Whales did (NOT) evolve

I think you are correct for some who espouse ID and some who promote EC. I think almost all who call themselves EC agree that life is intelligently designed, but that the best way to understand on a practical basis is science. However, the I D movement itself has its problems. Talk about a big tent. Even the FSM fits under it, in theory.

1 Like

Perhaps… But the way forward is not blindly accepting whatever is the consensus at a particular point of time. Its looking at the theological,philosophical and scientific merits of each case.
We should not be intimidated by accusations of stupidity, being anti-science etc.
Take common descent for example. I am sure you have heard debates on this. I will attach where the scientific debate is at.

Is this closer to what ID is saying or to what Talk origins is saying… we should not mistake scientific conservatism with science.

Edit: I really don’t get why someone like @gbrooks9 whose beliefs are far more similar to ID than anything to do with evolution should have such contempt for ID or YEC.

Sorry, what is FSM? Thanks

Flying Spaghetti Monster I believe.

I had to think about it for a bit too, and I’ve been around the block on all these things more than a time or two. Pity any future linguists who without much helpful context come up against our current love affair with acronyms!

3 Likes

Thank you!IMHO U R right. :wink:
Medicine has a corny use of abbreviations too. PGY-1 Writes Admission Note That Does Not Contain a Single English Word | GomerBlog

Kudos to you for refusing to be intimidated by name-calling, shaming, etc. It would seem we are agreed that science should be allowed to explore and speak for itself.

I read the article you linked at Sott.net. The title is catchy: “Why Darwin was wrong…” which I bet gets this article lots of hits. It starts off with a simple and true enough description of the tree concept. It goes on to suggest that the discovery of DNA, and then subsequent discoveries of how much HGT (Horizontal Gene Transfer) takes place have all made a big mess of the neat tree. The accuracy of their claims in that regard is best left to others here to evaluate. But what still caught my attention is that all the fuss addressed by this article seems to be confined to the eukaryotic / prokaryotic (i.e. ‘simple and early’) levels of life. But then I encountered this paragraph which speaks to my concern:

Hang on, you may be thinking. Microbes might be swapping genes left, right and centre, what does that matter? Surely the stuff we care about - animals and plants - can still be accurately represented by a tree, so what’s the problem?

Well, for a start, biology is the science of life, and to a first approximation life is unicellular. Microbes have been living on Earth for at least 3.8 billion years; multicellular organisms didn’t appear until about 630 million years ago. Even today bacteria, archaea and unicellular eukaryotes make up at least 90 per cent of all known species, and by sheer weight of numbers almost all of the living things on Earth are microbes. It would be perverse to claim that the evolution of life on Earth resembles a tree just because multicellular life evolved that way. “If there is a tree of life, it’s a small anomalous structure growing out of the web of life,” says John Dupré, a philosopher of biology at the University of Exeter, UK.

Okay – sure. If we go by linear time span, multi-cellular life is only a late-comer in the process and the bulk of life history on earth would only be observable under a microscope. And even today in terms of biomass, all the multicellular life, humans (and throw in all the animals!) are outweighed by the prokaryotes. Nothing new in any of that.

So my original simplistic concern about all this being relegated to one little singular “abiogenesis event” is given some proper perspective: it’s a billions of years long, messy, and (if the article is correct --which I’m provisionally open to accepting): little understood affair. So what? The “little bit” that interested Darwin and still captures much of our interest today is that branching out of life when it really started to get interesting. Isn’t most of the hoopla about the tree analogy (or bush or whatever people want to call it) forged from all the interesting stuff of the last few hundred millions of years?

So I read on to see if the authors would address this. Here is what they had to say (in their very next paragraph).

More fundamentally, recent research suggests that the evolution of animals and plants isn’t exactly tree-like either. “There are problems even in that little corner,” says Dupré. Having uprooted the tree of unicellular life, biologists are now taking their axes to the remaining branches.

Notice how the rhetoric changed here. Now instead of the rhetoric of "Darwin being wrong, or the whole tree being a mess or needing to be uprooted entirely; we hear instead: “There are problems …”. What? What happened to everything being a mess and not making any sense? Surely our rhetoricians aren’t falling down on the job here are they? Only a few problems? I was eager to see where they would go with this … and read on to see this paragraph.

Nobody is arguing - yet - that the tree concept has outlived its usefulness in animals and plants. While vertical descent is no longer the only game in town, it is still the best way of explaining how multicellular organisms are related to one another - a tree of 51 per cent, maybe. In that respect, Darwin’s vision has triumphed: he knew nothing of micro-organisms and built his theory on the plants and animals he could see around him.

Did you miss that paragraph, Ashwin? This is from the article that you provided! It becomes apparent to me why you and so many others double down and focus so hard on the simple unicellular life (as dominant as it is in both time and mass). It is the only large canopy of refuge still available for those who want to hide behind problems and incomplete understandings. Not that they can’t also find many such remaining challenges in more recent evolutionary narratives too, but that picture is much more filled in (blurry as it still may be at some spots.) But the fact remains, if I see a photograph of the upper portion of a tree, I will recognize it for what it is regardless of the missing trunk that I can’t see because it’s not in my field of view. It could be a ten-thousand mile long trunk (or something else – not a trunk at all) for all I know. But what I do know is the bit of photo that is in view. And that’s the challenge you have to answer. It has problems – sure. But not near as many scientific problems as any competing narratives would create.

I’ll let the article have the last word in this conciliatory paragraph near the end of the article:

Even so, it is clear that the Darwinian tree is no longer an adequate description of how evolution in general works. “If you don’t have a tree of life, what does it mean for evolutionary biology?” asks Bapteste. “At first it’s very scary… but in the past couple of years people have begun to free their minds.” Both he and Doolittle are at pains to stress that downgrading the tree of life doesn’t mean that the theory of evolution is wrong - just that evolution is not as tidy as we would like to believe. Some evolutionary relationships are tree-like; many others are not. “We should relax a bit on this,” says Doolittle. “We understand evolution pretty well - it’s just that it is more complex than Darwin imagined. The tree isn’t the only pattern.”

3 Likes

@Ashwin_s, so, I have you on record stating that I.D. proponents advance an invalid form of Evolution?

You need to get off the fence, Ashwin. The one thing that BioLogos and ID has in common is God.

BioLogos, in its theological assertions, is quite different from I.D., in that it attaches a theological stance to the INCLUSION of mutation, natural selection, and speciation via common descent.

While a great many I.D. folks reject all three of these points in connection with the creation of new species.

Otherwise, BioLogos defends the right of scientists to not attempt to find God in science.

Ashwin, do you really have any idea what you are writing about? Or are you just here to attempt scoring points like it was a debating tournament?

[cc: @jpm, @pevaquark, @Mervin_Bitikofer ]

@Ashwin_s

I really don’t get why you don’t comprehend any of my explanations on this very issue.

  1. I accept/insist on God’s role in mutations (and its role in population genetics);
  2. I accept/insist on God’s role in driving Natural Selection in a teleogical manner;
  3. I accept/insist on God’s role in driving speciation by means of common descent - - ultimately from a single population of life on Earth - - ultimately requiring millions and millions of years for the currently extent species on Earth to arrive at their current state.

Do you know any I.D. supporters who share these three points with me? I would very much enjoy discussing additional topics with such a person. So… really … if you know an I.D. person that agrees with these 3 points, I need to meet them.

For example, based on recent discussions, neither @agauger or @RichardBuggs seem to share these positions with me.

Oh really? When the paper starts with a statement that anti-evolutionists are mistaken in their interpretation of the author’s results that is a pretty clear sign that your interpretation, what every it is, is going to be wrong. You like to proof text with papers and it does get old after a while.

1 Like

Merv is correct. I am guilty at times of intentionally throwing in a random reference just to broaden the thought process, and add a little humor, but that was a little obscure. Of course, referencing how ID originally did not state what or who the intelligent designer was (for legal/political reasons) so it could be space aliens or the deity(s) of choice.

But thinking independently is exactly what ID researchers do not do. All thinking is harnessed to the goal of reaching a pre-ordained result. How can anyone be said to “think independently” who does not engage in open ended inquiry?

2 Likes

There is nothing in those papers that agrees with creationist/ID ideas. I have yet to find any ID/creationists who agree that ILS can create noise in phylogenetic analyses, and that all animals (from protists to humans) share a common ancestor and evolved from that common ancestor.

Do you or do you not accept the natural origin of rain clouds?

1 Like

Within that debate, there is full acceptance that eukaryotes share a common ancestor and that the tree of life for eukaryotes is real. Do you accept this finding?

2 Likes

@T_aquaticus

Perhaps you should word that question thusly?:

@Ashwin_s, do you or do you not accept that God makes rain, in at least some cases, by natural lawful means?”

First of all, i am glad someone actually article and manages a nuanced response. So kudos to you for that.
Yes, i did read that paragraph. And i agree with this statement :slight_smile:

Blockquote
Nobody is arguing - yet - that the tree concept has outlived its usefulness in animals and plants.

Blockquote
it is still the best way of explaining how multicellular organisms are related to one another - a tree of 51 per cent, maybe

The “yet” and “still” are significant and only time will tell which way the consensus will change.However, the author, even today is only willing to concede that 51% of the genetic material supports common ancestry…
And knowing biology, that % can go anywhere… up or down. (and its probable being contested very strongly)
So yes, for the time being, you will see it as a glass half full… and i will see it as half empty.
Only time will tell whether all the water will drain out of the TOL… I am patient in these matters.

Gunter Bechly… His belief is below.
https://gbechly.jimdo.com/intelligent-design/

Blockquote
Even though, intelligent design theory is in principle compatible with universal common descent and guided evolution, I personally have come to reject common ancestry as naturalistic mode of macroevolution in favor of a sophisticated version of progressive (Old Earth) special creation in terms of non-random adaptive macromutations in the “womb” of parental organisms (analogous to Schindewolf’s and Goldschmidt’s “hopeful monsters”, recently endorsed by Rieppel 2017, as well as other representatives of saltationism, mutationism and orthogenesis) combined with the instantiation of a new platonic form that preexisted as template in the mind of the designer (“special transformism” sensu Chaberek 2017). Nevertheless, I do affirm that every organism (apart from the first living cell) was produced / born from a biological parent organism and thus did not pop into being ex nihilo. I also affirm microevolutionary speciation within biological kinds through Neodarwinian processes. However, these never generate new specified complex information, but mostly represent devolution or variation or reshuffling of pre-existing information (e.g., homozygosity from heterozygosity, deactivation or detioration of genes, polyploidy, gene duplication, horizontal gene transfer, hybridogenesis). The two above mentioned affirmations may qualify as affirmation of universal common descent in the eyes of most evolutionary biologists, but the difference is that I only affirm common ancestry in terms of an unbroken lineage of individual maternal and paternal relationships (individual common ancestry), but reject the origin of new biological kinds from other biological kinds via transformation lineages of ancestral species (supraindividual common ancestry). The fact that because of the delicate and intricate interdependence of different genes and their products during ontogenesis, any transition necessarily has to include a coordinated major reprogramming of different genes as well as of epigenetic factors in the zygote cell, shows that the apparent distinction between guided evolution and special creation is rather blurry and in either case involves heavy physical intervention (coordinated and synchronized in multiple individuals within a population). When the distinctive genetic makeup is not inherited from the parents but introduced by design from an external intelligent agent, the process is rather akin to special creation than common ancestry.
Micheal Behe might also hold a similar position… Though i am not sure.

Thats is illogical nonsense for the simple reason that the author does not mention an specific. How can a general disclaimer falsify all conclusions made by a particular group? The only thing that makes sense is that he could be referring to the overall conclusion of “creationism”, or "“Intelligent design” and that he is against it.

I see it more as saving his backside.
Pls address actual content of the paper…

So you expect us to believe an author that expresses “illogical nonsense”? Why trust the paper in the first place? I think you are trying to have your cake and eat it too.

He didn’t say that. Try to work on your reading comprehension. He just said his results can’t be used by anti-evolutionists.

And then you, an anti-evolutionist, want to use his results against evolution. Talk about illogical nonsense.

That may be your interpretation, but that is not what he said if you take a plain reading of the text.

Your opinion, but then again almost all of your arguments boil down to your opinion.

1 Like

@Ashwin_s,

I guess you have as much a problem reading your citations as any of us do.

Bechly explicitly rejects common ancestry!:

"Even though, intelligent design theory is in principle compatible with universal common descent and guided evolution, I personally have come to reject common ancestry as naturalistic mode of macroevolution . . .

in favor of a sophisticated version of progressive (Old Earth) special creation in terms of non-random adaptive macromutations in the “womb” of parental organisms (analogous to Schindewolf’s and Goldschmidt’s “hopeful monsters”, recently endorsed by Rieppel 2017, as well as other representatives of saltationism, mutationism and orthogenesis) combined with the instantiation of a new platonic form that preexisted as template in the mind of the designer (“special transformism” sensu Chaberek 2017). "

In fact, he has adopted my favorite form of Old Eartherism - - it is my favorite because no matter how many times I read a description of “progressive (Old Earth) special creation …”
it always makes me think there is a funny punchline at the end of the sentence. And if, for some reason, the writer doesn’t include a punchline, I add one of my own!

Yes he explicitly rejects common ancestry…
But if you told him what you believed… he would agree with it and say what you believe is not common ancestry.(as per his definition).

You may not believe it brooks… what you describe is closer to old earth creationism than evolution.

@Ashwin_s, you are quite amusing. Now you are telling me what you think he would say.

You act like all this can be resolved by turning to the Oxford Dictionary.

What YOU might find surprising is that dictionaries don’t usually go to the trouble of saying “this definition only applies if there is no God”.

Whether you believe it or not, the definition for Common Ancestry doesn’t change whether God uses the principle or not. The question comes down to two (2) possibilities:

[1] Are the existing members of a species ultimately the literal descendants (by birth or parallel process) of another species?

vs.

[2] Are the members of a given species merely descended from one of many, many species created by means of Special Creation, rather than through Evolutionary processes harnessed by God?

So the only thing you object to is vertical inheritance in 100% of situations? I really don’t see how horizontal genetic transfer helps your case at all. Can you explain why HGT falsifies the natural evolution of species and how it supports ID/creationism?