Darwin in a well known challenge in his book defied anyone showing that anything in biology could not be explained as to its origin by small steps from start to finish. Modern evolutionists also insist , however complex, that all biological entities at any point can be seen as coming from small changes in populations and from there in lineages from start to finish for anything.
It always bothered me that this line of reasoning was so important to darwins claim.
It was up to creationists to prove why accumulating small changes could not turn fish could not become fishermen or bugs into buffaloes . WHY NOT ? Darwin asked and ever since. however extreme the claim mat seem to so many.
I say lets turn the argument around on them. The line of reasoning works against them as follows.
I will use two improbable, impossible9did I say impossible) lineages of a finale creatures evolutionary origin.
ONE. to start you have a fish, then a fish breathing on land with crab legs, then it has horse legs, then its got a t-rex head, then its a ground bird with flippers, then a primate monkey, then a rabbit type creature with horns and crab legs, then a bird again, then a mouse. All this happening in about 200 million years of evolution.
TWO. you start with a fish, then a duck like creature, then a fish with flippers, then a land breathing reptile creature with a trunk, then a cat like creature with long giraffe legsm then a primate, then a shrew, then a primate again and finally a bird. 200 million years start to finish.
This is impossible by any common sense, intelligence, of any human being. never mind the intermediates. this sequence of these two creatures evolving this way from start to finish is self evident nonsense.
For evolutionists THEN explain why not BY small steps could these lineages not happen?? Why not, if small populations could be selected on to account for our real biology glory, could not my examples easily, equally, be accounted for bu evolutions mechanism.
if evolution can explain anything we have then why not anything we can imagine??
iF you say no. then the absurdity of bugs becoming buffaloes and fish becoming fishermen makes the creationist point solid and Darwins reply worthless.
This is a problem best approached from molecular biology. You can argue it from other disciplines, but molecular biolgy has the best shot at being definitive.
I dare the anti-theist, anti-Creationist, anti-ID contingent here to avoid insults.
Dare accepted. See my first post.
if evolution can explain anything we have then why not anything we can imagine??
Evolution works by modifying exist features. Every species we see today arose through small modifications to its immediate ancestors. Your hypothetical violates this principle by requiring huge discontinuous jumps between classes if not phyla.
I dare you to defend it.
It’s a standard creationist misrepresentation to claim that evolution “can explain anything.” Such a statment is an ignorant retort to the truthful statement that creationism can explain anything (or really, nothing, but if we grant an open-ended causation it could “cause anything”)–yet we have only things that apparently follow evolutionary constraints.
An example–why are bat wings modified mammalian forelimbs, and bird wings modified dinosaurian forelimbs? Why aren’t bat wings modified pterosaur wings, or modified bird wings, the natural sorts of things for designers to effect? Furthermore, why do bird wings develop with many separated bones which were articulated in terrestrial dinosaurs, but which fuse together to create rigid wings in birds? The constraints of evolution answer these questions quite well, while design has no answers.
Indeed, since there are no constraints in ID on design, and design can explain anything, why do we not have anything we can imagine?
We know why we don’t have just anything that we can imagine, which is because evolution will not allow it. Those without a constrained process need to explain why life is as limited as it is–and continually fail to do so.
Glen Davidson
Because evolution doesn’t explain “anything we can imagine”. Evolution does a pretty good job of explaining all the life-forms we actually know to exist, but that’s just ‘anything we know to exist’. And ‘anything we know to exist’ is a pretty darned small subset of “anything we can imagine”.
You want an explanation that covers “anything we can imagine”, try Creationism. Case in point:
To the best of my knowledge, this ‘critter’ & associated ‘lineage’ is a figment of Byers’ imagination which does not exist. As such, it is unclear why Byers thinks the theory of evolution should be able to explain a nonexistent lifeform with a nonexistent lineage. I am inclined to think that the theory of evolution is, indeed, completely unable to explain a figment of some Creationist’s imagination… but it is unclear to me why this ‘lapse’ should be counted as a flaw in the theory of evolution.
Agreed: The two ‘critter’-and-‘lineage’ combos Byers described are, indeed, self-evident nonsense. If Byers truly does believe that the theory of evolution should be faulted for its inability to explain self-evidently nonsensical figments of someone’s imagination, I would suggest that this belief says more about Byers’ preposterously distorted caricature of the theory of evolution than it does about the actual theory of evolution.
While the theory of evolution is, indeed, powerless to account for the self-evidently nonsensical ‘critter’-and-‘lineage’ comboes Byers imagined for us, it’s worth noting that Creationism can account for those self-evidently nonsensical comboes quite easily, with a simple It was the Creator’s will—the exact same explanation Creationism offers for absolutely anything & everything whatsoever.
Intelligent extraterrestrial life superficially indistinguishable from Terran humans, and capable of exceeding the speed of light under their own power? It was the Creator’s will.
A squadron of pegasus and hippogriffs performing precision aerobatic maneuvers in the skies above Nelson’s Column in the UK? It was the Creator’s will.
That ‘red matter’ stuff from JJ Abrams’ first Star Trek movie? It was the Creator’s will.
Flight-capable birds with solid gold bones, veins filled with mercury, muscle tissue whose density is greater than that of lead, and extremely small wings? It was the Creator’s will.
This is all fine and dandy Robert. But suppose the fossil record reflects the kinds of changes you say are impossible (that we have fossils of the organisms you speak of, they are in roughly the correct chronological order, and we have some occasional transitionals that are morphologically “in between” them), and that comparative genetics is congruent, why would you not conclude these transitions took place?
You seem to be laboring under the misapprehension that evolution is some kind of a priori idea that was invented for the hell of it. Rather it was originally the geographical distribution of organisms, their fossil record, and comparative morphology that lead to the positing of gradual evolutionary change.
Then later it was found that genetics overwhelmingly supports the inferences. Combined with the observation that organisms constantly undergo small changes.
If we had been in a different situation, Robert. If we had zero fossils, if their chronological order was a complete mess with no pattern to it, if populations of organisms did not ever show any change over time, and if the same was true for the geographical distribution of organisms and comparative genetics, THEN it would not make sense to posit that the kinds of transitions you speak about actually took place.
But that is not the situation we are in. To quote Kenneth Miller: “We have the fossils. … We win.” We have the genetics too, and it is congruent with the fossil record and compative anatomy. And we have the biogeographical distribution of the present, and the biogeograhical distribution of fossils. And we have and continue to observe that organisms evolve through numerous slight modifications both in the field and in the laboratory. The whole thing fits together.
What are you, 5 years old?
Unfortunately molecular biology doesn’t have a chance at answering the question.
That is the propaganda, however no one has ever tested it. There isn’t anything that can be modified in/ on a prokaryote to bring about eukaryotes. There isn’t anything to be modified in a flagella-less population to bring about flagella. That list is close to endless.
Glen, what are the constraints on evolution that prohibit outcomes such as legs turning into flippers or legs turning into wings?
We don’t see it, therefore evolution did not allow it, seems to beg the question.
There is no prohibition against legs turning into flippers or wings (there is no strict prohibition against Byers’ scenarios either, they are just fantastically improbable). What is not possible in evolution is for bats to have pterosaur wings, or vice versa. What would be simple for a designer to do–transfer a design from one separated lineage into another–does not occur, rather the bat can only have modified mammalian forelimbs as wings, because that is all the information that evolution has to work with.
Evolution of complex structures such as wings requires the modification of suitable precursors–such as functional forelimbs.
With birds, during development you still get the separate bones of articulated dinosaur forelimbs that only later are fused into rigid structures, a needlessly complicated development program with opportunities for failure (notably, evolution is something that often makes things more complex than would competent design). Not an intelligent choice, but it is what evolution has to work with, so it does.
Glen Davidson
I was using Darwins own words and Evolutiionists ever since own words.
Darwin trued to defeat any complaint that evolution could not create from scratch the glory of biology. HE SAID show why small steps COULD NOT do the trick.
They still say this.
SO i made a impossible lineage thought exercise.
Since its impossible then why? Why could evolution, by small steps, NOT bring this to pass??
If the evolutionist says it could then he admits the impossible can be created by evolution and so the creationist says This IMPOSSIBLE lineage is no more impossible then the lineages evolutionism claims to explain for real biology.
are saying evolution couldn’t make my two impossible lineages given time??
if not why not? Small steps can do everything evolution claims!
if it can’t then what are the boundaries? whats stopping it? Creationists are asked what stops evolution! Well if no boundaries then my impossible lineage is no different then lineages in evolution literature.they are just as absurd and impossible.
Fish can’t become men. Saying why not small steps is saying my lineages are possible.
Creationism can demand small steps/evolution has boundaries based in whats humanely thought possible.
I say not at all.
Fill in the blanks as you wish. I don’t mean such great leaps. I just needed great changes.
Are you saying that small steps could bring this impossible lineage?
if not what are the boundaries? if so then this impossible lineage is in nature no different then the lineage origins of biology today claimed to be the result of small step evolutionism.
What do you say?
My thread here was about what Darwin and evolutionists actually say.
Show usm they say, why small steps could not create the diversity and complexity of existing biology. what are boundaries to what small steps could do THEY ASK creationists.
SO. I turn it around on them YOU FIRST.
I make a impossible lineage and ask them what boundaries in small step evolutionism would make this impossible.
If nothing then they are admitting biology complexity never has a boundary however impossible. so they have a hypothesis/theory for the impossible and thats what creationists can charge. IT IS IMPOSSIBLE to make bugs into buffaloes and they must say NOTHING is impossible. This is against mankinds reasoning.
If there are boundaries then they admit there are boundaries and we say so too.
What do you say?
IWell why not? Why can’t evolution explain anything we can imagine?
What are the boundares? Anything they explain now they tell creationists SMALL STEPS can do it and tell us why not!!
Well you first!
Why couldn’t small steps create the impossible lineages I made up??
Is some result so unlikely that it nulligy’s a cl;aim that small steps can do anything?
If so then Darwin and friends must retract a major defence.
Do you say evolution could not create the lineages i made up? why not?
Are you saying a fossil record would /could represent my impossible lineages???
I made then up to be impossible.
Thats the thread.
Are you saying small steps can do anything we can imagine?
Then that would be unreasonable to most people and creationists can say the present claims of evolved lineages in the literature are not constrained by the impossible. They are impossible to common sense. fish really can’t become men after all. Its impossible. Small steps doing the job are no more likely then small steps doing my/anyones impossible lineage creation.
your other stuff is interesting but off thread.
Again, it might be best to think of an actual tree. As the tree grows, branches happen. And those separate into more branches, which separate into more, etc. Now, select some major branch off the trunk of the tree. We know that no matter how much that branch divides into smaller branches, every leaf of every one can trace backwards to that single main branch.
You are asking why a branch that has divided, cannot somehow subsequently re-merge into one branch. The simple answer is that branching growth can’t travel backwards in time, it can only grow forward. In principle, today’s humans could have diverged into a menagerie of wildly different species 100 million years from now. But every one of those species would be an ape.
It’s pretty common for creationists to think of evolution as a mechanism by which some CURRENT species morphs into some other CURRENT species. Beetles can’t evolve into trees. But they can and do evolve into a million different kinds of beetles.
Now, presumably a “tornado in a junkyard” sequence of coincidences could eventually produce a beetle that looks and acts like a frog. But this beetle would be completely different from a frog at the molecular level. Evolution produces endless branches off branches, but it never “unbranches” and works backwards.
” They are impossible to common sense. fish really can’t become men after all. Its impossible”
I agree. Yet at some point in the distant past, fish and men had a common ancestor, which surely looked nothing like either a modern fish or a modern man. And at that point, there was a branching event, whereby one branch led to fish and the other to men. Evolution can’t do a U-turn, travel backwards to that initial branch, and follow the other one.
Amen. Thats my point. If there are constraints then there are. Creationists xan say so and not be defeated by the reply SMALL STEPS can do anything and why not?
Them first? Why not any impossible imagined lineage.?
I always thought there was a flaw in this point of Darwin and company?
so rather then show the boundaries LET them show it!! very naughty.
I don’t think that there is any known reason why lobe-finned fishes (Sarcopterygii) could not give rise to land animals, possibly evolving to bipedal, fire-using, and speaking organisms all over again. Humans? Of course not, but possibly something reasonably like humans.
I’m not saying that it’s definitely possible, since we don’t know all of the chemistry and what-not. But, just looking at the fossils, the basic structural traits in lobe-finned fishes that allowed tetrapods to evolve do not seem terribly different from extant lobe-finned fishes.
There’s no going back, naturally, but some living forms have not changed a great deal morphologically, and it’s not inconceivable that if land animals disappeared and lobe-finned fishes survived, that land animals similar to many current ones would evolve out of the Sarcopterygii.
Glen Davidson
A number of people have imagined a world in which Hitler won WWII. Why can’t we test such scenarios in the laboratory?
Are they impossible, or just something that didn’t happen?
Glen,
I suppose if some species of fish just happened to have exactly the right environmental pressures and exactly the appropriate mutations at the right time, it could start in on becoming an intelligent terrestrial animal.
Not into a human being, but perhaps functionally similar if at that time such a niche should come open.
Robert:
Here’ a mind experiment. Take a ball, toss it high in the air, and note the precise spot where it finally comes to rest. The probability of it landing exactly there and nowhere else as infinitesimal, yet the ball had to land somewhere. If you were to designate that spot as a target, you could spend from now to forever and never again hit that target (or any other precise spot twice).
You are setting up a target like that, and demanding to know why evolution can’t hit it. And the answer isn’t that evolution cannot hit it, it’s that by the nature of the game, every evolutionary outcome is unique and never replicated simply because there’s an infinity of possible outcomes, and every outcome is astronomically unlikely, but SOME outcome is guaranteed.
Those aren’t the examples Byers demanded evolution explain in his OP.
Why don’t you stick to trolling your own narcissistic threads and not Mung up this one.
I abstracted this phrase then read comments, and see that others have done the same – it sticks out as the essence of the error being made.
Evolution does not need to explain things that did not happen. It doesn’t really need to explain why they did not happen. If we observed these strange chimeras (which curiously mix existing features rather than having brand new ones), we might need to explain them. But asking evolution to explain these non-events is a bit like asking Creationism to explain why we don’t have titanium heads.
Mung,
Robert tends to attract far less opprobrium than, say, ‘Frankie’ or Gregory. The reasons are fairly clear – he displays almost no bile himself. People’s default mode is not necessarily ‘attack’, even if they do occasionally allow frustration to get the better of them.
Flint said:
Except for, er, you know, when evolutionary outcomes are replicated.
Oh? At the genetic level too?
But, you know, you are right. It makes no sense for the same environmental pressures to produce similar “designs”. Yeah, you’ve spotted a fatal flaw alright!
Don’t you just hate it when your bald assertions are not true:
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn13663-evolution-myths-the-bacterial-flagellum-is-irreducibly-complex/
So, this irreducibly complex structure was formed by proteins that, for whatever reason, existed prior to the flagellum, and performed their own functions regardless of their ultimate use. That sounds like evolution to me.
I am my own person, I cannot be held responsible for actions I do not myself take. As such, I have so far passed your challenge. Just as it would be unfair to paint all christians with the sins of a few, it would be unfair to challenge all of us non-theists around here and then judge all of us if some few mess up.
Except of course that convergent evolution produces outcomes that are no more than functionally similar. In my analogy, that would be like arguing that since the ball comes to rest every time, these are identical outcomes! You know, like saying that the wings of birds, bats and insects are all replications of the same outcome.
If you abstract your error broadly enough, you could say that all life is identical because it’s all alive.
Thank you.
I’d say that legs turning into flippers and wings is no less improbable, but how would we know. 🙂
Your earlier comment indicated that there were certain constraints on evolution that prohibited certain outcomes. You said “we have only things that apparently follow evolutionary constraints.”
But now you say this doesn’t apply to any scenario presented by Robert in the OP. So how does evolutionary theory separate the impossible from the merely improbable? What are these alleged constraints?
You also appear to disagree with other posters in this thread when you say:
“The constraints of evolution answer these [why not] questions quite well.”
Why this outcome, rather than that outcome, is an essential part of evolutionary theory. Glen says the theory can explain both.
You don’t read at all well.
Glen Davidson
…no putative explanation of a given phenomenon is warranted if it cannot eliminate relative alternative explanations in a principled fashion.
– Stephen Boulter
A statement challenging ID theory? Sorry. No.
Glen says there is a principled way, others claim no principled way is required. Who is right?
That’s a convincing rebuttal! At least you didn’t accuse me of not writing well. That would have really hurt.
Flint,
fine. Yet thats not my point. i’m debunking a intellectual argument made at critics of evolution . We said right away its impossible for evolution to have created the glory of biological complexity and diversity from bugs, bacteria, fish etc etc.
THEY said wHY NOT? Why couldn’t small steps create everything. SO i said THEN they have to admit everything could be created. I make a impossible lineage and test them . if they sasy no then what are the boundaries including whats impossible. if they say YES then they are saying the impossible is explained by evolution and WE can say there is no difference between this impossible and what they say was created by evolution. THAT is also impossible.
WE are not defeated by the WHY NOT SMALL STAEPS can create anything used by Darwin and today.
I’m not doing that. i’m making a careful argument.
I’m saying if evolution created everything and creationists say its impossible and DARWIN?modern Evolutionists say WHY NOT small steps can’t create everything we have THEN i ask why not small steps create a impossible lineage i made up.!
I’m striving to show evolutionism must admit ot explains everything if small steps are its mechanism. there is no boundaries. So its admiting its a hypothesis for the impossible and so creationists can say what evolution does say it explains is also impossible.
Small steps is not evidence for a criticism that its impossible what evolution is saying it did.
Who could disagree? I feel a but… coming.
Oh he reads just fine. It’s the twisting of other people’s words and quote-mining when he repeats them back that’s the problem.
My first , possibly only, thread on TSZ. It was okay. Lots but not too much attention.
I was making a good point as i saw it. My articulation m,ay of been clumsy. (As usual).
No one made a good point against my conclusion.
Darwin did make a bad intellectual claim. modern evolutionists also do.
If evolution can not be refuted for making the glory of biology because small steps COULD create everything and WHY NOT! then evolutionists could never refute evolution creating anything one could imagine in making a biological lineage.
So they are saying evolution could explain the clearly impossible. Therefore the possible they claim it does explain has no more credibility then the impossible they must agree it can’t explain.
A logical fallacy.
Poor thinking and not scientific methodology at all.
I’m not sure I follow / understand, but keep making posts. different viewpoints are welcome!