"To me, it seems to show that evolution works in a fashion (though to those that argue, it does not prove or disprove that men could come from fish or monkeys... whatever your opinion along those longs)"
Opinions are silly. Evidence says there is no serious argument.
More common is either simply not teaching evolution at all (what many many schools do), or even teaching straight out creationism. There are a number of controversies where teachers have been teaching ID that are coming to a head now.
But the bottom line is simply that if you don't teach evolution, then biology is just stamp collecting: and just as boring. Evolutionary biology is fascinating stuff, but most kids get a very stilted and poor understanding of it in public schools, if they get it at all.
"Every human being of sound mind and decision-making ability has, by simply existing, the natural right to do anything they want to their own body, including terminating their own lives."
That's not entirely right, because we can legally prevent someone from committing suicide: which the law treats as by definition being indictative of a lack of competance due to mental illness.
But you are right insofar as you mean refusing medical treatments or proceedures that would prolong life.
And I of course agree with and very much support people's rights to make their own medical decisions, including when to stop medical treatment.
No no, homeopathic neurology would be grinding the person up into tiny particles and then diluting them until there is not even a single particle left... and then expecting the resulting fluid to be even MORE like the original person than the person was themselves.:)
It's worth noting that it was the parents themselves that had to talk Michael into dating again: they not only once approved of him doing so, but encouraged it. And his new partner ultimately even spent more time at the hospice with Terry than Terry's own brother (who only got in on things once the media showed up). So it was doubly cynical and nasty that they would turn around and try to use this against him.
Tom Delay, of course, before the controversy began and he put himself at the forefront of it, pulled the plug on his own comatose father.
The problem with the extreme pro-life position is that they don't really believe their own rhetoric when it comes to actually applying it to real situations affecting THEM instead of other people they can just rail against. Given the choice between saving a billion zygotes and a single human child, they'd all save the child, and they know it. For all the talk about killing zygotes being murder, or morally equivalent persons no matter what stage of development they are, they don't really believe it. Even the group of brothers who supported the Schiavo parents had basically allowed their own founder to die when they could have kept his body alive just like Schiavo's.
Indeed. This is why there is no real "moment" or qualification that the first living on our planet went from not living to living. It's a hazy continuum, not a bright line.
Better for WHO exactly? If the original person is essentially gone, who's interests are we serving in creating a new person in their old body? Not the old person's. Not even the new person's because they don't exist yet to HAVE interests.
As we get more and technologically advanced, these what-if questions will always come up, and it's important to be serious about it.
If we develop the technology do bring a truly dead person back to life: to re-animate a day old corpse, will cremation be murder?
Or take the Schiavo case: it may one day be possible to insert new brain cells into someone like that and have them get up and be a person again. But they may not be the same person: the old brain matter that held their memories and personality may be gone. And yet, since we can do that, should we never pull the plug on a brain dead person?
What makes you, you? And what rights do YOU have in determining whether medical science can essentially keep your body alive, forever, no matter what happens to that "you?"
"Granted he may disagree with me about *why* there are no good examples of specific transitional forms"
Neither of them would agree with you in the slightest insofar as YOU understand transitional forms and are falsely trying to imply that they understand them.
"From my point of view, it is noteworthy that evolutionists can't rely on their evidence to tell me with much specificity at all what life-forms we specifically evolved from, but still want me to believe with 100% certainty that I evolved from a chimp of some sort."
You're just being disingenuous here. Just because I can't tell you exactly where every solider placed their boots at Gettysburg doesn't mean I can't demonstrate that the battle happened or have a very high degree of certainty about its overall course of events, many and and always increasing grasp of the specifics, and its outcome. Such is the case with common descent as a whole and evolutionary change in particular.
The evidence for our relation to chimps is rock-solid. But you don't understand it at all yet or how it fits together and why a vast convergence of evidence is such a powerful demonstration of accuracy. Which is okay, except that you think you have it all figured out already, which is hardly the sign of an open mind.
Of course, the idea of a creature who fits into every single taxonomic definition of an ape, without exception, telling me that he's incredulous that he's related to other apes is even sillier. You're telling me this with a mouth full of molars that are distinctively ape molars, unlike any other teeth in the entire animal kingdom other than an apes. With the same density of hair folicles. With all, in fact, the features that distinguish apes from all other forms of life. Heck, before evolution overturned the apple cart, even creationists lumped the apes in with man. Linneus dared anyone to show him a major morphological justification for separating them. And that was all before any hint of genetic evidence that cross-confirmed fossil evidence that all of course tied in in exactly the right way with geographic evidence and so forth.
"Even though in our public education evolution was the only idea of origins presented to us, we still haven't seen strong enough evidence to completely convince us."
Again, this is ridiculous. Because of the controversy, evolution is barely covered at all in most non-college realms: you'd be hard pressed to find high school classes that really cover it, and in many places in the Bible Belt, it's not taught at all. It's no wonder that people have such a caricatured and limited view of what evolution is and why it's considered so fundamental to the history of life on earth.
"Actually, you're incorrect in saying the blood clotting work has turned out to be an embarrasment to Behe. On the contrary he has written defenses of it to contest the attacks on his work. Hardly "embarrasment"."
See, this is the sort of attitude I find perplexing. To my evolution skeptics, the content of the arguments doesn't seem to matter at all. For them, merely the fact that someone can make words come out of their mouths in response to a refutation of their ideas means a victory.
Yes, Behe has responses. But they are no more satisfying or convincing than his original arguments. He claimed that there was no way blood clotting could have evolved. And yet, while he wrote, Doolittle had already uncovered some pretty powerful evidence of exactly how. Behe's lame response was to shift the goalposts without admitting what he'd done: now instead of showing that it was POSSIBLE that blood clotting had evolved and even laying out a plausible macro-sequence of events based on evidence from life on earth and genetics, Behe starts demanding the mutation by mutation history of its evolution: a rather completely different and silly demand which has none of the strength of his original IC argument.
"With your comment that speciation has been observed in nature, I assume you're referring to ring species. "
No, I'm referring to the countless observed instances of reproductive isolation and eventual genetic incompatibility. As I said, creationists try to pretend that the species barrier is some mysterious line that no one knows how anything could cross. In fact, the basic patterns of genetic drift and how incompatibilities accumulate between two populations is actually fairly easy to understand when you start studying population genetics.
"An article at answersingenesis.org, which lists many scientists among its contributors"
Please. If you are going to make an argument from authority, it has to be a PLAUSIBLE one. Answeringenesis is an activist organization whose members all pledge to defend the the truth of the bible. Their "scientists" are simply not acredited experts in their fields (many of them got degrees from mail-order diploma mills or aren't even tangentially related to biology), and trying to cite them as such is to falsely claim non-existent authority.
It's claims and articles are ludicrous, commonly in gross error, and very often slanderous. Citing them is a TERRIBLE way to make your point. You're trying to argue that evolution is misguided as SCIENCE because an evangelical religious organization who opposes evolution on basis of their believe in the primacy of biblical literalism says so? You were doing much better sticking with Behe.
"Lastly, yes, I did read the contexts of the quotes I have cited. "
That's not what I asked you. I asked you whether you'd actually read their actual work, not read them in the "context" of some website claiming they prove that evolution is a myth. The idea that, for instance, Gould believed that evolution isn't evidentially well supported is hilariously silly and misinformed. Do you know what phyletic gradualism is, off the top of your head? If not, then understand that you probably do not understand what these guys are talking about and debating.
"Patterson's quote is extremely telling of the fact that there is virtually no conclusive *specific* evidence for evoltution."
No, it's not. What Patterson is talking about is direct line ancestry in the fossil record. That's not the same thing at all. What you really need to do is to understand exactly HOW science is done and WHY evolution is considered so certain. You obviously have a lot of misconceptions about how the evidence and arguments actually work, and what they require.
"It shows that he has to look at the universe of fossils and come to a general conclusion."
A conclusion that is simply undeniable. You don't need to know every single individual that ever lived or the micro-level ancestral trees to see that every piece o
Indeed. The major problem with any system of classification with static levels like "order" or "kingdom" is that the levels don't end up meaning anything consistent across all of life: that's why the system is plauged with weasel terms like "sub-phylum, intra-order, super-class" and so forth. The other problem is speciation. When one species branches into two more, we need species names for each. Now, sure, we can just get rid of the species name, and give them two more within the same genus. But the problem is, the species name probably still describes a good group, into which the two new species both still fall. So by throwing it out, we lose something descriptive: lose a level that was still useful. It quickly becomes obvious that the entire ranked classification system is built for taking a single snapshot of life and classifying it. It wasn't built with evolution in mind, and so ends up being crudely shoehorned to fit reality.
There are systems that try to stick to just describing branchings in numerical order rather than levels, but of course those are sort of hard for laypeople too.
"Pointless? Hardly. The Shuttle is the only launch vehicle capable of completing ISS (International Space Station). Whether we're better off ditching the whole ISS/Shuttle program because it's wasteful is a separate, though related, argument."
So, we must have the shuttle because we need the ISS. Why do we need the ISS. Well hey, if we didn't have it, the shuttle wouldn't have anywhere fun to go!
That is just so tragically insane I hardly even know what to say.
"This really bears repeating: the viability of a successful space program -- public or private -- has nothing to do with technology; what we have now is totally adequate for the task and has been for at least the last 20 years."
It has everything to do with technology. Yes, what we have is adequate to get into space, but at an ENORMOUS COST that simply does not justify itself in any way shape or form.
"As for doing science, an astronaut can stop, look, say "ooh, what an interesting rock!" then walk over, pick it up, and examine it closely with a Mark I eyeball in, what, 30 seconds? It takes days if not weeks for a Mars rover to do the same thing."
Did I not already cover this argument? Robot missions are done for a tiny tiny fraction of the payload and cost of human missions. They have to conserve and go slow precisely because they are not given the funding, resources, or payload size that the human missions are. And several different sorts of robot eyes are a heck of a lot better than human eyes.
You still have yet to make any case whatsoever that sending meatbags into space has any point to justify the incredible expense. Right now, real science prorgams are being canceled left and right so that this nearly purely masturbatory enterprise of putting humans back on the moon can go forward.
"Of course innovation is the future, but let's not just drop what we have working. An expensive working shuttle is better than non-existant non-working less expensive... uhmm.. battle cruiser... or whatever."
Yuo couldn't be more wrong. What we have is working... to no purpose. It's not better, it's poitless. Getting humans into space is INCREDIBLY costly. In addition, at this point in our history, it serves no real purpose.
Why not work on better solutions to getting into space so that when we do come up with a reason to go, it won't be so ridiculously wasteful and take away from all the other things we have to work on?
"And I'm not so sure I've given a false representation of Patterson. What is the context? "
That fact that you don't know what it is suggests that you pulled it off of some creationist/ID list of "quotes that show evolution is bogus." Shouldn't that make YOU suspicious?
"The reason is that statements about ancestry and descent are not applicable in the fossil record. Is Archaeopteryx the ancestor of all birds? Perhaps yes, perhaps no: there is no way of answering the question."
While this is true, you are using this statement to draw false conclusions, and that is the crux of your misuse or misunderstanding of the quote. The fact that we cannot usually say for sure who the descendants of a particular individual creature was does not prevent us from understanding that it fits into an overall tree of relationships, and where. If you had a big family reunion, the chances of a random person pulled out of the crowd being your direct ancestor would be unlikely: it would more likely be a cousin or somesuch. It's the same way with fossils. Patterson is rightly warning against the temptation to make up "just-so" stories that explain the whys and hows of a particular lineage when in fact we almost never have that level of detail.
However, the key features of various fossils DO allow us to figure out structures of relationships. It is THAT which scientists use to demonstrate common ancestry, not relying on the need to know that this particular fossil is the direct descendant of modern birds (because the chances are always very likely that it is not).
Furthermore, Archaeopteryx is a transitional by any definition. It has features otherwise unique to both dinosaurs and modern birds, thus providing some pretty solid evidence that birds are descended from dinos. A fossil need not be the direct ancestor of a modern form of life to demonstrate a particular branching off of a particular line. And over the years, all the further evidence has demonstrated that the implication of Archaeopteryx is dead-on: birds are in fact descended from the dinosaurs (in a very real cladistic sense, this means that they ARE dinosaurs, the last of the dinosaurs).
And again, back to the example of the bacteria, you are again trying to draw suprious conclusions from the results. There is no evidence at all in the study that mutations were anything but random. That they hit upon the same mutational functionalities twice suggests only that the various solutions to the heat problem were quite nearby in this case, and so random variation quickly hit upon them each time. Your analogy is tortured:
"To use your casino analogy, the experiment is like poker player drawing the same 7 hands in a row... twice. Sure, randomness and predictability aren't to be confused. But the same gene's in the same order twice???"
They were very much NOT played twice in a row. Billions of billions of hands were played, and each time there was only a couple of "correct" hands after which the game would be over. These "correct" hands were eventually dealt in each round, which is very very different from them being dealt twice in a row. And in fact, in both cases, they had the exact same selection pressure: i.e. a particular guide as to HOW to deal the hands to be more likely to get the correct combo.
No, they don't even really need that. I would bet that the cost of a servicing mission and having the shuttle program to make it available far exceeds the cost of simply sending up another satelite via unmanned rocket as needed.
"but they are saying that since exactly the same mutations happened again"
They didn't say that. What they said was that 700 or so regained the same _functionality_. That's not the same thing as the same exact mutations happening to redo what was undone, or all of them being the same solution.
Seriously. The shuttle program at this point in time is insane. We do not have the technology yet to make space travel cost-effective. Instead of pointlessly doing it wastefully now for no other purpose than habit, why not pour all that money into a program to develop new forms of propulsion and energy, and come back to spacefaring when we have a better solution?
It's not like sending humans into space serves any real purpose anyway. Robots can carry out virtually everything we need to do for FAR less payload cost. People often whine about the limitations of the robot missions compared to human missions, but these people have simply not thought through the cost-benefit analysis. Sure, a human mission payload can do more than the current robot misisons: the payload of the human missions is many many many times greater than the robot missions. If any of the Mars lander people could fill something the size of the shuttle with robot equipment, we'd be able to set up huge self-sustaining robot colonies on Mars easily. Instead, we want to send humans in what will then have to mostly be wasted space.
Look Mars, we bring you... poop! And urine! And lots and lots of empty space for our various gases! And tons of food! And energy for a return trip! And beds, chairs, tables, toilets,etc.!
It didn't appear twice. "700 of those variants replicated some of the functionality of the naturally occurring gene." Some of the functionality of the naturally occuring gene is not the same thing as the exact same gene reappearing over and over. Granted, the way mutation works is a lot more complicated than purely random changes able to happen anywhere, and exact same mutations cropping up is part of how mutation can work. But in this case, we aren't actually talking about that.
This experiment is just like the one in which they knocked out the genes to process lactose, and the bacteria eventually evolved a new way to digest it. But it wasn't the same process, and even when things are functionaly identical, their underlying code can still vary.
In evolution, it's extremely unlikely that the same path gets followed twice on the macro scale. It's so unlikely that we have Dolo's law (which is a statistical law, properly formed, not an aboslute one).
Re:Evolution isn't just adapting to environment
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One theory on the appendix has been that the smaller the appendix comes, the MORE likely it is to get infected and kill. So once evolved, and once run out of a useful purpose, it has become very hard to get rid of, because many of the avenues are blocked.
Likewise, it's worth noting that very often disparate elements are linked. The appendix itself might not be a good thing, but it's developmentally linked to or even just very close to something on the genome that is hard or dangerous to tinker with. And thus, it has been left alone since tinkering with that area of the genome breaks something else important.
It's worth noting that SotF isn't really even Darwin's term. It wasn't even added to Origin until the 6th edition, and then only grudingly, Darwin being unsatisfied with most such terms but giving into popular parlance.
Re:So it almost seems evolution follows a... desig
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"As Michael Behe has shown, the most basic mechanisms of life--the structures within a cell, the chemistry of blood-clotting, the processing of oxygen--display "irreducible complexity" that could not have evolved randomly. If these already complex and finely tuned structures were not in place, life on any level could not exist."
But he hasn't shown this at all. Your argument doesn't even make sense: life could not exist without blood clotting? This will come as a huge surprise to bacteria! Sea cucumbers will all die in shock at the news! Inability to process the corrosive poison oxygen: oh noes! Yeast is a miracle!
Fact is, blood clotting has turned out to be as embarrasing an example for Behe as all the rest: there has in fact been extensive work done to figure out how blood clotting evolved.
And the larger point is even if we didn't have good leads on how something evolved, historically, simply saying "I don't see how it could have" is not a good argument: it's merely incredulity, not a demonstration of impossibility.
This is the reason Behe's arguments are not taken seriously. ID theorists, of course, would have you believe that it's because of a giant conspiracy or dogma. It couldn't POSSIBLY be because the arguments of ID proponents are incorrect. Merely being able to make arguments against evolution proves that these arguments are right and evolution is just a fad!
"However, Darwinism insists that natural selection is what creates new species. And the evidence for that happening--for bacteria turning into another life form--is lacking."
This is always fascinating to me. People like you claim that evolution is flawed... but when you actually start talking about it, you imply that you don't even understand what it is.
This is a REALLY key point to grasp. Evolution is cladistically conservative. What that means is that is one life form does not "turn into" another. Everything that descends from bacteria will still be rightly classed as bacteria (that is, everything that set bacteria apart from all other life will still set all its descendants apart), just like we humands are still eukaryotes, still tetrapods, still eutherians, still apes, and so on.
The evidence for speciation is not only solid, but has been observed in nature. The mechanisms, despite what ID theorists would have you believe, are not even mysterious. Speciation at base simply involves two population genetically drifting away from each other to the point where they can no longer interbreed. For some species we even know how this happens down to the point by point mutation (like in abalone, where the "lock/key" mechanism of sperm and eggs is constantly changing, often leaving islands of incompatibility where certain populations are stranded off of from others).
"We know that evolution can help an organism adapt... and, as the article shows, we are beginning to show that organisms do this in accordance to a pattern or (dare I say) a design."
Did you even READ the article? That's not what it shows at all. Where in the article are you finding this? Even patterns of mutation is not the same thing as design: mutation is a physical process with its own observable constraints and quirks.
"We still do know that organisms evolve into new species. And, dare I say, I doubt we ever will. The late Dr Colin Patterson, senior paleontologist of the British Museum of Natural History, wrote a book, Evolution. In reply to a questioner who asked why he had not included any pictures of transitional forms, he wrote: "I fully agree with your comments about the lack of direct illustration of evolutionary transitions in my book. If I knew of any, fossil or living, I would certainly have included them... . I will lay it on the line--there is not one such fossil for which one could make a watertight argument." The renowned evolutionist (and Marxist) Stephen Jay Gould wrote: "The absence of fossil evidence for intermediary stages between major transitions in organic de
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Andrew Sullivan voted for Kerry and has basically said that he's not really a Republican anymore.
"To me, it seems to show that evolution works in a fashion (though to those that argue, it does not prove or disprove that men could come from fish or monkeys... whatever your opinion along those longs)"
Opinions are silly. Evidence says there is no serious argument.
More common is either simply not teaching evolution at all (what many many schools do), or even teaching straight out creationism. There are a number of controversies where teachers have been teaching ID that are coming to a head now.
But the bottom line is simply that if you don't teach evolution, then biology is just stamp collecting: and just as boring. Evolutionary biology is fascinating stuff, but most kids get a very stilted and poor understanding of it in public schools, if they get it at all.
"Every human being of sound mind and decision-making ability has, by simply existing, the natural right to do anything they want to their own body, including terminating their own lives."
That's not entirely right, because we can legally prevent someone from committing suicide: which the law treats as by definition being indictative of a lack of competance due to mental illness.
But you are right insofar as you mean refusing medical treatments or proceedures that would prolong life.
And I of course agree with and very much support people's rights to make their own medical decisions, including when to stop medical treatment.
No no, homeopathic neurology would be grinding the person up into tiny particles and then diluting them until there is not even a single particle left... and then expecting the resulting fluid to be even MORE like the original person than the person was themselves. :)
It's worth noting that it was the parents themselves that had to talk Michael into dating again: they not only once approved of him doing so, but encouraged it. And his new partner ultimately even spent more time at the hospice with Terry than Terry's own brother (who only got in on things once the media showed up). So it was doubly cynical and nasty that they would turn around and try to use this against him.
Tom Delay, of course, before the controversy began and he put himself at the forefront of it, pulled the plug on his own comatose father.
The problem with the extreme pro-life position is that they don't really believe their own rhetoric when it comes to actually applying it to real situations affecting THEM instead of other people they can just rail against. Given the choice between saving a billion zygotes and a single human child, they'd all save the child, and they know it. For all the talk about killing zygotes being murder, or morally equivalent persons no matter what stage of development they are, they don't really believe it. Even the group of brothers who supported the Schiavo parents had basically allowed their own founder to die when they could have kept his body alive just like Schiavo's.
Indeed. This is why there is no real "moment" or qualification that the first living on our planet went from not living to living. It's a hazy continuum, not a bright line.
Better for WHO exactly? If the original person is essentially gone, who's interests are we serving in creating a new person in their old body? Not the old person's. Not even the new person's because they don't exist yet to HAVE interests.
As we get more and technologically advanced, these what-if questions will always come up, and it's important to be serious about it.
If we develop the technology do bring a truly dead person back to life: to re-animate a day old corpse, will cremation be murder?
Or take the Schiavo case: it may one day be possible to insert new brain cells into someone like that and have them get up and be a person again. But they may not be the same person: the old brain matter that held their memories and personality may be gone. And yet, since we can do that, should we never pull the plug on a brain dead person?
What makes you, you? And what rights do YOU have in determining whether medical science can essentially keep your body alive, forever, no matter what happens to that "you?"
"Granted he may disagree with me about *why* there are no good examples of specific transitional forms"
Neither of them would agree with you in the slightest insofar as YOU understand transitional forms and are falsely trying to imply that they understand them.
"From my point of view, it is noteworthy that evolutionists can't rely on their evidence to tell me with much specificity at all what life-forms we specifically evolved from, but still want me to believe with 100% certainty that I evolved from a chimp of some sort."
You're just being disingenuous here. Just because I can't tell you exactly where every solider placed their boots at Gettysburg doesn't mean I can't demonstrate that the battle happened or have a very high degree of certainty about its overall course of events, many and and always increasing grasp of the specifics, and its outcome. Such is the case with common descent as a whole and evolutionary change in particular.
The evidence for our relation to chimps is rock-solid. But you don't understand it at all yet or how it fits together and why a vast convergence of evidence is such a powerful demonstration of accuracy. Which is okay, except that you think you have it all figured out already, which is hardly the sign of an open mind.
Of course, the idea of a creature who fits into every single taxonomic definition of an ape, without exception, telling me that he's incredulous that he's related to other apes is even sillier. You're telling me this with a mouth full of molars that are distinctively ape molars, unlike any other teeth in the entire animal kingdom other than an apes. With the same density of hair folicles. With all, in fact, the features that distinguish apes from all other forms of life. Heck, before evolution overturned the apple cart, even creationists lumped the apes in with man. Linneus dared anyone to show him a major morphological justification for separating them. And that was all before any hint of genetic evidence that cross-confirmed fossil evidence that all of course tied in in exactly the right way with geographic evidence and so forth.
"Even though in our public education evolution was the only idea of origins presented to us, we still haven't seen strong enough evidence to completely convince us."
Again, this is ridiculous. Because of the controversy, evolution is barely covered at all in most non-college realms: you'd be hard pressed to find high school classes that really cover it, and in many places in the Bible Belt, it's not taught at all. It's no wonder that people have such a caricatured and limited view of what evolution is and why it's considered so fundamental to the history of life on earth.
"Actually, you're incorrect in saying the blood clotting work has turned out to be an embarrasment to Behe. On the contrary he has written defenses of it to contest the attacks on his work. Hardly "embarrasment"."
See, this is the sort of attitude I find perplexing. To my evolution skeptics, the content of the arguments doesn't seem to matter at all. For them, merely the fact that someone can make words come out of their mouths in response to a refutation of their ideas means a victory.
Yes, Behe has responses. But they are no more satisfying or convincing than his original arguments. He claimed that there was no way blood clotting could have evolved. And yet, while he wrote, Doolittle had already uncovered some pretty powerful evidence of exactly how. Behe's lame response was to shift the goalposts without admitting what he'd done: now instead of showing that it was POSSIBLE that blood clotting had evolved and even laying out a plausible macro-sequence of events based on evidence from life on earth and genetics, Behe starts demanding the mutation by mutation history of its evolution: a rather completely different and silly demand which has none of the strength of his original IC argument.
"With your comment that speciation has been observed in nature, I assume you're referring to ring species. "
No, I'm referring to the countless observed instances of reproductive isolation and eventual genetic incompatibility. As I said, creationists try to pretend that the species barrier is some mysterious line that no one knows how anything could cross. In fact, the basic patterns of genetic drift and how incompatibilities accumulate between two populations is actually fairly easy to understand when you start studying population genetics.
"An article at answersingenesis.org, which lists many scientists among its contributors"
Please. If you are going to make an argument from authority, it has to be a PLAUSIBLE one. Answeringenesis is an activist organization whose members all pledge to defend the the truth of the bible. Their "scientists" are simply not acredited experts in their fields (many of them got degrees from mail-order diploma mills or aren't even tangentially related to biology), and trying to cite them as such is to falsely claim non-existent authority.
It's claims and articles are ludicrous, commonly in gross error, and very often slanderous. Citing them is a TERRIBLE way to make your point. You're trying to argue that evolution is misguided as SCIENCE because an evangelical religious organization who opposes evolution on basis of their believe in the primacy of biblical literalism says so? You were doing much better sticking with Behe.
"Lastly, yes, I did read the contexts of the quotes I have cited. "
That's not what I asked you. I asked you whether you'd actually read their actual work, not read them in the "context" of some website claiming they prove that evolution is a myth. The idea that, for instance, Gould believed that evolution isn't evidentially well supported is hilariously silly and misinformed. Do you know what phyletic gradualism is, off the top of your head? If not, then understand that you probably do not understand what these guys are talking about and debating.
"Patterson's quote is extremely telling of the fact that there is virtually no conclusive *specific* evidence for evoltution."
No, it's not. What Patterson is talking about is direct line ancestry in the fossil record. That's not the same thing at all. What you really need to do is to understand exactly HOW science is done and WHY evolution is considered so certain. You obviously have a lot of misconceptions about how the evidence and arguments actually work, and what they require.
"It shows that he has to look at the universe of fossils and come to a general conclusion."
A conclusion that is simply undeniable. You don't need to know every single individual that ever lived or the micro-level ancestral trees to see that every piece o
If someone else is paying for the vanity project, any amount is acceptable.
Indeed. The major problem with any system of classification with static levels like "order" or "kingdom" is that the levels don't end up meaning anything consistent across all of life: that's why the system is plauged with weasel terms like "sub-phylum, intra-order, super-class" and so forth. The other problem is speciation. When one species branches into two more, we need species names for each. Now, sure, we can just get rid of the species name, and give them two more within the same genus. But the problem is, the species name probably still describes a good group, into which the two new species both still fall. So by throwing it out, we lose something descriptive: lose a level that was still useful. It quickly becomes obvious that the entire ranked classification system is built for taking a single snapshot of life and classifying it. It wasn't built with evolution in mind, and so ends up being crudely shoehorned to fit reality.
There are systems that try to stick to just describing branchings in numerical order rather than levels, but of course those are sort of hard for laypeople too.
"Pointless? Hardly. The Shuttle is the only launch vehicle capable of completing ISS (International Space Station). Whether we're better off ditching the whole ISS/Shuttle program because it's wasteful is a separate, though related, argument."
So, we must have the shuttle because we need the ISS. Why do we need the ISS. Well hey, if we didn't have it, the shuttle wouldn't have anywhere fun to go!
That is just so tragically insane I hardly even know what to say.
"This really bears repeating: the viability of a successful space program -- public or private -- has nothing to do with technology; what we have now is totally adequate for the task and has been for at least the last 20 years."
It has everything to do with technology. Yes, what we have is adequate to get into space, but at an ENORMOUS COST that simply does not justify itself in any way shape or form.
"As for doing science, an astronaut can stop, look, say "ooh, what an interesting rock!" then walk over, pick it up, and examine it closely with a Mark I eyeball in, what, 30 seconds? It takes days if not weeks for a Mars rover to do the same thing."
Did I not already cover this argument? Robot missions are done for a tiny tiny fraction of the payload and cost of human missions. They have to conserve and go slow precisely because they are not given the funding, resources, or payload size that the human missions are. And several different sorts of robot eyes are a heck of a lot better than human eyes.
You still have yet to make any case whatsoever that sending meatbags into space has any point to justify the incredible expense. Right now, real science prorgams are being canceled left and right so that this nearly purely masturbatory enterprise of putting humans back on the moon can go forward.
"Of course innovation is the future, but let's not just drop what we have working. An expensive working shuttle is better than non-existant non-working less expensive ... uhmm.. battle cruiser... or whatever."
Yuo couldn't be more wrong. What we have is working... to no purpose. It's not better, it's poitless. Getting humans into space is INCREDIBLY costly. In addition, at this point in our history, it serves no real purpose.
Why not work on better solutions to getting into space so that when we do come up with a reason to go, it won't be so ridiculously wasteful and take away from all the other things we have to work on?
Well, in fact, the current consensus is exactly that: complex cell walls with transport didn't come until much later.
"And I'm not so sure I've given a false representation of Patterson. What is the context? "
That fact that you don't know what it is suggests that you pulled it off of some creationist/ID list of "quotes that show evolution is bogus." Shouldn't that make YOU suspicious?
"The reason is that statements about ancestry and descent are not applicable in the fossil record. Is Archaeopteryx the ancestor of all birds? Perhaps yes, perhaps no: there is no way of answering the question."
While this is true, you are using this statement to draw false conclusions, and that is the crux of your misuse or misunderstanding of the quote. The fact that we cannot usually say for sure who the descendants of a particular individual creature was does not prevent us from understanding that it fits into an overall tree of relationships, and where. If you had a big family reunion, the chances of a random person pulled out of the crowd being your direct ancestor would be unlikely: it would more likely be a cousin or somesuch. It's the same way with fossils. Patterson is rightly warning against the temptation to make up "just-so" stories that explain the whys and hows of a particular lineage when in fact we almost never have that level of detail.
However, the key features of various fossils DO allow us to figure out structures of relationships. It is THAT which scientists use to demonstrate common ancestry, not relying on the need to know that this particular fossil is the direct descendant of modern birds (because the chances are always very likely that it is not).
Furthermore, Archaeopteryx is a transitional by any definition. It has features otherwise unique to both dinosaurs and modern birds, thus providing some pretty solid evidence that birds are descended from dinos. A fossil need not be the direct ancestor of a modern form of life to demonstrate a particular branching off of a particular line.
And over the years, all the further evidence has demonstrated that the implication of Archaeopteryx is dead-on: birds are in fact descended from the dinosaurs (in a very real cladistic sense, this means that they ARE dinosaurs, the last of the dinosaurs).
And again, back to the example of the bacteria, you are again trying to draw suprious conclusions from the results. There is no evidence at all in the study that mutations were anything but random. That they hit upon the same mutational functionalities twice suggests only that the various solutions to the heat problem were quite nearby in this case, and so random variation quickly hit upon them each time. Your analogy is tortured:
"To use your casino analogy, the experiment is like poker player drawing the same 7 hands in a row... twice. Sure, randomness and predictability aren't to be confused. But the same gene's in the same order twice???"
They were very much NOT played twice in a row. Billions of billions of hands were played, and each time there was only a couple of "correct" hands after which the game would be over. These "correct" hands were eventually dealt in each round, which is very very different from them being dealt twice in a row. And in fact, in both cases, they had the exact same selection pressure: i.e. a particular guide as to HOW to deal the hands to be more likely to get the correct combo.
No, they don't even really need that. I would bet that the cost of a servicing mission and having the shuttle program to make it available far exceeds the cost of simply sending up another satelite via unmanned rocket as needed.
"but they are saying that since exactly the same mutations happened again"
They didn't say that. What they said was that 700 or so regained the same _functionality_. That's not the same thing as the same exact mutations happening to redo what was undone, or all of them being the same solution.
Seriously. The shuttle program at this point in time is insane. We do not have the technology yet to make space travel cost-effective. Instead of pointlessly doing it wastefully now for no other purpose than habit, why not pour all that money into a program to develop new forms of propulsion and energy, and come back to spacefaring when we have a better solution?
,etc.!
It's not like sending humans into space serves any real purpose anyway. Robots can carry out virtually everything we need to do for FAR less payload cost. People often whine about the limitations of the robot missions compared to human missions, but these people have simply not thought through the cost-benefit analysis. Sure, a human mission payload can do more than the current robot misisons: the payload of the human missions is many many many times greater than the robot missions. If any of the Mars lander people could fill something the size of the shuttle with robot equipment, we'd be able to set up huge self-sustaining robot colonies on Mars easily. Instead, we want to send humans in what will then have to mostly be wasted space.
Look Mars, we bring you... poop! And urine! And lots and lots of empty space for our various gases! And tons of food! And energy for a return trip! And beds, chairs, tables, toilets
It's just nuts.
It didn't appear twice. "700 of those variants replicated some of the functionality of the naturally occurring gene." Some of the functionality of the naturally occuring gene is not the same thing as the exact same gene reappearing over and over. Granted, the way mutation works is a lot more complicated than purely random changes able to happen anywhere, and exact same mutations cropping up is part of how mutation can work. But in this case, we aren't actually talking about that.
This experiment is just like the one in which they knocked out the genes to process lactose, and the bacteria eventually evolved a new way to digest it. But it wasn't the same process, and even when things are functionaly identical, their underlying code can still vary.
In evolution, it's extremely unlikely that the same path gets followed twice on the macro scale. It's so unlikely that we have Dolo's law (which is a statistical law, properly formed, not an aboslute one).
One theory on the appendix has been that the smaller the appendix comes, the MORE likely it is to get infected and kill. So once evolved, and once run out of a useful purpose, it has become very hard to get rid of, because many of the avenues are blocked.
Likewise, it's worth noting that very often disparate elements are linked. The appendix itself might not be a good thing, but it's developmentally linked to or even just very close to something on the genome that is hard or dangerous to tinker with. And thus, it has been left alone since tinkering with that area of the genome breaks something else important.
It's worth noting that SotF isn't really even Darwin's term. It wasn't even added to Origin until the 6th edition, and then only grudingly, Darwin being unsatisfied with most such terms but giving into popular parlance.
"As Michael Behe has shown, the most basic mechanisms of life--the structures within a cell, the chemistry of blood-clotting, the processing of oxygen--display "irreducible complexity" that could not have evolved randomly. If these already complex and finely tuned structures were not in place, life on any level could not exist."
... . I will lay it on the line--there is not one such fossil for which one could make a watertight argument." The renowned evolutionist (and Marxist) Stephen Jay Gould wrote: "The absence of fossil evidence for intermediary stages between major transitions in organic de
But he hasn't shown this at all. Your argument doesn't even make sense: life could not exist without blood clotting? This will come as a huge surprise to bacteria! Sea cucumbers will all die in shock at the news! Inability to process the corrosive poison oxygen: oh noes! Yeast is a miracle!
Fact is, blood clotting has turned out to be as embarrasing an example for Behe as all the rest: there has in fact been extensive work done to figure out how blood clotting evolved.
And the larger point is even if we didn't have good leads on how something evolved, historically, simply saying "I don't see how it could have" is not a good argument: it's merely incredulity, not a demonstration of impossibility.
This is the reason Behe's arguments are not taken seriously. ID theorists, of course, would have you believe that it's because of a giant conspiracy or dogma. It couldn't POSSIBLY be because the arguments of ID proponents are incorrect. Merely being able to make arguments against evolution proves that these arguments are right and evolution is just a fad!
"However, Darwinism insists that natural selection is what creates new species. And the evidence for that happening--for bacteria turning into another life form--is lacking."
This is always fascinating to me. People like you claim that evolution is flawed... but when you actually start talking about it, you imply that you don't even understand what it is.
This is a REALLY key point to grasp. Evolution is cladistically conservative. What that means is that is one life form does not "turn into" another. Everything that descends from bacteria will still be rightly classed as bacteria (that is, everything that set bacteria apart from all other life will still set all its descendants apart), just like we humands are still eukaryotes, still tetrapods, still eutherians, still apes, and so on.
The evidence for speciation is not only solid, but has been observed in nature. The mechanisms, despite what ID theorists would have you believe, are not even mysterious. Speciation at base simply involves two population genetically drifting away from each other to the point where they can no longer interbreed. For some species we even know how this happens down to the point by point mutation (like in abalone, where the "lock/key" mechanism of sperm and eggs is constantly changing, often leaving islands of incompatibility where certain populations are stranded off of from others).
"We know that evolution can help an organism adapt... and, as the article shows, we are beginning to show that organisms do this in accordance to a pattern or (dare I say) a design."
Did you even READ the article? That's not what it shows at all. Where in the article are you finding this? Even patterns of mutation is not the same thing as design: mutation is a physical process with its own observable constraints and quirks.
"We still do know that organisms evolve into new species. And, dare I say, I doubt we ever will. The late Dr Colin Patterson, senior paleontologist of the British Museum of Natural History, wrote a book, Evolution. In reply to a questioner who asked why he had not included any pictures of transitional forms, he wrote: "I fully agree with your comments about the lack of direct illustration of evolutionary transitions in my book. If I knew of any, fossil or living, I would certainly have included them