bd-from-kg

tgamble:

If this kind of reasoning were the basis for the theory of evolution there might be some point to your analogy. But it isn't and never was. Actually the close affinity between certain species had been noted long before Darwin. In fact it was well known by even before 1700 that the known species seemed to form a heirarchical structure. This was the basis for Linnaeus' classification system. But none of this was considered, in itself, to be evidence of evolution.

bluefugue

Well, the so called "nested hierarchy of shared characteristics" is certainly considered to be evidence of evolution by some people now. I don't know how much weight it was given in Darwin's time. But it is certainly considered one of the lines of evidence, along with the fossil record, molecular/DNA evidence, etc., all converging on the idea of common descent.

Dawkins:

[ February 16, 2002: Message edited by: IesusDomini ]</p>

Ihatecheese

I presume this isn’t a plastic fork and a three tiered man of war wooden battleship?

Kosh

Either way, the name on the battleship was "Strawman"....

theyeti

But it is now. Evolution is the only theory that can explain this heirarchical pattern. Before, Darwin, there were lots of unsatisfying mystical explanations invoked, but none of them made much sense. Futhermore, those in the 1700s were not aware of the ammount of nested hierarchy within genetics. It provides much stronger evidence of evolution than morphology does.

theyeti

Buckster

Follow the evolution of metal forks and battleships back through history, and what do we find?

A common ancestor: The first crafted chunk of metal after man's discovery that he could do such a thing.

Valentine Pontifex

Which is one of the many good reasons why the creationists will not be able to show any good cladistic analysis showing a well supported relationship between a fork and a battleship.

:-)

bd-from-kg

theyeti:

Granted, it may be the only scientific theory that can do so. But there’s nothing in the least implausible in the idea that God created the species with such a pattern. (By the way, the “amount of nested hierarchy within genetics” doesn’t make this any more or less plausible. Given the nested hierarchy in the phenotypes, this is just what one would expect to find in the genotypes.) Of course if you begin with the assumption that the only acceptable explanation is a naturalistic one, this doesn’t matter. But the main competitor to evolution has always been creationism, not some other (nonexistent) scientific theory.

By the nineteenth century the most important evidence for evolution by far was the existence of the geological column. The clear-cut evidence that species had appeared and disappeared in a clear pattern, that no species ever reappeared in the fossil record after it had gone extinct, etc. was such convincing evidence that evolution was accepted as a fact by the vast majority of serious scientists well before Origin of Species was published. And few religious people had any problems with the idea at that point. The trouble came when Darwin produced a convincing case for his theory of the mechanism of evolution, showing that it could be explained as the product of “blind” natural forces. The idea that the process was essentially random and undirected, and that humans were just an “accident” of the details of how it happened to unfold, had implications for all of the major religions that were simply unacceptable to them.

IesusDomini:

I hate to disagree with Dawkins, but that is not the only way to interpret it. Dawkins is coming at this whole question from the point of view that religious beliefs, and therefore supernatural explanations, are just idiotic rubbish. Obviously from this point of view “cousinship” is the only reasonable explanation of the hierarchical pattern. But an argument that presumes from the outset that God-based explanations are out of court a priori is not going to be very convincing to those who think a God-based explanation might be reasonable. And these are the very people who needed from the outset to be convinced. And the vast majority of them were convinced. (Or at least the vast majority of those who were scientists were. One must remember that the great majority of nineteenth-century scientists were Christians, and almost all of them were theists.)

The really convincing evidence is stuff that doesn’t makes sense in terms of the “creation hypothesis”. That’s why Gould, in presenting the case for evolution, focuses on things like hen’s teeth and horses’ toes. The fact that chickens have genes that code for teeth and horses have genes that code for toes, even though chickens have no teeth and horses (normally) have no toes, is inexplicable except on the hypotheses that these genes were inherited from ancestors that did have these things. And the evidence of inactive genes with coding errors shared by species with common ancestors [see <a href="http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/molgen/" target="_blank"> Plagiarized Errors and Molecular Genetics </a> from the talk.origins archive] is even more compelling evidence for evolution because there is no conceivable explanation in terms of the creation hypothesis unless one is willing to argue that God is deliberately trying to mislead us – in which case science is impossible and we can all go home.

lpetrich

Actually, a common opinion in the early 19th century was special creations scattered over geological time.

Cuvier is usually looked down upon for his rejection of evolution; he rejected it because he had an all-or-nothing view of adaptation. However, he convincingly established that extinction had happened; it had been widely believed around 1800 that extinction could not happen, that God would not allow a species to go extinct.

Also, early-19th-cy views of evolution were sketchy and handwaving; consider the views of Lamarck. It took Darwin's work to flesh out the concept of evolution.

For Darwin, at least, biogeography was very important; especially the biogeography of islands. These have distinctive species, whose ancestors are those which are naturally able to cross oceans, such as flyers (insects, birds, bats) and cold-blooded land animals (turtles, lizards).

At the time, the fossil record was rather sketchily known, and it could only provide rather sketchy evidence for evolution. It was not until later in the 19th cy. that such good sequences as the horse series were discovered.

pangloss

I had an email exchange with Woody about 2 years ago regarding that asinine 'fable.'

I pointed out that DNA is like the blueprint for the battleship, not the metal used to make it.

First, he showed his stupidity by trying to say that DNA is a structural material, but later more or less admitted that his analogy was flawed, but since my 'worldview' is wrong, he saw no need to change it.

He then threw in some insults and said he didn't want to talk to me anymore.

What a pathetic lunatic.