Because you sound like a tool who's shilling for them something fierce. I mean, wow. It would be quite sad if you were making an ass of yourself for free.
Funny how the hemp promoters are uninterested in other coarse-fiber crops, like jute, sisal, kenaf, and manila.
I wouldn't say "uninterested", but given that the War On Jute, Sisal, Kenaf and Manila doesn't cost a ton of money, turn several generations of kids into criminals, and justify the civil-rights horrors of the drug war as a whole (without weed, there aren't enough druggies to justify the whole mess), I don't think you're going to get people marching in the streets to protest it.
Besides, the argument seems to be that it's not a harmful or dangerous plant, and it's in fact somewhat useful. The fact that there are other fibers that are also useful is beside the point.
If Fred Phelps's goal is to piss people off, he's on the right track. If Bush's goal is to anger people, he's doing a heckuva job. The anti-spammers in question have clearly pissed someone off, and it appears to be the same someone who sends a lot of spam. That the anti-spammers have done enough to be noticed seems like the most likely explanation, but of course, there might be others; I just can't think of any.
And you don't have either [falsifiability or Occam's Razor] unless somehow it is simpler to explain that one species evolved into another without leaving a trace in the fossil record than to say that it is simply a different species.
But that doesn't make any sense. We have instances where one species evolved into another, but we can still see the intermediates because they're still around due to an odd semi-isolation of the population's habitat; they're called ring species. (I mentioned ring species previously.) If you ignore the intermediates, the endpoints of ring species look, both genetically and macroscopically, like a pair of closely related species. In the instances where we can see the intermediates, they turn out to be closely related. When we use the same genetic techniques that tell us how closely individuals of the same species are related, they tell us that the descendants of this common ancestor are more closely related than individuals of more distant species.
And as I said previously (and you never followed up on): There exist fossils which show characteristics intermediate between those in two well-defined groups; this is what being a "transitional form" means. Yes, these forms are "other species"; organisms are categorized into species. What are you trying to get at?
I did a poor job here of explaining my position. If the predictions made were not found, yes that would have falsified it. However, the predictions were sufficiently vague as to be easily explainable with multiple reasonable theories. There is nothing specific enough to select between those theories.
Explain how the theory of punctuated equilibrium would have "easily explained" it if high rates of phenotypic change were never observed in the wild, or if they could not be produced in the lab, or if rates of phenotypic change appeared in the fossil record which exceeded what could be produced in the lab.
[How is my view "basically gradualism"?] mutations appear at a relatively constant rate. A population in equilibrium will not select for new mutations.
Gradualism refers to a constant rate in the change of form. I'm writing about a relatively constant rate in the change of genes; selection acts on the population to keep the form (and the genes responsible for it) in equilibrium because differing forms are less fit for a population in equilibrium. (Note that neutral mutations accumulate at a relatively constant rate, as they're not subject to the selective pressure.)
You seem to have a very poor grasp of how selection works. I would suggest taking up a hobby like raising rabbits or some other fast breeding animal so that you can see selection in action.
What would raising rabbits teach me, out of curiosity?
In the mean time, I will state it again, you can't select for what is not there. I tried to show the silliness of your argument by showing that you using invisible mutation that were magically becoming visible. Your answer appears to be no, they become phenotypic.
"Phenotypic" isn't a kind of mutation. An organism's genotype is the content of its genes; this is what mutation acts on. An organism's phenotype is the product of the combination of those genes and the environment. It's possible to change the former without changing the latter--as I pointed out previously, most mutations are neutral.
OK. My datapoints were from my experience (which you conveniently refuse to accept).
I also conveniently explained why--as I've said at least twice before, I have the sneaking suspicion that you've confused evo-devo for recapitulation theory. I'm not interested in just taking your word for things.
So I have done a google search (just like you could have). And what do you know, the first two links are pretty interesting. One is wikipedia where the google cache still show a statement backing up what I said (edited out in August).
What was your google search? I assume you're talking about this edit, yes? The one where the statement was removed because no one could provide evidence to back it up?
The second lists several books including ones published in the 2000s (this was actually a surprise to me, I figured by now that practice would be over).
Be still, my heart--after all this excuse-making, you're presenting actual evidence? The evidence doesn't actually say what you claim it does, but it's way better than just complaining that I won't take your word for it.
But at least we have a list... a list which points out places where Haeckel's drawings or similar ones are used, not a list of textbooks which state recapitulation theory. In fact, none of them do. Textbooks I and II in that list state that "the biogenic law is not literally true", but rather, "the embryonic stages of a particular vertebrate often reflect the embryonic stages of that vertebrate's ancestors", which is true. (The biogenic law would state that earlier stages of a later organism uniformly repeated the later stages of an earlier organism, which is false.) Textbook III states that in many cases organisms reflect the state of their ancestors during development (bones that will later fuse initially are separate, for instance), but that it's "certainly not an infallible guide to phylogenetic history". Textbooks IV through X don't even discuss the theory.
Let me be a little more specific. If there are multiple reasonable explanations for what is observed, there needs to be a way to choose between them.
Well, yes; that's why we have falsifiability and Occam's Razor.
Otherwise, all you have is your faith that your interpretation is correct. At least with gradualism, the expected results would have been hard to explain any other way, but the fossil record does not support it.
Yes, the fossil record doesn't support gradualism; that's why it's a discarded theory. Punctuated equilibrium fits the evidence better. What exactly requires faith here? The theory makes plenty of falsifiable predictions, some of which I've outlined above, the results of which turned out to support the theory.
Because your view is basically gradualism. Gradualism is also what is taught in schools, but we have long since gotten off of the original topic.
No, my view is not basically gradualism. I keep trying to explain what punctuated equilibrium is, and you keep saying that it's the same as gradualism. In gradualism, phenotypic change takes place at a uniform rate; in punctuated equilibrium, it happens quickly over relatively short periods. Do you see the difference? How is my view "basically gradualism"?
And once again, you are using selection as a magical pony. Change happens with mutation. Consistent
I claim that [recapitulation theory] is still in text books. I don't see any value in going to my daughter's school and looking up the textbooks to simply have you claim that you don't believe it is being used (after all, I'm just some guy on slashdot).
Which is why I listed a few ways in which you could back up your claim, by, for instance, referring to some bit of information that we could both access... which you've refused to do.
My point is made by the fact that even though it was known to be bad in the 1800s, it has been in text books throughout the 1900s (certainly until the the later half when I was in school) so it was clearly not there for its scientific merit. Adding a data point or two in the 2000s, is simply icing that is not worth any effort on my part to go for.
But you don't have any data points. I'm not asking you for icing; I'm asking you to provide a cake in the first place. I have a sneaking suspicion that if you look at what the textbooks actually say, they state that common features in embryology reflect a common ancestry, not that the embryo passes through its entire evolutionary history as it grows.
And since there is no way to falsify the finding, using it as evidence is more wishful thinking than science. In fact, this kind of thinking throughout "science" is a big part of why I think it is far more of a religion than science.
Of course the prediction could be falsified. We could fail to observe the rates of phenotypic change required for evolution in experiments, but we don't. We could find rates of change in the fossil record that far exceed the rates we can produce in the lab; we don't.
I never said it was wrong, it may even be right, but YOU have know way to know other than your faith.
I just threw a heap of evidence at you, and you're claiming that this is nothing but faith, without bothering to explain what part of the chain of evidence doesn't hold up in your estimation.
I'm glad we agree here. Now we are back to the problem of gradualism and the fact that the fossil record does not support it. Constant mutations (your contention). Lots of time (your contention). Will show up in the fossil record as changing species. In fact, there should be more intermediate species than anything else. Too bad that's not the case.
The fossil record doesn't support gradualism. Gradualism hasn't been part of evolutionary theory for many years now. Why are you harping on the idea that it is?
The rate of mutation is relatively constant. Whether or not those mutations are selected changes based on the environment; if the environment is static, the population won't change. If the environment is changing, the population will select new genes which, in a static environment, wouldn't have conferred an advantage over the genes that were there in the first place.
[When did I say that things were mutating without visibile change] When you were trying to explain why punctuated equilibrium did not require a large number of beneficial mutations to happen in a very short period of time.
The same number of mutations happen whether or not a species is undergoing change; the difference is in whether or not the change is selected. Whether or not a change is beneficial depends on the environment that the organism inhabits. Is there something about this that I'm not stating clearly?
I don't think much of anything we have talked about has really addressed complexity, yet without increasing complexity, you don't have evolution.
This sounds like you're talking about an increase in information. I wrote about that six posts ago; was there something I didn't cover then?
Mutations, like the house in Las Vegas, have the odds all on one side. We h
My daughter said is had elephants on the cover and biology in the title. I'm not planning on stopping by her school just to look it up for you.
Well, that's just about as vague as possible. You claim that recapitulation theory is everywhere, but can't come up with an example. Use the internet. Go ahead. I'll wait. Or, heck, as it's now the weekend, ask her to borrow the book and copy out the portion of the text that you think supports recapitulation.
You can't substantiate that there are intermediate species in the fossil record. Only that there are ones that look like they could be
I'm not sure what you're asking me for. Here's how we got here:
The theory of evolution predicts that organisms of one sort give rise, through successive modifications, to clearly different organisms. There is therefore a prediction that organisms with characteristics which are sort of like one and sort of like the other will be found. I point out that numerous such organisms appear in the fossil record... and your response is that they might be unrelated. How does that have any relevance to the original prediction, and how is that possibility more likely?
You can't substantiate that there has been a constant rate of mutations. The best you can do is to say we have observed a constant rate. That tells us until about the past.
Quite right. Just because things fall down today, it doesn't mean they didn't fall up yesterday. Of course, it seems a bit more likely that they fell down as well yesterday, and getting back to the point, the mechanisms which cause mutation aren't a new thing. The observed rates of mutation in organisms today lead to various kinds of phenotypic change over time--the same kind of phenotypic change we've seen in the past. It seems reasonable to infer that mutation rates work similarly when we can't see them to when we can, and the "molecular clock" based on mutation rates syncs up rather well with the fossil record. What's your explanation for why this is all wrong?
You can't select for something that is not there. The way you describe it, natural selection is your magical pony that is changing animals from one species to another.
No, it's not. You haven't been paying attention. Here, I'll reiterate.
Natural selection acts on variation which has already been introduced into the gene pool through random mutation. The question of when a new species emerges is generally answered by seeing whether or not an individual from one population is reproductively isolated from another. If they aren't alive at the same time, this experiment can't be done, but you can unequivocally state that two living organisms belong to different species. Speciation doesn't occur unless the population is split for some reason, and the populations diverge due to selection or drift or a combination of the two.
Where do you see "magical pony" in that?
It certainly sounded like you said things are mutating without visible change until natural selection comes by and changes them. Turning non visible changes into visible ones with natural selection is definitely a faith statement.
When did I say that things were mutating without visibile change unless "natural selection comes by and changes them"? How did you get that out of what I said? Where did I distinguish between "non visible changes" and "visible ones"? Visible to who? What are you even talking about?
Most mutations are neutral, which means that natural selection doesn't act on them. Some changes increase fitness (which is a function of both the organism and its environment); some decrease it. These are the mutations on which natural selection operates. According to the theory of punctuated equilibrium, in a population which in equilibrium--no new predators, no new prey, nothing changing--it will find a local maximum of the fitness function and stay there;
At the risk of sounding like a broken record, you could start by providing an example of someone doing good climate science who lost their job because they published good science that went against the consensus. You could start by pointing to a modern textbook which espoused Haeckel's recapitulation theory.
You've got quite a few assumptions going on here that can't be substantiated. You do a good job of simply stating them as fact.
If there's something you think I can't substantiate, please do point it out and I'll do my best to explain.
You do realize that selective pressure reduces genetic diversity, right?
That's a bit vague, and I'm not sure how it's relevant. Could you back up this claim, and explain how it applies?
[Transitions above the species level] could just be other species. There is nothing showing that these are transitional, it is simply an assumption.
What are you talking about? There exist fossils which show characteristics intermediate between those in two well-defined groups; this is what being a "transitional form" means. Yes, these forms are "other species"; organisms are categorized into species. What are you trying to say?
There is a good explanation of what transitional forms are on Wikipedia; there's a very, very long list of the fossils outlining various transitions here.
I will take the same out you did, I can't currently find the article that talks about his censure, so I will post more when I find it.
The set of links to measured rates of phenotypic change (an average of 0.6 darwins in the fossil record; up to 100,000 darwins in an experimental setting) is collected here. I look forward to seeing your evidence that Haeckel's drawings made it into textbooks. How we got to discussing Haeckel's motivations is beyond me, but I'm more interested in your original assertion that recapitulation theory is being taught in textbooks as some kind of dogmatic truth.
To be honest, I have not looked for a name yet. Almost every textbook I have looked at in the last 20+ years since I have been in school has had it.
And yet you can't point to a single one, despite having spent so much time looking at them.
This includes the ones my children have been using. So based on my experience, it certainly looks universal. If you know that the schools in your area don't teach with such garbage, consider yourself lucky.
I've been out of high school for some years now, and I don't have children attending. Schools in my area could be teaching phlogiston theory, for all I know. You're the one claiming some kind of knowledge, and you're the one that keeps weaseling out of providing any sort of actual evidence. Could you give me the titles and primary authors of your childrens' textbooks?
Do it. You've been dancing around backing up your outrageous claims for this entire thread. Jonathan Wells has made his bones claiming that textbooks teach Haeckel's theory; he's wrong. Either back up your claim with evidence or retract it.
So is it only corporate money that make scientists bad, or does all money come with certain expectations? If it is all money, I guess researchers will have to fund themselves before we can believe them. If you think government money does not influence the outcome, you must not be around the academic community much.
Who are you responding to? I pointed out that Pat Michaels is doing rather well for himself, and he certainly hasn't lost his job for his views on climate. I didn't say anything about how his reliance on industry funds might affect his research. You must be replying to a different commenter of the same name. In the meantime, either back up or retract your assertion.
Aren't we supposed to be the good guys, full of delicious moral superiority and all? Aren't we supposed to be different because we don't behead random people off the street in order to induce fear in our enemies? Why is it that the same people who vociferously deny the existence of savage practices are so keen for us to engage in them? Why is it such a short jump from "we'll liberate those ignorant savages with our civilization" to "we'll show them what savagery really means"?
Sometimes it even seems like a child's whine. "But he gets to behead people he doesn't like whenever he wants--why can't I?" Left unspoken here is the question of why someone would enjoy "get[ting] to" behead people without so much as a whiff of due process.
Yep, mutations are mostly harmful and as you point out, we have lots of them.
No, most mutations are neutral, not harmful. Harmful mutations are selected against; beneficial mutations are selected for; that's what selection means.
Every mechanism we know of for random mutations is most likely going to destroy not create.
I just outlined mechanisms for random mutations, pointing out that some destroy and some create. Are you paying attention or just repeating yourself?
You postulate that small non destructive changes add up to create new things. You need lots of time for this to even sound reasonable. Oops, now you are talking gradualism.
No, this isn't gradualism. Mutations occur at roughly the same rate whether or not a species is undergoing change (you can breed fast-mutating strains, but that's not the point); the difference is that where in a species at equilibrium any change away from that equilibrium will decrease its fitness, in a species in flux (say, during a migration event), this will not hold true, and the species will change.
I can't find my source for this, and I do apologize--I'm still looking, and I'll post it when I get it--but the average rates of phenotypic change over the long term seen in the fossil record are far, far slower than those seen in the short term when a population migrates into a new region, or when it's subjected to some new strongly selective pressure.
Gradualism is not supported by the fossil record. Punctuated equilibrium drastically reduces the amount of time you have for this to take place, so much so that none of the intermediate species end up in the fossil record.
Yes; that's a darned shame. Of course, there are plenty of fossil transitions above the species level. Luckily we can see what you term "intermediate species" in the wild today in the form of ring species; these cover a span of space rather than time, but the idea is the same--a continuum of organisms reaching from one form that's certainly in one species to a form that's certainly in another.
So your believing in some sort of magical pony (or whatever it is you want to substitute) that comes down and produces a large number of beneficial mutations in a short period of time sounds a lot more like a religious conviction than science.
You're not paying attention. The mutation rate stays largely constant, and whether or not a mutation is beneficial depends on the environment. In a new environment, more novel mutations will be beneficial, but that's a function of the environment, not a function of the way the species works.
And when are you going to find me one of those textbooks which describes the biogenetic law as fact?
The same way you wont accept the word of some guy on slashdot, I'm not going to take the internet as a source over more direct knowledge.
I won't accept the word of some guy on Slashdot because I have no way of verifying it. (I'm seven feet tall and can shoot blue hadoken from my furious fists!) I'm not asking you to take "the internet" as a source, and I ask--again!--what you're disputing. The guy receives significant compensation from ExxonMobil and the Cato Institute, and did not lose his job for being "a heretic".
Projects which are community-owned actually can legitimately use the name "community"; open source development projects can't be whisked away by corporate overlords; neither can Wikipedia or the media collection at the Wikimedia Commons, or freedb for that matter. Sure, any corporation that uses the word for their cattle--err, whoops, make that users--is lying like a rug, but there do exist legitimate instances.
You were being criticized for making a simple and obvious error.
The fallacy you're engaging in can be seen when someone uses the word "terrorist" around a fear-filled American. It acts to shut down debate, as anyone saying, for instance, "perhaps we shouldn't tap our citizens' phones without some form of oversight" or "shouldn't the tradition of habeas corpus prevent suspects who haven't been convicted of anything from being disappeared in the best tradition of Pinochet or Stalin", will be accused of being soft on the terrorists, or wanting them to win, or the like. Is this really the sort of argument you want to make?
Objecting to ham-handed measures taken against a despicable group doesn't mean you support that group.
People with principles may leave, but there's an infinite line of thirteen year old kids who'll use that "Sponsored Account" option to get extra bling on the their journals while providing tons of sweet ad revenue for Livejournal.
Getting rid of the chaff--people who use the service but don't feel a need to gnaw at the ad-supported teat--is good business for them. Now that LJ is ad-supported, the users are no longer their customers; the advertisers are. Cry moar, emo kid, but you're not the kind of user LJ sees in its future business plan. They may bleat platitudes about "community" and the like, but their actions speak louder.
(I mean, does anyone remember when Livejournal promised to never have ads? Or that the SixApart takeover wouldn't change anything? It's amazing anyone believes a damned thing that comes out of a corporate mouth at this point.)
I suppose you won't accept that I've been on the receiving end of that. Or maybe you just figure I deserve it.
No; I'm just hesitant to take "some guy on Slashdot said it" as a reliable source of information. No offense, but I can tell you I'm a six foot tall cowboy ninja with chainsaws for hands; that doesn't really demonstrate anything.
I guess we will simply have to disagree here. I can see that you are convinced that small hypothetical increments are more than enough to wipe out huge continuous destruction. This, to me, looks very much like faith.
"Huge continuous destruction?" What huge continuous destruction? And how are mutations hypothetical? The average human carries several hundred new ones.
Yep and dealt with by his peers within a pretty short time. This should never had made ANY text books.
You've yet to show that it actually has.
Well there is no chance that I will be able to remember what science book I had as a kid, but with some digging, I might be able to uncover which one my daughter was using a couple of years ago. It was still in that book.
If it's so common, you should be able to find a textbook which makes this claim. Heck, you should be able to find a critical essay with examples somewhere on the web. Please do link me.
I will admit that I do not know [Pat Michaels] personally, but I am good friends with someone who does and is in his field (I will not mention who that is since he would probably like to keep his job) so I can't answer your list of his crimes.
What does your knowing someone who knows Pat Michaels have to do with your addressing my opinion of him?
However, I will ask you if you have ever known of someone who has a bad reputation when looked up on the net that you know for a fact is made up of at best taking him out of context and and at worst pure lies? I know of a couple and to read about them on the net would leave me with a much worse opinion of them than deserved even when I don't agree with them. So unless you actually know (or know of) this person more directly, I will stick with what I hear from someone who does.
Do you dispute that Michaels displayed incompetent scholarship in the degrees/radians case? Do you dispute that he receives mad cheese from ExxonMobil? Do you dispute that he occupies a generously-compensated position at the Cato Institute? These are not abstract issues which can't be understood by laypeople.
BTW. Pat Michaels used to be state climatologist, so I would say he did lose his job.
There was never a provision for a state climatologist. The Secretary of the Commonwealth clarified that. He's employed by the University of Virginia in the same position he's always occupied, and he's listed at stateclimate.org representing Virginia. In summary, Virginia does not have, nor have they ever had, a state climatologist, but the closest thing they have has been and is Pat Michaels. There's not a shred of evidence that he's "[lost] his job" here.
Yeah, so why not try to defend their position. If it's a reasonable position, why should that be hard to do? Are these "commenters" so mentally incompetent that they can only resort to mocking?
No; your positions deserve mockery, and it's fun to do, which is why they get mocked. How exactly would one defend that position? Either you believe it or you don't; there's nothing to do other than state it, which I've just done--therefore, "these commenters" (that would be me) aren't so mentally incompetent that they can only resort to mocking.
Ah, one of the central mythologies of atheism: Religious people essentially inherit their religion, and those who don't... well, it's best to pretend they don't exist.
But I didn't say that. I said that people tend to take after the beliefs of their parents; do you dispute this? Do you think I'm unaware of the existence of converts? How am I pretending that they don't exist?
No, actually, there are not. That's my point. There is virtually nothing on the subject except childishness. I'm writing to advocate for reasoned discourse, as well as for a modicum of civility.
You've gone looking for something offensive, and now that your delicate sensibilities have been offended, you're clutching your pearls and going on about how impolite everyone else is. Other threads discuss the merits. You chose to respond to the snarky one.
Are you serious? I say that these people "seem to be capable of thinking about nothing else," and you believe yourself to have "shown that I was talking nonsense," by pointing out that they do at times think of other things? Really? Maybe English is your second language, in which case you might want to read up on usage and rhetorical style most common to the language. You might find idiom, figure of speech, metaphor, and hyperbole of interest.
To be fair, it's not just your "seem to be capable of thinking about nothing else" that was nonsense--while there's a fair amount of snark, there are plenty of threads, such as the one I linked above, that aren't just devoted to being crabby--it's also your complaint that nobody will correspond with you civilly which is addressed to me while I'm doing exactly that; it's your failure to read what I actually wrote in favor of a caricature of your own design ("people take after their parents' religion" "so you're saying that no one ever converts?"); it's this weird idea that you're some kind of island of civility in a sea of savagery.
If you want to discuss the merits, go to another thread. Maybe the one I linked, maybe another one. If you're just here to complain, by all means, stay here. But at least be honest about it.
Ah, sorry. Still, I don't see how that applies. ID claims that evolution by the neodarwinian mechanism couldn't have happened in specific cases, because past a certain point, no simplified forms of the structures in question could still be functional.
The "irreducible complexity" idea, right. They've yet to actually find something that's irreducibly complex; in the meantime, the argument goes that as (random person) can't explain how x developed, then it must have been a wizard. This argument is actually made by some people; if you're not making it, then kindly ignore this part.
You're saying the paper in the CB300 link is supposed to be evidence that it's possible for complex organs to evolve??? They made a trail of increasing rewards for increasingly complex logical operations, each within a couple of mutations of each other.
No, they didn't. There aren't "logical operations" involved in the process at all; the operations in question were all simple, slight changes in phenotype which could be made gradually. (I don't know what you're referring to as "increasing rewards.)
OF COURSE the program is going to follow the trail to the selected function. Saying that this is evidence of the possibility of complex organs evolving this way in actual organisms is circular logic or a straw man; as no one is denying that such evolutionary mechanism would work IF you had the breadcrumb trail in place, leading the way.
The only "breadcrumb trail" involved is a selection for better-functioning eyes. Here, I'll reiterate the point for you.
The eye is a complex organ. To show that the fish eye (our eyes are variants of that basic type) could have arisen from simpler organs, we show a path consisting or arbitrarily small steps which go from a light-sensitive patch to the fluid-filled "camera eye" that we use. Each step consists of a kind of variation which is observed as part of the variety of any given species (a body part is slightly longer, or slightly curvier, or thicker, or thinner), and in each step, the variation slightly improves the quality of vision. Furthermore, we can look at existing animals and see various stages of the proposed path in nature (for example, the nautilus has a pinhole-camera type of eye, with no lens), which provides evidence that not only is the path a possible one, it may in fact be the path that the ancestral eye took to get to where it is now in humans.
Evidence that actual organs could possibly evolve by a given mechanism would first require modeling DNA to morphology, something that, AFAIK hasn't even been done yet in any meaningful way.
While morphogenesis is a fascinating and darned complex topic, the only thing that needs to be understood here is that a change in genotype causes (through an arbitrarily complex system of feedback loops, agonists and antagonists) a change in phenotype. This has been known since the genome was discovered in the first place. While it's certainly an important question as to how DNA influences morphology (and there's some really nifty work involving Hox genes which explains a good part of it), it's not in question that it does.
To take a page straight from The Extended Phenotype, if a change in a beaver's genome makes the beaver more likely to build a better dam, then we can legitimately say that the gene is "for" dam-building, even if we know absolutely nothing about how it works--we know only that it does.
Of course there's scientific proof. It can never rise to the level of mathematic proof, of course, but it's still called proof. If you molecularly model a simple bacterium on a supercomputer and let it evolve by random mutation and natural selection, and it spontaneously develops photosynthesis or turns multicellular, then you have proof that it's possible, and extraordinarily strong evidence that it probably did happen that way.
You should really try to read what I wrote. Gradualism is what is being taught. It does not fit the fossil record. Trying to point that out will get you branded as a heretic. All I'm wanting is for "science" to clean house and at least abide by its own rules. I'm not trying to get science to agree with me, just to not make thinks up out of thin air and then teach it to my kids as a proven fact.
Somehow I doubt that. Please provide me with an example of someone attempting to point out that phyletic gradualism isn't well-supported and being "branded as a heretic" for their trouble. Please note that the basic idea goes back as far as Darwin, who wrote that "the periods during which species have undergone modification, though long as measured in years, have probably been short in comparison with the periods during which they retain the same form" in Origin of Species.
Gene duplication is not new information, just a copy. What point mutation has created something new as opposed to removed something from the gene. If your new thing only comes from removing information, you will eventually end up with nothing.
Did you read the "point mutation" link? I feel pedantic breaking it down this far for you yet again, but here goes.
Point mutations do not add or remove anything. A point mutation changes one base pair in the genome. For instance, an 'A' becomes a 'G'. The reason that duplication is important is that while the point mutations may change the functionality of the second copy of the gene, the original functionality remains intact in the first copy.
Appeals to "information" are popular among the intelligent design crowd, but they're not terribly relevant. A large heap of random noise is a lot of "information", but it's not terribly useful. The gene duplication event adds information, but the point mutations keep it constant--yet it's the point mutations following the duplication that create the new functionality in question.
Because if true, [recapitulation theory] would be observable evolution. That's why the hoax was created in the first place.
A hoax? Wait, you have evidence that recapitulation theory was the result of a conspiracy rather than scientists just plain getting it wrong and ignoring evidence that wasn't what they expected to find? Could you present this evidence?
Recapitulation theory is a pretty obvious [example].
And you'll be showing me a textbook that states that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny when, exactly? A link to a description or review of a textbook would be fine.
You cited "people who have lost their job for doing good science simple because it did not agree with the prevailing opinions". Pat Michaels either fudged his numbers or is too incompetent to do them right--not very good science--and did not, it seems, lose his job. So, again.
I know people who have lost their job for doing good science simple because it did not agree with the prevailing opinions.
Please cite someone who's done good science which disagreed with the prevailing opinions on climate and lost their job for their troubles.
What's the point? There can be discussion, such as to how seriously people should take Bronze Age or Stone Age myths, histories, laws, prophecies, and philosophical and religious works.
Well, yeah--the position taken by the commenters who you're disparaging is that they should be viewed as historically interesting, but certainly not some sort of special knowledge which has a magical claim on truth.
We could even discuss the basis by which many people credit certain of those works to God and find a limitless source of enlightenment within them.
Limitless enlightenment, eh? I suppose we could, but it's not that interesting a question--tradition and authority carry a lot of weight, and people essentially inherit their religion most of the time.
Or we could ignore each other and not waste our time.
You seem to have ignored most of the discussion in this thread, centering around the idea that creationism is ridiculous, and attempted to get some cheap martyrdom out of it. Why do you feel the need to waste your time?
But those who just start ridiculing, even in the absence of even an attempted discussion, only cause mutual antagonism, and will themselves fail to be taken seriously by rel... people of faith.
If you'd like to attempt discussion, there are plenty of other threads in this discussion that are focusing on the merits. You seem to be content to focus on the mockery in order to complain about it.
And I assure you, no one in this thread is losing sleep over the idea that creationists won't take them seriously.
As long as we agree that taking things too literally is deserving of ridicule. (PWNED!:-))
Ah, the "I was kidding" defense, always a good fallback position when you're shown to be talking nonsense.
Punctuated equilibrium is a much better explanation than gradualism. However, textbooks still teach gradualism as "proven fact". It is one of the many non scientific things in the textbooks that are still in text books and any attempt to correct such errors is met with blind religious opposition.
Wait, I thought that evolutionary biology was a church, according to you. What kind of a church can't even distribute its sacred texts reliably?
Also, if a textbook states that a theory is "proven fact", then it's poorly written. Science isn't in the business of providing absolute proof.
I'm just trying to follow your argument of reversible mutations. You have yet to point to an observed mutation that adds information, so until you give a specific, I'm sticking to my point.
Gene duplication is well-known; gene duplication plus point mutations (also well-known) equals new genes. Both have been observed. I pointed to these things in the last post I made, and I'm pointing to them again now. What are you not getting?
Yep. [Biology textbooks teaching recapitulation theory] are still in use. Keep in mind that as a religious tools it is very effective. Much more so than any actual science.
Why is recapitulation theory effective "as a religious tools"? Why is it more effective (at what, exactly?) than modern results in evo-devo? And when are you going to actually provide an example of these textbooks you keep invoking?
Try looking over the science text books in your area. You will see they are full of crap that has long been shown false. Try getting some of it corrected (I'm talking the real obvious stuff here not things still in flux). Let me know if you still think the same way.
Textbooks are frequently not terribly good, but I think science texts are bad for the same reason that math texts are bad, and in the same way--they're written by committee, and the whole process is a damned racket designed to make the whole mess teacher-proof.
But if you're trying to show that science textbooks are part of a massive conspiracy to cover up something (what, exactly?), you're going to have to do better than waving your hands. Specific examples, please--start with the "real obvious stuff".
For real fun, try disagreeing with the anthropomorphic global warming crowd. I know people who have lost their job for doing good science simple because it did not agree with the prevailing opinions.
Again, examples, please. If someone has good results that the establishment is covering up, I certainly want to hear about it.
Also, that's anthropogenic, meaning human-caused; anthropomorphic means human-shaped, like Bugs Bunny.
Oh, right - because it can't be that bad. And if you HAVE to work at Wal Mart for a job, well, that just means you have no right to complain.
Well, isn't that just tidy. Are you familiar with company towns in the late 19th century? Nobody forced people to work there; nobody forced them to put their kids to work in the mill. Of course, if they didn't want to starve, they'd better do so, and forget about complaining to management about conditions, much less forming a union--you'd be lucky to get away with being fired, if management didn't send their goons after you.
But all that's okay by your logic, because people can just go get another job which you've handwaved into existence.
Thanks--I had been wondering about how chromosome counts could change since I was in high school, and looking back, I'm really quite disappointed that my biology teacher didn't at least point me in the right direction when I asked. It's not so much that we had bad biology classes, but evolution was covered rather quickly; there was a unit on Punnett squares and Mendelian inheritance (I'm the blue-eyed child of two brown-eyed parents, which makes me a nifty example), and then there was a drawing of a phylogenetic tree, and then we were dissecting earthworms. It was all a bit of a blur.
I can respect the characterization of it as an argument from personal incredulity, but not an argument from ignorance. The scientists who advocate it may be religious, but they are not ignorant of the subject. But it's incredulity on claims being made as "scientific" that there is no evidence for...
Saying that it's an argument from ignorance isn't saying that the people making the argument are ignorant. The argument from ignorance goes, "we don't know how it happened, therefore it didn't"; it's a logical fallacy, and a more generalized form of the argument from personal incredulity.
To start with, there is insufficient evidence to demonstrate that it is even possible for a new type of organ or system to evolve through the mechanism of random mutation and natural selection.
There's plenty of evidence that it's possible for complex organs to evolve. See CB300; the eye is a particularly well-explored example of this. So what else do you think is impossible? (You might want to consult the Index to Creationist Claims first; I get the impression that you're unfamilar with it.)
I could go on from there to the larger claims being taken on faith, (such as the claim that all new organs and systems did evolve by that mechanism) but that would be an excellent starting point to prove.
Haven't you been paying attention? Science isn't in the business of proving anything. If you think that anything's been proven, you're not paying enough attention.
Punctuated equilibrium is how scientists are currently trying to explain the fossil record.
You say that like it's a poor explanation. Care to elaborate?
OK, when have we seen a mutation happen and then reverse. If this is a no-new information mutation, then my statement still holds. If it is one were information is lost, I don't think you will find an example.
Why on earth would you expect (let's take this for an example) a point mutation to occur twice at the exact same locus? That's like lightning striking twice in the same place. (Yes, I know that lightning strikes aren't truly random, but roll with it here.)
We see that small-scale mutations fall into certain classes. (There are also larger-scale mutations, such as gene duplications, but we'll leave that aside for now.) The genome can be visualized as a set of very long strings (chromosomes) made from a four-letter alphabet. (I'll use an 'XYZ' alphabet because I don't want to give the impression that I'm writing out actual genes.) A point mutation, for example, changes 'XYZ' to 'XZZ'. An insertion changes, for instance, 'XYZ' to 'XYYZ'. A deletion changes, for instance, 'XYZ' to 'XZ', and so forth.
Based on definitions set forth in information theory, point changes have no effect on the quantity of information in the genome, insertions add information, and deletions remove it. Do you understand?
You need to take a look a the school textbooks still in use around here. It was taught when I was in school and is still being taught now. Any attempt to remove such an obvious problem stirs up the religious nuts who worship at that alter.
You've seriously seen school textbooks which teach that embryonic development recapitulates the evolutionary history of the organism in question? Bear in mind that describing common features in embryos which become different structures in adults is quite different from recapitulation theory. I'd like to see an example, if you can provide it.
Also, that's "altar".
I define religion in the public schools as doctrine backed only by faith that gets you branded as a heretic if you disagree. Naturalism in the public schools fits that bill pretty well.
"Backed only by faith"? Perhaps 29+ Evidences for Macroevolution would be a good place to start; if you don't want to click over there, the existence of the dual-nested hierarchy (which predicts the absence of chimaeras) is very strong evidence for common descent. What part of the theory do you see as being "backed only by faith"?
One isn't "branded as a heretic" for disagreeing. Poor scholarship and gross ignorance will get one branded a charlatan if one keeps at it for long enough. Attempting to do an end run around the scientific process and trying to sell conclusions directly to the public (as the cold fusion guys did, for example) is at the very least impolite, if not outright offensive.
A persistent refusal to back up wild claims peppered with insults generally won't be met with hugs and kisses. Creationists are no different from the infinite-free-energy crowd or any other set of cranks who waste scientists' time; the claims of persecution are pretty much the same ones. The difference is that creationists have a much better lobby,
Slashdot Mirror
Because you sound like a tool who's shilling for them something fierce. I mean, wow. It would be quite sad if you were making an ass of yourself for free.
Besides, the argument seems to be that it's not a harmful or dangerous plant, and it's in fact somewhat useful. The fact that there are other fibers that are also useful is beside the point.
If Fred Phelps's goal is to piss people off, he's on the right track. If Bush's goal is to anger people, he's doing a heckuva job. The anti-spammers in question have clearly pissed someone off, and it appears to be the same someone who sends a lot of spam. That the anti-spammers have done enough to be noticed seems like the most likely explanation, but of course, there might be others; I just can't think of any.
But that doesn't make any sense. We have instances where one species evolved into another, but we can still see the intermediates because they're still around due to an odd semi-isolation of the population's habitat; they're called ring species. (I mentioned ring species previously.) If you ignore the intermediates, the endpoints of ring species look, both genetically and macroscopically, like a pair of closely related species. In the instances where we can see the intermediates, they turn out to be closely related. When we use the same genetic techniques that tell us how closely individuals of the same species are related, they tell us that the descendants of this common ancestor are more closely related than individuals of more distant species.
And as I said previously (and you never followed up on): There exist fossils which show characteristics intermediate between those in two well-defined groups; this is what being a "transitional form" means. Yes, these forms are "other species"; organisms are categorized into species. What are you trying to get at?
Explain how the theory of punctuated equilibrium would have "easily explained" it if high rates of phenotypic change were never observed in the wild, or if they could not be produced in the lab, or if rates of phenotypic change appeared in the fossil record which exceeded what could be produced in the lab.
Gradualism refers to a constant rate in the change of form. I'm writing about a relatively constant rate in the change of genes; selection acts on the population to keep the form (and the genes responsible for it) in equilibrium because differing forms are less fit for a population in equilibrium. (Note that neutral mutations accumulate at a relatively constant rate, as they're not subject to the selective pressure.)
What would raising rabbits teach me, out of curiosity?
"Phenotypic" isn't a kind of mutation. An organism's genotype is the content of its genes; this is what mutation acts on. An organism's phenotype is the product of the combination of those genes and the environment. It's possible to change the former without changing the latter--as I pointed out previously, most mutations are neutral.
As I said before, he's still listed as representing Virginia, and he's still employed by the same University that he was at previously. (The state never
I also conveniently explained why--as I've said at least twice before, I have the sneaking suspicion that you've confused evo-devo for recapitulation theory. I'm not interested in just taking your word for things.
What was your google search? I assume you're talking about this edit, yes? The one where the statement was removed because no one could provide evidence to back it up?
Be still, my heart--after all this excuse-making, you're presenting actual evidence? The evidence doesn't actually say what you claim it does, but it's way better than just complaining that I won't take your word for it.
But at least we have a list... a list which points out places where Haeckel's drawings or similar ones are used, not a list of textbooks which state recapitulation theory. In fact, none of them do. Textbooks I and II in that list state that "the biogenic law is not literally true", but rather, "the embryonic stages of a particular vertebrate often reflect the embryonic stages of that vertebrate's ancestors", which is true. (The biogenic law would state that earlier stages of a later organism uniformly repeated the later stages of an earlier organism, which is false.) Textbook III states that in many cases organisms reflect the state of their ancestors during development (bones that will later fuse initially are separate, for instance), but that it's "certainly not an infallible guide to phylogenetic history". Textbooks IV through X don't even discuss the theory.
I can understand how the statements "embryonic organisms frequently resemble their ancestors' embryonic forms" and "organisms relive their evolutionary history through their morphogenesis" might seem similar. Here's a good summary of the differences, if you're still confused about the concept.
Well, yes; that's why we have falsifiability and Occam's Razor.
Yes, the fossil record doesn't support gradualism; that's why it's a discarded theory. Punctuated equilibrium fits the evidence better. What exactly requires faith here? The theory makes plenty of falsifiable predictions, some of which I've outlined above, the results of which turned out to support the theory.
No, my view is not basically gradualism. I keep trying to explain what punctuated equilibrium is, and you keep saying that it's the same as gradualism. In gradualism, phenotypic change takes place at a uniform rate; in punctuated equilibrium, it happens quickly over relatively short periods. Do you see the difference? How is my view "basically gradualism"?
Which is why I listed a few ways in which you could back up your claim, by, for instance, referring to some bit of information that we could both access... which you've refused to do.
But you don't have any data points. I'm not asking you for icing; I'm asking you to provide a cake in the first place. I have a sneaking suspicion that if you look at what the textbooks actually say, they state that common features in embryology reflect a common ancestry, not that the embryo passes through its entire evolutionary history as it grows.
Of course the prediction could be falsified. We could fail to observe the rates of phenotypic change required for evolution in experiments, but we don't. We could find rates of change in the fossil record that far exceed the rates we can produce in the lab; we don't.
I just threw a heap of evidence at you, and you're claiming that this is nothing but faith, without bothering to explain what part of the chain of evidence doesn't hold up in your estimation.
The fossil record doesn't support gradualism. Gradualism hasn't been part of evolutionary theory for many years now. Why are you harping on the idea that it is?
The rate of mutation is relatively constant. Whether or not those mutations are selected changes based on the environment; if the environment is static, the population won't change. If the environment is changing, the population will select new genes which, in a static environment, wouldn't have conferred an advantage over the genes that were there in the first place.
The same number of mutations happen whether or not a species is undergoing change; the difference is in whether or not the change is selected. Whether or not a change is beneficial depends on the environment that the organism inhabits. Is there something about this that I'm not stating clearly?
This sounds like you're talking about an increase in information. I wrote about that six posts ago; was there something I didn't cover then?
Well, that's just about as vague as possible. You claim that recapitulation theory is everywhere, but can't come up with an example. Use the internet. Go ahead. I'll wait. Or, heck, as it's now the weekend, ask her to borrow the book and copy out the portion of the text that you think supports recapitulation.
I'm not sure what you're asking me for. Here's how we got here:
The theory of evolution predicts that organisms of one sort give rise, through successive modifications, to clearly different organisms. There is therefore a prediction that organisms with characteristics which are sort of like one and sort of like the other will be found. I point out that numerous such organisms appear in the fossil record... and your response is that they might be unrelated. How does that have any relevance to the original prediction, and how is that possibility more likely?
Quite right. Just because things fall down today, it doesn't mean they didn't fall up yesterday. Of course, it seems a bit more likely that they fell down as well yesterday, and getting back to the point, the mechanisms which cause mutation aren't a new thing. The observed rates of mutation in organisms today lead to various kinds of phenotypic change over time--the same kind of phenotypic change we've seen in the past. It seems reasonable to infer that mutation rates work similarly when we can't see them to when we can, and the "molecular clock" based on mutation rates syncs up rather well with the fossil record. What's your explanation for why this is all wrong?
No, it's not. You haven't been paying attention. Here, I'll reiterate.
Natural selection acts on variation which has already been introduced into the gene pool through random mutation. The question of when a new species emerges is generally answered by seeing whether or not an individual from one population is reproductively isolated from another. If they aren't alive at the same time, this experiment can't be done, but you can unequivocally state that two living organisms belong to different species. Speciation doesn't occur unless the population is split for some reason, and the populations diverge due to selection or drift or a combination of the two.
Where do you see "magical pony" in that?
When did I say that things were mutating without visibile change unless "natural selection comes by and changes them"? How did you get that out of what I said? Where did I distinguish between "non visible changes" and "visible ones"? Visible to who? What are you even talking about?
Most mutations are neutral, which means that natural selection doesn't act on them. Some changes increase fitness (which is a function of both the organism and its environment); some decrease it. These are the mutations on which natural selection operates. According to the theory of punctuated equilibrium, in a population which in equilibrium--no new predators, no new prey, nothing changing--it will find a local maximum of the fitness function and stay there;
There is a good explanation of what transitional forms are on Wikipedia; there's a very, very long list of the fossils outlining various transitions here. The set of links to measured rates of phenotypic change (an average of 0.6 darwins in the fossil record; up to 100,000 darwins in an experimental setting) is collected here. I look forward to seeing your evidence that Haeckel's drawings made it into textbooks. How we got to discussing Haeckel's motivations is beyond me, but I'm more interested in your original assertion that recapitulation theory is being taught in textbooks as some kind of dogmatic truth. And yet you can't point to a single one, despite having spent so much time looking at them. I've been out of high school for some years now, and I don't have children attending. Schools in my area could be teaching phlogiston theory, for all I know. You're the one claiming some kind of knowledge, and you're the one that keeps weaseling out of providing any sort of actual evidence. Could you give me the titles and primary authors of your childrens' textbooks?
Do it. You've been dancing around backing up your outrageous claims for this entire thread. Jonathan Wells has made his bones claiming that textbooks teach Haeckel's theory; he's wrong. Either back up your claim with evidence or retract it. Who are you responding to? I pointed out that Pat Michaels is doing rather well for himself, and he certainly hasn't lost his job for his views on climate. I didn't say anything about how his reliance on industry funds might affect his research. You must be replying to a different commenter of the same name. In the meantime, either back up or retract your assertion.
Aren't we supposed to be the good guys, full of delicious moral superiority and all? Aren't we supposed to be different because we don't behead random people off the street in order to induce fear in our enemies? Why is it that the same people who vociferously deny the existence of savage practices are so keen for us to engage in them? Why is it such a short jump from "we'll liberate those ignorant savages with our civilization" to "we'll show them what savagery really means"?
Sometimes it even seems like a child's whine. "But he gets to behead people he doesn't like whenever he wants--why can't I?" Left unspoken here is the question of why someone would enjoy "get[ting] to" behead people without so much as a whiff of due process.
No, most mutations are neutral, not harmful. Harmful mutations are selected against; beneficial mutations are selected for; that's what selection means.
I just outlined mechanisms for random mutations, pointing out that some destroy and some create. Are you paying attention or just repeating yourself?
No, this isn't gradualism. Mutations occur at roughly the same rate whether or not a species is undergoing change (you can breed fast-mutating strains, but that's not the point); the difference is that where in a species at equilibrium any change away from that equilibrium will decrease its fitness, in a species in flux (say, during a migration event), this will not hold true, and the species will change.
I can't find my source for this, and I do apologize--I'm still looking, and I'll post it when I get it--but the average rates of phenotypic change over the long term seen in the fossil record are far, far slower than those seen in the short term when a population migrates into a new region, or when it's subjected to some new strongly selective pressure.
Yes; that's a darned shame. Of course, there are plenty of fossil transitions above the species level. Luckily we can see what you term "intermediate species" in the wild today in the form of ring species; these cover a span of space rather than time, but the idea is the same--a continuum of organisms reaching from one form that's certainly in one species to a form that's certainly in another.
You're not paying attention. The mutation rate stays largely constant, and whether or not a mutation is beneficial depends on the environment. In a new environment, more novel mutations will be beneficial, but that's a function of the environment, not a function of the way the species works.
The guy who had a feud with Haeckel and called him a fraud? What about him? All I found was a quote in which Haeckel defends his drawings as being diagrammatic rather than strictly representational, and as being a fair representation of the features depicted. Where's the fraud?
And when are you going to find me one of those textbooks which describes the biogenetic law as fact?
I won't accept the word of some guy on Slashdot because I have no way of verifying it. (I'm seven feet tall and can shoot blue hadoken from my furious fists!) I'm not asking you to take "the internet" as a source, and I ask--again!--what you're disputing. The guy receives significant compensation from ExxonMobil and the Cato Institute, and did not lose his job for being "a heretic".
The website hasn't been updated in nearly a year; what are they doing?
Projects which are community-owned actually can legitimately use the name "community"; open source development projects can't be whisked away by corporate overlords; neither can Wikipedia or the media collection at the Wikimedia Commons, or freedb for that matter. Sure, any corporation that uses the word for their cattle--err, whoops, make that users--is lying like a rug, but there do exist legitimate instances.
You were being criticized for making a simple and obvious error.
The fallacy you're engaging in can be seen when someone uses the word "terrorist" around a fear-filled American. It acts to shut down debate, as anyone saying, for instance, "perhaps we shouldn't tap our citizens' phones without some form of oversight" or "shouldn't the tradition of habeas corpus prevent suspects who haven't been convicted of anything from being disappeared in the best tradition of Pinochet or Stalin", will be accused of being soft on the terrorists, or wanting them to win, or the like. Is this really the sort of argument you want to make?
Objecting to ham-handed measures taken against a despicable group doesn't mean you support that group.
People with principles may leave, but there's an infinite line of thirteen year old kids who'll use that "Sponsored Account" option to get extra bling on the their journals while providing tons of sweet ad revenue for Livejournal.
Getting rid of the chaff--people who use the service but don't feel a need to gnaw at the ad-supported teat--is good business for them. Now that LJ is ad-supported, the users are no longer their customers; the advertisers are. Cry moar, emo kid, but you're not the kind of user LJ sees in its future business plan. They may bleat platitudes about "community" and the like, but their actions speak louder.
(I mean, does anyone remember when Livejournal promised to never have ads? Or that the SixApart takeover wouldn't change anything? It's amazing anyone believes a damned thing that comes out of a corporate mouth at this point.)
Where on earth do you get these ideas?
If you want to discuss the merits, go to another thread. Maybe the one I linked, maybe another one. If you're just here to complain, by all means, stay here. But at least be honest about it.
The "irreducible complexity" idea, right. They've yet to actually find something that's irreducibly complex; in the meantime, the argument goes that as (random person) can't explain how x developed, then it must have been a wizard. This argument is actually made by some people; if you're not making it, then kindly ignore this part.
No, they didn't. There aren't "logical operations" involved in the process at all; the operations in question were all simple, slight changes in phenotype which could be made gradually. (I don't know what you're referring to as "increasing rewards.)
The only "breadcrumb trail" involved is a selection for better-functioning eyes. Here, I'll reiterate the point for you.
The eye is a complex organ. To show that the fish eye (our eyes are variants of that basic type) could have arisen from simpler organs, we show a path consisting or arbitrarily small steps which go from a light-sensitive patch to the fluid-filled "camera eye" that we use. Each step consists of a kind of variation which is observed as part of the variety of any given species (a body part is slightly longer, or slightly curvier, or thicker, or thinner), and in each step, the variation slightly improves the quality of vision. Furthermore, we can look at existing animals and see various stages of the proposed path in nature (for example, the nautilus has a pinhole-camera type of eye, with no lens), which provides evidence that not only is the path a possible one, it may in fact be the path that the ancestral eye took to get to where it is now in humans.
While morphogenesis is a fascinating and darned complex topic, the only thing that needs to be understood here is that a change in genotype causes (through an arbitrarily complex system of feedback loops, agonists and antagonists) a change in phenotype. This has been known since the genome was discovered in the first place. While it's certainly an important question as to how DNA influences morphology (and there's some really nifty work involving Hox genes which explains a good part of it), it's not in question that it does.
To take a page straight from The Extended Phenotype, if a change in a beaver's genome makes the beaver more likely to build a better dam, then we can legitimately say that the gene is "for" dam-building, even if we know absolutely nothing about how it works--we know only that it does.
Cla
Point mutations do not add or remove anything. A point mutation changes one base pair in the genome. For instance, an 'A' becomes a 'G'. The reason that duplication is important is that while the point mutations may change the functionality of the second copy of the gene, the original functionality remains intact in the first copy.
Appeals to "information" are popular among the intelligent design crowd, but they're not terribly relevant. A large heap of random noise is a lot of "information", but it's not terribly useful. The gene duplication event adds information, but the point mutations keep it constant--yet it's the point mutations following the duplication that create the new functionality in question. A hoax? Wait, you have evidence that recapitulation theory was the result of a conspiracy rather than scientists just plain getting it wrong and ignoring evidence that wasn't what they expected to find? Could you present this evidence? And you'll be showing me a textbook that states that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny when, exactly? A link to a description or review of a textbook would be fine. Pat Michaels who can't tell degrees from radians? Somehow I'm not impressed by his scholarship. He also appears to have a fat sinecure at the Cato Institute, and receives plenty of cheese from ExxonMobil and their subsidiaries. He also appears to be a research professor at the University of Virginia.
You cited "people who have lost their job for doing good science simple because it did not agree with the prevailing opinions". Pat Michaels either fudged his numbers or is too incompetent to do them right--not very good science--and did not, it seems, lose his job. So, again. Please cite someone who's done good science which disagreed with the prevailing opinions on climate and lost their job for their troubles.
And I assure you, no one in this thread is losing sleep over the idea that creationists won't take them seriously. Ah, the "I was kidding" defense, always a good fallback position when you're shown to be talking nonsense.
Yeah, I'm the him you thanked for the great link--that should have read "you're welcome" rather than "thanks". Egg on me.
Also, if a textbook states that a theory is "proven fact", then it's poorly written. Science isn't in the business of providing absolute proof. Gene duplication is well-known; gene duplication plus point mutations (also well-known) equals new genes. Both have been observed. I pointed to these things in the last post I made, and I'm pointing to them again now. What are you not getting? Why is recapitulation theory effective "as a religious tools"? Why is it more effective (at what, exactly?) than modern results in evo-devo? And when are you going to actually provide an example of these textbooks you keep invoking? Textbooks are frequently not terribly good, but I think science texts are bad for the same reason that math texts are bad, and in the same way--they're written by committee, and the whole process is a damned racket designed to make the whole mess teacher-proof.
But if you're trying to show that science textbooks are part of a massive conspiracy to cover up something (what, exactly?), you're going to have to do better than waving your hands. Specific examples, please--start with the "real obvious stuff". Again, examples, please. If someone has good results that the establishment is covering up, I certainly want to hear about it.
Also, that's anthropogenic, meaning human-caused; anthropomorphic means human-shaped, like Bugs Bunny.
But all that's okay by your logic, because people can just go get another job which you've handwaved into existence.
Thanks--I had been wondering about how chromosome counts could change since I was in high school, and looking back, I'm really quite disappointed that my biology teacher didn't at least point me in the right direction when I asked. It's not so much that we had bad biology classes, but evolution was covered rather quickly; there was a unit on Punnett squares and Mendelian inheritance (I'm the blue-eyed child of two brown-eyed parents, which makes me a nifty example), and then there was a drawing of a phylogenetic tree, and then we were dissecting earthworms. It was all a bit of a blur.
We see that small-scale mutations fall into certain classes. (There are also larger-scale mutations, such as gene duplications, but we'll leave that aside for now.) The genome can be visualized as a set of very long strings (chromosomes) made from a four-letter alphabet. (I'll use an 'XYZ' alphabet because I don't want to give the impression that I'm writing out actual genes.) A point mutation, for example, changes 'XYZ' to 'XZZ'. An insertion changes, for instance, 'XYZ' to 'XYYZ'. A deletion changes, for instance, 'XYZ' to 'XZ', and so forth.
Based on definitions set forth in information theory, point changes have no effect on the quantity of information in the genome, insertions add information, and deletions remove it. Do you understand?You've seriously seen school textbooks which teach that embryonic development recapitulates the evolutionary history of the organism in question? Bear in mind that describing common features in embryos which become different structures in adults is quite different from recapitulation theory. I'd like to see an example, if you can provide it.
Also, that's "altar". "Backed only by faith"? Perhaps 29+ Evidences for Macroevolution would be a good place to start; if you don't want to click over there, the existence of the dual-nested hierarchy (which predicts the absence of chimaeras) is very strong evidence for common descent. What part of the theory do you see as being "backed only by faith"?
One isn't "branded as a heretic" for disagreeing. Poor scholarship and gross ignorance will get one branded a charlatan if one keeps at it for long enough. Attempting to do an end run around the scientific process and trying to sell conclusions directly to the public (as the cold fusion guys did, for example) is at the very least impolite, if not outright offensive.
A persistent refusal to back up wild claims peppered with insults generally won't be met with hugs and kisses. Creationists are no different from the infinite-free-energy crowd or any other set of cranks who waste scientists' time; the claims of persecution are pretty much the same ones. The difference is that creationists have a much better lobby,