Where is the evidence for evolution?

Oooo, goody. Quotes. These are tougher than average - not because they're legitimate, but because they're unreferenced. At least bart gave actual references that could be checked (no doubt much to his subsequent chagrin).Let's see: Austin Clark, who's been dead for 50 years. According to the creationist sites I looked up (the only place I've been able to dig up the reference), Clark's quotation was made in 1928. Hmmm, 75 years out of date, at least. Wonder what he was really talking about? In any event, it's so far out of date that it's meaningless. Considering the "thus" (referring to a conclusion) that the quote starts with, we're missing a whole lot of argument/discussion/context to figure out what Clark's conclusion related to.Harry Rubin: Apparently this was a title of an article (although I can't find an actual copy on line). The full citation is The book is a popular creationist compendium of some 60 articles by various people who happen to also be Christians. Rubin is something of a gadfly — he is opposed to the scientific consensus on the viral basis of AIDS (which got him favorably mentioned by Philip Johnson), advocates a holistic approach to biology (based on quantum complexity theory over mechanistic biology to explain biological complexity), etc. I have no doubt he wrote this. So what? At best, it’s an opinion. At worst, the article says something other than what ol’ blanko would like it to. Anyone have a copy handy?Evan Shute: Well, for a dead Canadian, he IS pretty famous. His 1940’s clinical trials on the efficacy of vitamin E in helping diabetes and heart disease patients was landmark (although ignored/denigrated at the time.) He is, however, a died-in-the-wool creationist. He’s the author (among other works) of the little 1961 book Flaws in the Theory of Evolution. I would say that probably takes him out of the respected evolutionist category blanko put him in.Philip Johnson, father of the intelligent design school of creationism, author of such notable works as Darwin on Trial and Defeating Darwinism would probably be insulted at being characterized as a respected evolutionist. Oops.The Dawson quote is probably accurate. He was a vocal opponent of Darwinian evolution right up until his death in 1899. He even came up with a fragmentary foraminiferan (which he dubbed Eozooan canadense) that he found in Laurentian bedrock that falsified evolution. Unfortunately, the fragment later turned out to be a pseudofossil Can you say, out of date quotation? Also, another creationist vice respected evolutionist.Charles E. Brewster is a YEC whose PhD was on the biblical chronology from Adam to the Flood. Sure doesn’t make his assertions on probability and molecular biology very authoritative.So, on blanko’s list, we have two evolutionists (Darwin, whose quote has proven spurious, and Austin, whose quote is unverifiable), one anti-darwinian with his own theory of complexity (Rubin), and four creationists. Hardly conclusive proof that, according to blanko,

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Today everyone of these respected evolutionists (that is still living) continues to cling to what they admit is a battle against the evidence.

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Come back when you have something substantive.

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First of all, let me apologize to everyone involved in this debate. I admit, I got a little lazy with my research and should have been more careful with my quote selection. I appreciate you guys keeping me honest, but understand I would in no way intentionally made false statements to support my argument.

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Good show, blanko. I am very favorably impressed with your willingness to admit that you might have been misled - I never assumed you had done the "quote mining" yourself, nor did I think that you were being deliberately dishonest.Having said that, although you're still using quotes (), at least you appear to be willing to discuss them.Richard Lewontin: No, it's not a false accusation, in the sense that the quote probably represents Dr. Lewontin's opinion. He sees the issue as a cultural war between what he terms the "scientific establishment" and "the masses". Sagan, in "Demon Haunted World" which Lewontin was reviewing, sees it as an issue of reason vs superstition. Lewontin is injecting a lot of his (what I would call) Marxist leanings into his essay. But he ALWAYS does in his non-scientific writings. If you get a chance, check out the small book by Richard Morris "The Evolutionists", which provides a fairly easy-to-read overview of both the disagreements and the personalities of the major participants in the evolution debates. It's a fascinating bit of science history. Read the whole essay you referenced: it's a very interesting look - not into Sagan or the nature of science, but into Richard Lewontin. As to rebuttals, Lewontin was taken to task by a LOT of people for his characterization of Sagan's work. Here's one person's rather scathing look at the piece. However, remember that we are dealing with peoples' opnions, and in a literary review to boot, not with scientific facts. Both Lewontin and Nicastro are writing op-ed pieces, not science. Someone's opinion doesn't bolster or provide evidence for your claim that scientists are biased.Piltdown Man: The story of Piltdown would make a great mystery movie. It has con artists, gullible scientists, national pride, Arthur Conan Doyle, etc. It's one of my favorite stories from the history of science. I think Percy is probably right - most of the evidence leads to Dawson being the culprit. Another potential perpetrator is Martin Hinton, who is alleged to have had a grudge against Dawson because of a lost job opportunity at the British Museum, and who was found in possession (or at least was attributed to him) of trunk full of similarly treated bones - some Dawson apologists think that Hinton set Dawson up. I think it was Dawson because, of all the players, he was the only linking thread. Anyway, Dawson already had the reputation of finding real bones, so his find was a priori accepted as genuine. Bring in a gullible Arthur Woodward (chief of geology at the Museum) who was the person who "validated" the find - not so much because of unequivocal evidence, but because it matched his preconceptions: after all, even the French (Cro Magnon) and the Germans (Neanderthal) had primitive humans, so why not the British? Couple this with an era where peer-review didn't really exist; the widespread acceptance of "argument from authority" (i.e., if Woodward accepts it - since he's the head of a department at the prestigious British Museum - who are we to question?); and lack of technology necessary to definitively "prove" the reality or falsehood of the claim; and you have all the makings of a wonderful embarassment. However, even then there were scientists who questioned the reality, foremost among them being the paleontologist William King Gregory (remember these names, you'll be seeing them again shortly). The point of all this is - it was scientists that exposed the hoax once they had the tools and access necessary. Go Oakley!Nebraska Man: For a short-lived controversy, this one sure seems to be popular. Some of the same things happened here as happened with Piltdown (except it wasn't apparently a hoax - just a case of mistaken identity). An amateur geologist discovers a fossil tooth, sends it to Henry Osborn at the AMNH in New York. Osborn, apparently succumbing to the same temptation as Woodward in England, excited about the possibility of an early hominid in the US, proclaims Cook's initial identification as correct, names the beast Hesperopithecus haroldcookii before it's examined by anyone else. In other words Osborne jumped the gun by writing back to Cook that it was a real hominid tooth. However, he DID send it out to 26 other institutes, including the British Museum, where none other than Arthur Woodward proclaimed that it couldn't be anthropoid - for the same reasons he proclaimed the British Piltdown WAS genuine. However, that didn't stop the British anatomist Grafton Smith from not only adding Hesperopithecus to Eoanthropus (Piltdown) and Pithicanthropus (now Homo erectus - the only REAL hominid in the bunch), but collaborating with the tabloid Illustrated London News in an "artists reconstruction" - which became a sensation. Meanwhile, William Gregory of "piltdown skeptic" fame, very cautiously cast doubt on the relationship. It should be noted that, whereas Osborn certainly jumped the gun, he insisted that additional excavations be performed at the site - and it was the revelation of these subsequent discoveries that sounded the death knell of the American Ape Man less than five years later. Oddly, only Smith seems to have been embarassed - the man who helped sensationalize the find. As for the rest, it shows that the self-correcting nature of scientific inquiry - no matter WHICH authority proclaims something, it doesn't mean squat if there's no evidence to back it up. Not that we don't still make mistakes - consider Archeoraptor - but that science eventually corrects even the most egregious errors.Java man: I'm not sure what the controversy here is supposed to be? Pithecanthropus (now re-classified as Homo erectus) may have been originally identified from a skull cap, but there have been other Java finds that have much more complete skulls, showing that Java man is in fact H. erectus. One such find is Sangiran 17 - a nearly complete skull that matches in most particulars the casts (all that remain) of Dubois' Pithecanthropus skull cap. You'll have to provide a better reference (like title, at least) of the "342 page investigative report" that calls Java man into question.Peking man: Another Homo erectus (formerly Sinanthropus pekinensis). I've never heard anyone call it a monkey before. It had a cranial capacity of around 970 cc, lots bigger than any monkey. It would have to be a bloody huge monkey...On Lucy: The whole quote is fraudulent, from wherever you got it. In any event, the simple explanation by Johanson himself was that there were TWO SEPERATE finds - the 1973 knee joint and the 1974 discovery of a nearly 40% complete skeleton (Lucy). Only in creationist writings has there ever been any conflation of the two. The point being, Johanson never claimed the knee joint he discovered belonged to Lucy. He did claim that both were from the same species...The bottom line here is: argument from authority (or argument by quotation) simply doesn't fly.

Well, you could try taking him at his word. "I don't know" seems pretty straightforward to me, especially on something of a peripheral point. Alternatively, you could pin him down with a nice, "Okay, you don't know. Fine. Does anyone?", which forces him (if so inclined) to go scrambling about the journals looking for information. Finally, you could simply drop that particular issue and go on to something else - like responding to the points he DID make or refuting something he wrote. What irritates a lot of evos is the immediate leap from "I don't know" to "Aha! See, evolution is dead". If you're serious about asking questions, then ask. If not, then rant away - the tactics are pretty well known, so don't be surprised if you're called on it.

Sonnikke: Here's a description of gene duplication. It's not really exhaustive, but explains how it can occur. For a more detailed discussion of how one particular gene came into being through duplication events on a related gene, please see this article: Evolution of vertebrate steroid receptors from an ancestral estrogen receptor by ligand exploitation and serial genome expansions. There are a number of examples of beneficial mutations or enhanced functions from gene duplication in the literature. See the Sdic gene, as well.

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.

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...

Which "two measures" were those, Peter? I use the same yardstick with Margulis as I do with other "new" theories that are presented. The difference being, of course, that quite a large part of Margulis' theories have solid foundations, whereas other theories have none, or are even contraindicated by the available evidence - their proponents whining notwithstanding.What do YOU think of SET as the basis for the diversity of life? If her theory attacks the importance of NS, it utterly obliterates the GUToB, since there are no pre-existing genomes, and everything that has occurred (assuming she's right), has done so via symbiosis and NOT mutation (whether random or NRM).(edited to add: And you and I have not yet crossed swords on Dawkins. You might find it enlightening that I don't agree with everything he wrote - especially the "selfish gene" concept. Try it sometime on a new thread.)[This message has been edited by Quetzal, 03-17-2003]

Probably. The only problem with opening a new thread for discussion of something like SET or the role of parasites in evolution is the OP for the topic requires a pretty hefty essay. I may take a stab at it - right after I finish the essay on metapopulation dynamics and extinction I promised funky - which is progressing at the snail's pace of about a paragraph a day... Otherwise, it's just easier to reply in an existing thread, even if it's sort of (or mostly) off topic. (Yeah, yeah. I know I'm a lazy sod, but there it is.) It's one thing to post a "Evolutionists can't explain X" sort of one line challenge OP. It's another to develop an explanation for a complex line of argument. I don't know what the solution is...

Was there anything specific in my very brief overview of what I liked and disliked about Margulis's book that you would like to discuss? After all, it isn't the infallible bible. You shouldn't be terrified of questioning it. No one will send you to hell for actually discussing it (or heaven forbid, disagreeing). "And far better evos than" you disagree with her.However, I've made my views known. You of course merely re-post your original quote followed by a lengthy insult. Tell you what - here's your chance to show how brilliant and knowledgeable you are. Take any one of Margulis's specific ideas OR examples from the book, and we'll discuss it. Karyotypic fissioning? Anastomosis as applied to phylogeny of higher organisms? Symbiotic fusion as origin of chromosomes? Origin of kinetochores via symbiosis? Pick any topic and give it your best shot. Or post exerpts from the book - at least those I can check - if you're too ignorant to post your own synopsis. Go for it - be a man.(edited to add: Or even better, since you clearly accept Margulis as gospel - perhaps you'd like to discuss her Gaia hypothesis. After all, this is also her idea as to how the planet is tied together. If you accept the neodarwin-bashing, you must accept gaia theory as well. Feel free to describe how gaia hypothesis matches your fundy worldview of God.)(edited a second time to add: Out of curiosity, what damning revelations were those? Be specific. If possible, cite page numbers. Must have missed them. I certainly would've remembered if I'd seen anything in there that was so damning. And now we're capitalizing "book". What is it, your new bible?[This message has been edited by Quetzal, 03-19-2003]