Problems with evolution? Submit your questions.

Hasn't evolution been proven wrong again, as described in the July, 2010, issue of Scientific American? Apparently fully developed birds existed along side dinosaurs. How about that, no evolution from theropod dinosaurs of the late Cretaceous, and no post-extinction evolutionary radiation into suddenly empty ecological niches, fundamental claims of evolution.--Percy

Let's let SwampDonkey handle these tough questions, should he ever return.--Percy

Mike, quote mines? I know this is Free For All, but still, after all your time here, quote mines? And you don't even bother to restore the "[Emphasis added]" portions that you lost via the cut-n-paste.Incredible that on this first day of the new year we're once again treated to a list of quotes of evolutionists supposedly denying evolution. Why not go all the way and include a Darwin quote, say this one: "I am quite conscious that my speculations run quite beyond the bounds of true science."--Percy

Science works because of the scientific method that ties theories to evidence from the real world through replication and successful predictions.If what you said were really true, that science is based upon "the authority of logical wisdom," then it wouldn't work. "The authority of logical wisdom" is not science at all, though it does sound much like revelation.--Percy

Hi Mike,If all you meant by "the authority of logical wisdom" is that science employs logic as one of its tools then I agree with you, but your full statement was this: If by "knowledge" you mean knowledge about the real world, then knowledge *is* king. No amount of logic, clever thinking and wise discernment will get you anywhere without genuine facts garnered from the real world. If this were not true then armchair theorists would rule. Science works because it ties theory, which are generalizations from facts, to the real world. At heart Coyote's criticisms stem from your reluctance to tie your preferred ideas to the real world. This is too far off topic to comment on the errors, but you should probably avoid drawing your examples from physics.Getting back to your quote mining: The reason these are quote mines is because they give a false impression of Gould's and Dawkin's views. Even in your quotes you seem disinterested in tying your beliefs to reality.--Percy

But you didn't write about the cosmological constant, did you. You wrote that light was a constant.Mike, if you had a lawyer he would be pleading with you to stop talking right now. You're just digging deeper and deeper holes. What, did Christmas mass renew your determination to combat evolution, thereby fueling this chain of errors from you today? It's great that you've got renewed enthusiasm for the fray, but there's no substitute for basing your arguments upon things that are actually true. Learn and think, then post. If you're telling us something true about the real world then you should be able to describe it without making constant errors.--Percy

Mike, you are aware that you sometimes work yourself into a fervor where discussion with you becomes impossible? Like now?--Percy

--Percy

I was just about to say this, and the mutual adaptation likely would have continued afterwards.One possible scenario is that those prokaryotes being consumed by other prokaryotes evolved strategies to prevent being digested and gradually became able to survive and somehow escape. And they also might have evolved the ability to survive and reproduce once eaten, eventually exploding the organism that consumed them. Both prokaryotes would have had to evolve strategies to survive these possibilities, and eventually a permanent symbiosis evolved. The symbiosis would have to continually evolve improvements in order to remain competitive with the well established prokaryotes, and later with other eukaryotes.There wouldn't have been one line of descent, either. There would have been entire genera and families of species of prokaryotes that evolved strategies to survive being eaten, and other genera and families of prokaryotic species that evolved strategies to survive eating an organism that had evolved such defense strategies. All these species would have been able to plug and play among one another, and the best combinations survived. Whether all eukaryotic life today is descended from one or many of these early pioneers would be impossible to say at this time.--Percy

The specific portion of the Woese paper (Molecular signatures of ribosomal evolution) you're probably thinking of regarding saltation is this one that mentions "major evolutionary saltations:" Those who are disagreeing with you about Woese advocating "major evolutionary saltations" will have to deal with this quote.--Percy

Hi Shadow,I fixed your link because it contained a typo. Don't try to type links from scratch, cut-n-paste them instead.But your link isn't to the paper you cite, it's to the page for the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. I could not find the paper at this journal. There are five papers co-authored by Daryl J. Bem, and not one of them has this title.It appears that your information comes from an article in the January 5, 2011, edition of the New York Times, Journal’s Paper on ESP Expected to Prompt Outrage. The reason the paper cannot be found at the journal is because it hasn't been published yet.Here's a link to an advance copy of the paper: Feeling the Future: Experimental Evidence for Anomalous Retroactive Influences on Cognition and AffectHere's a link to a rebuttal: Why Psychologists Must Change the Way They Analyze Their Data: The Case of PsiHere's a relevant excerpt from the rebuttal: --Percy

The news accounts are full of people who insist they've been abducted by aliens. While responding to your previous post I was wondering what it had to do with the topic, and I guess I should have asked that question instead. I don't imagine that anyone here would object to the scientific investigation of the hypothesis that God exists, but what has that got to do with the topic?If you're thinking that this means it should be valid for you to propose God as the means by which some event in natural history took place then you're wrong. Except when speculating, science only proposes answers based on known mechanisms, and God is not a known mechanism until it becomes scientifically demonstrated through replicated observations and experiments and through successful predictions.--Percy

Haldane said this, but I have no idea why, and certainly this never became an accepted tenet of the theory of evolution. After all, there's nothing in evolutionary theory precluding life from employing anything that provides a survival advantage, so while I think we would all agree that finding motors or magnets in life would be highly unexpected, unless it's impossible it would probably be prudent to agree with that famous polymath Ian Malcom when he said, "Life will find a way."--Percy

I don't think we have found magnet or motors in life. As I think others have already told you, structures that are analogous to motors have been found, but these structures have no magnets, which is how an electric motor works.But that's just a detail and not the important point. As I said before, there's nothing about motors and magnets in evolutionary theory. The only requirement is "whatever works." As genetic algorithms have taught us, evolutionary processes are very adept at finding novel and unexpected solutions. If life figures out some way to incorporate motors and magnets then I'm sure biologists would find it very surprising, but it isn't something that would call evolutionary theory into question. Evolution is just descent with modification and natural selection.--Percy

We shouldn't really be saying Dembski and Gitt are wrong. It's more the case that their ideas are undemonstrated. The only people claiming to have successfully applied the concepts of Dembski and Gitt information to demonstrate the existence of a designer are Dembski and Gitt, and their approaches are not the same. You haven't even shown us that you have a way of doing this, yet. Show us the approach we should use to tell that this is gibberish: And this isn't: You also haven't successfully made the case that this is a problem for evolution, which is the topic of this thread. We've observed evolution in action, we know how it works, even quite a bit about how it works at the molecular level. If there's a designer mucking around in there he must be very, very subtle, but even if he does exist the processes of evolution are still very real and observable processes. How would proving the existence of the designer be a problem for evolution that we can see happening?Knowing that there was a designer (which would probably involve developing an understanding of how he carried out his changes) would force us to reinterpret evolutionary history with an eye toward figuring out what things evolution did and what things the designer did, but it wouldn't mean there's no such thing as evolution.--Percy