody ever said Gould didn't think and write about the
research that others had done on the subject. But he did none of his own.


He spent decades on it but did no research? Sure.


Usually when you quote someone you quote the relevant material. Disliking
where they came from doesn't make them go away. His quotes are entirely
consistent with what I've read of him and is consistent with his reasoning
for coming up with Punctuated Equalibrium.


I doubt you understand or know his
reasoning, since all you have ever read was these trimmed snippets.


That's another wiild ass assertion designed to fit your mindset.



Have you ever read any full article,
paper, or book that Gould wrote? I have. Don't all the ellipses make you
just the least bit suspicious?


I'm most suspicious of your failure to show how he was misrepresented.


Preston Cloud & Martin F. Glaessner, "Ever since Darwin, the geologically
abrupt appearance and rapid diversification of early animal life have fascinated
biologist and students of Earth history alike....This interval, plus Early Cambrian,
was the time during which metazoan life diversified into nearly all of the major
phyla and most of the invertebrate classes and orders subsequently known."
Science, Aug.27, 1982

What do you think Cloud and Glaessner meant by "this interval"? They
clearly aren't talking about the Cambrian explosion, because they say
"plus Early Cambrian".

It's clear to me that they are talking about the abrupt timespan of
appearance and diversification of life, which includes the early Cambrian
period.

The Early Cambrian alone is about 25 million years long. Add some other
unspecified period to that and how abrupt is it?

Yes, according to everyone else that I've read. The words Cambrian Explosion
comes to mind.


You are being highly flexible about time here.


Not at all. I use and understand the term in context, like the authors
I quoted.


The Cambrian explosion is
a short period. But Cloud and Glaessner obviously were not talking about
that, but about some unspecified longer period.


That's not true, they mentioned the early Cambrian specifically.
They also mentioned a time period prior to that but refer to them
as rendering an abrupt appearance of life, consistent with the
'explosion' term used so often by those who make it their profession
to study such things.


If you want to encompass
most of the first clear appearances of phyla with good fossil records,
that short period is good enough. If you want to encompass all the
phyla, it's not. If you want to encompass most classes, you need longer
still, and if you want to encompass most orders, you will need to
enlarge that to the entire Paleozoic.


That means the explosion of life didn't occur? If that's what you mean
why should we believe you over them?


I don't know what they mean, but most classes
don't come along until the Ordovician or later, and most orders not
until the late Paleozoic. Also note that they are talking here about
just those phyla with good fossil records.

That's your belief but that isn't what they said. There's no mention
of fossil record quality, but "all of the major phyla and most of the
invertebrate classes and orders subsequently known."

We don't know what they're talking about because the quote doesn't tell
us.

Yes it does.

"Ever since Darwin, the geologically abrupt appearance and rapid
diversification of early animal life have fascinated biologist and students
of Earth history alike..."


Yes, that's clear up to a point. I'm trying to figure out what "this
period" means, and I can't.


The words abrupt and rapid work for me.


But I do know when, according to the fossil record, most
invertebrate classes and orders arose. And it's not in the Cambrian. I
can't find a single source on the web for this (though there are clues
for individual groups here and there). You might want to check out this
book: M. J. Benton (ed). 1993. The Fossil Record 2. Chapman & Hall, London.

1993? Ten year old stuff is too old but a 12 year old book will do? I'm
not buying into it since it contradicts everything I've read and I don't have the
time or opportunity to excavate fossils for myself.



The reason you think it contradicts what you have read is that you don't
understand what you have read. The creationist sites you frequent do a
good job of obscuring the meanings of the stuff they quote, so not all
the blame belongs to you. And I'm not sure you have any clear idea of
the difference between a phylum and an order anyway.

He
www.encyclopediaofgeology.com/samples/026-2.pdf

This pdf has a diagram showing the stratigraphic ranges of the 26
traditional orders of brachiopods. If you will look, you will see that
13 of them, or just half, originate some time in the Cambrian. Now, the
Cambrian is 53 million years long, and the explosion is just a small
part of that. A couple of those orders originated before the explosion,
and several after it. But never mind, take the whole Cambrian. You will
see that the other half arose at various times through the rest of the
Paleozoic, and one even in the Triassic. And that's about the best case
you're going to get, because most brachiopods became extinct at the end
of the Permian, giving them little opportunity to give rise to new
orders. I don't think you could find another phylum with anywhere near
so large a proportion of ordinal first appearances during the Cambrian.

But this stuff isn't so easy to find on the web, and I was lucky to get
that one.


And it contradicts the quotes how? The chart shows an explosion of
life in a brief time period, the few later branches have question marks
so they are uncertain of that late a date. They may well be moved
back.



By the way, you have consistently dodged this question: What is a
phylum, or a class, or an order to you? If you think all species are
separately created, higher taxonomic groups must merely be arbitrary
assemblages of species. Why even talk about them?


I'm not defining the terms, my point is that I've seen no evidence that
one animal, like your dolphin example, becomes a sea lion or visa
versa. I would consider those separate species and in all of these posts
you've shown nothing to demonstrate how it took place or even if it could.



A fossil fight would be an interesting read but the general consensus is
as that alot happened in a geologically short time span and it defies
the traditional evolution model.


How do you know what the general consensus is? You have never read
anything except what some creationist web sites tell you. You think they
don't have an agenda here?

All you ever do is back up assertions with more assertions.

Fletis Humplebacker wrote:

John Harshman wrote:

Fletis Humplebacker wrote:


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.

Exactly what was sudden is
a matter of contention. The traditional view of evolution you refer to
is not necessarily Darwin's, since he said that evolution was probably
not constant in rate but proceeded in bursts interspersed with long
periods of stasis. Again, these bursts could take 100,000 years or more.
Some of this "traditional" view is Gould's strawman, as he needed to
make his theory of PE appear revolutionary. Some of it was due to the
mistaken impression of many paleontologists about what the consequences
of natural selection ought to be in the fossil record, which was
essentially a misunderstanding of time scales. In order to see a gradual
trend, sustained over a million years or more, natural selection by
itself won't do it. Any strength of selection capable of moving a
population's characteristics would operate much too quickly. What you
would need is an environment changing at just the right rate so that the
population optimum, the target of selection, would move smoothly over
that time. Natural selection would just be keeping up. Also, it was only
comparatively recently that the highly episodic nature of deposition was
fully appreciated.

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.

STEPHEN J. GOULD, HARVARD, "The Cambrian Explosion occurred
in a geological moment, and we have reason to think that all major
anatomical designs may have made their evolutionary appearance at
that time. ...not only the phylum Chordata itself, but also all its major
divisions, arose within the Cambrian Explosion. So much for chordate
uniqueness... Contrary to Darwin's expectation that new data would
reveal gradualistic continuity with slow and steady expansion, all major
discoveries of the past century have only heightened the massiveness
and geological abruptness of this formative event..." Nature, Vol.377,
26 10/95, p.682

Gould had an axe to grind. You are right about one thing, that people
tend to interpret data to fit their theories. That's why science is a
social effort and can't depend on one person. Others have shown how
Gould misinterpreted some of what he saw. The Cambrian explosion may
have spawned most phyla, though we can't tell this from the fossil
record,

You know, you are constantly telling me to believe you and not my
lying eyes. You want to discount comments if they are quoted on
creationist sites then argue with them even if they aren't. You believe
that you know more about the fossil records than Gould did, that's fine
with me but don't expect me to come aboard that easily.

I do know more than Gould did at the time he wrote that. There are new
discoveries every day, and ten years can make a lot of difference. But
you are picking out little fragments of Gould that distort his meaning,
and lots of paleontologists disagree with even his real meaning.

And what did I distort? And no one suggested that evolutionists were
harmonious, in fact my point has been just the opposite.

I'm not sure you have a point at all.

Apparently I do because you are saying one thing and some
prominant evolutionists are saying another.

My point is that you don't actually know what they are saying. You have
never read their work, just those heavily massaged snippets.

You are of course not the
distorter; whoever mined the quote did that, and you are just passing on
the misunderstanding.

There's no misunderstanding if everyone else understands it.
Calling something a misunderstanding doesn't make it one. I've
challenged you to show how their words are being misrepresented.

For some of these I cannot easily find the original articles. For Gould,
I have a direct quote stating how annoyed he is at being misrepresented
by creationists. Why isn't that good enough?

I have
difficulties with his theory of how things happened but not with his
observations on what did happen. I've seen no evidence that his research
was sloppy.

So you pick what you like and throw away what you don't.

I thought that's what you were doing? I never took issue with what he
found, only his theory of why it was. Those are two separate things.

You have no clear idea what he found, because you have never read
anything he wrote except these little snippets. You have no basis to
accept or reject anything he said.

To the contrary, you are the one dismissing his words as a
misrepresentation. I'm calling your bluff.

One more time:

" [T]ransitions are often found in the fossil record. Preserved
transitions are not common -- and should not be, according to our
understanding of evolution (see next section) but they are not entirely
wanting, as creationists often claim. [He then discusses two examples:
therapsid intermediaries between reptiles and mammals, and the
half-dozen human species - found as of 1981 - that appear in an unbroken
temporal sequence of progressively more modern features.]

Faced with these facts of evolution and the philosophical bankruptcy
of their own position, creationists rely upon distortion and innuendo to
buttress their rhetorical claim. If I sound sharp or bitter, indeed I am
-- for I have become a major target of these practices.

I count myself among the evolutionists who argue for a jerky, or
episodic, rather than a smoothly gradual, pace of change. In 1972 my
colleague Niles Eldredge and I developed the theory of punctuated
equilibrium. We argued that two outstanding facts of the fossil record
-- geologically "sudden" origin of new species and failure to change
thereafter (stasis) -- reflect the predictions of evolutionary theory,
not the imperfections of the fossil record. In most theories, small
isolated populations are the source of new species, and the process of
speciation takes thousands or tens of thousands of years. This amount of
time, so long when measured against our lives, is a geological
microsecond . . .

Since we proposed punctuated equilibria to explain trends, it is
infuriating to be quoted again and again by creationists -- whether
through design or stupidity, I do not know -- as admitting that the
fossil record includes no transitional forms. Transitional forms are
generally lacking at the species level, but they are abundant between
larger groups."

- Gould, Stephen Jay 1983. "Evolution as Fact and Theory" in Hens
Teeth and Horse's Toes: Further Reflections in Natural History. New
York: W. W. Norton & Co., p. 258-260.


And Gould
actually did no research on the Cambrian explosion. He wrote a popular
book, and in his early years he did some simulations that bear on the
question, but that's it.

No research?

No research *on the Cambrian explosion*.

That's hard to believe. surely he must have realized
it would be read by his peers. Not that I didn't believe you but I
looked into it and you are downplaying his research and role within
the scientific community.

Not at all. He was an important paleontologist and evolutionary
theorist. But he did no research on the Cambrian explosion.

I understand that's your belief but he wrote a book on the Burgess
Shale, among others so it's difficult to believe that he did no research
on the Cambrian. I'm skeptical on that claim too.

Are we confused about what "research" means? I'm talking about original
scientific research here. Gould read the primary literature when writing
his book, but he never wrote any of the primary literature on the
subject. Believe what you will, but Gould never published any research
on the Cambrian explosion. He relied entirely on the research of others
when writing his book. There's nothing wrong with that; it's just true.

http://www.arn.org/docs2/news/gouldobituary052702.htmn

Noting that in graduate school Dr. Gould dodged bullets and drug runners
to collect specimens of Cerion and their fossils, Dr. Sally Walker, who studies
Cerion at the University of Georgia, once said, "That guy can drive down the left
side of the road," which is required in the Bahamas, "then jump out the door and
find Cerion when we can't even see it."

Note: Cerion is a genus of land snails. Gould was working with
Quaternary (very recent) fossils here. Nothing to do with the Cambrian.

I think it was the Bahamas where most of his research on those were,
but the point is that he was familiar with fossils, wrote books and
was well known for his theory of the Cambrian Explosion so I can't buy
that he did no research on it.

I don't know how I could possibly demonstrate that he didn't do any such
research. You could, however, easily show that he did do such research
by citing a scientific publication in which he details this research.
Yes, he had a theory, expressed often. But theories are not research.
Gould did no such research.

March, Harvard University Press published what Dr. Gould described as his magnum
opus, "The Structure of Evolutionary Theory." The book, on which he toiled for decades,
lays out his vision for synthesizing Darwin's original ideas and his own major contributions
to macroevolutionary theory.
"It is a heavyweight work," wrote Dr. Mark Ridley, an evolutionary biologist at University
of Oxford in England. And despite sometimes "almost pathological logorrhea" at 1,433
pages, Dr. Ridley went on, "it is still a magnificent summary of a quarter-century of influential
thinking and a major publishing event in evolutionary biology."

Agreed. And irrelevant to the point. The book does cover the Cambrian
explosion. Nobody ever said Gould didn't think and write about the
research that others had done on the subject. But he did none of his own.

He spent decades on it but did no research? Sure.

Science is a cooperative venture. He made use of the research of others.

Usually when you quote someone you quote the relevant material. Disliking
where they came from doesn't make them go away. His quotes are entirely
consistent with what I've read of him and is consistent with his reasoning
for coming up with Punctuated Equalibrium.

I doubt you understand or know his
reasoning, since all you have ever read was these trimmed snippets.

That's another wiild ass assertion designed to fit your mindset.

Do you claim that the snippets were not trimmed, or that you have read
something other than those snippets, or that the trimmed snippets do so
accurately represent what he meant?

Have you ever read any full article,
paper, or book that Gould wrote? I have. Don't all the ellipses make you
just the least bit suspicious?

I'm most suspicious of your failure to show how he was misrepresented.

I've done it multiple times, most recently above in this same post, in
Gould's own words. Why is this not sufficient?

Preston Cloud & Martin F. Glaessner, "Ever since Darwin, the geologically
abrupt appearance and rapid diversification of early animal life have fascinated
biologist and students of Earth history alike....This interval, plus Early Cambrian,
was the time during which metazoan life diversified into nearly all of the major
phyla and most of the invertebrate classes and orders subsequently known."
Science, Aug.27, 1982

What do you think Cloud and Glaessner meant by "this interval"? They
clearly aren't talking about the Cambrian explosion, because they say
"plus Early Cambrian".

It's clear to me that they are talking about the abrupt timespan of
appearance and diversification of life, which includes the early Cambrian
period.

The Early Cambrian alone is about 25 million years long. Add some other
unspecified period to that and how abrupt is it?

Yes, according to everyone else that I've read. The words Cambrian Explosion
comes to mind.

You are being highly flexible about time here.

Not at all. I use and understand the term in context, like the authors
I quoted.

Which authors? We were talking about Cloud & Glaessner. The term
"Cambrian explosion" appears nowhere in that quote, which also says
nothing about what time interval they are discussing.

The Cambrian explosion is
a short period. But Cloud and Glaessner obviously were not talking about
that, but about some unspecified longer period.

That's not true, they mentioned the early Cambrian specifically.

"plus Early Cambrian".

They also mentioned a time period prior to that but refer to them
as rendering an abrupt appearance of life, consistent with the
'explosion' term used so often by those who make it their profession
to study such things.

Actually, the quote says nothing about the time period they mention
being either before or after the Early Cambrian. I still have no idea
what they were talking about, and you certainly don't either. I need to
get to a library and look that article up.

If you want to encompass
most of the first clear appearances of phyla with good fossil records,
that short period is good enough. If you want to encompass all the
phyla, it's not. If you want to encompass most classes, you need longer
still, and if you want to encompass most orders, you will need to
enlarge that to the entire Paleozoic.

That means the explosion of life didn't occur? If that's what you mean
why should we believe you over them?

No, there was an explosion. It just doesn't encompass what you say it
does. During the last part of the Early Cambrian, approximiately the
Atdabanian and Bottomian stages, all but a few of the readily
preservable invertebrate phyla: arthropods, mollusks, echinoderms.
Brachiopods appeared a bit before that, and bryozoans considerably
later. This also marks the first appearance of well-preserved and
identifiable members of a number of soft-bodied phyla in various
lagerstatten. There are however various clues to the existence of
several of these groups as much as 40 million years earlier.

There are many theories on what this explosion actually was. My opinion
is that it marks a great period of innovation after the evolution of
macrophagy, i.e. animals eating other animals. Many new means of attack
and defense had to co-evolve within a few million years, and the entire
world ecosystem was affected. There are publications supporting this
view if you are interested.

I don't know what they mean, but most classes
don't come along until the Ordovician or later, and most orders not
until the late Paleozoic. Also note that they are talking here about
just those phyla with good fossil records.

That's your belief but that isn't what they said. There's no mention
of fossil record quality, but "all of the major phyla and most of the
invertebrate classes and orders subsequently known."

We don't know what they're talking about because the quote doesn't tell
us.

Yes it does.

"Ever since Darwin, the geologically abrupt appearance and rapid
diversification of early animal life have fascinated biologist and students
of Earth history alike..."


Yes, that's clear up to a point. I'm trying to figure out what "this
period" means, and I can't.

The words abrupt and rapid work for me.

They may, but they don't tell you what "this period" means.

But I do know when, according to the fossil record, most
invertebrate classes and orders arose. And it's not in the Cambrian. I
can't find a single source on the web for this (though there are clues
for individual groups here and there). You might want to check out this
book: M. J. Benton (ed). 1993. The Fossil Record 2. Chapman & Hall, London.

1993? Ten year old stuff is too old but a 12 year old book will do? I'm
not buying into it since it contradicts everything I've read and I don't have the
time or opportunity to excavate fossils for myself.

The reason you think it contradicts what you have read is that you don't
understand what you have read. The creationist sites you frequent do a
good job of obscuring the meanings of the stuff they quote, so not all
the blame belongs to you. And I'm not sure you have any clear idea of
the difference between a phylum and an order anyway.

He
www.encyclopediaofgeology.com/samples/026-2.pdf

This pdf has a diagram showing the stratigraphic ranges of the 26
traditional orders of brachiopods. If you will look, you will see that
13 of them, or just half, originate some time in the Cambrian. Now, the
Cambrian is 53 million years long, and the explosion is just a small
part of that. A couple of those orders originated before the explosion,
and several after it. But never mind, take the whole Cambrian. You will
see that the other half arose at various times through the rest of the
Paleozoic, and one even in the Triassic. And that's about the best case
you're going to get, because most brachiopods became extinct at the end
of the Permian, giving them little opportunity to give rise to new
orders. I don't think you could find another phylum with anywhere near
so large a proportion of ordinal first appearances during the Cambrian.

But this stuff isn't so easy to find on the web, and I was lucky to get
that one.

And it contradicts the quotes how? The chart shows an explosion of
life in a brief time period, the few later branches have question marks
so they are uncertain of that late a date. They may well be moved
back.

You mistake the nature of the question marks. They refer to
relationships among the orders, not to the dates assigned. The chart
does indeed show an explosion of life. But you were claiming that most
orders originated during the Cambrian explosion. If "most" does indeed
mean "less than half", then you are right.

By the way, you have consistently dodged this question: What is a
phylum, or a class, or an order to you? If you think all species are
separately created, higher taxonomic groups must merely be arbitrary
assemblages of species. Why even talk about them?

I'm not defining the terms, my point is that I've seen no evidence that
one animal, like your dolphin example, becomes a sea lion or visa
versa. I would consider those separate species and in all of these posts
you've shown nothing to demonstrate how it took place or even if it could.

We know much less about how it too place than about whether it took
place. I'm also assuming that if it did happen, this is a good clue that
it could happen. Since dolphins and cows (not to mention other mammals,
etc.) are clearly related, as shown by DNA and fossil evidence (would
you care for references?) then the events in question clearly must have
happened.

A fossil fight would be an interesting read but the general consensus is
as that alot happened in a geologically short time span and it defies
the traditional evolution model.

How do you know what the general consensus is? You have never read
anything except what some creationist web sites tell you. You think they
don't have an agenda here?

All you ever do is back up assertions with more assertions.

You can live in your little insulated world if you like. But don't you
ever feel like a mushroom?

Fletis Humplebacker wrote:

John Harshman wrote:

Fletis Humplebacker wrote:


It's time to whittle the posts down for the sake of brevity,
you are already at 43k.

I was recently trying to figure out why you never responded to my
evidence for human evolution, so I looked back in the thread. The reason
is that you deleted the whole thing without comment, even though you in
fact asked me to give you that evidence. I know this was a mere
oversight on your part, and I have thoughtfully restored it below:

[You need to view this in a font in which all the characters take up the
same amount of room. If you view it in a proportionally-spaced font,
both the tree and the DNA sequence will fail to line up properly.]

Evidence for human relationships to the other apes.

But first, a primer on DNA and how it can be used to understand
phylogenetic relationships. If you understand
this already, skip ahead to "Here is a set of DNA sequences" below the
dotted line.

DNA is double helix, each half being a twisted string of chemicals,
called bases or nucleotides, on a backbone. The bases come in four
flavors, each with a slightly different chemical formula, which can be
represented as single letters: A, C, G, or T, from the first letters of
each chemical's name. Because each of the two strings completely
determines the other one, we can ignore one of them, and because of
DNA's beads-on-a-string structure, we can completely describe a given
gene by a linear sequence of the four bases. So if I tell you that the
DNA sequence in some gene in some species is AAGAAGCTAGTGTAAGA, I have
completely described that particular part of the DNA molecule.

Different species have slightly different sequences, and when we line up
the corresponding sequences from different species, the patterns of
bases (letters) at each position (or site) in the sequence can tell us
about their relationships. Consider a set of 5 species. At any
particular position in the sequence each species has either A, C, G, or
T. For my purposes I don't care about the particular bases, only about
the patterns of similarity, so I'm going to use a different symbolism to
describe those patterns. I'll use lower case letters to represent
identical bases. So if I say a position has pattern xxxyy, I mean that
the first three species have one base and the last two have another. The
real bases could be TTTCC, GGGAA, or any other combination. There
are many possible patterns: xxxxx, xyzyz, xyxyy, etc. But only a few of
them can be used to determine relationships. It should be obvious that
xxxxx, all bases the same, tells us nothing. If only one base differs,
such as xyxxx, that also tells us nothing except that one species is
different from all the rest; but we already knew it was a separate
species. The only patterns that make a claim of relationships are those
in which two species have one base, and the other three have another:
xxyyy, xyxyx, xxyxy, and so on. (Actually, patterns like xxyzz tell us
something too, just not enough for my current purposes.) Why is this?
Because such patterns split the species into two groups, implying a tree
that looks something like this:

y x If all the species on the left have state y, and
\ / all the species on the right have state x, then
\ / somewhere in the middle (the branch marked *),
y__\_____/ there must have been a change in that site --
/ * \ a mutation -- either from y to x or x to y
/ \ (we can't tell which from this information).
/ \
y x

A little further note: the patterns that I represent in rows above
(xxyyy, etc.) are shown in columns in the DNA sequences below. That is,
in the sequences below, you read across to find the sequence in a single
species, but you read down to read the contents of a single site in five
species. So the first column of the sequence, reading down, would be
AAGAG, which is an xxyxy pattern.

-------------------------------------------------------

Here is a set of DNA sequences. They come from two genes named
ND4 and ND5. If you put them together, they total 694 nucleotides. But
most of those nucleotides either are identical among all the species
here, or they differ in only one species. Those are uninformative about
relationships, so I have removed them, leaving 76 nucleotides that make
some claim. I'll let you look at them for a while.

[ 10 20 30 40 50]
[ . . . . .]
+ 1 2++ 3 11 +4 3 ++ 52+1 2615+4 14+ 3 3+6+
gibbon ACCGCCCCCA TCCCCTCCCT CAAGTCCTAT CCAATCTACT GTACTTTGCC
orangutan ACCACTCCCA CCCTTCCTCC TAAGACTCAC ACAACTCGCC ACACCTCGTC
human GTCATCATCC TTCTTTTTTT AGGAATTTCC TCTCTCCGTC ACGCTCTACT
chimpanzee ATTACCATTC CTTTTTTCCC CGGATTCTCC CTTCTTCATT ATGTCTCATT
gorilla GTTGTTATTA CCTCCCTTTC AAGAACCCCT TTCACCTATC GCGTCCCACT

[ 60 70 ]
[ . . ]
+++ +++1 + + 2 + +++
gibbon CCTACAGCCC AGCCAAACGA CACTAA
orangutan CCTACCGCCT AGCCATTTCA CACTAA
human CCCCTTATTT TCTTGTCCGG TGACCG
chimpanzee TTCCTCATTT TCTTACTCAG TGACCG
gorilla TTCCTTATTC TTTCGCCTAG TGATTA

I've marked with a plus sign all those sites at which gibbon and
orangutan match each other, and the three African apes (including
humans) have a different base but match each other. (That's the xxyyy
pattern mentioned above) These sites all support a relationship among
the African apes, exclusive of gibbon and orangutan. You will note there
are quite a lot of them, 23 to be exact. The sites I have marked with
numbers from 1-6 contradict this relationship. (Sites without numbers
don't have anything to say about this particular question.) We expect a
certain amount of this because sometimes the same mutation will happen
twice in different lineages; we call that homoplasy. However you will
note that there are fewer of these sites, only 22 of them, and more
importantly they contradict each other. Each number stands for a
different hypothesis of relationships; for example, number one is for
sites that support a relationship between gibbons and gorillas, and
number two is for sites that support a relationship between orangutans
and gorillas (all exclusive of the rest). One and two can't be true at
the same time. So we have to consider each competing hypothesis
separately. If you do that it comes out this way:

hypothesis sites supporting pattern
African apes (+) 23 xxyyy
gibbon+gorilla (1) 6 xyyyx
orangutan+gorilla (2) 4 xyxxy
gibbon+human (3) 4 xyxyy
gibbon+chimp (4) 3 xyyxy
orangutan+human (5) 2 xyyxx
orangutan+chimp (6) 2 xyxyx

I think we can see that the African ape hypothesis is way out front, and
the others can be attributed to random homoplasy. This result would be
very difficult to explain by chance.

Let's try a statistical test just to be sure. Let's suppose, as our null
hypothesis, that the sequences are randomized with respect to phylogeny
(perhaps because there is no phylogeny) and that apparent support for
African apes is merely a chance fluctuation. And let's try a chi-square
test. (I'm not going to explain chi-square tests here; just understand
that it's a statistical test that tells us the probability that we would
see the patterns we see if sequence differences were random.) Here it is:

hypothesis obs. exp. (obs.-exp)^2/exp.
African apes (+) 23 6.29 44.4
gibbon+gorilla (1) 6 6.29 0.0
orangutan+gorilla (2) 4 6.29 0.8
gibbon+human (3) 4 6.29 0.8
gibbon+chimp (4) 3 6.29 1.7
orangutan+human (5) 2 6.29 2.9
orangutan+chimp (6) 2 6.29 2.9
sum 44 44 53.7*

(*This column is rounded, so it doesn't quite add up here.)

These are all the possible hypotheses of relationship, and the observed
number of sites supporting them. Expected values would be equal, or the
sum/7. The important column is the third one, which is a measure of the
"strain" between the observed and expected values. The larger the sum of
this column ("the sum of squares"), the greater the strain. There are 6
degrees of freedom (meaning that if we know 6 of the observations, we
automatically know the 7th), and the sum of squares is 53.7. That last
number gets compared to a chi-square distribution to come up with a P value.

It happens that P, or the probability of this amount of asymmetry in the
distribution arising by chance, is very low. When I tried it in Excel, I
got P=8.55*10^-10, or 0.000000000855. That's pretty close to zero, and
chance can be ruled out with great confidence.

Having ruled out chance, now the question is how you account for the
pattern we see. I account for it by supposing that the null hypothesis
is just plain wrong, and that there is a phylogeny, and that the
phylogeny involves the African apes, including humans, being related by
a common ancestor more recent than their common ancestor with orangutans
or gibbons. How about you?

By itself, this is pretty good evidence for the African ape connection.
But if I did this little exercise with any other gene I would get the
same result too. (If you don't believe me I would be glad to do that.)
Why? I say it's because all the genes evolved on the same tree, the true
tree of evolutionary relationships. That's the multiple nested hierarchy
for you.

So what's your alternative explanation for all this? You say...what?
It's because of a necessary similarity between similar organisms? But
out of these 76 sites with informative differences, only 18 involve
differences that change the amino acid composition of the protein; the
rest can have no effect on phenotype. Further, many of those amino acid
changes are to similar amino acids that have no real effect on protein
function. In fact, ND4 and ND5 do exactly the same thing in all
organisms. These nested similarities have nothing to do with function,
so similar design is not a credible explanation.

God did it that way because he felt like it? Fine, but this explains any
possible result. It's not science. We have to ask why god just happened
to feel like doing it in a way that matches the unique expectations of
common descent.

By the way, if you want to see the full data set I pulled this from, go
he

http://www.treebase.org/treebase/console.html

Then search on Author, keyword Hayasaka. Click Submit. You will find
Hayasaka, Kenji. Then click on Search. This brings up one study, in the
frame at middle left. Click on Matrix Fig. 1 to download the sequences.
You can also use this site to view their tree. The publication from
which all this was drawn is Hayasaka, K., T. Gojobori, and S. Horai.
1988. Molecular phylogeny and evolution of primate mitochondrial DNA.
Mol. Biol. Evol., 5:626-644.

On Thu, 27 Oct 2005 06:53:04 -0400, "Mike Marlow"
wrote:


"Charlie Self" wrote in message
oups.com...

Mike Marlow wrote:

I find it disappointing that I have to agree with the ID stuff getting
on
your nerves. I agree from the perspective that unfortunately, a very
small
minority of Christian believers with a very strict definition of things
(I'm
speaking of young earth creationists which differ greatly from the
majority
of Christianity) are causing the body of believers to be painted with
their
brush because of their vocal position. While I don't diminish their
faith,
I do wish they would go about exercising it in a different way. But
then
again, I wish the evolution-only advocates would exercise their faith in
a
different way too.



Evolution is not a faith. If you were as scientifically based as you
state, you'd never even make such a claim.


Correct - and I did not call evolution a faith. I referred to
evolution-only. That position requires as much faith as a creation faith.
It's the old argument of the starting point.


evolution does not address the starting point. it addresses the
process of change.

John Harshman wrote:
Fletis Humplebacker wrote:


John Harshman wrote:


Fletis Humplebacker wrote:


It's time to whittle the posts down for the sake of brevity,
you are already at 43k.


I was recently trying to figure out why you never responded to my
evidence for human evolution, so I looked back in the thread. The reason
is that you deleted the whole thing without comment, even though you in
fact asked me to give you that evidence. I know this was a mere
oversight on your part, and I have thoughtfully restored it below:


How can you not know??? You called my sources fraudulent and
presented your assertions as the gospel. I might as well be talking to
an Islamic fundamentalist. That and the length might have something
to do with it.



[You need to view this in a font in which all the characters take up the
same amount of room. If you view it in a proportionally-spaced font,
both the tree and the DNA sequence will fail to line up properly.]

Evidence for human relationships to the other apes.

But first, a primer on DNA and how it can be used to understand
phylogenetic relationships. If you understand
this already, skip ahead to "Here is a set of DNA sequences" below the
dotted line.

DNA is double helix, each half being a twisted string of chemicals,
called bases or nucleotides, on a backbone. The bases come in four
flavors, each with a slightly different chemical formula, which can be
represented as single letters: A, C, G, or T, from the first letters of
each chemical's name. Because each of the two strings completely
determines the other one, we can ignore one of them, and because of
DNA's beads-on-a-string structure, we can completely describe a given
gene by a linear sequence of the four bases. So if I tell you that the
DNA sequence in some gene in some species is AAGAAGCTAGTGTAAGA, I have
completely described that particular part of the DNA molecule.

Different species have slightly different sequences, and when we line up
the corresponding sequences from different species, the patterns of
bases (letters) at each position (or site) in the sequence can tell us
about their relationships. Consider a set of 5 species. At any
particular position in the sequence each species has either A, C, G, or
T. For my purposes I don't care about the particular bases, only about
the patterns of similarity, so I'm going to use a different symbolism to
describe those patterns. I'll use lower case letters to represent
identical bases. So if I say a position has pattern xxxyy, I mean that
the first three species have one base and the last two have another. The
real bases could be TTTCC, GGGAA, or any other combination. There
are many possible patterns: xxxxx, xyzyz, xyxyy, etc. But only a few of
them can be used to determine relationships. It should be obvious that
xxxxx, all bases the same, tells us nothing. If only one base differs,
such as xyxxx, that also tells us nothing except that one species is
different from all the rest; but we already knew it was a separate
species. The only patterns that make a claim of relationships are those
in which two species have one base, and the other three have another:
xxyyy, xyxyx, xxyxy, and so on. (Actually, patterns like xxyzz tell us
something too, just not enough for my current purposes.) Why is this?
Because such patterns split the species into two groups, implying a tree
that looks something like this:

y x If all the species on the left have state y, and
\ / all the species on the right have state x, then
\ / somewhere in the middle (the branch marked *),
y__\_____/ there must have been a change in that site --
/ * \ a mutation -- either from y to x or x to y
/ \ (we can't tell which from this information).
/ \
y x

A little further note: the patterns that I represent in rows above
(xxyyy, etc.) are shown in columns in the DNA sequences below. That is,
in the sequences below, you read across to find the sequence in a single
species, but you read down to read the contents of a single site in five
species. So the first column of the sequence, reading down, would be
AAGAG, which is an xxyxy pattern.

-------------------------------------------------------

Here is a set of DNA sequences. They come from two genes named
ND4 and ND5. If you put them together, they total 694 nucleotides. But
most of those nucleotides either are identical among all the species
here, or they differ in only one species. Those are uninformative about
relationships, so I have removed them, leaving 76 nucleotides that make
some claim. I'll let you look at them for a while.

[ 10 20 30 40 50]
[ . . . . .]
+ 1 2++ 3 11 +4 3 ++ 52+1 2615+4 14+ 3 3+6+
gibbon ACCGCCCCCA TCCCCTCCCT CAAGTCCTAT CCAATCTACT GTACTTTGCC
orangutan ACCACTCCCA CCCTTCCTCC TAAGACTCAC ACAACTCGCC ACACCTCGTC
human GTCATCATCC TTCTTTTTTT AGGAATTTCC TCTCTCCGTC ACGCTCTACT
chimpanzee ATTACCATTC CTTTTTTCCC CGGATTCTCC CTTCTTCATT ATGTCTCATT
gorilla GTTGTTATTA CCTCCCTTTC AAGAACCCCT TTCACCTATC GCGTCCCACT

[ 60 70 ]
[ . . ]
+++ +++1 + + 2 + +++
gibbon CCTACAGCCC AGCCAAACGA CACTAA
orangutan CCTACCGCCT AGCCATTTCA CACTAA
human CCCCTTATTT TCTTGTCCGG TGACCG
chimpanzee TTCCTCATTT TCTTACTCAG TGACCG
gorilla TTCCTTATTC TTTCGCCTAG TGATTA

I've marked with a plus sign all those sites at which gibbon and
orangutan match each other, and the three African apes (including
humans) have a different base but match each other. (That's the xxyyy
pattern mentioned above) These sites all support a relationship among
the African apes, exclusive of gibbon and orangutan. You will note there
are quite a lot of them, 23 to be exact. The sites I have marked with
numbers from 1-6 contradict this relationship. (Sites without numbers
don't have anything to say about this particular question.) We expect a
certain amount of this because sometimes the same mutation will happen
twice in different lineages; we call that homoplasy. However you will
note that there are fewer of these sites, only 22 of them, and more
importantly they contradict each other. Each number stands for a
different hypothesis of relationships; for example, number one is for
sites that support a relationship between gibbons and gorillas, and
number two is for sites that support a relationship between orangutans
and gorillas (all exclusive of the rest). One and two can't be true at
the same time. So we have to consider each competing hypothesis
separately. If you do that it comes out this way:

hypothesis sites supporting pattern
African apes (+) 23 xxyyy
gibbon+gorilla (1) 6 xyyyx
orangutan+gorilla (2) 4 xyxxy
gibbon+human (3) 4 xyxyy
gibbon+chimp (4) 3 xyyxy
orangutan+human (5) 2 xyyxx
orangutan+chimp (6) 2 xyxyx

I think we can see that the African ape hypothesis is way out front, and
the others can be attributed to random homoplasy. This result would be
very difficult to explain by chance.

Let's try a statistical test just to be sure. Let's suppose, as our null
hypothesis, that the sequences are randomized with respect to phylogeny
(perhaps because there is no phylogeny) and that apparent support for
African apes is merely a chance fluctuation. And let's try a chi-square
test. (I'm not going to explain chi-square tests here; just understand
that it's a statistical test that tells us the probability that we would
see the patterns we see if sequence differences were random.) Here it is:

hypothesis obs. exp. (obs.-exp)^2/exp.
African apes (+) 23 6.29 44.4
gibbon+gorilla (1) 6 6.29 0.0
orangutan+gorilla (2) 4 6.29 0.8
gibbon+human (3) 4 6.29 0.8
gibbon+chimp (4) 3 6.29 1.7
orangutan+human (5) 2 6.29 2.9
orangutan+chimp (6) 2 6.29 2.9
sum 44 44 53.7*

(*This column is rounded, so it doesn't quite add up here.)

These are all the possible hypotheses of relationship, and the observed
number of sites supporting them. Expected values would be equal, or the
sum/7. The important column is the third one, which is a measure of the
"strain" between the observed and expected values. The larger the sum of
this column ("the sum of squares"), the greater the strain. There are 6
degrees of freedom (meaning that if we know 6 of the observations, we
automatically know the 7th), and the sum of squares is 53.7. That last
number gets compared to a chi-square distribution to come up with a P value.

It happens that P, or the probability of this amount of asymmetry in the
distribution arising by chance, is very low. When I tried it in Excel, I
got P=8.55*10^-10, or 0.000000000855. That's pretty close to zero, and
chance can be ruled out with great confidence.

Having ruled out chance, now the question is how you account for the
pattern we see. I account for it by supposing that the null hypothesis
is just plain wrong, and that there is a phylogeny, and that the
phylogeny involves the African apes, including humans, being related by
a common ancestor more recent than their common ancestor with orangutans
or gibbons. How about you?


If it isn't by chance and your hypothesis is wrong that only
leaves one other thing, a deliberate design.


By itself, this is pretty good evidence for the African ape connection.
But if I did this little exercise with any other gene I would get the
same result too. (If you don't believe me I would be glad to do that.)
Why? I say it's because all the genes evolved on the same tree, the true
tree of evolutionary relationships. That's the multiple nested hierarchy
for you.

So what's your alternative explanation for all this? You say...what?

Sounds like more smoke and mirrors. Have you examined this objectively?

http://www.discovery.org/scripts/vie...20News&id=2477

At this point, the sympathetic reader eager to secure Darwin's narrative
might resort to searching the "biochemical record." Surely the molecular
structures of DNA, RNA, and proteins contain the long-sought evidence.
Again, though, molecular biology helps in some ways in that it shows
commonalities across species--just as other aspects of anatomical structures
show commonalities--but again it's the distinctions--and the means by which
they are generated--rather than the similarities that must be explained to
support the theory.

Perhaps it's enough for the friendly guardian of the Darwinian narrative to
propose that the genes that control the switching on and off of other genes
simply changed in some random way, allowing humans to branch off the
primate line. And maybe they did. But again, notice, this is a molecular
narrative, not a proposition demonstrable by experiment. It's a story that
fits the facts--but so might another.

http://www.apologeticspress.org/articles/2070
Marks went on to concede:

Moreover, the genetic comparison is misleading because it ignores qualitative
differences among genomes.... Thus, even among such close relatives as human
and chimpanzee, we find that the chimp’s genome is estimated to be about 10
percent larger than the human’s; that one human chromosome contains a fusion
of two small chimpanzee chromosomes; and that the tips of each chimpanzee
chromosome contain a DNA sequence that is not present in humans (B-7, emp. added).


It's because of a necessary similarity between similar organisms? But
out of these 76 sites with informative differences, only 18 involve
differences that change the amino acid composition of the protein; the
rest can have no effect on phenotype. Further, many of those amino acid
changes are to similar amino acids that have no real effect on protein
function. In fact, ND4 and ND5 do exactly the same thing in all
organisms. These nested similarities have nothing to do with function,
so similar design is not a credible explanation.


There has been many times that scientists did not see evidence
for function only later to realize their error.



God did it that way because he felt like it? Fine, but this explains any
possible result. It's not science. We have to ask why god just happened
to feel like doing it in a way that matches the unique expectations of
common descent.


No, you assume common decent so your theory fits your conclusion.



By the way, if you want to see the full data set I pulled this from, go
he

http://www.treebase.org/treebase/console.html

Then search on Author, keyword Hayasaka. Click Submit. You will find
Hayasaka, Kenji. Then click on Search. This brings up one study, in the
frame at middle left. Click on Matrix Fig. 1 to download the sequences.
You can also use this site to view their tree. The publication from
which all this was drawn is Hayasaka, K., T. Gojobori, and S. Horai.
1988. Molecular phylogeny and evolution of primate mitochondrial DNA.
Mol. Biol. Evol., 5:626-644.


1988? They haven't nailed it down any better since then?

"John Harshman" wrote in message
m...


Well, it's been fun visiting rec.woodworking, but my work here is done.

Not so fast mister...

You didn't tell us anything about your tablesaw, your jointer, your tool
wish list, and you didn't post any "gloat" about the free stack of 10 year
aged cherry that you got for free (so that we could tell you that you suck).

--

-Mike-

Fletis Humplebacker wrote:

John Harshman wrote:

Fletis Humplebacker wrote:

John Harshman wrote:



Fletis Humplebacker wrote:


It's time to whittle the posts down for the sake of brevity,
you are already at 43k.


I was recently trying to figure out why you never responded to my
evidence for human evolution, so I looked back in the thread. The reason
is that you deleted the whole thing without comment, even though you in
fact asked me to give you that evidence. I know this was a mere
oversight on your part, and I have thoughtfully restored it below:

How can you not know??? You called my sources fraudulent and
presented your assertions as the gospel. I might as well be talking to
an Islamic fundamentalist. That and the length might have something
to do with it.

Your sources *are* fraudulent. They exist only to make you feel secure
in your existing beliefs and give you a warm, fuzzy cocoon to protect
you from any jarring facts. As for assertions, hey, you deleted the
data. Obviously you don't really care about it. And why not? You might
as well not have read the stuff I restored below. You don't address it
at all. There seems no point in continuing, but I will make one last,
futile attempt.
[snip all the good stuff]

Having ruled out chance, now the question is how you account for the
pattern we see. I account for it by supposing that the null hypothesis
is just plain wrong, and that there is a phylogeny, and that the
phylogeny involves the African apes, including humans, being related by
a common ancestor more recent than their common ancestor with orangutans
or gibbons. How about you?

If it isn't by chance and your hypothesis is wrong that only
leaves one other thing, a deliberate design.

The problem is that deliberate design doesn't explain it. You have yet
to confront the nested hierarchy of life, and you never will.

By itself, this is pretty good evidence for the African ape connection.
But if I did this little exercise with any other gene I would get the
same result too. (If you don't believe me I would be glad to do that.)
Why? I say it's because all the genes evolved on the same tree, the true
tree of evolutionary relationships. That's the multiple nested hierarchy
for you.

So what's your alternative explanation for all this? You say...what?

Sounds like more smoke and mirrors. Have you examined this objectively?

Yes. Like many, it confuses multiple questions, notably common descent
and natural selection. We can investigate common descent, as I did
above, without knowing the mechanism by which the differences we
consider important arose. So that whole spiel is irrelevant to the
question I asked.

http://www.discovery.org/scripts/vie...20News&id=2477

At this point, the sympathetic reader eager to secure Darwin's narrative
might resort to searching the "biochemical record." Surely the molecular
structures of DNA, RNA, and proteins contain the long-sought evidence.
Again, though, molecular biology helps in some ways in that it shows
commonalities across species--just as other aspects of anatomical structures
show commonalities--but again it's the distinctions--and the means by which
they are generated--rather than the similarities that must be explained to
support the theory.

Perhaps it's enough for the friendly guardian of the Darwinian narrative to
propose that the genes that control the switching on and off of other genes
simply changed in some random way, allowing humans to branch off the
primate line. And maybe they did. But again, notice, this is a molecular
narrative, not a proposition demonstrable by experiment. It's a story that
fits the facts--but so might another.

http://www.apologeticspress.org/articles/2070
Marks went on to concede:

Hardly conceding. Simply a bit of the obvious. Most of the differences
between human and chimp don't matter, and a few matter
disproportionately. That article is wrong from start to end, by the way.
As a useful corrective, you can download this recent comparison of the
human and chimp genomes:

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal...ture04072.html

Moreover, the genetic comparison is misleading because it ignores qualitative
differences among genomes.... Thus, even among such close relatives as human
and chimpanzee, we find that the chimp’s genome is estimated to be about 10
percent larger than the human’s; that one human chromosome contains a fusion
of two small chimpanzee chromosomes; and that the tips of each chimpanzee
chromosome contain a DNA sequence that is not present in humans (B-7, emp. added).

However do you explain one human chromosome being a fused version of two
chimp chromosomes without common descent?

It's because of a necessary similarity between similar organisms? But
out of these 76 sites with informative differences, only 18 involve
differences that change the amino acid composition of the protein; the
rest can have no effect on phenotype. Further, many of those amino acid
changes are to similar amino acids that have no real effect on protein
function. In fact, ND4 and ND5 do exactly the same thing in all
organisms. These nested similarities have nothing to do with function,
so similar design is not a credible explanation.

There has been many times that scientists did not see evidence
for function only later to realize their error.

Less than you would imagine. But your defense is that I must be wrong
because some unspecified people have been wrong before? That's it? But
that's a universal defense; it works on anything anyone says, if it
works at all.

God did it that way because he felt like it? Fine, but this explains any
possible result. It's not science. We have to ask why god just happened
to feel like doing it in a way that matches the unique expectations of
common descent.

No, you assume common decent so your theory fits your conclusion.

You weren't paying attention. I assumed (in my statistical test) that
there was no common descent, and I falsified that hypothesis. You just
blipped over the data and analysis, didn't you? As long as your
creationist web sites give you a fig leaf of rejection, you can be happy.

By the way, if you want to see the full data set I pulled this from, go
he

http://www.treebase.org/treebase/console.html

Then search on Author, keyword Hayasaka. Click Submit. You will find
Hayasaka, Kenji. Then click on Search. This brings up one study, in the
frame at middle left. Click on Matrix Fig. 1 to download the sequences.
You can also use this site to view their tree. The publication from
which all this was drawn is Hayasaka, K., T. Gojobori, and S. Horai.
1988. Molecular phylogeny and evolution of primate mitochondrial DNA.
Mol. Biol. Evol., 5:626-644.

1988? They haven't nailed it down any better since then?

Not any better, no. Just more and more data all pointing to the same
thing. Really, this particular relationship is a no-brainer. That's why
I picked it. So you can't do any better than to note that 1988 was a
long time ago? Nobody publishes papers talking about human relationships
these days, just as nbody publishes papers showing that heavy objects
don't fall any faster than light ones. Been there, done that. But if you
want recent stuff, you can go to GenBank, the genetic sequence database,
and pull up hundreds of priimate DNA sequences of all sorts, more every
week. They'll all tell you the same thing, like I said. But none of this
matters to you, does it? You are secure in your world. Your requests for
data were a sham.

Well, it's been fun visiting rec.woodworking, but my work here is done.

Mike Marlow wrote:

"John Harshman" wrote in message
m...


Well, it's been fun visiting rec.woodworking, but my work here is done.


Not so fast mister...

You didn't tell us anything about your tablesaw, your jointer, your tool
wish list, and you didn't post any "gloat" about the free stack of 10 year
aged cherry that you got for free (so that we could tell you that you suck).

That's why I'm just visiting. Don't have any of that stuff. Just tell me
that I suck and get it over with.

"John Harshman"
Fletis Humplebacker wrote:

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.


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.
And yes, you are right, we can't test the cause although we can draw
conclusions based on what we know. You believe miracles are natural,
I believe they are supernatural.


All you ever do is back up assertions with more assertions.

You can live in your little insulated world if you like. But don't you
ever feel like a mushroom?


No, I feel freed from the burdens of the fundamentalism that has
enslaved your thinking. I can look at both sides of the issues.