DARWIN'S MACROEVOLUTION: Why Unscientific?

If you don't post in it, she still will. Does she communicate? When I tried to talk to her, all I got back was words that didn't have anything to do with what I had said.

 

ALTER2EGO -to- FLINTC:
A philosophy amounts to a personal opinion. I didn't ask Prof_Sarcastic anything about frogs. I asked him three specific questions, which he evaded, after which he went into his spin about frogs by telling me:

The expressions "it seems" amounts to speculations aka personal philosophy. Nobody was around 2 million years ago to have known there were no frogs in existence. And I didn't ask him anything about frogs. I asked three specific questions that he was careful not to answer.

 

ALTER2EGO -to- FLINTC:
What evidence? The non-existent evidence for macroevolution that neither Niles Eldredge nor Stephen Gould could find, after which they decided to invent the idea of punctuated equilibrium?


Niles Eldredge admitted regarding the lack of transitional fossils: "The pattern that we were told to find for the last 120 years does not exist." (Source: The Enterprise, November 14, 1980, page E9)


"All paleontologists know that the fossil record contains precious little in the way of intermediate forms; transitions between major groups are characteristically abrupt. Gradualists usually extract themselves from this dilemma by invoking the extreme imperfection of the fossil record." (Gould, Stephen J. The Panda's Thumb, 1980, p. 189.)


Eldridge and Gould—like every paleontologist before them and after them—kept running into "missing links." They could never show how, for example, Creature A evolved into Creature F because the transitional fossils were nowhere to be found. In other words, they could not find fossils showing Creature A evolving into Creature B, and then Creature B evolving into Creature C and then into Creature D, followed by Creature E. So Niles Eldredge and Stephen Gould decided to play slick by proposing a fabricated term in 1972 entitled: "punctuated equilibrium". In this scenario, Creature A evolved into Creature F with no need for transitional fossils in between. In other words, they were making things up as they went along.

 

Yeah, I did. I make no apologies for evading deceptive, leading questions that contribute nothing to any discussion.

Tell you what, I'll answer your multiple-choice question, when you answer this multiple-choice question: When did you stop beating your spouse?
1. You haven't stopped.
2. You stopped beating them a while ago.

Which of those two is your answer?

See the problem with that kind of "question" yet?

That is not the thing that I said "in no way disproves evolution." Next time, as well as reading text, I suggest you try comprehending it too.

The fossil record IS the evidence. But I'm curious as to what your fevered imagination can twist into thinking is 'evidence' of intelligent design - please do tell.

 

ALTER2EGO -to- PROF SARCASTIC:
The three questions I asked you at Post 167 on Page 17 of this thread are directly related to your fallacious claim at Post 123 on Page 13 of this thread. Therefore, the questions contribute to the discussion you and I have been having, as follows:

.
http://www.politicalforum.com/relig...rwins-macroevolution-why-unscientific-13.html


In response to your claim about "all the facts known" for evolution theory, I asked you the following at post 167.

You realized you could not contradict the truth within each of the three questions and that there are no facts in support of macroevolution myth. So of course you evaded.

 

quote mining and taking them out of context is a form of lying. My understanding is that if you lie to make your point you are acting in an immoral manner. Can you explain why you do that?

quote in context: The evidence we find in the geologic record is not nearly as compatible with darwinian natural selection as we would like it to be. Darwin was completely aware of this. He was embarrassed by the fossil record because it didn't look the way he predicted it would and, as a result, he devoted a long section of his Origin of Species to an attempt to explain and rationalize the differences. There were several problems, but the principal one was that the geologic record did not then and still does not yield a finely graduated chain of slow and progressive evolution. In other words, there are not enough intermediates. There are very few cases where one can find a gradual transition from one species to another and very few cases where one can look at a part of the fossil record and actually see that organisms were improving in the sense of becoming better adapted.

 

solid point


ie.... religious sobs, are about the most horrid on the globe.

For example: The best examples of anti christ can often be found by observing christians.

each of us, came from a single cell/sperm .............................. and evolving everyday

Lying sobs, will deny what they know is a fact. Perhaps just 'gppd' christians!

 

Expecting the fossil record to show the complete lineage of anything is rather naive, as the record itself is not complete and never will be. This would be similar to thinking ten pieces of a 500 piece jigsaw puzzle would allow you to see what the finished product looks like.

Not all bones become a fossil, and few that do have even been found....perhaps in another thousand years we will have discovered enough to fill in most of the blanks, but it's a crap shoot regardless.

Science does not have all the answers, but that does not mean it stops looking. Enough has been found however, to make it likely Darwin was generally correct but the theory has been added to continuously.

The Evolution of Whales being an excellent example.
"

Whale Evolution:


Call it an unfinished story, but with a plot that's a grabber. It's the tale of an ancient land mammal making its way back to the sea, becoming the forerunner of today's whales. In doing so, it lost its legs, and all of its vital systems became adapted to a marine existence -- the reverse of what happened millions of years previously, when the first animals crawled out of the sea onto land.

Some details remain fuzzy and under investigation. But we know for certain that this back-to-the-water evolution did occur, thanks to a profusion of intermediate fossils that have been uncovered over the past two decades.

In 1978, paleontologist Phil Gingerich discovered a 52-million-year-old skull in Pakistan that resembled fossils of creodonts -- wolf-sized carnivores that lived between 60 and 37 million years ago, in the early Eocene epoch. But the skull also had characteristics in common with the Archaeocetes, the oldest known whales. The new bones, dubbed Pakicetus, proved to have key features that were transitional between terrestrial mammals and the earliest true whales. One of the most interesting was the ear region of the skull. In whales, it is extensively modified for directional hearing underwater. In Pakicetus, the ear region is intermediate between that of terrestrial and fully aquatic animals.

Another, slightly more recent form, called Ambulocetus, was an amphibious animal. Its forelimbs were equipped with fingers and small hooves. The hind feet of Ambulocetus, however, were clearly adapted for swimming. Functional analysis of its skeleton shows that it could get around effectively on land and could swim by pushing back with its hind feet and undulating its tail, as otters do today.

Rhodocetus shows evidence of an increasingly marine lifestyle. Its neck vertebrae are shorter, giving it a less flexible, more stable neck -- an adaptation for swimming also seen in other aquatic animals such as sea cows, and in an extreme form in modern whales. The ear region of its skull is more specialized for underwater hearing. And its legs are disengaged from its pelvis, symbolizing the severance of the connection to land locomotion.

By 40 million years ago, Basilosaurus -- clearly an animal fully adapted to an aquatic environment -- was swimming the ancient seas, propelled by its sturdy flippers and long, flexible body. Yet Basilosaurus still retained small, weak hind legs -- baggage from its evolutionary past -- even though it could not walk on land.

None of these animals is necessarily a direct ancestor of the whales we know today; they may be side branches of the family tree. But the important thing is that each fossil whale shares new, whale-like features with the whales we know today, and in the fossil record, we can observe the gradual accumulation of these aquatic adaptations in the lineage that led to modern whales. "
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/library/03/4/l_034_05.html

 

So when DID you stop beating your spouse?

For the hard of thinking: the two answers I provided to the spouse-beating question are, of course, both false. That was meant to be an analogy to show that ALTER2EGO's 3 "facts" were false too.

Just like the spouse-beating question, the only truthful answer is to point out that the question is deceptive and leading.

 

For the record, and because it's interesting:

What Gould and Eldredge noticed was that the fossil record didn't fit well with the (then current) understanding of evolution as gradual changes occurring constantly in all populations. Instead, what they found was that species in the fossil record appeared "suddenly", remained unchanged for some period of time, and then vanished. New species made sudden appearances, old species vanished. The fossil record, then, suggested that evolution isn't a constant gradual change in populations. Instead, evolution largely consists of speciation. When conditions change, existing populations do not change to track them. Instead, new, slightly different, better adapted species branch off of the existing species.

Gould and Eldredge named this pattern "punctuated equilibrium", by which they meant that by observation, new species once established remain in equilibrium until they go extinct. The "punctuations" are the new species that appear suddenly in the fossil record.

This discovery (or interpretation of the record) suggested a different emphasis on evolutionary patterns - that gradual morphing of a settled population is rare, and that speciation events are relatively rapid (perhaps a thousand years or less) and relatively local (within perhaps only a few square miles).

Bottom line: Punctuated equilibrium was a proposed explanation for a pattern of evidence.

Yes, this was the problem they faced. They were told that all species gradually change as new mutations enter the population and spread. And this is true only to a limited extent. Their students would study some species in the fossil record, find that over millions of years it didn't change, and conclude that no evolution happened! Gould and Eldredge coined the phrase "stasis is data", to emphasize that if no visible morphological changes could be found in the fossil record, then the best explanation is that no morphological changes happened. And THAT was important, because for 120 years the picture had been of constant change, so that's what everyone was looking for.

So now, having been given a scientific (rather than a creationist) context, you can understand what he was saying. Intermediate forms aren't often found because speciation is both rapid and local. You'd have to be VERY lucky to find fossils in just the right place, at just the right time. Fossilization itself is so rare it's possible that not a single individual fossilized during the speciation event.

Since that time, an interesting thing has happened. Punctuated equilibrium, if true, suggested a very different search method. This method has been adopted because it works, and sure enough, a good many speciation events have been identified, and the blanks in the record are being filled in. There are some long geneologies, traced through many speciations, now known. (And it's also worth noting that according to the theory of evolution, those geneologies had to have happened - nothing appeared POOF by magic. It's easier to find something if you know what you're looking for.

They proposed this because that's what THE EVIDENCE suggested. And it appears they were right. A great deal has been discovered in the 40 years since your quotemine was written, and much of that has been discovered because punctuated equilbrium was correct, and guided the search..

Only partially. All scientific theories are necessarily based on incomplete evidence, because people will never know everything. But what these theories do is suggest TESTABLE hypotheses, of the form "if A is true, then B must be true, so let's test for B. If we do not find it, A must be false. If B is true, there is more support (not proof) for A." This is how science works. You make up a hypothesis. You test it (most hypotheses fail the tests!). The test, pass or fail, produces more evidence. You modify your hypothesis or create a new one. and you test that one. And this process iterates forever.

 

Yes, all three of her "facts" were wildly false. Here we need to quote William Benetta:

Now, I'm not saying that Alter2Ego is lying, because she doesn't know enough to lie. She is simply parroting lies that people who KNOW they are lying have fed her. And she hasn't been able to correct them, because she doesn't (and probably can not) allow the truth to penetrate her defenses. And the creationists know this. They have grabbed her by her Jesus and they are dragging her through the mud, while she praises Jeezus for the humiliation and cannot know better.

 

Richard Dawkins mentioned in The Simpsons:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ju1ii8bIgfU&feature=youtu.be

 

ALTER2EGO -to- THE WYRD OF GAWD:

You are making a fallacious argument by compare abiogenesis (life coming to life from non-life by itself) to the creation of a lifeless light bulb, Louis Pasteur and other scientists debunked abiogenesis theory more than a century ago. Nothing has changed since then.

In 1953, Stanley Miller attempted to create life from non-life and failed miserably. Miller managed to produce only 4 of the 20 the amino acids necessary for life when he passed an electric spark through an "atmosphere" of hydrogen, methane, ammonia, and water vapor. So not only did Stanley Miller fail to produce life, he inadvertently proved Louis Pasteur right: that life can only result from preexisting life.

 

ALTER2EGO -to- KARMA MECHANIC:
If you are accusing me of quoting people out of context, you debunked your claim by posting the larger portion of the text in which the author repeatedly admits that the geologic record aka the fossils record does not support gradual evolutionary transition. In effect, the author is admitting to gaps in the fossils record--which is what I have been saying all along.

BTW: Did you see that portion that I bolded in light blue? Even that is a speculation. Not only that, the term "species" does not mean the same thing to different paleontologists. They use the term "species" even when they are referring to variations of the exact same creature.

 

No, Louis Pasteur debunked SPONTANEOUS GENERATION. He proved that maggots and aphids and the like do not spring unbidden from unliving matter. Which is what the hypothesis of Spontaneous Generation proposed, and is NOT what abiogenesis proposes.

Besides which, you utterly, totally and completely failed to address his actual point - which isnt about lifeless light bulbs, but about how many tries it takes before you give up on something. I'm not surprised you didnt address it though, because I can't imagine any way you could possibly counter it effectively.

 

ALTER2EGO -to- PROF SARCASTIC:
The terms "spontaneous generation" and "abiogenesis" are synonyms. In case you don't know, synonyms are words that are identical in meaning or almost similar in meaning. In this instance, "abiogenesis" and "spontaneous generation" mean the same thing.


DEFINITION OF "ABIOGENESIS":

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/abiogenesis

http://www.biology-online.org/dictionary/Abiogenesis


QUESTION #2 to PROF SARCASTIC:: Did you notice that both of the above dictionaries say "abiogenesis" and "spontaneous generation" mean the same thing?

 

ALTER2EGO -to- PROF SARCASTIC:
Of course I addressed it. Obviously, not to your satisfaction, but I told The Wyrd of Gawd that his argument was fallacious because he was comparing life from non-life in organic beings to a light bulb that will never come to life.

If you think 10,000 tries will create life from non-life, you are welcome to give it a go. Stanley Miller and many other trained scientists, in controlled laboratory environments, have tried to do it, and--get this--they all failed to create life from non-life.

 

That second definition says that abiogenesis is a study that encompasses spontaneous generation. That doesn't mean spontaneous generation and abiogenesis are synonyms, but that one is a broad topic including the other. To put it another way, entomology is the study of insects, which encompasses the study of ants (myrmecology). You wouldn't then say that entomology and myrmecology are synonyms, right?

So, Pasteur disproved spontaneous generation, but not abiogenesis completely.

 

not this again

 

Which any idiot can tell you is not the point of his statement in any way shape or form. I even pointed out why in the post you just replied to. Wilful ignorance on your part I'm afraid.

The number is only to illustrate the point. This should be clear to anyone with a fraction of an ounce of understanding.

 

Not in this context.

However, if you're getting so hung up on the names that it's stoping you from understanding the actual point, then try addressing the ideas the names convey:

* Louis Pasteur proved that modern life forms don't appear from dead matter.
* The first life on Earth was clearly very different from modern life forms
* Louis Pasteur didn't even TRY to debunk the idea that those kinds of creatures didn't come from dead matter.

I noticed that the first one did. The second one said that one "encompassed" the other. Which quite obviously means they are NOT exactly the same thing. Dictionary writers are human and can disagree. Shocking, I know.

 

So let's suppose that somehow, it was proven that evolution was false. So now we have to come up with a new theory as to explain things like fossils, vestigial organs and the diversification of life on Earth. This theory would have to meet all scientific criteria of a theory so it would have to be falsifiable, make predictions, and be better at explaining the phenomenon than any other theory. So does ID meet this criteria? Is it falsifiable? Does it make any predictions? Does it do a better job at explaining life on Earth then say, the Hindu creation story, or the Norse creation story?

 

it would also be necessary to figure out what to do with all the various laws and theories in physics, chemistry, biology and geology that got blown out of the water.

There would not be much left of modern science.

 

ALTER2EGO -to- PROF SARCASTIC:
I gave you definitions that clearly state that the terms "abiogenesis" and "spontaneous generation" mean the same thing. Deny away, if that makes you feel good. It won't change the fact the words have the same meaning and that your claim at Post 190 is fallacious.

 

ALTER2EGO -to- PROF SARCASTIC:
You did not illustrate any point other than what I mentioned above: that you and The Wyrd of Gawd figure that repeated tries will eventually create life from non-life.

What you are both ignoring is that Thomas Edison was using preexisting natural laws that resulted in electricity. Edison used natural laws that humans did not put in place. If those natural laws had not been in place, he and others would have kept on trying to ad nauseam and never would have gotten a spark of electricity.

In other words, Thomas Edison did not create electricity. He simply channeled natural laws that Jehovah set in place. And since Edison did not create electricity, likewise humans cannot create life from non-life no matter how many times they try. Life can only come from previous life--as Louis Pasteur and other scientists have repeatedly illustrated.


QUESTION #3 to PROF SARCASTIC: Since life can only come from preexisting life, where did the "common ancestor" come from so that evolution could then supposedly occur?