TOE and the Reasons for Doubt

Here's a fuller rendition of what Sagan wrote: And of course, anything and everything in the natural world is always consistent with an omnipotent designer who can do anything, including giving the universe the appearance of great age and the fossil record the appearance of evolution.Peg, when are you going to learn to stop mining quotes from Creationist websites. Science is not chock full of evolutionary scientists authoring rejections of evolutionary science. If you find a quote from an evolutionary scientist who appears to be rejecting evolution in some way, you should assume he was taken out of context until proven otherwise.--Percy

Hi Peg,Are you daft? The evidence of your message is that you're incapable of comprehending simple English. Again, Sagan said: How can you read this passage and conclude, "The point of Sagan's quote was to show that he was acknowledging that the fossil record shows great design."He said, "could be consistent with," then followed it with, "But this notion is a little disconcerting" and is "inconsistent with an efficient designer."Not only is your response just an incredibly bad analysis, you must know that Sagan is on our side, not yours, so even if you had seen Sagan quoted saying, "The fossil record is clear and obvious evidence of intelligent design," an evolutionist denying evolution should have set alarm bells off in your head.Would it make sense to you if you read a Billy Graham quote denying Christ? Wouldn't it set alarm bells off in your head? Wouldn't you be suspicious of that quote?Well, in the same way you should be equally suspicious of quotes of evolutionists denying evolution. And if you're sure you have the correct quote, as is the case here with this Sagan quote, and you still think it denies evolution, then you should start questioning your own reasoning ability and English comprehension skills.Sheesh, Peg, start thinking, will you?--PercyEdited by Percy, : Grammar.

Yes, you're quote mining, which means taking a quote out of context to, in this case, make it seem that Niles Eldredge and Ian Tattersall believe something they don't. If you had them both in front of you, both evolutionary scientists of the top rank, and asked them whether they thought the fossil record was consistent with the theory of evolution, what do you think they'd say? Do you think they'd agree with you, or with Pandion?Without having the full context I can only guess that Eldredge and Tattersall were addressing the concept of gradualism and are laying the groundwork for introducing the concept of punctuated equilibrium.Creationists love quote mines so much because with great ease they can lift quotes out of context and make it seem like one of the great claims of creationism, that more and more scientists are rejecting evolution and accepting creationism, is actually true.In a more general sense, quote mining is just the fallacy of argument from authority. Even if all the creationist quote mines were an accurate reflection of their author's opinion, evolution, like all other scientific theories, stands or falls on the evidence.So I think everyone in this thread would be very grateful if the creationist participants would abandon quote mining and focus their attention on the evidence.--Percy

Hi Peg,I have a long todo list. This weekend I just completed the in-message image resizing feature, and I've been thinking about what new feature I should tackle next. The "ignore" feature is looking mighty appealing right now.But it won't happen right away, so in the meantime could you just not reply to my messages and I won't reply to yours? Thanks.--Percy

Kimura is neither praising nor critisizing. He's affirming that natural selection guides adaptive evolution. Neutral mutations, by definition, cannot be adaptive.Kimura believed that adaptive evolution is a result of natural selection, but that most evolutionary change is non-adaptive, a result of genetic drift. Since most mutations are deleterious and so would be selected against, what you're claiming Kimura showed was already obvious by definition. Or are you merely saying that while he's primarily known for his neutral theory that he was also responsible for determining that most mutations are deleterious. If that's what you're saying then I can't verify whether that's true or not, but nothing on the web attributes this to Kimura, and it's irrelevant to your point. Kimura would not agree with you that he showed natural selection was "absolutely useless," since he himself has stated the opposite, that natural selection plays the primary role in adaptive evolution. Well, sure, obviously this is true, but it isn't scientific ammunition. The distortions of their viewpoints are only effective at persuading those unfamiliar with science and/or possessing a religious reason for rejecting science.The last few months have seen a sudden influx of creationists all arguing along the same lines that various very prominent evolutionists rejected one or more of the primary foundational principles of evolution. Gould and Eldredge have often complained about creationist mischaracterizations of their views, and if Kimura, Haldane and Darwin were alive they would no doubt do the same.--Percy

This is one of the more common quote mines that we see. Darwin is raising the objection because he has a response. The paragraph's final sentence that makes clear more is to come is missing from the quote mine: The complete passage can be found at many places around the web, including here: Quote Mine Project: "Miscellaneous"--Percy

Your actual point was much more extreme: "Kimura showed that the vast majority of natural selection is negative in nature; absolutely useless for molecule-to-man evolution."This also answers the question you posed: I don't know what you think you said, but anyone else would conclude that you're saying Kimura questioned natural selection's ability to produce adaptation, and that's about as gross a distortion as you can get.--Percy

We've been trying to discuss your evidence with you, but most attempts are ignored as you move on to introduce yet another piece of evidence. You need stick with each piece of evidence long enough to explain how it supports your position.--Percy

Hi Calypsis4,I want to try to explain why you need to explain your picture evidence. Let's say you claimed there was a murder and showed us this picture: You wouldn't need to say much, we'd be pretty convinced there was a murder. But what if you instead showed us this picture: You'd need to explain how this picture proves there was a murder. What you've been doing, in effect, is showing us pictures of guns instead of murders, so you have to build a case that there was actually a murder. But instead of doing that you just show us more pictures of guns: So okay, you've got lots of pictures of guns. How do they add up to murder? You don't explain, you just show us more guns.--Percy

Yes, through the years people have found in coal mines all kinds of objects one would normally associate with coal miners and other people. Where is your evidence that they're ancient human artifacts from the time of Noah, which I assume is when you believe coal layers were layed down.Evidence would take the form of things like radiocarbon dating of the tooth, analysis of the iron or steel in the hammer to see if its manufacture is consistent with the technology of American Indians or whoever were the ancient peoples where the hammer was found, and other evidence of this sort.--PercyEdited by Percy, : Grammar.

Here' your "tooth": If you had asked me instead of telling me what was in the picture, I would not have been able to tell the rock was coal, and I probably would not have thought the encased object was a tooth. So is the rock coal, is the "tooth" actually a tooth, is the "tooth" human, and how old is it? Whoever is in possession of this object need only have it analyzed, and until they do it is evidence of nothing. Where did you find the picture, maybe we can learn more about it.People have been known to carry gold chains and hammers into coal mines, and they've been doing it for at least a couple hundred years. During that time many, many objects had to have been discarded or lost, and some undoubtedly ended up under enormous piles of coal under great pressure and were eventually uncovered.--Percy

Who were the scientists? Where's the paper the scientists published about the tooth?--Percy

I was able to find some information about your tooth online. It was discovered by a mining company doctor, J. C. F. Siegfriedt, in November of 1926 at the Eagle Mutual Coal Mine of Bear Creek, Montana. He was unable to convince paleontologists that it was human, and in fact they thought they knew pretty well what it was and wrote technical articles about it and other subsequent fossil discoveries. This excerpt is from an issue of Creation/Evolution, see page 35: His name goes largely unrecognized today, but Simpson was a famous paleontologist of the 20th century. He's the paleontologist who anticipated some of the ideas of Gould and Eldredge by decades with his book Tempo and Mode in Evolution.So Siegfriedt was actually responsible for the discovery of a hitherto unknown extinct fauna, and paleontologists studied this and similar fossils and produced papers that were printed in the technical literature, but Siegfriedt apparently lived out his days still insisting the tooth was human.--Percy

First, as the excerpt I included in Message 349 explained, Tetraclaenodon is a mammal, not a dinosaur.Second, the layers were around 60 million years old, not 250 million.Third, the fossils were not discovered in coal layers.Here's a link to the 1928 paper by George Gaylord Simpson: Some relevant excerpts: So we now have the following facts:

1. The fossil layer was clay-like, not coal.
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2. The layer was around 66-55 million years old.
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3. The tooth belonged to a Tetraclaenodon, not a human being.
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4. A number of extinct mammal species were discovered in this fossil layer, described in detail in the paper.

Apparently nothing you said about the photograph was accurate.--Percy

Haldane's dilemma is often discussed in terms of "deaths," but this is just a shorthand way of referring to "a number of deaths or their equivalents in lowered fertility" (p. 514, The Cost of Natural Selection by J. B. S. Haldane).In the end it all comes down to fertility. The outcome of competition is actually measured in terms of differential reproductive success. Naturally if an organism can out compete others of its species so as to actually cause their deaths then it has reduced their fertility to zero, but more commonly the outcome of competition expresses itself in terms of producing more offspring and contributing more copies of its genes to the next generation.With simple organisms such as bacteria, if in a population of bacteria there arose a mutation that allowed it to better compete for nutrients in the environment, then it would be able to reproduce more often. After some number of generations of dividing, say, every 20 minutes instead of every 30 minutes, the mutation would quickly come to dominate the population without actually having caused any deaths at all.With more complex organisms such as rabbits, a mutation that caused one to prefer a more nutritious food source might allow it to have larger litters, and over the course of some generations the mutation would probably come to dominate the population. Notice, again it causes no deaths in others of its species.Mutations that allow organisms to contribute more copies of their genes to the next generation are far, far more often the case than those that directly cause the deaths of other members of the same species. While one can easily imagine two alligators or lions fighting to the death over access to females, try imaging the same thing with earthworms, or better, turtles. "Come out, you coward!" One of the mistakes that Haldane made was assuming that it would take two mutations double the time to fixate as one, because he assumed that genes at different loci are independent. The relationship between genes at different loci turns out to be both varied and complex.In other words, you're accurately representing Haldane's conclusions, but Haldane's mistakes led him to wrong answers.--Percy