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Member (Idle past 4876 days) Posts: 310 From: Broomfield Joined: |
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Author | Topic: Page's misuse of Haldane's Dilemma | |||||||||||||||||||||||
Percy Member Posts: 22479 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 4.7 |
I'd like to see the response couched in a measured tone, and presented from the point of view that William's opinions are honest but mistaken. Pretend you're writing a rebuttal letter to a journal.
--Percy
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Percy Member Posts: 22479 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 4.7 |
Let's be fair, though. Fred hasn't been here in a couple months, and any delay likely means he simply isn't checking this site any more. We all of us cycle in and out of different discussion boards, there's no crime in that.
Maybe someone would like to send Fred a note that there's been a couple posts to a thread he started here. --Percy
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Percy Member Posts: 22479 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 4.7 |
There's a typo: "...informal debate in with..."
Also, do you really want to call it the concluding post? I've never seen one of those in this debate. This is only my opinion, but I think the discussion between you and Scott becomes impenetrable to anyone but yourselves when you focus so much attention on the other person rather than the actual issues. There were a few earlier posts that you weren't here for urging Scott to stay focused on the technical issues. --Percy
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Percy Member Posts: 22479 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 4.7 |
Just in case I'm not alone in the difficulties I've faced attempting to following the discussion between Scott and Fred, I thought I'd respond to Fred's excellent post with what I hope will be some clarifications. Please post corrections to anything I get wrong.
The first questions has to be, "What is Haldane's Dilemma?" because I don't think it's apparent from only a reading of the dialogue between Scott and Fred. Haldane's dilemma can be characterized through the example of man/chimp evolution. The evolutionary view is that some millions of years ago man and chimp shared a common ancestor from which both species eventually evolved, and today the difference between the chimp and man genome is around 2%. But man and chimp are both slowly reproducing species, so how could a difference of 2% occur in only 5 million years given prevailing rates of evolutionary change. Haldane brought some mathematical rigor to this issue, characterizing it in terms of beneficial and non-beneficial allelic changes, dominant and recessive genes, rate of fixation of an gene in a population, and so forth. But one doesn't have to approach it on a mathematical level to wonder how so much change could occur in so little time, and even evolutionists must concede that biology does not as of yet have satisfactory models to explain fairly rapid species change for animals like ourselves. The fossil differences between Australopithicus afarensis and Homo habilis are enormous, and if habilis is actually a descendent of afarensis (something that can only be conjectured at this point) then we have little idea how the change from one to the other took place. Lack of transitionals is the source of the lack of insight. This common Creationist objection to the fossil evidence has some validity. The well-documented example of horse evolution illustrates a clear and lengthy (in time) record of transition from one horse species to another, but how did the transitions between those species take place? There's no fine gradation. Is punctuated equilibrium the answer? Perhaps, but in a way this is an argument from no evidence, a charge often cast at Creationists. So Haldane's Dilemma can in some small way be viewed as a specialized form of the question about missing transitional fossils. How did the angle of the hip joint change? What about the orientation and shape of the pelvis? How about the angle of the skull on the backbone. What about skull and brain changes? How much, when, how fast, sequentially or all at the same time? We don't know. To evolutionists the fossil record is clear and unequivocal evidence that evolution has happened, but we must concede that we have little understanding of the actual process by which a new species with significant morphological differences evolves. To Creationists the fossil record is so clearly full of holes that it serves as very poor evidence of evolution and much better evidence of special creation. I think this skepticism is well founded, though it is scant justification for the Creationist flights of fancy that involve rejecting much of cosmology, physics, geology and biology. Trying to imagine the detailed changes human ancestral species might have gone through on their way to evolving into us brings some helpful visualization to the more abstract details of the Haldane's Dilemma discussion, which from a Creationist standpoint merely postulates that the rate of evolutionary change is too slow for a chimp/man ancestor to have evolved into us. If either Fred or Scott is willing, this might be a good time to summarize the current state of the Haldane's Dilemma discussion. --Percy
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Percy Member Posts: 22479 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 4.7 |
Scott's post introduced some welcome clarification for me, and I guess for me the discussion boils down to a single question for Fred.
We construct models within theoretical frameworks to help us make predictions, such as the one ReMine makes regarding human evolution. One of the inherent problems with models, however, is that they are only approximations of the reality which theory attempts to describe, and that they are constrained by the limits of human capability and understanding. So while problems in models *can* be indications of fundamental problems with theory, in the case of Haldane's Dilemma, which is based upon a 45 year-old model not given much attention in modern biology, the model seems the obvious suspect since no significant problems with evolutionary theory have been identified. While Haldane's work in this area is instructive, I think he attempted to model that for which he had insufficient information and insight, and I think that situation still exists today. In other words, even if Haldane's model had right up until the present been considered completely correct, and even assuming that ReMine has correctly applied Haldane's model, the wrong answers it provides only raise questions with the model and its application, and not with the theory. --Percy
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Percy Member Posts: 22479 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 4.7 |
Hi, Fred!
I don't really have anything apropos to add at this point, but I wanted to thank you for the helpful responses. They contributed quite a bit to clarifying this discussion for me. I *did* want to make a couple comments not directly bearing on this discussion. One concerns terminology. The term "anti-evolution" doesn't really exist within biology. The process you refer to as "anti-evolution" and define as loss of information is what an evolutionist would still term evolution, since it is still a change in allele frequency over time. It might be helpful if you could find another term for evolution involving loss of information. The other comment concerned this: Fred Williams writes: For most evolutionists, the first discovered, strongest, and most obvious evidence for evolution is the fossil record. Primary evidence from which we draw opposite conclusions probably deserves significant further discussion. --Percy
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Percy Member Posts: 22479 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 4.7 |
Fred Williams writes: Glad to help! Independent of whether evolution is falsifiable, the term "anti-evolution" is still a bit off the mark. You might want to try "evolution through loss of information", which you accept, and "evolution through gain of information", which you don't. Percy writes: Fred replies: That would be Fossils - Exposing the Evolutionist slight-of-hand. It has replies waiting for you. In fact, if you click on your name you'll get a list of your most recent message across all threads - you seem to have tons of replies waiting for you. Lucky for you this is a slow period. --Percy
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Percy Member Posts: 22479 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 4.7 |
Fred writes: Kudos! I hope I can be as gracious the next time I'm mistaken... --Percy
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