I note many public evolutionists, Prothero and Shermer and many others always stress the cases of vestigial parts in marine mammals as evidence for evolutionary biology.
Yet in reality this is a sampling error that in fact makes the opposite case against evolution.
I agree marine mamnmals once were land lovers and only later gained features to surbvve in the water. Not the impossible steps said by evolutionists, as Berlinski demonstrates, but some other mechanism.
Anyways evolutionists persusde themselves, and try to persuade others, that the real changes found in marine mammals proves creatures changed greatly and by Darwins method.
Yet the great truth is that for all the living and fossil biology that is observed at least 99%% has no vestigial features whatsoever. If all biology evolved then all biology should be crawling with remaining bits but in fact its a great missing anatomy. There are no vestigial bits save in very few special cases like marine mammals.
Therefore if evolutionists use these few cases to make the evolution case then in strict sampling disipline they actually make the opposite case. If finding a few vestigial bits is to prove evolution then the glorious ascence makes the true case that evolution didn’t happen because it should be that vestigial bits are the norm and not the exception.
So i propose its a sampling error to say vestigial bits of marine mammals prove evolution and in fact it must be proving the opposite.
I think this is a good point unless someone can show otherwise.
Maybe you could read about genetic algorithms, which are models of such a process. What’s interesting about these programs is that their output mimics the evolutionary process so very closely. Certainly they produce results unanticipated by those who developed the model.
The explanation is a reaction to what evolutionists find.
evolution has no right to claim that a clean sweep of all remnants/bits of previous anatomical body plans, and this endless from start to finish, WOULD leave the complete lack of vestigial bits from 99% of bodies.
the whole point of vestigial bits is about leftovers. In the snake the bits show a previous leggy life but they are irrelevant to be left by evolution for a purpose.
marine mammals have or sometimes are born showing remnant bits.
IYes evolutionism must explain the great amount of change in the bodies but the remnants is the issue here.
It should and muist be that all biology should be full of minor but many bits.
Evolution does not have a design to clean house but only make things effective.
Evolutionism can’t so easy dismiss complete acsence of vestigial bits by NOT NEEDING THEM.
Then invoke the few vestigial bits as proof of evolutionary biology/
the few are not the sample anyways and should not hint at evolutions truth.
YET evolutionists stress them to make a point.
As I said two points were made in my thread.
hotshoe_,
Or those viviparous sea-turtles. They had egg-laying ancestors who laid them in sand? They had fully land-dwelling relatives? Oh, come on!
Robert Byers,
Which is not what I said. Fundamentally, there is no significant reason to expect adaptive body parts to stop being adaptive on the grand scale. Where they do stop, it depends on whether they carry a cost as to whether one would expect them to be lost fast or slow, or partially or completely. This does not support an expectation that animals ‘should be’ stuffed with vestiges if evolution were true. It’s an expectation you made up.
[Shit, not doing very well with the old hierarchies and whales stuff …] Look over there! Flagella!
An appeal: is any creationist here qualified to discuss baraminology? By “qualified” I mean that you know enough about it to speak intelligently on the subject, to discuss its results, and to defend them.
John,
You want johnnyb, our newest moderator, who is a member of the Baraminology Study Group and has published papers in the “Occasional Papers of the BSG”.
I’ve never heard of viviparous turtles or tortoises, nor does a quick search bring up any.
Glen Davidson
LoL! Genetic algorithms are the antithesis of blind and mindless processes. GAs are great examples of evolution by design.
An appeal: is any evolutionist here qualified to discuss Common Descent? By “qualified” I mean that you know enough about it to speak intelligently on the subject and to show how to objectively test the concept.
LoL! If you can’t test that a bacterial flagellum evolved via NS, drift and/ or neutral changes, you don’t have a chance at explaining whales. And your “methodology” for determining Common Descent assumes it and doesn’t speak of any mechanism
Frankie is actually why I put out that appeal.
All evolutionists is why I put out mine.
John Harshman,
I don’t understand why you don’t just go to the creation orgs and ask
Most of them have banned him too.
Frankie,
‘Explaining whales’ is not the task (which is in any case likely to have absolutely knob all to do with explaining flagella). Inferring their relatedness to other groups is.
Explaining the existence of whales is the task Relatedness could also be related via a common design.
Frankie,
Nor does it need to. I don’t need a mechanism for how your mum and dad got to exist and meet in order to infer your common descent from them through molecular markers.
Was that a question? I don’t think they’d want to talk to me. It was my hope that the format of this site would provide a filter that would enrich the discussion in those creationists actually willing to consider a point and make an argument. So far my hope has been dashed almost continually. The signal/noise ratio here is no better than anywhere else.
There’s your problem. You are unwilling to consider how the data might look if there were common design vs. common descent and thus unwilling to think about tests of those hypotheses.
I don’t give a fuck about baraminology. All I know is that it predicted reproductive isolation before evolutionism existed.
I came here hoping that evos would actually have and post something that supports their claims. Unfortunately the signal/noise ratio here is no better than anywhere else.
Not true. Baraminology is a very recent “science”, a product of the late 20th Century. It seems you can do no more than parrot, either some creationist or the posts you respond to. And that’s noise.
Do you have any suitable examples of “creationist signal”? I’d like to see what it looks like.
Nor does baraminology predict reproductive isolation. What it predicts is that species in different kinds will be reproductively isolated (with some confusion about what degree of isolation there should be), but it also predicts (or claims, which is a bit less impressive) that reproductive isolation can also occur within kinds. Thus hybridization is evidence that two species are the same kind, but lack of hybridization is not evidence that they’re different kinds. According to baraminologists, at least. Why don’t you give a fuck about baraminiogy?
Of course baraminology predicts reproductive isolation. That is in the Bible. And I don’t give a fuck about the Bible and that is why I don’t give a fuck about baraminology. I have read about it but that is because I wanted to learn what people said about life on earth
Linne was a Creationist searching for the created kinds. That is baraminology
Frankie,
Could be, but ‘common design’ doesn’t really explain the existence of whales either.
Common Descent is much better supported by the data. Common Descent, or the desire of the Designer to make us think it was common descent.
Allan Miller,
How is Common Descent supported by the data when the concept cannot be objectively tested? And it only looks like Common Descent to the true believers
Frankie,
I think we’ve been through this [eta – check back from where I said you did not know what those words meant, something you have been handsomely demonstrating ever since].
If the data can be arranged as a tree, this is an objective test of the underlying possibility that the data resulted from vertical inheritance and branching from a common ancestor.
I could give you plenty of data that you could not arrange as a tree, even if your underlying assumption was that it was, because the assumption is not the deciding factor as to whether or not a tree is recovered. The data is.
That’s more of a Whig history thing. What makes you think he was searching for the created kinds?
What exactly do you give a fuck about?
Do you have a view at all? You dismiss evolutionary theory as far as I can tell. What’s left?
Ninja’d by John Harshman!
I figure Allan meant the (hypothetical) sea turtles of 20 million years from now, when my (hypothetical) replacement-idiot is denying that then-aquatic animals could ever have evolved from land-dwellers.
I think the example of sea turtles potentially evolving viviparity is brilliant. They wouldn’t have that brief but life-threatening land-based phase of egg hatching, so there could be selection pressure to drive that adaptation. It sidesteps some of CharlieM’s bizarre focus on whales — which I gather is just because of his underlying philosophy that animals must be advancing steadily up the ladder — and we know that viviparity has evolved many times in separate classes, so it’s not a baseless fantasy.
Yes, I figured that out almost as soon as it was posted, requested deletion, and then it reappeared. That’s been what happened the last two times I requested a deletion, and I have no idea why.
Oh well, there wasn’t any real need for your comment to be deleted, so it’s probably good that “requesting deletion” isn’t working. Your comment made me stop and think for a moment, which is a fine thing. 🙂
hotshoe_,
Yep, that’s it! Sometimes my dryness gets the better of me. 😉
I had, for extra drama, conveniently rendered all land tortoises extinct too, because it’s my future, dammit, I can do what I want!
I was prompted by a combination of an Attenborough documentary on turtle tribulations on the Great Barrier Reef, and a Wikimedia comparison of convergent evolution between whales and ichthyosaurs, both of which do/did tail-first live birth. I’d seen those only shortly before your post, and a little light bulb went on.
When you request deletion, the message goes into the moderation queue. And there is no indication on why it is there. So a moderator saw it, didn’t see a problem, and approved it 🙁
Maybe edit the message and insert “please delete” before you request deletion.
On a grand scale FINE from a evolutionary concept.
Why would it not be a expectation to have everyone , at leasy , some bits remaining from previous body plans.? why should any cost make a clean sweep?
Therefore I think the expectation should be of all creatures having leftovers in minor ways but lots if evolution did happen.
Yet its only a few cases that one would , without vestigial evidence, already conclude there had been a previous body plan very different.
This YEC seeing marine mammals as obviously one land creatures!!
I know we have been around the block on this.
You still are forced to see evolution clearing the deck of ANY vestigial bit and yet without a purpose to do so and so why should every BIT vanish? Especially when evolutionists stress vestigial bits when it suits them.
Anyways that is poor sampling which is another of my points about evolutionist presentations.
They don’t like the comment WHY ARE APES STILL HERE IF WE EVOLVED FROM THEM yet they don’t answer why are some creatures, few, have vestigial bits proving evolution, but 99% do not!!
anybody who has put their mind to it can contend about conclusions of origins of biology. Its not that hard as origins information is not really apparent. All we do is look at results and group things.
For example I don’t agree God created Mammals or reptiles or dinosaurs etc. These are just kinds that jave a few like traits.
Yet mankind got excited about the minor traits and made groups that nature doesn’t accept. LATER they said the groups came from common descent.
Yet its all from old ideas of grouping minor traits. No more clever then that.
Thats what furure people will say why there was so much error in biological classifications and origins.
A weird old concept of counting mammary glands and furry ears.
Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?
Robert Byers,
While I think my arguments on expectation have simply sailed over your head, can you actually name an organism that definitely has no vestigial parts? One of the 99%, so should be easy? Humans have a vestigial tail, so that’s in the 1% with the whales, snakes and flightless birds.
If you think your body has no vestigial features, take a hard look at your foot. It has toes, and those toes have nails on them, what for? There’s no reason for 5 individual potruding tiny limbs there, weak and vulnerable, with nails on top. They’re still around and have obviously been adapted to their position in some sense, but are they strictly required to be there and could a better system not be deviced? Of course it could.
All five of them could be sort of melded together into one single, wide and nailless toe.
Human vestigiality
This first placental mammal that you are so sure about, did it just aquire a placenta to the exclusion of all other mammals that were present at that time? Or were there placentas popping up all over the place by way of parallel evolution?
Is this fact or speculation?
The difference between us is that you are telling the story of placental mammal evolution as if it were an unquestionable fact and I am exploring other possibilities.
This from Resolving the relationships of Paleocene placental mammals, Thomas J. D. Halliday, Paul Upchurch, Anjali Goswami, Dec 2015:
They also say:
and:
So the alternatives are that placental mammals existed prior to 65 million year ago but no fossils have been found, or that they diversified with extreme rapidity after that time. I don’t deny that either of these scenarios could be possible.
Let’s say it was the latter. You believe that the evidence points to an exclusively land-dwelling furry critter as our common ancestor. This evidence is so strong that you are in no doubt that this is the case. Well following your lead let’s imagine this. At a time long into the future there is a museum with a collection of fossils found in strata that was formed from the UK c. 1000 – c.4000. There are currently in the UK an estimated 40 million plus shrews. They have a life span of about one year so you can work out their numbers over an extended period of time. News sources say that at this present time there are nine orcas living in UK waters. Let’s say their average lifespan is 50 years. If the future museum owns a couple of shrew fossils what do you think their chances of possessing an orca fossil is? I know its not an accurate comparison with what happened at the beginning of mammal evolution, but I you should be able to see the point I am making. Just because an organism reproduces more does not mean that it is going to be the one that shows a greater physical change as it evolves. For example compare bacteria and chordates.
What if your furry critter did very well at multiplying and colonising the world but didn’t do much evolving (after all it was successful as it was); but there was another mammal which lived in a very small corner of the planet but did not expand its territory in any substantial way. It however evolved rapidly and so left very few original stock to leave any fossils. But it did leave descendants which would eventually colonised the world. It may have flown under the radar of the fossil record. I’m sure we agree that the fossil record is highly fragmentary.
Do you know how many fossils have been found of your furry critter? The reason I ask is because I don’t know, but would like to find out.
In what way does the theory of continental drift extend the theory that land masses are fixed, or the steady state universe was just extended into an expanding universe? How about the phlogiston theory of combustion? How was that extended?
But if you want to stick with theories just being extended, what about the theory of evolution being extended? Directed evolution superceding unguided evolution.
You are explaining how science ought to operate, unfortunately it doesn’t always do so in practice.
I think you missed Flint’s point there. The theory of continental drift superseded the theory that land masses are fixed and part of the reason is that the understanding of continental drift extends our understanding of the distribution of plants and animals around the world and how they likely got in the current distribution (something that fixed landmass doesn’t help explain at all). It also extends our understanding of geological phenomenon as it now helps explain why certain mountain ranges appear to continue on separate continents (again, something that fixed land masses don’t explain at all). In other words, theories that supersede previously accepted theories do so in part because they help explain additional concepts that the previous theory didn’t help explain.
What does directed evolution add?
CharlieM,
It’s always possible that all land mammals evolved from repeated landward evolution from a rare marine mammal. But there are reptiles and amphibians to get under as well.
Basically, everything on land, in your idea, must come from side-radiations from a shallow marine lineage, if you wish to have that lineage permanently resident in the shallows (for the sole purpose of explaining whales!).
Look at the tree here, derived from molecular data not fossils. How many of those are marine, and how deep do modern marine exemplars go? Which do you think more likely: whales returned to the sea and lost legs, or there were multiple excursions from it which gained them?
How would you explore these other possibilities, scientifically? All you’re doing is saying “it could be true” without being willing to put your hypotheses to the test of evidence. Fossils and molecules all conspire against you here.