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During recent discussions, it was suggested that Darwin’s Doubt raised unanswerable questions for the theory of evolution. Discuss.
324 thoughts on “Stephen Meyer, Darwin’s Doubt and the Cambrian Explosion”
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It has, I realise, been been discussed before
phoodoo did not take part in that previous discussion I believe. But this would be a good opportunity to see the issues phoodoo’s point of view.
phoodoo, care to share the first “unanswerable” question?
Over at UD before I was cowardly “silently banned” by KF the question of Meyer’s claims on the Cambrian came up. In particular was a quote by Meyer he recently made criticizing BioLogos
This is the same Stephen Meyer who wrote “Darwin’s Doubt” in which he claimed the unnamed Intelligent Designer came to Earth 530 MYA and spent 20 million years creating the Cambrian body plans.
I asked the UDers how Meyer’s claims of a “straightforward reading” of Genesis are compatible with his DD claims. How does the vertebrate body plan being created in the Cambrian and then another 500 MY of vertebrate evolution square with a “straightforward reading of Genesis” and the special creation of the human race from Adam and Eve? Were the body plans supposedly created in the Cambrian the original created Biblical “kinds”? What about the 3 billion years of life before the Cambrian? What about the subsequent 5 major mass extinctions and re-radiations of life forms after the Cambrian?
Of course I got lots of hand-waving, lots of insults, the usual spam from BA77 but no one was brave enough to answer the actual question. You can bet the farm none of the IDiots will be brave enough to answer here.
So maybe there really are unanswerable questions. But they are unanswerable only because you are banned before you can give an answer.
I’m assuming that Meyer is talking about a scenario where the second generation offspring were produced through incestuous couplings of Adam and Eve’s children? And so forth through the generations.
Dumb question, but has such a thing _ever_ happened? Could all zebras have arisen from a single female and single male zebra, for example?
The problem is no one knows what Meyer is talking about because he never provides any details. Meyer isn’t a scientist, he’s a professional liar / Christian propagandist for the Discovery Institute. What he says on any given day can change 180 deg. depending on the audience he’s addressing.
How could the information for the phyla’s body plans arise without a designer, when (substantial, anyway) information only comes from intelligence?
That seems to be the main “unanswerable” question Meyer rises, and it’s unanswerable precisely because it already assumes that evolution not controlled by intelligence can’t do it, and only design can.
Not very clever, but good enough for much of the target audience.
Glen Davidson
socle,
In The Ancestor’s Tale Dawkins discusses the speculative theory that all New World monkeys derive from a single pregnant female rafted across on a vegetation mat. It’s certainly possible. The New Zealand possums derive from a tiny handful.
Of course, the distinction with Adam/Eve in the human line is that the proposed timeline is not consistent with the amount of variation in the human population. Severe bottlenecks should leave a signal, gradually erased by time. If there is no such signal, there is either no bottleneck or too much time.
One of the key innovations around the Cambrian was the refinement of multicellularity – of co-ordinated colonial life, particularly in the animal kingdom. Multicellularity wasn’t invented in the Cambrian, but does at that time appear to have uncovered kinds of adaptation not seen previously, in tandem with a greater noticeability of the dead forms in rocks. Some of that divergence may have been internal – dvelopmental programs that lent themselves to differential elaboration – and some external – novel environmental challenges, including a growth of co-evolutionary relationships between predators and prey.
There is no particular reason to suppose that the phylum-distinguishing variations on the simple Bilaterian tube structure forming the basis of most animal life fall outside of the capabilities of a process of descent-with-modification. One particularly troublesome issue for critics appears to be a difficulty in grasping the idea that, during the early development of a proto-phylum, it would simply be another species.
ENV almost never allows posts, so of course the questions are unanswerable.
Golden hamsters are from one breeding pair iirc. Not a species though.
Thanks, Allan and davehooke.
Meyers book , probably, will in history be seen as a important early punch in the decline of evolutionary biology.
He uses evolutionists own geology/biology claims of sudden explosion of complexity against them.
Simply the complexity is not where it should be in time and place if evolution is real.
These critters show too much complexity for the concept of slow evolving biology.
Its understandable to the general educated public because they understand evolution teaches primitive to complex over time.
Got’im!
hopefully Meyer thinks man was created by god and only creatures jave been around a long time.
in reality the whole thing is based on presumptions of geology.
There is no biological evidence gleaned from these creature imprints. for or against.
without the geology there is no info from the biology except what is in hand.
So all of it is not scientific biological investigation despite the conclusions about biology origins.
Its an explosion of illogical analysis.
There, that’s better.
I was wrong. It is a separate species.
Robert Byers,
How long should it have taken, if evolution was real? 20 million years not enough? So how long would have been enough? What factors go into your figure?
Robert, I think you should show your math. Tells what changes occurred and show us your computations that demonstrate the rate of mutation changed during the 20 million years under consideration.
The “explosion’ term was coined by evolutionists.
Suddenly complexity in great diversity of biology was found according to their ideas of realtime by geology.
So iD people, accepting these presumptions, demonstrate there was not enough time. The whole thing is based on historic conclusions of evolutionists dealing with time and complexity and evolution.
Thats the equation they work off.
If evolutionists start changing these concepts then thats a paradigm change.
the ID/yec don’t accept evolution or its potential time needs for evolution.
We have no time ideas except its not enough by historic evolution claims.
The fossil discovery/geology place is the rub.
It was too big a explosion from too little fuse.
The math is from historic evolutionists concepts of time needed for change.
ID/YEC don’t see actual options for evolution and so no ideas about mutations and time.
Except there wasn’t enough time !
It was too short for such common complexity by the rates of historic evolution teaching.
its also too short by any sense of reasonableness.
Its an explosion and so not defined as a natural standard of development.
Words matter.
Would you like some dressing to go with your salad Robert?
The difference between science and religion is that paradigms in science CHANGE as our understanding of reality grows.
How do you know that without having “time ideas”?
Was it?
“The term “explosion” may be a bit of a misnomer. Cambrian life did not evolve in the blink of an eye. The Cambrian was preceded by many millions of years of evolution, and many of the animal phyla actually diverged during the Precambrian”
http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evosite/evo101/VIIB1cCambrian.shtml
“The discovery of new pre-Cambrian and Cambrian fossils help resolve the debate, as these transitional fossil forms support the hypothesis that diversification was well underway before the Cambrian began. More recently, the sequencing of the genomes of thousands of life forms is revealing just how many and what genes and the proteins they encode have been conserved from the Precambrian. The explosion of external form (the phenotype) in the fossil record is what we see now, but more gradual adaptation was taking place at the molecular level (the genotype).”
http://www.fossilmuseum.net/Paleobiology/CambrianExplosion.htm
Only to quote some…
How does ID explain the Cambrian Explosion?
Robert Byers,
No, it wasn’t. I’m not convinced you know anything about “the rates of historic evolution teaching”.
I say 20 million years is plenty. You say it isn’t. And yet you deny that there were even 20 million years to play with – 6000, tops. Have-your-cake-and-eat-it time. Evolutionary timescales aren’t enough AND there was no evolutionary timescale!
How very strange that phoodoo has not jumped on this thread, given phoodoo’s belief that there are indeed such questions.
How very, very strange. It’s cargo-cult science at it’s best. No peeking under the covers allowed, or you’ll find out it’s just balsa-wood and sheets.
That would be a good argument if you were actually dealing with a contrary theory. But I take it the creationist’s response would be something like, “You need that kind of time for evolution to have done this work, but not for_______ to have done it.” (where the ________ is filled in by whatever magic Zeus played during the last couple thousand years, or 14 hours, or whatever is claimed.) It’s my sense that there can be no arguments of that sort against magic-makers precisely because “It was magic.” isn’t a real theory.
walto,
I think the Creationist’s usual response is “Speed of light! Whales! Inconstant radioactive decay! Piltdown Man!”
OMagain,
I think phoodoo became upset, and departed. I’m sure he has plenty to say on this topic.
There was skepticism and empiricism here.
It was just too disgusting.
Glen Davidson
GlenDavidson,
I do think it a shame that he should have got upset. I know ‘the debate’ can be pretty acrimonious at times – AtBC and UD for example – but I don’t take it too seriously, and I get taken aback when others do.
Guillermoe,
The operative word is explosion. its not a creationist concept. yet iD/YEC can use it against the whole evolutionary idea.
Saying there was molecular change, just not shown by external change, is pure guessing. no such evidence. The evidence is IN the external looks.
The evidence is the evidence that ID thinkers work with and very well.
A sudden explosion o0f complexity only counts as a explosion if its being admitted there was no gradual lead up.
If denied there was a explosion then deny it and change the textbooks.
Plain and simple it seems the fossil record, once again , fails a wrong idea.
i’m not saying 20 mill is too little or not enough.
its an idea based on timelines YEC rejects.
If your rejecting its an explosion in the Cambrian geological evidence for biological evidence of creatures complexity in their bodies THEN say so.
Otherwise a explosion only exists relative to stages in complexity evolution.
20 million will do it means there was no explosion. Just natural flow.
I think its too late and the great explosion has shrapnel of problems for evolutionary biology.
As I predicted.
Robert Byers,
Trust a literalist! It’s not a real explosion, nor even much of a figurative one. It’s just an expression, like ‘population explosion’. You think humanity is ‘exploding’ through causes inexplicable by science?
20 million years. That’s sudden enough when you are looking from 500 million years later.
Word gaming. Would you even notice if a textbook was changed? The ‘explosion’ covers a substantial thickness of strata. The localisation of these particular creatures to these particular strata does not even begin to be explained by The Flood, to take an alternative hypothesis completely at random.
What were you thinking?
Of course they would notice. They would be pointing to evidence of a world wide evilutionist conspiracy to plant their ideology in text books.
It’s amazing how much fine-sorting a chaotic global Fludde can achieve, isn’t it? Even down to microfossils and isotope ratios. In a different context, you might even expect YECs to argue against it based on the 2LoT or tornadoes in junkyards.
That reminds me, I’m still having some noise problems with my 747. It runs a little hot too.
A little off topic but sure the flood explains it.
The flood was the mechanism for these creatures to be uniquely covered/fossilized in a instant and simply show a diversity of earth at the time. Some 4500 years ago.
All biology below the k-t line is from the same operation happening in the first days/weeks of the flood.
Its an error to say the strata was laid in segregated time deposition events. it was just segregated flows in a single event with whatever it was depositing in same flow.
It works well for YEC. ID and evolutionists scramble over the geology/biology concepts regarding the fossils.
Its not fine tuning in the field. All that is found is layers of sediment rock and creatures within.
In a great movement of water flows it would be that sediment loads would be segregated and so laid over each other. A seeming design but really just flow events moving material.
It works.
I don’t know what you mean by “fine tuning in the field”. The problem for YECism is graphs such as this.
The proportion of carbon-14 decreases with depth in these core samples. The proportion 35 meters down is
roughly halfmuch less than the proportion at the surface. (edited: I read the graph wrong; it’s far less that one half)Can you explain how carbon isotopes could be separated in the context of a raging flood? It takes special equipment to do this sort of thing.
What is the explanation ID provides for the Cambrian Explosion? How did all those new forms of life appeared on Earth?
It is generally assumed that the fossil record is incomplete. How does ID deal with that?
Robert Byers,
Doesn’t work. The assemblage of creatures at the classic Cambrian sites of Burgess Shale, Chengjiang and Sirius Passet (look ’em up on a globe; they’re miles apart) is distinctive, containing mostly marine arthropods and worms. There are no fish. All the fish are in overlaying strata, in which, at a certain point, the trilobites just stop. These particular assemblages are restricted to these tiny pockets on the globe – as samples of the ‘diversity at the time’, they appear remarkably short of anything with a backbone, yet contain thousands upon thousands of examples of specific species found nowhere else on earth, in any stratum.
And the same things happens when you track graptolites, belemnites, ammonites … they are exquisitely stratified; they have their place and then disappear as you delve through literal kilometers of sediment. Just what you’d expect if it rained at more than an inch a minute globally for 40 days …
But it was a magic flood. Keep in mind, some of that water had fairly recently been turned to blood.
I note that you continue to evade the question of stable isotopes and radioactive decay. These are used to date different strata and to determine things like oxygen levels and temperature. Why are all of this data consistent with gradual deposition (and sometimes catastrophic) over very very long periods of time. As well, how do you explain the fact that there is a continuous line of tree ring evidence that extends well beyond the YEC timeframe?
Oh, you guys.
Isotope me no more isotopes.
I repeat (as you clearly didn’t hear me the first time): this wasn’t just any old flood. It was a magic flood of Biblical proportions. These carping criticisms betray faithless minds (and soulless bodies). You concentrate on your “science” and leave the magic spells to those equipped to handle them.
Hell awaits you and your test tubes.
That’s an answer I would somewhat respect from a YEC. However, for whatever reason, they often prefer naturalistic explanations. Dunno why.
I think it’s because ID proponents think that playing a burden shift game is a legitimate substitute for actual science. Take this paragraph of VJ Torley’s over at UD:
The demand that ID proponents should be able to demonstrate that a designer existed at the right place and time, with the requisite capabilities, and that they should describe a procedure that the designer could have employed, would be a reasonable one, if we were adjudicating between Intelligent Design and some other hypothesis about a process that was known to be able to produce life. The reason why the design explanation enjoys such an advantage is that it is the only process known to be capable of producing the distinguishing features of life on Earth – in particular, a digital code, developmental programs and highly functional but astronomically improbable configurations of matter. If there were some other process that were known to be able to generate these features, then the ID hypothesis would warrant a lot more critical scrutiny. But in this case, it’s the only scientific game in town. It’s a terrible pity that contemporary biologists are too ideologically wedded to naturalism to recognize that fact.
You see him here taking ID as “the only scientific game in town” as if the postulation of some super-smart designer who did something or other (we know not what) at some time or other (we know not when) is a scientific hypothesis, and not just the invocation of magic or the admission of ignorance.
I’m sure it’s quite comforting for purveyors of religion to seem to sound sciency.
Ah, yes, the distinguishing features of life, like the evidence for common inheritance and the constraints of evolutionary processes existing throughout life. That’s only known to be caused by intelligence. Uh huh, that must mean that children are intelligently designed, not begun with some comments like “Oh God” and heavy breathing.
Yeah, about that, it seems that you recognize common descent to a degree, to a variable extent based upon, well, nothing but your preconceptions. We actually do know about reproduction and its limits, and it produces what we see in life. We haven’t ever quite discovered a great intelligence that mimics evolutionary processes.
We’ll need to see it before we believe it–call us sticklers for, uh, at least the barest of necessary evidence for extravagant claims.
Glen Davidson
walto,
One thing that occurs to me is that Torley’s script would presumably sound fairly reasonable to a lot of people who might not have gotten around either to the sort of questioning stance required by science or to the many many aspects of life that absolutely make no sense from a design standpoint–especially the lack of interchangeability of “ideas” across non-breeding (and non-horizontally DNA interchanging) branches of life. Common design, you know, but cephalopods use one form of eye in the same environments that fishes use the quite different vertebrate eye, and bats’ wings have close homologies with mammalian forelimbs, not with bird or pterosaur wings.
For ID to seem reasonable means to begin with the terms that suggest machines along with the answer of design, not to begin with actual questions. It’s a script that they follow, not a process of discovery. And for the most part, biology began with the same script, only it yielded neither satisfying answers nor anything to really do with it except to praise the Creator.
There is a “digital code” and there are “developmental programs,” but such terms mask the peculiarities that these would be in the engineering realm. And what do you suppose makes life’s “programs” so much more evolvable than typical computer programs are (unless specifically made to evolve–but even these do so quite differently than do life’s programs).
So yes, biology can be construed so as to sound as if it were quite like designed things are, and you can insist that there is only an answer and not a question for which discovery and inference are needed. But that is only stopping science, not an attempt to learn from the world.
Glen Davidson
Man, what was the process like, again?
acartia_bogart,
Gah, don’t start him on tree rings! You can get dozens in a good year, apparently. Or maybe it’s radiation scarring from the catastrophically accelerated radioactive decay needed to explain isotope levels.