I guess creationists, or the Intelligent Design crowd, will not be too amused by this story.
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Key breakthrough in evolutionary scienceApril 21st, 2006 |
 47 comments to Key breakthrough in evolutionary science |
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Isn’t this story about a week old? ID would wanna make me vomit with rage, if it wasn’t for the fact that it also makes me choke with mirth. My favourite is a common explanation of how all the critters were squeezed aboard Noah’s Ark. They only took two of each “kind” – for example two proto-felines, not two jaguars, two tigers, two ocelots etc. and all the various cats we have developed from them over the last 4000-ish years. In order to contradict evolution they have to accept a turbo-charged version of it.
Such gems of pseudo-scientific bollocks are easily mined at: http://www.icr.org/
Have fun sceptical rationalists!
Now, I gotta go cook tuna steaks (assuming they ain’t developed legs and have buggered off outta the fridge).
It isn’t really a breakthrough. The link wasn’t missing, it was plainly obvious. Finding an interim species is interesting paleontology but meaningless cosmology. Heck, it won’t affect either side’s arguments. It just creates two more “missing links” either side.
Actually it is a really big deal, although perhaps true that it will not put a dent in the Fantasy crowd’s beliefs. Who cares anyway?
If you have seen pictures of the fossil, it is *magnificent*. You can clearly see more than just bone structure. The scientific importance is how much it shows the process of how life got from mud flat fish to things that got out of the water. There are a whole bunch of new things the proto-terranautical fish had to come up with and the details of how air breathing, leg joint development and other things came about was previously a mystery.
Yeah, there are now two smaller gaps in the fossil record… but this was a very big, very important one. This is the Archaeopteryx of land animals, the transitional form.
And did I say the preservation was magnificent? Go look for the pictures.
Nick M-
Take some Pepto-Bismol and you will fell better.
Dale-
C’mon, some stupid fossil gives *NO* insight on how the supposedly new apendage came about. I have a copy of National Geographic which showed a plethora of artists conceptions of feathered dinosaurs, based on a fossil of a bird and reptile glued together and sold to gullible palentologists in China some decade or so ago. And you snicker at Crusaders that sought pieces of the True Cross?
Note that the Darwinist religion *states* that small, imperceptible mutations when summed over time, will give rise to new organisms. It takes Faith to believe such, since the Bishops and Cardinals of the Darwinist religion require such of thee.
Uain,
I think I fall quite well when I want to.
Note that the Darwinist religion *states* that small, imperceptible mutations when summed over time, will give rise to new organisms.
This shows pig-headedness, or pig-ignorance. Sometimes the mutations can be rather large. You also seem stuck in some teleological mind-set. Evolution goes away from a start point, not towards a specific goal. That fish would be surprised to say the least to know that it’s descendants are arguing the toss over it’s bones…
Darwinian evolution isn’t a religion. It’s a scientific theory. It is the only one out there that can explain the diversity of species. Without a theory to explain that, Biology becomes a case of merely collecting interesting facts. Now, I’m not saying that Darwinian evolution is “right”, but it is brilliant science because it explains incredibly complicated phenomena from a beautifully simple set of axioms.
I hate the ID mob because they pretend what they’re doing is science. It isn’t because there is no explanation. If the current biodiversity of the planet is just down to God declaring it that way by fiat no attempt to explain is needed, God just wanted things that way and he is God afterall. That isn’t science, it’s scarcely even theology.
The creationists are always using “gaps in the fossil record” to provide them with ammo. Well, consider this one gap filled.
“Note that the Darwinist religion *states* that small, imperceptible mutations when summed over time, will give rise to new organisms.”
So what do you say when you see species in between a marine and a land animal like this? Looks awfully like a bunch of mutations summed over time to create something new to me! Theory, evidence, confirmation! Science, real science! Still only a theory likely to be replaced some day. But a bloody good theory at the moment.
Even small mutations are often highly perceptible. A new hair colour is a mutation arising from just one generation reproducing. Some aren’t perceptible to us but still make a huge difference.
And then there is the recent discovery of a fossil snake with hips.
Actually there are a number of extant snake species with vestigal back legs
Of course, the IDCers would rather you not know about extant species such as the Snakehead, either. This “missing link” has been causing problems in the U.S. for some time now. Poetic, in some ways, given how many there think no fish ever walked on dry land.
Uain,
National Geographic is not Science. They jumped the gun on that one in order to be first with the scoop. Once the real scientists got their hands on the “fossil”, the truth quickly came to the fore. There was a programme about the whole issue a few years back. Basically, Nat. Geo. ignored the Science and acted like Journalists. Not the example you thought it was, I’m afraid. At least you know the truth about what happened now.
I noticed you also didn’t mention the fact that the specimen was in fact made up of two previously unknown species, both of which are now pushing forward our understanding of the transition to flight.
James-
Thanks for the insight re; Nat. Geo.. It is stocked in most school libraries as a science resource.
Nick M and Ellen-
Why must they be vestigial hips. Why not *evolving* hips? How does one tell?
nic says “….still only a theory…..”
JACKPOT!!!!!!! My point exactly! My issue is with the Darwinist religiousity which treats the *theory* of evolution as unassailable fact.
Nick M, thank you for waiting….
“… I fall quite well when I want to…”
Not sure what you are saying, a little help?
“This shows pig-headedness or pig-ignorance…”
Let’s maintain our center here. Darwinist theory rests on the concept of *gradualism*. If you support the concept of disruptive mutations, then you are perhaps, a Huxley-ist? Huxley was a proponent of Spontaneous Generation. This means life can spring spontaneously from basic chemicals. I read where he had been involved with an expedition which dredged some slime up from the ocean bottom. They kept it in an aquarium
in London for a decade or more, fully expecting life forms to spontaneously spring forth. This theory goes back to Aristotle who surmised that Aphids arise from dew on plants.
Your second paragraph is spot on!
“I hate the ID mob…. ”
Your getting religious on me!
“Creationists are always……..”
Yes, there are alot of creationists attaching themselves to ID. But there are alot of athiests glomming on to evolution (Richard Dawkins et. al.). The study of fossils is intriguing but to test the hypotheses of evolution, scientists are looking at chemistry, etc. to see if they can discern just how mutations (either many small or a few large) can affect body structures, or for that matter, how the “simplest”single cell organisms arose.
During the times of Darwin and Huxley, their was no inkling of the fantastic complexity within a single cell. So their theories were reasonable based on the scientific knowledge and equipment of the time. Present science has discerned that the simplest biologic processes, based on present understanding, are irreducibly complex. Ever think of how digestion, vision, blood clotting, immune response, etc, etc. could arise from imperceptible mutations summed over time?
If the ID types are damned for punting these issues down the road by invoking some sort of intelligent agent, then how is Huxley-ism superior by proposing much the same but without the intelligent agent? Or how is Panspermia acceptable by punting the first life form as arising off world and hitching rides on meteorites or comets?
There is a point where fact ends, theory ends and faith begins. Do you take it on faith that some how non-organic chemicals could form organisms which evolved to today’s biodiversity? You must because it cannot be proven scientifically, tantalizing evidence and insights not with standing.
Nick M-
I get it now. I meant to write *feel* better.
Also error toward end of previous post;
in-organic was supposed to be *in-animate*
@Ellen K, “And then there is the recent discovery of a fossil snake with hips.” and Nick M. “Actually there are a number of extant snake species with vestigal back legs”…
o’course there could be a religious explanation for that, somewhere in Genesis.
😉
Afterthought…
I can see how this fish news would throw a monkey wrench into the hardcore bible-thumpers arguments, but why should it send the ID crowd into a tizzy? Aren’t they the ones who accept science, but also tout the possibility of an intellect behind the known laws of the universe? What makes this incompatible with their philosophies?
Uain,
Your understanding of Darwinism is flawed. The rate or significance of any given mutations has no influence on the basic process of natural selection. Darwin’s 19th century insistence on gradualism must be viewed in the context of of the intellectual climate of the times. He sought to argue against the ideas of massive catastrophism and orthogenesis.
Many victorians believed in the idea that evolution was driven by a kind of perfecting force that drove life form’s evolution into increasingly complex forms. They believed that this perfecting force could cause species to leap to a new form in a handful of generations. Darwin wanted to convey that the environment drove evolution and that it had no direction. The development of new structures require intermediate stages all of which had to enhance or at least not impede the survival of the current generation. Many people misread Darwin to mean that the rate of change was constant over time.
In any case, we know that natural selection works to create new and useful genes because we can replicate it at will in the lab. It is trivial to remove genes from bacteria and then place them in an environment where they must recreate the gene to survive. This they do.
Your own immune system using a process of natural selection to create the antibodies that defend against microbes. White blood cells reshuffle their own genes to produces new antibodies. Then the new white bloods cells are tested to see if the antibodies attack the body itself. If not, they are released to attack microbes. (Flaws in this system produce autoimmune diseases) If their antibodies do attach to microbes then that sets off a feedback loop causing the white blood cell producing the antibody to begin reproducing.
Unless you believe that your immune system somehow contains antibodies that can resist all possible disease organisms, you must concede that natural selection is capable of producing new and useful information. Once we know that natural selection can create a single gene then we know that it can create any structure defined by an arbitrarily large number of genes by mere repetition.
Natural selection at the level of individual genes is something that can be studied and reproduced at will in the lab. It requires faith not to believe in the mechanism. You must evoke some unknown mechanism that prevents natural selection from driving evolution.
Uain,
I’ll just add a bit to Shannon’s excellent post.
1. Look up “punctuated equilibrium” rather than Huxley.
2. The incredible complexity of the cell – well there are mysteries no doubt. One of the reasons Biology is so exciting at the moment. Also you should look up some of the work of Lynn Margulis on the role of symbiosis in evolution.
3. Whether those snake hips are coming or going is irrelevant to your argument. The point is natural selection is changing the morphology of the species.
leucantheum b,
ID does not accept science. A scientific explantion is a falsifiable statement which makes no recourse to Gods or the supernatural. That is not arguing that science is better than religious faith. It is simply a definition.
The alternative is to rapidlly head down the rocky road to pseudo-science. It’s a very cheap trick to say “We don’t know it all, the bits we don’t know must be God’s will”. That does not explain anything in a scientific manner. It may be an explanation to some, but not to a scientist.
You might as well explain that electricity flows through a circuit “because God wants it to”. Yeah, right, maybe. But an explanation involving potential differences and electrical conductivity and Kirchoff’s laws actually enables you to understand the “why?” of it. Not only that. It enables you to actually build electrical devices like the one you’re currently reading this on.
I hate ID not because of what it says about Biology, but because it bastardizes the scientific method for it’s own essentially political and theological ends.
Shannon-
Interesting post, thanks!
” … create new and useful genes because we can replicate it at will in the lab.”
Ummmm, doesn’t that make *you* like the intelligent agent postulated for ID?
But your immune systen example consists of a highly complex fully functional system. The white blood cells are mututating but how did they get to such a complex functional form? Does this imply a Huxley-ist spontaneous generation?
Uain,
Will you quit with your bloody Huxlian Spontaneous Generation already? It’s guff. Just because something isn’t understood that well now, doesn’t make it the work of Gods, Demiurges, Knights Templar, Dan Brown, Satan, Jewish conspiracies, Al Queda, Santa Claus, the Yeti, George Galloway, Bill Gates, L Ron Hubbard, David Icke, Aliens, the fifth Avatar of Krishna, Mahdis, Dubya, Halliburton, King Tut, Illuminati, Freemasons, Twelth Imams (hidden ot otherwise), The Grinch, Trotskyites, neo-Trotskyites, crypto-Trotskyites, The Blue Fairy, The Tooth Fairy, Unilever’s Fairy, Sauron, Aslan, The Cigarette Smoking Man, WWF, Pope Gregory the Ninth, Saddam Hussein, Spring-heeled Jack or Vlad the Impaler.
How about mysterious men in Black Helicopters? Oh no ! there’s one landing on my lawn now! … now where the devil did I put my tin hat ……
Uain,
I think you feel that natural selection is somehow magical because you don’t really understand it. You are as mystified by it as an Amazonian hunter gather would be by light bulb but there is nothing magical about natural selection.
It is no more mysterious than geology. In geology we observe many small but still measurable processes like erosion, upheaval and continental drift and then project those slow effects backwards though time to get an idea what the world looked like in the past.
With biological evolution, we can see the small but measurable changes in extant organism due to natural selection and then extrapolate those changes backwards in time. With modern genetics, the existence of fossils becomes just a bonus.
Ummmm, doesn’t that make *you* like the intelligent agent postulated for ID?
No human direction is necessary to evoke new genes. We simply established controlled conditions and natural selection shapes the organism to the new environment. The use of artificial environments proves that natural selection can create new and useful genes that did not exist in the organism before. End of discussion.
Where do you think new diseases come from? Do you believe that all possible diseases for every organism have all existed since the dawn of time and that we just stumble over them here and there? How do think microbes and insects develop resistance to antibiotics and pesticides?
The white blood cells are mututating but how did they get to such a complex functional form?
They evolved in complexity along with the parent organisms. One can chart the evolution of the immune system up through the order of increasingly complexity just like you can any other biological subsystem like the eye. The first multicellular organisms (examples of which are still around) did not have immune systems beyond scavenger cells that prevented ingested microbes from escaping the digestive areas. As organism grew larger they developed increasingly sophisticated immune systems as they went. You can see this easily buy looking at the immune systems of various existing organism. No magic needed.
Incidentally, Huxely did not believe in spontaneous generation as the term is used in the history of science. He was a proponent of what is now called orthogenesis, i.e.the idea that some innate force drove evolution.
Orthogenesis. Interesting idea. What if evolution itself could evolve? For example, what if natural selection favoured – at times of great ecological change – organisms which displayed a greater capacity for rapid evolutionary change. I’ve always wondered whether it was possible for natural selection to create a species capable of something like Lamarkian evolution.
“Darwin’s Radio” by Greg Bear is highly recommended for an interesting slant on the whole evolution thing.
What d’ya reckon the chances of bringing back mammoths are? And what would this do to the ID gang?
Nick,
For example, what if natural selection favoured – at times of great ecological change – organisms which displayed a greater capacity for rapid evolutionary change.
Bacteria actually do this. When starved, they switch off the anti-mutation mechanisms that prevent damage to their genes which causes a significant increase in the rate of mutation. In essence, they are accelerating natural selection to try and evolve themselves out a tight spot.
It’s arguable that that’s what happened with people, too. The addition of a layer of social and technological evolution on top of the physical one has given us vast advantages over other animals through the last Ice Age and all the wobbles since.
Shannon & Nick, somewhere in the back of my mind I thought that this happened in certain cases but I can’t recall. It may be utterly bogus but it sounds like Shannon says bacteria do this with their chromsomal DNA. Since I dated a bacteriologist for a while, that may be where I heard it.
SHannon, can anything like this happen with plasmids? Can they be naturally acquired and then passed on? I always thought plasmids could be very useful to higher life forms if they could be adapted.
Guy, yes.
OK, one more post and that’s it for me…
Shannon-
Your examples are compelling except that you keep pointing to highly developed complex functional systems which you as the intelligent agent can manipulate in a lab. I don’t dispute that evolution does a marvelous job at this level, but what about the biochemical level? This is where people like Michael Behe (Darwin’s Black Box) raise interesting questions, and he is not some young earth creationist nutter.
Nick M-
Stephen Hawking was was looked upon
a few decades ago as a nutter for pushing the silly notion of Black Holes. Now they are considered 95% proven to exist. He is a proponent of the Big Bang theory which I recall seeing the good Dr. Dawkins harrumph from his ivory tower as a “creation event”.
I totally agree with you that there are a plethora of wackos that attach themselves to ID, but you should look at what the actual scientists are saying (ie; Dr. Behe’s book). At the same time there are also a legion of nut cases that attach themselves to Evolution and I would wager are an embarassment to the evolution scientists.
If you read the actual people doing the work, you would find facinating reading to be had from Behe, Johnson, etc, vs. Dawkins et.al.. Who’s right? Who cares? It’s just fun to witness smart people contend on the field of intellectual competition.
Uain,
Black holes were first postulated by Oppenheimer (same guy) in the 30s. They are not directly, though the accretion disk is. Several very likely candidates have subsequently been discovered by astronomers – most notably the Cygnus X-1 radio source.
SW Hawking comes into the picture later on in the 70s. He postulated and theoretically proved the possibility that black holes could “dissolve” by emitting what has come to be known as “Hawking Radiation” (basically a result of quantum pair-production in the vicinity of the event horizon).
Let’s leave the Big-Bang out of this for a moment except to say that the Universe almost certainly started about 13-14 billion years ago in an extremely dense and hot state. Cosmology is a deeply troubled (and therefore fun) subject right now (dark matter, dark energy, nobody has the slightest idea what may’ve powered cosmological inflation etc.)
ID is not science. It might amuse the peanut munching crowd but science it ain’t. Science seeks to explain. It doesn’t seek to prove it can’t explain something. That’s the job of TBN, when they con old ladies outta their life savings.
I wrote an MSc thesis on Goedelian Rotational Cosmology at London University.
You do makeup for dizzy blonds? Can you prove it? Is it meaningful?
😉
Nick M-
I said he *pushed* the (then) silly notion of Black Holes.
.. Goedelian Rotational Cosmology? Sounds beyond cool!
My Doctoral research was on Hot Electron Trapping in SiO2 gate insulators of NMOSFETs. My 30 yrs in the VLSI industry has shown me that there is non-stop learning and so cherished theories or what was thought as settled science is constantly changing due to the shrinking of geometries. New field effects and reliability mechanisms are constantly being researched as well as advances in the VLSI circuit technology. So that has made me more sanguine with respect to new ideas or postulates that may at first sound counter intuitive.
Now off to search out Goedelian Rotational Cosmology..
Midwesterner,
You do makeup for dizzy blonds?
huh? Me no understand.
Can you prove it? Is it meaningful?
Insofar as the Goedel (I wish I could get an umlaut here) model is a vaild solution to the Einstien Field Equations it is proven and meaningful as mathematics. In it’s original form it is not a useful description of the Universe, but it does have some rather interesting features such as allowing time-travel – get in a rocket, go far and fast enough and you’ll end up back before you started, or back when you started. More technically it is an interesting solution to the EFEs which enables you to dig around through some interesting stuff in General Relativities basement – such as Mach’s principle.
There has been some work done (mainly in Russia) on similar rotating cosmologies but including expansion. These are potentially realistic models. They can be used to explain some oddities of the large scale structure of the Universe, notably a periodicity in the distribution of super-clusters observed by astronomers conducting very deep, narrow “pencil-beam” studies. These cosmologies don’t have any time-travel. There are other, simpler, explanations of the large scale structure anomolies so the field is a little moribund.
i’m sure the IE chaps, when it comes down to it, will want a bird flue vacine sythesised from the modern out break, not the 1918 virus.
Nick, I’m playing dumb. Not a great stretch, you’ll grant.
Rotation Cosmology, that’s applying makeup while turning in circles, right? That’s why blonds are dizzy, no? (Is dizzy blond strictly an Americanism?)
And as for Gödel’s theorem, doesn’t it basically say, for the assertion “This statement is unprovable” to be demonstrated to be indeed unprovable, then it’s is in fact proved. But if the statement is proved true, then it is false. Therefore, meaningfulness can still be found in an unprovable assertion, right?
Or something like that. Mathematical statements always befuddle me. I’m still working on “in the right triangle, some hippopotamus has equal legs”, I think it’s called the Pythongorean theorem.
I think I got that Pythongorean thing wrong. I’m pretty sure it’s supposed to be “some hippopotamus has square legs”. Equal or square, I’m not sure which. Maybe they are equally square.
Midwesterner,
Yup, that’s approximately what Goedel’s Incompleteness Theorems are about. That’s what he is most famous for. For a non-technical introduction to this stuff (and also the mind-blowingly wonderful field of infinite set theory) I can heartily recommend “Infinity & the Mind” by Rudy Rucker.
After he fled the Nazis in Europe he ended up at Princeton where as a pair of mathematically inclined (to put it mildly) German speakers he and Einstein struck up a friendship. Goedel got quite interested in Einstein’s General Relativity. Goedel got especially interested because he saw how General Relativity could produce a cosmology which was consistent with his own rather Kantian idealistic philosophy. To this end he produced a couple of papers outlining a cosmological system which essentially refuted the existence of time in the sense that most people (including most physicists) believe it to work.
There’s a great photo of Kurt & Albert here:
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/vhd05/vhd05_index.html
It sends a shiver down my spine. There should be a law of nature against two geniuses of such magnitude standing so close together.
They’d certainly know all about square legs on African beasts…
Nick-
Sorry for the delay in response to your reply. Thank you, but it still doesn’t answer my question. I understand why you contend ID isn’t science. Personally, I agree. My question wasn’t about our feelings toward pseudo-science, but about how this finding of a peculiar fish could upset their beliefs. Haven’t they already accepted that science has proven basic realities, such as the earth being round, earth revolving around the sun, and evolution? From what I understand, theirs isn’t so much a refusal to accept clear scientific evidence as it is a method of using scientific evidence to support their faith.
leucantheum,
a method of using scientific evidence to support their faith.
Agreed if we stick a “spurious” between “using” and “scientific”. I hate ID. I have nothing against creationism per-se. It is a logically consistent position for followers of a number of faiths to cleave to. It is the attempt to portray creationism as science, rather than religous belief that I object to.
I think it weakens the faith of those who believe they can scientifically justify belief that evolution never happened. I think it was a tactically unsound move for the creationists to shift from basing their arguments on books which have stood the test of time for thousands of years and currently have over a billion adherents to relying on the say-so of some highly dubious scientific figures.
Science does (unless you’re an absolute pedant) prove certain realities. The gross structure of the solar system, the laws of thermodynamics, the germ theory of infectious disease and the atmoic hypothesis are all amongst the group of truths that only a madman would contest. Evolution by natural selection does not reach those criteria. There are possibly other issues here. Lynn Margulis’ idea of symbiosis is deserve’s more than a second look. Darwinian evolution is a beautiful theory. It explains much very succinctly. It’s highly successful, but it’s a theory. That is the strength of science. To call it “truth” is to serve it badly.
Nick-
I’m no fan of the half-measure, ID, either, except that it can be a useful tool to bring somebody from hard faith into accepting scientific inquiry as legitimate means for re-examining his own beliefs (and I’ve seen closed minds in both creationist and atheist camps). It seems, to me, a step in the right direction for a person to admit that he doesn’t know everything. I thought that was what the front men (and women) in the ID crowd were doing…
From what I’ve read (and, granted, it isn’t an extensive library of data) on ID, it’s not stuck on literal interpretation of the Bible the way the fundie creationists are. These guys were admitting that they don’t know everything, but assume that science is proving God’s existence by detailing the very complexity of the known universe.
Call me thick, if you must, but I’m still not understanding how this odd fish stinks up the ID crowd’s arguments. They already accept that evolution is probably at play — only with a “guiding hand”, as it were. They shouldn’t argue that the fish — and evolution — exist, if they believe what they say they believe. The only issue they might have is whether it’s that freaky natural selection 😉 or the wondrous God’s will o 🙂 (as if, to them, there were any difference).
Are we looking at two separate bunches of IDers?
Nick, thanks. I will definitely look for “Infinity & the Mind”. Some of my favorite times have been spent sitting on the lake front on a warm summer evening with a few theoretical types and solving the great philosophical questions of time and space by the second or third pitcher. Now if we could just remember the solutions.
If we’re ever in the same part of the space/time continuum, I’ll buy the first pitcher.
Midwesterner,
I’m there in spirit already.
Tell you a tale, ’bout a great American philosopher. William James, the brother of Henry, the novelist was a founder of the first genuinely original American school of philosophical thought – pragmatism. It was the mid-late C19th and “ether frolics” were the cocaine of the day. William James had a pal who always reckoned that under the ether he’d figured out the mystery of the Universe – and I mean, the complete nine-yards.
Unfortunately, he could never remember it when he came back to the land of the fully living. William James set up an experiment in which he provided this guy with pencil, paper and ether. They all went on an “ether frolic” and when they came back they examined the paper upon which the secret of the Universe would be written.
It said:
Everything smells faintly of petroleum
leucanthemum,
You still don’t get it. If one accepts the idea of an omnipotent God (is there any other kinda God worth bothering with) he could’ve created the Universe in the last second of your life. It could be anyway he wanted it, including fake fossils, or, well, anything…
This could be the case. This could be true. It does not represent a scientific argument though. I know enough paleontologists to know that the arguments are, alas, technical, specific and generally rather dull.
I fail to understand how ID and evolution can ever go together. As I’ve said before, evolution proceeds from a point, it doesn’t head towards one. The minute you allow a “guiding hand” you totally destroy the idea of this being a scientific law. It becomes a point of divine fiat and therefore indistinguishable from God having created the complete extant universe a millisecond ago. The scientific world is mechanistic, not teleological.
Both old- and young-Earth creationism make claims about the age of the universe and Earth and the chronology of the appearance of life forms on this planet. Those claims are falsifiable. Only one element of these philosophies is not falsifiable: the assumed existence of a supernatural mechanism by which life is created.
(Natural creative processes are another story, although the “Terran life was created by aliens who evolved on another planet” theory would be a tough sell.)
What makes the hypothesis of the existence of evolutionary mechanism a scientific theory? How does DNA spontaneously generate new information? How do we know that creatures the existed at different times represent evolutionary chains and not phases of creation?
I’ve got a serious question for anyone who thinks they know the answer.
Why is there so much more contemporary physiological evidence for devolution than evolution. For example, the hand. Human hands are very highly complex. But look at a cow’s hoof. Or better, a horse’s. They are hands with most parts regressed. A horse is basically standing on it’s middle finger nail. Most of the rest of the human hand is represented in the horse in vestigal form.
Why do dogs have thumbs? Did dogs devolve from apes? Why thumbs (dew claws)? What am I missing?
And those vestigal hips, what do snakes need hips for? Particularly vestigal ones?
Just wonderin’.
Nick M-
I really admire your pluck and your entertaining vignettes.
Alan K.-
The concept that earth was seeded from outer space (Panspermia) was actually batted about by Harvard’s late Paleo-Botanist Stephen Jay Gould.
It’s most recent encore that I’m are of was the Mars Rock which justified a NASA Mars shot after non-other than Bill Clinton made a National speech to announce it.
Most scientists now do not consider it any proof of extra-terrestrials.
Miswesterner-
I would add another question;
If evolution is on-going and irrestistible, as is so often claimed, then why haven’t sharks evolved in 200+ million years, but so many other aquatic creatures have?
I wonder as I wander……
I interpreted panspermia to mean that (some or all) Earth life evolved from extraterrestrial organisms that somehow migrated here. That’s quite different from the hypothesis I stated: “Terran life was created by aliens who evolved on another planet” – it should be obvious that I meant “intelligently created.”
For the record, I am an old-Earth creationist, and I believe that both creationism and evolutionism in all their forms are essentially philosophies.
Uain, Midwestener, Alan,
No, of course dogs didn’t devolve from apes. Different branch of the tree mamalia. A better example of “devolution” is possibly the human foot. A gibbon can eat a banana with it’s foot, ever tried that recently?
Snakes need hips just the same way that you need an appendix. Evolution doesn’t perfect organisms, it makes them good enough. If a man lives long enough he will almost certainly develop prostate cancer – probably won’t kill him, cancer grows slower in the elderly – but still. A shame evolution didn’t work that one through but DNA doesn’t care. We live in a biochemical prison. As a species our peculiar curse is to be aware of this and perhaps that’s why we produce fairy-tales about creation and the afterlife.
Things evolve as they need to. With sharks, crocodiles, snails and a few other things evolution got it right a good long while back and these organisms have been successful at reproducing themselves in the form that they are. This happens in the world of commerce as well. A modern computer is way diferent from the hunk of junk I was happy to pay 800 quid for 15 years ago. Having said that, I doubt the nform of the chisel or hammer has changed much since Ugg started banging rocks together. I suspect it hasn’t needed to.
Dew claws. Well, Midwesterner you probably love having opposable thumbs. Very useful for opening jars and holding screwdrivers. All things dogs don’t do. You’ve stumbled onto exhibit A for evolution. All vertebrates have a pentadactyl limb. You look at the skeleton of a lizard, a horse, a whale, a human, a bat they all have at least the vestiges of four limbs with five subdivisions. Over half of a bat’s wing is stretched over it’s “little finger”. Imagine that, flying on your pinkie!
Why five? Well, why not? It’s likely that all of these shared a common ancestor species that just happened to be pentadactyl. Being pentadactyl was not necessarily the thing which made that organism survive and prosper. Maybe it had a more effective metabolism or better mating strategy.
A common myth about evolution is the idea that it automatically favours more complex over simpler forms. It doesn’t. There is no teleology here, just blind mechanism. The grasses are pretty simple but they make up a huge fraction of this planet’s biomass. That’s evolutionary success.
Well, so concludes the sermon. I’ve enjoyed this thread. Alas, I suspect it’ll fall off the bottom of Samizdata very soon. Catch y’all on the flip-side.
It was a fun thread.
My point of perplexity was that there seem to be two mechanisms at work. Great leaping massive changes followed by a lot of refining devolution. And then another great huge change, followed by more specializing devolution. Is this an inaccurate perception?