Without fossils, no one would be talking about common ancestry and humans evolving from bacteria.
If you think my posts are âpreachingâ or âreligious fervourâ[1], you must have no experience of fervent preachers.
Also, youâve completely missed the point.
Inclusion of âuâ noted. âŠď¸
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Thatâs simply untrue.
Darwin wrote Origin and Descent long before most of the fossils we know today were discovered. He spent a large fraction of Origin talking about why we donât have many fossils. The main bases of his theory of evolution were comparative anatomy and biogeography. These have since been supplemented with genetics and biochemistry. While the fossil record is one source of evidence and ideas for evolution, it isnât even the most important source, let alone the only one.
There is enough evidence for evolution from genetics, biogeography and other current observations that the theory of evolution could have been produced even if the Earth didnât contain a single fossil.
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Without fossils, Darwin wouldnât have spoken about fossils at all, nor would he have proposed a theory about the origin of species, which was obviously inspired by the fossil record.
âWhy then is not every geological formation and every stratum full of such intermediate links? Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely graduated organic chain; and this, perhaps, is the most obvious and gravest objection which can be urged against my theory. The explanation lies, as I believe, in the extreme imperfection of the geological record.â
Charles Darwin (1859), The Origin of Species
Most likely, that is all but unknowable.
Youâre complaining that the paper is a failure for not addressing things outside of its scope.
And in any case, so what if we donât have a great idea for how it happened in a few specific instances? Why would the mechanism that works every time where we can figure out how it happened suddenly stop working when we donât know the exact causes or pathway?
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Thereâs an additional piece of context hereâDarwin was an extreme uniformitarian, so he believed that anything that looked abrupt was actually showing that there was a stratum missing. Now we have things like well-evidenced punctuated equilibrium and absolute dating that shows him to have been wrong on that.
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You are supporting your claim that Darwinâs ideas were âobviously inspired by the fossil recordâ by quoting Darwin saying the fossil record doesnât support his ideas.
Did you really get that quote from Origin?
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The theory of evolution canât explain lots of things in nature. How did the snakeâs venom glands come to be connected to its fangs, for example? Donât expect ToE to explain how - itâs clueless.
Little wonder disciples of evolution are allergic to arguments for irreducible complexity - such arguments make ToE look rather feeble.
Not only canât ToE offer an explanation, thereâs no way of putting any explanation to the test ⌠so weâve not even entered the realm of science.
I donât think thatâs true. Darwin explicitly said that anything that looked abrupt could have been due to species migrating from other areas:
"According to this view, the chance of discovering in a formation in any one country all the early stages of transition between any two forms, is small, for the successive changes are supposed to have been local or confined to some one spot. Most marine animals have a wide range; and we have seen that with plants it is those which have the widest range, that oftenest present varieties; so that with shells and other marine animals, it is probably those which have had the widest range, far exceeding the limits of the known geological formations of Europe, which have oftenest given rise, first to local varieties and ultimately to new species; and this again would greatly lessen the chance of our being able to trace the stages of transition in any one geological formation.
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We continually forget how large the world is, compared with the area over which our geological formations have been carefully examined; we forget that groups of species may elsewhere have long existed and have slowly multiplied before they invaded the ancient archipelagoes of Europe and of the United States. We do not make due allowance for the enormous intervals of time, which have probably elapsed between our consecutive formations,âlonger perhaps in some cases than the time required for the accumulation of each formation. These intervals will have given time for the multiplication of species from some one or some few parent-forms; and in the succeeding formation such species will appear as if suddenly created.
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when the same species occur at the bottom, middle, and top of a formation, the probability is that they have not lived on the same spot during the whole period of deposition, but have disappeared and reappeared, perhaps many times, during the same geological period. So that if such species were to undergo a considerable amount of modification during any one geological period, a section would not probably include all the fine intermediate gradations which must on my theory have existed between them, but abrupt, though perhaps very slight, changes of form." [ref]
I sometimes wonder whether Eldredge and Gould reread Origin before proposing punctuated equilibrium, since the reasons they give for abrupt replacement of species in the fossil record were all anticipated by Darwin.
True, thereâs that option as well; but Darwin was definitely opposed to the existence of abrupt extinction events or rapid turnover due to environmental changes.
The usual reason for negative reaction to arguments for irreducible complexity is that they themselves are rather feeble arguments and rely on something like arguments from incredulity or make God-of-the-Gaps errors. I have yet to see any that are actually good arguments.
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Thatâs complete bollocks.
Most of the people you disparagingly refer to as âdisciples of evolutionâ are fully aware that most of the supposed examples of âirreducible complexityâ are not in fact not irreducible (the Dover transcripts help a lot),that the ID simplification that components get added one-at-a-time and never change is a ridiculous misunderstanding of how evolution happens, that irreducible complexity is achievable by modifying existing components, and that it is not only an expected outcome of an evolving multi-part system but was actually described and predicted by Herman Muller in 1918, some 60 years before Behe wrote his book![1]
We arenât in the slightest bit âallergicâ to arguments involving irreducible complexity, because they are soft balls that can be hit for six with minimal effort, and the only problem with dealing with them is the usual tendency of creationists to refuse to listen, and instead ignore the responses in which their pet âargumentsâ are completely dismantled and repeat their false claims later or elsewhere as if they had never been addressed.
So if you think arguments about irreducible complexity âmake ToE look rather feebleâ thatâs because youâve never bothered to look beyond the ID bafflegab, or even look at that in any detail, and so havenât got the faintest idea what the actual responses to raising an âirreducible complexityâ argument will be.
Some of us are also aware that irreducible complexity was a creationist concept, and that Behe cribbed the idea - including the use of the bacterial flagellum as an example - from a paper in Creation Research Society Quarterly. âŠď¸
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âWe shall best understand the probable course of natural selection by taking the case of a country undergoing some physical change, for instance, of climate. The proportional numbers of its inhabitants would almost immediately undergo a change, and some species might become extinct. We may conclude, from what we have seen of the intimate and complex manner in which the inhabitants of each country are bound together, that any change in the numerical proportions of some of the inhabitants, independently of the change of climate itself, would most seriously affect many of the others. If the country were open on its borders, new forms would certainly immigrate, and this also would seriously disturb the relations of some of the former inhabitants.â
(my emphasis)
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We can observe all of these processes happening in the here and now (i.e. natural selection, random mutation, neutral drift, and speciation).
Prove absolutely, 100%? No, we canât. Thatâs true for every single scientific theory, many of which you accept.
The evidence we do have, such as distribution within the geologic record and the nested hierarchy, are exactly what we would expect to see if the known mechanisms were responsible for past biodiversity.
We donât need to know the blow-by-blow, mutation-by-mutation history of a lineage in order to evidence evolution. Thatâs just silly. What we do know is that all vertebrates fall into a nested hierarchy, exactly what the theory of evolution would predict. We see the lower divergence in exons than in introns, exactly what we would predict. We see the exact transitional fossils we would expect to see with the exact mixture of features we would predict to see. The theory predicts exactly what we observe which is why it is accepted within the scientific community.
Until you can start explaining observations there is no reason why science should consider your claims.
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Itâs science. You construct hypotheses and then test them. Once again, it appears you reject science.
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Then you would have to explain why all of the fossils we have found match the predictions of the theory of evolution. If you have to invent data that doesnât exist it appears to be a tacit admission that the data we do have supports the theory of evolution.
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You are a broken record/
There is more to life than science, and there is more to thought and diagnosis than the Scientific method.
Stop turning it into an act of god.
Richard
You still need to explain why the theory of evolution is able to make so many accurate predictions if the theory is false.
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