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Author Topic:   The egg came first
crashfrog
Member (Idle past 1467 days)
Posts: 19762
From: Silver Spring, MD
Joined: 03-20-2003


Message 3 of 111 (234661)
08-18-2005 8:25 PM
Reply to: Message 2 by New Cat's Eye
08-18-2005 8:22 PM


Ha! Brilliant post.

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crashfrog
Member (Idle past 1467 days)
Posts: 19762
From: Silver Spring, MD
Joined: 03-20-2003


Message 33 of 111 (243081)
09-13-2005 6:47 PM
Reply to: Message 32 by igor_the_hero
09-13-2005 6:32 PM


It assumes that everything has the knowledge it needs and that their is no trial and error process.
Huh? The only one here assuming anything is you. You've just posted a post filled with assumptions that you didn't even bother to try to support.
Unnerved? Greatly different? Predators? Do you have any support for these ideas or are we just supposed to toss out the best-supported theory in science based only on your little game of what-if?
You're not exactly knocking them out of the park, Igor. Allow me to welcome you to the forum but you need to realize that you've jumped into a small pool with some big fish. A lot of us are intimately involved in scientific research based on evolution; some of us are even published experts on the subject. (Not me.) It's pretty obvious that a lot of your knowledge about evolution is flawed. Whether or not you improve that situation is going to depend on whether or not you are going to allow yourself to be informed by people that you currently disagree with.

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 Message 32 by igor_the_hero, posted 09-13-2005 6:32 PM igor_the_hero has replied

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crashfrog
Member (Idle past 1467 days)
Posts: 19762
From: Silver Spring, MD
Joined: 03-20-2003


Message 39 of 111 (243155)
09-13-2005 10:26 PM
Reply to: Message 38 by igor_the_hero
09-13-2005 10:01 PM


Re: Evolution 101
It Texas there is a river clearly showing humans walking with dinosaurs.
No, there's not.
When the rock was excavated they found more footprints from the same time period.
No, they didn't.
CC101: Paluxy River footprints
I am sorry to bring it into this, but in the Bible in the book of Job, he clearly describes a Brachiosaurus and Plesiosaurus.
No, it doesn't. What it describes is an elephant with an obliquely-referred-to penis.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 38 by igor_the_hero, posted 09-13-2005 10:01 PM igor_the_hero has replied

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crashfrog
Member (Idle past 1467 days)
Posts: 19762
From: Silver Spring, MD
Joined: 03-20-2003


Message 48 of 111 (243255)
09-14-2005 7:54 AM
Reply to: Message 42 by igor_the_hero
09-13-2005 10:45 PM


Re: Evolution 101
Ah! You did not refer to the plesiousaur.
You did not say where in the Bible you think it refers to any plesiosaurs.
If you have actually read the Bible through you will see that it does descrirbe a brachiosaur.
No, it doesn't. Behemoth is not a brachiosaur.
quote:
15 "Behold, Be'hemoth, which I made as I made you; he eats grass like an ox. 16 Behold, his strength in his loins, and his power in the muscles of his belly. 17 He makes his tail stiff like a cedar; the sinews of his thighs are knit together. 18 His bones are tubes of bronze, his limbs like bars of iron. 19 "He is the first of the works of God; let him who made him bring near his sword! 20 For the mountains yield food for him where all the wild beasts play. 21 Under the lotus plants he lies, in the covert of the reeds and in the marsh. 22 For his shade the lotus trees cover him; the willows of the brook surround him. 23
"Lotus trees" are a kind of fruit-bearing bush, like an orange tree or apple tree. They are not very large. Brachiosaurus stood over 50ft tall. It would have been unable to lay under a lotus, or hide in the reeds or in a marsh.
Elephants, on the other hand, while large, are still the right size to be able to do all those things.
Yes they did excavate the rock.
What rock? The Paluxy rocks? Yeah, they excavated them, and determined that the human footprints had been carved in. They found tool marks and everything. The Paluxy tracks are forgeries.

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 Message 42 by igor_the_hero, posted 09-13-2005 10:45 PM igor_the_hero has replied

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crashfrog
Member (Idle past 1467 days)
Posts: 19762
From: Silver Spring, MD
Joined: 03-20-2003


Message 60 of 111 (243466)
09-14-2005 6:49 PM
Reply to: Message 50 by igor_the_hero
09-14-2005 4:12 PM


That is clearly a Brachiosaur.
Too small to be a brachiosaur, as I've proven - also, brachiosaurs had been dead for over 65 million years by the time the Bible was being written.
"He makes his tail stiff like a cedar."
That's a euphemism for "penis". You'll probably understand when you're older.
Brachiosaur spent most its time in the water so that it would not have to support its weight.
This is a common myth. Brachiosaurus did not enter the water; had it submerged itself to the neck, the water pressure would have crushed its chest. It would have been quite unable to breathe underwater.
Elephants, on the other hand, are well-known to engage in snorkeling behavior; it is this behavior to which the Bible refers to when it says that the Be'hemoth need not fear the rushing Jordan, or whatever.
They excavated the rocks and found others underneath it in the strata proving these could not be faked.
Which rocks? I'm still not clear. Are you talking about the Paluxy tracks? Fakes. Admitted by the fakers, as I recall.

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crashfrog
Member (Idle past 1467 days)
Posts: 19762
From: Silver Spring, MD
Joined: 03-20-2003


Message 63 of 111 (243477)
09-14-2005 7:12 PM
Reply to: Message 62 by bkelly
09-14-2005 7:08 PM


Re: Et al
But aren't you kind of arguing from a position of species essentialism? If a species is a reproductive community, or a community between whose members there is significant gene flow, then it's hard to understand how an offspring can be in a different reproductive community from it's parents - the gene flow between parent and child should be obvious.

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 Message 62 by bkelly, posted 09-14-2005 7:08 PM bkelly has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 66 by bkelly, posted 09-15-2005 8:49 PM crashfrog has replied

  
crashfrog
Member (Idle past 1467 days)
Posts: 19762
From: Silver Spring, MD
Joined: 03-20-2003


Message 81 of 111 (244343)
09-17-2005 10:18 AM
Reply to: Message 66 by bkelly
09-15-2005 8:49 PM


Re: Et al
I am not understanding what your are trying to tell me.
Are you familiar with the discredited concept of "species essentialism"?
First, do you disagree with my conclusion, the egg came first?
I haven't decided which I believe came first. I'm just not certain that its reasonable to assert that a child can somehow be of a different species than its parent, when the child obviously belongs to the same reproductive community, the same population of gene flow, as its parents.
(For the sake of discussion, assume grandual and even and continuous advancement of characteristics)
It's not clear to me that that's an appropriate assumption. The actual, nitty-gritty cause of speciation is still a subject under much scientific debate. There's several possibilities for the cause of the speciation that created Gallus gallus; for instance if the speciation was allopatric then the chicken came first; the original founding members of the new population are best described as the first chickens, despite probably being totally normal specimens of red junglefowl (the bird's immediate evolutionary ancestor). On the other hand, if the speciation was symbiogenic, then perhaps its best to consider that the egg came first.
I don't think it's as cut and dry as you try to make it, and arguing that there's some arbitrary line where the offspring suddenly has enough of the characteristics of the modern chicken - i.e. the parents are 49% chicken, and their offspring is 51% chicken - smacks of species essentiallism, and really doesn't have anything to do with how we actually define and recognize species.

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crashfrog
Member (Idle past 1467 days)
Posts: 19762
From: Silver Spring, MD
Joined: 03-20-2003


Message 82 of 111 (244345)
09-17-2005 10:28 AM
Reply to: Message 66 by bkelly
09-15-2005 8:49 PM


Re: Et al
I am not understanding what your are trying to tell me.
Are you familiar with the discredited concept of "species essentialism"?
First, do you disagree with my conclusion, the egg came first?
I haven't decided which I believe came first. I'm just not certain that its reasonable to assert that a child can somehow be of a different species than its parent, when the child obviously belongs to the same reproductive community, the same population of gene flow, as its parents.
(For the sake of discussion, assume grandual and even and continuous advancement of characteristics)
It's not clear to me that that's an appropriate assumption. The actual, nitty-gritty cause of speciation is still a subject under much scientific debate. There's several possibilities for the cause of the speciation that created Gallus gallus; for instance if the speciation was allopatric then the chicken came first; the original founding members of the new population are best described as the first chickens, despite probably being totally normal specimens of red junglefowl (the bird's immediate evolutionary ancestor). On the other hand, if the speciation was symbiogenic, then perhaps its best to consider that the egg came first.
I don't think it's as cut and dry as you try to make it, and arguing that there's some arbitrary line where the offspring suddenly has enough of the characteristics of the modern chicken - i.e. the parents are 49% chicken, and their offspring is 51% chicken - smacks of species essentiallism, and really doesn't have anything to do with how we actually define and recognize species.

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 Message 66 by bkelly, posted 09-15-2005 8:49 PM bkelly has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 87 by bkelly, posted 09-17-2005 2:00 PM crashfrog has replied
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crashfrog
Member (Idle past 1467 days)
Posts: 19762
From: Silver Spring, MD
Joined: 03-20-2003


Message 92 of 111 (244426)
09-17-2005 3:59 PM
Reply to: Message 87 by bkelly
09-17-2005 2:00 PM


Re: Et al
If, as you say, a child cannot be of a species different from its parent, then how could we possibly evolved from an ancestor that also led to chimpanzees.
French evolved from Latin, to the point where a speaker of French cannot meaningfully communicate with a person who speaks only Latin. That change happened over successive generations of language change.
Nontheless it does not follow that one of those speakers of Latin had a child who spoke only French.
Indeed, if as some say, all life can be traced back to the first primitive life with DNA, then to have a descendant of a different species seems to be required.
A decendant, certainly. That does not neccessitate that a parent had a child of a different species. You're asserting that the line is arbitrary and fine; I'm asserting that the line disappears when you look closely at it.
It's like the old question "when is it raining?" If a lot of raindrops are falling on your head, it's certainly raining. If one drop falls all day, it didn't rain. So how many drops constitutes rain? 10? 100? It's meaningless to try to say. The "line" is not a line at all, but a gradiation. It's fuzzy, and there's no way to say exactly when you've crossed it.
Seems to me the numbers should be 99% chicken and 100% chicken.
Even chicken isn't 100% chicken. You're getting back to species essentialism. If I have two chickens, and they have slightly different characteristics, which one of them is the "more" chicken?
Species essentialism is the doctrine that all organisms of a certain species are deviates from some Platonic, perfect species "essence"; that the varation among individuals represents the corruption of some perfect ideal member of that species. Species essentialism is disproved, of course, by evolution, but it's often implicitly invoked by creationists when they speak about "kinds". You're the first evolutionist I've met who implies species essentialism, though.
To say that something is 99% chicken implies that there's some kind of chicken "essence", or a specific configuration of characteristics that means "chicken." That's species essentialism. Organisms are 100% themselves, not part-chicken or part-ape. And the species that they belong to is determined by the population with which they share gene flow, not the essence of which they are an imperfect copy of.

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 Message 87 by bkelly, posted 09-17-2005 2:00 PM bkelly has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 93 by bkelly, posted 09-17-2005 5:41 PM crashfrog has replied

  
crashfrog
Member (Idle past 1467 days)
Posts: 19762
From: Silver Spring, MD
Joined: 03-20-2003


Message 96 of 111 (244513)
09-18-2005 12:13 AM
Reply to: Message 93 by bkelly
09-17-2005 5:41 PM


Re: Et al
From my understanding of your statement, I do not buy into species essentialism.
No, I didn't believe that you did, of course. But it does seem like what you're arguing, which is why we're having this discussion - to see if it's merely that I don't understand your argument, or you haven't entirely thought through every last implication of it.
At no point on the card can one say that this side is white and the other black.
Indeed. And, while it's certainly the case that the decendant of the modern chicken was a red junglefowl, at no point did a red junglefowl give birth to a chicken; at no point can a parent be said to have given birth to an offspring of a different species.
There's certainly a line between the red junglefowl and the chicken where organisms on this side are junglefowl and organisms on the other are chicken; but it's impossible to determine where this line lies. You can, perhaps, assert the probability at each point of you being on one side of the line or the other.
The only way to get from a single species, the first life that existed, to today’s myriad of species, is for one species to begat two or more descendant species. This fact seems to completely refute your position.
No, it doesn't, for the reasons that I said, and that I illustrated via the analogy you just dismissed. Even though species beget new species, that doesn't in the least imply that a parent has offspring of a different species; which as I've explained would be a situation completely incoherent with the definition of "species" as a reproductive community.
The only way a parent can issue an offspring of a different species, of a different reproductive community, is if the offspring's genes came from some other source - surrogate parenting via in vitro implantation, if you will. Since this was certainly not the case among the organisms in question, we know that there's really no organism among the ancestors of the chicken that we can point to as "the first member of species Gallus gallus".
At least, that's the way it seems to me. We know that a speciation event occured, obviously; nontheless it seems impossible, or at least incoherent with the idea of species, to try to point to one or another individual as the one to whom the event "occured."

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crashfrog
Member (Idle past 1467 days)
Posts: 19762
From: Silver Spring, MD
Joined: 03-20-2003


Message 100 of 111 (244651)
09-18-2005 2:47 PM
Reply to: Message 99 by bkelly
09-18-2005 2:03 PM


Re: Et al
While I am not positive, I am quite certain that many of these can breed between species.
They can, but they don't. There's no significant gene flow between these populations, which is why they're different species.
The offspring must be of a different species from at least one of the parents.
I don't believe that hybrid animals are even classified as species, particularly since they don't form populations. But I could be wrong. Nonetheless you raise an interesting point.
On the other hand, it seems to me that the fowl that is 99% chicken, and the fowl that is 100 % chicken can be of the same species.
I guess my original point was that it's not clear to me how you can say "99% chicken" without implicitly invoking species essentialism. A bird is not a chicken because it has a certain number of chicken parts, although that morphological criteria is how we recognize species, for the large part; a bird is or isn't a chicken based on the degree to which the bird is part of a population that experiences significant gene flow with populations of chickens.
The egg came first.
Depending on the mechanism of chicken speciation, I'm not sure that I agree. Or that it can even be decided. If a population of red junglefowl was split from their parent population (allopatric speciation) and gave rise, eventually, to Gallus gallus, then those red junglefowl adults became the first chickens, and thus, the chicken came first.

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Replies to this message:
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crashfrog
Member (Idle past 1467 days)
Posts: 19762
From: Silver Spring, MD
Joined: 03-20-2003


Message 103 of 111 (244718)
09-18-2005 10:05 PM
Reply to: Message 101 by bkelly
09-18-2005 9:47 PM


Re: Et al
If a species cannot begat another species
When did I say that they couldn't? Of course species give rise to other species. Where else do the new species come from?
If we were watching the transition one generation at a time, at what point would bankiva become domesticus?
It would be impossible to say, or at least, impossible for us to agree. That's rather my point. You might say it happened here, and I might say it happened three generations later there, and there would be no way to determine which of us was right.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 101 by bkelly, posted 09-18-2005 9:47 PM bkelly has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 104 by bkelly, posted 09-19-2005 7:38 PM crashfrog has replied

  
crashfrog
Member (Idle past 1467 days)
Posts: 19762
From: Silver Spring, MD
Joined: 03-20-2003


Message 106 of 111 (245030)
09-19-2005 9:29 PM
Reply to: Message 104 by bkelly
09-19-2005 7:38 PM


Re: Et al
Did I miss-uderstand this from messsage 96:
If you understood it to mean that I was saying that new species couldn't come from old ones, then indeed you did misunderstand me. My apologies; I'll try to be clearer.
Let me try to sum up succinctly what I believe speciation looks like - a subpopulation of organisms is set apart and begins to accrue mutations that will eventually separate it permanently from the "parent" population; a population of (for instance) red junglefowl gathers phenotypical changes, until the species as determined by morphology becomes more ambigously "red junglefowl", until it can't be determined precisely if they're the same species or not, it becomes less ambiguous that they're not of the "red junglefow" species, until it's so unambiguous that the new species "chicken" is coined and described and published in the literature.
There's a sort of "fuzzy" period in the middle where we're not sure we have a new species or not; you belive that there's a line that is crossed somewhere in there and I believe that no such line could exist; there's only differing opinions about what species these organisms belong to, until there's little ambiguity that they're not red junglefowl anymore.
I keep saying that evolution in the sense for individuals occurs when the sperm and egg meaning the one cell unfertilized entity in the female) meet. Based on that, the egg (meaning the laid spheriod) deserved the name chicked before an adult did.
I don't think it's possible to name an individual a certain species without naming that individual's entire population a species. That's my view but perhaps not the only one. I guess this is why this is such a contentious issue among biologists.
Regardless, this thread has gone on long enough. Thanks for some good thoughts.
Thank you, and likewise. Allow me to welcome your prodigious intellect to EvC if I haven't already.

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 Message 104 by bkelly, posted 09-19-2005 7:38 PM bkelly has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 107 by bkelly, posted 09-20-2005 8:42 PM crashfrog has replied

  
crashfrog
Member (Idle past 1467 days)
Posts: 19762
From: Silver Spring, MD
Joined: 03-20-2003


Message 109 of 111 (245363)
09-20-2005 9:34 PM
Reply to: Message 107 by bkelly
09-20-2005 8:42 PM


Re: Et al
Would you be so kind as to take a look there and give me a critique.
I think the admins have been wrong to reject it; threads have begun on much much less. And I think you suffer a bit from too much verbiage; your argument could have been summed up by pointing out that ID proponents advance an argument that is self-refuting, essentially a sort of "first cause" argument:
1) Complex things are too complex to evolve; they need to be designed by something even more complex.
Therefore:
2) Life on Earth must have been designed by God, who was not himself designed by anybody.
Arguments where the conclusion contradicts one of the premises are "proofs by contradiction", and they disprove one of the initial assumptions; in this case, the idea that all complex things necessitate an intelligent designer. Proven false by the rules of logic.
I'm not sure what response is possible, but I think ID's proponents deserve a chance to respond to what must be the most obvious and commonly-heard refutation of their complexity arguments.

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 Message 107 by bkelly, posted 09-20-2005 8:42 PM bkelly has replied

Replies to this message:
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crashfrog
Member (Idle past 1467 days)
Posts: 19762
From: Silver Spring, MD
Joined: 03-20-2003


Message 110 of 111 (245371)
09-20-2005 9:50 PM
Reply to: Message 109 by crashfrog
09-20-2005 9:34 PM


Re: Et al
What a surprise, too, to see Jar arguing from admin mode in your thread. The thread approval process doesn't mandate that admins promote arguments that are "likely to come up", and you're under no obligation to respond to them until such time as your thread is promoted for discussion.
Opening posts need merely lay out an opening argument, not anticipate objections to it. That's what the discussion is for.

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 Message 109 by crashfrog, posted 09-20-2005 9:34 PM crashfrog has not replied

  
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