You’re not grasping the idea of nested hierarchies.
[quote=“Daniel_Fisher, post:105, topic:36197”]
Let me again clarify this point, as it seems to be missed repeatedly… I am not a fan of the current “ID movement.” [/quote]
Let me clarify this point: did I accuse you of being a fan? I asked if you are aware of something that you clearly aren’t grasping.
They don’t have any scientific hypotheses, man. None. Zero.
That’s my point.
[quote] They appear to have a foregone conclusion in sometimes desperate search for corroborating evidence.
[/quote]Correct. It’s pseudoscience.
I think you misunderstand the point I’m trying to make… which is in the opposite direction! Miraculous interventions that could be argued as easiest for God to do may well be quite impossible to detect … even with a camera and a microscope!
For example, there are at least two ways to evaluate the significance of a mutation:
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How much molecular “editing” is required to accomplish the mutation?
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How much Ecological pressure is required to drive a change in alleles through most of the entire population, before a secondary or subsequent mutation or change in alleles makes its dramatic influence known?
Item (1) above is where the YECs usually spend much of their time, talking about probabilities and “lost information”.
But item (2) clearly doesn’t get enough attention. If a change at the allele level runs rampant through a population, how would we be able to distinguish between God “cooking the books” vs. the equally difficult task of determining whether the environment really was applying dramatic pressure on the preservation of the change or the elimination of the configuration of the old allele configuration?
It is precisely this problem of ambiguity that dooms Intelligent Design efforts; @Marty , I welcome your thoughts on the matter!.
In my view, if God’s action and influence can be at any level of activity for influencing evolution, how can we really know when something is truly unusual - - without a full listing on the ingredient label !!!
The idea that Science is going to be able to conclusively determine “that natural selection is just too weak to allow for this development” seems quite unlikely.
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Hi Daniel,
I appreciate your willingness to consider that you may be misinformed.
First, please consider that no one is proposing that Dorudon is a direct descendant of Kutchicetus. The evidence points to a tree, not a ladder:
No one can say whether a given fossil is on the main branch or an offshoot.
As an initial step to evaluating the existence of relevant fossils, I propose that you consider the two families that contain these genera by clicking on this Wikipedia link:
Where did you get the notion that there are only two relevant fossils/genera?
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Those gaps are being filled. For human evolution we have tons of transitional fossils. Sometimes it is just a matter of people not wanting to accept the evidence.
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Can you think of any testable hypotheses that they should be looking at?[quote=“Daniel_Fisher, post:134, topic:36197”]
However, if I am right that design is not even permitted as a scientific hypothesis to be tested. Then my assessment stands.
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What is stopping you from proposing a testable hypothesis for design?
The situation you are describing is often called “painting the bulls eye around the arrow”. By their very nature, each and every mutation is highly improbable, but the arrow of time guarantees that mutations will happen. It is a bit like shuffling cards. Each time you shuffle a deck you produce a series of cards that has a 1 in 8x10^67 chance of occurring. It is an extremely, extremely unlikely outcome, but the very act of shuffling the cards guarantees that you will produce and extremely unlikely outcome. If you were playing poker you could deal out those cards, and someone would win. Once again, the probability of someone winning with those cards is an extremely, extremely unlikely event, but the very act of playing the game guarantees that someone will win with a very unlikely set of cards.
The same applies to biology. Each and every mutation is extremely unlikely, but due to physics and chemistry it is almost guaranteed that mutations will happen. There will be tons and tons of mutations that will not be selected for, but due to chance and environment there will always be mutations that will be selected for, just as there were winners in the poker game.
The mistake is in calculating the probabilities afterwards, which is completely inappropriate. Once something has happened the probability of that event occurring are 1 to 1, because it happened.
I would say that this is where faith comes into play.
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Existing is not the same as being fossilized and discovered by scientists. I would think that we could both agree that there are fossil species in the ground that scientists have not discovered yet.[quote=“Daniel_Fisher, post:137, topic:36197”]
And we could talk more population dynamics, but the bottom line is we have fossils of a supposed ancestor and a supposed descendent that remain radically different in many ways.
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That would be a common but incorrect statement. No fossil is assumed to be a direct ancestor of any living or fossil species, and no fossil is considered a direct descendant of another fossil species. Ancestral and transitional are two different things. The transitional nature of a fossil is determined by its morphology and morphology alone.
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.[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. Because of the incompleteness of the fossil record, there is usually no way to know exactly how close a transitional fossil is to the point of divergence. Therefore, it cannot be assumed that transitional fossils are direct ancestors of more recent groups, though they are frequently used as models for such ancestors.
What fossils allow us to do is test the theory of evolution. The theory predicts which transitional species should have existed in the past, AND which transitional species should NOT have existed in the past. For example, the theory predicts that there should have been species transitional between non-avian dinosaurs and birds, and the theory also predicts that there should NOT have been transitional species between mammals and birds. Each fossil we find is a test of these phylogenetic predictions.
The theory does NOT predict how abundant fossils should be, nor how easy they should be to find. That is a function of geology and effort, not biology.[quote=“Daniel_Fisher, post:137, topic:36197”]
But none of this changes the basic observation… unless I am misinformed, there are fossils of kutchiceti, and dorudon, and nothing in between.
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How do you know that? Have you searched the entire Earth in every fossil bearing strata, and also gone back in time to ensure that the geologic strata that used to hold these fossils have survived to the current day?
I fear you are going about this in exactly the opposite sequence of evaluation and assessment. Here you are attempting to dismiss Evolutionary evidence, because, from the start, the data points don’t seem to be provably connected.
But that’s not how any of this developed in real time.
Hypothetical Sequence for Explication Purposes
1st: Academics aggregated large numbers of finds, with information about the sedimentary rock layer they were found, and where.
2nd: they started to arrange the information in order of Younger down to Older, with no major effort to fix exact chronology as of yet.
3rd: Looking at the world’s collection of fossils, from Younger (More Recent) to Older, they saw a strange phenomenon: mammals with which we were familiar in the modern era eventually disappeared the deeper into the layers academics reviewed.
4th: As recognizably modern fossils began to disappear, variations of these animal designs would appear… and then continuities between these variants began to be seen, where Variant “Z” and Variant “Y” might dominate one layer of rock - - while beneath “Z” and “Y”, on levels below them were found Variant “X”, which had commonalities to both “Z” and “Y”.
5th: This process repeats itself all over the world, with similar findings for all major categories of creatures that left fossil evidence.
6th: What was noted was that below the level where “large mammals” seemed to emerge from out of nowhere, scientists found that “large reptiles” seemed to come to an end.
The Big Picture:
So, Darwin and his like-minded investigators were compelled to make some general conclusions:
a) Over very long periods of time, categories of animals showed changes, where frequently it was seen that some types of animals completely disappeared, while other animal types would emerge to take their place.
b) Modern researchers refined their deductions over these transitions until they reached an amazing conclusion:
…1] Large mammals couldn’t become populous until large reptiles had vanished.
…2] Until we knew more about genetics, “species” tended to be defined based on the aesthetics of their shape and form.
…3] There was a “Time-Context” factor applied to the term “species”, even though it was quite possible that a more recent animal form may be literally the grandchildren of a completely different looking animal millions of years before.
…4] The key factor to emphasize regarding changes-over-time is that populations could either completely go extinct, or changed so dramatically it is only possible to know if examples of prior phenotype populations did not go extinct by finding two divergent subsequent fossils populations that share different aspects of the earlier (potentially “common ancestor”) population.
@Daniel_Fisher, so with these observations and conclusions in mind, what exactly would you like to object about or refute?
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?
Darwin stated, “But, as by this theory innumerable transitional forms must have existed, why do we not find them embedded in countless numbers in the crust of the earth?” What modern evolutionists have done is redefine the term “Transitional” from the way Darwin used it, so they can argue that there are innumerable transitional forms. That’s disingenuous at best.
Consider the term as Darwin used it. As Daniel pointed out, there had to exist all the forms shown in the computer animation, if it happened by Darwinian gradualism. I think you will agree. Unfortunately a vast array of creatures is absent from the fossil record.
Dr. Berlinski critiques the mammal to whale transition here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S89IskZI740 starting at around 11:08. The whole video is excellent, unless you are committed to Evolution-only, in which case it may be exceedingly difficult to watch.
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.”
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!
It’s not that Daniel and I are dismissing the evidence. I have no doubts that Evolution is responsible for much of what we do see - genetic drift, geographic speciation. It’s just that the data indicates there may be something more going on that is not explained by the natural processes we know so far. The reason Daniel started this thread was to point out the double standard, that those who assume naturalism are accepted, but those who accept possible outside intervention are vilified for seeing the places where intervention seems apparent. In the fossil record, the characteristics are well established now that we have over 150 years since Darwin wrote, and the pattern has not changed since Darwin’s day.
So in summary, I feel comfortable stating that the fossil record does not prove “Evolution alone”. If Evolution alone is true, the herky jerky character of the 10000 foot view of the fossil record needs a much better explanation.
With all due respect to Eldredge and Gould, they were clearly trying to establish a niche by claiming something brand new that had been missed by others. Eldredge’s assertion of evolutionary novelty showing up “with a bang” must be taken into scientific context. His “with a bang” time frame could easily consist of hundreds of thousands to millions of years, and several studies have shown evolution occurring in observable time frames (check here, here, or here, just for a few quick examples).
I would highly recommend Ken Miller’s “Finding Darwin’s God” to anyone that sees the work of Gould and Eldredge as somehow discrediting the theory of evolution. Which brings me around to another point. It is rather unfair to Darwin to expect him to have put together a complete theory that would not have to be adjusted for 150 years. No one brings up exceptions to Gregor Mendel’s work and claims “therefore the entire field of genetics is built on error!”
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Starting about 12:58, Berlinski begins his argument about what would have to change for a land mammal to become aquatic. Let’s visit that list:
- The skin has to change.
This is true, but mammalian integumentary systems are already remarkably waterfproof. We can see transitions in the efficiency if we continue to the spectrum to mammals that spend a lot of time in the water (like beavers) to those that spend a majority of the time in the water (like seals). - The breathing apparatus must change.
Again, this is true, and again, we can see this change in things like the hippopotamus. - Diving apparatus must develop.
Yup, check out seals and their cousins - Lactation systems have to be designed.
Psst… David… Mammals already have lactation systems. - The eyes have to be protected.
Again, check out seals. - Hearing
Yep - seals - Salivary organs
Seals… - Feeding
Seals…
You can see the trend here. Berlinski is talking about these like they are impossible to adapt EVEN WHEN WE CAN SEE THE ADAPTATIONS IN LIVE ANIMALS! There is no need to get into the mathematics when we can go to our local zoo and observe a large number of these adaptations for ourselves. Sorry, Marty, that’s about all of this video I am going to waste my time on.
Marty. No, that is called science. Here’s a nice review…
One quote from that article:
Darwin didn’t know #$!%. I’m going to make another prediction (and I hope to be proven wrong): Meyer will not discuss all the current research that shows just how wrong Darwin was about things like this. Darwin’s work predates the most basic understanding of genes, alleles, and DNA by over 100 years.
You know what? Darwin is not the high priest of evolutionary biology. If one casts doubt upon Darwin (the myth that he converted to Christianity before he died or that he owned slaves), it still doesn’t matter that the ideas he had about biology were brilliant. And it certainly doesn’t matter to the millions of peer-reviewed research papers that talk about all the different aspects of evolution that Darwin couldn’t possibly have known anything about.
Omg. This is one of your “goto” refutations?
So despite the fact :
- There is no way all the fossils that we Do have could have died and turned to stone in 6000 years;
- 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?
[/quote]
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”.
[/quote]
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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