"Would that be the vast majority of people that study the data, funded by grants they would lose without vowing fealty to evolution, or the vast majority of people that study the data, knowing that any discovery that threatens evolution will cost them tenure?"
Ah, now its all a conspiracy, and thousands of scientists are all in on it, compromised by fear and greed (I'm sure this accusation will impress them). Boy, that makes your position SO much more compelling than your simple inability to discount or deal with all the evidence directly did alone.
We don't know the properties of the early universe past a certain point, nor any other purely naturalistic state of existence prior or causal to it. Nor do we actually KNOW that everything must have a cause: in fact, this is simply something we assume given that everything IN the universe appears to (though perhaps not: QM raises some interesting issues here). Applying that logic TO the universe itself is a category error.
In short, you can either declare that all things need causes, or you can admit that there are exceptions (for your pet Prime Mover theory). But once you admit that there can be exceptions, you lose all ability to deny the same exception to some naturalistic uncaused cause: which is always going to be a simpler brute fact sufficient than a brute fact intelligent designer.
I don't know where anyone gets the idea that the Big Bang says anything about there being "nothing" at any point. It doesn't really even describe the beginning of existence as everyone seems to think, just he beginning of the universe as we know it.
"Frankly there's not enough data to "prove" either side. "
So you say. The vast vast majority of the people that actually study the data disagree, and most of the people that agree with you, when asked to explain why, demonstrably get things wrong and misrepresent what the evidence is and how it is used.
"And even he recognized, for example (to use a beaten-to death example, at that!), that the eye was very complex and his theory did not account for it at that time."
Why do critics constantly bring this up, when all it does is display their own ignorance about Darwin? Darwin noted the complexity of the eye and how it SEEMED to refute his ideas, and THEN he DID go on to show how his theory could not only account for it, but that the remnants of many of the necessary transitional stages existed in existent life. Right or wrong, he did NOT think it was "too complex for his theory at the time."
That people think so and claim so is a telltale sign that they've only ever read the creationist quote mine, where they quote Darwin saying that the eye seems confoundingly complex... but then fail to continue the quote or note that he RIGHT AFTERWARDS discusses why theis perception is mistaken.
And look, you shifted the goalposts, from common descent via natural selection to complaints about the "genesis of life" which doesn't even concern evolution BY DEFINITION (since evolution is only relevant when you have self-reproduction with heredity, i.e. life already).
Your accusations are standard "pox on all houses" boilerplate. But the rub is that they are creationist boilerplate: the idea of the tactic is that one attacks the very idea that we have good evidence or can know much of anything at all... i.e. simply tries to discredit most of modern biology without actually doing any work... with the hopes that once this is done, religious assertions become more compelling in the aftermath.
"God demands faith. God does not provide proof, because proof kills faith."
Maybe all you've ever encountered are fundamentalist Protestants, but for the majority of the world's Christians at least, the idea that God provides compelling evidence and reason for belief is a tenet of the religion (Catholicism in particular).
There's no "pet" speculation. Claiming that it's a big deal when phyla first appear is creationist bs based on not understanding how taxonomy works.
"No, that's not the issue."
That IS your issue, as you've made very plain. Your entire case is parrot of the Discovery Institutes's position on the CE and what it implies for common descent and evolution.
"You are making that up. Nobody knows where the hell arthropods, chordates, etc. came from outside of speculation."
Pure bs. We do have precambrian fossils for some. We have molecular evidence. We have measured rates of morphological change in modern species (which arguably are far less bodyplan flexible than the much simpler multicelluar life around during the CE era) that are many times faster than the fastest transition even in the CE. And we have the one and only explanation that fit all the evidence.
The problem is that it isn't just a giant flightless bird: it's also unambiguously a dinosaur in a particular lineage of dinosaurs, and most probably a cousin of the modern flightless birds (moas, ostriches, etc.)
There isn't any basin structure that comes anywhere near qualifying (remember it needs to be all land and then get filled to several THOUSAND feet and THEN drained away back to land again) period, let alone in the area of the mountains in question.
The ancestors of slugs didn't have legs, and you can't just evolve something because it would be cool or even useful: you're stuck with the options you can get given your existing form and whatever might be likely to crop up via mutation. Slugs and snails, however, both do incredibly well in their niche, without legs. They have all sorts of other adaptations instead.
"Claiming that "Proper Christianity" is based on anything but the Bible seems a bit ridiculous to me--I would argue that proper Christianity is rooted in following the teachings of Jesus Christ."
Christ taught in a oral tradition, as did most of his followers and later apostolic descendants. for decades there was Christianity without any of the texts of the Bible, and for centuries there was no Bible at all: just lots and lots of different opinions and letters and texts circulated around, all copied by hand over and over leaving things in and out, changing words, etc.
Frankly, I think on this one the Catholics have it far more right: plenty of important traditions and teachings existed long before there was any such thing as a Bible, and don't happen to be included in the Bible (since the Bible is not exhaustive: it's just a collection of some of the texts considered most important and reliable against heresy: no one who compiled it ever meant it to be the SOLE reference as to what Christianity was all about, just the most trustworthy and orthodox documents they could gather)
Of course, given that there is no "original" source document that we have for pretty much every Bible document, and many of our source documents have significant differences (including differences on such important things as the Trinity, what Christ's attitude towards death was, the role of women, etc.), talking about there being one and one only true text literally reliable in every word makes no sense at all.
How the heck do you "localize" a flood that supposedly covered MOUNTAINS? Gravity requires that the water level equilibrate before it can raise any higher, which means that for water levels to get that high, there's no way to flood one part of the world without flooding the whole thing... unless of course magic forcefields kept the high water levels from simply running off sideways across other continents and seas.
Of course, this being YEC apologism, I've actually heard YECs say, matter of factly, that, well, of course there was no gravity the way we experience it today before the flood! Duh.
I can't say how incremental or revolutionary it is or not (it is basically a pilot program for ENCODE, and most people think it is doing and will do and is doing great work but has only just begun), but I do know that "junkDNA" is a very sloppy and confusing term, and implying that biologists have claimed that none of it has any function is just false.
The basic history of biology in this realm is that biologists originally assumed that all or almost all of DNA would all be functional and meaningful: natural selection would pare down everything to peak efficiency and get rid of "waste." Then they discovered that it was far far more complicated than that: there are all sorts of complications to the story, from viruses that insert themselves into DNA to elemenents in it that actually select for themselves as sequences period regardless of what they do. In fact, a large part of the genome is explained in biology not by natural selection but instead by the neutral theory of mutation.
The attitude of biology on function at that point became: we need to show EVIDENCE of function in "junkDNA" before assuming it: we expect to find some, but we can't just assume that there will be any. And that's basically where things are at today.
We do know, and these findings do not contradict, that our genome and others are full of stuff that can be changed radically or even deleted without any apparent effects on the organism. Some gets translated into RNA and some doesn't. Some appears to be "conserved" in genomes while other parts just seems to vary randomly.
I think I am? But honestly, looking back on that, if that was me, I probably could have stood to be a little more patient and less nasty, since that's never going to help make the case, even if it is a pretty legitimate expression of frustration against the sort of things going on over there.
Now you're really getting ridiculous. So 2000 years from now when they are exploding whales with space-guided lasers from starships you're still going to be buying the "we must respect and preserve traditional culture" excuse for why they can't just stop doing something?
If you claim that you need to do something because of "tradition" when you happily alter that tradition willy nilly in lots of other respects, THAT excuse really IS rendered sort of silly.
I dunno, but if your whole argument for whale killing is that its preserving an ancient tradition, don't you think that arguments starts to look a little silly when you go out and do it with machine guns and sonar.
"We don't know what they are the heads of because we cannot see the "body"."
Non-responsive.
"That's called "creativity", not solutions. One can make up theories about *any* odd observation."
This is completely non-responsive. The issue was whether the CE demonstrated, as many creationists and ID'ers claim, something that cannot be explained in an evolutionary context. And yet there are too many different ways that it could. We indeed don't know exactly what happened and that the possibilities remain speculative. But many perfectly plausible explanations exist that are not contradicted by the facts and indeed have some support in the facts we have so far (and we keep looking to learn more, so its all good). That already refutes the claim that the CE is some great challenge to evolution.
"They don't fit anything because we have no solid answer."
Non-sequitur. I said that they fit the overall pattern of evolution. None of these lifeforms are anything like the extremely complex modern multicelluars. All of them are variations of multicelluar forms, many of which we DO have precursors for in the fossil record.
Again, you do the same thing again: claim that the appearance of many new _phyla_ is significant, when in fact they are only the heads of new phyla in retrospect. I'm not arguing (and so it does no good to argue against) the idea that there was no CE at all: but the supposed uniqueness and suddeness has been greatly misrepresented.
And yes we have lots of speculation without lots of certain answers on many elements here. But that's exactly the point. There are too MANY different possible explanations for the CE, not too few, certainly not none at all, and definitely not anything approaching a demonstration that it was anything other than the evolutionary based on stepwise genetic change we see everywhere else. And in fact, all the details still fit that pattern rather than contradicting it.
After reading what some actual scientists have to say about this, I think its worth noting that the way this article phrases and "explains" things is seriously confused and confusing, and most of our discussion here is a complete mess because of it. Understanding biology's position on JunkDNA is a LOT more complicated than just thinking you know what the word "junk" implies.
You guys are also missing some pretty major factors here: things like intragenomic selection which preserve certain sequences over others irregardless of what they "do."
Slashdot Mirror
Pascal's wager has been refuted and debunked so many times that it's just plain boring to even bring it up anymore except as trolling.
"Would that be the vast majority of people that study the data, funded by grants they would lose without vowing fealty to evolution, or the vast majority of people that study the data, knowing that any discovery that threatens evolution will cost them tenure?"
Ah, now its all a conspiracy, and thousands of scientists are all in on it, compromised by fear and greed (I'm sure this accusation will impress them). Boy, that makes your position SO much more compelling than your simple inability to discount or deal with all the evidence directly did alone.
If you want to know why its an issue in the USA, check out this site:
http://allphilosophy.com/tag/show/evolution
The amount of utterly ignorant ridiculous babbling on that site is beyond belief.
We don't know the properties of the early universe past a certain point, nor any other purely naturalistic state of existence prior or causal to it. Nor do we actually KNOW that everything must have a cause: in fact, this is simply something we assume given that everything IN the universe appears to (though perhaps not: QM raises some interesting issues here). Applying that logic TO the universe itself is a category error.
In short, you can either declare that all things need causes, or you can admit that there are exceptions (for your pet Prime Mover theory). But once you admit that there can be exceptions, you lose all ability to deny the same exception to some naturalistic uncaused cause: which is always going to be a simpler brute fact sufficient than a brute fact intelligent designer.
I don't know where anyone gets the idea that the Big Bang says anything about there being "nothing" at any point. It doesn't really even describe the beginning of existence as everyone seems to think, just he beginning of the universe as we know it.
"Frankly there's not enough data to "prove" either side. "
So you say. The vast vast majority of the people that actually study the data disagree, and most of the people that agree with you, when asked to explain why, demonstrably get things wrong and misrepresent what the evidence is and how it is used.
"And even he recognized, for example (to use a beaten-to death example, at that!), that the eye was very complex and his theory did not account for it at that time."
Why do critics constantly bring this up, when all it does is display their own ignorance about Darwin? Darwin noted the complexity of the eye and how it SEEMED to refute his ideas, and THEN he DID go on to show how his theory could not only account for it, but that the remnants of many of the necessary transitional stages existed in existent life. Right or wrong, he did NOT think it was "too complex for his theory at the time."
That people think so and claim so is a telltale sign that they've only ever read the creationist quote mine, where they quote Darwin saying that the eye seems confoundingly complex... but then fail to continue the quote or note that he RIGHT AFTERWARDS discusses why theis perception is mistaken.
And look, you shifted the goalposts, from common descent via natural selection to complaints about the "genesis of life" which doesn't even concern evolution BY DEFINITION (since evolution is only relevant when you have self-reproduction with heredity, i.e. life already).
Your accusations are standard "pox on all houses" boilerplate. But the rub is that they are creationist boilerplate: the idea of the tactic is that one attacks the very idea that we have good evidence or can know much of anything at all... i.e. simply tries to discredit most of modern biology without actually doing any work... with the hopes that once this is done, religious assertions become more compelling in the aftermath.
"God demands faith. God does not provide proof, because proof kills faith."
Maybe all you've ever encountered are fundamentalist Protestants, but for the majority of the world's Christians at least, the idea that God provides compelling evidence and reason for belief is a tenet of the religion (Catholicism in particular).
There's no "pet" speculation. Claiming that it's a big deal when phyla first appear is creationist bs based on not understanding how taxonomy works.
"No, that's not the issue."
That IS your issue, as you've made very plain. Your entire case is parrot of the Discovery Institutes's position on the CE and what it implies for common descent and evolution.
"You are making that up. Nobody knows where the hell arthropods, chordates, etc. came from outside of speculation."
Pure bs. We do have precambrian fossils for some. We have molecular evidence. We have measured rates of morphological change in modern species (which arguably are far less bodyplan flexible than the much simpler multicelluar life around during the CE era) that are many times faster than the fastest transition even in the CE. And we have the one and only explanation that fit all the evidence.
The problem is that it isn't just a giant flightless bird: it's also unambiguously a dinosaur in a particular lineage of dinosaurs, and most probably a cousin of the modern flightless birds (moas, ostriches, etc.)
There isn't any basin structure that comes anywhere near qualifying (remember it needs to be all land and then get filled to several THOUSAND feet and THEN drained away back to land again) period, let alone in the area of the mountains in question.
The ancestors of slugs didn't have legs, and you can't just evolve something because it would be cool or even useful: you're stuck with the options you can get given your existing form and whatever might be likely to crop up via mutation. Slugs and snails, however, both do incredibly well in their niche, without legs. They have all sorts of other adaptations instead.
"Claiming that "Proper Christianity" is based on anything but the Bible seems a bit ridiculous to me--I would argue that proper Christianity is rooted in following the teachings of Jesus Christ."
Christ taught in a oral tradition, as did most of his followers and later apostolic descendants. for decades there was Christianity without any of the texts of the Bible, and for centuries there was no Bible at all: just lots and lots of different opinions and letters and texts circulated around, all copied by hand over and over leaving things in and out, changing words, etc.
Frankly, I think on this one the Catholics have it far more right: plenty of important traditions and teachings existed long before there was any such thing as a Bible, and don't happen to be included in the Bible (since the Bible is not exhaustive: it's just a collection of some of the texts considered most important and reliable against heresy: no one who compiled it ever meant it to be the SOLE reference as to what Christianity was all about, just the most trustworthy and orthodox documents they could gather)
Of course, given that there is no "original" source document that we have for pretty much every Bible document, and many of our source documents have significant differences (including differences on such important things as the Trinity, what Christ's attitude towards death was, the role of women, etc.), talking about there being one and one only true text literally reliable in every word makes no sense at all.
How the heck do you "localize" a flood that supposedly covered MOUNTAINS? Gravity requires that the water level equilibrate before it can raise any higher, which means that for water levels to get that high, there's no way to flood one part of the world without flooding the whole thing... unless of course magic forcefields kept the high water levels from simply running off sideways across other continents and seas.
Of course, this being YEC apologism, I've actually heard YECs say, matter of factly, that, well, of course there was no gravity the way we experience it today before the flood! Duh.
Just did a search, and here's as decent a summary of any of the field and development of thinking about the subject:
e nialists_move_fast_1.php
http://scienceblogs.com/denialism/2007/06/those_d
It's part of a larger discussion about creationism that's offtopic from what you asked about, but the timeline itself is what I wanted to point out.
I can't say how incremental or revolutionary it is or not (it is basically a pilot program for ENCODE, and most people think it is doing and will do and is doing great work but has only just begun), but I do know that "junkDNA" is a very sloppy and confusing term, and implying that biologists have claimed that none of it has any function is just false.
The basic history of biology in this realm is that biologists originally assumed that all or almost all of DNA would all be functional and meaningful: natural selection would pare down everything to peak efficiency and get rid of "waste." Then they discovered that it was far far more complicated than that: there are all sorts of complications to the story, from viruses that insert themselves into DNA to elemenents in it that actually select for themselves as sequences period regardless of what they do. In fact, a large part of the genome is explained in biology not by natural selection but instead by the neutral theory of mutation.
The attitude of biology on function at that point became: we need to show EVIDENCE of function in "junkDNA" before assuming it: we expect to find some, but we can't just assume that there will be any. And that's basically where things are at today.
We do know, and these findings do not contradict, that our genome and others are full of stuff that can be changed radically or even deleted without any apparent effects on the organism. Some gets translated into RNA and some doesn't. Some appears to be "conserved" in genomes while other parts just seems to vary randomly.
I think I am? But honestly, looking back on that, if that was me, I probably could have stood to be a little more patient and less nasty, since that's never going to help make the case, even if it is a pretty legitimate expression of frustration against the sort of things going on over there.
Now you're really getting ridiculous. So 2000 years from now when they are exploding whales with space-guided lasers from starships you're still going to be buying the "we must respect and preserve traditional culture" excuse for why they can't just stop doing something?
If you claim that you need to do something because of "tradition" when you happily alter that tradition willy nilly in lots of other respects, THAT excuse really IS rendered sort of silly.
I dunno, but if your whole argument for whale killing is that its preserving an ancient tradition, don't you think that arguments starts to look a little silly when you go out and do it with machine guns and sonar.
"We don't know what they are the heads of because we cannot see the "body"."
Non-responsive.
"That's called "creativity", not solutions. One can make up theories about *any* odd observation."
This is completely non-responsive. The issue was whether the CE demonstrated, as many creationists and ID'ers claim, something that cannot be explained in an evolutionary context. And yet there are too many different ways that it could. We indeed don't know exactly what happened and that the possibilities remain speculative. But many perfectly plausible explanations exist that are not contradicted by the facts and indeed have some support in the facts we have so far (and we keep looking to learn more, so its all good). That already refutes the claim that the CE is some great challenge to evolution.
"They don't fit anything because we have no solid answer."
Non-sequitur. I said that they fit the overall pattern of evolution. None of these lifeforms are anything like the extremely complex modern multicelluars. All of them are variations of multicelluar forms, many of which we DO have precursors for in the fossil record.
Again, you do the same thing again: claim that the appearance of many new _phyla_ is significant, when in fact they are only the heads of new phyla in retrospect. I'm not arguing (and so it does no good to argue against) the idea that there was no CE at all: but the supposed uniqueness and suddeness has been greatly misrepresented.
And yes we have lots of speculation without lots of certain answers on many elements here. But that's exactly the point. There are too MANY different possible explanations for the CE, not too few, certainly not none at all, and definitely not anything approaching a demonstration that it was anything other than the evolutionary based on stepwise genetic change we see everywhere else. And in fact, all the details still fit that pattern rather than contradicting it.
After reading what some actual scientists have to say about this, I think its worth noting that the way this article phrases and "explains" things is seriously confused and confusing, and most of our discussion here is a complete mess because of it. Understanding biology's position on JunkDNA is a LOT more complicated than just thinking you know what the word "junk" implies.
- encode-from-scientific.htmle ts-wired.htmlk -dna.htmln k_get_over_it.php
Here's some posts relevant to this issue:
http://genomicron.blogspot.com/2007/06/more-about
http://genomicron.blogspot.com/2007/06/junk-dna-g
http://sandwalk.blogspot.com/2007/06/wired-on-jun
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2007/06/its_ju
You guys are also missing some pretty major factors here: things like intragenomic selection which preserve certain sequences over others irregardless of what they "do."