Recently, Evolution News and Views published an article titled, The Human-Ape Missing Link — Still Missing (July 18, 2017), which attempts to cast doubt on human evolution by quoting from a recent BBC article which highlighted the massive uncertainties that still remain over the identity, appearance and date of the last common ancestor (LCA) of human beings and chimpanzees, and which even questions whether the chimpanzee is our closest relative, after all. The Evolution News and Views (ENV) article also revives the myth of an unbridgeable gap between Australopithecus and Homo.
Here’s my two-sentence rebuttal: uncertainty as to who the last common ancestor of humans and chimps was, what it looked like, and when it lived, in no way diminishes scientists’ certainty that it existed. And while the fossil record of human ancestors is very meager and patchy until about 4.4 million years ago, from that time onward, we have a veritable hodgepodge of hominins – and no unbridgeable gaps.
Well, that was quick, wasn’t it? Now for a more detailed rebuttal.
What’s the best evidence for human evolution?
For those wanting a quick overview of the evidence for human evolution, I would recommend Dennis Venema’s four-part series, titled, Intelligent Design and common ancestry, as well as his five-part series, Vitellogenin and Common Ancestry.
Dennis Venema’s 22-part series, titled, Adam, Eve, and Human Population Genetics, goes on to establish that the ancestral human population has never numbered less than 10,000 during the past one million years. In short: the notion that humanity originally descended from a single couple has been scientifically discredited. After reading Venema’s posts, I have been forced to revise my own views on Adam and Eve. (More about that in a future post.)
Readers who may be inclined to query the alleged 98% genetic similarity between humans and chimps might want to have a look at my Uncommon Descent articles, Human and chimp DNA: They really are about 98% similar and Double debunking: Glenn Williamson on human-chimp DNA similarity and genes unique to human beings. The latter article also deals with the genes which are alleged to be totally unique to human beings, and shows that they are nothing of the sort.
What the BBC article actually said
The BBC article cited in the anonymous Evolution News and Views post on human evolution was refreshingly frank about what we do and don’t know about the last common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees. Here’s how the ENV post summarized its findings:
Here is a long, substantive, and interesting article from the BBC — “We still have not found the missing link between us and apes.” It is interesting for two reasons.
1. It admits that we haven’t found anything that resembles the last common ancestor (LCA) between humans and apes, what author Colin Barras calls the “missing link.”
2. It admits that it’s hard to even agree on what the LCA might have looked like.
Nowhere, however, did the article contest the evidence for human evolution. What it said was that last common ancestor may have looked a lot less chimp-like than most scientists had previously believed, and that we still haven’t found this creature yet.
My major quarrel with the BBC article is that it did not mention any hominin fossils (in the line leading to humans) older than that of the 4.4-million-year-old Ardipithecus ramidus. Older probable hominin fossils such as Ardipithecus kadabba, Orrorin tugenensis, Sahelanthropus tchadensis and Graecopithecus freybergi, which go back as early as 7.2 million years ago, are completely ignored. This is a significant omission, as the human-chimp split is currently estimated to have taken place between 7 and 13 million years ago. If the oldest hominin fossil is 7.2 million years ago, then we are not so far from the last common ancestor, after all.
The allegedly unbridgeable gap between Australopithecus and Homo
The Evolution News and Views article also claims that “we don’t even have transitional forms between Australopithecus and Homo.” This, I have to say, is simply not true.
The article they link to, to support this claim, is an earlier post on Evolution News and Views (“A Big Bang Theory of Homo,” August 13, 2012). Unfortunately, the references cited nearly all date from 1990 to 2007. In recent years, there has been a dramatic shift in scientists’ views.
Until a few years ago, many anthropologists believed that there were stark anatomical differences between Australopithecus and Homo ergaster (pictured above), whose Asian counterpart was Homo erectus. Many of these anthropologists also believed that Homo habilis should be classified as a species of Australopithecus. Oft-cited in this regard is a 2000 paper by J. Hawks, K. Hunley, S.H. Lee, and M. Wolpoff, titled, Population bottlenecks and Pleistocene human evolution (Molecular Biology and Evolution 17(1):2–22), in which the authors write: “We, like many others, interpret the anatomical evidence to show that early H. sapiens was significantly and dramatically different from earlier and penecontemporary australopithecines in virtually every element of its skeleton (fig. 1) and every remnant of its behavior…” In support of their claim, the authors cited the work of Bernard A. Wood and Mark Collard, who put forward powerful arguments for this view in 1999, in their paper, The human genus (Science Vol. 284 no. 5411 pp. 65-71). However, I should mention that while Wood and Collard found major anatomical differences between Homo habilis in six broad categories of traits – body size, body shape, locomotion, jaws & teeth, development, and brain size – three of those traits could not be assessed for another species of early Homo, Homo rudolfensis. Wood and Collard defended their view that Homo erectus represented a clean break from his hominid predecessors once again in their 2001 paper, The Meaning of Homo (Ludus vitalis, vol. IX, no. 15, 2001, pp. 63-74) and more recently, in their 2007 paper, Defining the genus Homo (in Henke, W. and Rothe, H. and Tattersall, I., (eds.) Handbook of Paleoanthropology, Springer Berlin Heidelberg: Berlin, pp. 1575-1610).
However, the scenario proposed by Wood and Collard and is now out of date. Recent papers published in 2012 – see Early Homo: Who, When, and Where (by Susan C. Antón, in Current Anthropology, Vol. 53, No. S6, “Human Biology and the Origins of Homo,” December 2012, pp. S278-S298), Origins and Evolution of Genus Homo: New Perspectives (by Susan C. Antón and J. Josh Snodgrass, in Current Anthropology, Vol. 53, No. S6, “Human Biology and the Origins of Homo,” December 2012, pp. S479-S496) and Human Biology and the Origins of Homo: An Introduction to Supplement 6 (by Leslie C. Aiello and Susan C. Antón, in Current Anthropology, Vol. 53, No. S6, “Human Biology and the Origins of Homo,” December 2012, pp. S269-S277) show that the transition from Homo habilis to early Homo ergaster / erectus was not much larger than that between Australopithecus and Homo habilis. A detailed anatomical comparison indicates that the transition from Australopithecus to early Homo, who appeared about 2.3 or 2.4 million years ago, and from early Homo to Homo ergaster / erectus, is much smoother and more gradual than what anthropologists believed it to be, ten years ago. The above-cited 2012 article by Susan C. Antón and J. Josh Snodgrass, titled, Origins and Evolution of Genus Homo: New Perspectives, conveys the tenor of the new view among anthropologists (emphases mine – VJT):
Recent fossil and archaeological finds have complicated our interpretation of the origin and early evolution of genus Homo. It now appears overly simplistic to view the origin of Homo erectus as a punctuated event characterized by a radical shift in biology and behavior (Aiello and Antón 2012; Antón 2012; Holliday 2012; Pontzer 2012; Schwartz 2012; Ungar 2012). Several of the key morphological, behavioral, and life history characteristics thought to first emerge with H. erectus (e.g., narrow bi-iliac breadth, relatively long legs, and a more “modern” pattern of growth) seem instead to have arisen at different times and in different species…
Over the past several decades, a consensus had emerged that the shift to humanlike patterns of body size and shape — and at least some of the behavioral parts of the “human package” — occurred with the origin of Homo erectus (e.g., Antón 2003; Shipman and Walker 1989). This was seen by many researchers as a radical transformation reflecting a sharp and fundamental shift in niche occupation, and it emphasized a distinct division between H. erectus on the one hand and non-erectus early Homo and Australopithecus on the other. Earliest Homo and Australopithecus were reconstructed as essentially bipedal apes, whereas H. erectus had many of the anatomical and life history hallmarks seen in modern humans. To some, the gap between these groups suggested that earlier species such as Homo habilis should be excluded from Homo (Collard and Wood 2007; Wood and Collard 1999).
Recent fossil discoveries paint a picture that is substantially more complicated. These discoveries include new fossils of H. erectus that reveal great variation in the species, including small-bodied members from both Africa and Georgia (Gabunia et al. 2000; Potts et al. 2004; Simpson et al. 2008; Spoor et al. 2007), and suggest a previous overreliance on the Nariokotome skeleton (KNM-WT-15000) in reconstructions of H. erectus. Additionally, reassessments of the Nariokotome material have concluded that he would have been considerably shorter than previous estimates (∼163 cm [5 feet 4 inches], not 185 cm [6 feet 1 inch]; Graves et al. 2010), younger at death (∼8 years old, not 11–13 years old; Dean and Smith 2009), and with a life history pattern distinct from modern humans (Dean and Smith 2009; Dean et al. 2001; Thompson and Nelson 2011), although we note that there is substantial variation in the modern human pattern of development (Šešelj 2011). Further, the recent discovery of a nearly complete adult female H. erectus pelvis from Gona, Ethiopia, which is broad and has a relatively large birth canal, raises questions about the narrow-hipped, Nariokotome-based pelvic reconstruction and whether H. erectus infants were secondarily altricial (Graves et al. 2010; Simpson et al. 2008).
I should add that the average brain size of Homo ergaster / erectus specimens in Africa, dating from 1.8 to 1.5 million years ago, is a mere 863 cubic centimeters, while that of Georgian specimens of Homo ergaster / erectus dating from 1.8 to 1.7 million years ago is even lower, at 686 cubic centimeters (see Susan C. Antón and J. Josh Snodgrass, from Origins and Evolution of Genus Homo: New Perspectives, in Current Anthropology, Vol. 53, No. S6, “Human Biology and the Origins of Homo,” December 2012, pp. S479-S496). By comparison, the brain size of early Homo specimens (excluding 1470 man) is 629 cubic centimeters. [The brain size of 1470 man, or Homo rudolfensis, is variously estimated at anywhere between 526 and 752 cubic centimeters.] Quite clearly, there is no evidence for a sudden jump in brain size from Australopithecus afarensis (whose average brain size was 478 cubic centimeters) to Homo ergaster / erectus. The brain size of early Homo (who lived around 2.3 million years ago) is intermediate between the two.
Is the chimp our nearest relative, or is it the orangutan?
The Evolution News and Views post on the missing link also questions the molecular data linking human beings to chimpanzees, citing the work of Jeffrey Schwartz (who is referred to in the BBC article which it quotes from). Schwartz contends that our nearest relatives are orangutans, not chimpanzees. In a 2009 paper, John Grehan and Jeffrey Schwartz argued that orangutans were morphologically closer humans than chimps were. (See here for a summary of their arguments.) However, another more recent study using a larger dataset found that chimpanzees are morphologically closer to humans than orangutans are (see also here).
The BBC article also pointed out that “few researchers agree with Schwartz.”
In short: the claim that humans are anatomically closer to orangutans appears doubtful. In view of the unequivocal molecular evidence linking humans to chimps, I think it would be prudent to go with the mainstream view that chimps are indeed our closest relatives.
When did humans split off from the line leading to chimpanzees?
Family tree showing the extant hominoids: humans (genus Homo), chimpanzees and bonobos (genus Pan), gorillas (genus Gorilla), orangutans (genus Pongo), and gibbons (four genera of the family Hylobatidae: Hylobates, Hoolock, Nomascus, and Symphalangus). All except gibbons are hominids. Image courtesy of Wikipedia and Fred the Oyster.
Ever since the late 1960s, molecular biologists have argued that humans and chimpanzees last shared a common ancestor around five or six million years ago. Gorillas were subsequently estimated to have diverged from the human-chimp line about seven million years ago. Recently, however, these specialists have revised their dating, and some researchers in the field are now doubling their original estimate of the date of the human-chimp split.
In 2012, a report in Nature by Aylwyn Scally et al. estimated that humans and gorillas last shared a common ancestor 10 million years ago, while humans and chimps diverged around 6 million years ago.
In 2014, however, a new study by Gil McVean et al. (vol. 483, 169–175 (08 March 2012), doi:10.1038/nature10842) suggested a much older date for the human-chimp split. A Live Science report by Charles Quoi (Human and Chimp Genes May Have Split 13 Million Years Ago, June 12, 2014) summarizes the results of the study (emphases mine – VJT):
Past estimates of when the ancestors of humans diverged from chimps suggested the most recent common ancestor of both species lived about 6 million years ago. However, in the past decade or so, genetic analyses revealed the human mutation rate is actually half as fast as was previously thought, suggesting the most recent common ancestor of humans and chimps actually lived at least 12 million years ago.
Now a new study of chimp mutation rates appears to confirm that the most recent common ancestor of humans and chimps lived about 13 million years ago.
“Our results add substance to the idea that the human-chimpanzee split was considerably older than has been recently thought,” said study co-author Gil McVean, a geneticist at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics in Oxford, England.
Quoi qualifies his remarks by acknowledging that the new evidence is compatible with the human-chimp split having taken place as recently as 7 million years ago:
Paleoanthropologist John Hawks at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who did not participate in this study, noted that 13 million years is only the average time for when the genes of the ancestors of humans and chimps diverged; it’s not necessarily when the ancestors of humans and chimps split into different species.
“A species divergence of 7 million to 10 million years would be just fine with a genetic divergence averaging 13 million years if the common ancestor population was very large in numbers, or the common ancestor population was spread into different subpopulations with reduced mixing between them,” Hawks said. [8 Humanlike Behaviors of Primates]
McVean agreed with Hawks’ analysis. If the size of the ancestral population of both humans and chimps was very large, then their common gene pool may have begun diversifying long before the ancestors of humans and chimps split into different species, he said.
In the last year, more recent research has lent further support to the view that humans and chimps may have split up to 12 million years ago. I’ll mention just two articles:
(1) Variation in the molecular clock of primates (PNAS, September 20, 2016; 113(38): 10607–10612) by Priya Moorjani, Carlos Eduardo, G. Amorim, Peter F. Arndt and Molly Przeworskia:
Events in primate evolution are often dated by assuming a constant rate of substitution per unit time, but the validity of this assumption remains unclear. Among mammals, it is well known that there exists substantial variation in yearly substitution rates. Such variation is to be expected from differences in life history traits, suggesting it should also be found among primates. Motivated by these considerations, we analyze whole genomes from 10 primate species, including Old World Monkeys (OWMs), New World Monkeys (NWMs), and apes, focusing on putatively neutral autosomal sites and controlling for possible effects of biased gene conversion and methylation at CpG sites. We find that substitution rates are up to 64% higher in lineages leading from the hominoid–NWM ancestor to NWMs than to apes. Within apes, rates are ∼2% higher in chimpanzees and ∼7% higher in the gorilla than in humans. Substitution types subject to biased gene conversion show no more variation among species than those not subject to it. Not all mutation types behave similarly, however; in particular, transitions at CpG sites exhibit a more clocklike behavior than do other types, presumably because of their nonreplicative origin. Thus, not only the total rate, but also the mutational spectrum, varies among primates. This finding suggests that events in primate evolution are most reliably dated using CpG transitions. Taking this approach, we estimate the human and chimpanzee divergence time is 12.1 million years, and the human and gorilla divergence time is 15.1 million years.
(2) New geological and palaeontological age constraint for the gorilla–human lineage split (Nature, vol. 530, pp. 215–218 (11 February 2016) doi:10.1038/nature16510) by Shigehiro Katoh et al., argues strongly that humans last shared a common ancestor with the gorilla at least 8 million years ago, and possibly 10 million years ago:
The palaeobiological record of 12 million to 7 million years ago (Ma) is crucial to the elucidation of African ape and human origins, but few fossil assemblages of this period have been reported from sub-Saharan Africa. Since the 1970s, the Chorora Formation, Ethiopia, has been widely considered to contain ~10.5 million year (Myr) old mammalian fossils. More recently, Chororapithecus abyssinicus, a probable primitive member of the gorilla clade, was discovered from the formation. Here we report new field observations and geochemical, magnetostratigraphic and radioisotopic results that securely place the Chorora Formation sediments to between ~9 and ~7 Ma. The C. abyssinicus fossils are ~8.0 Myr old, forming a revised age constraint of the human–gorilla split. Other Chorora fossils range in age from ~8.5 to 7 Ma and comprise the first sub-Saharan mammalian assemblage that spans this period. These fossils suggest indigenous African evolution of multiple mammalian lineages/groups between 10 and 7 Ma, including a possible ancestral-descendent relationship between the ~9.8 Myr old Nakalipithecus nakayamai and C. abyssinicus…
The authors are uncertain as to whether Nakalipithecus nakayamai lived just before or just after the split between the gorilla lineage and the line leading to humans and chimps.
So at the moment, any date between 7 and 12 million years appears possible, for the human-chimp split. For my part, I’ll go with a date of 8 or maybe 9 million years for the human-chimp split, and 10 to 12 million years for the split between gorillas and the human-chimp line. I should mention that a date of 8 million years for the human-chimp split would push back the date of the split between orangutans and the other great apes to as early as 20 million years ago, which is about as early as the fossil evidence will allow.
Who was the last common ancestor, anyway?
Curiously, the BBC article cited by ENV says nothing about Sahelanthropus tchadensis (pictured above and at the top of this post), a hominin who lived 7 million years ago in Chad. Its discoverers claimed that it was a very ancient human ancestor but not a chimpanzee ancestor; however, some experts now believe it may have been the common ancestor of humans and chimps – or a very near relative.
Another possible candidate for the last common ancestor of humans and chimps is Graecopithecus freybergi, who lived on the savanna in Greece about 7.2 million years ago. However, a detailed examination of the morphology of the molar teeth associated with two fossils of Graecopithecus freybergi published in 2017 suggests that it may be a hominin, although other experts are skeptical.
Finally, Oreopithecus bambolii, an extinct hominoid primate discovered in the 1950s that lived in Italy from 9 to 7 million years ago, has been proposed by some as a human ancestor, although most scientists view it as an ape who was not part of the human lineage, and regard its anatomical resemblances to humans (notably in its hands) as an example of convergent evolution. To this day, the creature’s taxonomic status remains hotly disputed.
To sum up: the last common ancestor of humans and chimps may have already been found. But if the human-chimp split occurred 8 or 9 million years ago, the existence of possible hominin fossils from 7.2 million years ago is definitely a hopeful sign.
Conclusion
Despite the many uncertainties regarding the timing of the human-chimp split and the identity and appearance of the last common ancestor, scientists are justifiably confident that the chimpanzee is our closest relative. There is no good evidence for a “Big Bang” in human evolution, as far as the evolution of the human body is concerned; nor was there a time when our brain size suddenly increased. To sum up: the recent ENV article, which uses the absence of the missing link in order to cast doubt on human evolution, is profoundly misguided.
There has to be a reason we ask for reasons. Else what are you doing here?
I don’t think you ever answered mine. How about a little quid pro quo?
Actually, free of context, we have no idea whether a deletion requires one mutation or two. What if the two species without the extra base are sister taxa? A single deletion in their common ancestor could then account for their condition.
We learn a lot by trial and error methods. That does not make it innate.
Which ones?
That’s true, if we don’t know the relationships of the species we can’t distinguish between those scenarios.
Do you really not understand the difference between a sensory mechanism and the ability to use it effectively and efficiently?
LOL! Irony much?
*Sigh*…
http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/14854185
You know…you could actually look some of this up instead of just making up what you think makes sense. Because clearly, your concept of how things work isn’t all that accurate.
Of the two of us, I’m doing a better job…
Actually, I learned from watching other people do it and practicing on different foods. Like…um…all kids.
ETA: http://www.new-vis.com/fym/papers/p-feed27.htm
http://www.madeformums.com/baby/how-to-help-your-baby-learn-to-chew/11587.html
The specifics seem to me beside the point. Phoodoo is right in that there really are innate instinctual behaviors, he’s just happened to pick some bad examples.
Nobody taught you to breathe, to pick the most obvious. But he’s wrong when he says nobody has any idea where these come from or how they are passed on from generation to generation.
There is something worth thinking about here.
Lower animals have innate instinctive knowledge, knowledge that they do not learn from their parents because their parents aren’t around to teach them. Higher animals have some instinctive knowledge but the higher the animal the more they progressively they obtain knowledge by individual learning, and human learning takes this to the next level.
There is an evolutionary progression from a species or group knowledge to conscious knowledge at the level of the individual.
I’m not arguing there are not innate behaviors, but really…even his concept of that is flawed. However, there’s no reason to let his made up nonsense slide. Bats do not innately echo locate food. They are, in fact, shown how to do that by their parents and the community of bats as a whole. Even we humans have to learn to chew. The fact that he doesn’t know this, and worse, care enough to even try to find out, is really a testament to the ridiculousness of his perspective.
Don’t we look at the sequences so that we can know the relationships?
*Sigh*…
Who taught the bat to eavesdrop to learn to hunt?
1. Do you agree with me that Avida rewards longer genome lengths?
2. Why do you think it does that?
3. What do you think would happen if it didn’t?
I know I’m not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but I don’t understand any of this.
If one accepts common descent, then one must accept that a series of allele fixations can create complex structures. Whether those fixations were adaptive or neutral is an interesting question, but it’s besides the point: whatever the answer is, the process was capable of “designing” those complex structures. What kind of intelligent design hypothesis is compatible with this scenario? Is God sending angels to make sure the carriers of certain alleles score all the partners so that those alleles get fixed in the population?
Silly you. Thinking you’re a knife at all.
What else would I be? A spoon?
The sharpest spoon.
Glen Davidson
I’ll just point out that I don’t agree with the “third way” movement. I agree that there some problems with the traditional neo-Darwinist account. But I don’t agree with the “third way” alternatives.
It would be better to say that for me, it is naturally occuring homeostasis.
Kantian Naturalist,
Dear Spoon 🙂 I would be grateful to get your thoughts on this article.
Why Aristotle and Aquinas?
Michael Egnor
July 25, 2017, 1:50 AM
Aquinas
Here’s a fair question: Why do I prattle on so much about scholastic philosophy? Of what genuine relevance is it to intelligent design, and how is it of help in our twilight struggle with Darwinism and materialism?
My quick answer (and quite honest) is that I love it. The metaphysical perspective of the great scholastic philosophers — hylomorphism — is the best idea anyone ever had. At least, the best secular idea anyone ever had. There is a deep beauty and encompassing rationality to the Aristotelian-Thomist way of understanding the world. It can be said that Aristotle was the last man to know everything that could be known in his time, and that Aquinas was the last great systematic philosopher — the last philosopher/theologian to put together a coherent system for understanding all of reality. It is a way of understanding the world that is at once true and beautiful (and St. Thomas would say that truth and beauty are really the same thing). And I think that he pretty much got it right.
How does this help in the struggle between design and Darwinian materialism? Do beauty and truth really play a role in this fight in the trenches of 21st century science and culture? I think they do, in a practical way.
The fundamental modernist error is Nominalism. Nominalism, which is a philosophical school that had a foreshadowing in antiquity but fruition in the 14th century, is the belief that universals don’t exist independently of the mind. It is the view that such general things as justice or humanity or mathematics are merely concepts, with no real instantiation in the extra-mental world. Nominalism is the view that universals are just names, without instantiated reality. It is a view in contrast to the radical realism of Plato, who believed that universals existed in perfect Forms in a realm more real than our own, and to the moderate realism of Aristotle, who believed (in characteristically moderate fashion) that universals had an extra-mental reality in this world, but not in the Platonic world of Forms.
The problem with Nominalism is that it detached and eventually isolated the mind from the world, and evolved over time into the Cartesian dualist model of the mind — that man was a composite of two separate substances, mental and physical. Modern materialists simply discarded Descartes’ “mental” substance, and built their metaphysical structure (tottering as it is) on matter — merely a substance extended in space. It is through matter, and matter alone, that materialists try to explain the world. And of course “stuff extended in space” left no necessary room for God, which pleased newly emboldened atheists no end.
Materialism, the witless spawn of Nominalism and Cartesian dualism, provided passable grounding for some aspects of modern science, especially after Bacon discarded teleology as a principle of nature and Newton developed a rather successful cosmology based on the analogy of nature to a machine. Mechanical philosophy, the ideological substrate of materialism, became the default metaphysical stance of modern science.
But an explanation for life seemed beyond the reach of even most passionate materialist. “Stuff extended in space” seemed (to the unreflective atheist) adequate to investigate rocks and such, but living things manifest a breath-taking complexity and purpose that no one in their right mind could attributed to “just extended stuff.” Richard Dawkins got it right: materialism left an atheist intellectually unfulfilled.
Fulfillment came in 1859. Darwin’s “survivors survived” theory put life into the machine of nature, and seemed (if you don’t really think about it) to explain the uncanny adaptation of living things to the natural world. “If they didn’t adapt, they’d die! — that’s how it all happened! The non-adaptive ones are dead, the adaptive ones are alive! Biology is explained!” Atheism’s shiny new creation myth put out pseudopods into science and culture, degrading both in ways painful to examine. Fairy tales became scientific explanations, and they weren’t even nice fairy tales. In the Darwinian myth, man’s highest attributes evolved due to his lowest dispositions. Eugenics was and is the inevitable outcome of Darwin’s sanguinary anthropology.
If we are to defeat this madness, for the sake of science and culture and humanity, we must do more than grind Darwinism to dust, as necessary (and satisfying) as that is.
We must replace it. And the replacement must be something true and moral. Hylemorphism, the metaphysics of Aristotle and Aquinas, is the metaphysical system that Nominalism and Mechanical Philosophy and materialism and Darwinism replaced, yet it remains the one metaphysical system utterly opposed to the idiot and ugly errors of Darwin’s fairy tale.
My hope is that the ID movement can move toward an Aristotelian and Thomist critique of Darwinism. It is the most effective way — I think the only really effective way — to kick out the foundation of Nominalism and Mechanical Philosophy on which Darwin and his children built their fiction.
I admit it. Though considering you are the most prolific poster at TSZ …
I would be grateful to get the thoughts of anyone who could make sense of whatever claims Egnor is making there.
🙂
Yes but I was talking specifically about my made up example there, not about phylogenetics in general.
Never seen these questions before but ok.
No, in general that’s not what it does. What it rewards are particular logic functions, and those logic functions require increasingly complex supporting architecture as compared to the ancestor, depending on the type.
But merely increasing genome length isn’t rewarded with anything. It’s only when that genome can perform certain logic functions it will be rewarded. There are many possible large genomes that are not rewarded because they don’t happen to perform those logic functions.
Well since it doesn’t….
Will you respond to my questions now?
Once again you are wrong about Avida, lol. But yes, I will answer your questions.
It’s complete gibberish. Egnor is apparently in love with Thomism. Thomism, besides being an archaic (and useless) view of physics, also comes with this really strange idea that some things have some sort of true inherent purpose, and in so far as it is not correctly performing that purpose, it is “sinning” against it’s nature or some nonsense along those lines.
I really don’t believe I am, but I’d be happy to correct my purported misapprehensions if indeed they are.
Well, let’s think about this. Certain logic functions require quite a few steps to perform, even at minimum. If the reward is for performing these functions, and performing them requires longer genome lengths, can it be said that Avida rewards longer lengths? Well, yes, but this is like saying that if your goal is to drive from point A to point B and these points are some distance apart, that the “winning” paths are rewarded according to length rather than reaching the destination. And clearly, length isn’t the goal, nor is the reward given out for adding length.
So no, he’s not wrong about Avida. Instead, and as usual, you have misrepresented what’s going on. In fact, if you wish to drive from Baltimore to DC and you go by way of Dallas, you do get there but your path isn’t superior for being unnecessarily long, and there are some costs incurred with unnecessary length…
I don’t believe in mindless evolution because science cannot tell us that evolution is mindless. If you believe in mindless evolution what is the scientific evidence upon which you base your belief?
I also don’t believe in mindless evolution because I am a theist and I believe that God upholds all things in existence and sustains them in their existence.
To the extent that God might be involved in evolution I have no idea what the details might look like. It’s not like we have an overabundance of information on the matter.
No idea. And you don’t know and can’t know that mutations are accidents which God had no part of. Science just can’t answer that kind of question.
I’ve no idea. And neither do you. There’s no scientific way to exclude God as a possibility.
I don’t know, and neither do you. Science is silent and humans are largely ignorant. Sadly they are also too proud to admit it.
You should probably shut up since you obviously don’t know what you’re talking about.
If that were the criterion for posting here, you would have NO posts. Maybe you should think twice – uh, once. For a change.
I appreciate that.
Here is the relevant text:
Two distinct and separate ways to acquire additional processing, which of course leads to a reproductive advantage.
ETA:
http://myxo.css.msu.edu/papers/nature2003/Nature03_Complex.pdf
I read Sober on methodological naturalism in his Did Darwin Write the Origin Backwards? earlier today.
One point he makes is that when biologists say that mutations are “unguided,” what they really mean is very specific: it means only that the frequencies at which mutations occur is not caused by what will be adaptive to the organism. It does not mean that there are no “hidden variables”, not even supernatural or divine ones. And there’s this:
“The fact that mutations are undirected in the sense that I have described is not a problem for theism. Maybe God arranged for mutations to be undirected. And if some mutations in some organisms in some environments turn out to be directed, that is no threat to atheism. Atheism has no more stake in mutations being undirected than it does in organisms being unable to synthesize vitamin D from sunlight. The theory of evolution does not rule out deism, the thesis that God starts the universe in motion and forever declines to intervene. But the theory also does not rule out a more active God whose interventions into nature fly under the radar of evolutionary theory. Divine intervention isn’t part of science, but the theory of evolution does not entail that none occur” (p. 139).
This needs to be stressed, I think: the theory of evolution does not entail that there is no divine intervention even though mutations are undirected, because of what biologists actually mean when they claim that mutations are undirected. It’s an empirical claim about the frequency data, not a metaphysical claim about whether there are hidden variables, divine or otherwise!
The clear difference being that when I say you don’t know what you’re talking about I can back it up.
I would actually agree with that in most cases.
I don’t believe in mindless evolution because it has somehow been demonstrated, rather I go by the principle of parsimony, otherwise known as occams razor. In science we like to pick the simplest explanation. Positing an intending agent somehow being behind it all is an unnecessary complication. The explanation works without mind behind it, so there’s no need to invoke it to make it work.
It is not that I believe it has been proven false. I agree with you, in so far as we know nohing about the designer, that can’t be done.
But there is an exception to this. If we’re willing to become very specific and claim to know what the designer behind it all wants to do. In which case, this now gives us certain expectations about what we should observe evolving.
To make something up: Supposing we thought we knew that the designer would always want to make a species adapt instead of going extinct (say it said so in some particular religions holy book), in which case the fossil record would falsify that designer.
I agree though, we are not in that position in general. There are God-concepts that are sufficiently nebulous that they don’t make any predictions about evolution and seem like they can be bent to fit any observation. For such God-concepts, evolution can’t be said to have falsified them. Then for my part we’d just be back to Occam’s razor.
Excellent comment.
Must as when they call mutations random, they mean random with respect to the current needs of the organism.
Ahh no, you have misunderstood what this actually translates into in the avida world.
Yes, the organism is given energy equal to it’s genome length, so larger genomes are given more. But it is all expended on replicating that genome (as in the cost of genome replication is directly proportional to the number of SIP’s given).
So there is no advantage merely from having a long genome. If none of the logic functions evolve, the organism with a larger genome won’t have extra SIPs to spend on more rounds of replication. It’s entire budget is spent on one round of replication every time.
This just renders genome-length neutral. Not advantageous.
It gives them an advantage over the digital organisms with shorter genomes with a future goal in mind, which is stacking up logic functions. It’s teleological.
Do you really think that EQU would evolve without it?
Why not allow the additional genome length to be disadvantageous by not rewarding it with additional SIPs? Because the “complex functions” would never evolve if they did that. It’s designer meddling.
Why not smash the computer while we’re at it? lulz
First off Robin, the article doesn’t say that bats don’t know how to locate food unless they are taught. It says they become better hunters by watching other bats. But that doesn’t even matter, because the bats still have to learn how to fly. They have to know what up is and down is. They have to know not to fly straight into a wall. That have to know their mouths are for eating.
Are you seriously claiming that a single bat, raised in isolation, will just sit on a stump forever waiting to be taught (ok, not sitting, because no one taught him that. And again, not hanging upside down, no teachers. Perhaps just laying in a pile for a few years, only moving when someone forces food down their neck)?
So, I didn’t see you answer Robin, who taught you how to chew? Who taught you how to move your eyes and focus them? Who taught you how to move your fingers? Your parents must have been really really busy with you. Neil claims we learn to chew through trial and error. I guess swallowing as well. So when you first give babies food, I guess they often attempt to slam their chin up and down on their cribs, then do somersaults to get food into their guts.
Our brains connections and muscles are underdeveloped when we are babies, so we are uncoordinated. But each species still have their own unique knowledge they posses, and develop. No one teaches a whale to use its spout, no one teaches a shark to eat seals. Sharks will eat a seal as soon as it can. Monkeys will learn to climb, birds will learn to fly, even when no one teaches them.
I will give you credit however, you did make me laugh, by claiming you watch woodpeckers and that you have never seen a woodpecker learn to make a hole or find food by itself. That was funny. Now I think I am starting to get it, you were raised by woodpeckers, THEY taught you how to chew. To this day, do you twitch your head a lot from side to side while at a restaurant?
They are not bad examples, just examples you have no explanation for. And it is most certainly not besides the point. If we don’t even know what heredity is, how can we make assumptions about its causes? Charlie gave another good example, about the bioelectric code. More unexplained causes of life. There are so many its hard to keep up.
Handwaving these away and saying, “yea, but still, what do you think about mutations, did God do it,” is just trivial nonsense, and ignoring everything else that we need to account for.
We have this massive gap of understanding about what makes living things, living things (despite your sides silly proclamation that, hey someone knows, or Robin’s, “I watched woodpeckers, they can’t do ANYTHING without teachers bullshit) and I am supposed to be concerned with what causes gene insertions?
Talk about missing the forest for the tree.
I also like this part from Robins article:
This is one of the not so clever ruses of evolutionists. WE have to believe that one time, 49.5 million years ago I guess, there were all these bats with really bad echolocation. I mean really bad, terrible. They were slamming into each other, making incessant loops and getting dizzy, eating each others feet; most bats died early on just from head on collisions. But the few that did survive, well, another 10 million years later, their ancestors existed with only marginally bad radar. They occasionally would just fly up to the stratosphere, where they would run out of oxygen, or dive into the bottom of the Marinas trench. But again, a few more survived for the next ten million years, and they got even better…
And this my friends is the story of all living creatures, struggling along with terrible systems, until 50 million years later, the good ones emerged.
When I think about this, I think, I guess since humans have not been around for 50 million years yet, there are still enough people dam stupid enough to actually believe in this evolution fairytale crap.
lol. I loved it. Evolution may true, but god, the stories! Surely they compete with anything in religious texts.
You would think that there might be some bats who got stuck on a local peak in the fitness landscape.
I seriously doubt that there is a single person stupid enough to believe the evolution fairytale crap you presented. So you can sleep easier tonight.
Since I am not a Young Earth Creationist, and I do not believe, by away of example, that God literally took some mud and formed it into the shape of a man in less than 24 hours (I think it took millions of years for God to form the mud into a man), why should I care if humans and chimps share a common ancestor?
Because I don’t. I really don’t care. If they do, it’s a big so what to me.
But Flint, natural selection is all about optimization. If everything is already optimal, there’s no need for it. So what phoodoo is pointing out, in his unique style, is how nonsensical the evolutionist claims are.
Either that, or echolocation (for example) always worked perfectly.
Except in the real world where environments are always changing and what is optimal one generation may be far less than optimal a few generations later. Which is why evolution uses the feedback from selection to keep the population moving towards an optimum.
Could you be a bigger trolling asshole if you tried? Rhetorical.
I would think good enough would be the optimal over the long run. Too much specialization has risks.
If anybody know nonsensical it is phoodoo.
It doesn’t follow that the ancestor of bats with primitive echolocation must have been just like present bats, except for the echolocation. Another phoomungdish epic fail