Discovery Institute Exposed

You should read Neil Shubin’s book Your Inner Fish. And you should watch the films Your Inner Fish, Your Inner Reptile, and Your Inner Monkey. Are you interested? The films are free.

1 Like

If you want some bedtime reading, there’s a good selection here (morphologies are mentioned):

DNA nested phylogenies - Google Search

1 Like

I might have missed some of the earlier posts, but is one of your main arguments that since you believe scientists can’t explain X, therefore Y? Insert in various things for X… and your “therefore Y” I would guess is something like “therefore God supernaturally must have done it?” Is that correct?

1 Like

Please explain again how the bones in the middle ear of mammals (allegedly) evolved from the jaw bones of reptile.

Sorry, your gotcha didn’t get me. I suspect someone with more familiarity with the genetics could point to some similarities in DNA sequences, but just because I cannot connect the dots like you pretend I should be able to does not mean they are ultimately not connectable.

No - it’s got nothing to do with God. It’s more like this:
If you know how evolution works, please explain the steps involved - and how natural selection produced those steps - in the evolution of eurkaryotes from procaryotes, amphibians from fish, reptiles from amphibians, birds from reptiles.
Then demonstrate that your version of events is factual.

If you can’t do all of the above, you can’t claim to know how evolution works.

Do you think ID is science?

Check it out.

2 Likes

In that case, it’s pretty safe to say that you, for one, don’t know how evolution works.

Btw, some story about “DNA sequences” won’t suffice - what’s needed is a description of how and what natural selection produced the steps involved. … then it’s necessary to prove that the proposed steps and their causation are factual.

Do you know how HDICs are made?

The essential distinction here is that microscopic squishy lifeforms a billion years old would not and did not leave any progressive fossil evidence for the development of the prokaryotic nucleus. No record is no record, scientists do not just make stuff up. Progress here is challenging.

On the other hand, there are fossils for the path from fish to amphibian, and reptile to bird. So it is entirely to be expected that we know more about these than the eukaryote transition. They are not the same situation at all. Do you not think that having fossils vs not having fossils should make a difference?

1 Like

Well of course I do … everyone knows that! What are HDICs?

1 Like

https://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-transitional/part1b.html

Evolution of the mammalian middle ear and jaw: adaptations and novel structures

1 Like

So between know nothing and know absolutely everything you find no middle ground at all? Does that apply to cities and people too? If I don’t know my wife’s entire DNA I just don’t know her? Or if I have forgotten where she attended second grade I may as well admit she is a stranger?

Not buying it. I think your standard is ridiculously high. The fact that I can hum some bits of Beethoven’s 5th indicates a degree of knowledge more than some people have but less than someone who has helped to perform it which probably still less than a person who has conducted its performance.

Evolution can place in chronological order nearly all the fossil evidence. That is knowledge. We don’t have the entire genome for every extinct creature but some DNA evidence remains for some.

Knowledge doesn’t work the way you seem to assume. But of course in the disinformation game getting things right isn’t really the point.

5 Likes

A good review, which raises a question to me. It seems to me that our consideration of evolution as a general topic forces us to talk past each other, since there are so many issues and starting points. It is more, much more, than the assumption that complex traits arise via a series of small steps, each new step offering a small advantage over the last. Rather than view EES as micro v. macro, reading Nick Lane’s book The Vital Question points me toward a different context. To me at least it seems that early v. late is the real problem. So if we define “the early part” as life’s origins that must get to us eukaryotes, and the late part as the more standard view of evolutionary mutations and natural selection, we have more that we can both agree on and be mystified by. Leaving aside the Cambrian explosion for a minute, look at what had to happen to get to that point only a few years ago :-).

The early part is what is the most impossible! And yet is testable in labs. If each trait getting to our eukaryotic state arose by natural selection, we should see multiple origins of them in bacteria, but we do not. On one and only one occasion, bacteria gave rise to eukaryotes. How can we explain that? Getting to, evolving to that point is where God’s hand may have been required. There are no intermediates between the simplicity of bacteria and the enormously complex LECA (last eukaryotic common ancestor). And entropy (disorder, chaos) must always increase! Yet the system moves toward and becomes more stable rather than chaotic. Getting to the point of having a source of energy to sustain the early evolution to eukaryotes seems an insurmountable problem of the early-life evolution. But once in place, our standard understanding of evolution seems easier to understand.

That energy comes from the establishment of a proton gradient across a eukaryotic cell membrane which then binds onto the C-ring inside, such that electrons create electrostatic interactions spinning it like a crankshaft (in one direction only) forcing conformational changes with clefts that open and close to grasp ADP and P together to create a new ATP. And all of this follows from the most amazing molecule, ATP synthase.

The later traits seem more reliably possible, since even the complexity of eyes have arisen independently on many occasions as has powered flight.

So it’s more like, “since scientists can explain every step of every part of X over the past several billion years, therefore Y.”

3 Likes

It’s more like:
Scientists can’t explain how even one macro-evolutionary step evident in the fossil record took place, much less verify any explanation by demonstrating what actually happened.

All scientists can do is tell pseudo-scientific stories about what might have happened.

I’m not disputing that some form of evolution has occurred; I’m disputing the claim that science knows how it happened.

No, it’s really not like that. The reality: we have overwhelming evidence that all species are changing genetically all the time. We have overwhelming evidence that all species are related to one another genetically, which is to say, that macroevolution occurs through common descent from common ancestors. We have very good reason to think that all of the genetic differences between species are the result of accumulated mutations since they shared a common ancestor, and overwhelming reason to think that all of the macroevolutionary differences can be explained by those genetic differences. In light of everything we do know, and in the absence of anything resembling an alternative explanation for differences between species, we conclude that large-scale changes have occurred through evolutionary processes.

8 Likes

Those links attempt to describe what happened, but I couldn’t find any attempt to explain how and why it happened … as in, how and why did natural selection and environment pressures produce the changes described, exactly. This omission is hardly surprising, since no one has a clue about the actual causations. Someone with a vivid imagination could no doubt come up with a story, but they’d only be guessing (even I could do that).

So, nice try but no cigar - the two links you provided don’t in any way demonstrate that authors involved know how evolution works.

So you don’t even understand the mechanisms of evolution, such as natural selection? What about artificial selection? Do you at least know about that?