As an ID proponent and creationist, the irony is that at the time in my life where I have the greatest level of faith in ID and creation, it is also the time in my life at some level I wish it were not true. I have concluded if the Christian God is the Intelligent Designer then he also makes the world a miserable place by design, that He has cursed this world because of Adam’s sin. See Malicious Intelligent Design.
Jesus prophesied of the intelligently designed outcome of humanity: “wars and rumors of wars..famines…pestilence…earthquakes.” If there is nuclear and biological weapons proliferation, overpopulation, destruction of natural resources in the next 500 years or less, things could get ugly. If such awful things are Intelligently Designed for the trajectory of planet Earth, on some level, I think it would almost be merciful if the atheists are right….
The reason I feel so much kinship with the atheists and agnostics at TSZ and elsewhere is that I share and value the skeptical mindset. Gullibility is not a virtue, skepticism is. A personal friend of Richard Dawkins was my professor and mentor who lifted me out of despair when I was about to flunk out of school. Another professor, James Trefil, who has spent some time fighting ID has been a mentor and friend. All to say, atheists and people of little religious affiliation (like Trefil) have been kind and highly positive influences on my life, and I thank God for them! Thus, though I disagree with atheists and agnostics, I find the wholesale demonization of their character highly repugnant — it’s like trash talking of my mentors, friends and family.
I have often found more wonder and solace in my science classes than I have on many Sunday mornings being screamed at by not-so-nice preachers. So despite my many disagreements with the regulars here, because I’ve enjoyed the academic climate in the sciences, I feel somewhat at home at TSZ….
Now, on to the main point of this essay! Like IDist Mike Gene, I find the atheist/agnostic viewpoint reasonable for the simple reason that most people don’t see miracles or God appearing in their every day lives if not their entire lives. It is as simple as that.
Naturalism would seem to me, given most everyone’s personal sample of events in the universe, to be a most reasonable position. The line of reasoning would be, “I don’t see miracles, I don’t see God, by way of extrapolation, I don’t think miracles and God exists. People who claim God exists must be mistaken or deluded or something else.”
The logic of such a viewpoint seems almost unassailable, and I nearly left the Christian faith 15 years ago when such simple logic was not really dealt with by my pastors and fellow parishioners. I had to re-examine such issues on my own, and the one way I found to frame the ID/Creation/Evolution issue is by arguing for the reasonableness of Black Swan events.
I will use the notion of Black Swans very loosely. The notion is stated here, and is identified with a financeer and academic by the name of Nasim Taleb. I have Taleb’s books on investing entitled Dynamic Hedging which is considered a classic monograph in mathematical finance. His math is almost impenetrable! He is something of a Super Quant. Any way:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_swan_theory
The black swan theory or theory of black swan events is a metaphor that describes an event that comes as a surprise, has a major effect, and is often inappropriately rationalized after the fact with the benefit of hindsight.
The theory was developed by Nassim Nicholas Taleb to explain:
1.The disproportionate role of high-profile, hard-to-predict, and rare events that are beyond the realm of normal expectations in history, science, finance, and technology.
2.The non-computability of the probability of the consequential rare events using scientific methods (owing to the very nature of small probabilities).
3.The psychological biases that blind people, both individually and collectively, to uncertainty and to a rare event’s massive role in historical affairs.Unlike the earlier and broader “black swan problem” in philosophy (i.e. the problem of induction), Taleb’s “black swan theory” refers only to unexpected events of large magnitude and consequence and their dominant role in history. Such events, considered extreme outliers, collectively play vastly larger roles than regular occurrences.[1] More technically, in the scientific monograph Silent Risk , Taleb mathematically defines the black swan problem as “stemming from the use of degenerate metaprobability”.[2]
….
The phrase “black swan” derives from a Latin expression; its oldest known occurrence is the poet Juvenal’s characterization of something being “rara avis in terris nigroque simillima cygno” (“a rare bird in the lands and very much like a black swan”; 6.165).[3] When the phrase was coined, the black swan was presumed not to exist. The importance of the metaphor lies in its analogy to the fragility of any system of thought. A set of conclusions is potentially undone once any of its fundamental postulates is disproved. In this case, the observation of a single black swan would be the undoing of the logic of any system of thought, as well as any reasoning that followed from that underlying logic.Juvenal’s phrase was a common expression in 16th century London as a statement of impossibility. The London expression derives from the Old World presumption that all swans must be white because all historical records of swans reported that they had white feathers.[4] In that context, a black swan was impossible or at least nonexistent. After Dutch explorer Willem de Vlamingh discovered black swans in Western Australia in 1697,[5] the term metamorphosed to connote that a perceived impossibility might later be disproven. Taleb notes that in the 19th century John Stuart Mill used the black swan logical fallacy as a new term to identify falsification.[6]
The very first question I looked at when I was having bouts of agnosticism was the question of origin of life. Now looking back, the real question being asked is “was OOL a long sequence of typical events or a black swan sequence of events.” Beyond OOL, one could go on to the question of biological evolution. If we assume Common Descent or Universal Common Ancestry (UCA), would evolution, as a matter of principle, proceed by typical or black swan events or a mix of such events (the stock market follows patterns of typical events punctuated by black swan events).
If natural selection is the mechanism of much of evolution, does the evolution of the major forms (like prokaryote vs. eukaryote, unicellular vs. multicellular, etc.) proceed by typical or black swan events?
[As a side note, when there is a Black Swan stock market crash, it isn’t a POOF, but a sequence of small steps adding up to an atypical set of events. Black Swan doesn’t necessarily imply POOF, but it can still be viewed as a highly exceptional phenomenon.]
Without getting into the naturalism vs. supernaturalism debate, one could at least make statements whether OOL, eukaryotic evolution (eukaryogenesis), multicellular evolution, evolution of Taxonomically Restricted Features (TRFs), Taxonomically Restricted Genes (TRGs), proceeded via many many typical events happening in sequence or a few (if not one) Black Swan event.
I personally believe, outside of the naturalism supernaturalism debate, that as a matter of principle, OOL, eukaryogenesis, emergence of multicellularity (especially animal multicellularity), must have transpired via Black Swan events. Why? The proverbial Chicken and Egg paradox which has been reframed in various incarnations and supplemented with notions such as Irreducible Complexity or Integrated Complexity or whatever. Behe is not alone in his notions of this sort of complexity, Andreas Wagner and Joe Thornton use similar language even though they thing such complexity is bridgeable by typical rather than Black Swan events.
When I do a sequence lookup at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) National Center of Biotechnology Information (NCBI), it is very easy to see the hierarchical patterns that would, at first glance, confirm UCA! For example look at this diagram of Bone Morphogenetic Proteins (BMP) to see the hierarchical patterns:
From such studies, one could even construct Molecular Clock Hypotheses and state hypothesized rates of molecular evolution.
The problem however is that even if some organisms share so many genes, and even if these genes can be hierarchically laid out, there are genes that are restricted only to certain groups. We might refer to them as Taxonomically Restricted Genes (TRG). I much prefer the term TRG over “orphan gene” especially since some orphan genes seem to emerge without the necessity of Black Swan events and orphan genes are not well defined and orphan genes are only a subset of TRGs. I also coin the notion of Taxonomically Restricted Feature (TRF) since I believe many heritable features of biology are not solely genetic but have heritable cytoplasmic bases (like Post Translation modifications of proteins).
TRGs and TRFs sort of just poof onto the biological scene. How would we calibrate the molecular clock for such features? It goes “from zero to sixty” in a poof.
Finally, on the question of directly observed evolution, it seems to me, that evolution in the present is mostly of the reductive and exterminating variety. Rather than Dawkins Blind Watchmaker, I see a Blind Watch Destroyer. Rather than natural selection acting in cumulative modes, I natural selection acting in reductive and exterminating modes in the present day, in the lab and field.
For those reasons, even outside the naturalism vs. supernaturalism debate, I would think a reasonable inference is that many of the most important features of biology did not emerge via large collections of small typical events but rather via some Black Swan process in the past, not by any mechanisms we see in the present. It is not an argument from incredulity so much as a proof by contradiction.
If one accepts the reasonableness of Black Swan events as the cause of the major features of biology, it becomes possible to accept that these were miracles, and if Miracles there must be a Miracle Maker (aka God). But questions of God are outside science. However, I think the inference to Black Swan events for biology may well be science.
In sum, I think atheism is a reasonable position. I also think the viewpoint that biological emergence via Black Swan events is also a highly reasonable hypothesis even though we don’t see such Black Swans in every day life. The absence of such Black Swans is not necessarily evidence against Black Swans, especially if the Black Swan will bring coherence to the trajectory of biological evolution in the present day. That is to say, it seems to me things are evolving toward simplicity and death in the present day, ergo some other mechanism than what we see with our very own eyes was the cause of OOL and bridging of major gaps in the taxonomic groupings.
Of course such a Black Swan interpretation of biology may have theological implications, but formally speaking, I think inferring Black Swan hypotheses for biology is fair game in the realm of science to the extent it brings coherence to real-time observations in the present day.
cubist,
Can you explain why biology is more complex than quantum mechanics?
colewd,
The laws of quantum mechanics and the most important laws of physics can be expressed on one page. But how these laws play out in the world is as enormously complex as biology since these laws are part of how biology works.
The laws of how biology operates are not physical laws but cybernetic ones, much like the conventions of languages and X-boxes. They have law of their own. These laws are not easy to uncover and also there are so many of them! I count so many different kinds of biological languages at the molecular level (i.e. the DNA genetic code, the Histone code, the epigenetic codes, the epitranscriptomic codes, the glycome codes, etc. etc.).
Here are the fundamental laws from, you’ll have to scroll down this link to see the picture of them more clearly:
http://www.leaderu.com/offices/bradley/docs/scievidence.html
stcordova,
No, no you didn’t. There is no way to create a working piece of software from what you wrote.
It’s almost like this annihilator thing you talk about doesn’t actually exist.
Perhaps it annihilated itself while running.
Patrick, to Sal:
You forgot to capitalize ANNIHILATOR. It looks more impressive that way.
petrushka:
Retroactively.
This is surely wrong.
Yes, you could write down some equations on one page. But if you could travel back in time, and deliver that one page to, say, Aristotle, he would be unable to make sense of it.
You can fit syntactic laws of physics on a page. But it would take an encyclopedia to provide enough semantics to make that useful.
I have copies of everything I’ve ever written (other than proprietary stuff I wrote for employers).
I still think there’s some confusion over complex vs hard.
Quantum mechanics may require years of graduate school to understand, but the phenomena described are extremely regular.
Biology is extremely messy. There’s precious little that can be written in formulas.
Sal can struggle and strain til he busts a gut, and population genetics will never successfully predict extinction by genetic entropy.
This is thermodynamics all over again. Another lesson to be learned.
There is no neat formula to describe why populations do not go extinct, but except for very small and compromised ones, they don’t. Not without change to the environment.
You’ve been called out on making that false insinuation several times:
So how many times does Petrushka intended to keep insinuating that I’m making the argument that genetic entropy is necessarily leads to extinction?
Earlier in that same comment I pointed out:
Genetic deterioration isn’t the major cause of mass extinction, but mass extinction is a component of genetic extinction — 100% functional loss. Selection doesn’t arrest that [extinction], in fact it helps speed the elimination. Said it again, 7th time at least.
Genetic deterioration isn’t the major cause of mass extinction, but mass extinction is a component of genetic extinction — 100% functional loss. Selection doesn’t arrest that [extinction], in fact it helps speed the elimination. Said it again, 8th time at least.
Genetic deterioration isn’t the major cause of mass extinction, but mass extinction is a component of genetic extinction — 100% functional loss. Selection doesn’t arrest that [extinction], in fact it helps speed the elimination. Said it again, 9th time at least.
So now I count at least twice Petrushka insinuating something I don’t claim.
petrushka,
Just programs, thankfully.
Any poetry is compost.
I know you can do it Patrick, just model the extinction you see happening in the real world, you know — elimination of species by means of environmental destruction by humans seizing more environmental resources. The NCSE (National Center for Sellling Evolution) even provides the models:
http://ncse.com/blog/2015/08/polar-bears-climate-change-clich-disaster-0016579
The relevant section of code could look something like this:
....
if ( man_beats_polar_bear_in_struggle_for_existence) {
terminate_species_by_natural_selection (Polar_Bear);
System.out.println("You have been terminated! Bwahaha!")
}
....
I notice you haven’t claimed to have written an actual working program.
Patrick:
Sal:
Rhetorical question: Why are IDers like Sal and fifth always trying to get others to do their work for them?
keiths,
The last round of GAs, for example. Non of the doubters partook in the dark arts..
Even more interesting, why does this apply to work already done?
Sal, have you actually written and tested the program you describe?
A simple yes or no will suffice.
petrushka,
Sal already answered that question:
But as Patrick points out:
He hasn’t answered my question. Was there ever a program? Yes or no.
Here’s what was said. I notice there’s no actual claim of a working program.
I think perhaps it would be best to re-boot this thread and eliminate the fantasy components.
Leading question that presumes I used the word “program” rather than “model”.
So a simple no will not suffice since it was a leading question, like “have you stopped beating your puppies.”
But I have not written the software. I said so earlier:
Here is one fact:
But some code section can be rendered like this to model it:
If Number_right_whales_died > Number_right_whales_born, then they go extinct.
So why would you need to see such a computer simulation? You have the real data right there. Is a computer simulation somehow going to lend more force to my model than actual data?
And what about species we know went extinct in recent history, likely because of habitat destruction by humans. Why model it computationally. The actual data have more force.
In contrast, WEASEL doesn’t really model how the human genome from now onwards is going to acquire more function. How many nucleotides are being selected for to create that brand spanking new protein a few generations from now? No one knows, maybe it’s not even happening.
But I know the game, I’ll write a program and you’ll say it’s not realistic. Then I’ll point to the realistic data which still confirm the model in general and you’ll keep complaining about the lack of fidelity of the program! But no program will ever be as accurate as the actual data. So if you have the actual data, why do you need a simulation, why do you need code to validate the ANNIHILATOR model.
The ANNIHILATOR model is confirmed by the actual data. One could write the could as a theatrical exercise like WEASEL was a theatrical exercise. That’s the context I referred to the ANNIHILATOR software.
As of right now ANNIHILATOR software is vaporware, but the ANNIHILATOR model attempts to describe real evolution in the present day. I described the model in the OP this way:
Nothing in this discussion has overturned those basic claims.
Sal,
No. In that (pseudo)code, Number_right_whales_born and Number_right_whales_died represent the number of whales who were born/died in the current year. So if Number_right_whales_died > Number_right_whales_born, the population decreases, but that doesn’t mean the whales go extinct.
The condition for extinction is
Sal:
One reason is that it would help you catch stupid mistakes like the one you just made. Your model would have erroneously declared right whales extinct the first time the population declined. You would have noticed this and fixed it.
Aw, c’mon Kieths, that wasn’t the most charitable reading of what I said. But thanks again for your editorial suggestions. You’re comments are always helpful in that regard.
But what do you think, do you think more species are leaving the planet than arriving? If you say, “yes”, then what’s the point of my sim at least in terms of you agreeing with me? If you say, “yes”, then that moots the issue between you and me.
Same for everyone here. All I was trying to establish in the Black Swan OP is that evolution in the past must have operated differently in the way it operates today — that is in the past, if evolution happened:
1. net species increasing
2. cumulative evolution, not reductive
3. no net genetic erosioin
What’s not clear is where people really disagree. Do they disagree with my claim that in the present day and recorded history:
1 net species decreasing
2. reductive evolution
3. net genetic erosion
Is any one disagreeing with #1 for the present day and recorded history?
Well there have been about five mass extinctions, some involving more than 95 percent of known species. So the ratio of species creation to extinction varies.
But over the last 500 million years or so, new species have outnumbered extinction.
My reading is that, if we were to graph number of species against geologic time, we’d see a sawtooth shape – gradual increase in species numbers, followed by rapid wide-scale extinction. In addition to several major extinctions, there have been plenty of smaller scale mass extinctions. After each mass extinction, we see gradual radiation into vacated niches. This is explained in high school.
Whether or not we are currently in the midst of a mass extinction event has been the subject of some speculation, and the consensus seems to be that humanity’s explosive expansion and uniquely destructive practices have laid waste to vast swaths of habitats worldwide. By the time we have driven ourselves extinct, we’ll have taken countless species with us, creating new vacancies of all kinds.
None of this current extinction, however, really has anything to do with genome degradation. Each species humanity is driving extinct has a perfectly good, highly evolved genome rendering it entirely suitable for habitats people are in the process of re-engineering into something inhospitable for those species. I doubt anyone would term our slash-and-burn practices “evolution” of any kind.
It’s like the objects of mathematics!
Numbers 1, 2, and 3 are just flat wrong.
Next question.
I have copies of copies of everything I’ve ever written, even proprietary stuff.
In Ruby, all numbers are true.
You seem to be completely unaware of what is implied by the term Genetic Entropy.
I think I could write an ANNIHILATOR GA. It just has to not work, right?
stcordova,
Thanks for the references. Lots to read and think about here. Overall it looks like the ability to model physics is based on repeatable forces therefor we can create a model of cause and effect that is likely to simulate the real world (no black swans). Those same highly repeatable forces are just part the cybernetic world so when you try to model it with a known process you get lots of black swan events. I wonder what it is about the Cybernetic world that makes it so difficult to create a repeatable model?
Nor is this news to Sal. I can’t remember if it was this thread, or another thread last week, but I pointed out to Sal the Sixth Great Extinction: us driving extinction of species for reasons which have nothing to do with genetics. And Sal obviously read that, because he directly thanked me for pointing it out.
But here we are, a few days later, and Sal is right back to his fantasy that – since evolution can’t come up with a passenger pigeon which can cope with a new predator (who had guns) – evolution never did work and never can have worked.
Poor guy. He’s trapped in a world of excilience, doomed to ignore all aspects of reality which don’t conform to his YEC worldview. I believe it’s literally impossible for him to understand that our current disruption of all the world’s ecosystems is just a blip.
It’s not a graph of species but here is one chart I found plotting total number of genera vs. time for the last 550 million years. You can clearly see the mass extinction events and the subsequent recovery after each one.
Most people can see them anyway, but Sal won’t.
Source is here.
Hyper-evolution vs. Genetic Entropy.
When Sal was peddling Genetic Entropy over at UD he would just delete the posts of people who disagreed with him. Here at TSZ, he just ignores them. 🙂
You go Sal!
Bear in mind that if it weren’t for terminal confirmation bias, religion could not exist. Just try to count the number of gods people have invented because they WANTED them to be true, and how sincerely they believed in the reality of each of them. How could this be, if people had not mastered the art of ignoring all that didn’t fit, and inventing what did?
Yes, I thank you for pointing it out, and I still thank you for pointing that out.
If for the sake of argument the fossil record indicates a Saw tooth pattern of bursts of new species followed by decline (as Flint pointed out), then it is still not a proven fact the bursts happen by anything we see in the present day.
In the present day there is a huge amount of selection pressure being exerted on species because their habitats are being destroyed. Does this enormous amount of selection pressure create or destroy species? It seems to destroy more than they make. So it would seem the best chance of creating more species would be relaxing the selection pressure.
If I were an evolutionist and atheist, I’d argue the bursts of so many species in the fossil record was the result of a naturalistic Black Swan, possibly one we will never understand.
Physicists and information theorist have said the laws of physics are simple relative to very complex things. What they mean, in formal terms, is that the relationships represented by the laws of physics are “algorithmically compressible”, that is they are stated very succinctly — as I said, they can be symbolically stated on one page.
From those equations, namely Hamilton’s, one can derive Netwon’s 2nd law:
F = ma
Doesn’t get much simpler than that. How about Einstein’s famous formula (derivable from equation 5):
E= mc^2
Biology in contrast is highly complex from an information storage standpoint. It cannot be stated compactly, that’s why we have colossal gene databases.
Now, by complex, I really mean how compactly the equations can be stated. I’m not saying Physics is a simple discipline, or that Physics is not involved in complex questions — physics is most certainly involved in complex questions and ideas. It is complex in meaning (semantics) but not complex in regard to the symbols (syntax). For example, Einstein’s famous equation:
E = mc^2
is compact and simple to represent in terms of grammar, but it’s meaning is pretty complex.
So when I say physical laws are not complex, I was referring to the succinct and relatively simple syntax of equations, I wasn’t referring to the meaning of the equations, which as Neil pointed out, is very complex.
Look at the last of the 5 equations for Relativity. That is the equation, it is simply stated. But there are an infinite number of solutions to that equations, but most of those solutions, not even Einstein could find! Same with the Schrodinger Equations (the 4nd equation), same with Maxwell’s equations (the 2nd equation).
What I do I mean by solutions? Take Newton’s 2nd law
F = ma
there are an infinite number of possible values for F, m and a that will make that equation true, and those combinations that will make the equation hold true are solutions to that equation.
The equations of physics are relatively simple (relative to other things in math, not relative to the average person). But the solutions to the equations are not in general — some solutions to the equations can’t even be discovered by mere human minds.
stcordova,
Ignoring HGT, any given collection of bacteria coalesces upon single ancestral organism, so there’s no problem there. But this does not mean that that organism was the only one around, of course. It’s related to your ‘MRCA’ issue a bit back, although in this case, the MRCA really is one organism. Just not the only one of its type.
See also ‘mitochondrial Eve’. Her mitochondria (and hence all ours) will have descended from a single mitochondrion in her mum or her gran. It wasn’t the only mitochondrion in the world.
No, you’re looking at it backwards, no surprise, because of the personal bias you have towards a (biblical) narrative of degeneration from a state of initial paradise. It’s not a pattern of species followed by decline at all. It’s a pattern of sharp major extinctions caused by environmental disaster followed by bursts of radiation into newly-opened niches for species. These numbers of new species more than balance the “declines” upon which you choose to focus. You can speculate that every single one of those millions upon millions of new species in its own time was a special creation, if that makes you feel better.
But there’s absolutely no evidence that evolutionary innovation and speciation requires anything special, anything different than the processes we see in the present day: random genetic variation, drift, isolation, selection, adaptation, with successful new variations, and species divergence. IF it were done by special creation, it was done in such manner as to flawlessly mimic the cumulative process of unguided natural evolution.
The fact that we are currently in a period of “decline” – entirely caused by human population interference with evolved ecosystems – means that only a fool would try to draw conclusions about the average rates of speciation over a billion year timeframe based solely on “present day”. Just as you’d be a fool to draw conclusions about average rates of extinction based on the day the Chicxulub meterorite struck. You have to take a longer view. Yes, I’m aware of the futility of telling a YECcer to take a “longer view”.
Ahh, so close, Sal, so close to getting it right. If too much selection pressure is bad, then no selection pressure must be the good state, hmm? No selection pressure means only drift, which is a slow route to speciation. Drift is probably the explanation for species’ traits which don’t seem particularly adaptive, such as zebra stripes. But a moderate amount of selection pressure – not none, not too much – is the route to adaptation to new niches and speciation at the rate we see on average over the last half billion years.
Well, you can’t be an “evolutionist” because you’re a YECcer, and therefore you literally cannot believe in deep time, the time necessary for natural evolution to have occurred. But since we did in fact have that much time to accumulate genetic variation in populations, there’s no reason to think we need a special “Black Swan” explanation for bursts of new species into newly-open niches following major disasters. And there’s absolutely no reason to think “we will never understand”. We already do understand. Too bad you don’t.
stcordova,
I fail to see the relevance of this to biological history. And polar bears are a bad example. We aren’t lassoing the ice and dragging it southwards, and increasing our share of the niche as a result.
Richardthughes,
‘Twas ever thus. In the ‘M&M’ threads phoodoo had every chance to model fixation or generations, but let the ball fall to ground. I recall him getting pissy with me because I hadn’t provided some promised modifications to my own parameters by lunchtime, however. 🙂
stcordova,
The unrestrained enthusiasm of species for procreation, at heart. Pretty well understood. Speciation comes from partial or complete reproductive isolation between two such ‘enthusiastic’ subpopulations. Bursts [eta: noticeable bursts] can follow niche clearance, or when a particular change (eg wings) really takes off.
Take the lid off and organisms will crawl out of the container, till they hit a new limit, because (at the heart of the process) DNA replication produces two-for-one. Exponential increase is an inevitable consequence of lack of restraint.
Mutation plus Malthus.
Plus the red in tooth and claw queen.
Wow. Thanks for catching my error. You are correct and I’m wrong!
But, two things.
If that is the case, then what is happening in the present day is a mode not seen in the interpretation of the fossil record of species diversification where species are supposedly being added.
What we see in the present day is selection, not accidents, actively destroying species, not creating them. When evolutionists describe radiation, for radiation to happen, it is actually through absence of strong selection between species. There may be some mild adaptation within a species, like color, size, beak thickness, etc. So you pointing out my error strengthens my thesis.
I realized however, what I was referring to was Koonin:
If one ponders this, it shows an something incongruous with the sawtooth pattern you just described.
Look at Figure 2 by Koonin, it highlights the incongruity:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3840695/figure/fig02/
If we are in the sixth extinction, does any one really expect a new burst of complexity after most of the creatures on the planet are wiped out? I don’t.
That diagram highlights the long age interpretation of the fossil record is likely wrong! If the INTRA-species genomic comparisons lack diversity, as I said in my preliminary glance at gene databases, then my point is even more reinforced, and the phylogenetic trees are all wrong because the fail to deal with the lack of interspecies diversity.
Recent special creation of life is indicated. But if one doesn’t believe in God, one can say there is some undefined black swan process.
Thanks for pointing out my error and motivating me to revisit Koonin’s paper where I found new meaning in Figure 2.
Thanks for the skepticism, criticism, and correction of my mistakes. That alone made it worth my time to visit TSZ.
Koonin Figure 2:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3840695/figure/fig02/
Sorry Sal but there’s enough compelling evidence that it is considered scientific fact the re-radiations were evolution, not magic POOFing.
Which is what happens after a mass extinction. The survivors have much less competition and can move into the empty ecological niches. Biology101 Sal.
Evolutionists and atheists aren’t idiots trying desperately to twist reality to fit their religious fantasies.
The logic behind Sal’s posts is interesting, though repetitive:
1) Evolution does not happen.
2) There is overwhelming evidence that it happens.
3) Since it does NOT happen, this is actually evidence of miracles
4) Therefore, Sal’s god. QED.
There’s a neat diagram in Maynard Smith’s Evolutionary Genetics (forget the page, don’t have it to hand). It shows a series of lineages splitting and dying out, with one among the original many giving rise to most of the modern diversity. “What special properties did this lineage have, that others lack?”, he asks. None, it turns out – it’s computer generated, with nothing but stochasticity operating. Diversity is unavoidable. Populations cannot grow indefinitely and still act as a homogenised unit, with only one ecological niche to play in no matter what happens.