What does neo-Darwinism have to say about the following?

[jonathan]

Until it can answer these questions the debate over
evolution will not end.

The concept of self-organization can answer these questions
since creation and speciation are the result of....internal
processes, not...natural selection, which serves merely
to fine-tune what has already been crated.



On the Origins of New Forms of Life
6.5: Gould and Eldredge


The battle between the gradualists and the saltationists, which is
further discussed below, continued until the 1940s, when a strong
intellectual shift occurred. Gradualism then became the ascendant
perspective among biologists. But in the early 1970s paleontologists
Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge raised the flag of saltation once
again.1 Their 1972 article caused an evolutionary uproar that has not
subsided to this day. As had many of their saltationist colleagues in
years gone by, they emphasized that a wide variety of fossil types 1)
arise suddenly and 2) are static thereafter. Gould (1980a: 182) later
expressed the problem succinctly:

The history of most fossil species includes two features particularly
inconsistent with gradualism:

(1) Stasis. Most species exhibit no directional change during their
tenure on earth. They appear in the fossil record looking much the same
as when they disappear; morphological change is usually limited and
directionless.

(2) Sudden appearance. In any local area, a species does not arise
gradually by the steady transformation of its ancestors; it appears all
at once and 'fully formed.'

Fossil Trilobites
Fossil Trilobites (Cambrian)

For years Eldredge had sifted through fossils trying to document
examples of slow, steady directional change. Instead he found that “once
species appear in the fossil record, they tend not to change very much
at all. Species remain imperturbably, implacably resistant to change as
a matter of course — often for millions of years.”2 For example, over an
eight-million-year period, the only detectable alteration in one of the
trilobites Eldredge had been studying was a slight change in the
structure of its compound eyes, the number of lens-rows dropped from
eighteen to seventeen.3 Eldredge (1995: 68) asserts paleontologists have
hesitated to emphasize the observed pattern of stasis in the fossil
record because it is inconsistent with neo-Darwinian theory:

For the most part it has been paleontological reluctance to cross swords
with Darwinian tradition that accounts for the failure to inject the
empirical reality of stasis into the evolutionary picture.

But exacting studies like Eldredge’s really serve only to emphasize the
existence of a phenomenon that most people could infer on the basis of
ordinary experience. Look at any guide to the identification of fossils.
Each of the listed types must be relatively stable — otherwise the
pictures and descriptions provided by the guide would be useless. For
each type, a guide specifies a particular time range during which that
form existed. Outside that range, the type in question is not known to
exist. Each type remains identifiable by its description and/or picture
over the entire period of its existence, from its first appearance to
extinction.

That is, each has a characteristic set of traits retained largely
unchanged. Each such form appears in the fossil record at a certain
lowermost stratum with its peculiar set of traits that remains stable up
to the time of the form's extinction. This is the typical pattern seen
in fossils.

Many types of organisms existing today have persisted unaltered for vast
ages. This fact has long been known. Even Huxley, Darwin's most ardent
supporter, was aware of it. In the Origin's year of publication (1859)
he gave a lecture entitled On the Persistent Types of Animal Life. In it
he noted that

certain well marked forms of living beings have existed through enormous
epochs, surviving not only the changes of physical conditions, but
persisting comparatively unaltered, while other forms of life have
appeared and disappeared. Such forms may be termed “persistent types” of
life; and examples of them are abundant enough in both the animal and
the vegetable worlds.

Among plants, for instance, ferns, club mosses, and Coniferæ, some of
them apparently generically identical with those now living, are met
with as far back as the Carboniferous epoch [which ended nearly 300
million years ago]; the cone of the oolitic [i.e., 135–152 million years
ago4] Arancaria is hardly distinguishable from that of existing species;
a species of Pinus has been discovered in the Purbecks [which date to
about 144 million years ago5], and a walnut (Juglans) in the cretaceous
rocks [the Cretaceous Period ended about 65 million years ago]. All
these are types of vegetable structure, abounding at the present day;
and surely it is a most remarkable fact to find them persisting with so
little change through such vast epochs. Every subkingdom of animals
yields instances of the same kind."6

The cassowary (Casuarius casuarius), the second-largest extant bird, is
known from 24-million-year-old deposits.7 Fossil insects, preserved in
amber for long eons of time are often indistinguishable from living
ones.8 In an article describing his experience examining ancient insects
in Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology, Paul Zahl (1978: 237) makes
the following comment on fifty-million-year-old amber-preserved
specimens in the museum's collection:

In each was a fly, ant, grasshopper, beetle, or spider, all perfectly
lifelike as though some magic wand had cast the spell of frozen sleep
upon them. [They looked] singularly like the fly, ant, grasshopper,
beetle, or spider in my own garden. Had evolution overlooked such genera
during the intervening fifty thousand millennia?

Many of the crocodilians (alligators, crocodiles, caimans, gharials)
have apparently persisted without change for some 200 million years
(2000 times the “lifetime” of Homo sapiens). Stokes (1982: 510) states
that the inarticulate brachiopod Lingula anatina “appeared first in the
Cambrian and has persisted without change through a life history of
innumerable generations spread over at least 500 million years.” Extant
animals such as the horseshoe crab once dodged the tread of dinosaurs.9
The Dawn Redwood (Metasequoia glyptostropoides) was once known only from
fossils. This tree, dating back to at least the Upper Cretaceous (about
70 million years ago), was discovered alive in China in 1941. Modern
specimens are nearly identical to the ancient fossils.10 Unchanged from
the time of the dinosaurs, it is now popular with landscapers here in
the United States.

Schindewolf (1993: 190) notes that in the ideally preserved remains of
220-million-year-old (Triassic) triopsid crustaceans from the Keuper
formation in Franconian region of southwest Germany,

Every detail of the structure of the body and its most delicate
appendages can be made out — the eyes, the antennae, the mandibles, with
their serrated masticatory surfaces, the maxillae, with their rows of
fine bristles, the filmy swimmerets (exopodites and endopodites) set
with bristles, the brood chamber filled with eggs, and much more. As a
consequence, a very detailed comparison with the Recent species Triops
cancriformis could be made, and the author stresses that even the most
minor characters were identical.

Romer (1966: 129) says Homoeosaurus, a contemporary of early dinosaurs
(Jurassic Period), “appears to have been almost identical in structure”
with a modern lizard, the tuatara (Sphenodon punctatus), now confined to
islands off the coast of New Zealand. The fossils of the modern
ocean-dwelling mollusc Neopilina galatheae (see image right) can be
found alongside extinct 350-million-year-old trilobites.11 The ostracod
Sylthere vonhachi is known from the Upper Ordovician (i.e., prior to 490
mya) and still exists today.12

How do these various forms of life persist so long without change? The
cases cited are glaring. But the typical organism in the fossil record
shows the very same pattern on a more modest time scale. The only
difference is that, in the usual case, a fossil form exists unchanged
for millions, rather than hundreds of millions, of years. Neo-Darwinian
theory would say this stability is imposed by functional restrictions on
form dictated by the environment. But are environmental constraints
really so demanding? Over such long time periods, it seems radical
changes in the environment must have occurred. Is it plausible that the
environment, especially an environment altered greatly with time, should
be able rigidly to control and stabilize the form of every part of an
organism?

As Bowler (1989: 337) notes, by the 1970s many paleontologists had
become dissatisfied with gradualistic explanations of evolution

because many of the classic examples of gradual change had not withstood
the test of modern techniques. If there were no genuine cases of
gradualism in the record, then the argument for treating all cases of
sudden change as the result of imperfect [fossil] evidence was
undermined. It might be better to reexamine the evidence in a new light,
putting aside the traditional Darwinian assumption of gradualism and
opting instead for a model of evolution that would allow for the sudden
appearance of new forms as indicated by the fossil record.
The abruptness of the paleontological data is still clearly at odds with
gradualistic explanations of evolution, just as it was in Cuvier's day.
As Winsor (1979: 112) notes

Even species that resemble one another in all but the most trivial
details are seen to maintain their particular distinctness generation
after generation, often for millions of years. It takes a very
determined and sympathetic searcher to find any transformations in
nature comparable to the appearance of domestic breeds, and such forms
are not regarded as species.

If anyone, could be described as a “very determined and sympathetic
searcher,” it was Ernst Mayr. He, too, admits saltation is the typical
pattern: Although he maintains that a “certain proportion” of fossil
forms undergo gradual change into subsequent forms,13 “far more
frequently,” he says, “the extant species are supplemented by — or the
extinct species are replaced by — new species that turn up in the fossil
record. In the classical literature this sudden introduction of new
species was usually ascribed to instantaneous saltations.”14 As Gould
(1980a: 189) puts it, “All paleontologists know that the fossil record
contains precious little in the way of intermediate forms.”

http://www.macroevolution.net/stephen-jay-gould.html

[RonO]

You can't tell what modern science has to say about this because the
last reference on this page was from 1995 (that is 20 years ago). I
haven't kept up with the issue, but when I was a graduate student in the
1980's most of it seemed to be sampling issues. Later I recall Gould
acknowledging that when a finer gradation time interval was looked at
punctuation didn't look so good in that there were obviously more
intermediate forms if you could find the sediments of the missing time
intervals. It does seem to be a trait of nature that when a successful
form does arise that it can be maintained over extended periods of time,
and successful traits can arise independently in different lineages.
Look at eutherian and marsupial moles.

The lack of recent references is really an issue. Just check out this
paper from 2008 on the tuatara.

http://www.nature.com/news/2008/080327/full/news.2008.695.html

So the two existing species may look very similar, but their DNA seems
to have them separating 50 million years ago. How does your model fit
in 50 million years worth of DNA change while keeping the animal's
morphology the same? We just claim natural selection for that
particular body form. What is your alternative?

My guess is that the paper's rates are an over estimate because he is
dealing with population samples (fossil DNA) and not the mitochondrial
sequences that survive selection and speciation over time. They
probably have refined the methods since 2008, especially weeding out the
errors due to DNA degredation in the fossils.

Ron Okimoto

[*Hemidactylus*]

On 11/27/2015 10:06 PM, jonathan wrote:
>
>
>
> Until it can answer these questions the debate over
> evolution will not end.
>
> The concept of self-organization can answer these questions
> since creation and speciation are the result of....internal
> processes, not...natural selection, which serves merely
> to fine-tune what has already been crated.

Do those crated things have a shelf-life? It is poor form to open with
poorly thought nonsense and not clearly demarcate your initial
"contribution" from the cut and paste that follows below. And I think
not only is Gould and Eldredge's punc eq not quite the saltationism of
de Vries with the primrose or Goldschmidt's systemic mutations, Ernst
Mayr would have been horrified to be lumped with the idea of
saltationism, but claimed credit for punk eq. But punk eq is a
paleontologically significant pattern of species selection/turnover over
somewhat larger periods of time, not an exemplar of so-called hopeful
monsterish jumps in phenotypic space within a population in generational
time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo_de_Vries#Mutation_theory

Not that there aren't discrete jumps in evolution on smaller scales. My
fave example is pocket gophers, but even that's mundane in evo-devo terms.

https://groups.google.com/d/msg/talk.origins/nWigApZxOPM/Lpftgf0mKv8J

[*Hemidactylus*]

Jonathan copies and pastes rhetoric he doesn't understand. I've
forgotten more about saltationism than he will ever know. I read
Goldschmidt's _Material Basis of Evolution_ several times years ago with
a very sympathetic ear. But I doubt Jonathan could give a coherent
account of developmental systems theory circa late 90s/early 00s nor
explain what a fucking phenocopy is. Oh hell yeah I went there. Long
live Goldschmidt!!!

[John Harshman]

On 11/27/15 7:06 PM, jonathan wrote:
> If anyone, could be described as a “very determined and sympathetic
> searcher,” it was Ernst Mayr. He, too, admits saltation is the typical
> pattern: Although he maintains that a “certain proportion” of fossil
> forms undergo gradual change into subsequent forms,13 “far more
> frequently,” he says, “the extant species are supplemented by — or the
> extinct species are replaced by — new species that turn up in the fossil
> record. In the classical literature this sudden introduction of new
> species was usually ascribed to instantaneous saltations.”14 As Gould
> (1980a: 189) puts it, “All paleontologists know that the fossil record
> contains precious little in the way of intermediate forms.”

Those are certainly two of the most egregious quote-mines I've seen in a
while. Are you ashamed?

> http://www.macroevolution.net/stephen-jay-gould.html
>

[jonathan]

On 11/27/2015 11:19 PM, *Hemidactylus* wrote:
> On 11/27/2015 10:06 PM, jonathan wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>> Until it can answer these questions the debate over
>> evolution will not end.
>>
>> The concept of self-organization can answer these questions
>> since creation and speciation are the result of....internal
>> processes, not...natural selection, which serves merely

>> to fine-tune what has already been created.

>
> Do those crated things have a shelf-life? It is poor form to open with
> poorly thought nonsense and not clearly demarcate your initial
> "contribution" from the cut and paste that follows below. And I think
> not only is Gould and Eldredge's punc eq not quite the saltationism of
> de Vries with the primrose or Goldschmidt's systemic mutations, Ernst
> Mayr would have been horrified to be lumped with the idea of
> saltationism, but claimed credit for punk eq. But punk eq is a
> paleontologically significant pattern of species selection/turnover over
> somewhat larger periods of time, not an exemplar of so-called hopeful
> monsterish jumps in phenotypic space within a population in generational
> time.
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo_de_Vries#Mutation_theory
>
> Not that there aren't discrete jumps in evolution on smaller scales. My
> fave example is pocket gophers, but even that's mundane in evo-devo terms.
>
> https://groups.google.com/d/msg/talk.origins/nWigApZxOPM/Lpftgf0mKv8J
>

Your so-called rebuttal is without the least bit of content
or reason. The question stands how do you reconcile stasis
on the order of geologic time with gradualism?

I'm just asking, can you offer an explanation?

Offering an example of gradualism, the exception to the rule,
doesn't answer the question in the slightest. Besides if
the question was as easy to answer as your ridicule would
suggest you should be able to explain it easily and concisely
so even a child could understand.

Please don't tell me all Darwinists can do to data they
don't like is shoot the messenger?



s

[jonathan]

Still waiting for an answer to the question posed, how does
Darwinism reconcile stasis over geologic time scales with
gradualism? Your reply wouldn't convince a fly.




s

[Gomer Pyle USMC]

On 11/27/2015 10:42 PM, RonO wrote:

> On 11/27/2015 9:06 PM, jonathan wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>> Until it can answer these questions the debate over
>> evolution will not end.
>>
>> The concept of self-organization can answer these questions
>> since creation and speciation are the result of....internal
>> processes, not...natural selection, which serves merely

>> to fine-tune what has already been created.

>>
>>
>>
>> On the Origins of New Forms of Life
>> 6.5: Gould and Eldredge
>>

>>

Just because the cites are old doesn't change the simple
question, how does gradualism reconcile species that
remain almost unchanged over geologic time spans?

Why don't we see more examples of gradually changing
from one species to another, while we have /plenty/ of
examples of species lasting almost unchanged since
the dinosaurs.

Missing fossil records is an excuse, not a reason.


From the paper you cited...


"The New Zealand reptile has hardly changed its appearance
over the last 200 million years."

"They arrived at an estimate of 1.56 sequence changes per base
every million years — placing the reptile among the fastest
of any animal yet tested."
http://www.nature.com/news/2008/080327/full/news.2008.695.html



If that's gradualism, it's like calling glass a fluid, hardly
convincing that such variety could flow from that rate of change.
in fact, it's quite convincing otherwise, that once a species
has evolved, it tends to stay very much the same.


s









> Ron Okimoto
>

[Öö Tiib]

On Saturday, 28 November 2015 09:23:39 UTC+2, jonathan wrote:
> On 11/28/2015 12:27 AM, John Harshman wrote:
> > On 11/27/15 7:06 PM, jonathan wrote:
> >> If anyone, could be described as a "very determined and sympathetic
> >> searcher," it was Ernst Mayr. He, too, admits saltation is the typical
> >> pattern: Although he maintains that a "certain proportion" of fossil
> >> forms undergo gradual change into subsequent forms,13 "far more

> >> frequently," he says, "the extant species are supplemented by -- or the
> >> extinct species are replaced by -- new species that turn up in the fossil

> >> record. In the classical literature this sudden introduction of new
> >> species was usually ascribed to instantaneous saltations."14 As Gould
> >> (1980a: 189) puts it, "All paleontologists know that the fossil record
> >> contains precious little in the way of intermediate forms."
> >
> > Those are certainly two of the most egregious quote-mines I've seen in a
> > while. Are you ashamed?
> >
> >> http://www.macroevolution.net/stephen-jay-gould.html
> >>
> >
>
>
> Still waiting for an answer to the question posed, how does
> Darwinism reconcile stasis over geologic time scales with
> gradualism? Your reply wouldn't convince a fly.

Wasn't that Dr. Eugene M. McCarthy the interesting guy who had theory that
man is hybrid of chimp and pig? Trilobites were likely similar to each
other for same reason why fish, sharks and dolphins are similar to each
other. Deviation from that stremlined body form is too large disadvantage
in that environment.

[Burkhard]

Well, for starters, not all, or not even the most important,

Changes are changes in appearance. Changes in the digestive system e.g.
that allow an organism to exploit a different food source, and with that
migrate into a different territory, where there are ew selective
pressures etc etc are just as important.

Secondly, well yes, glass is a fluid. Nothing in gradualism rules out
very slow change for some species, nor does gradualism require a
constant rate of change for all species.

[jillery]

On Sat, 28 Nov 2015 02:18:38 -0500, jonathan <Wr...@Instead.com>
wrote:

Since you asked:

<http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/quotes/mine/part1-2.html>

"The Quote Mine Project, Or Lies, Damned Lies and Quote Mines"

Gould and Eldredge did not use "stasis" to say that species remained
literally unchanged for tens or hundreds of millions of years. Nor
did they use "gradualism" to say that evolution is always stuck on
some insensibly slow rate.

Your quotes are just a revisit of the same old arguments that Gould
and Eldredge themselves spent decades to refute. Time and again, they
backpedaled from their original hubris and hyperbole, and made it
clear they really meant to highlight a particular method of speciation
which the mechanisms of taphonomy cannot capture except as exceptional
cases.

By analogy, most of the fossil record is like a series of random
snapshots which can only capture specific moments in time. The
exceptions you oh-so-casually dismiss are like archived footage from a
fixed spycam.

If your simple-minded implications were literally true, there should
be no exceptions, zero cases where the fossil record successfully
preserved an unbroken progression of minute and gradual changes within
individual populations from one location. But there are such cases,
Gould's snails being an ironic example.

>Offering an example of gradualism, the exception to the rule,
>doesn't answer the question in the slightest. Besides if
>the question was as easy to answer as your ridicule would
>suggest you should be able to explain it easily and concisely
>so even a child could understand.
>
>Please don't tell me all Darwinists can do to data they
>don't like is shoot the messenger?

It's almost certain that the record of your own past life is broken
and sporadic. By your reasoning, you should conclude that your past
is a figment of your imagination, that each recorded instance of it is
merely of unrelated individuals created de novo. Even you should be
able to recognize how silly that sounds.
--
This space is intentionally not blank.

[Jonathan]

When a species stays virtually unchanged for 200 million years
it's hard to say the environment is the reason, but maybe the
environment hasn't changed in all that time <g>.

Darwinists can't admit what the observations clearly indicate.

If a species were created by gradual steps, slowly over time
transitioning from one species to a new one, then those
intermediate forms must be successful enough to show up
in the fossil record, or the new species would never
have had a chance.

The only logical conclusion is all those graduated variations
happen essentially at once, and only the successful variations
make it to the fossil record.

But that would mean speciation and creation is *sudden*, not
gradual, a complexity driven fractal-like distribution
of possibilities.

So they refuse to accept what nature in telling them.
It's called making the observations fit the theory, bias or
....unbridled faith in their long-held and now dogmatic
scientific traditions.

And they have the nerve to criticize religion.



Jonathan


s

[Jonathan]

The old incomplete fossil record rebuttal eh? So the lack of data
proves your point? Let me use that tactic next time the proof of God
comes up.

> If your simple-minded implications were literally true, there should
> be no exceptions, zero cases where the fossil record successfully
> preserved an unbroken progression of minute and gradual changes within
> individual populations from one location. But there are such cases,
> Gould's snails being an ironic example.
>

That's bull, a few examples means nothing, they're called
anecdotes, when the examples of species remaining almost
unchanged are numerous if not overwhelming by comparison.

And also, for a transition to take place, the intermediate
forms must be successful else the progression would never
make it very far, unless you're going to suggest the progression
stops at the first...unsuccessful...mutation.

So the intermediate forms should be found in the fossil record
at a much higher rates than we observe, which is /hardly ever/.

>
>> Offering an example of gradualism, the exception to the rule,
>> doesn't answer the question in the slightest. Besides if
>> the question was as easy to answer as your ridicule would
>> suggest you should be able to explain it easily and concisely
>> so even a child could understand.
>>
>> Please don't tell me all Darwinists can do to data they
>> don't like is shoot the messenger?
>
>
> It's almost certain that the record of your own past life is broken
> and sporadic. By your reasoning, you should conclude that your past
> is a figment of your imagination, that each recorded instance of it is
> merely of unrelated individuals created de novo. Even you should be
> able to recognize how silly that sounds.
> --

Unlike you I recognize how certain events have sudden
and lasting changes in my life, seldom does a fundamental
change in attitude, beliefs, love or lifestyle happen by
baby-steps, but generally in one fell swoop - followed by
incremental fine-tuning of the new reality.

Like most objective mind-sets, you have it all so
completely backwards.

[TomS]

"On Sat, 28 Nov 2015 10:09:00 +0000, in article <n3bubd$o2d$1...@dont-email.me>,
Burkhard stated..."
[[...snip...]]

>
>Secondly, well yes, glass is a fluid. Nothing in gradualism rules out
>very slow change for some species, nor does gradualism require a
>constant rate of change for all species.
>

Glasses are solids. See for example the Wikipedia article on glass, where
there is some discussion on the "urban legend" that glass is a liquid,
under the heading "Structure".


--
it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
Macbeth V.5
---Tom S.

[jillery]

On Sat, 28 Nov 2015 08:27:07 -0500, Jonathan <WriteI...@gmail.net>
wrote:

The old lack of reading comprehension rebuttal, eh?

>So the lack of data
>proves your point? Let me use that tactic next time the proof of God
>comes up.

To refresh your convenient amnesia, you're the one who claims the
fossil record shows rapid speciation and stasis.

>> If your simple-minded implications were literally true, there should
>> be no exceptions, zero cases where the fossil record successfully
>> preserved an unbroken progression of minute and gradual changes within
>> individual populations from one location. But there are such cases,
>> Gould's snails being an ironic example.
>
>
>That's bull, a few examples means nothing, they're called
>anecdotes, when the examples of species remaining almost
>unchanged are numerous if not overwhelming by comparison.

No, they're called evidence. You don't get to dismiss them by calling
them something else. You're wearing Creationist blinkers.

>And also, for a transition to take place, the intermediate
>forms must be successful else the progression would never
>make it very far, unless you're going to suggest the progression
>stops at the first...unsuccessful...mutation.
>
>So the intermediate forms should be found in the fossil record
>at a much higher rates than we observe, which is /hardly ever/.

You conclusion doesn't follow from your premise. If speciation
usually happens as fast as you say, then the number of potential
fossilization events should necessarily be much less than from the
alleged static populations. So your conclusion doesn't even follow
your own line of reasoning.

>>> Offering an example of gradualism, the exception to the rule,
>>> doesn't answer the question in the slightest. Besides if
>>> the question was as easy to answer as your ridicule would
>>> suggest you should be able to explain it easily and concisely
>>> so even a child could understand.
>>>
>>> Please don't tell me all Darwinists can do to data they
>>> don't like is shoot the messenger?
>>
>>
>> It's almost certain that the record of your own past life is broken
>> and sporadic. By your reasoning, you should conclude that your past
>> is a figment of your imagination, that each recorded instance of it is
>> merely of unrelated individuals created de novo. Even you should be
>> able to recognize how silly that sounds.

And no comment in response to the above. Is anybody surprised?

>Unlike you I recognize how certain events have sudden
>and lasting changes in my life, seldom does a fundamental
>change in attitude, beliefs, love or lifestyle happen by
>baby-steps, but generally in one fell swoop - followed by
>incremental fine-tuning of the new reality.

Your analogy simply shows your inability to recognize that gradualism
doesn't exclude relatively large changes, any more than
uniformitarianism excludes global catastrophes. Your line of
reasoning is bale of Creationist straw.
--

[RonO]

Why don't you put up the side by side comparison of Jurassic Sphenodon
fossils and modern taratua? I've tried to find them and the fossils
that they put up do not look identical. The reconstructions that I have
found have the holes in the right places, but they aren't the same size,
and the teeth are different shapes and arrangements. One source even
had a range of different sphenodon taxa reconstructions, so which one
was used? What do they mean by nearly identical? Can you find the
comparison? I could not.

Why not make a big deal about dragon flies? What is it about successful
body plans that is a problem for biological evolution? How does your
model explain a couple hundred million years of similar body plans? How
did the intelligent designer keep the taratua from changing very much?
Why are those cases the exception and not the rule?

Ron Okimoto

[Jørgen Farum Jensen]

"[...] new species would never have had a chance.
To be fossilized?" :-)

"Not every transitional form appears in the fossil record,
because the fossil record is not complete. Organisms are
only rarely preserved as fossils in the best of circumstances,
and only a fraction of such fossils have been discovered. Paleontologist
Donald Prothero noted that this is illustrated
by the fact that the number of species known through the
fossil record was less than 5% of the number of known living
species, suggesting that the number of species known through
fossils must be far less than 1% of all the species that have
ever lived."

It's easier to cite Wikipedia than paragraphs in books for
the same argument I have read in several books.

> The only logical conclusion is all those graduated variations
> happen essentially at once, and only the successful variations
> make it to the fossil record.
>
> But that would mean speciation and creation is *sudden*, not
> gradual, a complexity driven fractal-like distribution
> of possibilities.
>
> So they refuse to accept what nature in telling them.
> It's called making the observations fit the theory, bias or
> ....unbridled faith in their long-held and now dogmatic
> scientific traditions.
>
> And they have the nerve to criticize religion.
>

And You have the nerve to criticize Science.


--

Jørgen Farum Jensen
"Science has proof without any certainty.
Creationists have certainty without any proof."
— Ashley Montagu

[TomS]

"On Sat, 28 Nov 2015 09:42:46 -0500, in article
<0kcj5bhevc7a2n89s...@4ax.com>, jillery stated..."

However, many Young Earth Creationists insist that they accept the natural
generation of new species. What they call "microevolution" (borrowing the
scientific term which refers to evolution within a species) within a "kind"
(something vaguely like a taxonomic family, so that, say, cows, sheep,
goats, all being bovids, microevolved from the pairs of bovids taken on
Noah's Ark - I'm not making this up, you know(*)).

I'm bringing this up because there is a convergence of studies
which provide evidence for evolutionary biology.

(Footnote *) Acknowledging the famous line of Anna Russell.

[RonO]

It does matter, because of what we have learned since. What about the
DNA evidence? Evolution doesn't stop even if the body plan is
maintained by selection.

>
> Why don't we see more examples of gradually changing
> from one species to another, while we have /plenty/ of
> examples of species lasting almost unchanged since
> the dinosaurs.

You not only have to struggle with a very incomplete fossil record, but
you have to deal with how biological evolution actually works. Look up
allopatric speciation, and then check out how modern species are
distributed and vary as sub populations. We would not have the horse
fossil series if we did not find the relevant fossils on two continents.
If all you had were the Asian samples you would have missed quite a
lot. A lot of horse evolution happened in North America. Look at the
distribution of white tailed deer. If the environment changed and
suddenly Key deer were at some advantage and took over the rest of the
range it would look like a punctuated event, but it was just one sub
population taking over when it had some advantage.

We have the example of whales. We didn't even know where to look for
the whale ancestors until they got lucky in Pakistan. We would not have
those fossils if India hadn't moved due to continental drift and smashed
into Asia uplifting ocean sedimentary rock of the right age, and all we
have there is a bit of coast line and we know that some whale evolution
had to happen somewhere else. There was a lot of coast line and a lot
of ocean, and what got preserved was a little patch that was uplifted
when India ran into Asia. We know for a fact that basilasaurids evolved
some place else because we have found their fossils in Egypt, but where
did the ancestors of basilasaurids evolve and are those sediments
accessible today?

>
> Missing fossil records is an excuse, not a reason.

It is a major excuse and a major factor. It is not the only excuse
because we know how allopatric speciation is a fact of nature. This is
speciation somewhere else and the product comes back and takes over from
the parent population. Just take the whale and horse evolution examples.

>
>
> From the paper you cited...
>
>
> "The New Zealand reptile has hardly changed its appearance
> over the last 200 million years."
>
> "They arrived at an estimate of 1.56 sequence changes per base
> every million years — placing the reptile among the fastest
> of any animal yet tested."
> http://www.nature.com/news/2008/080327/full/news.2008.695.html
>
> If that's gradualism, it's like calling glass a fluid, hardly
> convincing that such variety could flow from that rate of change.
> in fact, it's quite convincing otherwise, that once a species
> has evolved, it tends to stay very much the same.

Look at dragonflies. Why should that body plan change? It is very
successful and dragonflies still do what they did hundreds of millions
of years ago. The DNA evidence is just evidence that these are not the
same species that existed a couple hundred million years ago. They may
look similar, but their DNA is so different that they likely could never
interbreed. They haven't stopped evolving. That is what the DNA tells us.

Ron Okimoto
> s

[jillery]

Yes, many posters have intermittently entertained TO with their
versions of the Christian Creation myth, complete with similar
assertions of authenticity(*).

(Footnote *) Being from the other side of the pond, I am more familiar
with Dave Barry's version.

[Jonathan]

If the transitional form is more successful it should be
in the fossil record just like the original.

If the transitional form is less successful and not
expected to be reflected in the fossil record, the new
species would be less successful also.

Is evolution a process of favoring less successful
adaptations or more successful?

>
> "Not every transitional form appears in the fossil record,
> because the fossil record is not complete.

That's a God of the Gaps argument. Are you serious?

The trend as I see it is there are many examples
of ancient and little changed species, yet precious
few examples of transitional forms. On what basis
are you claiming that trend should be magically reversed
with more a more complete fossil record?

> Organisms are
> only rarely preserved as fossils in the best of circumstances,
> and only a fraction of such fossils have been discovered.

So the missing data supporting gradual transformations
are only found in species that don't fossilize well.
That's pretty convenient, and a great excuse to fund
all kinds of digs in exotic places all over the world.

Paleontologist
> Donald Prothero noted that this is illustrated
> by the fact that the number of species known through the
> fossil record was less than 5% of the number of known living
> species, suggesting that the number of species known through
> fossils must be far less than 1% of all the species that have
> ever lived."

Right, but the fossil record would tend to favor the
species that are more successful and more abundant.

How do you envision a process where one species
transforms gradually into another species but the
intermediate steps are less successful adaptations
than either start or finish, and so are not reflected
in the fossil record?

Wouldn't the gradual steps each have to better
adaptations, else the process of transformation
would cease or settle on the less successful
adaptations?

But still you have the problem that the fossil record
that /does exist/ shows many examples of extremely old
and little changed species, yet precious few examples
of transitional forms, your argument that this trend
will magically reverse itself isn't supported by
the facts or reasoning that I can see.

What happened to letting the observations speak for itself?

>
> It's easier to cite Wikipedia than paragraphs in books for
> the same argument I have read in several books.
>
>> The only logical conclusion is all those graduated variations
>> happen essentially at once, and only the successful variations
>> make it to the fossil record.
>>
>> But that would mean speciation and creation is *sudden*, not
>> gradual, a complexity driven fractal-like distribution
>> of possibilities.
>>
>> So they refuse to accept what nature in telling them.
>> It's called making the observations fit the theory, bias or
>> ....unbridled faith in their long-held and now dogmatic
>> scientific traditions.
>>
>> And they have the nerve to criticize religion.
>>
>
> And You have the nerve to criticize Science.

Some might say obligation to criticize, not blindly accept
whatever someone with an alphabet behind their names says,
or which pulpit they speak from, as the case may be!

You have this contradiction with the notion of
gradual changes from one species to another.

Which is if the transitional forms are more successful
they should be in the fossil record as much as the
original.

But if the transitional forms are less successful
the new species will be also, meaning evolution
would be a process of creating less successful
adaptations over time.

The only logical way around this is that the
graduated differences tend to happen all at once
and nature then selects the better mutations.

But then creation and speciation would be sudden
not gradual, and gradualism merely a fine-tuning
process, not the underlying cause.

It's no wonder Darwinists place their faith in
evidence that has yet to be found or in species
that don't fossilize.





s




>
>

[jillery]

On Sat, 28 Nov 2015 15:11:41 -0500, Jonathan <WriteI...@gmail.net>
wrote:

One of the many problems with your expressed line of reasoning above
is that you conflate success and longevity. In fact, they have
nothing to do with each other. Evolutionary success is measured by
the number of offspring who themselves succeed in reproducing. But
longevity depends on a changeable environment.

One can have a very successful population which rapidly evolves to
some other form, and one can have a very successful population whose
fossil morphology remains relatively static. It's the latter which
will likely appear over-represented in the fossil record. It's the
former which will likely leave no trace. Even you should be able to
understand this.

[David Canzi]

On Fri, 27 Nov 2015 22:06:48 -0500, jonathan <Wr...@Instead.com> wrote:
>
>Until it can answer these questions the debate over
>evolution will not end.

It doesn't matter how many questions biology answers or how
well it answers them. Even if biologists had perfect, exact,
and rigidly proven answers to all questions about life, it
would not end the debate.

There are people motivated by wanting to know what is true.
There are people motivated by what they want the truth to be.
As long as there are both of these kinds of people there will be
futile debates.

--
David Canzi | "No single raindrop believes it is to blame for the flood."
| http://www.despair.com/irresponsibility.html

[John Harshman]

Perhaps you could ask Ernst Mayr, or just read what he wrote elsewhere
in that article. But I see now that the quote mine wasn't yours, just
whoever you cut and pasted.

The solution is twofold. First, that geologic time scales are much
longer than evolutionary time scales. What seems instant in geologic
time can be tens of thousands of years in evolutionary time, enough time
for gradual evolution to produce sizeable changes. Second, that
geographic sampling of fossils is very seldom very good, and existing
species can expand their ranges; it you don't sample the original range,
they appear to have come from nowhere, instantly, into the expanded range.

[Jonathan]

Don't you mean longevity depends on the ability
to survive changing environments?

> One can have a very successful population which rapidly evolves to
> some other form,

You seem to miss the distinction between 'rapid' and 'gradual'.
Wouldn't a successful mutation take place in the course
of a single or few reproductive cycles? As in suddenly, not in
gradual progressive steps?

> and one can have a very successful population whose
> fossil morphology remains relatively static. It's the latter which
> will likely appear over-represented in the fossil record. It's the
> former which will likely leave no trace. Even you should be able to
> understand this.

So in your own words speciation takes place 'rapidly' or
is relatively static, not gradually in incremental steps.

Not sure how your reply contradicts my point.

[eridanus]

Sorry, pal. There must be an error in some part of the phrase.
The species of the past we know of, are the same as the fossils
we had found so far. If the fossils are just a little fraction, this
is a rational assumption. That is all. There is not any way we
can say "[the] species known through the fossil record was less
than 5% of the number of known living species," For this phrase
requires a clarification. I invoke here the brain of Okimoto that
looks the best informed guy in this theater.
Eri

>
> It's easier to cite Wikipedia than paragraphs in books for
> the same argument I have read in several books.
>
> > The only logical conclusion is all those graduated variations
> > happen essentially at once, and only the successful variations
> > make it to the fossil record.
> >
> > But that would mean speciation and creation is *sudden*, not
> > gradual, a complexity driven fractal-like distribution
> > of possibilities.
> >
> > So they refuse to accept what nature in telling them.
> > It's called making the observations fit the theory, bias or
> > ....unbridled faith in their long-held and now dogmatic
> > scientific traditions.
> >
> > And they have the nerve to criticize religion.
> >
>
> And You have the nerve to criticize Science.
>
>
> --
>
> Jørgen Farum Jensen
> "Science has proof without any certainty.
> Creationists have certainty without any proof."

> -- Ashley Montagu

[jillery]

On Sat, 28 Nov 2015 16:37:29 -0500, Jonathan <WriteI...@gmail.net>

You make a distinction without a meaningful difference.

>> One can have a very successful population which rapidly evolves to
>> some other form,
>
>
>You seem to miss the distinction between 'rapid' and 'gradual'.

That doesn't even make sense. Explain how you think I missed
anything.

>Wouldn't a successful mutation take place in the course
>of a single or few reproductive cycles? As in suddenly, not in
>gradual progressive steps?

Of course not. You conflate genetic mutation with morphological
change. Thousands of genetic mutations can occur without causing any
recordable morphological changes. That's another reason why the
fossil record is necessarily incomplete.

>> and one can have a very successful population whose
>> fossil morphology remains relatively static. It's the latter which
>> will likely appear over-represented in the fossil record. It's the
>> former which will likely leave no trace. Even you should be able to
>> understand this.
>
>
>So in your own words speciation takes place 'rapidly' or
>is relatively static, not gradually in incremental steps.

I was wrong. Apparently you can't understand this.

In my own words, recordable morphological changes can appear rapidly
or slowly, depending on the rate of genetic mutations, and on the
amount of selective pressure from the environment. You're still
conflating genetic mutations with morphological changes.

>Not sure how your reply contradicts my point.

Apparently you don't know what is your point. Are you arguing for
punctuated equilibrium or not? Are you arguing that the fossil record
shows rapid appearance of species followed by stasis or not? Are you
still waiting for an answer about how "darwinism" reconciles stasis
with gradualism or not?

[*Hemidactylus*]

Hmmm, given the apparent stasis may be accounted for by Gould and
Eldredge's punc eq model and though controversial within the bounds of
modern evolutionary theory I fail to see what the fuss is about. And
that there are so-called living fossils shows that species can go quite
long times without changing a great deal..."if it ain't broke don't fix
it" even these organisms can still evolve somewhat, at least genetic due
to drift in smaller population packets or the oscillation or fixation of
neutral alleles. They might even undergo some adaptive phenotypic change
over time. Stasis is a relative term. And as Harshman has pointed out
punctuation on a geological time frame is not the same as saltational
jumps between generations.

I was calling attention to your odd usage of Mayr in as a supporter of
saltation. Have you accounted for what others here are referring to as a
quote mine?

There may be a limited scope for saltation in evolution, de Vries
evening primrose comes to mind. He was a co-discoverer of Mendel's work
and had a love for mutationism. But plants with weird genetic systems
don't form the basis for all encompassing generalizations. And
Goldschmidt's reputation hit the rocks of the infamous systemic
mutation, though his use of phenocopies in his developmental work was
still valid and respectable and for me as interested in behavioral
evolution, a laboratory model for how the Baldwin effect might work in
the wild.

[*Hemidactylus*]

If this thread boils down to acceptability of Gould and Eldredge's punc
eq, I fail to see its shock value. Now throw in some inflammatory
rhetoric that puts Mayr in legion with Goldschmidt and de Vries and we
have something far more shocking.

I don't really care whether punq eq is correct or predominant (or not).
And species selection? WTF? ;-)

I do think the discrete developmentally based character shift in pocket
gophers is fascinating and perhaps of macroevolutionary significance,
but are they the hopeful monsters of yore? Maybe if they invade your
lawn. And their character shift might be more relevant to generational
time than to longer geological scales.

[*Hemidactylus*]

It's a matter of differing time scales, as Harshman has opined and
actual frequency.

Saltation is rare on short generational scales. Most evolutionary change
is quite gradual on this scale. There could be instant speciation events
in strange plants like the evening primrose. No generalization obtains.

In the longer term gradualism may still hold and what Gould refers to as
extrapolationism from micro to macroevolution. But there could be
infrequent (or frequent) occurrences of the punq eq mode. Dawkins could
be wright (oops right) or Gould. Doesn't really matter to me on this
topic. Either way you aren't exactly chopping off our heads here so what
was the point again?

It's kinda like when you invoke fractals, chaos, or complexity and fail
to make a salient point in all the poorly delineated cut/pastes. But for
you it seems earth shattering.

[John Harshman]

Are you talking to me?

[Öö Tiib]

On Saturday, 28 November 2015 15:18:41 UTC+2, Jonathan wrote:

Our planet has never been homogeneous environment as whole.
Maybe during Huronian glaciation it was homogeneous snowball for
200 millions of years ... but what lived back then were only microbes.
The conditons are typically relatively stable but different in different
biomes and it is not rapidly changing environment. Certain environmental
conditions stay same for millions of years. Recent rapid changes
are caused by humans.

>
> Darwinists can't admit what the observations clearly indicate.

May be. I do not see any clarity in your copy-paste of
Dr. Eugene M. McCarthy. None of his quotes is less than 20 years
old and the ones skew the opinion of authors of those. Also he
has made zero original research.

>
> If a species were created by gradual steps, slowly over time
> transitioning from one species to a new one, then those
> intermediate forms must be successful enough to show up
> in the fossil record, or the new species would never
> have had a chance.

You perhaps think that major trouble for evolution is taking these
gradual steps? It is not. Mutations happen rapidly. If advantageous
direction is clear then with big enough population it goes fast. It
is easy to breed several freaky breeds of mice or pigeons just by
selecting those. One life-time of a man is more than plenty. Trouble
is that middle steps from local to global optimum (if more optimal
exists at all) often have disadvantages.

In large homogeneous biomes the species are not too diverse.
Most robust things that work there win there and things stabilize.
Interesting things happen where biomes contact or overlap or alternate
since there the conditions are more varying and complex.

>
> The only logical conclusion is all those graduated variations
> happen essentially at once, and only the successful variations
> make it to the fossil record.

Those variations are triggered by "experiments" at narrow stripes
where large stable biomes touch or overlap or in rare complex biomes.
If nothing revolutionary emerges for million of years from those then
there is very low variation.

For example it is possible that cyanobacteria are close to optimal
for what these do, as simple, efficient and robust as it can go. So
for achieving change there must be niche conditions that are
advantageous to something different from cyanobacteria. Otherwise
these will be never replaced with something else.

>
> But that would mean speciation and creation is *sudden*, not
> gradual, a complexity driven fractal-like distribution
> of possibilities.

It is certainly "sudden" if we consider hundreds of millions of years.
I already explained that it does not take one life-time of a man to
alter physical properties if pressure to certain direction is clear.

>
> So they refuse to accept what nature in telling them.
> It's called making the observations fit the theory, bias or
> ....unbridled faith in their long-held and now dogmatic
> scientific traditions.

Calm down. No one is refusing anything. Scientists are always the worst
opponents of other scientists. Your Dr. Eugene "Ape+Swine" McCarthy
goes too far with his quote mining and not doing science but instead
blogging his fantasies. His theories are too weak from too several
sides.

>
> And they have the nerve to criticize religion.

If you claim that someone (natural or not natural) did breed or even
construct some beings here then you need better evidence for that than
caps in fossil record. You can not change what happened in our world
by talking and fantasizing. It already happened how it happened. All
that you can do is finding it out by investigating and experimenting.

[*Hemidactylus*]

That you would make more effort to reply to an asshole like Nyikos
because you have some sort of twisted affinity toward him says much more
about you than me now doesn't it? Do go on and help him pollute the
group with his crap.

[John Harshman]

Whoa. That was some serious crazy there. I merely point out that nothing
you said seemed to me at all relevant to what I had said, so it seemed
odd as a response to me.

[jillery]

On Sat, 28 Nov 2015 08:14:41 -0500, Jonathan <WriteI...@gmail.net>
wrote:

The relevant question is not whether a particular environment has
remain unchanged, but whether a particular environment has been
largely available around the globe.

[Glenn]

"John Harshman" <jhar...@pacbell.net> wrote in message news:fNidnR01s6LUpsTL...@giganews.com...

> On 11/27/15 7:06 PM, jonathan wrote:
>> If anyone, could be described as a “very determined and sympathetic
>> searcher,” it was Ernst Mayr. He, too, admits saltation is the typical
>> pattern: Although he maintains that a “certain proportion” of fossil
>> forms undergo gradual change into subsequent forms,13 “far more

>> frequently,” he says, “the extant species are supplemented by — or the
>> extinct species are replaced by — new species that turn up in the fossil

>> record. In the classical literature this sudden introduction of new
>> species was usually ascribed to instantaneous saltations.”14 As Gould
>> (1980a: 189) puts it, “All paleontologists know that the fossil record
>> contains precious little in the way of intermediate forms.”
>
> Those are certainly two of the most egregious quote-mines I've seen in a
> while. Are you ashamed?
>

https://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/jksadegh/A%20Good%20Atheist%20Secularist%20Skeptical%20Book%20Collection/Gould_The_Return_of_Hopeful_Monsters_sec.pdf

[RSNorman]

On Sun, 29 Nov 2015 10:52:06 -0700, "Glenn" <g...@invalid.invalid>
wrote:

As usual, Glenn's one-line comments completely fail to explain or
elucidate or advance any point whatsoever, particular whether the
quote-mines are terribly egregious or merely misrepresentational.

[Glenn]

"RSNorman" <r_s_n...@comcast.net> wrote in message news:6mfm5bhc39ngqg1t8...@4ax.com...

> On Sun, 29 Nov 2015 10:52:06 -0700, "Glenn" <g...@invalid.invalid>
> wrote:
>
>>
>>"John Harshman" <jhar...@pacbell.net> wrote in message news:fNidnR01s6LUpsTL...@giganews.com...
>>> On 11/27/15 7:06 PM, jonathan wrote:
>>>> If anyone, could be described as a "very determined and sympathetic
>>>> searcher," it was Ernst Mayr. He, too, admits saltation is the typical
>>>> pattern: Although he maintains that a "certain proportion" of fossil
>>>> forms undergo gradual change into subsequent forms,13 "far more

>>>> frequently," he says, "the extant species are supplemented by - or the
>>>> extinct species are replaced by - new species that turn up in the fossil

>>>> record. In the classical literature this sudden introduction of new
>>>> species was usually ascribed to instantaneous saltations."14 As Gould
>>>> (1980a: 189) puts it, "All paleontologists know that the fossil record
>>>> contains precious little in the way of intermediate forms."
>>>
>>> Those are certainly two of the most egregious quote-mines I've seen in a
>>> while. Are you ashamed?
>>>
>>https://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/jksadegh/A%20Good%20Atheist%20Secularist%20Skeptical%20Book%20Collection/Gould_The_Return_of_Hopeful_Monsters_sec.pdf
>
> As usual, Glenn's one-line comments completely fail to explain or
> elucidate or advance any point whatsoever, particular whether the
> quote-mines are terribly egregious or merely misrepresentational.
>

As usual, you seem to have no brain.