Ed

I'll take that as a concession of defeat.

lpetrich

(Me on how one should not laugh too hard at Ptolemaic epicycles...)
Ed:
Who is laughing? As a scientist myself I am not happy when scientists are fooled into coming up with the wrong theory.

I'd be surprised if Ed really knows what a Fourier Transform is.

(gametes, fertilized egg cells, and embryos not having "person" features)
But we know from experience that fertilized egg cells and embryos have those features in potential form.

Very ingenious. Being able to produce something is not the same as already having that something's features. Consider a block of ice. If heated enough, it will become liquid water. And if heated more, it will become steam. Does that mean that ice has the features of liquid water and of steam in potential form?

Yes, but we know that there are things in this universe more complex than cows, ie persons. So a cowlike creator is unlikely.

However, as Xenophanes had pointed out, a cow would disagree.

(pseudogenes)
Yes, but the ones that are not presently functional may have been functional in the past.

Before they became broken to become pseudogenes.

(weird mosaics looking like multiple designers...)
For the same reason that if you get multiple architects to design a library, you get multiple different designs for the same functional purpose.

Which is EXACTLY what we see in the Earth's biota -- multiple inventions of features in different lineages.

Camera eyes
Wings
Grasping organs
Etc.

(Hierarchy of features)
This is exactly what you would expect from a single designer that show an overarching similarity but differences in detail to provide diversity and yet show the individualism of the designer.

Notice how unfalsifiable that hypothesis is -- similarity means choice of a common plan, difference means choice of variety.

(Charles Darwin)
I never said he invented it, but he is the one that popularized it to the point where the majority of scientists accepted it. And he would never have been able to convince them if there was not already underlying patterns in the morphologies of organisms.

So Ed believes that the Earth's biota was created with the appearance of being the result of evolution?

ps418

There was nothing at all in your post that indicated such as restriction. And though you may now wish to so restrict your definiton, that won't make your definition any more sensible, unless you wish to say that only normal, healthy adults are persons, or assume two different and contradictory definitions of person, which would not necessarily surprise me, given your inability to discern similarities and differences in so may other things.

Nope. A person who has, for instance, had a massive frontal lobe cortectomy does not in any substantive have the potential ability to communicate propositionally. Further, there is an obvious difference between having a potential for X and actually having X, and your definition of person was based on having X, not having a potential for X.


Which, according to your definition, would make embryos potential persons, not actual persons. My piece-of-crap car has the potential to have a 500hp big block hemi engine, chopped-top, a turbocharger, fat tires, digital gauges, nitrous oxide, hydraulics, a 2000-watt stereo, and lots of pretty girls leaning over the hood. But it does not actually have any of those things, so I don't actually refer to it as a street rod.

Patrick

GunnerJ

Sez who? Sure, people have more complex brains, but I defy you to compare the digestive system of a human to that of a cow and conclude that humans are more complex.

MrDarwin

You are being absurd, Ed. There is no comparison. We are talking about cows, they are almost like another universe.

For all we know, every cow is God incarnate, willingly sacrificing him/herself by the thousands every day so that we might live.

Coragyps

Ed, Elsie the Cow just told me that she's thinking about sending Elmer the Bull over to your house with a 55-gallon drum of whoop-ass unless you retract that statement.

Ed

But australopithicines ARE apes in every other characteristic. I am not saying that the position of the FM is the defining difference between apes and humans, most of the differences between humans and apes do not show up in the skeleton, ie mental abilities.

Quote:

jtb: Unfortunately for the creationists, we have a range of transitional forms from this point on. I hereby nominate Homo Habilis as "Fossil C". Ed: Actually the evidence points to the Homo habilis material being a mixture of human and australopithecus fossils. Anthropologist Dr. Dean Falk has written that "The evidence presented shows that skull KNM-ER 1805 should not be attributed to Homo ...... the shape of the endocast from KNM-ER 1805 is similar to that of an African pongid, whereas the endocast of KNM-ER 1470 is shaped like that of a modern human." These are both so-called habilis fossils. jbt: It is a TRANSITIONAL FORM between australopithecus and ergaster. OF COURSE cretinists will call it a "mixture"!

Dr. Falk is not a cretinist, you are! Just kidding, dont take it personally.

Quote:

jtb: But are you now arguing that if skull KNM-ER 1805 should not have been classed as Homo Habilis, therefore homo habilis does not exist? What about all the others, like KNM-ER 1470? The evidence certainly does NOT point to Homo Habilis being an "invalid taxon". There is no scientific controversy about THAT. The only controversy is that, BECAUSE it is a transitional form between australopithecines and Ergaster/Erectus, individual fossils may or may not fall within the taxon: some will be more like australopithecus, others will be more like ergaster. Here is an article on the subject.

KNM-ER 1470 is probably human, though the skull is quite fragmentary in nature. Notice how much replacement material is in Oolon's photo.

Quote:

jtb: There are MANY transitional forms in the fossil record, and they utterly destroy creationism. It isn't just their mere existence: their chronological position is also proof of common descent. For instance, there are no modern humans among the australopithecines or habilines. Ed: But there are modern birds among archaeopteryxes. jtb: You have already been called on that one. Again: PROVE IT.

Actually I didnt mean to say modern in the sense of modern robins and blue jays. I meant 100% birds were living at the same time. Like Protoavis and Confucianornis.

Quote:

jtb: And are there any "major" gaps? What is a "major" gap, exactly? There is no reason why we should expect the fossil record to be entirely gap-free. The general structure of the evolutionary "Tree of Life" is very evident in the fossil record, and in the pattern of similarities between living organisms today. This has been recognized by all biologists, even before Darwin: it is the basis of the Linnaean classification system.. Ed: As I have been saying, evolution is unfalsifiable. Thanks for proving it! jtb: Of course it's falsifiable! If the evidence didn't support it, it would be falsified! It's like round-Earthism. In principle, flat-Earthers could falsify round-Earthism at any time, by finding the edge of the world. But, nowadays, experts generally agree that this is very unlikely to happen, given the overwhelming evidence for round-Earthism that already exists..

No, round earthism is empirical scientific fact that can be repeatedly tested and observed, evolution is a scientific THEORY that is a historical interpretation of a past event. So your analogy fails. Scientific theories are much more susceptible to ideologies and the attendant tendency for being "made" unfalsifiable by their advocates.

Ed

See my post to Jack above.

Ed

Hardly. The placement of FM has major ramifications for locomotion. If it is too basal on an animal that also spends time on all fours then it's neck musculature will be inadequate for forward looking.

Quote:

ps: Furthermore, even though I have used terms loosely, I don't think its really correct to call australopiths 'facultative' bipeds, in the same way that some living apes are facultative bipeds. They obviously were very well-suited to bipedal locomotion, far more so than any living ape, and share many postcranial skeletal adaptations for bipedal locomotion that are only found in humans, some of which have been brought to your attention earlier in this thread, and many of others which you can read about in any textbook on human evolutionary anatomy. Patrick

No, living apes are facultative quadrapeds. Also as even your own post below states, Australopithcine hands are more like gorilla hands than human hands.

ps418

That's nice and all, but maybe you should respond to what I actually said. What I said is that the between-genus differences in FM placement in Australopiths and Homo, relative to the basicranial landmarks, is trivial, not that FM placement is itself is unimportant.

Ed, you're making things entirely too easy on me. Let's take a trip down memory lane here, back to June 3, with the help of the thread Australopithecine hands. There I posted abstracts from two research articles. The first concluded:

Geez, what part of "fully human" makes "more like gorilla" leap out at you? Well, maybe it was the second one that you're referring to. So let's look at that one too. It says:

A.L. 333-80, of course, which is said to be more similar to humans than to gorilla, is Australopithecus afarensis. So, as you can see, rather than supporting you, both of my sources contradicted your assertion in the most direct way possible.

Nope, you are once again flatly wrong. Australopiths are like humans more than they are like other living apes in a variety of characteristics. In terms of most postcranial and dental characteristics, there are very much more like humans than they are like other living apes.

Good. We're making some progress. Now, tell us what ER 1813 is, and how you are diagnosing Homo.

Some more obvious errors. First, only 2-3 paleontologists think that Protoavis might be a bird, and the extremely poor state of preservation hardly supports any confident assertions. Second, the animal represented by the Protoavis fossils did not live at the same time as Archaeopteryx, but much earlier. Third, there is no such taxon as 'Confucianornis.' If you're referring to Confuciusornis, then you are making yet another error, since the earliest known members of this genus appear much, much later, approximately 20 million years later, than Archaeopteryx. Check out Swisher et al (1999)

Swisher et al, Cretaceous age for the feathered dinosaurs of Liaoning, China. Nature 400, 58-61.

So, no, there is precisely zero evidence for modern birds coexisting with Archaeopteryx, and that holds true whether you're referring to any "modern" bird species, genus, family, or order. Its certainly not clear that Protoavis even belongs to the class Aves, but if it does it is certainly not placed in an existing genus, family, or order, nor is Confuciusornis, though it is a member of the class Aves.

Patrick