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Originally posted by Theo:
I agree with much of your response. I have made multiple assertions in many posts without proper referencing which I have promised to make good on and will do so but let me clarify one thing.
References would be appreciated when you get the opportunity. After all, you’ve made some pretty sweeping accusations, and it would be interesting to see the evidence.
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Allopatric evolution is not a mechanism. It still does not explain the mechanism of Goldschmidt's hopeful monster theory that Gould and others have labelled punctuated mechanism.
You are conflating or plain wrong on several points here. In the first place, allopatric speciation IS a mechanism.
Here is a good explanation, if you are interested. According to Gould, allopatric speciation is one of the primary mechanisms for Punctuated Equilibrium (not mechanism): the idea that species change slowly unless something happens — sort of a conservation of species, if you will. His contention makes a lot of sense, because as has been pointed out small populations are more easily effected by changes in allele frequency. There are, of course, other mechanisms. The hopeful monster is a fallacy: no evolutionary theorist predicts that this would occur. There are no lizards-from-chicken eggs giant saltationism. Speciation occurs slowly, and has been observed. PE is merely a more rapid Darwinian evolution. Note: more rapid in this context merely means a few million rather than tens of millions of years. It is still gradualism — only faster. Generally, this type of rapid speciation would only occur when some large-scale environmental change occurred (e.g., major climate change, mass extinction event, major habitat creation, etc) that opened substantial new niches. Otherwise, speciation is a very slow process. That’s all PE talks about. For an excellent generalist explanation, try this article:
Species, Speciation and the Environment by none other than Niles Eldridge himself — the co-founder of PE.
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It is simply a postulate as to why, with darwinian evolution's prediction of finding many transitional forms, there aren't any.
What are you talking about? There are tons of transitional forms. What isn’t observed is microscopic incremental changes — simply because this kind of change is soooo gradual and the fossil record is sooo spotty that such change wouldn’t necessarily be recognized. Darwin wasn’t wrong, he simply didn’t have the whole picture (since paleontology, genetics, microbiology, etc hadn’t been invented when he wrote
Origin). Only creationists demand that this absolute direct linear descent. Given fossil organisms A, B, and C, where A and C are completely different and unlike, science defines a transitional form B as having traits belonging to A and C concurrently. That’s all. Creationists seem to want a direct father-to-son-to-grandson linear record — which is, of course, impossible. Let me put it to you this way: how many generations back can you trace your own ancestors? 3 or 4? A couple hundred years? Any surprise that science, dealing with timescales a million times greater, doesn’t have this kind of one-to-one ancestry? From the fossil record, no less?
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What mechanism causes the sudden new morphology of irreducible complexity? There still isn't one.
Sorry, this sentence makes absolutely no sense. What does IC have to do with morphology? And what does IC have to do with PE or anything else we were discussing?
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The Wistar institute did the math in the sixties and concluded that even with 4 billion years, mutation and natural selection cannot account for the macro-evolutionary changes embraced on faith by macro-evolutionists. That was part of the push to punctuated equilibrium.
Ya know, I’ve had creationists quote this to me before — supposedly from something called Mathematical Challenges to the Neo-Darwinian Interpretation of Evolution. Because I’ve never been able to find any reference for the document nor any reference to the alleged series of meetings in the Wistar archives (which date back to the 1880’s), I contacted the Wistar Institute directly last October. A very congenial gentleman by the name of Frank Hoke, Wistar’s Director of Public Affairs, very kindly searched their off-line sources. He regretfully informed me that there was no record of either a series of meetings in 1967 on the mathematical probabilities of evolution nor any reference to an Institute-sponsored book or document by that name. I think you need to come up with a better source than Wistar for this quote.
Here’s their website — feel free to contact them yourself.
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The Bible predicts the first law of thermodynamics when in Genesis it says God quit creating and the second law is predicted in Genesis when God put the curses put on Adam and eve which is referred to in Romans eight when it says the creation waits to be delivered from the bondage of decay.
Well, I confess I’m no biblical scholar. That hasn’t been one of my interests. Obviously you’ve read the book more closely than I have. I certainly don’t remember any mention of the words entropy or thermodynamics. Maybe I just had a bad translation. I’ll let one of the better informed on this forum answer this bit.
ludvanB, are you out there?
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As well, the Bible predicts the law of biogenesis given to us by Pasteur which evolution violates.
In the first place, biogenesis (life comes from life) is not a law, it’s an observation. In the second place, evolution (change in allelic frequency over time), certainly follows the principle. How can you have evolution without life? Third, this is another term that doesn’t appear in my translation of the bible — I’ve really got to learn Aramaic some day. I’m obviously missing a lot in the translation.
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