“The selective incompleteness of the fossil record”

Posted on by

Denyse O’Leary quotes Steve Meyer’s question:

Why, he [Agassiz] asked, does the fossil record always happen to be incomplete at the nodes connecting major branches of Darwin’s tree of life, but rarely—in the parlance of modern paleontology—at the “terminal branches” representing the major already known groups of organisms?…

Was there any easy answer to Agassiz’s argument? If so, beyond his stated willingness to wait for future fossil discoveries, Darwin didn’t offer one.

and responds:

And no one else has either.

Oh, yes, they have, Denyse.  That’s what what punk eek was.  But it also falls readily out of any simulation – you see rapid diversification into a new niche at a node, and thus few exemplars, followed by an increasingly gradual approach to a static optimum, and thus lots of exemplars.  But I present an even more graphic response: when you chop down a tree, and saw it up into logs for your fire, what proportion of your logs include a node?

 

 

255 thoughts on ““The selective incompleteness of the fossil record””

  1. PaV: I have only stated here exactly what Schrodinger pointed out in 1946. There is nothing “mangled” about my view of life and thermodynamics. And if you think this book settles the matter, then let’s point out that Schneider is a geologist.

    PaV, how about you read the rest of the book instead of just the introduction? It debunks the very misconception, the apparent paradox. Apparent, not actual paradox.

    The book explains how life is a manifestation of the 2nd law of thermodynamics, not a violation or exception to it. Of course, you don’t get it all served on a platter in the introduction, so read the book in it’s entirety.

  2. One more ‘final’ quote:

    “How,” Schrodinger asked, “does the living organisms avoid decay?”
    “The obvious answer is: By eating, drinking, breathing and (in the case of plants) assimilating. The technical term is metabolism.” . . . Thus a living organism continually increases its entropy—or, as you may say, produces positive entropy—and thus tends to approach the dangerous state of maximum entropy, which is death. It can only keep aloof from it, i.e. alive, by continually drawing from its environment negative entropy—which is something very positive as we shall immediately see. What an organism feeds upon is negative entropy. Or, to put it less paradoxically, the essential thing in metabolism is that the organism succeeds in freeing itself from all the entropy it cannot help producing while alive.”

    You’ll notice the parallel between what I wrote and what Schrodinger wrote. This “Into the Cool” is a literal gold mine for ID thought. Let’s hear it for Schrodinger.

    BTW, I’ve begun reading Schrodinger’s lectures on Thermodynamics. Again, Schrodinger is pure genius. A bit advanced, though.

  3. Rumraket,

    rumraket:

    How is a ecological geologist, without a single equation, going to present a convincing thermodynamic argument, and especially when his use of language is sloppy?

  4. Rumraket: The book explains how life is a manifestation of the 2nd law of thermodynamics, not a violation or exception to it.

    But everything is a “manifestation of the 2LofTh. Life is impossible outside of this law. If life were possible outside of it, then it wouldn’t be a law. This is a circular way of thinking. What needs to be explained is “how” life produces “negative entropy.” And the word for “negative entropy” is “information.” And, guess what, we’re right back to where we started from, because ID argues that the presence of this “negative entropy”–that is an “aperiodic” protein–cannot be explained by the laws of nature. Hence some extra-natural explanation is needed: i.e., “design.”

Leave a Reply