Does a commitment to methodological naturalism mean you have to ignore evidence of special creation

@Marty

Omg. This is one of your “goto” refutations?

So despite the fact :

  1. There is no way all the fossils that we Do have could have died and turned to stone in 6000 years;
  2. There is no way the flood could have precisely killed all these animals in order of phylogeny and phyla;

and

3… There is no way the associated rock layers could be less than 6000 years old and yet test as millions of years old.

You are going to assert that there just aren’t enough iterations of phenotype for you to be convinced?

As for disengenuous replied… do you actually think there is some special definition of “transitional” has been deployed to cheat the Creationists of an easy victory?

You’ll have to explain that one…

(As for the something else going on… I thought you and I agreed That “something” else was God at work guiding evolution?)

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Why is that “disingenuous”? The very purpose of science is to follow the evidence where it leads. Darwin lived a century and a half ago. Why are you assuming that scientists today have to retain such archaic definitions?

The reason scientists argue that there are innumerable transitional forms is because that is what is observed both in modern organisms and those in the fossil record. Do you recognize that every organism which has reproduced is a transitional form?

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Me:
Why wouldn’t you concentrate on the sequence evidence?

[quote=“Marty, post:152, topic:36197”]So are you saying that we should only look at the evidence which supports a theory, and not look at the evidence which contradicts it?
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No, I’m not. I’m pointing out that the sequence evidence is stronger, and you’re avoiding it. Is your best response falsely attributing a position to me?

I’m also pointing out that you’re not actually looking at any fossil evidence. Your regurgitation of quote mines doesn’t come close to looking at the evidence, and you haven’t pointed to any fossil evidence that contradicts current evolutionary theory.[quote=“Marty, post:152, topic:36197”]
So in summary, I feel comfortable stating that the fossil record does not prove “Evolution alone”.
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Do you feel comfortable in understanding that in science, all conclusions are provisional, and nothing is ever considered to be proven? And that is the reason why science is so powerful?

So, why wouldn’t you concentrate on the sequence evidence, Marty? It’s much stronger and there’s much more of it.

George - I’m confused why you would bring this up. I’m not a Young Earther.

My comment is about the redefinition of “Transitional Forms” by Evolutionists. By their new definition, every fossil is a transitional form, so it’s a tautology. Science doesn’t need tautologies.

Darwin stated “innumerable transitional forms must have existed.” The new definition states, “All fossils are transitional forms.” Can you see how the new definition works? They could just say “all fossils are transitional.” But they chose to co-opt Darwin’s language about a real issue, making it much more difficult to talk about the real issue. Darwin was not wrong about this.

@Marty, my apologies about implying you were a YEC; whenever I hear someone complain about transitional fossils, my reflex is to conclude he or she is a YEC.

As for the use of the word “transitional”, modern researchers do conclude that every fossil has the potential to become transitional… if a newer fossil is found that shared traits with the fossil in question or known to be descended from the fossil in question (But not if the newer fossil is known to be descended from one of the common ancestors of the fossil in question.)

That is not tautological, nor incorrect.

A fossil that is not transitional is either the last in a series of common descent and/or known to be part of a population that went completely extinct … rather than generate a new offshoot.

This is all pretty reasonable analysis.

To the extent Darwin’s use of the word varied from its use as described here is the extent to which his use of the word “transitional” is antique and no longer relevant.

I really didn’t think you, Marty (of all people), would get sucked into a fairly lame area of YEC refutation.

Curtis - you missed the point of Berlinski’s comments. He’s not saying these things did not take place! Of course, that would be silly.

Maybe I was mistaken that one could start part way through, I don’t know. Perhaps try watch it from the beginning.

I followed his “cow to whale” argument through to the end, as I should have done the first time. His point is that there are not enough fossils supporting this transition. I would maintain that he is using the lack of fossils to imply that the transition from a land mammal to a marine mammal didn’t happen. My point is that we can see all the changes he is talking about in living systems. If we can see evolutionary adaptations in living systems, why would we need more fossils to tell us that these changes are possible?

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I’m surprised at how many people feel the need to explain to me this thing called “the progress of science.” Perhaps my post was completely confusing.

I spoke with a philosopher friend of mine yesterday about this Transitional Forms issue. I quoted Darwin, then I quoted wikipedia. In immediate response to the “new” definition, he stated without prompting, “That’s a pretty meaningless definition.” He’s right, and that’s my point. Except for something that “shows up with a bang” or the disappearance of any trace of a species and its relatives, almost everything is, by the “new” definition, a transitional form. So we have some important definition we need to defend for the 99% case? Why?

I notice an assumption here that because science has progressed, everything that comes out is progress. The whole edifice of science is not threatened if they get something wrong. So must we assume that the new definition is “better” because science progresses? That’s my point. It’s not.

Tautology: in logic, “a statement that is true by necessity or by virtue of its logical form.” The new definition is mostly a tautology.

I stand by my opinion that the new definition of Transitional Form hinders the discussion. Look how much time and energy we have expended on the term itself without even engaging the data it supposedly helps explain.

It is rather odd to me that anyone would view science’s self correction and progress as a bug rather than a feature. Theories are proposed and tested, at some point they are found lacking or insufficient. New theories are proposed which do better or they are discarded. To cast doubt on the modern TOE because Darwin made an incorrect assertion concerning transitional fossils would be like denying modern theories of gravitation because Newton’s prediction of the precession of Mercury’s perihelion was wrong.

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Yes, it is rather odd when someone does that.

Could you explain why you think Darwin made an incorrect assertion?

You appear to be saying arguing in a like manner.

The incorrect assertion was regarding the expectation of many fossils indicating gradual steady transitions. He made it because the theory was new and it was a reasonable assumption based on his nascent version of TOE. The fact that he was wrong doesn’t mean that modifications to Darwin are “just so” stories. “Just so” stories are generally poor at making predictions.

@Marty,

Your complaint is in this quote below:

I can imagine why you might have some trouble with the exact wording the @cwhenderson is writing in his post. And I do believe if he were actually holding the evidence in his hands and writing a paper, he would intuitively make the adjustments you are talking about - -

Namely:
A] If he wants to say “Fossil X representing younger Population B” was just found.
B] Fossil X does have a significantly differing traits from Fossil Z representing older Population A".
C] But with this important proviso: "While Fossil B is different, it does share a few identical traits that only Population A has. By definition, this turns Fossil “Z” into a transitional fossil.

It’s not transitional because it is older. It’s transitional only when you identify the likely flow from one (older) population to a second (younger) population.

And if for some reason, there is some evidence suggesting why the older population could not have been the source (like, perhaps it was found on an isolated land mass with virtually no way for any of the population to end up where the younger population fossil was found) - - then, of course, it is not transitional… and we would be looking for the plausible older source, which would (by reason of the above analysis) is likely sharing a common ancestor with the original older population.

How does all that sound to you, @Marty?

The term transitional can only be used when the evidence suggests one population contributed to the genetic content of another (usually more recent) population, right?

Hi Curtis. I’m not seeing his comments the way you are. I think his question is one of mechanism, how a plodding adaptive mechanism like Evolution can produce these massive and multiple coordinated sets of changes in such a short time frame by itself. I think that’s what he is saying.

Bless you George, and thanks! Someone is starting understand what I’m saying! I was beginning to despair. You are definitely homing in on one of my points.

From the wikipedia page which someone linked, “it cannot be assumed that transitional fossils are direct ancestors of more recent groups.” Yet they still call them transitional fossils. They are including everything that has any morphological relationship to anything, which ultimately includes pretty much everything.

My other point around this, even in Darwin’s day, plenty of “transitional forms” by this newer definition were known. So that cannot be what Darwin meant. The recasting of Darwin’s words, as if he was just ignorant and we have this wonderful thing called scientific progress which has filled these gaps, is, I think, historical revisionism. One must read the full context of Darwin, and his full argument. I think this re-interpretation of his words would have annoyed Charles Darwin.

@Marty

Wiki articles are not perfect … but your description of this article doesn’t sound quite right. Let’s have a look again:

“A transitional fossil is any fossilized remains of a life form that exhibits traits common to both an ancestral group and its derived descendant group.”
[FN 1]

"This is especially important where the descendant group is sharply differentiated by gross anatomy and mode of living from the ancestral group. These fossils serve as a reminder that taxonomic divisions are human constructs that have been imposed in hindsight on a continuum of variation. "

[FN 1] Freeman, Scott; Herron, Jon C. (2004). Evolutionary Analysis (3rd ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education. ISBN 0-13-101859-0. LCCN 2003054833. OCLC 52386174; p. 816.
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^ As the above reads … the description seems quite reasonable. ^

But I can see that these next paragraphs probably bring you more than a little heartburn - - and some surprise to me as well!

“Transitional versus Ancestral: A source of confusion is the notion that a transitional form between two different taxonomic groups must be a direct ancestor of one or both groups.”

“The difficulty is exacerbated by the fact that one of the goals of evolutionary taxonomy is to identify taxa that were ancestors of other taxa. However, it is almost impossible to be sure that any form represented in the fossil record is a direct ancestor of any other.”

“In fact, because evolution is a branching process that produces a complex bush pattern of related species rather than a linear process producing a ladder-like progression, and because of the incompleteness of the fossil record, it is unlikely that any particular form represented in the fossil record is a direct ancestor of any other.”

“Cladistics deemphasizes the concept of one taxonomic group being an ancestor of another, and instead emphasizes the identification of sister taxa that share a more recent common ancestor with one another than they do with other groups.”

“There are a few exceptional cases, such as some marine plankton microfossils, where the fossil record is complete enough to suggest with confidence that certain fossils represent a population that was actually ancestral to a later population of a different species.”

“. . . in general, transitional fossils are considered to have features that illustrate the transitional anatomical features of actual common ancestors of different taxa, rather than to be actual ancestors.”
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@Marty, I can see that what I was describing as “truly transitional” is rarely accomplished. I am, indeed, surprised by this. So I can see where you got your impetus to complain about academics stretching the term “transitional” to mean more than what some folks think is fair!

I spoke too soon when I wrote about what @cwhenderson might or might not describe as “transitional”. When I used to produce family genealogies for some of my relatives, there was the tendency for them to refer to an important Great Grand Grand Uncle as “our ancestor” . . . when, technically speaking, the Great Grand Grand Uncle may have never had any children at all.

By virtue of a very large Brooks family that settled in Concord, Massachusetts circa 1635, I am honored to know as my distant cousin, many times removed, the Episcopal Bishop Phillips Brooks (b. 1835 – d. 1893) - - who was known for writing the words to “Oh Little Town of Bethlehem”, and being the long time Rector of what some have hailied as “an American Hagia Sophia” - - Trinity Church in Copley Square, Boston, Massachusetts.

As a very scrupulous, but amateur family genealogist, I would always wince
if someone referred to the Rev. Brooks as my ancestor. And so I must confess a bit of anxiety and concern about the academic use of the term.

I cling to the one thing that seems to have survived my 2 hour education in the term:

“. . . in general, transitional fossils are considered to have features that illustrate the transitional anatomical features of actual common ancestors of different taxa, rather than to be actual ancestors.”

To be thorough, a “Taxon” (plural: Taxa) is “a group of one or more populations of an organism or organisms seen by taxonomists to form a unit. Although neither is required, a taxon is usually known by a particular name and given a particular ranking, especially if and when it is accepted or becomes established.”

I have added some additional text to the informative graphic below:

But perhaps this Wiki paragraph is a way to grasp the value of the term “Transitional” being applied to living things that share a Poly-Phyletic category:

“Polyphyletic species”
"Species have a special status . . . as being an observable feature of nature itself and as the basic unit of classification. It is usually implicitly assumed that species are Mono-Phyletic (or at least Para-Phyletic). However hybrid speciation arguably leads to Poly-Phyletic species. Hybrid species are a common phenomenon in nature, particularly in plants where polyploidy allows for rapid speciation."

Now that I know how academics use the term “Transitional”, I think the obvious answer is to use caution and reasonableness when throwing that word around.

But, @Marty, to say there are “few transitional fossils” seems to be a willful exploitation of the limits of what we can know about an array of fossils that may or may not be “common ancestors” or “common descendants”, but which clearly tell a story of how animal populations diversify form and behavior to survive long enough to produce another generation of offspring!

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The figures in this blog were helpful to me in understanding the relationship of found fossils to transitional species. I won’t clutter things up with a cut and paste, but it was interesting to be how it explains why the ideal A to B to C to D progression is really not what you would see in the real world.

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Darwin wrote an entire chapter in Origin of Species explaining why we don’t see innumerable transitional forms in the fossil record. Perhaps you should read it. He demonstrated that there were major gaps in the geologic record which means that there were major time gaps when no fossils were being produced. He also discussed how the range of a species will change over time, and how we have barely scratched the surface when it comes to finding species, which is still the case.

" For my part, following out Lyell’s metaphor, I look at the natural geological record, as a history of the world imperfectly kept, and written in a changing dialect; of this history we possess the last volume alone, relating only to two or three countries. Of this volume, only here and there a short chapter has been preserved; and of each page, only here and there a few lines. Each word of the slowly-changing language, in which the history is supposed to be written, being more or less different in the interrupted succession of chapters, may represent the apparently abruptly changed forms of life, entombed in our consecutive, but widely separated formations. On this view, the difficulties above discussed are greatly diminished, or even disappear. "
–Charles Darwin, "Origin of Species.

I am using the same definition that Darwin was using:

“In looking for the gradations by which an organ in any species has been perfected, we ought to look exclusively to its lineal ancestors; but this is scarcely ever possible, and we are forced in each case to look to species of the same group, that is to the collateral descendants from the same original parent-form, in order to see what gradations are possible, and for the chance of some gradations having been transmitted from the earlier stages of descent, in an unaltered or little altered condition.”–Charles Darwin, “Origin of Species”[quote=“Marty, post:152, topic:36197”]
That’s not necessary. The pattern is repeated everywhere in every strata. Niles Eldredge stated over 30 years ago, “We paleontologists have said that the history of life supports [the story of gradual adaptive change] knowing all the while it does not. … When we do see the introduction of evolutionary novelty, it usually shows up with a bang, and often with no firm evidence that the fossils did not evolve elsewhere! Evolution cannot forever be going on somewhere else.”
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That’s why they proposed Punctuated Equilibria, which is evolution.

“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.”–Stephen Jay Gould, “Evolution as Fact and Theory”

Yes, it is. If you say that these fossils don’t exist then you need to demonstrate that they don’t exist. This means digging up every single fossil.

Take Tiktaalik roseae as an example. It took an entire research group 3 years digging in the same set of sediments to find one specimen. Just one. New transitional fossils are being found all of the time. To pretend that our fossil collections are complete is a complete joke.[quote=“Marty, post:152, topic:36197”]
This is part of what led him to propose what S J Gould popularized as Punctuated Equilibrium (PE). But PE is yet another “just so story” added to, what could be termed, “Evolutionary mythology” (a naturalist creation story), added to explain away why the data doesn’t fit the theory. It is not falsifiable so it is certainly not science!
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You are projecting.

“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. It represents much less than 1 per cent of the average life-span for a fossil invertebrate species—more than ten million years. Large, widespread, and well established species, on the other hand, are not expected to change very much. We believe that the inertia of large populations explains the stasis of most fossil species over millions of years.”–Stephen Jay Gould, “Evolution as Fact and Theory”

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Oh my! We have psychologists on the forum who can diagnose at a distance! :slight_smile:

Phil - thanks much for the link! I’ll chase that down.

George! I’m astonished at how thoroughly you have worked this through! Thank you. Excellent clarifications! I am truly grateful!

To all: Unfortunately I have to disengage from this thread. Many other items are on my list, and it does seem that many here simply assume those who question macroevolution are dolts. Unfortunate. I can have no expectations of being able to explain to them.

Dr. Tour of Rice U has an excellent column here that is worth a read. Further down he states, “But my recent advice to my graduate students has been direct and revealing: If you disagree with theories of evolution, keep it to yourselves if you value your careers…” Two comments on that: he and some of his grad students have disagreements with macroevolution, and second, the hostility in many quarters is very real.

I would encourage those here who disagree with me to find out why some very bright and capable people find macroevolution unconvincing. If you cannot explain that perspective, how can you discuss it convincingly?

Thanks for visiting. I don’t think you are a dolt. And I fully support people who need to quit the BioLogos forum cold turkey to get back to real life before their family schedules an intervention. Hope to see you again some rainy day.