In a previous post here at TSZ Mark Frank asked why people doubt common descent.
A more interesting question is why did Charles Darwin doubt common descent?
Stephen Meyer has written two books which I think adequately answer both questions.
Those two books are:
In this thread I am willing to discuss either book, but I’d prefer to limit discussion to Meyer’s most recent book, Darwin’s Doubt
While Signature in the Cell concentrated on the origin of life, Darwin’s Doubt concentrates on the “Cambrian Explosion,” the sudden appearance of numerous distinct phyla and their subsequent diversification.
Neo-Darwinism offers no realistic account of origins, with the difference being that Darwinists can in the case of the origin of life assert that their theory does not apply while that excuse fails to apply to the appearance of different animals in the Cambrian and their subsequent diversification.
Just to prove I can – [Edited 09/15/2013]
Deleted from the OP – [Edited 09/201/2013] – Just to prove I can. “The arguments are the same for both:”
How does Intelligent Design explain the appearance of different animals in the Cambrian and their subsequent diversification then?
You seem to know what did not do it, but do you know what did?
“: Neo-Darwinism offers no realistic account of origins”
WERE YOU THERE????????
A whole book of pseudoscience is past my limit, but I did find Donald Prothero‘s review both amusing and educational.
In full:
http://www.amazon.com/review/R2HNOHERF138DU/ref=cm_cr_pr_cmt?ie=UTF8&ASIN=0062071475
Mung,
You use the phrase “sudden appearance” in the OP. Could you tell me how long a time period that actually is? Minutes? Weeks? What?
6 days?
Seconds.
Mung,
And you know this how? We know you love the truth..
The period of the most rapid rate of change was about 13 million years – Tommotian and Atdabanian.
Mere seconds… *facepalm*
If your definition of ‘sudden’ is so broad it can encompass >10 million years, you’ve lost the argument to begin with.
Regardless, Nick Matzke’s review together with Prothero’s has already completely annihilated the gibberish that is Darwin’s doubt.
Isn’t the other problem the fundies have, besides their deceptive misuse of the word ‘sudden’, that the Cambrian explosion is just not as explosive as it once was? The more fossils we acquire the more it looks like many of the phyla were already well on their way before the supposed ‘explosion’. Mung, along with his brethren, is clinging to outdated science.
Why do the extant phyla that arose in the Cambrian appear related? Unless, say, they’re actually related, you know, by common descent?
Since most creationists accept that the evidence of relatedness for dogs and wolves, and there is no apparent break in the evidence of relatedness back to archaea and bacteria, what possible excuse could we have for assuming that the evidence that life is related does not, in fact, demonstrate that it is related, via observed processes?
Glen Davidson
Two comments. Darwin didn’t doubt common descent. Comments to the contrary are simply dishonest. Quote mining is the vilest form of dishonesty.
Second, I don’t know anyone who doubts common descent. No one who’s opinion I value. It’s one of those flat earth/time cube things. You meet someone who wants to question common descent, and you look for another seat somewhere else.
It might be cool if someone actually came up with a theory of ID or a carefully reasoned critique of evolution, but after 50 years I’m still waiting.
Harsh but fair.
Mung, we have evidence for life going back at least 2 1/2 billion years before the Cambrian, including 100 million years of multicellular life (Ediacaran) What is Meyer’s / ID’s explanation for all that data?
Amazing, Mung hit’s and runs his own OP.
Whereas of course ID does.
Mung, if your intent is to make ID supporters look like they cannot support or defend their own claims then you are doing a bang up job.
What I find a little bit interesting is Meyer’s exegetic approach to Darwin. It doesn’t matter one iota whether Darwin had a doubt or not. Nor does it matter that he was wrong about quite a lot. Meyer’s treats Darwin’s output textual scholar would rather than as a scientist.
The important it issue is whether the Cambrian explosion is inconsistent with universal common descent. The data clearly indicate that it is entirely consistent with common descent. If it were not, then phylogenetic analysis wouldn’t return such a strong tree signal.
Whether Darwin thought it was inconsistent or not is irrelevant.
More serious, in my view, is Meyer’s dogged insistence on regarding taxonomy as categoric, and then using those categories as evidence to support his own categoric view. If you start with a non-tree model and refuse to fit a tree model you won’t get a tree model.
Just about the silliest thing in the book, in my view, is his gotcha! point that diversity is greater in older strata, not less, as he seems to think evolutionary theory predicts.
Anyone who has ever run an evolutionary algorithm knows that the longer it runs, the more you lose lineages, so that you end up with a population with a LUCA that is a lot younger than the FUCA.
Indeed, it’s simple logic, unless you assume that no lineages ever go extinct, or that extinctions are randomly distributed across lineages.
But thanks for posting the OP, Mung. I’ve been meaning to post an OP about Darwin’s Doubt since I finished it, but I’m up to my ears in alligators in various swamps right now.
Mung’s general approach has always been to ask questions but never to answer them. And certainly not to explain anything.
I will not comment directly on Darwin’s Doubt as I have not seen the discussion of these issues in it, just the reviews of those by Matzke and by Prothero.
By Darwin’s time, biologists had been impressed by the growing evidence from fossils, from embryology, and from comparative anatomy, which was showing a hierarchical clustering of groups. There were people who tried other geometric arrangements but they were losing out to a groups-within-groups scheme. That there were “relationships” between groups was not really in doubt by about 1850.
Today we have much more evidence of all kinds. The comparative anatomy approach has been supplemented by molecular data, which generally reinforces the trees from anatomy. Of course creationists (and on this point it’s creationism one is debating with, not particularly ID) try to respond to this by pointing to noise in the inference, saying “there are problems with the trees” and avoiding the elephant in the room. For example, elephants themselves. Anatomy suggests elephants and hyraxes are closely related. Guess what the molecular trees show? Do they show elephants more closely related to hyraxes? Or is it to tuna? To oak trees? Three guesses — there will be no prize for this one.
The other two tactics they use are
1. To point to horizontal gene transfer and other violations of a perfectly treelike pattern and say that aha, there isn’t a perfect tree. They act like this is some new revelation, but of course hybridization in plant species has been known for a very long time. They also ignore that this does not invalidate the concept of a genealogy of life, just that that genealogy is not exactly and in all respects a perfect tree. (Modern systematists have not helped this discussion by saying there is a Tree Of Life without making any qualification. Nor have microbial evolutionists who declare the demise of the tree “at least in prokaryotes” without reminding us that the genealogy has not disappeared, and that in eukaryotes it is much more treelike.)
2. They say that the data could be explained equally well by “common design”. The problem with that as a hypothesis is that it explains everything, and thus it explains nothing. Without knowing the “motives, means, and opportunity” of the Designer one cannot predict what she would do. So Common Design neatly explains why elephants are big, lumbering and gray. But it also equally well predicts that elephants will be small, pink, and flit around pollinating flowers. So it explains everything we could possibly see. Alas, it also explains everything we don’t see. And thus it is not a scientific explanation at all.
What about the phyla we see in the Cambrian? Offhand, I can think of a number of major relationships among them:
1. Wiwaxia is pretty clearly a mollusc (a chiton). Molluscs are also there in the Small Shelly Fauna which precedes the Cambrian “Explosion”.
2. There is a complex of forms including but not limited to Aysheaia, Hallucigenia, Anomalocaris, Opabinia and Diania that show relationships to the onychophora and tardigrades, as well as to arthropods. The latter three are groups that survive today — I’m sure some of our readers have recently seen, and been bitten by, an arthropod. And guess what molecular evolution shows? Do these three groups cluster together on the tree? Or are they scattered here and there across the tree? Three guesses — there will be no prize.
3. Echinoderms and hemichordates are present in the Cambrian Explosion, and so are chordates (Pikaia). Relationships between echinoderms, hemichordates, and chordates were firming up in anatomical work in the late 1800s. All three groups are still with us (for example, our readers themselves). And guess what molecular evolution shows? Three guesses — there will be no prize.
4. Cnidarians (which we used to call “coelenterates”) are present in the Cambrian Explosion and also earlier, in the Precambrian in the Ediacaran fauna.
5. Molecular evolution puts all modern metazoans in one group (clade) — not scattered here and there across the tree of life. So all the groups in the Cambrian Explosion, and in the Small Shelly Fauna before that, and most likely all the groups in the Ediacaran, all of them are together as metazoans and all metazoans we have now are a clade in molecular phylogenies.
And that’s just some of the groups I know about, and I’m no paleontologist. Someone like Don Prothero could go into much more detail and provide more examples of Cambrian Explosion organisms that not only show evolutionary relationships to each other, but to modern organisms that are related in molecular evolutionary studies.
Joe, Isn’t one of Prothero’s suggestions that we should stop calling it an ‘Explosion’?
Good point.
I just might summarize the sources of evidence against special creation of phyla in the Cambrian:
1. Cases where we see that phylum earlier as well, in the Small Shelly Fauna or in the Ediacaran.
2. Cases where two phyla are phylogenetically related (and all present-day phyla are related, when the evidence of molecular evolution is taken into account).
The one argument that this does not refute is a Designer who does not originate new phyla unrelated to previous ones, but only intervenes among related forms and modifies some of them.
… but if the Designer only modifies existing forms, leaving intact the evidence that they are related, then one would see evidence of common ancestry. And the creationists around here seem to be very very reluctant to admit that there is evidence for common ancestry.
“the creationists around here seem to be very very reluctant to admit that there is evidence for common ancestry.”
Doesn’t seem to be too many YECists at TSZ. I wouldn’t worry or spend much time thinking about their arguments if I were you. They don’t stack up to much.
What you describe sounds like the position of Evolutionary Creation (not ‘creationism’). In this case, you can just substitute ‘Creator’ for ‘Designer’ because it is the supposed instantiation of ‘guided modification’ that is in question. Of course, it isn’t a purely natural scientific question one way or the other, which means natural science cannot rule against the possibility. It depends on your worldview, what you believe.
The Cambrian diversification is nevertheless still fascinating to theists like S.C. Morris. I wonder if he takes a position on ceasing to call it an ‘explosion’ or not. Does anyone here know?
Darwin’s Doubt review: http://www.religiondispatches.org/books/science/7234/creationism_3_0__meet_intelligent_design_s_huckster/
Thanks for the link.
I read that review and am persuaded not to bother reading Meyer’s book Heh, don’t even have to read the review, just the headline:
Creationism 3.0: Meet Intelligent Design’s Huckster.
Well done!
Chapter One – Darwin’s Nemesis
No, not the Cambrian Explosion, Louis Agassiz.
Agassiz:
There are many other gems of interest in chapter one, perhaps I can return to them at a later date.
Feel free to depart this thread then.
🙂
Don’t expect me to respond to any of your posts.
Are you actually going to address any of the glaring problems that have been pointed out about Meyer’s claims in DD? Or are you just going to do a Jr. High School level book report and mindlessly repeat the book’s nonsense chapter-by-chapter?
How about that 2 1/2 billion years of life before the Cambrian? How about other major radiations of life well after the Cambrian, like the Great Ordovician Biodiversification? Or the five major mass extinctions and subsequent repopulation by speciation from the survivors?
Does ID have any answers for those data at all?
Joe Felsenstein:
Hi Joe,
Near as I can tell Meyer does not argue for “special creation” of phyla in the Cambrian. But maybe what you mean by “special creation” and what I think of when I read “special creation” are different.
There’s no entry for “special creation” in the index, nor is there any entry for “creation.” But heck, maybe Meyer is one of those “STEALTH CREATIONISTS!!!”
But if you bothered to read Meyer you’d know he accepts an old earth.
On to your other points, that’s getting ahead of ourselves in the order the material is presented in the book. Rest assured, Meyer addresses how many phyla first appeared in the Cambrian strata and how many can be traced further back.
But since you brought it up, do you want to give us your numbers and we can see how they compare to Meyer’s?
p.s. Your name doesn’t’ appear in the index either. An obvious oversight. I’ll subtract half a star from my review. (You are in the Bibliography.)
pps. Have you published on the Cambrian and/or Pre-Cambrian?
Are you another one who hasn’t read the book and doesn’t plan to, thorton?
And by “hit’s and runs” you apparently meant “didn’t hit and run”?
I work seven days a week. It’s not always possible to spend the time on this blog that you think I should, which is just tough.
I’m looking for people with something intelligent to say about the subject matter. Why not contribute?
I’ve read enough summaries to see the battleship-sized holes that Meyer didn’t address. Apparently you aren’t willing or able to discuss those huge problems either.
All I’ve seen to date from Meyer and the ID camp is:
1. There is clear unambiguous evidence for Precambrian evolutionary ancestry in some Cambrian lineages.
2. There is no unambiguous ancestry evidence for many other lineages in the Cambrian.
3. By the best ID-of-the-gap reasoning, that means the ones without unambiguous ancestry evidence must have been designed, pardon me, “Designed” in the Cambrian.
Please correct me if I got that wrong.
Our bad. It’s just that you confused everyone when in the OP you offered to discuss Meyer’s ideas. It’s clear now what you really meant was you only wanted to mindlessly regurgitate Meyer’s nonsense and ignore the same glaring problems that Meyer refused to address.
I never expect you to respond to my comments, so why would this thread be different? Because this time, you claim to have actually read the book and I haven’t? It’s never bothered you before, when I’ve read the book, and you haven’t.
I’m sure I’ll survive the heartbreak of being shunned by Mung.
Elizabeth:
I disagree. The important issue is whether the Cambrian explosion is inconsistent with Darwinism. Meyer clearly shows that it is. And why is that important?
Because if it is true, then you have a theory (universal common descent) with no plausible mechanism.
Pretty funny then that he hasn’t been able to convince a single actual paleontologist, geneticist, or evolutionary biologist with his popular-press published hand waving.
Still waiting for your ID explanation for the Cambrian lineages that *do* show clear unambiguous evidence for Precambrian ancestry, as well as that other 2 1/2 billion years’ worth of life before the Cambrian.
BUY HIS BOOK!
Mung,
We, since Mung has sworn off answering me, I guess we probably won’t get an answer here:
Why do you think we should pay a speck of attention to Agassiz’ complaint, based on the fossils he had studied, given that Agassiz died 130 years ago? Why? Don’t you recognize that the fossil record is now millions of times better, millions of times more complete? His opinion was excellent for its time, based on the best scholarship available at the time (and he was indeed a great scholar) but it was unavoidably wrong because he just could not get all the data he needed to form an opinion which might still be worth two cents in the 21st century. Not a tragedy, that’s just how science progresses.
Too bad for Meyer, though, that he stoops to such a transparent propaganda trick in his very first chapter. Implying that Darwin’s theory must be fatally flawed because 130 years ago Agassiz didn’t find all the fossils … tsk, tsk, Stephen Meyer, you should be ashamed of yourself for being such a dishonest ass.
It’s doubly a shame because Agassiz was actually a fascinating man, brilliant; he doesn’t deserve to be dragged into Meyer’s hucksterism.
It’s amazing to think how many books sell that do nothing other than validate the target readership’s prejudices.
I guess that’s why you don’t read books?
In support of my reply to Elizabeth:
I’ve read all the books that provide positive evidence for the Intelligent Design of biological life. Every last one of them. 😀
You sure have a lot of questions outstanding on Meyer’s Cambrian claims. Well Mung?
…and so Mung begins his Gish Gallop. 🙄
More of a Mung’s meander. The missing link: Meanderthal
Gregory:
Meyer:
Richardthughes:
No. Just don’t pretend to want to discuss it when you haven’t read it.
Let me explain the difference between me (a true skeptic) and all you poseurs.
I read books that offer an opposing view to my own!
You want to know what Prothero says about the “Cambrian explosion” in his book? You want to know what Coyne says about the “Cambrian explosion” in his book? You want to know what Joe Felsenstein says? Ask Joe.
So I constantly buy (and read) books written by people who I may disagree with, but that doesn’t prevent me from buying their books
So I constantly put my beliefs to the test, I constantly challenge them. You all shame the name of “Skeptic.”
Joe F:
See: The Changing Role of the Embryo in Evolutionary Thought
Worthy of a discussion in itself. Not that anyone here as actually read it.
The ideas that Meyer pushes in DD have been extremely well publicized by both him and the DI. Buying his piece of Creationist offal isn’t a barrier to discussing the huge flaws in his reasoning.
Do you known anyone who is capable of answering questions about the many errors and misrepresentations in Meyer’s Cambrian claims? It’s glaringly obvious you’re not up to the task.
Oh Mung, you truth lover! That isn’t “the difference” between you and us; it isn’t even “a difference” between you and us. Has anyone here not read a book they disagreed with? Is Mung an Indian name for “dances with strawman”? In fact I both agree and disagree with *parts* of just about every book I read. Have I I violated LNC and must be expelled! from the promised land called “Uncommon descent”?
Here’s why I’m not buying Meyer’s book, Mung. It’s a reasonable induction that he’s still a lair for Jesus writing propaganda and trying to pass it off as science. I base that on previous writings by him I have read, so he won’t be getting my money. I don’t pretend to know why others do or don’t buy his book, I don’t have Munglike telepathy.