human tails and the midriff - hiccups, what are the creatonist theories about them?

Some points for your consideration:* Humans are descended from Old World monkeys. No Old World monkey has a prehensile tail.* Natural selection must have a tendency to remove whatever's not really necessary. For consider that every appendage has a cost: it costs to produce it, it costs to maintain it, it carries a risk of injury or infection. If it's not much use, then that's a selective pressure to remove it. Now, in New World monkeys, the tail helps them hang on to trees, in Old World monkeys it serves as an organ of balance ... it is clearly of less use in ground-dwelling apes, such as ourselves, chimp, gorillas, all tailless.* This argument, which I've seen before, seems strange in the mouths of creationists. For if humans would be better if we had tails, then why did an omniscient creator not provide us with them? If, as you must maintain, God did not mess up, then how could our lack of tails be an example of evolution messing up? Surely the creationist question must always be: "How could evolution produce something so perfect that so many people attribute it to God?" not "How could evolution produce something so dumb that I could have designed it better myself?" For if you think that your idea is better, and you attribute the status quo to God ... you see the problem?I recently wrote an article on the Argument From Undesign, you might want to take a look.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

I did. See post 28. It is not necessary to argue for Haeckel's blunders in order to argue that such quirks of embryology provide evidence for evolution.This is why biologists, who know that Haeckel was wrong about recapitulation, also know that such quirks of embryology provide evidence for evolution. "Clearly" you say? "Clearly"? Not only is this not "clearly" true, it is, a little research suggests, not even remotely true.Reasoning that the post-anal gut, if ancestral, was most likely very ancient, I googled the phrase "post-anal gut" together with the word tunicates. You will doubtless recall that chordates are held to be most closely related to the tunicates, or you doubtless would recall this if you were a biologist.Lo and behold, this google search brought me immediately to a paper, Studies on the Protochordata, which assesses as probable the homology between the endodermic cord of tunicate larvae and the post-anal gut of chordates, and asserts as assured fact the existence of a post-anal gut in certain living chordates: Now, considering this, and looking at the embryology of the post-anal gut in tetrapods (in this case the chick, a standard "model organism" in embryology) it seems clear what its role was: like the notocord, with which it lies parallel in the tail, it probably added a certain amount of rigidity which can be dispensed with in animals with caudal vertebrae (again, like the notocord) and still more in animals, such as ourselves, without tails.Now, perhaps you feel that I have not completely made my case that the post-anal gut is a basal feature of the chordates. But, on the other hand, you haven't even started making a case that it isn't --- you've just used the word "clearly" as a substitute for producing any facts or argument whatsoever.We cannot therefore accept your entirely unsupported claims about the post-anal gut as a refutation of the proposition that such quirks of embryological development are in conformity with evolutionary history.---P.S: what's the creationist explanation for God giving us, and then removing from us, this post-anal gut? Just one of his little pranks, eh?Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

No, I think the point still stands.As a creationist, you must assert that God chose to give monkeys tails and humans none, and you must also assert that (being God) his design decision in this respect (as in all others) was a good one.Well, if humans are better without tails than with, as you must therefore assert, then should not natural selection have removed the tail in the process of turning monkeys into men? If God would have designed us well by not giving us tails, then natural selection would have adapted us well by removing the tails.The question of whether it would be a good idea for us to have tails now is not affected by the question of whether having tails was the basal state for primates, nor by the question of whether we evolved from them.---Your confusion between having prehensile tails and having tails at all has been addressed by another poster.

Wow.

I am mildly curious as to what you can be talking about, but I guess it's probably not on topic in this thread.

I'd like to raise this point one more time for slevesque's benefit.Slevesque, you brought to my attention a fact of which I was not aware --- the development and then loss of a post-anal gut in human embryos. (By the way, may I ask where you found out about this? Thanks.)Now, to me this embryological feature immediately made sense. Let me talk you through my reasoning.First, I knew that whatever you asserted, this feature would turn out to be ancestral. The theory of evolution implies this, and I have always found it to be very reliable in such matters.Second, I knew that in a standard bilaterian, such as a worm, the mouth is at one end and the anus at the other, and that this feature is so widely spread amongst bilaterian clades other than our own that this feature must be basal. (Again, this is a conclusion reached by applying the theory of evolution.)Third, I knew that, by contrast, chordates and our closest cousins the tunicates (in their laval stage) are distinguished by a post-anal tail.This led me to see where the post-anal gut had to fit into all this. Surely the most parsimonious explanation is that the development of the post-anal tail was the result, not of the tail being tacked on behind and dorsal to the anus, but that the anus migrated forward along the ventral surface of the body of the ancestral line, so that (so to speak) chordates don't so much have a post-anal tail as a pre-tail anus (if you see what I mean).Is this just a "just-so-story"? No. For it leads to certain predictions.* The position of the post-anal gut: If the evolutionary conclusion is correct, then the post-anal gut in chordate embryos should lie inside the tail ventral to the notochord. And that's just where it is (see the book on embryology I linked you to).* The taxonomy of the post-anal gut: If the evolutionary conclusion is correct, then this feature should by no means be confined to human embryos. On the contrary, it should be basal not just to the chordates, but even to the tunicates. And the evidence I have found supports this: the post-anal gut, as you will see from the references and quotations in my previous post, appears in chick embryos; it appears in adult sharks; and it has a homologue in tunicate larvae. It is hardly necessary to do a complete survey of the phyla in question to conclude that the evidence is indeed consistent with the proposition that the feature is basal to chordates.So, that was my reasoning, and that's how the evidence supported it. Now let us compare the creationist take on the same feature. Learning that human embryos acquire and then lose a post-anal gut, you immediately, without evidence or reasoning, declared that it could not have been a mature feature of an ancestral form. In maintaining that it could not be so you were completely wrong, for, as I have shown, the post-anal gut is present in some living adult chordates. So it could have been an adult feature of a chordate ancestral to us, and, as I have shown, the evidence is strongly consistent with the proposition that it was.Furthermore, challenged to produce a good reason why a creator God should have produced this quirk of embryology, you have maintained a discreet silence. And, after all, what can you say? What can any creationist say, except: "Well, because God wanted it that way ... for reasons whereof we know not." Contrast, then, our two very different positions. You brought me this information about the post-anal gut in human embryos --- a new piece of the jigsaw, and one that I had never seen before. You chose this jigsaw piece yourself in the hope and belief that it would be impossible to fit into the evolutionary jigsaw. I immediately saw where it fitted, and it allowed me to infer the existence of other pieces, all of which turned out to exist and to fit together in the grand evolutionary picture.Meanwhile, you are left with a bunch of disconnected jigsaw pieces --- and a devout hope that God knows how to fit them together to make a picture quite different from the one that biologists are constructing.Perhaps this allows you to see the appeal of evolution. Everything fits. In the famous words of Dobzhansky, nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution. Meanwhile, what can you creationists do, presented with the facts of embryology --- or, for that matter, morphology or biogeography or the fossil record or molecular phylogeny --- but throw up your hands and declare that God moves in mysterious ways?And that's not the end of your troubles. For the most mysterious of God's ways (if we were to accept the creationist hypothesis) would be this: that he has mysteriously created living things in such a way that everything fits the evolutionary picture. It was, you must claim, his will or whim to provide the human embryo with a post-anal gut, and a notochord, and a tail, and a coat of fur --- all of which is compatible with evolution. But he could have blown the whole thing apart by giving human embryos feathers.So this, for creationists, should be the mystery of mysteries --- why did God so create the world that every detail of it is consistent with evolution? Creationists do not spend much time contemplating this mystery, preferring instead to degrade themselves with squalid and stupid arguments that it is not so. But so it is: and this is why biologists favor evolutionary biology over fiat creationism.

Well, I suspect that the words I'm using would be equally foreign to you if I'd written them in French. I'm also going to guess that the French words would look almost exactly the same as the English words. The foreign language I'm talking isn't English, it's biology.There is a lot of technical jargon in science. It isn't there to baffle and confuse you, it's there because scientists need precise words for the precise concepts they're talking about.And if you want to join in the debate --- if you want to talk about morphology and taxonomy --- then you're just going to have to learn the words: just as if you want to talk about basketball you'll have to learn what "slam-dunk" means, and if you want to talk about music theory you're going to have to learn what "diminished seventh" means.Here are the definitions of the words I've used.Clade : A clade is any group of species which are more closely related to one another than any species outside that group.For example, the "cat family" (lions, tigers, housecats and so forth) are a clade. They are all more closely related to one another than they are to anything outside that clade (whales, baboons, bats, or whetever).By contrast, the non-human apes (chimps, gorillas, orang-utans) are not a clade. Why? Because there is a species outside this group (humans) that are more closely related to a species inside that group (chimps) than chimps are to another species in that group (gorillas, for example).From an evolutionary point of view, this is the only really sensible way of grouping organisms.Basal : A feature is said to be basal to a clade if an ancestor of that clade had that feature. For example, we would say that having a tail is basal to the primates.You will find people writing "primitive" to mean the same thing. But the word "basal" is better, because "primitive" has the connotations of "crude, simple, unsophisticated". This can only cause confusion.Dorsal : Dorsal literally means "having to do with the back". So the dorsal side of a human is the back side of a human. The dorsal side of a fish is the top of the fish. Unless it swims upside-down, which some fish do. Or unless it's a flatfish.These qualifications should make it clear why we need a special technical word for it.Ventral : The opposite side from "dorsal". The front of a human, the bottom of a fish.Chordates : A clade including all vertebrates, plus some fish-like creatures such as lampreys and hagfish and Amphioxus and PikaiaTunicates : A weird clade. They start off as tadpoles (the "larval form") that look much like chordates. Then, when they grow up, they anchor themselves to the sea-bed and develop into a form that looks nothing like an tunicate larva or an adult chordate (the "sessile form").It is generally agreed that tunicates are the closest relatives to chordates --- that is, tunicates and chordates are a clade.You will usually see it claimed that the tunicate lifestyle is basal to the clade, so that in effect chordates are tunicates that don't become sessile. But this may not be true. I myself regard it as an open question.Notochord : The notochord is a rod running down the spine of tunicate tadpoles and chordate embryos. In vertebrates, such as humans, this is another of those features that appears during embryological development and then vanishes. In chordates that aren't vertebrates, such as lampreys, the notochord persists into adulthood.I think that that's all the jargon I've used. But feel free to get back to me if there's some word I've used with which you're unfamiliar.Or, now I come to think of it, you could look it up. I'm not inventing these words as I go along, they are used by all biologists and are precisely defined.Really, like I say, if you want to argue about morphology and taxonomy --- if you want to "play with the big boys" --- then at some point you're going to have to learn the language in which the debate is framed.You say that biology is "not your strong point". And yet, for some reason, you've come on this forum to argue on biological grounds that the world's greatest biologists are all wrong about biology. Well then, it's time you learned some biology. Ah. In short, it's a piece of creationist ignorance.I like the use of the rhetorical question. "Does this mean that we descended from an animal with such a thing?" Yes. Yes, Mr Creationist, it does. We are not discussing embryonic recapitulation.Creationists are discussing embryological recapitulation, because ever since some biologist told them that this doesn't happen, they've been pretending that this is what biologists say happens.I am not discussing embryological recapitulation. I am discussing the predictions made by the theory of evolution. This is true, but only because we lose our tails during embryological development. When you were an embryo, what was at the other end of you was the tip of your tail. And you had a post-anal gut. As I understand the descriptions in the books, we're talking about something like this. Imagine that this is a cutaway diagram of a shark. It's not a good picture of a shark, I'm better at biology than art. That's probably not completely anatomically accurate, but you get the point.A question occurs to me. You said that "clearly" this could not be an ancestral feature. And now you say that you don't even know what that feature is.So why was it so "clear" to you that it wasn't ancestral, if you didn't even know what it was?Oh, right, because you read it on some creationist website.Let me tell you something about creationists. When they give you a piece of information about biology, that information will either be true or false. You can, of course, ignore anything they tell you that is false. And everything they tell you that is true is, of course, known to biologists. How else do creationists know true things about biology except that biologists told them?Biologists know that Haeckel was wrong about recapitulation. Biologists know about the post-anal gut. And the only reason that creationists know about these things is 'cos biologists told them.So if there was any fact in biology that refuted evolution, biologists would be the first to know, wouldn't they? If the facts of biology refuted evolution, then biologists would be its most vehement opponents, rather than its biggest supporters, wouldn't they?But you insist that biologists are wrong about the most fundamental fact of biology, when, as you say, biology is "not your strong point".What is wrong with this picture?Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

A further question occurs to me. Looking back at your posts, I find that you wrote: Now, why did you write "many"? Be honest here. Off the top of your head, how many can you think of? You were completely wrong about the one instance that you actually cited, namely the post-anal gut.Tell me, truthfully, did you have anything else in mind?No?Then what impudent brazen cheek led you to write that there were many such instances?

You are right. The theory of evolution does not predict that recapitulation must occur. You are wrong. That is exactly what it predicts. You are wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong and wrong. You are hopelessly wrong because creationists have been lying to you.The theory of evolution makes some very definite predictions about embryology. These are completely different from Haeckel's concept of recapitulation, which is wrong.Creationists, because they are either liars or idiots, try to mix up what the theory of evolution says about embryology with what Haeckel said about embryology.The theory of evolution makes some very precise predictions about embryology. These, on examination, always turn out to be correct. But this isn't actually true, is it?When you said that "clearly" the post-anal gut couldn't be an ancestral feature, this was not based on statements made by biologists. It was because you'd read some dumb creationist website asking a dumb rhetorical question that implied that the post-anal gut wasn't ancestral, and you fell for it hook line and sinker.Of the two of us, only one of us, and that would be me, has quoted and cited papers and books written by biologists. You picked up some completely false idea fed to you on a creationist website, and you believed it. But you are misrepresenting my case. I do not claim that it is impossible to be a biologist and a creationist. This is indeed possible.My point is that every true statement about biology is, of course, known by biologists. This thing about the post-anal gut, for example --- it's not like the existence of a post-anal gut in human embryos is something that only creationists know, is it? It's not like you guys have special knowledge which, if you could just bring it to the attention of the 99.99% of biologists who are evolutionists, would cause them to slap their foreheads and exclaim: "Oh, I see now! Obviously the doctrine of fiat creation is correct! What a fool I've been!"

Oh, for heaven's sake.This is why I despise creationists. It's not just that you make factual errors, which we all do from time to time, it's the whole way that you think. Or don't think.Let's look again at your behavior.You asserted very confidently that there were "many" embryological features that didn't fit with evolution.When I ask you to list them, you can't produce any such features. Apart from this stuff about the post-anal gut, where you turned out to be completely wrong.But you still maintain that you "have no doubt" that "many" such features exist.Just think about what you did, will you? You confidently told us all that there were "many" such embryological features. But you don't actually know of any such features, do you?So, let me put this as tactfully as I can ... you are a liar. Now, you're not a liar in the strongest sense --- you didn't assert something that you knew to be false. But you confidently asserted as a fact something that you did not know to be true.So, two questions occur to me.The first is how you can bring yourself to behave like that.The second is why, if you're going to behave like that, anyone should bother to debate with you. If you're just going to say stuff without checking whether it's true or false, then your arguments are worthless.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

No. The theory of evolution makes no predictions in that respect. Yes, more or less.Let's state it more precisely. If, during the course of embryological development, an embryo develops and then loses any significant structure, then the theory of evolution predicts that the other evidence as to ancestry will be consistent with the hypothesis that that is an ancestral feature. This is, for example, how I immediately knew that the evidence would be consistent with the proposition that the post-anal gut was ancestral. I was right. See my previous paragraph on what the theory of evolution says.Haeckel thought that every evolutionary development had to be recapitulated in the embryo, and in the same order in which they evolved. This is not at all true, nor is there any reason why this should be true, nor is there any reason why we should be discussing the obsolete ideas of Haeckel which no-one in the whole world believes, except that creationist liars are trying to mess with your head by mixing up what the theory of evolution says about embryology with what Haeckel said about embryology.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

No, not unless you're going to mention any specific point.For heaven's sake, slevesque. I talk in great detail about the post-anal gut, and I refer you to papers and books written by biologists, and I write you a glossary of biological terms, and I draw you a diagram, dammit, do you know how long that took me, and I explain to you what the evolutionary prediction is, and why this is different from what Haeckel was talking about ... and every time you ask a question then I waste precious moments of my life answering it ...... and, dammit, slevesque, I've done a lot of work for you. I've done your homework. I've found the papers that you should have read. I've defined the words that you didn't know. I drew the diagram to explain the facts that you couldn't grasp ...... and then you just refer to this "cleavage pattern" and then act as though you've scored some sort of point if I don't know what you're talking about.Well, I don't. What's your point? If there is some standard line of creationist bullshit about "the cleavage pattern in the early embryonic stage", then you're going to have to tell me what it is.As it is, it seems that you're taunting me for not being able to read your mind and figure out what it is that you want to be wrong about.What is it you want to be wrong about? You seem to think that there is some creationist argument about "cleavage patterns", but you won't tell us what it is.Compare this with my behavior. And this is the kind of comment that makes me think that creationists are nuts in the head.Where are all the embryologists who are not evolutionists?Your call.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

Well the first thing that I have to think about is this. If Wayne Fair has an M.A. in embryology, in what subject does he have a doctorate?Well done to him for getting an M.A, but he's never published any actual results in embryology, has he?I'm going to guess that his doctorate is in theology. I might be wrong.Now, let's look at what "Dr" Fair has to say.

quote:

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My advisor, Dr. Gilbert Woodside, was chairman of the Department of Zoology at the University of Massachusetts and was an evolutionist with an international reputation in embryology. He apparently did not appreciate a scientific alternative to evolution, but he declared to me very clearly that evolution was not applicable in the field of embryology. It was obvious to him that evolution actually had hurt embryological disciplines, because many fine scientists had wasted their time trying to fit data from their studies into some illusionary evolutionary scheme.

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So, he does not quote Dr Woodside saying this nutty stuff. He says that it was "clear" and "apparent" that Woodside thought that "evolution actually had hurt embryological disciplines".I don't want to break your heart, but creationists lie a lot. Even if they don't lie deliberately, they are so stupid that you can't believe anything they say.Let me give you an example. The biologist Stephen Jay Gould, a professor at Harvard, once saw a creationist pamphlet saying that "Harvard Scientists Agree Evolution Is a Hoax". Since he was at Harvard, he was kind of keen to see which of his colleagues had said anything that crazy and dumb.What do you know ... it was him. The creationists had so lied about what he'd said that he didn't even recognize himself until he saw his name in their pamphlet, and realized to his horror that they were lying about him.So when creationists say: "I heard such-and-such a professor say such-and-such a thing", then, frankly, I don't believe them. My experience of creationists is that this is the respect in which they lie the most. I want to see an actual sourced quotation, or else I shall assume that they're lying.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

Good luck with that. What subject, by the way? You're sure? Well, I did say I might be wrong. But that would just make it a bigger lie.Let's hear Dr Woodside declare this himself, and say why. You are absolutely my favorite creationist. Yeah, his attack on NOMA is wrong. I disagree with his philosophy.Does he, at any point, say anything factually inaccurate about biology? It's quite disgusting. However, you should note that the "lie" he's talking about is not anything to do with the facts of biology. The "lie" that he's sticking up for is that it's possible to believe in science and God. The "lie" that he's defending is that it is possible to have scientific knowledge and religious faith. I happen to think that this is true. So do you.And it's not a lie that he actually tells himself. What makes me want to punch people like him very hard in the face is that he thinks that I'm lying when I say it, and he's being kindly and understanding and tolerant about me telling this lie. But when I say it, it's not a lie.Please note that this is not a "lie" that he tells himself. He never says that science is compatible with religion. What he says is that when I say it, I'm lying, but that's kind of OK by him.To summarize. He says that science teachers are lying to their students when they say that you can have God and science, and that in his opinion it's OK for them to lie in this way. I think that this is a dishonorable and pusillanimous opinion for him to hold, and I also despise him for believing that people who talk in that way are lying.---But in any case, I did not claim that no evolutionist has ever told a lie about any subject. Looking back on my life, I believe that I have told a few lies myself. What I claim is that creationists lie and lie and lie and lie and lie and lie and lie. And lie and lie and lie. And lie. And lie. And lie.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

The fact that this statement is utterly, ludicrously, wildly untrue kinda vitiates your argument. I've been reading that article: it's a tissue of lies and a farrago of nonsense from beginning to end.In response to your specific question, as Gould has given it as his opinion that transitional fossils are, and I quote, "abundant" in the fossil record, he can scarcely have been inspired by the made-up "fact" that they are lacking from said record.Gould was most annoyed by creationists lying about him. As he writes in his essay Evolution As Fact And Theory: I note that the website also calls him a Marxist. This seems strange --- I know they must hate him for his real views of the fossil record, but if they're going to pretend that he said something that they approve of, then why also tell a lie about him that seems designed to discredit him?As his widow has written, he was not a Marxist: Why do creationists lie so much? Now, superficially it would seem that this is just because they couldn't support creationism by telling the truth. But this would hardly explain the scope of their dishonesty --- they have no need to make up petty little lies about Gould's political leanings. They could just lie about the fossil record, or other relevant facts. Moreover, as I have pointed out, since they are trying to use him as support for their lies about the fossil record, lying about him to discredit him is actually contrary to their interests.One is therefore forced to the conclusion that they simply have an ungovernable compulsion to be untruthful.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.