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:”
http://tiktaalik.uchicago.edu/searching4Tik.html
I really have no idea why you veered off on some nonsensical tangent about “mechanisms” and “chance”. The fact is, the Theory of Evolution explains data, contrary to your first erroneous claim that I responded to and asked for an elaboration on. Thus far you’ve not provided an elaboration on that point. As I have definitely demonstrated that point to be false, I suspect you will try to veer to a different tangent, but whatever…you and Mung are clearly wrong on that point.
Oh…and in case you’ve forgotten, here’s the post I’m referring to:
So…what…? If Evolutionary Theory doesn’t predict exactly what you want it to predict, it thus doesn’t predict anything? Is that how your “logic” works there William? C’mon…
Mung,
The idea that you care a whit about science is belied by the fact that you simply ignore all the points raised with regard to the book’s content.
Science is about duelling with evidence. Meyer has made his case, and others have responded.
And from what I’ve read so far Meyer has been destroyed. Now, that may or may not be the case, I’ve not read the book. But it certainly seems so. But if you really did care about science you’d respond to the points that have been made, regardless of if the person has read the book or not as long as they have a valid point to make. And you’ve not done that!
Yet you are not skeptical about the book at all, and you seem unwilling to accept the fact that there may be things in it that are simply (and obviously) wrong pointed out by people who know better.
Why?
Deep divergence seems to be a term made up by creationists.
Is design predictive in any meaningful way William? You seem to be ignoring my questions on that?
If the inability to predict “what’s next” makes evolution not-science what does it make design in turn?
Mung,
Did I miss where you supported this claim? Please reference it.
If you care about science…..
;P
+1 and a vorpal sword.
If this is true then ToE should at least predict how many mammals would try to elongate his neck as the ancestor of the jiraffe did 60? millions years ago.
If a change in color saves the bug from being eaten I’d say it’s a pretty damn important thing for the bug.
It does do that. the answer is zero.
Why?
Because populations evolve, not individual animals. They also don’t “try” to evolve any more than an orbiting moon “tries” to follow the law of gravity.
But Mung LOVES the TRUTH, told us so himself!
It’s very precious to him, which is why he’s so economical with it in his postings.
If you cannot answer that question yourself, you simply don’t know what evolution is.
You might argue against my position, but if you can’t understand why I took it, you simply don’t know anything about biology.
But the “explanation” is not simple or obvious or settled.
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2010-10/01/why-do-giraffes-have-long-necks
That you do not understand or do not agree with my explanation doesn’t mean I didn’t offer one. For a model to explain data, it must be able to predict it in some meaningful way. Darwinism doesn’t predict the data we find – it predicts no probability distributions nor any particular kinds of outcomes. It cannot, because no distributive parameters exist – nobody has set forth any Darwinistic parameters (that I know of, anyway).
What kind of features can the mechanism produce in X amount of time? What data, if found, would lie outside of that probability distribution to the point of falsifying that mechanism as being sufficient?
As i said, Darwinism doesn’t even describe what data would be excluded from being within the probabilistic resources of the proposed “mechanisms”. A model that cannot discern what data supports the theory and what data contradicts it doesn’t explain any of the data at all.
Another utter lack of comprehension of my point.
When every last person you’ve offered it to has explained why your understanding is wrong, it’s a good bet the lack of comprehension is at your end.
That you still refuse to learn even the basics of evolutionary theory and continue to make your ridiculous demands is only reflecting badly on you WJM, not anyone else. Numerous people have poined out your errors, corrected you, provided concrete examples of things you claim ToE doesn’t do.
There’s a difference between a determined effort at logical argument and sheer uninformed pigheadedness. You’ve been at the second place for a while now.
William, I understood your point. Hence the link to Shubin’s prediction of where he would find Tiktaalik. That you wish to deflect the subject by moving the goal posts is not going to rebut my response.
The issue at hand was your comment:
I just provided an example of where the data is specifically explained by the Theory of Evolution and, based on that explanation, was found where predicted. That you do not like it is not a weakness of Evolutionary Theory.
Now, if you wish to change the subject to some other point, have at it. Perhaps I’ll address that as well. But as far as your and Mung’s original claim is concerned, such has been demonstrated incorrect.
The theory does make predictions, which have been confirmed, and continue to be confirmed, and examples have been provided.
The theory does not have to make the predictions you want it to make.
There do not have to be any constraints beyond the laws of physics, as long as there are interbreeding populations with changes in allele frequencies.
Even IF your objection had stuck, it would be of no use to you, giving you a pyrrhic victory.
Can you tell me why this data would be outside of the acceptable probability distributions of Darwinistic mechanisms?
You tell us, William. What do you think the response would be?
This was pretty much settled 80 years ago, so you really should be able to find the discussion online.
It is remarkable that you seem to expect to be treated as an adult in these discussions, but can’t seem to feed yourself.
Because to get a cat from a dog, all the variants that have occurred in the dog lineage since cats and dogs diverged would have to be reversed, no more and no less, and all the variants that have occurred since that divergence in cats would have to be introduced, each organism being viable at all times, in whatever environment it happened to be, currently.
Whereas to get a chihuahua from a wolf, you just need incremental changes that enhance their owner’s chance of breeding.
And quite quickly you get an animal that almost certainly cannot breed successfully with a wolf, and certainly bears little resemblance to it.
No, you do not understand my argument, Robin, which is why you keep referring to “evolutionary theory” instead of the term I used – “Darwinism”.
Darwinism doesn’t predict in what strata one would find Tiktaalik; common descent does. Darwinism is the theory that random (unguided by intelligence) mutations and natural selection generate all biological diversity. Your example is irrelevant to my argument. I’m not making the case that common descent is an unproductive scientific theory. Common descent doesn’t necessarily support or indicate Darwinism.
What do you mean “reversed”? Is it not possible that after a few tens or hundreds of millions of years, the dogs we have today could not evolve into cat? Couldn’t cats evolve again, starting with the dog as the initial life form?
Well, what would you say it supported then? I’m always interested in alternate interpretations of the data, wherever they may lead!
Lean on!
Sure. Any more detail then that? Or is that it? Shortest ‘theory’ I’ve ever seen!
Wikipedia notes of the ‘scientific theory’:
Is what you suggest there a theory then? What experiments support it? If you can’t bring any to mind perhaps give it a new label?
Does Darwinism include in it that it should be able to predict events millions of years in the future, such as new organs etc as you demand?
If not, then why are you using the ‘fact’ that it does not as evidence against it? An argument it’s not making is being used as evidence against it as a failure?
If it does include such predictions, then let’s see them! Linkies please! I’m always willing to be educated!
You might want to have a look at this, by the way.
https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/images/darwinsmoth_optimised.pdf
A prediction from Darwin himself, fulfulled many years later.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xanthopan_morgani
Well, I wish you’d stop using such a non-standard term. It’s very confusing.
William, Darwin proposed common descent. Here, is how he famously concluded Origin:
“There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”
Darwin had two great insights: one was common descent; the other was his proposal as to how the descendents of “few forms or …one” could be so diverse, namely the proposal of “natural selection” action on incremental heritable changes. He did not propose that those changes were “random” – he didn’t know what caused them, and at one point thought that they might be acquired by parents and passed on to children. He didn’t know about mutations. His proposal certainly did not require the premise that changes were guided, but it was not the proposal that they were not, any more than the theory of gravity is the theory that apples are not guided to the ground when they fall from a tree. The one thing you got right is natural selection.
Common descent was proposed by Darwin. There are be other mechanisms that account for variation, given common descent, apart from heritable variance in reproductive success (drift for example), but nobody is claiming there isn’t. That’s why we talk about “evolutionary theory” – we know a lot more than Darwin did.
You are nonetheless grossly misrepresenting Darwin by your characterisation of “Darwinism”.
Which is not a word I see used by anyone except people who think they are agin it.
Credit where credit is due. William appears to see the difference between the fact of common descent and the theory of evolution.
The fact of common descent and the overall nested hierarchy of relatedness of life on Earth is undeniable. The theory of evolution – what William is calling Darwinism – is the best effort science can make at explaining the facts of common descent.
So now we can concentrate on the dogs into cats canard.
If I had god-like powers and existed from the dawn of life and had a huge army of angel helpers with neat cameras with a large storage facility and I organised a photo of all organims (or a representative sample of one individual per generation of all species -organisms sharing a gene pool. Let’s not be too ambitious) and I ensured the pose and angle was similar between parent and offspring and I put them into a series of films, what do you think we would see? For evolution to be true, for every extant and exinct lineage we would need to see a smooth transition as niche opportunites come, go and change. No jerky frames. And yet that is what the evidence must fit for evolution to be true. And what do we see in reality. Not the full picture, but the data points we do have fit that pattern.
No – try reading my post again. I honestly think I was pretty clear.
Dogs might well evolve into something with cat-like features, but it won’t be a cat, it will be something in the clade “dog”, and it will share more characteristics, both genetic and anatomical, with today’s dogs than with today’s cats.
Just as a modern whale, though having many fish-like features, shares far more characteristics with us than it does with modern fish.
A dog [eta: population] might well evolve into a marine mammal, but it will still be more closely related to modern dogs than to modern marine mammals.
No, a cat will never evolve again. Something that fits in a cat’s ecological niche might, especially if cats go extinct. A cat evolving again is about as probable as a smashed wineglass rejoining without intervention. The probability of any pre-specified creature evolving is essentially zero. But the probability of some creature evolving to fit an available niche or utilize a new resource or something is pretty high. Just like winning the lottery (I know that’s much too intellectual for you to comprehend).
JonF,
I’m not sure but it seems that you might mean that it would be possible to look at the fauna and environment of someplace, like say Australia, and see what adaptations critters have that have allowed them to fill the available niches? Are you also suggesting that you might see cat-like or dog-like creatures (marsupials all), that are not related to cats or dogs, that have evolved similar features that adapt them to their niches? What a novel thought! William might want to give it some consideration as well as doing a bit of reading to overcome that self-professed ignorance of science that he has proclaimed. Lord knows his questions underscore his ignorance of the topic with every post he makes.
I vote we call this new scientific paradigm “Murrayism”. As in
“Murrayism says we should see a cat evolve into a dog.”
“Murrayism says we should be able to predict all macroevolutionary changes millions of years into the future”
Has about as much connection to reality as anything else WJM has written.
Seems that ToE not only can´t predict if another mammal will elongate his neck, also can t explain´why a jiraffe have one. Your cite:
“For the moment, the question of “How did the giraffe get its long neck?” must be answered with “We do not yet know”, but that is as it should be. It is better to admit that we are still unravelling a mystery than to dogmatically assert that all is solved and that all the uncharted places on the evolutionary map have been filled in.”
So evolution can’t explain every detail of history. What point are you trying to make?
Liz,
What Darwin proposed, or did not propose, has nothing to do with my argument. The term “Darwinism” has long been used here and at UD as shorthand for mutation and selection that are unguided by any form of intention or intelligence.
So, you’re saying that a dog cannot evolve into a cat because a cat is defined by it’s clade, or what it evolved from? IOW, a dog could evolve into something that looks and acts exactly like a cat, but it wouldn’t be a cat because it evolved from a dog?
So your argument is that a dog giving birth to a cat would contradict Darwinism because it would violate common descent (cats, by clade definition, cannot come from dogs)?
My argument isn’t about common descent. It’s about Darwinism – the theory that unguided mutation and unguided natural selection can account for biological diversity.
Er…no. The terms Darwinism and Darwinist are used almost exclusively by Creationists, usually quite scientifically ignorant ones, to mean their cartoon version of what they think the real ToE is. Pretty much exactly what you’re doing now.
If you want to call your version “Murrayism” then we can proceed. But your demand that we stick to your winnowed-down cartoon version and omit all the rest of our knowledge about evolution is just plain dumb.
William J. Murray,
http://evolutionlist.blogspot.com/2007/10/rm-ns-creationist-and-id-strawman.html?m=1
Now, if anyone wants to tell me what the limitations of random mutation and natural selection are, we can get down to the business of seeing if there is any predictable probability distribution for what those “mechanisms” can, and cannot, generate in a given time frame within plausible earthly resources and constraints.
Because you find Tiktaalik where the theory of common descent predicts and it is what common descent (coupled with the ideas of variation and heritable adaption) predict it should be (given here arguendo), doesn’t mean that your evolutionary mechanisms (random mutation and natural selection) have been shown to explain that transition.
Sigh. Again – read this : http://evolutionlist.blogspot.com/2007/10/rm-ns-creationist-and-id-strawman.html?m=1
What is a “predictable probability distribution”?
thorton,
If I was making an argument about “evolution”, you might have a case. I’m not making an argument about “evolution”. I’m making an argument about a particular aspect of “evolutionary theory” that is taken on faith and can accommodate all data, because it has no defined null. One cannot claim that the accumulative mutations are unguided unless they can say what an accumulation of guided mutations would look like. One cannot say that selection is natural unless they can say what artificial selection outcomes would look like.
Darwin and other evolutionary biologists of the past attempted to make this case by claiming that a designer (god, in their argument) wouldn’t do X, or that there wouldn’t be so much junk DNA, or that we wouldn’t have vestigial features IF features were designed or selection outcomes were intentional. The problems is that many of those arguments have failed, and in fact were proven factually in error.
Until Darwinists can define what mutational or selective outcomes are outside of their probability range, their theory cannot be said to explain any data at all. It only accommodates (allows) all selection and mutational data and assumes it is unguided.
William J. Murray,
Your continued willful ignorance is getting rather tiring WJM. You insist we limit the discussion to the basic mechanisms of microevolution then demand we explain and make predictions about both past and future macroevolutionary events.
The answer to your cartoon version of Murrayism has already been given. Just taking genetic variation and selection all by themselves then the only theoretical limits are the ones imposed by the laws of physics on the size and strength of biological materials. In the real world evolution is constrained not only by that but also by the fact evolution can only modify / build on what already exists. That’s the part that gives ToE its predictive power for discovering things like tiktaalik.
Now if you want to keep discussing Murrayism it’s been covered. If you want to discuss the actual theory of evolution then get off your lazy duff and learn about it before embarrassing yourself any more.
He appears to be doing the equivalent of asking people here to explain a “crockaduck”.
I can’t decipher any of his demands. It’s all gobbledygook.
You’re arguing about your cartoon version of evolution, “Murrayism”.
More pitiful scientific ignorance. Science doesn’t claim to know mutations or selection are unguided. The working assumption is ‘unguided’ because there’s zero positive evidence for any conscious external guidance and lots that no such guidance is necessary.
Please, do everyone a favor and go get a freshman level biology book, then read the damn thing.
Cats, Dogs, and the rest of the Canivorians are descendents of Miacids, a dog-cat-weasel like animal that looked similar to modern day Civets. So the question is not can a dog give birth to a cat, or vice-versa, but can a miacid evolve into both the cat and dog (as well as the weasel, bear, skunk, etc.).
WJM, might the Miacids be the prototypical dog/cat “kind” that baraminology seeks to discover?
ID/creationist fascination with cats goes back to Duane Gish’s catdog.
Apparently they think cats are prolific generators of other species.
There are catfish, cattails, catnip, catamarans, catwalks, cat burglars, caterpillars; and there is even a Cat Woman.
It’s whatever the great mathematician William J. Murray wants it to be. As long as he can dazzle the rubes with it.
William,
What is a “predictable probability distribution”?