Doubting Didymus

Prove it.

Ed

No, because the major differences between humans and apes are not necessarily genetic. There is growing evidence that not everything that makes an organism what it is in the DNA. The major difference is primarily the mind and the existence of personhood in humans and only partially in apes.

Ed

If evolution above the species level is not evolution from one creature into another, then different organisms would have never come into existence.

Doubting Didymus

Thats not what I was implying, and its not true. Organisms (well, populations) do change from one sort of thing into a different sort of thing, but its not neccesarily "above the species level" when it happens. What I'm telling you is that that macroevolution is not what you seem to think it is. It refers to historical patterns of change, as well as a horde of other interrelated factors from varying fields that affect the course of evolution, and does not mean "big morphological change", which is almost always influenced by both macroevolutionary patterns and by microevolutionary population genetics.

Ed

Some bat kinds may have greater skull morphology variability than other mammals. Humans and dogs seem also to have great skull variability.

Quote:

oc: Ed, please could you PM me. I am constantly amazed by your apparent obtuseness. So I’d very much like to know, please please, whether you are actually, genuinely serious, after all that’s been discussed in this thread. Please let me know if you’re just having us on. I promise -- hence posting this publicly, so you can hold me to it -- that I will not divulge the answer to any poster here, but for my own sanity, I’ve got to know! You accept evolution really, and are just stringing us along, aren’t you?! Cheers, Oolon

Ok, I will PM you tonight. But the typical atheist condescending attitude is not necessary.

Ed

I think those two particular rattlers are probably the same kind. Some organisms have greater variability in size like dogs therefore these snakes may also have a similar characteristic.

Ed

It would be a fine theory just considerably less plausible.:boohoo:

Doubting Didymus

Well, yes, I'd have to agree with that. However, that's a mighty far cry from your original statement: "if there is just one major gap in the fossil record then evolution is in serious trouble"

Lobstrosity

Allow me to try to recreate my lost response to this:

I didn't bring it up because I thought the answer was self-evident. If you postulate that there was no time prior to the Big Bang then any form of causation is impossible. All causation requires time over which to act and thus is an undefined concept without time (just like velocity, force, power, etc). This much should be obvious to you.

I'm glad you asked. First allow me to detail the experimental setup. You have a barrier with two narrow parallel slits (of width a and separated by a short distance d) cut into it at which you fire massive particles (in the experiment I heard about I believe the researchers used rubidium atoms). A given distance D beyond this barrier is a screen upon which particles are collected. Each particle that makes it past the slits impacts this screen and the location of each impact is recorded (this can be done in any number of ways).

Now, the expected classical distribution one would expect to see on the screen is a set of overlapping Gaussians. After all, if you cover up one of the slits, you simply get a Gaussian distribution. So, researchers fired particles one at a time (and this is important) at the slitted barrier and guess what pattern emerged on the screen over time: a standard interference pattern characterized by alternating maxima and minima of intensity. Since only one particle was in the air at any given time, exactly what was it interfering with on route to the target screen? The only solution is that it was interfering with itself...it has a probability amplitude to pass through both slits and the particle's wavefunction was thusly interfering with itself just like photons interfere with eachother constructively and destructively in this same experiment.

But here's the wackiest part: researchers performed the exact same experiment again only this time they set up detectors by each of the slits so they could tell which slit a given particle passed through on route to the target screen. Any guesses as to what they distribution pattern formed on the screen? Yup, the classically-expected overlapping Gaussians. Here the detectors at the slits had acted to collapse the particle's wavefunction, thereby preserving the classical nature of the particles. So, in short, as long as you don't look, the particle goes through both slits...one object simultaneously in two places. Not intuitive, but also not unphysical.

No, Ed, it's more fundamental than that. It means that the information does not exist. As I said before, Aspect's experiments in the 80's showed that Einstein's local realism principle was false and confirmed the idea that non-commuting observables cannot simutaneously exist with perfect precision. For example, exact angular momentum (meaning both magnitude and direction) does not exist. What you now need to explain to me is how causal factors operate on information that does not exist. Remember, I didn't say that no causes operate at that level, I said that causes operate differently and in no way bar what are considered to be "spontaneous" processes.

There is nothing empirical about that, Ed, and you know it.

I fully agree with that last clause. For the same reason, however, you must then conclude that a cause with the characteristics of a person would be inadequate to produce a universe that contains cows and rocks. I'm sorry, but I've never seen a person create a cow or anything resembling cow "essence." So what we're left with is somewhat of a logical conundrum, isn't it? The existence of people means the universe could not have been created by a cow, while the existence of cows means the universe could not have been created by the "personal." Looks like you've just disproved God...good job, Ed.

Wow, you sound like a little child who retorts "am not...you are!" without even thinking about what he's saying. Something is not "unfalsifiable" simply because it hasn't yet been falsified, and, frankly, you'd have to be an idiot to not see the billion ways that evolution could be falsified. It actually proposes the mechanisms by which genomes can change, so it's pretty obvious that one can conceive of patterns of life that would be inconsistent with such mechanisms.

Think about it this way, Ed...the historical evolution of life on Earth is a highly complex process about which almost none of the variables are known to science. As such, all scientists can say about a proposed course of life's development is whether it happens to be consistent with the theory of evolution. Let's look at an analogy. Say I take a die and roll it onto a highly-complex bumpy surface. If physicists cannot determine ahead of time what number I will roll, does this invalidate physics? Does this mean that physics can't predict anything and is unfalsifiable? Get real. All this means is that complex real-world applications of theories aren't simple enough to allow us to make cut-and-dry predictions. In practice, outside a lab, you generally can only say that a given outcome is consistent with current theories. The physicists could watch the roll to determine whether it broke any laws of physics. If, for example, the die stopped in midair for a little while before taking off in a new direction, my roll would have falsified the current laws of physics. Similarly, experimental findings can falsify evolution, which would force the theory to be either scrapped (not likely given the wealth of evidence that already supports it) or revised (far more likely).

Another example: does the fact that the morning weatherman is incapable of telling you whether it will rain next week imply that meteorology and its underlying principles are not science? Are they unfalsifiable? Your biggest misunderstanding, Ed, is that you don't seem to grasp the difference between the theory of evolution and our attempt to apply it to one specific complex scenario (using the fossil record as a guide).


Also, I have a question for you, Ed: If organisms were created, why is it even remotely possible to taxonomically classify them? Is it just a remarkable coincidence? Why aren't all species "mosaic"?

Jack the Bodiless

"Mosaic species"...

That's another way of saying "transitional form", for those who have built a mental block which prevents them from saying "transitional form". Like "adaptation" for "evolution".

The platypus is a "living fossil", a surviving representative of a transitional form between reptiles and mammals. Its ancestry can be traced in the fossil record, going back to the therapsids.
According to the creationists, Archaeopteryx IS a fully-developed bird (and also 100% dinosaur, Compsognathus, with feathers attached by evolutionist fakers). But, like the platypus, a transitional form can be still in existence even after the period of transition.

But Protoavis, which predates Arcaeopteryx by 75 million years, is known only from a single badly-crushed skull. It might have been birdlike, or it might not.
Homo Erectus is plainly not Homo Sapiens, and nobody is claiming that it is (except creationists, of course). As we all evolved from Homo Erectus, "transitional forms" between Erectus and Sapiens are to be expected. How does their existence pose a problem for evolution? Obviously, it does not.

Some scientists propose that Sapiens evolved from Erectus in Africa, and then moved out to displace Erectus everwhere else (the "Out of Africa" hypothesis). Others believe that Erectus evolved into Sapiens all over the place. There is plenty of middle ground between those positions, involving a combination of a migration of Sapiens and intermingling between archaic Sapiens and Erectus at various stages and locations.
There is still absolutely no evidence whatsoever for creation. Of course, you can multiply zero by a series of ever-larger numbers if you like, but you'll still get zero.

However, the evidence for evolution has indeed grown since the discovery of DNA, with genome amalysis illustrating the pattern of relationships between species.