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Author | Topic: Try out this exercise, sitting in front of fossil distribution data | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Peter Member (Idle past 1501 days) Posts: 2161 From: Cambridgeshire, UK. Joined: |
My main problem, in general, with TB's 'flood model' is
that in order for it to fit the evidence that we all agree exists it requires large numbers of convoluted sub-theories and is still full of holes. Fitting evolution to the same data requires little more thanthe evolutionary concept, the data, and a few dotted lines with a note to fill in as more data is uncovered. Which seems more likely to any rational human without an ingrainedpre-conception that their mythology MUST be correct? |
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edge Member (Idle past 1728 days) Posts: 4696 From: Colorado, USA Joined: |
quote: Specifics please. We cannot debate these vague assertions about fantastic mechanisms. You might begin by telling us where we find these mechanisms in action today.
quote: Of course not. That was not the point. The point is that evolution explains why this happened.
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edge Member (Idle past 1728 days) Posts: 4696 From: Colorado, USA Joined: |
quote: Obviously this is where intelligence comes into the equation. Mangroves were able to plan ahead and build this ark, you see and.... I was also wondering what happened to all traces of life and civilization before Noah? We don't see much of it represented in the Pre(Flood)cambrian record... Even with all of the unanswered and unanswerable questions, I'm sure that TB will tell you, with a straight face, that his model if better than mainstream explanations. This just cracks me up!
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Tranquility Base Inactive Member |
Laugh away Edge.
I must similarly confess to cracking up every time I read Gould's famous 'tradesecret' quote. The idea that an entire discipline would have a secret that utterly destroys the entire basis of their paradigm and yet continue going in to their work places each day is highly amusing but also very sad. When I first read paleontology monographs I was sure that all those dotted lines were littered with transitional forms or at least two or three per line. When I finally realized the truth of it, that none of the dotted lines represented actual data my jaw dropped and I suddenly realized in what sense Gould was writing. Gould was writing literally. I had given mainstream science so much benefit of the doubt I never accepted what the creationist books said or even what Gould et al had said. Only now that I have seen the data with my own eyes do I understand how it all works and how Gould could possibly have said what he said. You ridicule our faith in the flood (distribution mechanisms in particular) but in your scenario you have systemaitc dotted lines that link not to observed forms but to more dotted lines. Your faith is at least as great as ours. [This message has been edited by Tranquility Base, 01-15-2003]
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edge Member (Idle past 1728 days) Posts: 4696 From: Colorado, USA Joined: |
quote: It gets especially funny when I ask a creationist why (if Gould actually meant what this quote says) was Gould still an evolutionist. There has never been an answer to this question...
quote: My jaw dropped (well, not really) when I realized that you don't understand what a dotted line means in geology...
quote: Well, he probably didn't. This sounds like one of those out-of-context quotes. It has at least been used in a way which Gould never meant. Perhaps you could quote Gould exactly and give us a reference.
quote: No way. I have no faith at all. All I have is evidence and an explanation that works. Now, let's get back to your mechanisms. Please explain why flowering plants are found higher in the fossil record than dinosaurs or gymnosperms...
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mark24 Member (Idle past 5217 days) Posts: 3857 From: UK Joined: |
TB,
As I recall, we've had this debate before. It concluded with you having "faith" that the flood caused fossil distribution, despite counter examples being made for every proposed mechanism. Have faith, by all means, but please don't pretend that observation of all fossils/taxa is actually being used as evidence. It isn't. It sounds good when you use some examples, but is directly contradicted when taking the whole body of evidence into consideration (seed ferns, shelly fauna, angiosperms, etc). Mark ------------------Occam's razor is not for shaving with.
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peter borger Member (Idle past 7687 days) Posts: 965 From: australia Joined: |
Dear Mark,
You say:As I recall, we've had this debate before. I say:But that's what it is and always will be. An endless story. Maybe we should program a computer to spawn words and sentences at random and let it go on for ever and ever. It would not only produce a whole lot of nonsense --all mailings on this board, mailings on every board on internet, mailings ever to be produced by man-- it would also produce the complete work of Shakespear --not only one or two or ten or hundred, but millions of volumes....with and without typo's, with and without punctuated with nonsense--, also the work of Newton, Huygens, Galileo, Freud, Schopenhauer, Hegel, Einstein, Darwin, Dawkins, Hawkins, evolutionism, all theories ever invented by man and all rebuttals of all theories ever invented by man and all rebuttals of rebuttals of all theories invented by man and all rebuttals of rebuttals of rebuttals of all theories invented by man and all rebuttals of rebuttals of rebuttals of rebuttals of all theories ever invented by man and al rebuttals of rebuttals of rebuttals of rebuttals of rebuttals of theories ever to be invented by man and all rebuttals of rebuttals of rebuttals of......., and rebutalls thereof and rebuttals thereof, and rebuttals thereof, etcetera............. That would be nice, isn't it? Best wishes,Peter [This message has been edited by peter borger, 01-17-2003]
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mark24 Member (Idle past 5217 days) Posts: 3857 From: UK Joined: |
Peter,
quote: TB & I have had this same debate before, rather than this debate has occurred before. Mark ------------------Occam's razor is not for shaving with.
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peter borger Member (Idle past 7687 days) Posts: 965 From: australia Joined: |
But wouldn't it be nice, Mark?
Peter
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PaulK Member Posts: 17825 Joined: Member Rating: 2.2 |
[QUOTE]Originally posted by Tranquility Base:
[B]Laugh away Edge. I must similarly confess to cracking up every time I read Gould's famous 'tradesecret' quote. The idea that an entire discipline would have a secret that utterly destroys the entire basis of their paradigm and yet continue going in to their work places each day is highly amusing but also very sad.
[/QUOTE] But that is certainly NOT what Gould meant at all.
quote: That isn't true either. Your problems are far worse because there is so much data against your view. The problem of "ghost lineages" is due to a lack of data - the equivalent of an "argument from silence". And an argument that has proven unreliable in the past. Michael Behe used to point to the absence of transitional fossils for whales as a problem. Then in the '90s those missing fossils were found. So there is a recent example where the problem was not even the fossil record, but just our limited knowledge of it.
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Tranquility Base Inactive Member |
Paul K
But that is certainly NOT what Gould meant at all. I disagree. The distribution diagrams show that not only are gaps systematic but the dotted lines don't even join up to anything other than more dotted lines. Gould meant it literally.
That runs into one BIG problem. It isn't what Gould was talking about at all. Gould was attacking an extreme gradualist view which was at the time assumed in paleontology. He was talking about a lack of transitional fossils between a species and other species immediately descended from it. He and Eldredge went on to apply evolutionary theory to the problem and produced the original version of Punctuaed Equilibria. I kmnow all about PE. PE was required becasue of the distinctness of the fossil groups.
Gould himself later said that transitional fossils between higher taxa were "abundant". And I fully agree with him with the proviso of inverted commas around the word 'transitional'! Whether we talk from fish to amphibian to reptile or within orders you can get apparent transitonals but they are distinct organisms. They are simply organisms buried in a pattern of sea-floor to marine to aquatic to land. The more similar the closer they are vertically! The crown jewel of transitonals is the mammalian reptile sequence. Look what evolutionists say about it:
' . . . each species of mammal-like reptile that has been found appears suddenly in the fossil record and is not preceded by the species that is directly ancestral to it. It disappears some time later, without leaving a directly descended species . . .' Tom Kemp, 'The Reptiles that Became Mammals', New Scientist 92:583 (1982) You said:
Your problems are far worse because there is so much data against your view. The problem of "ghost lineages" is due to a lack of data - the equivalent of an "argument from silence". And an argument that has proven unreliable in the past. I have been at pains to point out that the ghost lineage problem is a systematic one for six seperate groups only because of evolutioanry assumptions about three other groups. You can believe the problem will go away if you want.
Michael Behe used to point to the absence of transitional fossils for whales as a problem. Then in the '90s those missing fossils were found. So there is a recent example where the problem was not even the fossil record, but just our limited knowledge of it. Your supposed transitonals here are weaker than those of the reptile-mammal transition. [This message has been edited by Tranquility Base, 01-20-2003]
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Peter Member (Idle past 1501 days) Posts: 2161 From: Cambridgeshire, UK. Joined: |
quote: It's not faith, it's supposition awaiting new evidence forconfirmation or refutation (mainly the latter). It's how science is conducted isn't it? i) Make some theory based upon dataii) See if that theory can apply to other data iii) Investigate to see if data can be found that refutes the theory iv) back to (i) That's not faith ... nor is it driven by faith or a pre-concievednotion of what happened. It is driven by the data. Darwin proposed the ToE based upon his observations, and no-oneto date has put forward anything like a global refutation. Some aspects have been shown in error and amended or discarded, but the theory as a whole still carries weight because it fits the extant data.
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PaulK Member Posts: 17825 Joined: Member Rating: 2.2 |
[QUOTE]Originally posted by Tranquility Base:
[B]Paul K But that is certainly NOT what Gould meant at all. I disagree. The distribution diagrams show that not only are gaps systematic but the dotted lines don't even join up to anything other than more dotted lines. Gould meant it literally. [\QUOTE] Even here you are relying on Faith. If you want to know what Gould was talking about you should refer to Gould's writings. Why don't you ? Because you know that I am right ? How about : "The supposed lack of intermediary forms in the fossil record remains the fundamental canard of current antievolutionism. Such transitional forms are sparse, to be sure, and for two sets of good reasonsgeological (the gappiness of the fossil record) and biological (the episodic nature of evolutionary change, including patterns of punctuated equilibrium, and transition within small populations of limited geographic extent). But paleontologists have discovered several superb examples of intermediary forms and sequences, more than enough to convince any fair-minded skeptic about the reality of life's physical genealogy."(Top Cash Earning Games in India 2022 | Best Online Games to earn real money) [QUOTE]
That runs into one BIG problem. It isn't what Gould was talking about at all. Gould was attacking an extreme gradualist view which was at the time assumed in paleontology. He was talking about a lack of transitional fossils between a species and other species immediately descended from it. He and Eldredge went on to apply evolutionary theory to the problem and produced the original version of Punctuaed Equilibria. I kmnow all about PE. PE was required becasue of the distinctness of the fossil groups. [\QUOTE] It was also predicted by evolutionary theory. Even Darwin got close to it. The whole point of proposing PE was that paleontologists were forcing their interpretations into an extreme gradualist view which had no sound foundations in the theory it was supposedly based in. In their original paper Eldredge and Gould make it very clear that their view is derived from Mayr's work on speciation.
[QUOTE]
Gould himself later said that transitional fossils between higher taxa were "abundant". And I fully agree with him with the proviso of inverted commas around the word 'transitional'! Whether we talk from fish to amphibian to reptile or within orders you can get apparent transitonals but they are distinct organisms. They are simply organisms buried in a pattern of sea-floor to marine to aquatic to land. The more similar the closer they are vertically! [\QUOTE] Which raises the question of why the dating of rocks does not show this progression. At all. Why don't we run out of marine fossils where the amphibians first appear ? The distribution of trilobites is another problem - why don't we find them sorted by their life-style - all sea-bottom dwellers in one strata, all free-swimming species in another ? It seems that even here you face a problem far more serious than the ghost lineages.
[QUOTE]
The crown jewel of transitonals is the mammalian reptile sequence. Look what evolutionists say about it:
' . . . each species of mammal-like reptile that has been found appears suddenly in the fossil record and is not preceded by the species that is directly ancestral to it. It disappears some time later, without leaving a directly descended species . . .' Tom Kemp, 'The Reptiles that Became Mammals', New Scientist 92:583 (1982)
[\QUOTE] A New Scientist article 20 years old ? A couple of facts you omit to mention is that it is generally accepted that we cannot reliably identify direct ancestors or descendants without the very sort of data that Gould says is so rare - intermediates between species. Another is that the fossil record is not that good - we do not have every or even most species. So even if your quote is entirely accurate today it is no great surprise. On the other hand there is a feature of these fossils that is very telling against creationism. We do see a very good sequence showing how the mammalian jaw evolved from the reptilian - something that appeared unlikely enough for some creationists to proclaim it impossible. Why, assuming creationism, should creatures with an intermediate jaw even exist ? In short you are using what is at best very weak evidence (if it is evidence at all) to dismiss much stronger evidence. And you claim that your opponents are relying on faith !
quote: Indeed they are. But they are still very good transitionals. They still represent an example where your argument failed. They still represent a successful prediction of evolution - a prediction that creationism could not make.
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