Can the history of life on earth be proven to be the result of any natural process?

[Roy]

@RichardG

Your famous feathered Dinosaur? A few fronds near the tail.

“Specimens of Sinornithosaurus have preserved impressions of feathers both covering the entirety of the body and forming the wings.”

Now it’s a choice of ignorance vs dishonesty.

[Buzzard]

Which of Henry Gee’s comments in the quotes I provided are scientifically incorrect?

How exactly is my use of his quotes misleading?

[Buzzard]

@Roy

@Buzzard

It’s obvious that every criticism of evolution you have raised applies at least as much to your own preferred history, and you are being a massive hypocrite.

I’m wondering how you know what my “preferred history” is, when I don’t even have one.

Even if I believed that, you’d still be criticising others for not being able to provide something that you can’t provide either.

You don’t believe me when I say I don’t have a “preferred history”? Oh, okay.

[Roy]

@RichardG

@Roy

And again, ToE provides predictions about the relative ages of rocks.

That is not ToE and you know it…

You didn’t quote this part of my post:

@Roy

ToE provides predictions about the relative ages of lava flows based on what fossils are found in the rocks they intrude into and have been overlain by.

If you had, your mendacity would have been obvious…

@RichardG

So branches of science overlap? Geology is still geology not ToE.

Yes, branches of science overlap.

Aren’t you supposed to have taken a science teacher training course? Did you sleep through it?

@RichardG

@Roy

a prediction about human and chimpanzee chromosomes based on their evolution from a common ancestor.

You really are a (insult not written)

How can you predict that human came from a chimp?

That’s not what happened.

What happened was that researchers predicted that if humans came from the same ancestors as chimps, then because humans and chimps have different chromosome counts, we should find two chromosomes in one species that match a single chromosome in the other. They then performed experiments on human and chimp chromosomes to confirm or deny that prediction.

That you seem completely unaware of any of this renders your opinion of evolutionary predictions even more irrelevant than it was before.

Examples restored and emphasis added:

@RichardG

@Roy

“That should be obvious to anyone except, apparently, scientists, who know better. ”
“The problem is that scientists have extrapolated beyond the basic evidence. ”
“Scientist are so (vulnerable or arrogant or defensive, or over confident) that they defend the theory with every innuendo, or guilt trip or justification they can muster. ”

You are belittling scientists. If you don’t want that pointed out, then stop doing it.

No I am not. I a belittling people like you who venerate them.

All three of those examples were of you belittling scientists.

You should remember that other people have memories and scrollbars.

[Buzzard]

@Paraleptopecten

Wrong, and I gave examples of it above.

You gave examples of genus-or-above-level transitions evident in the fossil record? I was under the impression that you gave examples of species-level transitions and speciation …

@Paraleptopecten

For the first, the decrease in variability of Busycon carica over the last 2 million years would work as an example. Telling apart the second and third from fossils is basically impossible, but nearly every species-level transition would fit. For speciation, the divergence of Chesapecten septenarius and C. madisonius from C. jeffersonius ancestors would fit. As would the divergence between Busycon roseae and Busycon contrarium, the diversification of the Argopecten gibbus group during the Pliocene and early Pleistocene, or the increasing differentiation among varieties over time in Ilyanassa harpuloides.

Those are just examples off the top of my head from the groups and deposits that I work on most

@Paraleptopecten

Taken out of context like that, those both sound like straight-up lies.

Roy convinced me that those quotes are indeed taken out of context. My bad. I’ll never use them again. Sorry.

[Roy]

@Buzzard

@Roy

You are not being honest

Your comment reminds of the atheist online forums I used to participate in. Those atheists all did the same thing … their first line of attack was always, “You are dishonest.”

That only suggests you haven’t changed.

[Buzzard]

@Roy

That only suggests you haven’t changed.

Oh no … that’s such a depressing thought!

[Roy]

@Paraleptopecten

@Buzzard

“No fossil is buried with its birth certificate. That, and the scarcity of fossils, means that it is effectively impossible to link fossils into chains of cause and effect in any valid way… To take a line of fossils and claim that they represent a lineage is not a scientific hypothesis that can be tested, but an assertion that carries the same validity as a bedtime story - amusing, perhaps even instructive, but not scientific.”
(Henry Gee, In Search of Deep Time)

“The intervals of time that separate the fossils are so huge that we cannot say anything definite about their possible connection through ancestry and descent.”
(Henry Gee)

Taken out of context like that, those both sound like straight-up lies.

The context of the second one is available here:

The obstacle to this certain knowledge about lineal ancestry lies in the extreme sparseness of the fossil record. As noted above, if my mystery skull belonged to an extinct giant civet, Pseudocivetta ingens, it would be the oldest known record of this species by a million years. This means that no fossils have been found that record the existence of this species for that entire time; and yet the giant civets must have been there all along. Depending on how old giant civets had to be before they could breed (something else we can never establish, because giant civets no longer exist so that we can watch their behaviour), perhaps a hundred thousand generations lived and died between the fossil found by me at site LO5 and the next oldest specimen. In addition, we cannot know if the fossil found at LO5 was the lineal ancestor of the specimens found at Olduvai Gorge or Koobi Fora. It might have been, but we can never know this for certain. The intervals of time that separate the fossils are so huge that we cannot say anything definite about their possible connection through ancestry and descent.

Gee was talking about two specific civet fossils, not about the fossil record in general.

It’s a blatant quote-mine.

[Buzzard]

@Paraleptopecten

@Buzzard

For all we know, the true history of life on earth could be very very different from what the fossil record suggests.

That would require people who work to reconstruct paleoenvironments to be incompetant

Really? Perish the thought!

I thought it meant it’s entirely possible that only a very small percentage of all the organisms that have ever exisred have been fossilised.

[Buzzard]

@Roy

Gee was talking about specific civet fossils, not about the fossil record in general.

Okay, you’ve convinced me. I won’t use those quotes again. Thank you for pointing out my error.

[Roy]

@Buzzard

@Roy

You can imagine that if you like, but it’s not what Gould said, isn’t what happens, and is a slur against honest researchers.

You’re still promoting an out-of-context quote (and now misrepresenting its contents as well), you haven’t said where you got it from, and you haven’t acknowledged Gould’s later clarification of his position.

Gould said “The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the
trade secret of paleontology.” [Evolution’s Erratic Pace - “Natural History,” May, 1977]

Why did he describe the extreme rarity of transitional fossils as “the trade secret” of paleontology?

Then Gould said (in the same article as above) evolutionary trees displayed in textbooks include inferred branches - aka “ghost branches” - that are not based on the evidence of fossils, which means they’re imaginary and have been added by somone.

That begs the question: Why are ghost branches added if they’re imaginary and not the evidence of fossils? How would you answer that?

I’ll answer that by noting first that you haven’t shown that any ghost branches are added, and second that you may be ‘quoting’ a source that you haven’t read, which may not contain the text you have posted.

[Roy]

@Buzzard

Which of Henry Gee’s comments in the quotes I provided are scientifically incorrect?

How exactly is my use of his quotes misleading?

“Stringing together sentences that were separated by more than 80 pages into a single paragraph is dishonest.”

[Roy]

@Buzzard

@Roy

Gee was talking about specific civet fossils, not about the fossil record in general.

Okay, you’ve convinced me. I won’t use those quotes again. Thank you for informing me of my error.

You shouldn’t abandon just “those quotes”, but all quotes from whatever source(s) you got them from. Better yet, abandon use of all quotes you haven’t verified, unless you cite your secondary source.

[Paraleptopecten (Timothy Campbell)]

@Buzzard

@Paraleptopecten

Wrong, and I gave examples of it above.

You gave examples of genus-or-above-level transitions evident in the fossil record? I was under the impression that you gave examples of species-level transitions and speciation …

Here’s the example from this thread:

@Paraleptopecten

The species-level transitions are the only ones where it’s comparatively easy to tell which process was at play, but it’s not very difficult to find intermediates among and evidence for speciation events between genera, e.g., Busyconidae (no, I don’t recommend taking any of the systematics at face value, but Petuch et al., 2015 does have good figures of a lot of them). For multiple families, cetaceans are a reasonable example; as are early pteriomorphs or heterobranchs.

[Buzzard]

@Roy

you may be ‘quoting’ a source that you haven’t read, which may not contain the text you have posted.

The quote could be bogus? I’d better check that out.

[Buzzard]

@Roy

You shouldn’t abandon just “those quotes”, but all quotes from whatever source(s) you got them from.

Perhaps you’re right.

[Buzzard]

@Roy

Stringing together sentences that were separated by more than 80 pages into a single paragraph is dishonest.”

80 pages apart? Wow, that’s sounds bad.

[Roy]

@Buzzard

@Roy

Stringing together sentences that were separated by more than 80 pages into a single paragraph is dishonest.”

80 pages apart? Wow, that’s sounds bad.

It could have been worse.

I know of one case where a ‘quoted’ ‘paragraph’ was cobbled together by concatenating extracts from two different books.

[T_aquaticus]

@Buzzard

For all we know, the true history of life on earth could be very very different from what the fossil record suggests. It seems to me that without knowing the true history, the claim that the fossil record confirms predictions made by ToE seems rather impotent…

That could be said of every single scientific theory, including the ones you accept. Without knowing the true actions of germs we can’t accept the Germ Theory of Disease. Without knowing the true actions of how atmospheres work we can’t accept the science of meteorology. Without knowing the true nature of space and time we can’t accept the Theory of Relativity.

For science, we use the evidence we have. We don’t throw out all of that evidence simply because there are things we have yet to observe.

@Buzzard

I was obviously not referring to “the here and now”. I was referring to genus-or-above-level transitions evident in the fossil record. No one has observed a genus-or-above-level evolutionary transition in real time, let alone observe the processes responsible, so I dare say the same applies to the fossil record.

There is no such thing as genus and above in nature. Everything above the level of species is human made, our way of organizing species. There is nothing stopping us from putting all great apes into the same genus, including humans. Species is it, and we have observed speciation. The fossil record is completely consistent with repeated rounds of speciation leading to the groups we call genera, families and so on.

@Buzzard

How can the Cambrian and Ediacaran biota from a nested hierarchy? The morphological and functional gap between them is enormous.

It’s the shared features that matter.

@Buzzard

You claim that you know that certain biological mechanisms were responsible for the evolutionary journey of mammals from fish, in which case you should be able to describe the steps involved.

The mechanisms involved are natural selection, random mutation, neutral drift, and speciation, amongst others. Do you need me to describe how these mechanisms work?

@Buzzard

… except neither you nor anyone else knows the the nuts and bolts of how a mammal evolved from a fish, for example. How did a double-circulation heart (allegedly) evolve from a single-circulation heart? No one knows.

The evidence we have supports the mechanisms listed above.

@Buzzard

How did the limbs of a tetrapod (allegedly) evolve from the fins of a fish? No one knows.

We have the transitional fossils.

[T_aquaticus]

@Buzzard

However, I certainly don’t accept ToE as the truth … I don’t even think it’s a very good theory, but an inadequate theory based on a simplistic, outdated, nineteenth-century idea.
Little wonder some evolutionary theorists have expressed doubts about its adequacy.

Scientists think all theories are inadequate which is why they continue to do research and refine those theories.

At the same time, the Theory of Evolution has changed A LOT since Darwin. First with the Modern Synthesis in the 1930s and 40s, then again with the discovery of Neutral Evolution, and then again with the advent of the ability to sequence DNA.