I would appreciate a more charitable treatment by you. Saying that some people have become so focused on the principles of individual evolution that they have become blind to the implications when evolution involves communities and social relationship is NOT an example of labeling any other participants of this forum as blind. Just saying… all the best to you.
It has been frequently explained on this forum that “survival of the fittest” has never defined evolutionary theory.
Here is my post on the topic in a thread where many explained about this.
Mitchell, I am happy to discuss and disagree with you respectfully in a “face-to-face” discussion in a single conversational thread. Here you, in an entirely different topic conversation, misrepresented my viewpoints to others “behind my back” in a manner in which I could not respond, and then called me “blind” over the straw man you created. I am happy to let a moderator judge whether this was fair and charitable.
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Incorrect. There was no mention of you whatsoever. Not everything is about you. Likewise there was no reference to other forum participants.
I think it would be obvious to anyone looking at the topic area you referred who was involved. Anyways, I don’t care if you didn’t name the person, referring to ANY forum participant in such a way behind their back in a different conversational thread is not gracious or fair to them.
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No, you suppose or assume that. it fits your preconceptions. It is all you can think of. And that is the summation of Evolutionary theory as it stands. You think it all fits and cannot possibly see any flaws. You do not look for flaws and refuse to identify any that are suggested. You play on your own playing field with you own rues about what can or cannot be deemed accurate and declared as fact. But these rules are not the ones that govern reality and fact. In any other field of study. Before a conclusion is made, all doubts, discrepancies, and especially unknowns are removed. There are so many unknowns in TOE, yet you claim absolute certainty. (And try to gag or belittle any, and all who refuse to abide by your rules about theories and conclusions.)
I will not be gagged by you or anyone else. Neither will I submit to your “superior” knowledge.
You cannot answer my challenges about physiology and anatomy. You just divert to Genetic manipulation as if it is a cure-all. And you refuse to see any chasms in your precious inheritance from microbe to human. I do not care about the 2%. That one I might even give you, But I will not give you your history of birds, not the “creation” of Mammals, Nor the “creation” of reptiles, or amphibians. And I definately will not give you a fish that sprouts legs whether a mudskipper can survive for periods out of water or not. (yes, I know it can)
Richard
You believe that? You don’t think you’ve been lied to? Some people deny the lunar landings just as they deny evolution.
I have the evidence, which you refuse to address.
Apparently you can’t find any flaws, either. You have refused to engage the evidence we have presented.
Your personal incredulity is not a challenge to science.
That’s just vertebrates producing vertebrates. Don’t you accept that, since we can describe them by the same name?
Your refusal to accept fossil evidence is not a challenge to the science.
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And that just proves how little you understand of my criticisms. Just vertebrates! wow.
Richard
You have a fossil of a fish with legs? Or is it an impression of a dent that might have been made by a stump that might be a precursor of a leg?
You do not have:
A fossil of your so-called Vertebrate matriarch.
A fossil of any creature that is an incomlete mammal, or incomplete reptile, or incomplete amphibian.
And that is just the tip of the iceburg
Richard
Yes.
That is Ichthyostega. Four limbs, gills, lungs, and other transitional features.
We also have . . .
Acanthostega
And then . . .
Tiktaalik roseae
A closer look at an illustration of the forelimb
If evolution is true, then there is no such thing as an incomplete mammal, reptile, or amphibian. Those divisions are man made, to begin with. We can draw the line wherever we want. The only division that exists in nature is at the species level.
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But all of that history is recorded right there in the genetic code, where we find the coding for features no longer used as well as unused code which has no reason to be the same unless it was inherited from the same common ancestor.
It shows how little you understand your own criticisms. You seem to think that if you can call two species by the same name then there was no evolution between them. You also think orders, families, classes, etc. are real things in nature. They aren’t. Those are man made divisions. We could just as easily put humans, chimps, gorillas, and orangutans in the same genus as in separate genera, as one example.
The one objective pattern in biology is the nested hierarchy, which evolution explains in spades but separate creation can not.
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Why can’t you tell us what level of biology you studied? ‘A’ level? And what you studied to teach for your B. Ed. You’ve never read a non-textbook by a biologist but you are qualified somehow to dismiss some of the greatest minds of the twentieth century on their subject.
Again, tell us how Haldane’s rule isn’t science and how evolution doesn’t make sense of it for me, because you know that I’m wrong.
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They have all been answered. But for an enjoyable and accessible read, I would recommend these two books by Donald Prothero, which should put your concerns to rest. Most of his fossil examples focus on transitional forms which demonstrate how life developed from prior forms.
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Even more narrowly, they are just tetrapod vertebrates producing tetrapod vertebrates.
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@Bill_II , thank you for your comment.
I agree 100% with that statement, which means that ecology through natural selection guides evolution. However, many people on this site refuse to accept it as established science. Is this your conclusion or you sharing the ideas of others that you can identify?
It goes against the views of Dawkins, which for me is good, but for others is not.
I would say that most, if not almost all, organisms work together. It is called symbiosis.
@T_aquaticus - “The one objective pattern in biology is the nested hierarchy, which evolution explains in spades but separate creation can not.”
The issue is not evolution vs separate creation, but random change vs natural selection. Natural selection works while random change does not. If evolution is random change, then it is wrong. If evolution is guided by natural selection through the environment that works.
Not mine. Found it here.
Not sure I would agree with that “most.” Cooperation could be with other members of your group which isn’t symbiosis.
Replace "natural Selection with God and you get theistic Evolution. To be honest, I cannot see how Natural selection could guide anything. It seems to be reactive rather than pro-active. Guidance involves building and parameters which TOE has always denied.
Richard
I am sorry, but \i have trouble identifying the elements, even with the annotations. And the creatures do not seem to conform to any fish form that exist today.
Nested Hierarchy was never part of the evidence I knew. I was not aware that we had successfully decoded DNA to be able to be certain how it works. I can see how it might encourage common ancestry but not how it negates any sort of creation. It stirs up the question I added earlier which was fobbed off as irrelevant. How DNA evolved without a designer/creator. TOE seems to rely on it, and yet the whole concept of a controlling “chip” for want of a better term would seem to encourage a creator rather than some sort of random construction.
Dancing around with names and categories seems to me to be rather a desperate ploy. There is so much of a creature that is not fossilised, and there lies the speculations and the complications that I have always felt TOE ignored or glossed over as “irrelevant” because time could conquer.
Richard