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Different areas of the brain handle different tasks - the back of the brain is where the visual center is, while the sides are where the audio recognition/speech centers are (as determined from individuals who have lost parts of their brains from surgery, accidents or diseases).

The insular cortex seems to have been the most recent part of the brain to have evolved.

It isn't so much brain size alone, as the ratio of brain size to body size that seems to be a measure of intelligence. There seems to be a minimum amount of brain volume required to manage the metabolism and immune system of body of a certain mass, so any excess about that amount has some other purpose like cognitive thinking, memory, recognition.

These can be placed in a graph:

Graph #1
Graph #2

1. You have to be specific about what you mean by transitional - evolutionary theory regards all individuals are intermediate. Perhaps you mean species that have developed into other species? here are some examples of still existing species that have given rise to other species that are alive today. But perhaps species is too close as in "a brown bear and a polar bear are still bears", perhaps you'd like something more intuitively striking - how about a fish that can breath air and crawl on land? Or perhaps a platypus which is half way between between mammals and reptiles. There are so many ways to define transitional that you have to be specific in order for me to address your question specifically

2. The evolution of the eye is explained adequately elsewhere. What aspect of this is incompatible with the timeframe within which teeth are thought to have evolved?

3 . The evolution of the whale ear is outlined here If you google whale ear evolution there is a wealth of explanations of how whale ears evolved.

4. Again you have to be specific about what you mean by transitional. Archaeopteryx is descended from reptiles, and has some bird features and some reptile features, but does not have any living descendants. Modern birds share a common ancestor with Archaeopteryx. The article you link (from the mid 90's) to is talking about Alan Feduccia's theory that birds did not develop from dinosaurs, but instead developed from ancient reptiles that predate dinosaurs. Up till the mid 90's it was thought that Archaeopteryx was a direct descendant of modern birds. Fossil evidence around this time of feathered reptiles found in china established that Archaeopteryx was not a direct ancestor of modern birds, but instead was a cousin of the lineage that did eventually become modern birds.

This revision has no impact on the validity of evolutionary theory. There are a large number of well documented evolutionary progressions that apply to current living populations, such as land mammal to whale evolution, and there are other intermediate forms such as tiktaalik which are more obviously intuitive "half-way" examples that are useful as intuitive examples, which was the primary advantage of Archaeopteryx.

If God came up with a good design for the great apes, why not reuse His own material when creating humans? When I write code, I frequently dig back into old projects and copy&paste stuff I'd written before.

So far the facts are for a different theory which is microevolution which is small changes within the same species which generally degrade the DNA (loss of information) and has NEVER shown that DNA information is added.

OK. My datapoints were from my experience (which you conveniently refuse to accept).

I also conveniently explained why--as I've said at least twice before, I have the sneaking suspicion that you've confused evo-devo for recapitulation theory. I'm not interested in just taking your word for things.

So I have done a google search (just like you could have). And what do you know, the first two links are pretty interesting. One is wikipedia where the google cache still show a statement backing up what I said (edited out in August).

What was your google search? I assume you're talking about this edit, yes? The one where the statement was removed because no one could provide evidence to back it up?

The second lists several books including ones published in the 2000s (this was actually a surprise to me, I figured by now that practice would be over).

Be still, my heart--after all this excuse-making, you're presenting actual evidence? The evidence doesn't actually say what you claim it does, but it's way better than just complaining that I won't take your word for it.

But at least we have a list... a list which points out places where Haeckel's drawings or similar ones are used, not a list of textbooks which state recapitulation theory. In fact, none of them do. Textbooks I and II in that list state that "the biogenic law is not literally true", but rather, "the embryonic stages of a particular vertebrate often reflect the embryonic stages of that vertebrate's ancestors", which is true. (The biogenic law would state that earlier stages of a later organism uniformly repeated the later stages of an earlier organism, which is false.) Textbook III states that in many cases organisms reflect the state of their ancestors during development (bones that will later fuse initially are separate, for instance), but that it's "certainly not an infallible guide to phylogenetic history". Textbooks IV through X don't even discuss the theory.

I can understand how the statements "embryonic organisms frequently resemble their ancestors' embryonic forms" and "organisms relive their evolutionary history through their morphogenesis" might seem similar. Here's a good summary of the differences, if you're still confused about the concept.

Let me be a little more specific. If there are multiple reasonable explanations for what is observed, there needs to be a way to choose between them.

Well, yes; that's why we have falsifiability and Occam's Razor.

Otherwise, all you have is your faith that your interpretation is correct. At least with gradualism, the expected results would have been hard to explain any other way, but the fossil record does not support it.

Yes, the fossil record doesn't support gradualism; that's why it's a discarded theory. Punctuated equilibrium fits the evidence better. What exactly requires faith here? The theory makes plenty of falsifiable predictions, some of which I've outlined above, the results of which turned out to support the theory.

Because your view is basically gradualism. Gradualism is also what is taught in schools, but we have long since gotten off of the original topic.

No, my view is not basically gradualism. I keep trying to explain what punctuated equilibrium is, and you keep saying that it's the same as gradualism. In gradualism, phenotypic change takes place at a uniform rate; in punctuated equilibrium, it happens quickly over relatively short periods. Do you see the difference? How is my view "basically gradualism"?

And once again, you are using selection as a magical pony. Change happens with mutation. Consistent

If there will be a scientific experiment or scientific observation showing that change of the number of chromosomes on the individual level of a species of a sexually proliferating animal could spread and produce successful progeny then I am ready to remove this division line. So far I have seen no such evidence.

Evolution, in the contrary, for its explanation of the origin of species needs a whole range of elementary steps: mutations work, of course, on the level of microevolution, that is evolution within species, but each larger scale of evolution requires addition of a SIGNIFICANTLY DIFFERENT kind of genetic modification (there are plenty of them).

I can postulate a response, though. It's possible that the designer fused the DNA themselves.

Speciation in mammals is a much harder sell than it is in bacteria due to the complexity of the organism. mutated humans are typically unable to reproduce - much less find a whole colony who suddenly have a mutation at the same time and then reproduce with each other over a thousand years.

I don't see any fossil record of that just like you don't see a 'God' in the sky.

I didn't say that a complicated entity didn't come from something complicated. I'm talking about life on this earth, only.

Be it organic life or artificial life (Deep Blue), man has been 'creating' for much of the last century. Why is it so hard to consider that a lot of life on this planet may have originated in a similar way?

Absence of PROOF has never stopped DE.

Maybe the "religion" gene is neither helpful nor harmful, but linked to other useful genes (other higher brain function, perhaps)?

Sort of how blind cave-fish aren't being selected for blindness, so much as being selected for other traits which happen to have blindness as a side-effect?

http://pharyngula.org/index/weblog/comments/develo pment_of_cavefish_eyes/

I've done a fair bit of reading on the subject, actually. (Although I do admit I'm not as inspired to read any "new proof" considering the trend the old proof follows.)

We don't have a complete fossil record. Heck, the pieces of the *incomplete* fossil record is generally explained away (the Nebraska Man, the Piltdown man, etc, etc, etc). Yes, any conclusive evidence would be lost to time, but that doesn't lend any credence to that conclusion.

The DNA evidence really doesn't prove anything at all. Yes, it's similar. Most creatures have DNA that is strikingly similar, and considering how similar humans and apes are, it would be a surprise if it were drastically different.

Michael Behe is an embarassment to Lehigh University, and the only reason he is still employed there is because he has tenure.

Immoral, fearless and don't forget:

Smart

http://www.mc.vanderbilt.edu/reporter/?ID=1421 [vanderbilt.edu]

And Regenerating

http://pharyngula.org/index/weblog/comments/tales_ of_the_x_mice/ [pharyngula.org]

When is someone going to attach laser beams to their heads?

Hey! Don't forget about their newly acquired ability to REGENERATE too!

http://pharyngula.org/index/weblog/comments/tales_ of_the_x_mice/

Soon you'll never be able to get these vampire mice out of your house.

They can't be stopped and I think it's all being orchestrated by the greedy mouse trap company cartels.

Blogs don't have to be publicly viewable. I'm sure many people write completely private entries. If you wander round LiveJournal an awful lot of people post to a select group of friends, ie their blogs are "by invitation only".

You have to go to the effort of loading up a blog in order to reading - hardly comparable to spraying stuff on a wall.

Being a celebrity is hardly a reason to have an interesting blog; being able to write is. The successful blogs belong to people who are interesting writers. Whether they write about their experiences in computer security, the London Ambulance Service or evolutionary biology, it always comes down to content. It takes a lot of skill to write about nothing and make it interesting, so why are you complaining that 14-year-olds don't write interesting blogs? They're probably sub-literate to start with!

Complaining that anything is bad when all you've seen are the very worst examples is misguided and childish. Or flamebait.

It doesn't matter if the dogma is religious dogma or scientific dogma. If you can't question it and get reasonable answers back, it's just dogma. And, unfortunately, too much of science is that way.

Science is the exact antithesis of what you've described. Science welcomes questions. (Well, except for stupid ones.) What you can't do is make wild claims without significant evidence or some other support for your ideas. Evolution has that support. ID doesn't. If ID can make scientific arguments and predictions and test for its claims, then it can get published in scientific journals. But it can't, so it resorts to publishing books and videos and marketing to the scientifically-ignorant public.

nobody has actually refuted "Darwin's Black Box" by Michael Behe

There are numerous refutations of Behe out there. Behe's argument basically boils down to, "It looks really complicated. It must be magic!" See, for example: http://talkorigins.org/faqs/behe.html. Here's a good refutation of Behe's recent testimony in the Dover trial.

ID makes no predictions, observations, or has any supporting evidence. Just vague claims of "it's complex" or "it looks designed". The only reason it's getting the attention that it is getting is because it dovetails nicely into fundamentalist Christian theology. And don't doubt that Behe's "irreducible complexity" is anything other that Christian creationism in fancy clothing.

Behe said "the designer is God" and that "I concluded that based on theological, philosophical and historical facts." [Note: none of these things are science.] So he has admitted that his conclusions are not scientific, and therefore do not belong in the classroom.

It doesn't matter if the dogma is religious dogma or scientific dogma. If you can't question it and get reasonable answers back, it's just dogma. And, unfortunately, too much of science is that way.

Science is the exact antithesis of what you've described. Science welcomes questions. (Well, except for stupid ones.) What you can't do is make wild claims without significant evidence or some other support for your ideas. Evolution has that support. ID doesn't. If ID can make scientific arguments and predictions and test for its claims, then it can get published in scientific journals. But it can't, so it resorts to publishing books and videos and marketing to the scientifically-ignorant public.

nobody has actually refuted "Darwin's Black Box" by Michael Behe

There are numerous refutations of Behe out there. Behe's argument basically boils down to, "It looks really complicated. It must be magic!" See, for example: http://talkorigins.org/faqs/behe.html. Here's a good refutation of Behe's recent testimony in the Dover trial.

ID makes no predictions, observations, or has any supporting evidence. Just vague claims of "it's complex" or "it looks designed". The only reason it's getting the attention that it is getting is because it dovetails nicely into fundamentalist Christian theology. And don't doubt that Behe's "irreducible complexity" is anything other that Christian creationism in fancy clothing.

Behe said "the designer is God" and that "I concluded that based on theological, philosophical and historical facts." [Note: none of these things are science.] So he has admitted that his conclusions are not scientific, and therefore do not belong in the classroom.

Kevin Drum responded to this about a week ago.

PZ Meyers also has a pretty good response:

Kurzweil cheats. The most obvious flaw is the way he lumps multiple events together as one to keep the distribution linear. For example, one "event" is "Genus Homo, Homo erectus, specialized stone tools", and another is "Printing, experimental method" and "Writing, wheel". If those were treated as separate events, they would have inserted major downward deflections in his chart a million years ago, and about 500 to a few thousand years ago.

...not only is the chart an artificial and perhaps even conscious attempt to fit the data to a predetermined conclusion, but what it actually represents is the proximity of the familiar. We are much more aware of innovations in our current time and environment, and the farther back we look, the blurrier the distinctions get. We may think it's a grand step forward to have these fancy cell phones that don't tie you to a cord coming from the wall, but there was also a time when people thought it was radical to be using this new bow & arrow thingie, instead of the good ol' atlatl. We just lump that prior event into a "flinging pointy things" category and don't think much of it. When Kurzweil reifies biases that way, he gets garbage, like this graph, out.

And second opinions here and here

Disagreed. IMNSHO, a "valid theory" requires falsifiablity. ID is at best a hypothesis with a modest amount of evidence against it, such as inefficiencies in metabolic biochemistry, the existance of a blind spot in the human eye (which is not the case in some marine species), not to mention the classic joke that God is a Civil Engineer.

Furthermore, successful prediction of expermental results is what allows a Hypothesis to advance to being considered a Theory. I have never heard anyone trying to use the concept of ID to make testable experimental predictions. This means that the Flying Spaghetti Monster Hypothesis is markedly superior to the Intelligent Design Hypothesis, as the FSMH allows the prediction that the number of pirates on the high seas will continue to fall as Global warming continues to rise — a testable proposition which might allow the FSM to be considered a theory in the next few decades. Really.

Evolution, on the other hand, has among other things been used to successfully predict that intermediate forms (such as archaeopteryx) would be discovered in gaps in the fossil record.

I repeat: ID is not science. I will elaborate: ID should not be taught in science classes. (It might be suitable for mention in modern American government high school classes in Junior or Senior year, as this is usually about as early as you can get students to intelligently reflect on the WHY and HOW of their education, and on whether this is how they SHOULD be educated.) I will also add: if intelligent design is in fact true, the Watchmaker is not only Blind, but a drunken Idiot with a perverse sense of humor to boot.

Yes, I am saying it may be Proven, but is still Invalid. It's not science. Science can be wrong — the Thompson "Plum Pudding" model of the atom springs to mind. Science, however, after tripping over an inconvenient counterexample, tends to dust itself off, examine the stumbling block, pick it up and add it to the collection, and continue on an adjusted course. Religion merely pretends that there's no problem there, even after tripping over the stumbling block, until someone picks the stumbling block up and tries to use it the beat religion's head in — at which point Religion says it's being "persecuted".

What is the will of the party but another flavor of revealed knowledge? Evidence, consensus, and reason are superfluous when Those On High have told you the answer--never mind that it conflicts with reality, or requires you to sacrifice your sons and daughters, or overrides the ideals of yesterday ("Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness" is soooo Eighteenth Century--the new mantra is "Fear and Obedience"). Reality must conform to ideology, not the other way around.

A more in depth explination of the situation is provided on Pharyngula, here

http://pharyngula.org/index/weblog/comments/thimer osal_distortions/#comments

I can't speak to other cells, but the neurons in your brain and the nerve cells in your spinal column are all you've got. They do not regenerate. I suspect that there are other cell complexes in other organs that are probably one-timers as well (ova for instance).

That was the common consensus ten years ago but the last few years has seen that turned upside down.

For example with neurons:

http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/bb/neuro/neuro00/web1 /Wall.html

and ova:

http://pharyngula.org/comments/484_0_1_0_C/

Insightful replies can be found at the blog of PZ Myers.

Some MAN needs to calculate the rotational velocity of MLK's corpse, immediately!
More on academic sexism

Insightful replies can be found at the blog of PZ Myers.

Some MAN needs to calculate the rotational velocity of MLK's corpse, immediately!
More on academic sexism

Over at Pharyngula the claim is that the tooth structure and muscle attachments on the jaw indicate the strength that is characteristic of a carnivore, not a scavenger.

Chimps, which themselves have had 6 million years of evolution since our last common ancestor, aren't so stupid themselves. They use very simple tools and are capable (at least some Bonobos in captivity) of learning to understand human language. Not to mention that some argument can be made to put paniscus and trogdolytes into the Homo genus. (Other species as closely related as chimps and humans do get put in the same genus. But there are political reasons to keep them as Pan and Homo, so it'll probably be a couple of decades before the naming move is made.)

But as this webpage points out (and note the nice side and back views of the skull: most news stories are only showing the front views):
"The accompanying paper on the archaeology also shows the tools found with these little hominids; these weren't simple apes. They were making some wicked weapons and carving tools."

When you look at the graph of brain size vs height for human species on that same page, there is an overlap between erectus and sapiens, and erectus was notable for fire and for creatively making up new stone tools. What I'd assume is that as H.f. became smaller, evolutionary pressure would have maintained as much intelligence as possible... slightly denser grey matter, losing acuity in less important senses. Suppose we'll have to wait for the scans of the insides of the skulls to show what folding is visible there.

I'm not surprised that any member of the Homo family shows intelligence-- we've been doing that for a few million years, and simply shrinking one cousin species ought not to remove too much of it as its a major part of what we are.

Yes, I do understand the Principle of Parsimonious Explanation. see here where it says "Occam's Razor is a useful tool for formulating hypotheses for testing. It says nothing at all about whether a hypothesis is valid." and here where it says "Use Occam's Razor to prune the list of hypothetical explanations of the observation". I won't suffer any more ad-hominems.

And you don't want heuristics for selecting heuristics because the object of your study aren't heuristics but observables (hint: heuristics aren't, except in Epistemology). Note that while there exists an a-priori conclusive proof of the hypothesis "Voynich is real" (a successful decipherment), a proof of "Voynich is a hoax" is, by necessity, indirect and, barring the uncovering of documentary evidence, circumstantial.

BTW, you still have the burden of proof. You might state that you are unconvinced, or convinced of the contrary option, in an informal setting; but that is an expression of a belief, and beliefs aren't proofs.

Personally, I don't expect to ever in my lifetime see the matter settled.