Where is the evidence for evolution?

Ten-zeph,You basically bailed in the thread in question:http://EvC Forum: Zephan: What is Evidence? -->EvC Forum: Zephan: What is Evidence?more bluster form the incompetent...

Well, gas is getting expensive so I guess he has fewer ambulances that he can chase these days...why else would a guy who came onto the site saying PB has great "evidence"..(must be secret evidence) and that the site was a waste of time continue to come back here under different names ..unless there is justice and he has been disbarred

I have two advisements to issue:

1. Discussion of the definition of evidence must be moved to a thread in the Is It Science? forum. Someone please open the thread and post a link to it here. Board policy is to never delete messages, but given the history of recent past discussions on the topic, I will be making an exception in this thread. Messages discussing the definition of evidence here will be deleted, even if it's just one sentence of a lengthy tome.
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   Added by edit: That goes for messages in any other thread other than the thread designated for discussion of the definition of evidence.
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2. Zephan's quotes from the Margulis/Sagan book have been given short shrift. The book needs to be addressed in a forthright way.

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--EvC Forum Administrator[This message has been edited by Admin, 03-13-2003]

Hi Taz, I've been doing a little reading on the horseshoe crab. Fascinating creature. In fact it must be a concern for evo's since it is a living fossil, and a complex organism. (what would a horseshoe crab w/o a tail do if it got turned upside down?)
Re: Behe, he has said this: ref btw, you can read Behe's rebuttals to his blood clotting criticisms at this same ref.
Anyway, the incredible horseshoe crabs blood is now used to detect lethal bacterial toxins during surgery on humans. This is just another example of the unlimited wisdom and foresight of the Creator.
Here is that link again ref, thanks for pointing it out.Out of time for now,
Regards
Sp.s. Taz, In what circumstance does "chance favour the prepared mind" according to Pasteur?[This message has been edited by sonnikke, 03-13-2003][This message has been edited by sonnikke, 03-13-2003](3rd edit: apparantly you cannot edit the "Subject"..I tried to change it to "Horseshoe Crab")[Bug regarding edit of sub-topic noted. --Admin][This message has been edited by sonnikke, 03-13-2003][This message has been edited by Admin, 03-13-2003]

I'm confused. Is the above evidence against evolution?------------------
o--greyline--o

Margulis' ideas of symbiosis being the driving force behind evolution is fascinating, and it will be interesting to see how much evidence there is to support the idea.You do understand, however, that she is only arguing that the mechanism of how speciation occurs is wrong, not that it doesn't occur, don't you?If her and others' work eventually reshape our idea of where new species come from, then science will change. It's the evidence that will convince, and it will be exciting if it happens.

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I've been doing a little reading on the horseshoe crab. Fascinating creature. In fact it must be a concern for evo's since it is a living fossil, and a complex organism.

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Sharks and alligators haven't changed much either, so what? Evolution does not require constant, great phenotypic change in all creatures.Again, I think if you bothered to educate yourself in Biology you would have make better arguments.

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(what would a horseshoe crab w/o a tail do if it got turned upside down?)

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Meaningless argument. They evolved with tails.

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Re: Behe, he has said this:
In the final several pages he writes of a totally unrelated clotting system, that of lobsters. In other words, Miller spends almost all of the space writing about things other than how the vertebrate blood clotting cascade may have arisen step-by-Darwinian-step.
ref btw, you can read Behe's rebuttals to his blood clotting criticisms at this same ref.
Anyway, the incredible horseshoe crabs blood is now used to detect lethal bacterial toxins during surgery on humans. This is just another example of the unlimited wisdom and foresight of the Creator.

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Um, your point is what?[This message has been edited by schrafinator, 03-14-2003]

Actually schraf, Margulis isn't even saying that much. She accepts natural selection, but believes that it is only a minor player in evolution and especially in speciation (does this sound familar to anyone?). She also has a VERY long history of bashing what she terms the "darwinian establishment". This isn't to say her theories are hollow, just that she has a history of greatly overstating the evidence for her claims (again, sound familiar?) However, a lot of her opposition stems from a rejection of the "competition" model, not evolution. She's been consistent on that score for at least 30 years. (I like Margulis, and bought "Acquiring Genomes" last summer shortly after it hit the shelves.)Some elements of her theory have good support, some less so, and some none at all. Unfortunately, the way she has always written is that no matter HOW speculative something she believes is, it's all presented as factual. For instance, there is good support for the existence of symbiotic/endosymbiotic relationships involving organisms all up and down the chain of complexity. Serial endosymbiosis theory at the prokaryote/eukaryote boundary is well supported. Cooperative metazoa - at least at very simple levels - abound (ex, Pharsalia pharsalis, the Portuguese man of war, is actually a colony organism consisting of four different critters acting mutualistically).However, her theory gets weaker and weaker as you deal with more complex organisms such as vertebrates. In the book she provides a number of examples of organisms that are classified as different species due to the incorporation of a symbiont in one of them allowing a radiation into a new niche - but fails to show the causal connection that a majority or even a sizeable minority of speciation events in vertebrates occurred this way. This is what would be needed (at the least) in order to "prove" her hypothesis. Basically, she's advocating almost a saltationist paradigm, by saying that no speciation occurs due to the weeding action of natural selection, but all new species appear fully formed following a symbiotic event. This is part of where she goes overboard, IMO.At the molecular level, she goes a bit overboard as well. Although there's a long argument concerning kinetochores and the absence of centromeres in prokaryotes "proving" symbiosis from bacteria as the base of the metazoan tree, the argument basically boils down to "they've got 'em HERE but not THERE, so HERE must've gotten them from SOMEWHERE ELSE".The other quibble I've got with the book is that she downplays the rather negative role of parasites in driving evolution. Although she talks about parasites as symbionts, it's never in the context of competition or parasite/host arms races. Rather it's more on the order of "see, Wollbachia shows that genomes can be acquired whole by more complex organisms", which is something of a mis-statement because it ignores what REALLY happens in parasite/host dynamics.Finally, the major complaint I have about the book is the same one I've always had about Margulis - she simply can't resist dragging in yet again her (and Lovelock's) quasi-metaphysical Gaia hypothesis to tie everything together. The book would have been MUCH better without it.Anyway, to make a long story shorter - the book is worth reading. She doesn't "destroy" natural selection OR evolution. She provides even more good information on early prokaryote-eukaryote transitions. She lends even more support to her previous (now-well-accepted) serial endosymbiosis theory. But she falls flat as always by pushing her hypothesis beyond what can be supported.Overall, IMO she provides another good nudge toward fruitful research areas that have been generally overlooked or underplayed. But she hasn't even come close to overthrowing the "neo-Darwinian paradigm" (which she spends a great number of words pointlessly lambasting).BTW: I think it's fascinating that the creationists wasted no time in seizing on the book as more "proof" of the demise of Darwinism. The first creationist mention was in an ICR Impact article barely more than a month after the book hit the streets. ICR, of course, proclaimed it the death knell of evolutionary theory. Sigh.

Good Morning Sonnikke,
I have actually read that piece by Dr. Behe. I actually thought that he was the one who skirted the issue. I do not have time for a full criticism now but I hope to have more time tonight. To put it simply, IC relies on the theoretical inability for systems to be cobbled together from existing system or pieces. First off there is a paper in the Journal of Theoretical Biology (By D. Ussery,, if I remember correctly) that destroys this arguement from a theoretical standpoint. Here is the linkhttp://www.cbs.dtu.dk/staff/dave/JTB.htmlSecond, he (Behe) totally ignored the point re: crustacians. Namely that they have an OPEN circulatory system (hence my point w.r.t. the Horseshoe crab), allowing for the simpler form of the clotting cascade for a different purpose, namely bacterial defense. The modified reuse of systems is a central point in evolutionary biology, as M. Behe should well know. As to the "problem" with the existence of the horseshoe crab, it is no such thing. The three remaining species are a small remenant of a once much larger family (read "Creation in a Crucible") and have done quite well in a rather small ecological niche, as would be expected under evolutionary theory whether you go with pure neodarwinian or PE based theory.Actually neither Behe nor Miller use the Horseshoe crab much becuase they are both academics. ANyone in Biotech knows about the LAL assay, it is a key component in the testing of recombinant proteins derived from gram negative bacteria. It (the system) EVOLVED as a defense against bacteria, it was not created for our use, we have co-opted it. Biotech used to use rabbits and look for temperature spikes to determine the level of pyrogens, but that assay stunk.As for the Pasteur quote, it has to do with keeping your mind primed for alternative explainiation or for the unexpected when reviewing data and events. It has served me well in the lab many times.Got to get back to the lab now, I will try to go into the flaws of Behe's arguements in more detail later.------------------
"Chance favors the prepared mind." L. Pasteur
Taz[This message has been edited by Dr_Tazimus_maximus, 03-14-2003]

Thanks for the indepth analysis, Q.

Taz'z post is pretty good also.I hate to see such quality messages buried 300 messages into a topic.Might you be interested in starting a new topic, with a reference back to this topic?Moose (running in non-admin mode)------------------
Professor, geology, Whatsamatta U
Evolution - Changes in the environment, caused by the interactions of the components of the environment.
My big page of Creation/Evolution Links

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S: Ad hoc unsupported gibberish works on creationists

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Hi SLPx...don't forget not reading about, researching, or making any effort at all to understand the topic they are supposedly so passionately opposed to as a modus operandi...that stategy has served PB and other creationists very well.

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Back to the grind..

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Greetings, oh frozen one!Oh - I have not forgotten at all....

Thanks moose (and Schraf). I'd be happy to open a new thread to discuss SET, etc, if it becomes germane. I just thought I'd throw that post out there in response to Percy's noting that nobody addressed Zeph's quote mine substantively. SET is a neat theory, and as an ecology type, I LOVE talking about symbiotic relationships, especially parasitism, because I think they provide a wonderful line of evidence supporting evolutionary theory. I also sort of agree with Margulis that symbionts (parasites at least) have had a greater impact on evolution in everything from population dynamics to adaptation than is usually accepted.Death of evolution, indeed...

Page,You cannot simply let pass another opportunity to show what evolutionism is worth these days. So, make the link where you evo guys rebut my claim that 'now we have discovered that the elements to induce variation within species is preexisting in the MPG, it is crystal clear that Darwin made the unwarranted extrapolation of microbe-to-man-evolution from his observations on dogs, pigeons, finches. (The latter being MPGs in action)'PB

To SLPx and peter borger,Please restrict discussion of GUToB, MPG, NRM, etc, to those threads opened for that purpose.------------------
--EvC Forum Administrator