Sandbox (3)

Sometimes very active discussions about peripheral issues overwhelm a thread, so this is a permanent home for those conversations.

This is also a continuation of previous Sandbox threads (1) and (2) that have fallen victim to the dreaded page bug.

1,013 thoughts on “Sandbox (3)

  1. From Dan Graur via jerry coyne’s site:

    1.Evolutionary biology is ruled by handful of logical principles, each of which has repeatedly withstood rigorous empirical and observational testing.
    2. The rules of evolutionary biology apply to all levels of resolution, be it DNA or morphology.
    3. New methods merely allow more rapid collection or better analysis of data; they do not affect the evolutionary principles.
    4. The only mandatory attribute of the evolutionary processes is a change in allele frequencies.
    5. All novelty in evolution starts as a single mutation arising in a single individual at a single time point.
    6. Mutations create equivalence more often than improvement, and functionlessness more often than functionality.
    7. The fate of mutations that do not affect fitness is determined by random genetic drift; that of mutations that do affect fitness by the combination of selection and random genetic drift.
    8. Evolution occurs at the population level; individuals do not evolve. An individual can only make an evolutionary contribution by producing offspring or dying childless.
    9. The efficacy of selection depends on the effective population size, an historical construct that is different from the census population size, which is a snapshot of the present.
    10. Evolution cannot create something out of nothing; there is no true novelty in evolution.
    11. Evolution does not give rise to “intelligently designed” perfection. From an engineering point of view, most products of evolution work in a manner that is suboptimal.
    12. Homo sapiens does not occupy a privileged position in the grand evolutionary scheme.

    https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2016/02/22/what-are-the-fundamentals-of-evolutionary-biology/

  2. Mung: New book by Douglas Axe is coming out in July.

    I visited the link (Amazon). But there was no “Look inside”.

    Thought I’d post a link here in case anyone wants to start writing a review of it before they’ve actually read it or get it re-shelved in the Religion section.

    If I look at the section “Customers Who Viewed This Item Also Viewed” on the Amazon page, then religion seems to be the right place to shelve it, assuming that the bookstore is looking for sales.

    I doubt that I will be buying or reviewing this book. But, who knows — maybe something will come up that changes my mind.

  3. I took this photo yesterday west of Pahrump, NV, on the way to Death Valley. For some reason it made me think of Sal.

    Heck of a Flood, eh, Sal?

  4. Not a review, but a prediction. Axe will prove that squirrels are unlikely to evolve into birds.

    Or some microbial equivalent.

    Supported by research.

  5. Mung:
    New book by Douglas Axe is coming out in July. Thought I’d post a link here in case anyone wants to start writing a review of it before they’ve actually read it or get it re-shelved in the Religion section. It’s already #1 New Release in Developmental Biology on amazon.

    Did the DI buy up the first 10,000 copies like they did for Meyer’s Darwin’s Doubt brain fart just to skew the numbers?

  6. Adapa:

    Did the DI buy up the first 10,000 copies like they did for Meyer’s Darwin’s Doubt brain fart just to skew the numbers?

    Did that actually happen?

  7. keiths:
    Adapa:

    Did that actually happen?

    Yep. It was part of the DI’s marketing strategy so they could boast about Meyer’s stupidity being #1 in sales for science books, at least temporarily.

  8. Adapa: Yep.It was part of the DI’s marketing strategy so they could boast about Meyer’s stupidity being #1 in sales for science books, at least temporarily.

    Where did you hear that? I don’t recall hearing about it.

  9. Adapa: Yep.It was part of the DI’s marketing strategy so they could boast about Meyer’s stupidity being #1 in sales for science books, at least temporarily.

    Not finding any references to this via Google.

  10. Apart from the fact that not supporting claims with evidence is bad form, in this case it might be considered defamatory. Some confirming evidence would therefore be appreciated. (By me, at least.)

  11. keiths:
    I took this photo yesterday west of Pahrump, NV, on the way to Death Valley.For some reason it made me think of Sal.

    Heck of a Flood, eh, Sal?

    The interesting thing to me – having walked that kind of territory many times – is that the whole foreground is clearly water-moved (well, in that kind of dry environment, wind erosion and deposition is also visible when you look close, but ignore wind for now) but moved at a timescale of one pebble at a time. If you hike up just a little way onto that range and look back down, you would see that the “plain” is a flat-fan shaped talus slope, barely consolidated, moved grain by grain and pebble by pebble from the eroding upper strata whenever a rainstorm loosens up a bit of rock enough to start it moving down. If you’re lucky enough, you’ll hear one bounce down while you walk — it’s a pretty sound. If you’re smart enough, you’ll extrapolate how long it would take to have moved just the visible pebbles, given one or two an afternoon as the average rate. Then if you’re geology-smart, you’ll think about the part you can’t see, whatever is buried under the eroded surface debris.

    In close view, you would see that the plain is cut by zillions of miniscule (and not-so miniscule) gullies and washes; whenever water flows, it pushes the debris fan further from the range into the basin. Of course, as it moves it sorts by size: the bigger stuff gets left closer to the foot of the range and the small sandy stuff can be carried farther away.

    We’ve known for generations that those pebble-and-sand-filled basins, kilometers wide, are also kilometers filled up, with the original bedrock surface of the valley now buried kilometers deep in the middle of the basin. And we’ve also known for generations that it wasn’t filled in a catastrophic single flood (because we know what that kind of damage looks like afterwards). 18th century technology and science were plenty sufficient to extrapolate and calculate what kind of time span must have passed to wash the range down into the valley, grain by grain.

    Of course it’s not thousands of years or tens of thousands. It’s millions of years. Anyone can see that.

    It takes willful blindness to ignore the reality of the rocks in favor of a hand-me-down tale from the Israelite goatherders (who, ironically, lived in a similar slowly-eroding land, and who surely would have been smart enough to visualize a longtime world – like the Hindu or Maya worldviews – if they hadn’t been blinded themselves by petty tribal religion).

    I recollect that Sal’s bible has something to tell him about his willful blindness to the old age of our Earth. Something like:

    Hear this, you foolish and stupid people:
    They have eyes, but don’t see;
    they have ears, but don’t hear.

    Okay, I admit that’s taken a bit out of context 🙂 but it still applies. Don’t forget, Augustine affirmed:

    Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience. Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn.

    Which is why the faithful christian 18th-century founders of modern geology were at least as smart as Augustine, and orders of magnitude smarter than today’s foolish YECcers who expose their personal versions of christianity to scorn with their literal nonsense.

  12. Alan Fox: Where did you hear that? I don’t recall hearing about it.

    Sorry I haven’t looked at this thread for a few days. I read about it on another science blog, don’t remember exactly where. The DI had their people pre-order a large number of copies of DD so it would immediately be listed as the top science seller the day it came out. If you check the sales record that’s exactly what happened. Of course after that one initial surge the sales rapidly sunk out of sight.

    BTW fuck you Mung. Stick to your lying and quote mining.

  13. Adapa: Sorry I haven’t looked at this thread for a few days. I read about it on another science blog, don’t remember exactly where. The DI had their people pre-order a large number of copies of DD so it would immediately be listed as the top science seller the day it came out. If you check the sales record that’s exactly what happened. Of course after that one initial surge the sales rapidly sunk out of sight.

    There’s no doubt the initial sales surge happened and rapidly faded away. I guess this may have been caused by bulk pre-orders. Whether somebody bought a large quantity purely to induce the spike is speculation for which there doesn’t appear to be any hard evidence. Does Amazon have a rule preventing anyone from gaming the system by paying out a large sum of money? It doesn’t seem to have been an effective use of cash in this case.

  14. I don’t have any evidence. But the evidence is out there, somewhere. I Think. Trust me. LoL

  15. Blast. I can comment but can’t preview an OP. I’ll try later on another computer.

  16. Neil Rickert,

    An issue arises on this computer (it’s not mine) when I have the link in the text. I can Save & Preview successfully if I edit the link out, but when the link is embedded, both give me an instant comms error screen (although the Save operation itself does appear to work, since a bad format in a prior version has been successfully overwritten).

    I’ll try at home later.

  17. Jason Spezza missed the last Dallas Stars game due to illness, but he was feeling much better Saturday. Spezza scored three goals, including the game-winner with 1:00 remaining, as the Stars rallied for a 3-2 win over Nashville to finish the 2015-16 season as the Central Division champions and the No.1 seed in the Western Conference.

    http://stars.nhl.com/

    Whee!

  18. keiths:
    The perennially confused Denyse O’Leary is at it again:

    Tree of life morphs into … leaf?

    Why, oh why won’t someone on the ID side sit her down and explain what the word ‘tree’ means in the context of evolutionary biology?

    There’s no vascular tissue. Hence it’s not a tree.

    Stupid Darwinists.

    I guess if “looks designed” is a powerful argument, so should “looks like a tree” be–along with its opposite. Any chance they’ll ever learn to think beyond homilies?

    Glen Davidson

  19. GlenDavidson: walto:
    My cat is def softer, though.

    But is it cuter?

    No way. But do we fault marshmallows and clouds for not being cuter than Robin’s bunny?

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