The British biologist J.B.S. Haldane is said to have remarked that the discovery of fossil rabbits in the Precambrian would falsify the theory of evolution. Over at Evolution News and Views, Dr. Cornelius Hunter has argued in a recent post that the sea anemone (whose genome turns out to be surprisingly similar to that of vertebrates) is “the genomic equivalent of Haldane’s Precambrian rabbit – a Precambrian genome had, err, all the complexity of species to come hundreds of millions of years later.” Apparently Dr. Hunter is under the impression that many of these ancestral genes would have been lying around unused for much of that time, for he goes on to triumphantly point out that “the idea of foresight is contradictory to evolutionary theory.” RIP, evolution? Not by a long shot.
An unfortunate misunderstanding
Dr. Hunter seems to have missed the whole point of the report that he linked to. A sentence toward the end of the report would have set him right, had he read it more carefully (emphases and square brackets are mine – VJT):
It’s surprising to find such a “high level of genomic complexity in a supposedly primitive animal such as the sea anemone,” [Dr. Eugene V.] Koonin [of the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) in Bethesda, Md.] told The Scientist. It implies that the ancestral animal “was already extremely highly complex, at least in terms of its genomic organization and regulatory and signal transduction circuits, if not necessarily morphologically.”
That’s right. Genomic complexity and morphological complexity are two completely different things. That was the take-home message of the report. It was also the message of the other report cited by Dr. Hunter:
It is commonly believed that complex organisms arose from simple ones. Yet analyses of genomes and of their transcribed genes in various organisms reveal that, as far as protein-coding genes are concerned, the repertoire of a sea anemone — a rather simple, evolutionarily basal animal — is almost as complex as that of a human. (Emphases mine – VJT.)
As if that were not clear enough, Figure 1, on the opening page of the report, spells it out:
Figure 1: Animal miRNAs and morphological complexity. Grimson et al.3 (data along red lines) reveal the evolutionary origin of animal miRNAs by examining organisms at the base of the animal tree. Combining their data with previous work, three different measures of complexity become apparent: the number of protein-coding genes, total number of neurons and number of miRNAs. There is relatively little correlation between morphological complexity and the number and diversity of protein-coding genes. However, miRNA number correlates well with the organism’s total number of neurons. Indeed, a large proportion of vertebrate miRNAs are expressed in the nervous system. These data also show the dynamic nature of the miRNA complement in each lineage, particularly visible in rapidly evolving species (Oikopleura and fruitfly).
Morphologically, the ancestral animal was a very simple creature – so simple that the only real debate going on at present is whether it was more like a comb jelly (a creature with muscles, a nerve net and sensory organs, but no brain or central nervous system, pictured above, image courtesy of Kevin Raskoff) or a sponge (which is sessile and which lacks a nervous system altogether). Certainly it was nothing like as complex as a fly or a worm.
Genetically, however, the ancestral animal seems to have been in some respects better endowed than a fly or a worm. As the report cited by Dr. Hunter puts it (emphases mine – VJT):
The genome of the sea anemone, one of the oldest living animal species on Earth, shares a surprising degree of similarity with the genome of vertebrates, researchers report in this week’s Science. The study also found that these similarities were absent from fruit fly and nematode genomes, contradicting the widely held belief that organisms become more complex through evolution. The findings suggest that the ancestral animal genome was quite complex, and fly and worm genomes lost some of that intricacy as they evolved… The researchers also discovered that exon-intron structure is very similar between modern vertebrates and sea anemones. Both have intron-rich genomes and about 80% of intron locations are conserved between humans and anemones. Fly and nematode genomes, on the other hand, have lost between 50 and 90% of the introns likely present in the animal ancestor.
Building the Precambrian genome – was foresight required?
And what were these genes doing in the original ancestor, anyway? Is there any evidence to suggest that they were placed there in an act of foresight, to be used only by the ancestor’s distant descendants? I’m afraid there isn’t. Dr. Hunter has made an inferential leap here. He isn’t the only one: Dr. Stephen Meyer makes a similar criticism in a 2001 paper which he co-authored with P. A. Nelson and Paul Chien, The Cambrian Explosion: Biology’s Big Bang. Referring to Dr. Susumu Ohno’s now-famous paper, The notion of the Cambrian pananimalia genome (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Vol. 93, pp. 8475-8478, August 1996), in which Ohno proposed that “all those diverse animals of the early Cambrian period, some 550 million years ago, were endowed with nearly identical genomes, with differential usage of the same set of genes accounting for the extreme diversities of body forms,” Dr. Meyer objects that Dr. Ohno “envisions the pananimalian genome arising well before its expression in individual animals. Specific genes would have arisen well before they were used, needed or functionally advantageous” (pp. 31-32). However, in his paper, Dr. Ohno makes it clear that the ancestral genome he is envisaging was “rather modest in size,” and he points out that all of the five genes which he argues were “certain to have been included in the Cambrian pananimalia genome” were in fact useful to organisms back in the Cambrian period: indeed, it was possession of these genes that “made the Cambrian explosion possible.” Finally, I would like to pass on a rather blunt but factually accurate observation made by Dr. Nick Matzke, in a comment on an Uncommon Descent post I authored back in 2015:
…[B]ecause he’s not a paleontologist, one thing Ohno misses, IIRC, is that there is clear evidence of bilaterians in the Precambrian — trackways and burrows indicating bilateral symmetry, a coelom, etc., and these continually increase in complexity through the small shelly fossils, only reaching the “classic” Cambrian Explosion tens of millions of years later. This is all true regardless of one’s interpretation of the Edicarans etc. Thus, it’s idiotic to say, as Meyer does, that Ohno’s hypothesis means “the pananimalian genome ar[ose] well before its expression in individual animals.” Fossil traces of bilaterians are there before the Explosion, they had worm-level complexity, all of those common genes between all the phyla basically are what is required to specify a bilaterian body plan, which is what worms have.
In a follow-up comment, Dr. Matzke added:
There was, in fact, not a huge amount of origination of genes and proteins required to produce the Cambrian phyla, and we know this because they all have the same basic complement of genes and proteins. The differences that they have are basically due to differential duplication of genes and subsequent modification of genes, and sometimes rearrangement/recombination of pre-existing gene chunks.
A mea culpa
At the time, I was prepared to concede that Dr. Meyer was “probably wrong” on the the question of when these genes and proteins originated, and that they may have arisen long before the Cambrian period. I was even prepared to allow that the genes in the ancestral pan-animalian genome, back in the Precambrian, may have originally had functions of their own, that were later co-opted or ex-apted by their Cambrian descendants, giving rise to new functions. But it seemed to me that Dr. Meyer’s larger point – that the likelihood of even one functional protein fold originating on the primordial Earth was vanishingly low – was still valid. In the end, I thought that Dr. Douglas Axe’s 2010 paper, The Case Against a Darwinian Origin of Protein Folds, clinched the matter, since at least some new protein folds would have had to have come into existence during the Cambrian explosion, even if (as Dr. Matzke pointed out) there were only a few folds that were actually unique to bilaterian animals (the group of animals in which the Cambrian Explosion occurred), with just 17 new domains at the root of bilateria, (sponges and cnidarians having originated earlier).
How wrong I was. Last year, Rumraket wrote an excellent post debunking Dr. Axe’s claim that only about one in 1077 sequences of 150 amino acids was capable of folding and thereby performing some function — any function. There are, at the present time, no good grounds for accepting such a claim, and there are several grounds for treating it with skepticism. In my review (written last year) of Dr. Axe’s book, Undeniable, I describe how my own confidence in the much-vaunted one in 1077 figure was shattered, when I emailed some scientists in the field who kindly set me straight. I would therefore like to offer my belated apologies to Rumraket and to Dr. Matzke. They were right and I was wrong.
If you’re going to argue for design in the genome, this is not the way to do it. Here’s a better way, which doesn’t even use the word “design.” The facts speak for themselves.
Two questions for Dr. Hunter
Finally, I’d like to pose two simple questions to Dr. Hunter, regarding the papers he cited:
(1) Do you agree with the claim that humans are scarcely more complex (genetically speaking) than sea anemones?
(2) Can you cite a single proponent of either Intelligent Design or creationism who predicted this discovery, prior to 2005?
Complexity – good and bad metrics
Regarding (2), I can attest that leading ID proponents fought against the claim, tooth and nail, appealing to the “fact” that human beings have 210 cell types, while Cambrian animals had about 50 and sponges, only 5 (see this paper, for instance), and arguing that new genes and proteins would have been required to generate these additional cell types. However, the oft-repeated assertion that humans have 210 cell types turns out to be a myth, which has been roundly debunked by Professor P.Z. Myers. What’s wrong with this assertion?
The short answer: this number and imaginary trend in cell type complexity are derived entirely from an otherwise obscure and rarely cited 60 year old review paper that contained no original data on the problem; the values are all guesswork, estimates from the number of cell types listed in histology textbooks. That’s it.
And here are the original references cited to back up those figures about the number of “cell types” (a term which has never been explicitly defined) in various kinds of animals (emphases mine – VJT):
5. Andrew, W. 1959. Textbook of Comparative histology. Oxford Univ. Press, London
13. Borradaile, L.A., L.E.S. Eastham, F.A. Potts, & J. T. Saunders. 1941. The Invertebrata: A manual for the use of students. 2nd ed. Cambridge Univ. Press, Cambridge.
85. Maximow, A.A. & W. Bloom. 1940. A textbook of histology. W. B. Saunders Co., Philadelphia.
126. Strasburger, E., L. Jost, H. Schenck, & G. Karsten. 1912. A textbook of botany. 4th English ed. Maximillian & Co. Ltd. London.
Further comment is superfluous.
I’d also like to draw readers’ attention to a 2007 post by Professor Larry Moran, titled, The Deflated Ego Problem, in which he gently pokes fun at scientists who clung to the belief that the complexity of the human genome was far greater than that of “primitive” animals like flies and worms, and listed seven proposals (all invalid, in his view) for redeeming the complexity of the human genome.
Dr. Hunter’s statement that “we repeatedly find early complexity” when investigating the history of animals suggests that he would answer question (1) in the affirmative: our genes are about as complex as a sea anemone’s. As for morphological complexity, I can only state that as far as I can tell, there isn’t any straightforward way of measuring it, although I have no doubt that I’m structurally far more complex than a worm or a sea anemone. (Insects I’m not so sure about – see below.)
I understand that a recent paper in Nature (which unfortunately I cannot access) has finally addressed the origin and evolution of cell types in a rigorous fashion, and that Steven McCarroll’s Lab at Harvard Medical School and the Broad Institute is attempting to map the different kind of cells in the body, using micro-RNA.
I’d like to conclude with a quote from P.Z. Myers’ 2007 post, Step away from that ladder, on the subject of complexity, which is well worth reading (emphases mine – VJT):
I’m fairly familiar with the insect neurodevelopment literature, so when I saw papers saying arthropods only have 50-60 cell types, alarm bells started ringing...
I’m also familiar with some embryonic vertebrate nervous systems, and I can say that they tend to have many more cells in them — but they don’t seem to be as precisely identified at the single cell level as the invertebrate CNS. We have large populations of cells with similar patterns of molecular specification, rather than this kind of precise, cell-by-cell programmatic identity.
Now, from a genetic perspective, which pattern is more complex? I don’t know. They’re both complex but in very different ways — it’s basically impossible at this point to even identify a quantifiable metric that would tell us how complex either of these kinds of systems are. How many cell types are present in this whole animal? I don’t know that either… I bet it’s many more than 60, though.
I’ll go out on a limb and make a prediction: any difference in the degree of complexity, assuming an objective method of measurement, in the triploblastic metazoa [basically, all animals except sponges, placozoans, cnidaria and possibly comb jellies – VJT] will much be less than an order of magnitude, and that the vertebrates will all be roughly equivalent… and that if any group within the vertebrates shows a significant increase in genetic complexity above the others, it will be the teleosts. I’ll also predict that any ‘extra’ complexity in members of these groups will not be a significant factor in their fitness, although it might contribute to evolvability.
What do readers think? Over to you.
No, that’s not even close to being correct.
The Origin and Evolution of Eukaryotes
Just google “drunk cartoon parrot”. That is the first phrase that comes to my mind whenever Joey repeats one of his lame catch phrases.
Environmentally induce mutations do not make them directed mutations.
If they are not “random with respect to fitness” they aren’t Darwinian. If such non-Darwinian mutation occur, then Darwinism is false. We’re still waiting to hear what theory has taken its place. Do you know?
Wouldn’t one need to do an analysis of all the environmentally induced mutations to know if they were random according to fitness, not just a selective few?
If you read PaV’s comment…
Did all of these mutations come about almost at once because of a changed environment? IOW, are these “directed” mutations.
…it’s immediately obvious what’s being debated and why this doesn’t imply any kind of “directed” mutations, or “directed” evolution, unless you want to label the environment and natural selection a “director”
I wouldn’t agree with that. It looks “non-random,” and I’ll tell you why.
First, the IS proportion continues as the lineage begins to change. I’m assuming here that the IS involve transposons, and since McClintock’s time they were observed to act in a “non-random” fashion.
Second, the amount of “deletions” decreases with time. Behe postulates that the “First Rule of Adaptation” is to begin breaking things down, usually via deletions of one sort, or another. Behe presumes that there are inner “mechanisms,” such mechanisms also being to some degree “non-random”.
Third, the intergenic number of mutations increases in time, and I suspect this is simply the analogue to what we see happening with transposons and deletions.
No- random with respect to fitness is not point. Random with respect to evolution means happenstance, accidental. error, mistake.
Environmentally induced mutations support Spetner’s (1997, 2015) “non-random evolutionary hypothesis” which posits “built-in responses to environmental cues” (1997) as one mechanism. Epigenetics seems to support that claim, at least he seems to think so (2015).
This is an odd statement. I wonder if you haven’t thought it through enough. Think of the Adriatic Lizards that changed phenotypes in less than 30 generations.
PaV,
Hey PaV. Are you suggesting that mutations are directed by God?
BTW, you explain things quite clearly. That’s not an admission that I think you’re correct about these matters–not ready to do that now–but you do explain yourself well. I’m guessing you teach.
As to your response: first, it states what I didn’t think you would state, and that is why I asked the question you didn’t quite understand.
You’re positing that an Archaeon engulfed a proteobacterium (I’m assuming you mean it wasn’t quite fully a ‘bacteria’–is that right?) and eukaryotes came about. The first question that pops up in my mind is why did it take 2 billion years for an Archaeon to “engulf” a proteobacterium?
It sounds like a “just-so” story, right?
Endosymbiosis only explains the origin of mitochondria and chloroplasts. Eukaryotes are much more than prokaryotes with mitochondria or chloroplasts. So that is one issue. Also not one of the observed endosymbiotic events has ever lead to anything like what would be required for an engulfed prokaryote to become mitochondria or chloroplasts. And that would be another issue.
Remember you are expecting blind and mindless processes to pull this off. So you would need the “right” kinds of populations of prokaryotes. living together or very close to each other so they could get together- and where they came from, well forgetaboutit- they just were and they pulled off this magical union. Once that union was solid magical things started happening- other organelles emerged and a nucleus was ordered from Amazon. Once the nucleus arrived we discarded the original host genome and inserted the nucleus. It was the 2.0 version so it started downloading genetic material from the mitochondria straight away. Eukaryotes by means of blind and mindless processes!
Nudge, nudge, say no more…
Who or what directed the environmental changes which affected the lizard’s phenotypic changes? The Intelligent Climate Designer?
Wikipedia says:
Here, eukaryotes resulted from the entering of ancient bacteria into endosymbiotic associations with the ancestors of eukaryotic cells, which were themselves possibly related to the Archaea.
If they invoke “ancestors” of eukaryotic cells for this explanation, then what did that “ancestor” look like? Did it have a nuclear membrane? And, if so, where did it come from? It couldn’t have “engulfed” it from somewhere else.
Further, where did diploidy come from, and the associated mechanisms for mitosis and meiosis?
If someone were to say that God brought this about, that would be a better explanation than saying that all of this just showed up. It seems to me that you only make the latter statement to avoid making the former, even though the former is logically more satisfying. Both statements involve that which is invisible. So how do we discriminate between them?
PaV – working hard to bring back the “God of the gaps” defense for Creationism science has rejected for over 200 years. 🙂
Why do you say that? The article you link doesn’t argue against what I wrote.
I say it because your one line response was overly simplistic. There is far more involved in eukaryotic origins than a single simple “engulfed” event.
An explanation for eukaryotes has to involve more than the statement that “an archaeon engulfed and alpha-proteobacterium”.
I agree. But even if the environment is causing additional mutations to happen, or even specific mutations to happen, that still doesn’t mean they aren’t random with respect to fitness. It’s not like the environment, or the cell, somehow “knows” and has “set up” the mutation to happen? At least, why should we believe that it was?
Suppose the environment contains some sort of chemical, or a pollutant, which if it enters a cell, causes a mutation in a particular gene (we can just stipulate for the sake of this hypothetical that there is some mechanistic reason for this, perhaps the chemical has some particular shape, so it attaches to a particular protein, which regulates a particular gene, so it only comes into contact with that particular gene, causing the mutation). Ok, so this chemical is causing this particular mutation. It’s “environmentally induced”. Does that make it non-random with respect to fitness? I mean, is there something intrinsically beneficial or deleterious about such mutations, for example? Does the organism “know” that this will happen? It seems to me it’s entirely a matter of contingency, a happenstance, that there happens to be this particular chemical in the environment, and that it happens there is a protein in the cell to which it sticks, and so on and so forth.
Sure. If. Are we aware of a case where mutations happen which aren’t random with respect to fitness, and out of all the mutations that can and do happen, how many are produced by such a mechanism?
Right. I didn’t purport to offer anything more than the explanation by it’s title. Endosymbiosis, between alpha-proteobacterium engulfed by an archaeon. Does that single sentence constitute the actual explanation? No, of course not. Merely saying that this is the event that started it all doesn’t say how this subsequently evolved into eukaryotes. It’s a subject I don’t think I can do justice myself. So rather than try, and waste a lot of time, I name the explanation. If PaV wants more detail, he’s going to have to read about it.
What’s a big deal about this non-sense?
Don’t you ALL know that mindless evolutionary processes can accomplish anything you have not been able to predict?
That’s why they are called evolutionary. Anything you want, they will do it as long as long as it is a slow process and takes billions of years.*
*if need be, we can do it faster if non-sense theory requires it.
Rumraket. So many topics, so little time. LoL.
A 21st century view of evolution (pdf)
Evolution by Natural Genetic Engineering
Natural Genetic Engineering and Natural Genome Editing
If organisms adapt in response to their environment that is hardly Darwinian evolution.
I don’t recall specific details but it’s my understanding that many of these experiments are in fact repeatable, and “random mutation” as an explanation is no longer viable. This is non random evolution. I won’t call it directed. But I also won’t call it Darwinian.
Thank you, but no I actually don’t teach.
Ahh, no. I guess you misread the word “proteobacterium” to be proto-bacterium, As in “prototype” or “primitive” or something like that.
The correct term is alpha-proteobacterium. which is a specific class of bacteria that still exists today, from the proteobacteria phylum. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphaproteobacteria
I’m not quite sure what kind of answer you expect to get to a question like that. Why wasn’t I myself born 400 years ago? Well my parents weren’t born yet. Why weren’t they born yet? Well their parents weren’t born yet. Why weren’t they? Etc.
What other kind of answer can I give, than something like that? Why do things take the particular time, and require the particular conditions they do, and why don’t they happen sooner and require less time? PaV, could you even imagine that I could give you an answer to a question like that, that you would find satisfying and compelling?
When we explain historical events, many years later, they’re always going to sound like just-so stories. After all, the event already happened. So when we explain it, we are explaining something from history. Hi-story. it happened so and so. Just like that.
Suppose I tell you there was a designer and that designer designed the first eukaryotes. It was a God, or technologically advanced space aliens, or whatever, and they/it came to the Earth, and had some sort of technology or power, and created the first eukaryotic cell, and placed it in some particular environment so it could adapt to life and subsequently evolve and bla bla bla. How would that be less of a just-so story?
Hi Mung. Thanks for your comments. I’m a bit busy right now, but I’ll get back to you in about 16 hours. Have a good day.
Story of my life. :/
I’d say that would be “textbook” Darwinian evolution. What the hell else would they adapt in response to?
I’m kidding, I think I get what you were saying, you just described it in a bad way.
If organisms can reliably and repeatably cause their own evolution, in a biased systematic way, such that they increase their rate of adaptation to changing conditions, I agree that would be a form of non-Darwinian evolution.
I don’t disagree with any of that. As you probably know, I follow Larry Moran’s blog and I’ve been pretty convinced by his arguments about the large role of genetic drift in molecular evolution. So I don’t have any problems saying I don’t believe strictly Darwinian evolution is the best explanation for the nature and diversity of life. At minimum, such an explanation has to include genetic drift and endosymbiosis.
So no, random mutations filtered by natural selection does not explain all aspects of the nature and diversity of life. In so far as ‘Darwinism’, or ‘Darwinian evolution’ is taken to mean “random mutations filtered by natural selection”, Darwinian evolution is insufficient as a full explanation for the nature and diversity of all known life on Earth.
Predict the next design and what process the designer will use to implement his design.
Do the organisms adapt to survive or do the organisms with the adaption survive more often?
Ramruket:
You haven’t yet written anything about the “non-randomness” I pointed out. Will you be doing that? I’d be interested in how you’d react.
I don’t believe Dr. Hunter thinks Darwinism is falsified, I believe he thinks it is unfalsifiable. He doesn’t think a pre-Cambrian rabbit would falsify Darwinism, and he doesn’t think the sea anemone will either.
Darwinism is a story of moving from the simple to the complex. Yet that’s not what we find. We find initial complexity. We find that evolution must have made organisms less complex. IOW, we find the opposite of what the theory predicts. Yet this doesn’t serve to falsify the theory. The conclusion is not that it has been falsified, but that it is incapable of falsification.
That, IMO, is the point of Hunter’s post.
It’s not an argument for front-loading. It’s not an argument for design. It’s not an argument against common descent. It’s none of that. It’s a statement about evolutionary theory.
And Hunter sums up:
That’s his point. If you’re not addressing that you are not addressing his argument.
If that was true as a matter of principle, and a counter-example was found, then the theory would be falsified. It’s just how logic works,
Your intellect has been poisoned by religion and you clearly don’t understand what “entailments entail”, because you’re used to proof by assertion. But that’s your fault (and possibly Hunter’s too) and no one else’s
It’s fucking hilarious. Someone asks how one could falsify evolution. Well, you shouldn’t need to ask, all you need to do is figure out the entailments of the theory, but ok, you get your response: a precambrain rabbit.
What do you do? you ignore that and keep repeating the same nonsense that evolution is unfalsifiable.
Irony meter explodes again: common descent is an entailment of evolution. You believe in common descent, but you also believe evolution is unfalsifiable. Therefore, you believe that you believe in common descent for totally unscientific reasons.
LMFAO
Except counter-examples abound, yet the theory is not falsified.
Is it your claim that counter-examples have not been found or is it your claim that the theory has in fact been falsified?
The alternative, of course, is that the principle is false. But then you may as well believe in “poof” and other forms of saltation which you appear to think are anathema.
Make up your mind dazz.
Is “poof” ok in evolutionary theory or not?
This is simply mistaken.
As one author puts it:
IOW, common descent could be true, and Darwinism could be false.
Until you understand this you will never understand people like me who accept common descent but question the panoply of proposed mechanisms of modification.
Such as? Did Jesus teach common descent and I believe it because he taught it?
It would be different if your questioning was based on scientific reasons and not your usual arguments from ignorance.
I have yet to see any evidence that environmentally induced mutations are not random with respect to fitness. Do you have any examples?
No one said anything about “environmentally induced mutations” except you.
So what?
Common descent could be an entailment of evolution,
yet Darwinism could be false and common descent could be true.
Perhaps you are confused about “entailment”. Or perhaps you are prone to fallacious reasoning.
I must have been sick when they taught this. I always thought that it was the change in phenotype (and behaviour, metabolism, etc.) over time as the result of selection acting on variation, drift, etc.. this could lead to both increased complexity and decreased complexity. Whatever is meant by complexity in this context.
dazz:
Mung:
Poor Mung. Incapable of grasping simple logic.
Except that my comment was in response to Pav saying:
“Did all of these mutations come about almost at once because of a changed environment? IOW, are these “directed” mutations.”
Usually, when someone says that A came about because of B, it is reasonable to say that A induced B.
Or you could actually quote me as saying that common descent is not an entailment of evolution and that would settle the matter in one stroke. But you won’t be able to do that, because I took pains to not say that.
Sucks for you, Neil.
Must have been. Perhaps a picture of a sick parrot would be appropriate.
Except you were quoting me, not PaV. So I thought you were responding to me.
And your legendary mind-reading skills settle the matter.
I originally wrote that his claim was false, but then I changed it to say it was simply mistaken. Why do you think that is?
Or you could actually quote me as saying that common descent is not an entailment of evolution and that would settle the matter in one stroke. But you won’t be able to do that, because I took pains to not say that.
Frick and Frack. Always good for a laugh. But not to be taken seriously.
Go plant a garden.
That’s what is implied by your earlier comment.
You’d have a better case if I had said his claim was false, but I did not say that either. Yeah, I actually thought about what I wrote and avoided actually saying that common descent is not an entailment of evolution and avoided actually saying that it is false that common descent is an entailment of evolution.
Then I explained why dazz was mistaken in conflating the two theories.
I was responding to you responding to me responding to Pav. You really have to keep up. 😀
I was responding to me responding to Rumraket responding to me. You really have to keep up. lol
I don’t post pictures of sick parrots. Just drunk ones and those pining for the fjords.
Are you suggesting that evolutionary theory does not predict that the level complexity can also decrease?
When you quote someone, and say that they are mistaken, it is normal to read that as if the mistake were in what was quoted. If you saw a mistake elsewhere, you should have quoted more. Or, at least, you should have more clearly explained where you saw the mistake.
Do you often talk to yourself? Was it the good Mung talking to the bad Mung? Or the bad Mung talking to the good Mung?