If you were to actually study the history of fossil evidence, you'd find that that your tiny handful of frauds is dwarfed by THOUSANDS of authentic fossils which make them irrelevant. Furthermore, you'd find that of those frauds: most were never taken seriously by scientists anyway, as their particular nature contradicted everything else we knew, and thoes frauds were exposed by the work of other scientists, not creationists.
In other words, the fact that you can cite one or two examples where someone tried to make a buck or play a joke has little relevance at all to the hordes of solid evidence for the basic transitions of hominids.
Oh, I agree. I'm just making a nitpicky point about the over-willingness to ascribe to mutation what is in fact something else. I'll even note that a creationist museum has acquired that very same cat I spoke about and is trying to pass it off as evidence against evolution, claiming that all mutations are bad. The fact that it is not caused by a mutation at all was apaprently lost on the founders of the organization.:0
There is both a law of gravity and a theory of gravity. Laws are not "higher" than theories in science. Often, theories are composed OF a collection of laws and facts and so on. That's because theories are explanations, and laws are generally just descriptions of universally constant relationships.
Evolution contains many "laws" for instance. Like Dolo's Law (which is that the same evolutionary pathway is statistically unlikely to be transversed in reverse, meaning that you cannot in general "undo" evolutionary changes), which is a sort of entropy-like bound on morphological change.
It's worth noting that it is possible that the six-legged lamb is not a genetic mutation, and hence not heritable or likely to be passed on. The one-eyed cat is like this. Some of these changes are caused by different developmental events, not genetic ones. Of course, it can get complicated when you can consider that certain genetic changes can affect the rate of these developmental quirks and so on... but my point is, don't necessarily assume that every strange individual is necessarily the result of a mutation.
I agree, sort of, and I agree that we should probably play it safe in regards to the rights that we give fetuses. Of course, most states ALREADY do this: late trimester abortions are already heavily regulated, and even second trimester abortions can be: even under Rv.Wade.
I don't think there is a point at which something gains consciousness: even newborn babies have a lot less conscious awareness than adults. It's a gradient, and you have to draw an arbitrary line somewhere. But it's worth noting that you can compare different forms of life. If you feel fine killing and eating chickens, for instance, it seems bizarre to think that RU486 is bad, because it at best can kill something with far far far less individuality, feelings, psychological fear, and so on than a chicken. That's not to say that human beings and chickens are equivalent. It's just that if you are just going by degree of capacity for things like consciousness and pain and so on, its seems totally out of order to care first about the appropriate treatment of zygotes before you've worked out the appropriate treatment of chickens.
Not sure if your anonymous comment is you sig, but I mostlyagree. I think the main reason AC are given less credence is that they have no need to maintain a reputation, even for their made up name like "plunge." They can post without having any prior connection or relationship to the website, and so are on average less wedded to its rules and so on.
I should add my favorite creationist misunderstanding: the idea that one form of life should, according to evolution, "turn into" something else. i.e. that at some point, dogs should evolve into something that is not a dog. However much you breed fruit flies, they complain, all you get are fruit flies (albiet fruit flies with all sorts of different and new features, but they are STILL FRUIT FLIES!!!!)
However, common descent implies just the opposite. Just as humans are still mammals (if you keep breeding some mammals together, all you ever get is mammals! Evolution never happens!), it will still make sense to group all the descendants of "canis" (dogs/wolves/canines/etc.) as "canis." That's because however much they may change in the future, their common group origins will still serve to distinguish them and set them apart AS A GROUP from all other forms of life. Evolution is actually fairly conservative in this way. While change, sometimes quite radical change happens, a common origin is often the best predictor of the future. Just as a random walk around Chicago will most likely stay in the vicinity of Chicago rather than being confused with the random walks that start in New York, whatever changes come about to any given lineage will still stay relatively in the same areas of trait dimension as their fellows that started from the same place.
And thus, humans are still eukaryotes. We're still tetrapods. We're still therians (mammals). We're still primates. We're still apes. And all our descendants will still have be distinctly human in the sense that we will be able to group them together under the term "human" as being different from all the other apes in the same key ways.
There are, of course, some lousy words like "monkey" or "reptile" or even "fish" which somehow refer to arbitrary groupings of life but NOT at least some of the descendants of those groups. But these are archaic holdovers from a time when no one understood biology, and biologists generally don't really acknowledge them in their actual brass tacks classification system.
It's worth noting that humans are monkeys depending on how you define Monkey. The problem is that "monkey" is not a good clade. Good clades terms are supposed to include a common ancestor and all of its descendants. Generally, most people's understanding of "monkey" includes a common ancestor and only SOME of its descendants, arbitrarily excluding apes, despite the fact that apes are descended from monkeys.
Of course, "fish" "reptile" and "dinosaur" are all lousy clades as well, since there are groups nested WITHIN those groups that most people would object to calling "fish" "reptile" or "dinosaur." For instance, birds are almost certainly dinosaurs. They are descended from dinosaurs, and you never STOP being part of the group your ancestors were a part of.
If you actually knew any great apes, I think you'd see that they have quite a lot of individuality, though of course it would be a mistake to read human-like personality traits into them, as they are not human.
On the other hand, if you ever met a fetus, it would be pretty hard to work out any sort of individuality, given that at least for most of its term, it has no substantive brain function. I'm willing to grant that later term fetuses can feel pain and should be protected, but I've never understood the idea that we should care more about the fate of a zygote with no nervous system than, say, a prawn, which is infinately more self aware (and yet still not much aware).
I think any biologist you talk to would agree that "missing link" is a terrible and misleading term that journalists love (because it makes a good headline) but really has no good meaning in science.
What you have to understand is that common descent predicts all of life should be in nested clades: that means, groups nested entirely within larger groups, and so on. And not just any grouping either: a very very specific pattern of ancestry. And, in fact, despite there being something like 10 to the 38th power number of possible ways that even just 30 species could be arranged into a nested clade, we always find that fossil and genetic and morphologic evidence all point to the exact SAME arrangement.
So. We now have a sort of branching bush of life. What about fossils? Well, fossilization is a fairly rare and somewhat random process. Furthermore, environmental conditions affect it. For instance, things that live and die in the acidic forest soils almost never fossilize. Things that live in river silt fossilize quite a lot. And so on. So the fossil record is unlikely to ever give us a balanced or complete picture of every species that ever lived, and furthermore, any given fossil is far more likely to be a distant cousin of a modern animal than a direct ancestor (because there are many more branches from a line that terminate before they reach the present day). However, because all life fits into the nested clade pattern I described (and because of genetic methods we have now), we don't really need that balanced picture to work out all the basic relationships.
However, fossil evidence is often very helpful to figure out the fine details of larger transitions. There was never any recent doubt, if you understand morphology and genetics, that tetrapods evolved from lobed fishes. But the recent find fills in some of the details about what sorts of features and characteristics were around branching out from that lineage.
As to your specific question, to my knowledge there are some pretty decent fossils of insect transitions, though I don't think stick insects and centipedes are very closely related. As far as birds, I probably not what you are looking for, especially in the case of a tropical forest bird like a toucan. Acidic forest soils don't leave many fossils. Most of what we know of bird lineages comes from morphological and genetic comparison, because birds don't often fossilize.
However, it's important to realize that fossils are really not as central or as important to evolutionary biology as it might seem from the outside. We don't need entire fossil sequences to work out the general relationships, and we aren't particularly concerned from a "proving evolution" standpoint about not having them. We have more than enough evidence to be certain about common descent even if we don't know exactly what the recent ancestor of the toucan looked like.
I agree. Neither of these recent discoveries have in any way been motivated to happen because of ID. They both came about because of slow advances in how we search for fossil evidence and how we target where to look. No one planned out what would be found, and certainly not to respond to some provincial, largely American political fad.
No, that's not what convergent evolution is. Convergent evolution is when similar selection pressures cause similar _traits_ (at least when observed on a gross level: often they are different in underlying ways) to appear in different lineages. It isn't an entire species going extinct and then re-emerging out of a different lineage. The fact that the teeth of different lineages of cats (placental and marsupial) became elongated at different points in time is not the same thing as an "established Paloentological fact that the Sabertooth Tiger has appeared, went extinct, and reappeared at least four times in prehistory." It CERTAINLY isn't because domestic cats carry latent Sabretooth genes.
Uh hello? That's not what the parent poster said. They said that Sabertooth tigers had gone extinct and then re-appeared, and even that their could ust magically reappear from domestic cats at any time.
for ($pork;$American_people != "rubes";$pork++) { print "We have to have the space shuttle because how else are we going to fly people to the space station! We have to have the spacestation because otherwise the space shuttlewouldn't have anywhere to fly to!" }
Well, they have had most of their real science stuff gutted so that they can put on pointless shows of heroism to impress our dear leader.
I mean, wtf is up with missions to the moon and mars? Mars is an interesting destination, but for robots. People whine about how a human being there could do so much more, but they forget that the robots we've been able to send so far all had to be EXTREMELY tiny and simple because they had to fit into a very tiny payload. If you were actually going to send human beings to Mars, you'd have to use a HUGE payload size. And for that same size, you could send tons of really powerful and complex robots that could do far more per the space they take up than two guys, their toilet, food to turn into poop, beds, tons of water to turn into urine, and entire return trip worth of fuel, spacesuits, tons of oxygen, an entire re-launcher system to get home, playstation, and so on. Not to mention a ridiculous amount of EMPTY SPACE to give the people room to move around in.
All a total waste. All so that George Bush can promise something dramatic that has no real purpose, and probably won't even really happen anyway.
And for that, NASA has had to gut tons of small, VERY cost-efficient programs that have actual scientific merit. It's insanity of the highest degree.
Well, if you think of the rules of the game pool as sort of like the laws of nature, then some people might be impressed that someone is violating them: those lifted balls are miracles.
But then, of course, you remember that the laws of nature would have to be things that God laid down in the first place. So now we have God violating his own laws to accomplish something that he apparently couldn't do by playing by his own rules.
And if you try to fit all this into what we know of the history of life on earth, a history without evolution, what we end up with is a tinkerer: a God who has to intervene CONSTANTLY in his own natural world to fix a constantly failing and unsustainable creation.
Were I a believer, I don't see how I could ever imagine such a circumstance as being particularly majestic for an all powerful being: bizarre is more like it. But then that's the problem with creationism: it's not a theory that's thought through to its logical conclusions. It's a very brief smokescreen meant to distract, meant to get people to stop thinking and back to just affirming.
I agree, but the problem is that all the prominent "questioners" of evolution are making, well, exceedingly dumb arguments.
If evolution is all wrong, okay, but SHOW ME SOME EVIDENCE. And while you're at it, please please explain all the evidence that already exists, particularly the twin (or even triple) nested cladistic heirarchy of life.
As soon as I see a creationist/IDist even attempting to do that in a rational, non-completely out of their depth way, I'll happily listen to them. But all this "but dogs only ever breed more dogs" idiocy that can't even be bothered to understand the theory they are criticizing isn't going to cut it.
I'm not sure what you are getting at. "Striking similar" is a matter of relative degree. Most mammals are "strikingly similar" in most respects. It's not surprising that marsupial mammals have similar niches as placentals. In fact, it goes far beyond the sabertooth. There are marsupial "deer," "dogs," "bears," etc. So?
That's not the same thing as sabertooth tigers popping in and out of existence.
"since I'm a Republican you'll have to trust that I'm more familiar with it."
Unless Republican is synonymous with "historian" or "logician" I'll have to take that with a gargle of salt.:) Read Martin Luther's "On Jews and their Lies": the text that Hitler read that got him all fired up and which he cited over and over: you'll find pretty much the blueprint for everything the Nazi's did in the writings of the founder of Protestantism.
I don't really understand the state of denial here. The fact that Germans were religious, and did bad things anyway, is not some horrible secret that needs to be covered up. It doesn't mean that religion is bad, anymore than Stalin demonstrates that not having a religion is bad. Christianity used to be very anti-Semetic, but thanks in part to absolute disgust at the Holocaust, it's purged itself so completely of that that there is almost no sect in the world where someone can express anti-semetism and not be condemned for it. That's an incredible achievement, not just for Christianity, but for human society.
"And me, I just think that will give us some new thing to have wars about."
I agree. I don't think religion is bad anymore than I think sports are bad. If people express views and beliefs that I think are bad, I can say so. Trying to pin it on religion, or anything else, is a fools game. Worse, it allows the people who actually chose the act to move out of focus: they're the ones responsible.
"It's almost like to argue ID is to say that God is too stupid to design an evolutionary process or too vain to give Man free will upon the Earth."
That's what Kenneth Miller argues in his "Finding Darwin's God" a great book on the controversy. A common analougy is a pool shot: who's the better player, the guy who picks up each and every ball and drops it in the pocket? Or the guy who sinks the whole table in one shot.
"But it just shows that scientists, quite frankly, are not unbiased."
But science doesn't really rely on anyone being unbiased: its a method set up whereby good evidence eventually beats out bad. Science as a process is thus often conservative, but in the end highly flexible when the evidence is there. I can think of countless even recent examples where scientists proposed something that was controversial and harshly criticized, but ultimately became mainstream: it weathered the criticism and laid out a better case on the evidence.
When the BB was first introduced, it was controversial not only because it was different, but because the evidence for it wasn't very convincing yet and the current model still seemed to work pretty well. More evidence and developments elsewhere (like relativity) made the case, and won most everyone over pretty quickly. In fact, compared to virtually every other area of authority, from religion to politics, I'd say that the remarkable thing is how quickly people were to admit that they were wrong when the evidence showed them they in fact were.
As for the evolution debate, I agree that most people are unaware of the evidence, but I don't see how this is the fault of scientists. I mean, countless great resources and books have been written trying to explain things not only to other scientists, but also laypeople. The problem as I see it is that no matter how good your explanation is, it still requires readers to spend a lot of time and energy digesting it all: time many people don't have, or even refuse to commit to because they are hostile to the idea in the first place.
I also don't think it's quite fair to cite them insulting creationists while leaving out that creationists spend most of their time and energy insulting scientists, ascribing evil conspiracy motives to them, and trumpeting pure falsehoods. When a movement exists that constantly repeats a fallacy like how the 2nd law disproves evolution, how can you not get a little pissed off after awhile? I don't feel like creationists or even the ID movement has laid out good evidence for their case, and in fact I can point to countless examples where they really seem to spend most of their time on PR gambits, misleading people, misquoting scientists, and so forth.
This is not what the people pushing the Big Bang, symbiotic mitchondria, or all the rest did. They proved their cases, not by appealing to popular sentiment, but by producing convincing research and argument that couldn't be ignored and survived criticism. Creationists have generally done just the opposite: most of their arguments are so peppered with simple mistakes that they haven't even survived a basic first reading... and yet those arguments keep getting made as long as they continue to sound convincing to laypeople.
"They won't even entertain any alternate theories to evolution anymore, even if it was made by a non-religious person."
That's because, in science, you have to have evidence to back up what you say. If it were the case that scientists were just tossing away lots of convincing evidence against evolution and for another theory, you'd have a point. But instead, most of what they are being attacked with is hordes of poorly informed nonsense that's been dealt with a million times.
I would bet that with a little research, you could find huge gaping flaws in the logic of most of your ICR PhDs. In fact, I know so, because I'm aware of the work. From people arguing subjects outside of their field (which doesn't make them wrong, but which should certainly preclude them from claiming special authority just because they have a degree in something else) to people getting the basic facts mangled and misunderstood, I have a hard time seeing how the view that scientists are a bunch of dogmatists who simply wont listen to the virtuous arguments of heretics is anything more than self-serving.
"Nazism is sort of the ultimate proof that you don't need a Godlike God to go and destroy other people."
I think you meant Stalin. As crazy as Hitler became in his later years when he saw organized religion as just another obstacle in his way, his whole basic anti-semetic philosophy was basically a plagarism of Martin Luther's "On Jews and Their Lies" and the manipulation of centuries of church-approved anti-semetic prejeduce. Hitler referenced God and god's authority in his speeches as much if not more often than politicians today. The highest Nazi honor was the Iron Cross... and so on. The idea that a highly religious country like Germany somehow magically transformed overnight into a bunch of atheists is absurd.
You don't need evidence to demonstrate that the godless can be bad people. We're just people, after all, not some radically different form of life.
"If a Creationist, for example, points out a flaw, if he isn't met with outright derision, his flaw is usually dismissed offhandedly whether he has a point or not."
If you could produce some examples of creationists that have good points, you might be on firmer ground. But by and large, I've never really heard creationists make well informed criticisms, let alone ones that were "good points."
On the other hand, within science, there have knock-down cat scratch vicious fights over things like symbiotic theory, punk eek, Woese's theory of multiple common ancestors, and so on, all of which were pretty major criticisms. All of them were eventually incorporated into science. Why? Because the people making them had good points in the way that science measures good points: those backed up with solid evidence.
Oh really? You mean, the Behe that claims to accept common descent? The Behe who does not claim to be a creationist? That Behe?
Nice try, but you stepped into your own tarpit. I didn't say that merely being educated would convince you: and it's always still quite possible to be just plain wrong, no matter how smart or informed you are (though it's telling that ID mostly seems to be the need of a well-educated people who struggle with combining science with their faith). But I'm more than willing to state that most people's denials are based on a lack of understanding. That's easy to see from all the grossly uninformed criticisms made of evolution.
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If you were to actually study the history of fossil evidence, you'd find that that your tiny handful of frauds is dwarfed by THOUSANDS of authentic fossils which make them irrelevant. Furthermore, you'd find that of those frauds: most were never taken seriously by scientists anyway, as their particular nature contradicted everything else we knew, and thoes frauds were exposed by the work of other scientists, not creationists.
In other words, the fact that you can cite one or two examples where someone tried to make a buck or play a joke has little relevance at all to the hordes of solid evidence for the basic transitions of hominids.
Oh, I agree. I'm just making a nitpicky point about the over-willingness to ascribe to mutation what is in fact something else. I'll even note that a creationist museum has acquired that very same cat I spoke about and is trying to pass it off as evidence against evolution, claiming that all mutations are bad. The fact that it is not caused by a mutation at all was apaprently lost on the founders of the organization. :0
There is both a law of gravity and a theory of gravity. Laws are not "higher" than theories in science. Often, theories are composed OF a collection of laws and facts and so on. That's because theories are explanations, and laws are generally just descriptions of universally constant relationships.
Evolution contains many "laws" for instance. Like Dolo's Law (which is that the same evolutionary pathway is statistically unlikely to be transversed in reverse, meaning that you cannot in general "undo" evolutionary changes), which is a sort of entropy-like bound on morphological change.
Evolution is a theory. It's also a fact. :)
It's worth noting that it is possible that the six-legged lamb is not a genetic mutation, and hence not heritable or likely to be passed on. The one-eyed cat is like this. Some of these changes are caused by different developmental events, not genetic ones. Of course, it can get complicated when you can consider that certain genetic changes can affect the rate of these developmental quirks and so on... but my point is, don't necessarily assume that every strange individual is necessarily the result of a mutation.
I agree, sort of, and I agree that we should probably play it safe in regards to the rights that we give fetuses. Of course, most states ALREADY do this: late trimester abortions are already heavily regulated, and even second trimester abortions can be: even under Rv.Wade.
I don't think there is a point at which something gains consciousness: even newborn babies have a lot less conscious awareness than adults. It's a gradient, and you have to draw an arbitrary line somewhere. But it's worth noting that you can compare different forms of life. If you feel fine killing and eating chickens, for instance, it seems bizarre to think that RU486 is bad, because it at best can kill something with far far far less individuality, feelings, psychological fear, and so on than a chicken. That's not to say that human beings and chickens are equivalent. It's just that if you are just going by degree of capacity for things like consciousness and pain and so on, its seems totally out of order to care first about the appropriate treatment of zygotes before you've worked out the appropriate treatment of chickens.
Not sure if your anonymous comment is you sig, but I mostlyagree. I think the main reason AC are given less credence is that they have no need to maintain a reputation, even for their made up name like "plunge." They can post without having any prior connection or relationship to the website, and so are on average less wedded to its rules and so on.
I should add my favorite creationist misunderstanding: the idea that one form of life should, according to evolution, "turn into" something else. i.e. that at some point, dogs should evolve into something that is not a dog. However much you breed fruit flies, they complain, all you get are fruit flies (albiet fruit flies with all sorts of different and new features, but they are STILL FRUIT FLIES!!!!)
However, common descent implies just the opposite. Just as humans are still mammals (if you keep breeding some mammals together, all you ever get is mammals! Evolution never happens!), it will still make sense to group all the descendants of "canis" (dogs/wolves/canines/etc.) as "canis." That's because however much they may change in the future, their common group origins will still serve to distinguish them and set them apart AS A GROUP from all other forms of life. Evolution is actually fairly conservative in this way. While change, sometimes quite radical change happens, a common origin is often the best predictor of the future. Just as a random walk around Chicago will most likely stay in the vicinity of Chicago rather than being confused with the random walks that start in New York, whatever changes come about to any given lineage will still stay relatively in the same areas of trait dimension as their fellows that started from the same place.
And thus, humans are still eukaryotes. We're still tetrapods. We're still therians (mammals). We're still primates. We're still apes. And all our descendants will still have be distinctly human in the sense that we will be able to group them together under the term "human" as being different from all the other apes in the same key ways.
There are, of course, some lousy words like "monkey" or "reptile" or even "fish" which somehow refer to arbitrary groupings of life but NOT at least some of the descendants of those groups. But these are archaic holdovers from a time when no one understood biology, and biologists generally don't really acknowledge them in their actual brass tacks classification system.
It's worth noting that humans are monkeys depending on how you define Monkey. The problem is that "monkey" is not a good clade. Good clades terms are supposed to include a common ancestor and all of its descendants. Generally, most people's understanding of "monkey" includes a common ancestor and only SOME of its descendants, arbitrarily excluding apes, despite the fact that apes are descended from monkeys.
Of course, "fish" "reptile" and "dinosaur" are all lousy clades as well, since there are groups nested WITHIN those groups that most people would object to calling "fish" "reptile" or "dinosaur." For instance, birds are almost certainly dinosaurs. They are descended from dinosaurs, and you never STOP being part of the group your ancestors were a part of.
Humans are nested within the great apes.
If you actually knew any great apes, I think you'd see that they have quite a lot of individuality, though of course it would be a mistake to read human-like personality traits into them, as they are not human.
On the other hand, if you ever met a fetus, it would be pretty hard to work out any sort of individuality, given that at least for most of its term, it has no substantive brain function. I'm willing to grant that later term fetuses can feel pain and should be protected, but I've never understood the idea that we should care more about the fate of a zygote with no nervous system than, say, a prawn, which is infinately more self aware (and yet still not much aware).
I think any biologist you talk to would agree that "missing link" is a terrible and misleading term that journalists love (because it makes a good headline) but really has no good meaning in science.
What you have to understand is that common descent predicts all of life should be in nested clades: that means, groups nested entirely within larger groups, and so on. And not just any grouping either: a very very specific pattern of ancestry. And, in fact, despite there being something like 10 to the 38th power number of possible ways that even just 30 species could be arranged into a nested clade, we always find that fossil and genetic and morphologic evidence all point to the exact SAME arrangement.
So. We now have a sort of branching bush of life. What about fossils? Well, fossilization is a fairly rare and somewhat random process. Furthermore, environmental conditions affect it. For instance, things that live and die in the acidic forest soils almost never fossilize. Things that live in river silt fossilize quite a lot. And so on. So the fossil record is unlikely to ever give us a balanced or complete picture of every species that ever lived, and furthermore, any given fossil is far more likely to be a distant cousin of a modern animal than a direct ancestor (because there are many more branches from a line that terminate before they reach the present day). However, because all life fits into the nested clade pattern I described (and because of genetic methods we have now), we don't really need that balanced picture to work out all the basic relationships.
However, fossil evidence is often very helpful to figure out the fine details of larger transitions. There was never any recent doubt, if you understand morphology and genetics, that tetrapods evolved from lobed fishes. But the recent find fills in some of the details about what sorts of features and characteristics were around branching out from that lineage.
As to your specific question, to my knowledge there are some pretty decent fossils of insect transitions, though I don't think stick insects and centipedes are very closely related. As far as birds, I probably not what you are looking for, especially in the case of a tropical forest bird like a toucan. Acidic forest soils don't leave many fossils. Most of what we know of bird lineages comes from morphological and genetic comparison, because birds don't often fossilize.
However, it's important to realize that fossils are really not as central or as important to evolutionary biology as it might seem from the outside. We don't need entire fossil sequences to work out the general relationships, and we aren't particularly concerned from a "proving evolution" standpoint about not having them. We have more than enough evidence to be certain about common descent even if we don't know exactly what the recent ancestor of the toucan looked like.
I agree. Neither of these recent discoveries have in any way been motivated to happen because of ID. They both came about because of slow advances in how we search for fossil evidence and how we target where to look. No one planned out what would be found, and certainly not to respond to some provincial, largely American political fad.
No, that's not what convergent evolution is. Convergent evolution is when similar selection pressures cause similar _traits_ (at least when observed on a gross level: often they are different in underlying ways) to appear in different lineages. It isn't an entire species going extinct and then re-emerging out of a different lineage. The fact that the teeth of different lineages of cats (placental and marsupial) became elongated at different points in time is not the same thing as an "established Paloentological fact that the Sabertooth Tiger has appeared, went extinct, and reappeared at least four times in prehistory." It CERTAINLY isn't because domestic cats carry latent Sabretooth genes.
Uh hello? That's not what the parent poster said. They said that Sabertooth tigers had gone extinct and then re-appeared, and even that their could ust magically reappear from domestic cats at any time.
That's NOT what "convergent evolution" is.
for ($pork;$American_people != "rubes" ;$pork++)
{
print "We have to have the space shuttle because how else are we going to fly people to the space station! We have to have the spacestation because otherwise the space shuttlewouldn't have anywhere to fly to!"
}
Well, they have had most of their real science stuff gutted so that they can put on pointless shows of heroism to impress our dear leader.
I mean, wtf is up with missions to the moon and mars? Mars is an interesting destination, but for robots. People whine about how a human being there could do so much more, but they forget that the robots we've been able to send so far all had to be EXTREMELY tiny and simple because they had to fit into a very tiny payload. If you were actually going to send human beings to Mars, you'd have to use a HUGE payload size. And for that same size, you could send tons of really powerful and complex robots that could do far more per the space they take up than two guys, their toilet, food to turn into poop, beds, tons of water to turn into urine, and entire return trip worth of fuel, spacesuits, tons of oxygen, an entire re-launcher system to get home, playstation, and so on. Not to mention a ridiculous amount of EMPTY SPACE to give the people room to move around in.
All a total waste. All so that George Bush can promise something dramatic that has no real purpose, and probably won't even really happen anyway.
And for that, NASA has had to gut tons of small, VERY cost-efficient programs that have actual scientific merit. It's insanity of the highest degree.
You mean my iPod isn't nontechnology???? (cries....)
Well, if you think of the rules of the game pool as sort of like the laws of nature, then some people might be impressed that someone is violating them: those lifted balls are miracles.
But then, of course, you remember that the laws of nature would have to be things that God laid down in the first place. So now we have God violating his own laws to accomplish something that he apparently couldn't do by playing by his own rules.
And if you try to fit all this into what we know of the history of life on earth, a history without evolution, what we end up with is a tinkerer: a God who has to intervene CONSTANTLY in his own natural world to fix a constantly failing and unsustainable creation.
Were I a believer, I don't see how I could ever imagine such a circumstance as being particularly majestic for an all powerful being: bizarre is more like it. But then that's the problem with creationism: it's not a theory that's thought through to its logical conclusions. It's a very brief smokescreen meant to distract, meant to get people to stop thinking and back to just affirming.
I agree, but the problem is that all the prominent "questioners" of evolution are making, well, exceedingly dumb arguments.
If evolution is all wrong, okay, but SHOW ME SOME EVIDENCE. And while you're at it, please please explain all the evidence that already exists, particularly the twin (or even triple) nested cladistic heirarchy of life.
As soon as I see a creationist/IDist even attempting to do that in a rational, non-completely out of their depth way, I'll happily listen to them. But all this "but dogs only ever breed more dogs" idiocy that can't even be bothered to understand the theory they are criticizing isn't going to cut it.
LOL.
:)
Omg, you've solved the halting problem! Turing was wrong! Oh wait, nope, you just din't understand what it was in the first place.
I'm not sure what you are getting at. "Striking similar" is a matter of relative degree. Most mammals are "strikingly similar" in most respects. It's not surprising that marsupial mammals have similar niches as placentals. In fact, it goes far beyond the sabertooth. There are marsupial "deer," "dogs," "bears," etc. So?
That's not the same thing as sabertooth tigers popping in and out of existence.
"since I'm a Republican you'll have to trust that I'm more familiar with it."
:) Read Martin Luther's "On Jews and their Lies": the text that Hitler read that got him all fired up and which he cited over and over: you'll find pretty much the blueprint for everything the Nazi's did in the writings of the founder of Protestantism.
Unless Republican is synonymous with "historian" or "logician" I'll have to take that with a gargle of salt.
I don't really understand the state of denial here. The fact that Germans were religious, and did bad things anyway, is not some horrible secret that needs to be covered up. It doesn't mean that religion is bad, anymore than Stalin demonstrates that not having a religion is bad. Christianity used to be very anti-Semetic, but thanks in part to absolute disgust at the Holocaust, it's purged itself so completely of that that there is almost no sect in the world where someone can express anti-semetism and not be condemned for it. That's an incredible achievement, not just for Christianity, but for human society.
"And me, I just think that will give us some new thing to have wars about."
I agree. I don't think religion is bad anymore than I think sports are bad. If people express views and beliefs that I think are bad, I can say so. Trying to pin it on religion, or anything else, is a fools game. Worse, it allows the people who actually chose the act to move out of focus: they're the ones responsible.
"It's almost like to argue ID is to say that God is too stupid to design an evolutionary process or too vain to give Man free will upon the Earth."
That's what Kenneth Miller argues in his "Finding Darwin's God" a great book on the controversy. A common analougy is a pool shot: who's the better player, the guy who picks up each and every ball and drops it in the pocket? Or the guy who sinks the whole table in one shot.
"But it just shows that scientists, quite frankly, are not unbiased."
But science doesn't really rely on anyone being unbiased: its a method set up whereby good evidence eventually beats out bad. Science as a process is thus often conservative, but in the end highly flexible when the evidence is there. I can think of countless even recent examples where scientists proposed something that was controversial and harshly criticized, but ultimately became mainstream: it weathered the criticism and laid out a better case on the evidence.
When the BB was first introduced, it was controversial not only because it was different, but because the evidence for it wasn't very convincing yet and the current model still seemed to work pretty well. More evidence and developments elsewhere (like relativity) made the case, and won most everyone over pretty quickly. In fact, compared to virtually every other area of authority, from religion to politics, I'd say that the remarkable thing is how quickly people were to admit that they were wrong when the evidence showed them they in fact were.
As for the evolution debate, I agree that most people are unaware of the evidence, but I don't see how this is the fault of scientists. I mean, countless great resources and books have been written trying to explain things not only to other scientists, but also laypeople. The problem as I see it is that no matter how good your explanation is, it still requires readers to spend a lot of time and energy digesting it all: time many people don't have, or even refuse to commit to because they are hostile to the idea in the first place.
I also don't think it's quite fair to cite them insulting creationists while leaving out that creationists spend most of their time and energy insulting scientists, ascribing evil conspiracy motives to them, and trumpeting pure falsehoods. When a movement exists that constantly repeats a fallacy like how the 2nd law disproves evolution, how can you not get a little pissed off after awhile? I don't feel like creationists or even the ID movement has laid out good evidence for their case, and in fact I can point to countless examples where they really seem to spend most of their time on PR gambits, misleading people, misquoting scientists, and so forth.
This is not what the people pushing the Big Bang, symbiotic mitchondria, or all the rest did. They proved their cases, not by appealing to popular sentiment, but by producing convincing research and argument that couldn't be ignored and survived criticism. Creationists have generally done just the opposite: most of their arguments are so peppered with simple mistakes that they haven't even survived a basic first reading... and yet those arguments keep getting made as long as they continue to sound convincing to laypeople.
"They won't even entertain any alternate theories to evolution anymore, even if it was made by a non-religious person."
That's because, in science, you have to have evidence to back up what you say. If it were the case that scientists were just tossing away lots of convincing evidence against evolution and for another theory, you'd have a point. But instead, most of what they are being attacked with is hordes of poorly informed nonsense that's been dealt with a million times.
I would bet that with a little research, you could find huge gaping flaws in the logic of most of your ICR PhDs. In fact, I know so, because I'm aware of the work. From people arguing subjects outside of their field (which doesn't make them wrong, but which should certainly preclude them from claiming special authority just because they have a degree in something else) to people getting the basic facts mangled and misunderstood, I have a hard time seeing how the view that scientists are a bunch of dogmatists who simply wont listen to the virtuous arguments of heretics is anything more than self-serving.
"Nazism is sort of the ultimate proof that you don't need a Godlike God to go and destroy other people."
I think you meant Stalin. As crazy as Hitler became in his later years when he saw organized religion as just another obstacle in his way, his whole basic anti-semetic philosophy was basically a plagarism of Martin Luther's "On Jews and Their Lies" and the manipulation of centuries of church-approved anti-semetic prejeduce. Hitler referenced God and god's authority in his speeches as much if not more often than politicians today. The highest Nazi honor was the Iron Cross... and so on. The idea that a highly religious country like Germany somehow magically transformed overnight into a bunch of atheists is absurd.
You don't need evidence to demonstrate that the godless can be bad people. We're just people, after all, not some radically different form of life.
"If a Creationist, for example, points out a flaw, if he isn't met with outright derision, his flaw is usually dismissed offhandedly whether he has a point or not."
If you could produce some examples of creationists that have good points, you might be on firmer ground. But by and large, I've never really heard creationists make well informed criticisms, let alone ones that were "good points."
On the other hand, within science, there have knock-down cat scratch vicious fights over things like symbiotic theory, punk eek, Woese's theory of multiple common ancestors, and so on, all of which were pretty major criticisms. All of them were eventually incorporated into science. Why? Because the people making them had good points in the way that science measures good points: those backed up with solid evidence.
Oh really? You mean, the Behe that claims to accept common descent? The Behe who does not claim to be a creationist? That Behe?
Nice try, but you stepped into your own tarpit. I didn't say that merely being educated would convince you: and it's always still quite possible to be just plain wrong, no matter how smart or informed you are (though it's telling that ID mostly seems to be the need of a well-educated people who struggle with combining science with their faith). But I'm more than willing to state that most people's denials are based on a lack of understanding. That's easy to see from all the grossly uninformed criticisms made of evolution.