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?
There it is in all its glory; THE Fundamental Misconception of All ID/creationists.
For your information – not that it means anything with respect to your chosen path to remain ignorant – the second law of thermodynamics is required for any form of condensed matter, including life, to exist.
I won’t waste time trying to educate you because, as you clearly demonstrated here, you don’t learn. You continue to hold to the 50+ years of ID/creationist history and self-pity over the way you are being “persecuted.”
It is one thing to choose the path of ignorance for yourself; but it is quite another thing to become part of a socio/political movement that seeks nothing less than to throw misinformation and stumbling blocks into the learning paths of other people’s children by force of law. You get no respect from me for your choices.
If that’s what you wanted why didn’t you say! I’m sure a thread can be created and dedicated to this purpose!
A debate you say! Who was it you wanted to debate, and what about? Anything in particular? A fair few issues have been raised.
Ah, well, there is that.
So you are going because the rules you brought with you, that you did not mention in advance,were broken?
Is that right?
…
I don’t understand the necessity of that comment. It isn’t even true for anyone who has spent a lifetime doing science, Darwin, Kelvin, Pauling, Hoyle, and Einstein included
How is it possible to do science without making mistakes?
For anyone who has worked in science, if one isn’t making errors, one is very likely not learning anything new but is instead doing nothing more than the equivalent of routine drudge work and mopping up exercises. This is especially true at the frontiers of any scientific research.
Errors are a primary source of learning in science. If one isn’t learning from mistakes, one isn’t paying attention. In fact, historical blunders, misconceptions, dead ends, and escapes from these are routine parts of the educations of most scientists.
Take a look at Mario Livio’s book, Brilliant Blunders.
One of the primary differences between a pseudoscience, such as ID/creationism, and real science is that pseudo scientists never learn from mistakes because they are motivated by a preconceived ideology and an insatiable urge to be famous in some subculture.
Real scientific peer review is an intense crucible that no pseudo scientists can ever be exposed to without withering into a complete melt-down and whining about being persecuted.
Gregory:
I’m sture Darwin made errors, but not in the statement quoted by PaV. Feel free to jump in and point out where I am wrong.
Actually, cytochrome c is NOT required for cell growth and division.
See, for example,
Pearce and Sherman [PNAS June 9, 1998 vol. 95 no. 12 6915-6918 ]
“cyc1-Δ cyc7-Δ strains are defective in respiration because of the absence of both isocytochromes c.”
yet they seem to replicate just fine (on glucose, of course; they wouldn’t last long in the wild.)
Gregory, since you have accused me of posting in bad faith, the least you can do is tell me how I am wrong about this particular, rather narrow issue.
Mike E:
I’ve been wrong on a number of occasions, and I might be wrong here.
But I’m not willing to accept “it’s obvious” as proof I’m wrong.
So before you continue with the “everybody makes mistakes” apology, please tell where Darwin was wrong about life before the Silurian.
Has PaV actually defeatedDarwinism and is just too modest to rub it in by explaining how he did it?
Strange.
I’ve been outnumbered 12 to one on creationist sites without feeling outnumbered.
I don’t see anything wrong with the statement to which you are referring. PaV was simply being a jerk as far as I can tell.
However, Darwin was genuinely confused about the issue of inherited characteristics, and for good reason; he didn’t know about Mendel’s work.
Darwin went with blended heredity for a while, but seemed to be quite unhappy with it and eventually went with pangenesis, in which the entire body was supposed to issue instructions to the cells. He had notions of particulate inheritance but incorporated it into the wrong mechanism, pangenesis, for its implementation.
Mario Livio has a nice description of this in his book. The biologists here will know the history well.
PaV – and apparently Gregory, for reasons I don’t know – just seemed to be trying to tweak everybody here.
ID/creationist wannabe debaters ALWAYS assume the debates will occur on their turf and with their definitions, misconceptions, and misrepresentations. They will use the mistakes in science as fodder for arguments against science even though science is a progressive learning experience.
As we always see when one of the minions from UD shows up here, they throw a complete hissy fit when anyone here expects them to know some real science. They have spent all their time over at UD pumping themselves up to believe that their own pseudoscience is the real thing.
They won’t hear it when told that they don’t even have an adequate high school science education. That really upsets them; and, as we always see time after time, they cannot respond to questions about basic, high school level science. It is a startling phenomenon to watch. I feel I am sounding like an old, stuck record; but many of us who have been watching ID/creationism for something like 50 years now have seen it repeatedly, even among their “PhDs”.
Dembski, Sewell, Abel, and the rest get fundamental science concepts wrong at the most elementary level. As I am sure I have said a number of times over on Panda’s Thumb, if not here also, their misunderstanding of the second law of thermodynamics is what I call THE Fundamental Misconception of all ID/creationism. It is the misunderstanding that drives every calculation they make or demand of others. They really do think their opponents are expected to believe this misconception, argue accordingly, and then get trapped and lose in a flurry of gotchas.
I don’t think ID/creationists are capable of learning what the second law is all about. Henry Morris introduced the misconception back in the 1970s because the misconception fit perfectly with his sectarian beliefs; and ID/creationists are not about to change it now. That misconception has been central to ID/creationism ever since.
LOL! Nine years of debating ToE and you still don’t understand the basics. Whales didn’t evolve from hippos PaV. Whales and hippos shared a common semi-aquatic Artiodactyl ancestor around 60 million years ago.
There are terabytes of info on cetacean evolution readily available PaV, like this site by a prominent researcher:
Edward T. Babinski – Cetacean Evolution
I’ve known very few Creationists who enjoy staying as willfully ignorant as you do.
Now when will you be explaining about your ‘front-loading’ claims and telling us what Darwin got wrong about the Silurian?
Psst..hey PaV…even if Darwin meant Cambrian there’s still almost 4 billion years of Earth history before then as well as over 2.5 billion years of life before then. Darwin was still right, you are still dead wrong.
Seriously PaV, you are one of the most clueless Creationists ever to disgrace a science discussion board, and that’s saying something.
Is that really it? The terminology for geologic ages was imprecise?
Before radiometric dating and before most fossil finds. Before plate tectonics.
Just amazing.
ETA: That’s a bit like overturning the solar system because Pluto isn’t really a planet.
Holy crap I’ve rarely seen so much mangling thermodynamics. This is pretty much Vitalism you’re espousing. As if life somehow violates thermodynamics when it is alive. This is so wrong.
PaV, may I recommend a book?
Into the Cool: Energy Flow, Thermodynamics, and Life
PaV,
PaV,
Nobody is arguing that LUCA came about in a ‘completely random fashion’. LUCA is not the First Cell. It is supposed to itself have been an evolved cell, descended from ancestors that have left no other descendants. By reasonable inference, LUCA, all descendants and at least some ancestors had Cytochrome C. The origin of cytochrome C is therefore located in organisms ancestral to LUCA – unless LUCA was the first cell, which is not supposed by many. There remains the perfectly rational possibility that one would ultimately get to an ancestor of LUCA that did not possess ‘our’ cytochrome C – that had some other means of energetic conversion, or one so distantly related as to be unclassifiable as such. The universality of Cyt C is not evidence of its essentiality. Suppose we purged the world of every organism and fossil except for giraffes. Would a visiting alien be justified in asserting that life on earth is impossible without a long neck?
We don’t have a detailed history. You can have that one, if you like. Darwinists don’t know the Detail, therefore Design. It’s catchy; you could add a tune. Maybe Country. All we know for sure is that it had become non-negotiable by the time LUCA came along. But this fixity, in one or several proteins, still does not mean that LUCA’s descendants were incapable of evolution. Even cytochrome C itself can donate sequence to novel proteins, without any requirement to disable cytochrome C functionality while this happens.
But really, I struggle to follow your reasoning, which seems an ad hoc mix of Creationist notions. LUCA was front-loaded with all the proteins needed for all descendant forms, and yet none of those those proteins could change without Designer intervention, because some of them are conserved? Why did the Designer need to store them in organisms at all?
Ah, those pesky liberals!
True, ‘piling on’ is a bit of an issue. But ‘evos’ rarely feel it to be a problem at UD – indeed, they have to be escorted from the premises.
Well your paper :
“Ultimately, a combination of natural history, embryology, and palaeobiology will be needed to fully understand the unique anatomy of giraffes. This is not something which will be accomplished in a year or even ten, but will take the persistent investigations of many researchers working across a variety of scientific disciplines. For the moment, the question of “How did the giraffe get its long neck?” must be answered with “We do not yet know”, but that is as it should be. It is better to admit that we are still unravelling a mystery than to dogmatically assert that all is solved and that all the uncharted places on the evolutionary map have been filled in. ”
Agree with PaV.
An admit the darwinistic way of thinking:
“Giraffes, just like every other organism alive today, have a long evolutionary history stretching back to the last common ancestor of all life on earth, but understanding how they were shaped over the span of Deep Time is an ongoing endeavour which is just as inspiring as it can be frustrating.”
No matter what we will found evolution is true.
No, I do not want the detail, but I want the posiibility of speculate with the same level of respect as for darwinistics speculation that life started not with one LUCA but to teeming trillions of similar LUCAs that lead to the diversity of life we see.
Blas,
A frequent, rather petulant, complaint. And wrong. There are potential findings that would render evolution untenable. Find them, and lasting fame awaits. No scientific glory is obtained by supporting the status quo.
Usual darwinistic dicotomy. Maybe, but darwinism needs life started also by chance. If life didn´t started by chance ramdom unguided evolution could be only an illusion. So the very improbably fact that the 276 folded proteins able to evolve in the thousands of enzymes needed for the actual life were present in an viable cell millions of years ago should be a problem.
Incremental process in this case it is not usefull, you have the 276 folded proteins that will be usefull for all the future needs in the only life form that would have viable descendants. There is no incremental benefits. Maybe you should try the explanation that any other combination of 276 folded poteins would produce the same result (good lack with that) or invoke the multiverse, we are in the one it happened.
May be we stop to make “A frequent, rather petulant, complaint” when darwinists stop to write sentences like the quoted from the paper.
Edited for because of my poor English after A. M. response.
Blas,
Don’t quite understand. You made the complaint before my response … you’re going to stop saying it when darwinists stop responding to it? A bit cart-before-horse, surely? 🙂 Less facetiously, why does it offend?
[eta: now seen Blas’s clarification!]
Actually, no, it doesn’t.
May we anticipate an actual argument to this effect? I’ll be looking forward to the entertainment.
If life didn´t started by chance it was constructed. If it was constructed the diversity of the life was intended not “evolved” by chance but pre constructed. Also CD is not necessary. If you construct life you do not make a LUCA programmed to change in the diversity of life it is easier to construct as many different seeds as you can.
A dubious claim.
Maybe there was always life, so it never actually started. Or maybe it is an inevitable consequence of the laws of physics rather than the result of either a chance event or a construction.
This doesn’t follow, either. It could have been intended that evolution be the means whereby diversity is produced.
Your second claim doesn’t follow from your first. How do you know some intelligent space alien didn’t merely create the first imperfectly replicating molecules then drop them on Earth and let them develop any which way on their unguided own?
The cosmology in vogue denies that possibility, but suppose they are wrong Universe and life are eternal, why life make life re start with a LUCA to evolve again? What make it stop the eternal evolution?
The laws of chemistry determine that if life started only following them it was a chance event.
Neil Rickert:
This doesn’t follow, either.It could have been intended that evolution be the means whereby diversity is produced.
Well it is irrational to think that the intention of who constructed the LUCA (or the FUCA ) did it just to do it, without the intention of the variaton of life.
I do not know. But thinking rationally if you have the intention of seed life you do not drop replicating molecules and wait to see if chance made the job.
You may go for the unintentional drop of replicating molecules but it would be very interesting to read which molecules in which condition could produce life on earth.
The early earth was still inhospitable to life. It had to wait for some life to land there, and then evolve from whatever first landed.
An absurd response.
A designer God, who could design life so that it would evolve, would be a truly brilliant designer.
A God who would intentionally design, as a direct design, the AIDS virus, the yellow fever virus and the malaria parasite, would be a truly evil God.
What is it about ID proponents and creationists, that they prefer an evil God over a brilliant designer God? And then they say that they, themselves, are made in the image of that God.
According to many ID proponents, only micro-evolution is tenable. Therefore the designers did not create life to diversify, because every single time intervention is required to hurdle over the limits of their initial design. In other words, diversity = intervention.
It would seem that the microevolution position is incompatible with front loading and with fine tuning.
I would love to see the various schools of ID get together in one room and hash it out.
Sort of like Hunger Games.
Or more modestly, I would like to have an adult conversation with an ID advocate in which they don’t get pissy when you ask questions.
Given the observed behavior of Creationists (which category includes ID-pushers), it seems to me that the most parsimonious explanation for all of the seeming anomalies in Creationist argumentation against evolution is a simple one: Creationists are bullshitters. Their primary concern is that evolution must be seen to be false, and anything they can say is fair game, as long as it persuades others to see evolution as false.
Being bullshitters, Creationists are absolutely and totally unconcerned with the actual, intrinsic degree of truth or falsity of their statements; rather, their concern lies with the purely propagandistic issue of whether or not their statements have the appearance of truth—and even then, only to the degree that they feel the appearance of truth will encourage other people to see evolution as false.
Likewise, Creationists are absolutely and totally unconcerned with the internal consistency of their position. They don’t care whether or not Anti-Evolution Argument X, which they presented on Tuesday, directly contradicts the different Anti-Evolution Argument Y, which they presented on Monday. If Anti-Evolution Argument X is implicitly dependent on assumptions that falsify Anti-Evolution Argument Y, no problem; Creationists will happily present both arguments anyway, not caring that it’s impossible for both arguments to be valid.
It is certainly true that much of Creationists’ anti-evolution propaganda carries an seemingly-impressive veneer of sciencey truthiness. This is because Creationists recognize the persuasive power of valid scientific findings, so they craft some of their anti-evolution propaganda with the aim of emulating valid scientific findings.
There is, of course, value in unmasking a bullshitter’s lies as the lies they are. But never make the mistake of presuming that the bullshitter themself will be in any way affected by such unmasking; if they gave a damn about this “truth” thingamajig, they wouldn’t be a bullshitter. In pragmatic terms, the value of unmasking a bullshitter’s lies is that people are less likely to uncritically believe anything a known liar says, hence the bullshitter’s job becomes more difficult.
Niles Eldredge has written an essay (PDF but only 23 pages)
Finishing with the line:
which is an excellent homage to Darwin. Have a read and tell me what you think, Gregory.
I’m with the several other posters who have said that of course Darwin made errors, or at least some of his ideas proved incorrect (pangenesis and gemmules, for example) but so what? Science is not like philosophy. Darwin’s Origin is not a bible. Science moves on from Aristotle, Bacon, Dalton, Newton, Darwin, Einstein, keeping the good stuff.
And how this fitd with an eternal life?
No my response it is not absurd. If God could make all the life evolve from a LUCA it would be indeed a brilliant designer. The point is, knowing the actual life forms if we think in seeding life by an intelligent beeing capable of it, it is irrational to think that he seeded a LUCA and waited for the chance and natural selection do the job. It is more rational seed many “genomas” with the ability to evolved programmed on them.
The nature of God is a metaphysical question, not a scientific one.
Blas:
That’s not what LUCA means, Blas. It is not a seed. It doesn’t represent a point at which evolution stopped and started again. It is simply the common ancestor of all extant life. All contemporaries failed to leave descendants to the present. Even if life were eternal, a succession of individuals would qualify as a LUCA as viewed from the organisms alive at a given point in time, no intervention required. The logical possibility exists of independent origins or successive origins, but there would still be singleton LUCAs (in the ‘eternal’ scenario). The process is one of purification, as in a chemostat.
Do you agree that what you have said is speculation?
Blas,
No. It derives from mathematical treatment of replicating entities in a finite world over infinite time. Ultimately, one ancestor becomes the only one to leave descendants. It is the basis of neutral theory and of competitive niche exclusion in ecology. It can be demonstrated with a jar of M&M’s. The intuitive situation, of populations of descendants of different ancestors co-existing indefinitely, is unstable over the long run.
Applicabilty to ‘real’ history assumes that there is no process maintaining the balance – in that, it is speculative, but there needs to be a reason why the maths would not apply. You’ve simply imagined LUCA as a real bottleneck – that is speculative. No-one defines it thus.
Allan Miller,
Blas, cross-threaded to the ‘Barry Arrington’ thread:
LUCA is defined as the Last Universal Common Ancestor. A definition can’t be speculative. That there really was a LUCA is supported by work which has been extensively discussed at TSZ based in this paper by Theobald. The mechanics of population sampling that lead a neutral process to fix one ancestor from any starting population are well established. Selection will do the same, but more quickly. The main counterbalance to this effect in a real global population is likely to be provided by niche partitioning. Nonetheless, in the scenario we started talking of, an ‘eternal’ population, there is an infinite time for extinctions and recolonisation from elsewhere on the planet. You argued that LUCA would be repeatedly re-seeded. I said it would not – or rather it would not have to be. The world could be fully stocked at all times, and yet LUCAs appear successively.
These several lines of argument led me to offer that short answer to “will you agree it is speculation?”: No. (My car-sharing colleague was hovering over me at the time, so I had to be brief!).
-Theobald`s work is only a statistical analysis made assuming that 12 proteins evolved from one or two ancestors. Do not discard multiple ancestors with differents proteins or evlving independently.
-About your point of that populations that fix anly one ancestor. Do you mean that if I take two genetically modified crops only one will survive?
-When you talk about eternal life do you mean there are infinite OOL or infinite LUCA?
Blas,
It’s a statistical test of those possibilities. It comes down in favour of a single origin. Are we supposed to discard the test because we can think of other ways life could have evolved? The test supports a singular LUCA over those alternatives. And … you appear to be accepting evolution, just quibbling over a detail!
Yes. Assuming, of course, various things about the way you perform the experiment. Such as planting them in the same place, and not selecting.
I’m obviously not getting through on the LUCA thing. I assume an unknown origin(s), but the eternal operation of normal birth/death processes subsequent to the origin(s). A succession of LUCAs would emerge as part of those processes, being the prior organism from which (from any moment in the infinite series) all currently living organisms would descend.
One thing that creationists seem unable to wrap their minds around is that a common ancestor will exist in a population. Even from the earliest replicators.
If they are planted in the same place and interbreed.
No, I´m not accepting evolution as darwinist think it happened.
Let me refrase your idea. You have OOL that led to LUCA. Extintion of all life, and then a new LUCA. And this repeat eternally.
Right?
You make my point. You don’t understand the concept.
Who said anything about interbreeding? And ‘planting in the same place’ was simply a necessary condition for seeing the effect in a reasonable amount of time without added complications – such as evolution. Plant them on opposite sides of the world, and they do not form a population, and quite evidently much must happen before they can ever come to interact in an ecological sense. If they don’t form “A” population, because they do not cover the same geometric co-ordinates at any time, they are fully independent until such time as the descendants of one or other extend its range sufficiently, or extinction of one or other terminates the experiment (successfully, even though they never met).
Yeah, I gathered that. Though I would rephrase as “I´m not accepting evolution as I think darwinist think it happened” Your glib dismissal of the entire point of Theobald’s work by saying “Do not discard multiple ancestors with differents proteins or evlving independently” indicates that you don’t understand the work. But if you think the data could be accounted for by those things, you are relying upon a concept in order to argue against it – a damned sight closer to a ‘stolen concept fallacy’ that anything WJM ever dreamed up.
Jesus, no! I allow for any number of origins (or it just ‘always existed’). But it is a fact that most lineages will, in the fullness of time, become extinct. Each one that does increases the representation of those that don’t in the global ‘population’ – all organisms on earth. The logical conclusion of this, barring selection, is a point (in an infinite series, I am allowed that luxury) where the entirety of life of earth descends from a single individual. That’s not a ‘new LUCA’ – one becomes a LUCA retrospectively, just as you aren’t born a granddad.
Of course, in fact there IS selection, and there ARE niches such that selection varies across the planet. So there are other logical possibilities. An elephant will never compete with bacteria. It is perfectly logically possible for bacteria to have one origin – the LCA of all bacteria – and elephants to have another – the LCA of all mammals, say. This could happen through special creation, or something else. But bear in mind we are talking infinity. Can vertebrates last for ever? Probably not. They are susceptible to many threats that bacteria can evade. So even with special creation of these separate LCAs, there will be elimination of the lineages. Eventually, there is one LCA left standing – the Last Universal Common Ancestor. *** It was contemporary with elephants, and lived on a fully stocked earth. Elimination in this series is a gradual process, a bit like evolution itself (microevolution is extinction in miniature). You seem wedded to some notion of ‘big bangs’, and unwilling to grasp the implications of steady process. So an emphatic NO, I don’t propose the extinction of all life, just the gradual elimination of descendants, which is unavoidable in a random process.
*** I think, as a side-note, that LUCAs must always come from the ranks of the prokaryotes.
Of course, my analysis is purely for illustration of the conceptual requirement for being a LUCA. We don’t have eternity, and would struggle to imagine the elimination of all eukaryotes without a cataclysm. The issue is really with the historic LUCA, not the possibility for others.
LUCA can arise from different conditions. A single ‘seed’ organism would be a LUCA from its inception. But that is not the only way an organism can be a LUCA. Because it is simply an ancestor, it only requires that other ancestor lineages either never existed or have become extinct. The evidence does point to a single LUCA, but that is not necessary for evolution to be true. Nor is it necessary for evolution that LUCA had ancestors or contemporaries.
From the introduction of the book you cited:
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.
Is the process of refrigeration, and the process of calcification then the same process? IOW, the 2LoT explains how a refrigerator works and how crystillization occurs per your thinking. Yet one is obviously designed, is it not? So, then, how do you distinguish two systems which can only occur via the 2LoT?
In order for someone to learn, someone has to teach them. You have taught me nothing. Make reasonable and rational arguments, and support them with established scientific principles, and then you might be in a position to teach.
I have no children. I want to force children to learn anything by force of law. So, you know nothing about me, and yet you want to characterize me. You’re acting out of ignorance, not I.
From “Into the Cool,”:
So here you have an “anthropromorphic” view of nature (‘function’ and ‘purpose’) superimposed on life (its ‘function’ is to ‘reduce an ambient gradient’) masquerading as insight. Instead, it’s no more than bombastic rot.
Who can take this language seriously?
The ‘function’ of a balloon is to ‘rise.’ Yes, and this is because intelligent beings design them and enjoy them; and they have, outside intelligent agents, no other ‘purpose.’ Eliminate intelligent beings, and the language is completely vacuous.
I found these quotes via Google Books since I didn’t want to spend money on junk science. This is junk science. I’m not buying the book.
In Schrodinger’s “What is Life?” lectures, which I read years ago, and which forms the subject of “Into the Cool,” this is what Schrodinger has to say about “aperiodic crystals”, by which he was referring to ‘chromosomes’:
“Same pattern repeated again and again,”–that is, no NEW INFORMATION, versus “an elaborate, coherent, meaningful design.”
This says it all. QED.
Finally:
And when organisms ‘die,’ they return to ‘equilbrium’; that is, they turn to “dust.” Which is, of course, what I have posted.
BTW, I am now reading Schrodinger’s original papers on quantum mechanics written in 1926. Daunting, yet very rewarding, reading. I’ve studied QM for fifteen years, and it’s really only Schrodinger’s papers that give you an insight into QM. If you want to understand QM, then read his papers. Yet, as we all know, even these don’t answer all the questions, nor provide all the answers that Nature has already given us.
Schrodinger is one of the great minds in all of physics.