Denyse O’Leary quotes Steve Meyer’s question:
Why, he [Agassiz] asked, does the fossil record always happen to be incomplete at the nodes connecting major branches of Darwin’s tree of life, but rarely—in the parlance of modern paleontology—at the “terminal branches” representing the major already known groups of organisms?…
Was there any easy answer to Agassiz’s argument? If so, beyond his stated willingness to wait for future fossil discoveries, Darwin didn’t offer one.
and responds:
And no one else has either.
Oh, yes, they have, Denyse. That’s what what punk eek was. But it also falls readily out of any simulation – you see rapid diversification into a new niche at a node, and thus few exemplars, followed by an increasingly gradual approach to a static optimum, and thus lots of exemplars. But I present an even more graphic response: when you chop down a tree, and saw it up into logs for your fire, what proportion of your logs include a node?
PaV, how about you read the rest of the book instead of just the introduction? It debunks the very misconception, the apparent paradox. Apparent, not actual paradox.
The book explains how life is a manifestation of the 2nd law of thermodynamics, not a violation or exception to it. Of course, you don’t get it all served on a platter in the introduction, so read the book in it’s entirety.
One more ‘final’ quote:
You’ll notice the parallel between what I wrote and what Schrodinger wrote. This “Into the Cool” is a literal gold mine for ID thought. Let’s hear it for Schrodinger.
BTW, I’ve begun reading Schrodinger’s lectures on Thermodynamics. Again, Schrodinger is pure genius. A bit advanced, though.
Rumraket,
rumraket:
How is a ecological geologist, without a single equation, going to present a convincing thermodynamic argument, and especially when his use of language is sloppy?
But everything is a “manifestation of the 2LofTh. Life is impossible outside of this law. If life were possible outside of it, then it wouldn’t be a law. This is a circular way of thinking. What needs to be explained is “how” life produces “negative entropy.” And the word for “negative entropy” is “information.” And, guess what, we’re right back to where we started from, because ID argues that the presence of this “negative entropy”–that is an “aperiodic” protein–cannot be explained by the laws of nature. Hence some extra-natural explanation is needed: i.e., “design.”
PaV,
I’ll look for the book in a library. I only got to page 55 in the Google Preview.