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Member (Idle past 1971 days) Posts: 6165 From: Co. Wicklow, Ireland. Joined: |
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Author | Topic: Where are all the missing links? | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
nwr Member Posts: 6412 From: Geneva, Illinois Joined: Member Rating: 5.3 |
LOL, gotta love the stamina and sheer brazenness of some evos declaring the fossil record is now inconsequential.
I didn't read anybody saying it was inconsequential. It adds a lot of additional supporting evidence. Primary evidence for evolution: what can be seen in the currently existing species, together with what is known from artificial selection. Secondary evidence 1: the fossil record, and its consistency with ToE. Secondary evidence 2: the DNA evidence, and its consistency with ToE. If ToE were wrong, then there would be no reason to expect the degree of consistency that is seen.
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nwr Member Posts: 6412 From: Geneva, Illinois Joined: Member Rating: 5.3 |
Commonality of design explains it just as well,
In that case, you can have theistic evolution. Where is the problem?
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nwr Member Posts: 6412 From: Geneva, Illinois Joined: Member Rating: 5.3 |
Herepton writes:
There isn't any secret about this. You can find it in "The Origin of Species". His main evidence was experience with artificial selection, and observation of closely related species (in the sense of the Linneaus systematization) that were adapted to slightly different niches.
If the fossil record showed no signs of intermediacy (as admitted) then what was Darwin basing his theory on ? I must say it was based upon anti-Biblical worldviews, IOW, philosophy driven under the pretext of science.
It seems to me that you are jumping to conclusions. Why are you picking on Darwin? Why not Linneaus? Once his method of systematization was in wide practice, the evidence for evolution stood out.
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nwr Member Posts: 6412 From: Geneva, Illinois Joined: Member Rating: 5.3 |
Herepton writes:
Citation please. "There is indeed one belief that all true original Darwinians held in common, and that was their rejection of creationism, their rejection of special creation. This was the flag around which they assembled and under which they marched. There are two problems with using this to support your claim about what motivated Darwin.
There are similar problems in the way you are using your second quote, although you at least provided a citation in that case.
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nwr Member Posts: 6412 From: Geneva, Illinois Joined: Member Rating: 5.3 |
You quote Rahvin as saying "Evolution is not based on the fossil record in any way."
You later say "We have already agreed the fossil record does not support ToE, ..." Whoa! Where is that agreement? Certainly the statement you quote from Rahvin does not imply your own assertion of agreement. I won't try to put words in Rahvin's mouth. For myself, I certainly belief that the fossil record supports ToE, even though I agree that the theory was not based on the fossil record..
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nwr Member Posts: 6412 From: Geneva, Illinois Joined: Member Rating: 5.3 |
Gould and Eldrege are famous for concocting excuses as to why the record shows no speciation.
That's a misunderstanding. Gould and Eldredge were not making excuses. They were proposing that some change was needed from the standard neo-Darwinist account. That's in their 1977 paper in Paleobiology, "Punctuated equilibria: The tempo and mode of evolution reconsidered".
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nwr Member Posts: 6412 From: Geneva, Illinois Joined: Member Rating: 5.3 |
iano writes:
This is a misunderstanding. There is a large conceptual difference between theoretical science and empirical science. There is often little or no evidence that can back up statements of a scientific theory.
Saying "cannot arise" without firm evidence that it can is, to my mind not how theories work. I could say God exists and created it all in 6 literal days and nothing could stop him. I'd be immediately asked for evidence. Toe makes a positive statment about how it happened. ToE needs, does it not, to provide relevant evidence for the claims it makes. Evidence along the lines that "there is nothing to prevent it happening" is not evidence for the theory. For comparison, consider Newton's theory of gravity. Newton proposed that there was a force of attraction between masses. I understand that, at the time, he was criticized for introducing occult forces into his theory. In order to use the theory to make predictions about out solar system, we need to know the mass of the sun. How is this determined? We did not put the sun on a weighing machine to determine this. Rather, scientists simply assigned to the sun, a mass that would make the predictions come out correctly. You can imagine how the headlines might go -- "massive dishonesty by gravitationalists". Fortunately for Newton, there weren't any strong religious objections to his theory. Newton's theory works just as well if you present it as "Things move as if there were a force of attraction between masses". Copernical astronomy works just as well if you say "the planets move, and can be best understood, if we think of it as if the planets move around the sun." Galileo might have saved himself some problems, had he been willing to insert that "as if" qualifier. Scientists usually find it convenient to drop the "as if". For the most part, scientists are pragmatists, and they don't much care about the metaphysics. Physicists and cosmologists move quite easily between Newtonian gravity and general relativity. The first says that it is due to forces between masses, while the second says that it is due to the curvature of space. This is a huge metaphysical difference (which scientists barely notice) but makes only very small differences in the prediction made, differences that scientists take very seriously. Similarly, the theory of evolution works just as well if you add an "as if". The biological systems and fossil evidence are as if the bio-history of the world is one of common descent due to natural selection from variation due to mutation. Most scientists are not likely to add that "as if" qualification. It seems as silly as the assumption that there was phlogiston. But you could be a good YEC, and at the same time be an evolutionist, if you used that "as if" qualifier. Somebody who is both an evolutionist and a YEC could presumably say "God designed it so as to have an appearance of having evolved. We should therefore study evolution, so that we can best understand God's grand design."
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nwr Member Posts: 6412 From: Geneva, Illinois Joined: Member Rating: 5.3 |
There is often little or no evidence that can back up statements of a scientific theory. If there is little or no evidence that can back up a theory then it is not a theory anymore, surely. Is such an entity not a hypothesis or maybe only something that is postulated? There is usually a huge amount of evidence that the theory makes excellent predictions. There is often little or no evidence that the theory is literally true. We judge theories on their goodness of fit, not on their metaphysical truth (if there is such a thing as metaphysical truth). More later -- I have to rush to a meeting right now.
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nwr Member Posts: 6412 From: Geneva, Illinois Joined: Member Rating: 5.3 |
There is often little or no evidence that can back up statements of a scientific theory. If there is little or no evidence that can back up a theory then it is not a theory anymore, surely. Is such an entity not a hypothesis or maybe only something that is postulated? The trouble with ToE to my mind, is that it is presented as a "whole thing".
That's actually quite typical of scientific theories. A good theory will tend to define a field of study. The theory is not just a collection of assertions. The theory also defines new terminology, introduces new concepts, defines ways of gathering data. It pretty much has to come as a whole thing.
folk here seem to hold the view that fossils don't support ToE in and of themselves.
The better statement is that the theory is not based on the fossils. However, the fossils are consistent with the theory, and in that sense they do support the theory. It is easy to imagine fossils that are inconsistent with the theory, but there haven't actually been any such fossils. Most people would take that as support for the theory, although not by itself enough to confirm the theory.
The tips of the tree are all that we know: distinct species. Due to scarity of link data, there is nothing to show us the shape of the branches and roots that bind these nodal points all together.
That's a misunderstanding. We know the tips (the species). But we also have a pretty good knowledge of the relation between them. Our knowledge of the relation comes, initially, from the systematic classification due to Linneaus. When it turned out that the relationship between species as given by Linneaus was a close match to the relationship as given by DNA, that was taken as strong support for the theory. We also know biological processes, including those involved in reproduction. From those processes, we can infer the kind of change that should be expected, and the kind of evolutionary tree that would result. When the tree we see from the Linnaeus classification fits so well with what we can infer from the biological processes, that's also pretty strong evidence. The lab experiments (creating species in the lab) are mainly to test whether we are correct in our understanding of the processes. Compare to astronomy. We observe gas clouds. We observe young stars. We observe middle-aged stars. We observe old stars. But we never observe a single star being born in a gas cloud, progressing through the stages of young, middle aged, old. Everything happens far too slowly to observe that. We have to use our knowledge of the processes involved to put together a composite life history, based on the parts that we see. Or consider the tree in my backyard that was planted as a seedling. I have never actually seen the tree grow. I do look at it from time to time, to see how it has changed from the previous time. For all I know, every night a fairy comes, digs out the tree and replaces it with a slightly larger tree. Maybe everything I believe about trees is wrong. But it would really be bizarre to assume the fairy story. What we know about the processes involved, together with the periodic observations, is best explained by the traditional theory on how trees grow.
When folk say the theory is well-substantiated they never include the degree to which every piece of evidence is considered in the light of the assumptions on which it is based. And on the assumptions on which other branches of science on which it relies is based. Assumption seem to be the glue which holds the whole thing together. Assumption piled upon assumption.
When you go shopping at your local Walmart, you just assume that it is your local Walmart. But maybe, overnight, the old Walmart was removed and replaced by a substitute. Maybe the old employees were all kidnapped, and replaced by alien look-alikes. Assumption is the glue that holds your life together. Assumption piled upon assumption. Science does not depend on assumption any more than your every day life depends on assumptions. It really does seem bizarre to question these assumptions. If you want absolute truth, try mathematics. In science, as in every day life, we have to make do with what is available.
Question: How tentitive is ToE due to missing links and everything else and how does one measure that. Is ToE a 2% explaination or a 925 explaination and how do we know which?
You really cannot quantify this. Missing links are not any sort of problem. It would be nice if the fossil evidence were more complete, but only because that would satisfy our curiosity. The ToE is not dependent on fossil evidence.
Queston: Is there anything anybody actually 'knows' about evolution that is true in and of itself.
That gets us back to the question of "What is truth?"
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nwr Member Posts: 6412 From: Geneva, Illinois Joined: Member Rating: 5.3 |
Is there any clear evidence which is predicted by ToE and not by something else. Species mutating in nature but not turning into something else can be better explained by Species Mutate But Don't Change To Another Species Theory. Link species (of which there is a dearth) which attach to nothing at either end (an embarkation point and a destination) can too be better explained by the immutablity of species that that theory predicts (given that origins of life for both are equally indeterminate). Survival of the fittest can stand equally well in both theories - both predict that species will become extinct.
The "Species Mutate But Don't Change To Another Species Theory" does preduct extinction. But it does not predict that other species will arise. There is plenty of evidence that species have arisen.
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nwr Member Posts: 6412 From: Geneva, Illinois Joined: Member Rating: 5.3 |
The question was clear evidence. Does 'plenty of evidence' suffer from the same problem as "speciation occurs in the lab", ie: is the evidence being interpreted in the light of the presumption that evolution is occuring? Making the facts fit the theory in other words?
crashfrog did a pretty good job of answering this in Message 241.
Uniformatism is a presumption made, under which light the so-called geologic columm is constructed.
I don't agree with that. Uniformity is observed in the geologic evidence.
This seems to be a core problem with ToE, it's theories all the way down. Infinite regression but never landing on something solid on which we can strike out and know the evidence is in fact evidence. Every aspect of it appear to be built on a foundation of an unfounded presumption. That ToE is fantastically complex and interesting doesn't free it from it's position of a bootstrap arguement.
That's a misundestanding, in my opinion. If you look at ToE (or any scientific theory) as a collection of facts, then what you mostly see is a sparse collection of isolated facts, and a lot of interpolation to reach conclusions. Once could reasonably be skeptical. But that isn't how science works. Science, primarily, is a knowledge of processes. The lab work is where we test our understanding of these processes. Knowing the processes, you can predict the kind of world that we will have. You do need some facts to anchor the predictions in reality. But most of the facts serve as confirmation of what you could predict from knowledge of the processes.
I asked somewhere is there anything about ToE which anyone knows with certainty to be true. This would require a firm, non presumed piece of foundation at some point. Is there one, anywhere?
The foundation is in the known and well tested biological processes. Even for Darwin, this was true. His experience with artificial selection (pidgeon breeding was one example) gave him the process knowledge that connected all of the observed facts together. Today our process knowledge is far greater.
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nwr Member Posts: 6412 From: Geneva, Illinois Joined: Member Rating: 5.3 |
The quote from Denton is interesting.
You might want to check out this linkhttp://home.wxs.nl/~gkorthof/kortho29.htm for a more recent view of Denton's thoughts.
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