Perhaps it was Grog… certainly the thread is there for anyone to review.
In any case, scientists were researching the impact on Fishing policies … particularly laws that require throwing the small fish back … and only taking out the bigger fish. Sure… some of the small fish were too young… but in that selection process was also smaller adult fish. And they were being thrown back … to replace the mating dominance of the larger fish … that were being constantly harvested by eager fishermen.
Laboratory results with comparative aquarium environments clearly demonstrated how Natural Selection works… as if there was any doubt.
This is where you are supposed to say you were really objecting to Speciation. Well, fine… .let’s hear you say that!
I don’t want to hear you whining about “natural selection”. Natural selection is the least controversial aspect of Evolution - - and you need to come to terms with that!
No! My 2014 vs. your 2005 quote. See https://www.edge.org/responses/what-scientific-idea-is-ready-for-retirement
Dawkins: "We are linked to modern chimpanzees by a V-shaped chain of individuals who once lived and breathed and reproduced, each link in the chain being a member of the same species as its neighbours in the chain, no matter that taxonomists insist on dividing them at convenient points and thrusting discontinuous labels upon them. If all the intermediates, down both forks of the V from the shared ancestor, had happened to survive, moralists would have to abandon their essentialist, “speciesist” habit of placing Homo sapiens on a sacred plinth, infinitely separate from all other species. "
Forget Plank scale. Mendel’s dominant/recessive alleles are discrete at the organism level. http://nonlin.org/gradualism/ - you won’t read the link, so here is the full text:
Gradualism is the cornerstone of Darwin’s Theory of Evolution because without it, he could not justify one organism evolving into another. ‘Gradualism’ equals ‘Continuity’ and nothing more. It does not describe the direction, the speed or anything else we would like to know about that process.
In math, a function is gradual if continuous. A continuous function has a Grade’ (Slope) at every point. If a function is not gradual (continuous), then it is Discrete and has no ‘Grade’ (Slope). A Discontinuous function is a special case of ‘Continuous over limited ranges’.
Is Nature Gradual? No, Nature is Discrete from the most elementary particles, to molecules, cells, and organisms. New organisms are created by discrete processes and result in newborns that are measurably different from each parent while all DNA mutations are discrete events. Gregor Mendel observed the discrete nature of biology as early as 1865 in the inheritance of dominant and recessive alleles. Darwin might have learned that from Mendel’s papers sent to him, had he read and correctly interpreted the results.
We classify organisms into distinct groups with little if any overlap and with significant homogeneity within the group. If Gradualism were the norm, all living animals would fill a continuous spectrum which would make their classification in various taxa completely arbitrary.
Biological Time Continuity (Gradualism or Common Descent) would require a similar belief in Biological Space Continuity (for present time) were it not for this being contrary to observation. Instead of Gradualism, we observe that even unicellular organisms with huge populations and short-lived generations do not occupy a biological continuum. Plant diversity over the altitude & latitude continuum is a good example of Discontinuity in Nature: as conditions change, we see a changing mix of distinct species, rather than hybrid species as would be expected if Gradualism were true. Animal territoriality is also an example of discrete successful designs dominating certain ranges and mixing with each other at range boundaries without significantly changing their characteristics.
What about Speciation and Hybridization? A certain flexibility appears built into each biological design – more in some than in others. What we call Speciation and Hybridization may in fact be no more than adaptations within these flexibility ranges.
Doesn’t the Fossil Record show Gradualism? Without confirming experiments on living organisms, it is impossible to determine whether the Fossil Record shows Gradualism or instead predisposition to Gradualism prompts an incorrect interpretation of the Fossil Record.
@NonlinOrg, I am still curious why you and @Dredge, and @Tomi_Aalto feel so threatened by the theory of evolution. Most of us that “hang out” on the BioLogos forum do so primarily because we love and do our best to serve the resurrected Savior, Jesus Christ. We are probably not going to convince you of our viewpoint based on our view of science, and you have probably come to the conclusion that you are probably not going to convince us, either.
Why can we not “agree to disagree” on this issue of lesser importance and try to build consensus and harmony, instead? I would be willing to wager that fundamentally, we agree on several critical points:
Our sin and hopeless condition that it puts us in
The redemptive work of the Father sending the Son to die in our place
The victory over death by the resurrection of Jesus Christ
The indwelling of the Holy Spirit in those that accept His grace and mercy and choose to follow Him
His eventual return to claim His own children
I really fail to see what is so frightening about fellow Christians that have a different view of science than yours.
I’m with you 100% on points 1-5, Curtis. But it’s a fact that the theory of evolution has turned many folks into atheists. Like me, they feel that the Bible and evolution can’t both be true. One cannot serve two masters, as someone famous once said.
I made the decision to reject the atheist creation story that is evolution - and the opinons of thousands of scientists who are infinitely more intelligent and erudite than I - and accept God and his Word instead. Sadly, many people decide to conform to the scientismic zeitgeist and make the opposite choice.
I really don’t understand why many Christian scientists need to accept that all life on earth shares a common ancestor - I’m convinced it’s useless in any applied scientific sense and is therefore no more than a point of historical curiosity.
You are beating a dead horse. You don’t even know the facts. And when you do get a fact, you ride it forever … trying to take you to places that logically you can never reach.
Read … and learn something… the ability for Lions and Tigers to be reproductively compatible
producing fertile offspring - - is only explainable by Evolutionary principles.
Otherwise, your Yahweh is a dottering old man… Lions and Tigers are named as distinct species by convention and tradition - - but not because of their genetics.
As Chris has already stated, one can always find apparent discontinuities by “zooming in” sufficiently to molecular or even Planck levels. But meanwhile I think you misunderstand the project of mathematical modeling of our observations of nature. A model is not a perfect replica; it is … well … a model.
And even mathematical models can fool you with appearances. Take the top picture below here – the lighter violet function appears to have a fairly clean discontinuity in it, It is the derivative (slope function) of the darker red line which appears to have an abrupt change of slope (a ‘cusp’ or a corner) that could appear infinitely sharp.
But now zoomed in we see …
Here is that same “sharp cusp” but zoomed in as if looking through a microscope. Unlike true cusps such as found in functions like y = |x| this reveals that the apparent discontinuity of the function in the top pic was just that: apparent because it too has a finite slope at every point along the way if you just zoomed in far enough to see it.
Just like sharp objects in real life, like a needle, you could find a nicely rounded (not sharp) end if they were magnified to your view. So too, geological time scales allow plenty of space for zooming in or out, so that what looks geologically abrupt in the fossil layers can still (if we were there in human time scales to observe the event itself) actually turn out to be long and gradual transitions. The Cambrian “Explosion” would have been pretty boring as explosions go if you lived in the middle of it. It’s quite possible that that “cusp” might have nothing on the sharpness of a cusp we may be in the middle of now, say with climate change. Anything we can observe within the scale of a single human lifetime would qualify as about as sharp a corner as one could imagine on geological time scales.
So even mathematical models (cleanly theoretical as they are!) can have misleading appearances with regard to continuity.
Clarification: I do realize that mathematically speaking a cusp is by definition infinitely sharp --and so calling it such is redundant. That also means there is no cusp at all in any of the graphs above; hence my repeated use of the word “apparent”. Forgive my many words just to try (and fail?) to make a point.
…and if anybody is curious – the functions above are just a highly amplified y=arctan(x) and its anti-derivative; so it really is true that even the top graph has no true cusps or discontinuities at all except by necessarily pixelated appearance here.
Dodge, I appreciate what you are saying. I think some of the difference is related to what we see in our different spheres of influence. While you see people leaving faith due to feeling the Bible and evolution cannot be true, many here see people leaving the faith because they have been told that, and feel the truth of creation can not be reconciled to the truth of the Bible. Rather than live a lie, they leave the faith. However, the truth is, they are compatable, it is our understanding that is wrong.
I can definitely see your point of view because I once shared it. But make no mistake, although I do not do it perfectly, I serve a single Master. What we cannot do is make masters out of our fallible theology and our fallible science. I believe evolutionary creationism is the best approach for using both of these guidelines to ultimately serve my Master best.
I am not a Christian (or a professional scientist) but if I may jump in, the answer might have something to do with whether we can expect similarities between different organisms to be more than skin-deep. What are the chances a lizard, a mouse, and a fish will all react the same to a given drug? What about a monkey, a bat, and a mouse? Just because some animals have similarities on the outside, does that mean we could or should expect them to have similar DNA and molecular functions?
You could build an edifice of knowledge about the individual biochemistry, development, and reactions of each new species as we learn about it, but that’s a daunting mountain of work even in this day and age. Using the evolutionary tree of life to get some idea of the probability that something will or will not be the same between two lineages saves a buttload—technical term—of work, even with the occasional wrong prediction that must be corrected.
It is almost the same reason why people will build the framework and scaffolding of a house first so that the rest can be filled in from that. Could you build a house layer by layer from the ground up? Sure. Log cabins, right? But there’s a reason most people don’t do it that way.
The model of common descent works to explain the real world, and it works really, really well. Lots of individually ‘poofed’ species doesn’t even explain why birds lay eggs and bats don’t. You could, of course, suppose that maybe some little-studied species of bat deep in a cave in some jungle does in fact lay eggs, because according to the Bible God could have done it that way, and you don’t have any basis for knowing for sure until observing them, but why would you? Why ignore obvious conclusions from models which have been well-established to fit the data the vast majority of the time?
I hope this goes some way towards answering your question even if you weren’t addressing me specifically!
Can’t speak for others, but - as mentioned before - I am not threatened one bit by evolution. If you accept evolution on faith, we’re done - I will not debate your faith.
But if you want to push evolution as an “objective, observable, scientific fact”, then we have a problem as you have not demonstrated that. This is especially troublesome give that [I feel] evolution is encouraging atheism (a failed religion in my opinion), and pushing millions into a waste of time fake science on the same level with astrology.
Once again, your comments are besides the point. Repeating and shouting them doesn’t get you anywhere.
That’s nice, thanks for your thoughts. But we’re not dealing with a continuity that looks like a discontinuity. We’re seeing a real discontinuity being fudged into a fake continuity. DNA is 100% digital A, C, T, G. There is no in-between as Mendel observed in 1865! But the most important point that you missed is: if Vertical gradualism (in time) were true, we should also observe Horizontal gradualism from contemporary organism to contemporary organism: from human to cat; from e-coli to h-pylori; from whale to bat; etc. But we do not see that. Because they’re all extinct? To good to be true. We can’t even do transformations in the lab? WHY?
“Too good to be true” is not a scientific or rational argument. YES, because they’re all extinct! Simple math about how many organisms have died in the past billion years should make it obvious that we expect far more extinct varieties than living ones! It’s the living lineages who have bucked the trend and beaten the odds.
The short answer to your last question is that ‘labs’ are microcosms of the real world. Orbital dynamics of planets haven’t been demonstrated in one either.
@NonlinOrg, if you truly are not threatened by evolution, but instead are basing your arguments entirely on science, then you are setting yourself up for eventual disappointment. Experts in the fields of biology, chemistry, physics, astronomy, and geology (and probably a few other fields) overwhelmingly agree that the scientific evidence supports the theory of evolution. You haven’t come up with an adequate argument against any of these fields, let alone all five.
The two Dawkins quotes are not actually in contradiction. Speciation is a process in biology, and speciesism is an ethical position. Dawkins’ point is that the application of species labels to populations should have no ethical import because there is an underlying common ancestry. In other words, he is claiming that speciation does not imply speciesism.
For the record, Dawkins’ ethics argument has a hidden reliance on atheist assumptions, so I disagree with it.
With regard to “gradualism”: your reliance on Mendel is greatly misplaced because most traits are expressed on a gradient, rather than being binary. Height, intelligence, foot speed, hand-eye coordination, chest circumference, etc. are all traits that are very accurately modeled as a continuous, normal distribution.
Again, it was Laplace who first demonstrated this with French army recruits more than two centuries ago.
So where are we in the discussion? I predict that no matter how many examples of highly successful uses of gradients and continuous functions I and others supply across many scientific disciplines, you will continue to preach discretism for philosophical reasons. And resourceful scientists will continue to come up with new, more accurate and more successful models that rely on gradients and continuous functions. Maybe it’s time to take up a new subject.
Grace and peace,
Chris Falter
P.S. I had already read your post on gradualism several weeks ago. Your cynicism was unwarranted.
Your “argument” amounts to “hocus pocus”. You’re too emotionally invested in this to realize how illogical your argument is.
You get to vote for your favorite political party, but not in science. In fact science is done by the outsiders by definition. But then again, since evolution is like tarot reading, you get to claim whatever you want. Especially about the remote past that no one can verify independently.
That’s not the gradualism I talk about - you know that very well but chose to ignore. And even those functions are made of 7 billions discrete individual points as of today. Btw, I see you also ignore ACGT. Nice!
How about the fact that 30,000 years of worldwide dog domestication has not resulted in anything resembling a cat, a rat, or anything other than a canid? How about the Lenski failed experiment that has produced nothing but e-coli starting from e-coli? How about the fact that a finch (Darwin’s or not) is still a finch and not a sparrow? How about the clear deciduous-evergreen separation (mix without hybridization)?
Wow, quite a bit to discuss with your last post.[quote=“NonlinOrg, post:56, topic:35830”]
In fact science is done by the outsiders by definition.
[/quote]
What definition of science are you alluding to? Stipulating that science is only done by outsiders is an unusual assertion. Are you suggesting that you really don’t need to understand science in order to make significant breakthroughs?
I’m sure you know this isn’t true. As clever as your analogy to tarot reading is, it simply isn’t accurate.[quote=“NonlinOrg, post:56, topic:35830”]
Btw, I see you also ignore ACTG. Nice!
[/quote]
I don’t think anyone is disputing that the DNA code consists of 4 different nucleotides. What point are you trying to make with this observation?[quote=“NonlinOrg, post:56, topic:35830”]
How about the fact that 30,000 years of worldwide dog domestication has not resulted in anything resembling a cat, a rat, or anything other than a canid?
[/quote]
Lack of speciation in domesticated animals has been recently discussed. Two important things to consider are that 1) there is constant interbreeding and mixing of the gene pool, preventing reproductive isolation and 2) there is a very definite desire for dog breeders to keep producing dogs with reproductive viability. Losing reproductive viability would simply eliminate a particular line from the breeding pool.
Do you characterize the experiment has “failed” because a prokaryotic organism didn’t evolve into a new form of eukaryote? What would have to have happened for you to consider the experiment as a success? Although I haven’t read all of the primary literature that has been generated from the Lenski lab, I don’t think anyone was expecting it to generate entirely new organisms in the last 30 years.[quote=“NonlinOrg, post:56, topic:35830”]
How about the clear deciduous-evergreen separation (mix without hybridization)?
[/quote]
Forgetting about evolution momentarily, deciduous and evergreen trees are extremely different genetically. I have no idea why you would expect them to hybridize, let alone think they’re lack of hybridization is a big problem for evolutionary theory.
I’m only trying to connect with you at a level you are comfortable on.
There’s a concept here, for anyone interested. The prototypical mammal didn’t evolve into anything other than mammals, certainly not into birds or back into frogs. The first vertebrate evolved into a variety of…drumroll…that’s right, vertebrates! Why would anyone expect a dog to not be a canid? Especially in only a few thousand years?
Thank you for these thoughts; I think the Lord would find your last sentence especially pleasing. I suspect some scientists are prone to intellectual pride and consequently, Scientism, but It sounds like you have not lost sight of “the things that matter most” and have a godly perpective on things.
When a biologist models various traits as a continuous, normal distribution, s/he gives up some precision. That seems to bother you. It does not bother the scientist, who is glad to give up some irrelevant precision in return for the enormous explanatory and predictive power that modeling over a gradient provides. So scientists are going to continue using those models, in spite of your protests.
This also applies to gradient models of genetic similarities and divergences. It is true that in a world where all biology research dollars were controlled by you, NonlinOrg, you could insist on purely discrete modeling down to the individual. Species would presumably be represented as clusters within in a hypercubic genomic space.
This research project would run into intractable problems, however. The math would become intractable over such a large number of observations. Moreover, you could never really build a model because you would not be able to gather genomic data from every individual organism in a species, much less every individual organism on the planet.
Given these intractable roadblocks to discrete mathematical modeling of genomics across the biosphere, biologists instead take samples and project them into the global genomic space using continuous mathematical functions. The genomic characteristics of a population are represented as a probability distribution function, which is necessarily a continuous function. There is no other way to perform genomic research, your preferences notwithstanding, NonlinOrg.
Moreover, modeling along gradients allows dynamic features to emerge. Observations of neutral drift, mutations, and selection in experiments such as Lenski’s and in numerous field studies can be applied across the biosphere over time, yielding insights into how life evolves over time. As a Christian, I assert that those biological insights are in fact insights into how God has created, shaped, and upheld the creation.
As discussed ad nauseum in a previous thread, Lenski’s experiments showed that the genetic profile of an E.Coli population changed in important ways over 40,000 generations. The speciating mice of Madeira have been pointed out to you. And speciation over the distance from finch to sparrow takes a very, very long time and certain selection forces in the environment. The examples you cite therefore do not conflict in any way with the theory of evolution.
The fact that you think those examples contradict the theory of evolution, when they in fact do not, suggests that you do not understand the theory of evolution.
In order to keep the discussion of Lenski’s experiment from progressing to ad infinitum, I am going to refer readers to my posts in the previous thread.
