Problems with evolution? Submit your questions.

Hi, Shadow. You're reading too much into this. When Woese and Lane & Martin say, "major change," you inexplicably interpret this as, "major change that can't be explained by any natural processes."Neither of these papers is suggesting anything like this. In fact, surely you noticed that Woese even referred to these "major changes" as "Darwinian transitions"?While I agree that these observations are compatible with your views, they are not, in any way indicative of them, and so, don't even remotely serve as support or evidence for them.If you want to advance an Intelligent Design hypothesis, what you need is evidence that clearly points toward the correctness of your hypothesis, not evidence that just fails to directly contradict it.

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

Hi, Percy. I'm not sure anybody actually disagreed with him about Woese advocating major evolutionary saltations. Maybe I did inadvertently in my last post by being a bit cryptic, but, if so, I assure you that it was unintentional.I think everybody's comfortable accepting that Woese advocated major evolutionary saltations, and perhaps even accepting that such saltations are factual (I'm good with it, personally). I've seen everybody's arguments so far as going only against the claim that saltations like this don't fit into a neo-Darwinian explanatory model.Also, the URL in your link has an extra "http" in it.Edited by Bluejay, : "My" is not actually shorthand for "Maybe."

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

Hi, Shadow. "Intelligent design" is a catch-all phrase for any hypothesis involving direction of life's formation by an intelligent agent: I didn't mean to stigmatize you or shoehorn your opinions into a specific position.----- Wolf et al. didn't say that. What they said, in essence, was, "we have a question to answer, and the answer we're proposing here is fraught with problems, but we have to start somewhere."----- Science doesn't insist that it will always find all the answers. Science insists that, of all the methods we have available to us, it is the most likely to find the most accurate answers, and it has the track record to back it up.----- I agree with you. And my experience, after about four years in the scientific community, is that science says this very frequently. The problem is that, when a scientist states a conclusion, he is often taken as meaning, "this is how it is and there is no possibility that I am wrong," when, in reality, we all acknowledge that all of our conclusions are at least somewhat tentative.----- You really don't have to form an opinion. But, if you choose to, the best way to go about it is to not insert new things when you reach the edge of the evidence.You've gone from, "there's something that seems to be a major problem for current scientific explanations," to "there must be an intelligent overseer who made things this way, who must coincide with the God of my lifetime religion."In reality, there's not yet any reason to believe that the action of an intelligence is required to explain what is currently without explanation, and there's also not yet any reason to believe that whatever intelligence there might be is the God we were raised to believe in. You didn't take these details from the evidence (not even the circumstantial evidence): you filled them in on your own.This is a "God of the gaps" argument: you've resorted to a divine explanation, along with a lot of theological "baggage" (please forgive the disparaging term: insult isn't my intention here), simply because science has encountered a knot that it still hasn't been able to untangle.The best course of action is to simply let it rest at, "we don't know the answer," and not try to force an answer on it.

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

Hi, Shadow. Well, it's not really the board: it's the topic. There are forums on this board where we talk about pure philosophy with nobody's feet even approximating contact with the ground.But, when we talk about the origin or evolution of life, most of us are of the opinion that having our feet on the ground is important. And, it's difficult for science-minded folks to transition from our normal mode of doggedly searching for a way to solve a tantalizingly unsolvable problem to a mode of giving up the search and filling in the gaps with philosophy. That's the easy way out.-----After this far into the conversation, it may be of interest to you to know that Jar and I are both practicing Christians. I can't vouch for Jar, but I am very open to the idea of intelligent design, but I tend to be very hard on it because of its history of association with shoddy science and unscrupulous political tactics.I am perfectly willing to accept that the origin of eukaryotes may very well require the work of an intelligent designer, but, in the absence of any substantive evidence for this designer's existence, and given how primitive our collective understanding of how the chemistry of life functions, it's rather premature to fall back on a supernatural explanation at this time.

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

Hi, ICdesign.This is in response to Message 249.

1. Everybody dies eventually.
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2. The important part of my statement was "dies without contributing to the gene pool," as in, they can't reproduce.
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3. He did turn around and say exactly that. Look:
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   quote:

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   Later we will argue that most harmful single-gene mutations will at least come to the birth... In addition to not being able to reproduce, these individuals will make it more difficult for the remaining population to survive.

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   5th paragraph under "Population Genetics Background"

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   It is reasonable to assume that individuals with such defects not only cannot survive themselves, but also result in other individuals not being able to reproduce.

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   6th paragraph under "Population Genetics Background"

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Despite your misgivings, I did manage to get through enough schooling to learn how to read.Furthermore, the idiot goes on to incorporate this assumption into the math. Here:

quote:

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Then it follows that the chance of a gamete being free from a new, harmful mutation is 1/(2.718), or about 37 percent. This means that at equilibrium, only 1/(2.718) of the zygotes can become reproducing adults.

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7th paragraph under "Population Genetics Background"

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He made the categories "people without harmful mutations" and "people that can reproduce" into synonyms.His math is based on (at least) two contradictory assumptions:

1. People with harmful mutations will not reproduce.
2. The human population has inherited 4 million harmful mutations from our ancestors anyway.

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

Hi, Tram Start here.There are three species of echidna, or spiny anteaters, which are related to the platypus (i.e., they are monotremes, but they're in a different family). There are also three fossil species of echidna so far known.There are also about half a dozen fossil species of platypus, in four genera and three families. They go back as far as the early Cretaceous (~120 million years ago).With so few fossils, it's likely that monotremes have always been rather uncommon. We may never get a good picture of how they evolved.Edited by Bluejay, : borked the "url" tag

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

Hi, Havoc.Welcome to EvC! I should point out that "mutation" covers several different mechanisms (e.g. crossing over, point mutations, insertions, deletions, etc.). They're all united under one term (i.e., "mutation") because their patterns of occurrence are largely similar (i.e. random in relation to the fitness effects they have).----- Seems like spelling out the word "mechanism" should be pretty easy to do. Instead we get "mech" from you. Curiously though, it isn't my first impulse to assume that you don't know how to spell "mechanism" in it's entirety and are only writing "mech" in the hopes that no one will notice. Rather, I assume that you had some other reason for only using four of the nine letters.It would be kind of you to return the favor and not assume that textbook writers don't go into details because they don't know the details; but rather, assume that they have some other reason for doing so.I have a three-year-old son. A few months ago, I told him that he isn't allowed to play with the electrical outlets or the electrical cords, because (and I quote), "they have electricity in them, and electricity can burn you."We tailor our writing to our audience. That's the first rule of communication. If the information you want isn't there, maybe you should try looking for a more advanced source, like a textbook about evolutionary genetics, or, even better, search the primary literature on PubMed.----- Yes, it's a pretty weak argument. But, nobody made this argument. Rather, they made the opposite argument (i.e., if we do find mermaids or pegasus, this is evidence against evolution), which is not a weak argument.Don't confuse a failed argument against as an argument for: they are quite distinct.Edited by Bluejay, : Signature.

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

Hi, Havoc. Reality check:The Theory of Evolution is expressly about changes and how they occur over time in populations of organisms. Logically, then, shouldn't ToE expect there to be differences between species and groups?Likewise, since ToE entails gradual divergence from common ancestors, doesn't this logically require that not everything changes at one time, and that, thus, some similarities between species should linger, even as the species diverge from one another?So, how could the dichotomous reasoning you employ here possibly make sense? Clearly, ToE expects both differences and similarities.The key here is the pattern of occurrence of similarities and differences.
The counterarguments you should be employing should be about conflicting patterns of occurrence of similarities and differences, not just about pointing out differences when evolutionists are talking about similarities, or vice versa.

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.