TacticalLoco

Doug,
You are to be commended for your open mind. I sincerely hope it remains that way 'cause you have some tough lessons ahead. Be that as it may I would like to repond to a receint statment of yours.
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quote Douglas:
Also, I would say that God is involved even in the lives of creatures who are under the curse of sin - so, "natural selection", even in limited circumstances, presupposes that God is not "involved".
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If I understand your point, I don't see why god couldn't use natural selection as his method of involvement.
OR...
If you are saying that a creators hand would make the scientific definition of 'natural selection' false then you are limiting the power of your god. Is this what you meant?

Finally and most importantly, please note that scientists DO NOT presuppose god is not "involved" in the process of natural selection, they simply have no proof that he is.

Game On!

hezekiah jones

As much as I love scigirl's posts I'm afraid the formal debate has effectively given Douglas an excuse not to answer some of the questions raised in other threads, especially what appeared to be his imminent offering of the evidence for a 6000-year-old earth.

Hopefully he hasn't forgotten, and realizes that compelling evidence for the 6000-year-old earth and the 2000 BCE global flood would essentially end all debate over evolution.

I have a sinking feeling that this specious quibbling over the definition of the biblical term "kind" will lead to little more than an exponential increase in tedium. "Kind" is a necessarily amorphous expression, meaningless to the legitimate scientific community, and if it cannot be operationally defined to the satisfaction of the contestants, I fail to see any point in introducing it into the debate.

I was under the impression that the more progressive "creation scientists" were attempting to move away from this meaningless expression and had established a new system of taxonomy called "<a href="http://www.creationresearch.org/crsq/articles/37/37_2/baraminology.htm" target="_blank">baraminology</a>." Perhaps "baraminology" might be a useful subject for a future debate as well.

In the meantime it sure would be nice to see that evidence for the young earth. Just my unsolicited two shekels.

wonderbread

The <a href="http://www.sierrasafarizoo.com/animals/liger.htm" target="_blank">Sierra Safari Zoo</a> has a resident Liger named Hobbs. Look at the picture and the stripes on his legs, kinda cool huh? As Richi already pointed out, there is at least one reported instance of a lion-tiger hybrid producing offspring. I would still like to know why Mr. Bender believes these two animals are seperate kinds according to his definition.

Quetzal

wonderbread and richiyaado: <img src="graemlins/notworthy.gif" border="0" alt="[Not Worthy]" /> I stand utterly and thoroughly corrected. I'd never heard of liger (or tigon) before. I thought it was another "jackalope".

I think this really does pose a significant question for Douglas' definition of "kind". Heck, it poses a significant problem for the actual science of taxonomy: where does it fit and what does the fact that two - up to now distinct species - cats can interbreed, even artificially indicate. Do we need to revamp the taxonomy of other closely related species. Pantheris leo tigris indeed!

HJ: I don't agree that the "kind" question is "specious quibbling". The absolute Creationist rule that no "kind" can produce a different "kind" is at the heart of one of their primary attacks on descent with modification. Without a solid definition on their end, they could quite easily continue ad infinitum insisting - no matter how many times you refute the idea - that "vertebrate kinds" only produce "vertebrate kinds", hence evolution doesn't occur. If scigirl can pin Douglas down on at least one falsifiable premise, she'll have already gone an order of magnitude further than most other Science/Creationism debates I've seen.

[ December 08, 2001: Message edited by: Morpho ]</p>

theyeti

I don't think he does. I think his position is that the two are the same "kind" because they can reproduce with each other. According to his definition, tigers or lions are descended from a common ancestor, but any cats that can't breed with them are not. I'm sure this would apply to small kitty-cats as well. Kind of weird, huh?

Remember that according to the biological defintion of species, it doesn't matter that it's possible for the populations to interbreed, what matters is that they do interbreed if they get the chance. Many closely related species don't interbreed simply because they mate at different times of the year, or because they have different mating rituals, even though interbreeding might be possible with artificial insemination. The important factor is that their gene pools are isolated from one antother, which means that they will become increasingly different as time goes on. I don't know how this applies to tigers and lions, but the mere fact that they can be bred with each other in a zoo doesn't say much. It's if they do it in the wild that matters. And even if they weren't geographically isolated, I don't think that they would interbreed seeing as how their behaviors are so different (lions are social animals, tigers are loners), but I don't know for sure.

Here is what Douglas said about cats and "kinds" on <a href="http://ii-f.ws/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=3&t=001471&p=2" target="_blank">this thread</a>:
My point was that according to Douglas' definition of kinds, the ark hypothesis falls flat on its face, because now they're too many "kinds" to cram onto it.

Douglas is actually departing quite a bit from party-line YEC with his definition of kinds. It's much easier when they leave the definition vague and change it around to suit their needs.

theyeti

Richiyaado

Hello all,

To my way of thinking, the fact that we have 'tigons' and 'ligers' actually adds support the case that species can and do change over time. I'm no scientist, but the fact that such creatures can exist simply reinforces the 'fuzziness' actually present in nature, despite the best efforts of taxonomic classification to 'pin down' species. Taxonomy is an abstraction, and shouldn't be confused with the way nature actually is.

wonderbread

Well earlier in this thread, Mr Bender had this to say: The question is, why does he consider lions and tigers to be a different kind. As you said, according to the definition he gave us, they are of the same kind. If he does agree that they are the same "kind" he has a considerable amount of explaining to do. First of all, how such big difference could arise between the two if mutations are never benificial (unless he tries to say that the information for both lions and tigers is in both creatures, and that it's just expressed diffrently. Then it would be his job to provide evidence for that), and second on how these two animals changed so much in only 4000 years given the YEC time.

theyeti

Absolutely correct. The fuzzy lines between species are good evidence that they can and have evolved from recent common ancestors. All taxonomic categories are completely arbitrary, with the supposed exception of species. All that is required of a taxonomic category, according to modern systematics, is that it's monophyletic, meaning that it contains an ancestor and all of its descendants.

The definition of species is somewhat hard to pin down, but I consider the "biological" definition to be quite sound. The real problem is that it's not always practical, since it can't apply to asexual or extinct organisms. Ironically, the biological definition seems to be what Douglas is using to define "kinds", but he must take all the baggage that comes with it. For instance, it's possible to cause speciation just by elimiating intermediate forms, like with domestic dogs or ring species. This would be the creation of a new "kind" according to Douglas.

theyeti

Quetzal

theyeti: Maybe I’m getting confused. I thought the Creationist premise was that God or the IPU or whatever had created all the “kinds” in one fell swoop. Fossils are merely unclean “kinds” that didn’t make it into the Ark, or were touched by original sin, or allowed to die out for some other humanly-unfathomable and utterly diety-like reason. All the million+ species alive today HAD to be in the Ark, ‘cause a “kind” can only reproduce the same “kind”, although there is apparently some allowance for variation within a “kind”. Douglas seems to be indicating that the variations in, fr’ instance, Felinidae, are merely variations in “cat kind” (although it's not really consistent since he's saying tigers and lions are different kinds - but he's already "adjusting" the definition), sort of like different breeds of dogs, I guess. But he's changing the terminology already.“Kind” now seems to lie somewhere around family, not down at the species level, depending on what critter we're talking about. IF scigirl wants to nail him on barriers to macroevolution, which is what the whole debate is supposed to be about, someone’s gonna have to pin him to the floor at a particular taxonomic level where he delimits what defines the different “kinds”. After all, we’re saying that macroevolution is change in higher taxa over very long periods of time, using roughly the same mechanisms as microevolution. We’ve already gotten away from reproductive success as a criteria, I think, if I understand his last post. And we’re moving up the scale already with lions and tigers (and bears, oh my). If it isn’t defined, we risk eventually getting to the “vertebrate kind” or some such, and the whole argument really does turn into a “specious quibble” like HJ was complaining about.

O’ course, I could just be chasing my tail… Not an unusual situation when arguing with Creationists.

And in ritual sacrifice to the goddess Typo:

[ December 08, 2001: Message edited by: Morpho ]</p>

scigirl

My question is--if evolution is true, than wouldn't we expect to find it difficult to define 'species'? If all creatures were easy to place in neat little categories with no gray areas, this would be evidence against evolution, correct?

I heard somewhere (from a co-worker who left our lab) that lab mice are a new species, and are not able to breed with wild-type mice. Does anyone know if this is true?

scigirl