You are understating the case. This stuff was NOT, in fact, the preserved tissue itself, just sitting there but really really old. It was fossilized remains (which means, mostly being composed of othre materials that had leeched into and replaced what was there while retaining its structure) that happened to contain trace elements of the original chemical compounds when separated out in a centerfuge. Most people hear "T-Rex tissue" and they think of some barely decayed meat. This allows the creationists to fool them quite easily into thinking that it can't have been around for very long.
Eh? It also says: "Archaeopteryx is a powerful piece of evidence that birds evolved from dinosaurs. The skeleton is most similar to the dinosaurs of the families Dromaeosauridae and Troodontidae. "
Your quote about "perhaps produced as many questions as answers" is taken out of context. This sentence doesn't describe the fossil's general understanding as a related to both dinosaurs and the line of modern birds: it's about the very particular place of the fossil in this branch of things and its particular lifestyle, which of course is far more of a speculative matter. It's really important not to confuse and conflate all the various things we know and do not know about evolution and various fossilized species. Some things we know very very well. Other things are a mystery. The parts pertaining to demonstrating evolution and common descent in general we often know very very well. Things like exactly what any given fossil was ancestral to we generally know less well, since it is very hard to tell.
While its not fully certain, its pretty well accepted at this point that birds are descended from dinosaurs. They share too much in common in the way of otherwise unique features. The recent realization that there were many dinos that had feathers further clinches the connection, as well as the study of fossilized T-rex tissue: which turns out to have a tissue layer that, of all living animals, only birds have.
"Well, not really. It COULD be something totally unique."
Well, yes, except that morphologically it fits in at only one place and time into the tree of life. As you can read from the article, no one is saying that it is a direct ancestor of modern life, because we cannot know, as you note, it's particular future. But we CAN tell its past and from what orders of life it came, and its existence tells us all about what sorts of creatures were around and what they were like on this particular branch of the tree that led to modern land animals.
"We breed dogs with all sorts of other types of dogs, sometimes wolves, coyotes, and even Jackals and Hyenas (all in the "canis" family) and we always get offspring that are DOGS!"
I hate to break it to you, but if you think that evolution suggests something different, you are mistaken. Your exclamation is about as silly as saying "but if you breed two mammals together, we always get MAMMALS!"
Evolution is cladistically conservative. New species branch out from old categories: they do not replace or exit them. Just as all the species that will descend from dogs can still be grouped as "dogs" (because they will all still share the same traits that distinguished dogs from all other forms of life).
Of course, your statement is wrong anyway. There are plenty of canis that cannot interbreed already. It might even be the case with some domestic dogs: it's just that we've never really seriously tried.
"Third, they simply claim that this previously undiscovered creature is something "in transition" from one being to another when this is the first one found. How do they know that it's not just a unique creature that died out (ie: gone extinct)."
You're mixing up claims about this specific species with what a transitional fossil actually is. Transitionals are creatures that have the distinctive and otherwise unique features of both an earlier group (in this case lobed fishes) and a later group (in this case tetrapods). We know that this creature was related to the tetrapods because it has several features that are unique to tetrapods or otherwise related to tetrapods, while at the same time being identifiably Stegocephalian. As point of fact, you are also still a Stegocephalian. Just as you are: a tetrapod, an amniote, a synapsid, a therian, a eutherian (what you think of as a mammal), a primate, an ape, and a sapien sapien. If you mated with someone and produced offspring, I could scream "BUT THEIR BABY IS STILL A EUKARYOTE!" I would be right: but it wouldn't make a lick of difference in disproving evolution.
The problem is that you misunderstand evolution.
"There's no way to prove that this was an "adaption" to moving from water to land - else, why do animals like ducks still lay eggs"
I don't know what you mean by why. They lay eggs because all descendants of the early amniotes have eggs with amniotic fluid. Including humans.
"(or the platypus, et al)"
Platypi are monotremes, a group of therians (one of three, the other two being the placentals and the marsupials). Therians as a rule lay eggs. But their "eggs" are not like bird eggs. They are almost as if someone gave birth without first breaking the placenta: the "egg" is thin and membranous like a placenta, and it hatches almost immediately.
"and some mammals (whales, dolphins, seals, etc) live entirely in the water (but not breathe in the water like fish and some reptiles) bear live young like mammals if this is indeed an evolutionary change..."
Cetaceans very obviously tetrapods returned to the water. As such, they bear all the distinctive features of their tetrapod, amniote, euthreian, and so on ancestry, but have modified these features for life in the water. The features they have are not some random grab bag of features. They are all mammal features. Even the fact that they've "lost" their back limbs is deceptive: in the embryonic stage they still grow back limbs (which are then reabsorbed!). Sometimes, they are actually born with limbs (an atavism: just like when humans are born with tails), which happen to be in just the right place and hooked up to their vestigial pelvic girdle in just the right way... to be a tetrapod.
At one time, before evolution or cladistics were really understood, laypeople found them quite weird. However, there is nothing evolutionarily inexplicable about them today. Nothing about them is really birdlike: from egg-laying to the bill, all their features are characteristically therian, the group from which monotremes, placental, and marsupials descended.
"True there are numerous species in existence today, but we cannot identify DIRECT parent and child species of any particular species, respectively."
Correct! Evolution works by branching. That means there are almost an infinite number more distantly related _cousins_ in the fossil record than there are direct ancestors of any living creature. Given how rare fossilization is (even for the dinos), there's no reason at all to expect every single creature that ever lived to fossilize, which is basically what you're asking for. You need to learn a lot more about how fossilization works.
You're playing fast and loose here. Sure, ID as a movement makes it bread and butter about being coy, and not actually stating anything at all positive about their beliefs or expectations. But in practice, most of its major proponents have gone on record doubting this or that aspect of common descent or the fossil record. Even Behe, who purports to accept common descent, has made claims about how certain fossils would never be found... ironically just a year before they WERE found.
You don't understand the method. Observation is observation of some fact or state of affairs that we want to explain. In evolution, those facts are things like the fossil record, the diversity of life on earth, and the very particular character of that life. "Observation" is not a requirement that we see things with out eyeballs, or even the part where we draw conclusions. It's the set of circumstances that we are trying to explain. That's why it comes first. It's TESTING where we find out if the explanation was correct or not.
And that's where you go wrong again. Testing in evolution is testing any given piece of evidence to see if it confirms or disconfirms the theory. If you don't think evolutionary biologists run tests or use evidence to confirm or disconfirm their claims, then you don't know anything about the field.
IF evolution is true, then all other sorts of things MUST be true. Are they true, or not? We test, and find out. We gather evidence and compare it to those theoretical requirements. Does it hold up? Yes, it does: in fact it holds up in spectacular and exacting detail.
If what you were saying were true, then forensic science wouldn't be science either. But, unfortunately for your post, it is science. I don't think you're liable to find any textbook on the scientific method that would actually support what you are saying.
Yep. While "information" doesn't really have a good single definition space in biology (what exactly IS the information in biology? The functions? the code? expressed or unexpressed? Gene pools? Single creatures?), one good way to think about evolution is as an information imprinting process. Information about the environment is being imprinted onto an otherwise somewhat random walk through the space of traits in a gene pool.
I'm not sure what your point is. Whether or not this particular creature left water or not, it's still something morphologically between the later tetrapods and lobed-fishes that clues us into what sort of developments were going on.
If you aren't aware of the evidence for evolution, I could see how you might not think it vast. But once you look into it, into the twin nested heiarchy, into the convergence of an inumerable number of required evidential findings, it's pretty clear that what you're looking at has more and stronger evidential support than almost anything.
Creationists have been declaring that there are a "growing number" of doubters or biologists or what have you challenging evolution since the 1800s. That doesn't make it true. If anything, the numbe rhas declined over time.
This is false: some of them are biologists. That's irrelevant, of course, given the other problems with the statement, but it's worth not going too far and making false statements.
The only reason it seems like handwaving is because most people know that their audience wouldn't stick around if they went into detail. There's a lot of evidential support for just this very pathway. Furthremore, since the original challenge was one of plausibility, not history, a response based on possibility is certainly acceptable, and hardly cause for complaint.
"Prediction involves things that haven't happened."
And the discovery of ambulocetus had not yet happened. Then, after it was not only predicted, but genetic studies purported to tell us where to look for it, we found it. What is that, if not predictive power?
It both predicts AND requires it. They are of a kind.
It's zero. Look, it's certainly understandable that a layperson looking at something is going to see a vaugely froglike/croclike creature. That's because you are trying to tie it back to something in your own experience. But when you sit down with a creature like this in an informed way, there are countless important differences that demonstrate that this fossil is pre-amphibian/reptilian (of course, amphibians and lizards are the groups that emerge from this particular branch of life). Morphology is a study all unto its own, and it's a lot more complicated than simpyl looking at a platypus can declaring "it's a bird/mammal!" when in fact none of its features are in any way bird-like (it's beak is not a birds beak, it's eggs are not like bird eggs, and so on).
"No more than the leaders of various murderous regimes could make a similar case that they're acting on the "facts" (which are stated outright by people like Darby) that "religion is evil" and must be "wiped out"."
So, in your opinion, the Catholic Church was once a murderous regime? To you think they would beg to differ? My point is that Christianity purports to be an ideology. You can'y play the True Scotsman fallacy and rule out of hand all purported examples of that ideology being bad (as opposed to being used badly) anymore than you can accuse all Christians of believing the same things or being responsible for the beliefs of Christians with which they do not agree.
"But not as atheists"
precisely the point! One doesn't do ANYTHING "as" an atheist. One is an atheist by virtue of NOT being a theist. Otherwise, they are just a person.
"In doing so, these people expose themselves as a community of just the sort you deny exists, or can exist."
You yourself said: not AS atheists. As people that dislike religion perhaps, but then into such a group we cannot help but lump any number of theists. Jefferson, for instance, was a theist, but highly anti-religious in the same way as most atheists. Adams was a theist, but he was as also an elitist: he believed that what he called superstitions (meaning the religion of the common man) was a necessary evil to keep the uneducated in check.
And of course, the usual bugaboos like the ACLU are mostly made up of liberal BELIEVERS, which often gets overlooked.
"In that sense, they're hardly any different from that minority of atheists that managed to exterminate tens of millions of innocent lives -- or that minority of Christians that managed to sanction the Inquisition, and similar horrors."
So, is it your opinion that no criticism is allowed of religion without that criticism itself BEING a religion? Is not having or wanting an apple a type of apple? If you shave your head, is your hair color "bald?"
"In any case, atheists would do well (and be more intellectually honest) to stop using labels like "religion" in discussions such as this, and instead be more specific about exactly which behaviors they are criticizing, promoting, etc."
I agree. I'm just pointing out that various religions are not like atheism, and atheism is not a religion. Because religions are belief systems, and because they do have principles that CAN potentially be bad, they cannot be definitionally immune to criticism. Atheism, on the other hand, is not an ideology, not a set of beliefs or anything. If you want to criticize particular people for their hostility to religion, that's one thing. But to criticize them as atheists makes little logical sense. You seem to assert that being criticial of religion makes just as little sense. But because particular religions are defined and describe actual belief systems, they are not comparable. They are open to criticism in that way in a way atheism is not, at least not qua atheism.
"In that sense, saying "Christians were responsible for the Inquisition" is similar to saying "Atheists were responsible for the atrocities of Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot"."
No it isn't: you've changed subjects here. We were talking about the _ideology_, not just the characteristics of the people (if we were, then I could say that "Hindus commit murder!" which is absurdly pointless) Christianity is at least a body of ideas and claims. The leaders of the Inquisition could at least make some sort of plausible case that they were acting on those ideas, acting as Christians should. We can debate this because nobody can definitively say what Chrisitianity is or isn't. But it can at least be plausibly debated. Atheism, on the other hand, has no body of ideas or claims. It isn't itself a worldview or an ideology.
"Denying not only that God exists (or that gods exist), but also that those who believe otherwise are at best misguided, at worst evil (see Darby's earlier post for an example of how atheistic thinking ends up going down that road), seems about as "common" as necessary for the purpose(s) at hand."
None of these elements are common to all atheists, and regardless, even if they were, they simply would not be enough to constitute an ideology of its own. Communism is an ideology. Secular humanism is an ideology. Atheism is a category-by-exclusion, nto inclusion.
"They pertain to advantages and disadvantages of a coherent philosophy: atheists (in the pure sense, not in the "hijacked" or "hijacking" sense) don't have to worry about being in violent disagreement with each other, because what would they disagree about?"
Again, while I see you are starting to grok the right track here, you're still thinking of atheists as if they were some organization or class of people in society. But it makes no more sense to classify all atheists this way than it does to classify all non-American Idol fans together.
"In short, it seems our universe is designed to reward affirmation, rather than denial, as a precursor to reproduction."
See, you're still on the wrong track. Atheists affirm all SORTS of things. You're just so obsessed with whether or not someone affirms your particular metaphysics that you've completely forgotten for the moment how people go about living their lives, having values and convictions, politics, goals, hopes, and so forth, utterly regardless of their religious categories.
One can at least always at least argue that the source Christian texts or founders had bad ideas: there is SOME common content to Christianity that one can point to. There are no source atheist texts. There is no common content to atheism.
"whereas there are people and institutions today who defend (passively -- by not bringing up uncomfortable truths about, e.g., reporting on the USSR at the time of Stalin and Lenin -- if not actively) Communist and other atheistic mass-murder."
Again, noting that something is "atheistic" is about as descriptive as calling is "non-Star-Wars-themed." There is no doctrine "atheism" that anything can be "istic" about. There is no belief necessary for all atheists.
"As "attractive" (due at least to its simplicity) as Atheism is, there's little evidence it provides such a basis,"
No, you still misunderstand. No one is _just_ an atheist (except in the sense that rocks are atheists). Being an atheist is neither attractive or unattractive. All atheists have values and ideologies of their own.
But the biologist isn't using them how you are using them. i.e., biologists don't speak of them as some separate entity. The speak of them in the sense of talking about large scale changes vs. changes to single populations. Not unlike micro/macroeconomics.
I hate to burst your bubble, but changing numbers of chromosomes is no big mystery. While in primates in particular they happen to be fairly stable, even within human beings there are people walking around RIGHT NOW with different numbers of chromosomes who can reproduce. Heck, 1 out of every 900 people has a Robertsonian translocation! And our chromosome difference from other apes is pretty simple to explain: we have a chromosome which is very obviously two basal ape chromosomes fused together: so obviously that the tell-tale "ends" are still there, right in the middle of our fused chromosome! These sorts of fusions happen all the time.
Different numbers of chromosomes is not necessarily a serious barrier to reproductive success either. Mice chromosome numbers range fairly widely, for instance.
Put simply, your claim of a "barrier" between micro and macro changes is simply wrong. While scientists do refer to things like macroevolutionary trends, what they mean are descriptions of processes that affect many species at once, like extinction events or genetic drift. But that's not the same thing as what you imply: some sort of hard "line" that makes it hard for one species to have descended from others that were different.
There are any number of things you do with your code that is never observed in nature. For instance, you could decide that you've come up with a really good idea or rewrite of some basic function library, and spread it to all your code. But that sort of lateral transmission never appears in biology: genes that crop up in a particular lineage are only ever found in its descendants. Without exception. Your code probably also has all sorts of non-nested heirarchy too. For instance, some program may have functions A B C and D. Another might have C and D. Another, just A and D. But in biology, we find ONLY the nested cladistic pattern. Sure, and intelligent designer could deliberately mimic that pattern, but then a sufficiently intelligent designer could mimic ANY pattern in ANYTHING. The only explanation that DEMANDS this particular pattern, demands it our else it fails on the evidence, is common descent.
More importantly, the nested heirarchy we have has at least three different completely indepedent methods of being sampled: you can do genetic comparisons based on inherited sequences, you can look at the fossil/geographical record, and you can compare outward morphologies. When you do so, you come up with a cladistic tree: those nested heirachies. And yet, when you compare these three trees with each other... you find that they are exactly the same. In fact, they are the same to a matter of precision far exceeding almost any physical constant we can measure (that's because for every extra animal you add to a cladistic tree, there are an exponential number of different ways the tree could then be arranged into a nested pattern). That convergence of evidence is one of the reasons that evolutionary theory is held to be so certain: one of if not the most certain in all science. No other field has the sort of broad and complex range of evidence that all converges on the same point. Even human history can often only cite a few converging pieces of evidence. With biology, the convergence can be drawn from evidence from millions of example of all sorts of different fields, all at once, and all confirming the same conclusion over and over.
No. The platypus exhibits no bird features at all. Its characters and traits are well within its branch.
The way it works is cladistics: nested heirarchies. In the grossest sense, people as a group are nested within apes, which are nested within primates, which are nested within eutherians, which are nested within therians, which are nested within amniotes, which are nested within tetrapods, which are nested within vertebrates. Platypi are nested in exactly the same way, just on a different branch: they are therians, but not eutherians. All of their features are modified from the basal therians. The therians are split into three groups: the monotremes, and the marsupials & eutherians. Eutherians are the placental mammals. It's worth noting that the monotreme "eggs" are in fact quite different from bird eggs: they are a thin membrane (placenta-like) that hatch almost as soon as they are laid. They are almost like if someone gave live birth _without_ first rupturing the placenta, and the placenta was just a little hardier than it is in eutharians. But not much tougher or hardier.
The platypus doesn't have anything birdlike at all. It's "beak" is nothing like a bird beak, other than it happens to look similar from a distance.
Where did it pick up laying eggs? Uh, the BASAL form from which all mammals came are the amniotes. Platypuses are amniotes. So are we. They just split off from the rest before the fairly recent development in some mammals of not releasing their eggs.
Webbed feet are not uncommon in mammals either. Heck, if you look at your own hands and toes, you have webs between all your digits, just vastly reduced.
Platypuses, which are monotremes, fit quite intelligibly into the evolutionary picture.
They didn't ignore those factors. They controlled for them by the use of random assignment. Neither group was likely to have a higher number of people in it that had subsidiary prayers.
Now, of course, the study still could never really tell us much of anything, which is why it was so silly. It was particularly silly because the religious groups that wanted the study clearly knew that the results would be worthless when they contracted in the first place, which is simply bizarre.
Even if there was an effect, how are we supposed to distinguish the explanation of God from the explanation that human beings have psychic powers and can make things happen just by envisioning it? When you're dealing with the untestable and the supernatural, the real problem is not the lack of alternatives, but TOO MANY alternatives that you can never narrow down further (because they are all untestable).
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You are understating the case. This stuff was NOT, in fact, the preserved tissue itself, just sitting there but really really old. It was fossilized remains (which means, mostly being composed of othre materials that had leeched into and replaced what was there while retaining its structure) that happened to contain trace elements of the original chemical compounds when separated out in a centerfuge. Most people hear "T-Rex tissue" and they think of some barely decayed meat. This allows the creationists to fool them quite easily into thinking that it can't have been around for very long.
Well, if you understand anthropods to be animals too, then yes, it definately was not. The protosomes got there first!
Eh? It also says: "Archaeopteryx is a powerful piece of evidence that birds evolved from dinosaurs. The skeleton is most similar to the dinosaurs of the families Dromaeosauridae and Troodontidae. "
Your quote about "perhaps produced as many questions as answers" is taken out of context. This sentence doesn't describe the fossil's general understanding as a related to both dinosaurs and the line of modern birds: it's about the very particular place of the fossil in this branch of things and its particular lifestyle, which of course is far more of a speculative matter. It's really important not to confuse and conflate all the various things we know and do not know about evolution and various fossilized species. Some things we know very very well. Other things are a mystery. The parts pertaining to demonstrating evolution and common descent in general we often know very very well. Things like exactly what any given fossil was ancestral to we generally know less well, since it is very hard to tell.
While its not fully certain, its pretty well accepted at this point that birds are descended from dinosaurs. They share too much in common in the way of otherwise unique features. The recent realization that there were many dinos that had feathers further clinches the connection, as well as the study of fossilized T-rex tissue: which turns out to have a tissue layer that, of all living animals, only birds have.
"Well, not really. It COULD be something totally unique."
Well, yes, except that morphologically it fits in at only one place and time into the tree of life. As you can read from the article, no one is saying that it is a direct ancestor of modern life, because we cannot know, as you note, it's particular future. But we CAN tell its past and from what orders of life it came, and its existence tells us all about what sorts of creatures were around and what they were like on this particular branch of the tree that led to modern land animals.
"We breed dogs with all sorts of other types of dogs, sometimes wolves, coyotes, and even Jackals and Hyenas (all in the "canis" family) and we always get offspring that are DOGS!"
I hate to break it to you, but if you think that evolution suggests something different, you are mistaken. Your exclamation is about as silly as saying "but if you breed two mammals together, we always get MAMMALS!"
Evolution is cladistically conservative. New species branch out from old categories: they do not replace or exit them. Just as all the species that will descend from dogs can still be grouped as "dogs" (because they will all still share the same traits that distinguished dogs from all other forms of life).
Of course, your statement is wrong anyway. There are plenty of canis that cannot interbreed already. It might even be the case with some domestic dogs: it's just that we've never really seriously tried.
"Third, they simply claim that this previously undiscovered creature is something "in transition" from one being to another when this is the first one found. How do they know that it's not just a unique creature that died out (ie: gone extinct)."
You're mixing up claims about this specific species with what a transitional fossil actually is. Transitionals are creatures that have the distinctive and otherwise unique features of both an earlier group (in this case lobed fishes) and a later group (in this case tetrapods). We know that this creature was related to the tetrapods because it has several features that are unique to tetrapods or otherwise related to tetrapods, while at the same time being identifiably Stegocephalian. As point of fact, you are also still a Stegocephalian. Just as you are: a tetrapod, an amniote, a synapsid, a therian, a eutherian (what you think of as a mammal), a primate, an ape, and a sapien sapien. If you mated with someone and produced offspring, I could scream "BUT THEIR BABY IS STILL A EUKARYOTE!" I would be right: but it wouldn't make a lick of difference in disproving evolution.
The problem is that you misunderstand evolution.
"There's no way to prove that this was an "adaption" to moving from water to land - else, why do animals like ducks still lay eggs"
I don't know what you mean by why. They lay eggs because all descendants of the early amniotes have eggs with amniotic fluid. Including humans.
"(or the platypus, et al)"
Platypi are monotremes, a group of therians (one of three, the other two being the placentals and the marsupials). Therians as a rule lay eggs. But their "eggs" are not like bird eggs. They are almost as if someone gave birth without first breaking the placenta: the "egg" is thin and membranous like a placenta, and it hatches almost immediately.
"and some mammals (whales, dolphins, seals, etc) live entirely in the water (but not breathe in the water like fish and some reptiles) bear live young like mammals if this is indeed an evolutionary change..."
Cetaceans very obviously tetrapods returned to the water. As such, they bear all the distinctive features of their tetrapod, amniote, euthreian, and so on ancestry, but have modified these features for life in the water. The features they have are not some random grab bag of features. They are all mammal features. Even the fact that they've "lost" their back limbs is deceptive: in the embryonic stage they still grow back limbs (which are then reabsorbed!). Sometimes, they are actually born with limbs (an atavism: just like when humans are born with tails), which happen to be in just the right place and hooked up to their vestigial pelvic girdle in just the right way... to be a tetrapod.
"And where is the fossil evidence that the duckbill platypus evolved from another species?"
t ml
You aren't that same person who was claiming that platypi were crosses between birds and mammals, are you?
Platypi are monotremes, one of three different sorts of therians. Like all fossil records, their fossil record is skimpy, but not a mystery.
http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/mammal/monotremefr.h
At one time, before evolution or cladistics were really understood, laypeople found them quite weird. However, there is nothing evolutionarily inexplicable about them today. Nothing about them is really birdlike: from egg-laying to the bill, all their features are characteristically therian, the group from which monotremes, placental, and marsupials descended.
"True there are numerous species in existence today, but we cannot identify DIRECT parent and child species of any particular species, respectively."
Correct! Evolution works by branching. That means there are almost an infinite number more distantly related _cousins_ in the fossil record than there are direct ancestors of any living creature. Given how rare fossilization is (even for the dinos), there's no reason at all to expect every single creature that ever lived to fossilize, which is basically what you're asking for. You need to learn a lot more about how fossilization works.
You're playing fast and loose here. Sure, ID as a movement makes it bread and butter about being coy, and not actually stating anything at all positive about their beliefs or expectations. But in practice, most of its major proponents have gone on record doubting this or that aspect of common descent or the fossil record. Even Behe, who purports to accept common descent, has made claims about how certain fossils would never be found... ironically just a year before they WERE found.
Sigh. No.
You don't understand the method. Observation is observation of some fact or state of affairs that we want to explain. In evolution, those facts are things like the fossil record, the diversity of life on earth, and the very particular character of that life. "Observation" is not a requirement that we see things with out eyeballs, or even the part where we draw conclusions. It's the set of circumstances that we are trying to explain. That's why it comes first. It's TESTING where we find out if the explanation was correct or not.
And that's where you go wrong again. Testing in evolution is testing any given piece of evidence to see if it confirms or disconfirms the theory. If you don't think evolutionary biologists run tests or use evidence to confirm or disconfirm their claims, then you don't know anything about the field.
IF evolution is true, then all other sorts of things MUST be true. Are they true, or not? We test, and find out. We gather evidence and compare it to those theoretical requirements. Does it hold up? Yes, it does: in fact it holds up in spectacular and exacting detail.
If what you were saying were true, then forensic science wouldn't be science either. But, unfortunately for your post, it is science. I don't think you're liable to find any textbook on the scientific method that would actually support what you are saying.
Yep. While "information" doesn't really have a good single definition space in biology (what exactly IS the information in biology? The functions? the code? expressed or unexpressed? Gene pools? Single creatures?), one good way to think about evolution is as an information imprinting process. Information about the environment is being imprinted onto an otherwise somewhat random walk through the space of traits in a gene pool.
I'm not sure what your point is. Whether or not this particular creature left water or not, it's still something morphologically between the later tetrapods and lobed-fishes that clues us into what sort of developments were going on.
If you aren't aware of the evidence for evolution, I could see how you might not think it vast. But once you look into it, into the twin nested heiarchy, into the convergence of an inumerable number of required evidential findings, it's pretty clear that what you're looking at has more and stronger evidential support than almost anything.
Creationists have been declaring that there are a "growing number" of doubters or biologists or what have you challenging evolution since the 1800s. That doesn't make it true. If anything, the numbe rhas declined over time.
This is false: some of them are biologists. That's irrelevant, of course, given the other problems with the statement, but it's worth not going too far and making false statements.
The only reason it seems like handwaving is because most people know that their audience wouldn't stick around if they went into detail. There's a lot of evidential support for just this very pathway. Furthremore, since the original challenge was one of plausibility, not history, a response based on possibility is certainly acceptable, and hardly cause for complaint.
Well, for starters, insects.
"Prediction involves things that haven't happened."
And the discovery of ambulocetus had not yet happened. Then, after it was not only predicted, but genetic studies purported to tell us where to look for it, we found it. What is that, if not predictive power?
It both predicts AND requires it. They are of a kind.
It's zero. Look, it's certainly understandable that a layperson looking at something is going to see a vaugely froglike/croclike creature. That's because you are trying to tie it back to something in your own experience. But when you sit down with a creature like this in an informed way, there are countless important differences that demonstrate that this fossil is pre-amphibian/reptilian (of course, amphibians and lizards are the groups that emerge from this particular branch of life). Morphology is a study all unto its own, and it's a lot more complicated than simpyl looking at a platypus can declaring "it's a bird/mammal!" when in fact none of its features are in any way bird-like (it's beak is not a birds beak, it's eggs are not like bird eggs, and so on).
"No more than the leaders of various murderous regimes could make a similar case that they're acting on the "facts" (which are stated outright by people like Darby) that "religion is evil" and must be "wiped out"."
So, in your opinion, the Catholic Church was once a murderous regime? To you think they would beg to differ? My point is that Christianity purports to be an ideology. You can'y play the True Scotsman fallacy and rule out of hand all purported examples of that ideology being bad (as opposed to being used badly) anymore than you can accuse all Christians of believing the same things or being responsible for the beliefs of Christians with which they do not agree.
"But not as atheists"
precisely the point! One doesn't do ANYTHING "as" an atheist. One is an atheist by virtue of NOT being a theist. Otherwise, they are just a person.
"In doing so, these people expose themselves as a community of just the sort you deny exists, or can exist."
You yourself said: not AS atheists. As people that dislike religion perhaps, but then into such a group we cannot help but lump any number of theists. Jefferson, for instance, was a theist, but highly anti-religious in the same way as most atheists. Adams was a theist, but he was as also an elitist: he believed that what he called superstitions (meaning the religion of the common man) was a necessary evil to keep the uneducated in check.
And of course, the usual bugaboos like the ACLU are mostly made up of liberal BELIEVERS, which often gets overlooked.
"In that sense, they're hardly any different from that minority of atheists that managed to exterminate tens of millions of innocent lives -- or that minority of Christians that managed to sanction the Inquisition, and similar horrors."
So, is it your opinion that no criticism is allowed of religion without that criticism itself BEING a religion? Is not having or wanting an apple a type of apple? If you shave your head, is your hair color "bald?"
"In any case, atheists would do well (and be more intellectually honest) to stop using labels like "religion" in discussions such as this, and instead be more specific about exactly which behaviors they are criticizing, promoting, etc."
I agree. I'm just pointing out that various religions are not like atheism, and atheism is not a religion. Because religions are belief systems, and because they do have principles that CAN potentially be bad, they cannot be definitionally immune to criticism. Atheism, on the other hand, is not an ideology, not a set of beliefs or anything. If you want to criticize particular people for their hostility to religion, that's one thing. But to criticize them as atheists makes little logical sense. You seem to assert that being criticial of religion makes just as little sense. But because particular religions are defined and describe actual belief systems, they are not comparable. They are open to criticism in that way in a way atheism is not, at least not qua atheism.
"In that sense, saying "Christians were responsible for the Inquisition" is similar to saying "Atheists were responsible for the atrocities of Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot"."
No it isn't: you've changed subjects here. We were talking about the _ideology_, not just the characteristics of the people (if we were, then I could say that "Hindus commit murder!" which is absurdly pointless) Christianity is at least a body of ideas and claims. The leaders of the Inquisition could at least make some sort of plausible case that they were acting on those ideas, acting as Christians should. We can debate this because nobody can definitively say what Chrisitianity is or isn't. But it can at least be plausibly debated. Atheism, on the other hand, has no body of ideas or claims. It isn't itself a worldview or an ideology.
"Denying not only that God exists (or that gods exist), but also that those who believe otherwise are at best misguided, at worst evil (see Darby's earlier post for an example of how atheistic thinking ends up going down that road), seems about as "common" as necessary for the purpose(s) at hand."
None of these elements are common to all atheists, and regardless, even if they were, they simply would not be enough to constitute an ideology of its own. Communism is an ideology. Secular humanism is an ideology. Atheism is a category-by-exclusion, nto inclusion.
"They pertain to advantages and disadvantages of a coherent philosophy: atheists (in the pure sense, not in the "hijacked" or "hijacking" sense) don't have to worry about being in violent disagreement with each other, because what would they disagree about?"
Again, while I see you are starting to grok the right track here, you're still thinking of atheists as if they were some organization or class of people in society. But it makes no more sense to classify all atheists this way than it does to classify all non-American Idol fans together.
"In short, it seems our universe is designed to reward affirmation, rather than denial, as a precursor to reproduction."
See, you're still on the wrong track. Atheists affirm all SORTS of things. You're just so obsessed with whether or not someone affirms your particular metaphysics that you've completely forgotten for the moment how people go about living their lives, having values and convictions, politics, goals, hopes, and so forth, utterly regardless of their religious categories.
"I'd say much sillier"
One can at least always at least argue that the source Christian texts or founders had bad ideas: there is SOME common content to Christianity that one can point to. There are no source atheist texts. There is no common content to atheism.
"whereas there are people and institutions today who defend (passively -- by not bringing up uncomfortable truths about, e.g., reporting on the USSR at the time of Stalin and Lenin -- if not actively) Communist and other atheistic mass-murder."
Again, noting that something is "atheistic" is about as descriptive as calling is "non-Star-Wars-themed." There is no doctrine "atheism" that anything can be "istic" about. There is no belief necessary for all atheists.
"As "attractive" (due at least to its simplicity) as Atheism is, there's little evidence it provides such a basis,"
No, you still misunderstand. No one is _just_ an atheist (except in the sense that rocks are atheists). Being an atheist is neither attractive or unattractive. All atheists have values and ideologies of their own.
But the biologist isn't using them how you are using them. i.e., biologists don't speak of them as some separate entity. The speak of them in the sense of talking about large scale changes vs. changes to single populations. Not unlike micro/macroeconomics.
I hate to burst your bubble, but changing numbers of chromosomes is no big mystery. While in primates in particular they happen to be fairly stable, even within human beings there are people walking around RIGHT NOW with different numbers of chromosomes who can reproduce. Heck, 1 out of every 900 people has a Robertsonian translocation! And our chromosome difference from other apes is pretty simple to explain: we have a chromosome which is very obviously two basal ape chromosomes fused together: so obviously that the tell-tale "ends" are still there, right in the middle of our fused chromosome! These sorts of fusions happen all the time.
Different numbers of chromosomes is not necessarily a serious barrier to reproductive success either. Mice chromosome numbers range fairly widely, for instance.
Put simply, your claim of a "barrier" between micro and macro changes is simply wrong. While scientists do refer to things like macroevolutionary trends, what they mean are descriptions of processes that affect many species at once, like extinction events or genetic drift. But that's not the same thing as what you imply: some sort of hard "line" that makes it hard for one species to have descended from others that were different.
There are any number of things you do with your code that is never observed in nature. For instance, you could decide that you've come up with a really good idea or rewrite of some basic function library, and spread it to all your code. But that sort of lateral transmission never appears in biology: genes that crop up in a particular lineage are only ever found in its descendants. Without exception. Your code probably also has all sorts of non-nested heirarchy too. For instance, some program may have functions A B C and D. Another might have C and D. Another, just A and D. But in biology, we find ONLY the nested cladistic pattern. Sure, and intelligent designer could deliberately mimic that pattern, but then a sufficiently intelligent designer could mimic ANY pattern in ANYTHING. The only explanation that DEMANDS this particular pattern, demands it our else it fails on the evidence, is common descent.
More importantly, the nested heirarchy we have has at least three different completely indepedent methods of being sampled: you can do genetic comparisons based on inherited sequences, you can look at the fossil/geographical record, and you can compare outward morphologies. When you do so, you come up with a cladistic tree: those nested heirachies. And yet, when you compare these three trees with each other... you find that they are exactly the same. In fact, they are the same to a matter of precision far exceeding almost any physical constant we can measure (that's because for every extra animal you add to a cladistic tree, there are an exponential number of different ways the tree could then be arranged into a nested pattern). That convergence of evidence is one of the reasons that evolutionary theory is held to be so certain: one of if not the most certain in all science. No other field has the sort of broad and complex range of evidence that all converges on the same point. Even human history can often only cite a few converging pieces of evidence. With biology, the convergence can be drawn from evidence from millions of example of all sorts of different fields, all at once, and all confirming the same conclusion over and over.
No. The platypus exhibits no bird features at all. Its characters and traits are well within its branch.
The way it works is cladistics: nested heirarchies. In the grossest sense, people as a group are nested within apes, which are nested within primates, which are nested within eutherians, which are nested within therians, which are nested within amniotes, which are nested within tetrapods, which are nested within vertebrates. Platypi are nested in exactly the same way, just on a different branch: they are therians, but not eutherians. All of their features are modified from the basal therians. The therians are split into three groups: the monotremes, and the marsupials & eutherians. Eutherians are the placental mammals. It's worth noting that the monotreme "eggs" are in fact quite different from bird eggs: they are a thin membrane (placenta-like) that hatch almost as soon as they are laid. They are almost like if someone gave live birth _without_ first rupturing the placenta, and the placenta was just a little hardier than it is in eutharians. But not much tougher or hardier.
The platypus doesn't have anything birdlike at all. It's "beak" is nothing like a bird beak, other than it happens to look similar from a distance.
Where did it pick up laying eggs? Uh, the BASAL form from which all mammals came are the amniotes. Platypuses are amniotes. So are we. They just split off from the rest before the fairly recent development in some mammals of not releasing their eggs.
Webbed feet are not uncommon in mammals either. Heck, if you look at your own hands and toes, you have webs between all your digits, just vastly reduced.
Platypuses, which are monotremes, fit quite intelligibly into the evolutionary picture.
They didn't ignore those factors. They controlled for them by the use of random assignment. Neither group was likely to have a higher number of people in it that had subsidiary prayers.
Now, of course, the study still could never really tell us much of anything, which is why it was so silly. It was particularly silly because the religious groups that wanted the study clearly knew that the results would be worthless when they contracted in the first place, which is simply bizarre.
Even if there was an effect, how are we supposed to distinguish the explanation of God from the explanation that human beings have psychic powers and can make things happen just by envisioning it? When you're dealing with the untestable and the supernatural, the real problem is not the lack of alternatives, but TOO MANY alternatives that you can never narrow down further (because they are all untestable).
I was against gay marriage myself before someone told me that it wouldn't be mandatory. :)