EVIDENCE OF DESIGN IN NATURE?

[Ron.Dean]

<https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/score-onefor-punk-eek/>For
me, personally I believe there is an example of deliberate, purposeful
design on a universal scale with functions designs for meeting long
range objectives. This involved long term planning, design and setting
up universal programs for the formation of animal body forms parts:
shapes organs,limbs etc.. This occurred at one brief period of time
(geologically) at a period called the Cambrian about 485 million years
ago and during what is called the Cambrian explosion where vast numbers
of multicellular animal fossils are found in the strata. Almost all of
modern phyla are represented in fossils at this period of time, with
only a very few appearing later
These modern phyla appeared abruptly in the fossil record with no fossil
paths or intermediates leading back to the common ancestor of these 30+
distinct modern phyla.



his is where intelligent design, seems to be the best of the two
explanation. And especially from an engineers perspective. numbers

[broger...@gmail.com]

You know the article you linked to has absolutely nothing to do with the evolution of animal phyla in the Cambrian, right?

And you keep saying that "These modern phyla appeared abruptly in the fossil record with no fossil paths of intermediate leading back to the common ancestor of these 30+ modern phyla" even though I and others have given you links to the scientific literature describing just such fossils.

It is positively bizarre that you keep repeated things that you should, by now, know to be false, especially since the actual truth provides no reason at all not to believe in a designer if you want to.

[John Harshman]

Other things wrong:

1. The majority of modern phyla have no fossil record at all, and a few
more have only spotty records that don't include the Cambrian, so in
fact it's not true that almost all modern phyla even appeared in the
fossil record, not to mention without fossil paths or intermediates.

2. 485 million years ago would be during the early Ordovician, several
million years after the end of the Cambrian.

3. Nothing about this implies planning, design, or setting up universal
programs, even if it were true.

[peter2...@gmail.com]

On Wednesday, July 12, 2023 at 5:15:37 PM UTC-4, Ron.Dean wrote:

> <https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/score-onefor-punk-eek/

>For me, personally I believe there is an example of deliberate, purposeful
> design on a universal scale with functions designs for meeting long
> range objectives. This involved long term planning, design and setting
> up universal programs for the formation of animal body forms parts:
> shapes organs,limbs etc.. This occurred at one brief period of time
> (geologically) at a period called the Cambrian about 485 million years
> ago and during what is called the Cambrian explosion

You need to do a bit more homework before making such comments;
485 million years ago was the END of the Cambrian, which began ca. 539 mya,
with the Cambrian explosion itself, when almost all phyla known from fossils
appeared, ended around 510 mya and began about 20 million years earlier.

You really should buy or borrow a copy of Stephen Meyer's book, _Darwin's_Doubt_,
where some nice summaries of the Cambrian explosion itself can be found
and quickly read. The majority of the book is about various attempts to explain
the explosion without relying on intelligent design, and how they fall short.


John Harshman loves to claim that the best book on the Cambrian
explosion is the one by Erwin and Valentine, but it only gives more details
than Meyer's book about the events of the explosion, and doesn't attempt
to explain how it occurred nor why nothing remotely like it has happened since then.

> where vast numbers
> of multicellular animal fossils are found in the strata. Almost all of
> modern phyla are represented in fossils at this period of time, with
> only a very few appearing later

... in the fossil record. Harshman didn't cut you any slack on this one.

> These modern phyla appeared abruptly in the fossil record with no fossil
> paths or intermediates leading back to the common ancestor of these 30+
> distinct modern phyla.

Bill Rogers claimed that you had been given links to the scientific literature
"describing just such fossils" but that was a blatant equivocation.

For one thing, no one has any idea what the last common ancestor of any of the following
looked like:

eumetazoans [sponges and placozoans excluded]

bilaterians

protostomes vs deuterostomes

ecdysozoans vs lophotrochozoans

These are successively smaller groups of phyla that you would do well to
familiarize yourself with, since Bill Rogers and others keep
copying such equivocations from each other.

Second, only a small handful were true intermediates between modern phyla
and the smallest of the above listed groups containing them. Most are "small shellies"
and most of those are too fragmentary to even classify them.


> This is where intelligent design, seems to be the best of the two

> explanation. And especially from an engineers perspective.

There is a strong case to be made for this, but you need to keep articulating it;
you've only made a start here.


Peter Nyikos
Professor, Dept. of Mathematics -- standard disclaimer--
University of South Carolina
http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos

[peter2...@gmail.com]

On Wednesday, July 12, 2023 at 6:55:37 PM UTC-4, John Harshman wrote:
> On 7/12/23 2:29 PM, broger...@gmail.com wrote:
> > On Wednesday, July 12, 2023 at 5:15:37 PM UTC-4, Ron.Dean wrote:
> >> <https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/score-onefor-punk-eek/

> >> For me, personally I believe there is an example of deliberate, purposeful
> >> design on a universal scale with functions designs for meeting long
> >> range objectives. This involved long term planning, design and setting
> >> up universal programs for the formation of animal body forms parts:
> >> shapes organs,limbs etc.. This occurred at one brief period of time
> >> (geologically) at a period called the Cambrian about 485 million years
> >> ago and during what is called the Cambrian explosion where vast numbers
> >> of multicellular animal fossils are found in the strata. Almost all of
> >> modern phyla are represented in fossils at this period of time, with
> >> only a very few appearing later
> >> These modern phyla appeared abruptly in the fossil record with no fossil
> >> paths or intermediates leading back to the common ancestor of these 30+
> >> distinct modern phyla.
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> his is where intelligent design, seems to be the best of the two
> >> explanation. And especially from an engineers perspective. numbers
> >
> > You know the article you linked to has absolutely nothing to do with the evolution of animal phyla in the Cambrian, right?

Do you agree with Bill Rogers here, John?

I don't. I think the Cambrian explosion is a fine example
of a huge series of "punctuations," in fact the greatest one of them all by far.

> > And you keep saying that "These modern phyla appeared abruptly in the fossil record with no fossil paths of intermediate leading back to the common ancestor of these 30+ modern phyla" even though I and others have given you links to the scientific literature describing just such fossils.

As I told Ron Dean just now, there ARE no fossil paths of that sort known, and only a handful
of confirmed intermediates between a phylum and that unknown common ancestor.

In fact, I think Bill Rogers is bluffing here.

Don't be surprised that I am talking to you about Bill: he has had me in a killfile for
about five years now.

> >
> > It is positively bizarre that you keep repeated things that you should, by now, know to be false, especially since the actual truth provides no reason at all not to believe in a designer if you want to.

> Other things wrong:
>
> 1. The majority of modern phyla have no fossil record at all,

Really? Have you done a count? Keep in mind that more than 20
phyla are known from Cambrian fossils.

>and a few
> more have only spotty records that don't include the Cambrian, so in
> fact it's not true that almost all modern phyla even appeared in the
> fossil record, not to mention without fossil paths or intermediates.

Ron misspoke. What he should have said is that almost all phyla
that appear in the fossil record appeared in the Cambrian.

> 2. 485 million years ago would be during the early Ordovician, several
> million years after the end of the Cambrian.
>
> 3. Nothing about this implies planning, design, or setting up universal
> programs, even if it were true.

That would take a long essay, but the way so many different body plans appeared
in such a short time is a beginning of an implication, as I told Ron.

Peter Nyikos
Professor, Dept. of Mathematics -- standard disclaimer--

Univ. of South Carolina at Columbia
http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos

[John Harshman]

On 7/12/23 5:37 PM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> On Wednesday, July 12, 2023 at 6:55:37 PM UTC-4, John Harshman wrote:
>> On 7/12/23 2:29 PM, broger...@gmail.com wrote:
>>> On Wednesday, July 12, 2023 at 5:15:37 PM UTC-4, Ron.Dean wrote:
>>>> <https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/score-onefor-punk-eek/
>
>>>> For me, personally I believe there is an example of deliberate, purposeful
>>>> design on a universal scale with functions designs for meeting long
>>>> range objectives. This involved long term planning, design and setting
>>>> up universal programs for the formation of animal body forms parts:
>>>> shapes organs,limbs etc.. This occurred at one brief period of time
>>>> (geologically) at a period called the Cambrian about 485 million years
>>>> ago and during what is called the Cambrian explosion where vast numbers
>>>> of multicellular animal fossils are found in the strata. Almost all of
>>>> modern phyla are represented in fossils at this period of time, with
>>>> only a very few appearing later
>>>> These modern phyla appeared abruptly in the fossil record with no fossil
>>>> paths or intermediates leading back to the common ancestor of these 30+
>>>> distinct modern phyla.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> his is where intelligent design, seems to be the best of the two
>>>> explanation. And especially from an engineers perspective. numbers
>>>
>>> You know the article you linked to has absolutely nothing to do with the evolution of animal phyla in the Cambrian, right?
>
> Do you agree with Bill Rogers here, John?
>
> I don't. I think the Cambrian explosion is a fine example
> of a huge series of "punctuations," in fact the greatest one of them all by far.

I agree with Bill, and I think you have a mistaken impression of PE.
It's a theory about most morphological change being coincident with
speciation, which happens over a few thousand years, and with relative
stasis prevailing at other times. It's about the transition between
closely similar species. The Cambrian explosion is not that sort of thing.

>>> And you keep saying that "These modern phyla appeared abruptly in the fossil record with no fossil paths of intermediate leading back to the common ancestor of these 30+ modern phyla" even though I and others have given you links to the scientific literature describing just such fossils.
>
> As I told Ron Dean just now, there ARE no fossil paths of that sort known, and only a handful
> of confirmed intermediates between a phylum and that unknown common ancestor.
>
> In fact, I think Bill Rogers is bluffing here.
>
> Don't be surprised that I am talking to you about Bill: he has had me in a killfile for
> about five years now.

Again, this has nothing to do with PE. Now, are there fossil paths of
intermediates? Yes, but they aren't the smooth, infinitesimally graded
transitions expected by Gould's strawman of "phyletic gradualism".
They're the sort of intermediates we see throughout the fossil record,
not necessarily nicely ordered in time, not as finely graded as
creationists tend to demand. But they still work to show that the
Cambrian taxa had ancestors, and that's all that's needed.

>>> It is positively bizarre that you keep repeated things that you should, by now, know to be false, especially since the actual truth provides no reason at all not to believe in a designer if you want to.
>
>> Other things wrong:
>>
>> 1. The majority of modern phyla have no fossil record at all,
>
> Really? Have you done a count? Keep in mind that more than 20
> phyla are known from Cambrian fossils.

Some of those aren't modern phyla, though. I'm open to correction if you
have a better count. And there are many fine distinctions. A few phyla
are known from the Precambrian, a few are known from the Cambrian before
the explosion, a few are known from the Cambrian after the explosion, a
few are known from scattered fossils after the Cambrian, and some are
unknown from fossils at all. It may be that the last category are not an
actual majority, but it's at least the case that there are many of them.

>> and a few
>> more have only spotty records that don't include the Cambrian, so in
>> fact it's not true that almost all modern phyla even appeared in the
>> fossil record, not to mention without fossil paths or intermediates.
>
> Ron misspoke. What he should have said is that almost all phyla
> that appear in the fossil record appeared in the Cambrian.

That much may be true. But notice that "the Cambrian" is not the same as
"the Cambrian explosion".

>> 2. 485 million years ago would be during the early Ordovician, several
>> million years after the end of the Cambrian.
>>
>> 3. Nothing about this implies planning, design, or setting up universal
>> programs, even if it were true.
>
> That would take a long essay, but the way so many different body plans appeared
> in such a short time is a beginning of an implication, as I told Ron.

Good luck with that long essay. And it needs to start with getting your
facts straight. You would also have to have a rigorous notion of what
"body plan" means.

[John Harshman]

On 7/12/23 4:59 PM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> On Wednesday, July 12, 2023 at 5:15:37 PM UTC-4, Ron.Dean wrote:
>> <https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/score-onefor-punk-eek/
>
>> For me, personally I believe there is an example of deliberate, purposeful
>> design on a universal scale with functions designs for meeting long
>> range objectives. This involved long term planning, design and setting
>> up universal programs for the formation of animal body forms parts:
>> shapes organs,limbs etc.. This occurred at one brief period of time
>> (geologically) at a period called the Cambrian about 485 million years
>> ago and during what is called the Cambrian explosion
>
> You need to do a bit more homework before making such comments;
> 485 million years ago was the END of the Cambrian, which began ca. 539 mya,
> with the Cambrian explosion itself, when almost all phyla known from fossils
> appeared, ended around 510 mya and began about 20 million years earlier.

Where did you get those numbers? The official dates are 542-488ma. I
wouldn't place the dates of the explosion where you do either, but there
are no official dates for that.

> You really should buy or borrow a copy of Stephen Meyer's book, _Darwin's_Doubt_,
> where some nice summaries of the Cambrian explosion itself can be found
> and quickly read. The majority of the book is about various attempts to explain
> the explosion without relying on intelligent design, and how they fall short.

That's a really bad bit of advice, since the book is full of errors and
distortions, and is mostly not about the Cambrian explosion at all. You
mistake what the book is about.

> John Harshman loves to claim that the best book on the Cambrian
> explosion is the one by Erwin and Valentine, but it only gives more details
> than Meyer's book about the events of the explosion, and doesn't attempt
> to explain how it occurred nor why nothing remotely like it has happened since then.

Actually, the last chapter or so does make that attempt. But isn't it
better not to explain than to attempt an explanation that ignores the facts?

>> where vast numbers
>> of multicellular animal fossils are found in the strata. Almost all of
>> modern phyla are represented in fossils at this period of time, with
>> only a very few appearing later
>
> ... in the fossil record. Harshman didn't cut you any slack on this one.

Why should I?

>> These modern phyla appeared abruptly in the fossil record with no fossil
>> paths or intermediates leading back to the common ancestor of these 30+
>> distinct modern phyla.
>
> Bill Rogers claimed that you had been given links to the scientific literature
> "describing just such fossils" but that was a blatant equivocation.
>
> For one thing, no one has any idea what the last common ancestor of any of the following
> looked like:
>
> eumetazoans [sponges and placozoans excluded]
>
> bilaterians
>
> protostomes vs deuterostomes
>
> ecdysozoans vs lophotrochozoans

And yet there are fossils that have more primitive members of several of
these groups, outside the modern phyla. Why wouldn't that count as
intermediate?

Cloudina, Namacalathus, Kimberella, halkieriids, tommotiids, and various
others come to mind.

> These are successively smaller groups of phyla that you would do well to
> familiarize yourself with, since Bill Rogers and others keep
> copying such equivocations from each other.

Rude and unfounded accusation. If this is how you intend to continue,
better to go back on hiatus.

> Second, only a small handful were true intermediates between modern phyla
> and the smallest of the above listed groups containing them. Most are "small shellies"
> and most of those are too fragmentary to even classify them.

How does that fail to make them intermediates?

>> This is where intelligent design, seems to be the best of the two
>> explanation. And especially from an engineers perspective.
>
> There is a strong case to be made for this, but you need to keep articulating it;
> you've only made a start here.

Do you think the Cambrian explosion was designed? Who do you think
designed it and how was it accomplished? Do you really think there's a
credible case? If so, better write that essay, because Ron won't. He
won't even say what he thinks happened, or whether any species are
actually related to each other.

[broger...@gmail.com]

Well, I'm glad you agree. I simply thought the article unrelated to the Cambrian explosion because the article is solely concerned with experimental evolution in E. coli, and the number of generations involved would hardly qualify as the sort of stasis usually associated with punctuated equilibrium. Pretty hard to draw conclusions about the origin of animal phyla over millions of generations from their experimental set-up.

[John Harshman]

Simpler answer: PE has zip to do with the Cambrian explosion.

[peter2...@gmail.com]

On Wednesday, July 12, 2023 at 10:30:37 PM UTC-4, John Harshman wrote:
> On 7/12/23 6:36 PM, broger...@gmail.com wrote:
> > On Wednesday, July 12, 2023 at 9:20:37 PM UTC-4, John Harshman wrote:
> >> On 7/12/23 5:37 PM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:

> >>>>> You know the article you linked to has absolutely nothing to do with the evolution of animal phyla in the Cambrian, right?
> >>>
> >>> Do you agree with Bill Rogers here, John?
> >>>
> >>> I don't. I think the Cambrian explosion is a fine example
> >>> of a huge series of "punctuations," in fact the greatest one of them all by far.

"greatest" refers to "huge series," not to individual species that are the result
of punctuated equilibrium.

> >> I agree with Bill, and I think you have a mistaken impression of PE.

You can think anything you want, but here you are counting your
chickens before they are hatched. Read on.

> > Well, I'm glad you agree. I simply thought the article unrelated to the Cambrian explosion because the article is solely concerned with experimental evolution in E. coli, and the number of generations involved would hardly qualify as the sort of stasis usually associated with punctuated equilibrium.
> > Pretty hard to draw conclusions about the origin of animal phyla over millions of generations from their experimental set-up.


> Simpler answer: PE has zip to do with the Cambrian explosion.

Simpler but much less helpful. Not that I agree with Bill, but he at least points
us in the direction of fruitful discussion.


You don't: by similar, but slightly less radical standards than yours,
the Modern Synthesis, a.k.a. neo-Darwinism, has zip to do with the Cambrian explosion,
because it stops at speciation.

This applies *a fortiori* to the widespread definition of "evolution" as "change of frequency
of alleles in a population." Moreover, we might as well go beyond the case of the Cambrian
explosion to the grand panoply of organisms that are the result of over 3 billion years
of evolution in the more common meaning of the word, the one that creationists cannot cope with.

Peter Nyikos
Professor, Dept. of Mathematics -- standard disclaimer--

Univ. of South Carolina in Columbia
http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos

[John Harshman]

All I can gather from this reply is that I've said something you don't
like. And you snipped out most of what I said, so it's hard to know just
what you don't like and what you don't like about what you snipped or
even what you left in, since you only say that you don't like it.

I have to say that your return is disappointing, since you are falling
back immediately into your old ways.

[Ron.Dean]

On 7/12/23 7:59 PM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> On Wednesday, July 12, 2023 at 5:15:37 PM UTC-4, Ron.Dean wrote:
>> <https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/score-onefor-punk-eek/
>
>> For me, personally I believe there is an example of deliberate, purposeful
>> design on a universal scale with functions designs for meeting long
>> range objectives. This involved long term planning, design and setting
>> up universal programs for the formation of animal body forms parts:
>> shapes organs,limbs etc.. This occurred at one brief period of time
>> (geologically) at a period called the Cambrian about 485 million years
>> ago and during what is called the Cambrian explosion
>
> You need to do a bit more homework before making such comments;
> 485 million years ago was the END of the Cambrian, which began ca. 539 mya,
> with the Cambrian explosion itself, when almost all phyla known from fossils
> appeared, ended around 510 mya and began about 20 million years earlier.
>

Okay, I was a bit careless regarding the date of the Cambrian Explosion.
I've been informer time after time after time that this did not happen
during the early Cambrian.

>
> You really should buy or borrow a copy of Stephen Meyer's book, _Darwin's_Doubt_,
> where some nice summaries of the Cambrian explosion itself can be found
> and quickly read. The majority of the book is about various attempts to explain
> the explosion without relying on intelligent design, and how they fall short.
>

As a general rule, referencing Intelligent Design writers is met with
disdain. And you are accused of appealing to "creationist" sources. In
this way, they "shoot the messenger" and by so doing, whatever you write
then stands discredited.

>
> John Harshman loves to claim that the best book on the Cambrian
> explosion is the one by Erwin and Valentine, but it only gives more details
> than Meyer's book about the events of the explosion, and doesn't attempt
> to explain how it occurred nor why nothing remotely like it has happened since then.
>

I looked up this book on amazon. For a boo, it's just too expensive. I
live about 30 miles from the library, so unless I have another reason
fpr going into town.....

>
>> where vast numbers
>> of multicellular animal fossils are found in the strata. Almost all of
>> modern phyla are represented in fossils at this period of time, with
>> only a very few appearing later
>
> ... in the fossil record. Harshman didn't cut you any slack on this one.
>

I know, but I'm unconvinced that that there is any reasonable
evolutionary pathway
back into the early Cambrian or the Ediacaran. I've recall the reasons
given of the virtual absence of ancestors of the Cambrian complex
animals, low oxygen, the environment wasn't conducive for highly complex
animals bodies. I've read ice sheets that covered the globe so massive
erosion occurred with the melting. I think this is a very controversial
subject.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12542-021-00568-5
<https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12542-021-00568-5>

>
>> These modern phyla appeared abruptly in the fossil record with no fossil
>> paths or intermediates leading back to the common ancestor of these 30+
>> distinct modern phyla.
>
> Bill Rogers claimed that you had been given links to the scientific literature
> "describing just such fossils" but that was a blatant equivocation.
>
> For one thing, no one has any idea what the last common ancestor of any of the following
> looked like:
>
> eumetazoans [sponges and placozoans excluded]
>
> bilaterians
>
> protostomes vs deuterostomes
>
> ecdysozoans vs lophotrochozoans
>
> These are successively smaller groups of phyla that you would do well to
> familiarize yourself with, since Bill Rogers and others keep
> copying such equivocations from each other.
>

But, is there any bona fide links between any of the Cambrian phyla to
these phyla? According to the article, the affinities are still of small
shelly fossils.

>
> Second, only a small handful were true intermediates between modern phyla
> and the smallest of the above listed groups containing them. Most are "small shellies"
> and most of those are too fragmentary to even classify them.
>

Are you saying these small Shelly creatures are considered progenitors
of Cambrian Phyla?
According to this::

shttps://www.researchgate.net/publication/326486991_The_Cambrian_explosion_in_Iran_new_insights_from_small_shelly_fossils_of_the_Ediacaran-Cambrian_transition_in_the_Soltanieh_and_Alborz_Mountains
<https://www.researchgate.net/publication/326486991_The_Cambrian_explosion_in_Iran_new_insights_from_small_shelly_fossils_of_the_Ediacaran-Cambrian_transition_in_the_Soltanieh_and_Alborz_Mountains>.

>
>> This is where intelligent design, seems to be the best of the two
>> explanation. And especially from an engineers perspective.
>
> There is a strong case to be made for this, but you need to keep articulating it;
> you've only made a start here.
>

I understand the "new science of evo devo", IE evolutionary development
in biology is called the 3/rd field of biology is said by biologist,
Amoung the first discovery of these homeopox genes (Hox)
genes were with fruit flies. Sean Carroll it as evidence proving common
descent beyond any challenge. But this is in keeping with his own world
view. These master control genes because of their ancient appearance,
their highly conserved nature throughout time and the universality of
this family of genes throughout time and the animal kingdom could
certainly be interpreted as evidence of design.


https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/3650071/The-new-science-of-Evo-Devo.html


<https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/3650071/The-new-science-of-Evo-Devo.html>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qAHDHvGBMug&t=14s



It was commonly believed that the various animal body were expressed
each by its own unique set of genes. Another case is the eye was
believed to have evolved about 40 times independently over millions
years of time. But this is challenged by the evo devo.

The evidence that the same Homeboy genes controls body form, limbs and
organs the development throughout the animal kingdom is demonstrated by
this one organ (the eye) experiment.
>

file:///Users/rdhallman224/Desktop/Evolution:%20Library:%20Walter%20Gehring:%20Master%20Control%20Genes%20and%20the%20Evolution%20of%20the%20Eye.html
<file:///Users/rdhallman224/Desktop/Evolution:%20Library:%20Walter%20Gehring:%20Master%20Control%20Genes%20and%20the%20Evolution%20of%20the%20Eye.html>

[jillery]

On Fri, 14 Jul 2023 04:09:02 -0400, "Ron.Dean"
<rondean...@gmail.com> wrote:

>I know, but I'm unconvinced that that there is any reasonable
>evolutionary pathway
>back into the early Cambrian or the Ediacaran. I've recall the reasons
>given of the virtual absence of ancestors of the Cambrian complex
>animals, low oxygen, the environment wasn't conducive for highly complex
>animals bodies. I've read ice sheets that covered the globe so massive
>erosion occurred with the melting. I think this is a very controversial
>subject.
>
>https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12542-021-00568-5
><https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12542-021-00568-5>

Question 1: How would you describe a "reasonable evolutionary
pathway"?

Question 2: What evidence do you have that shows Cambrian forms were
designed by a purposeful agent?

--
You're entitled to your own opinions.
You're not entitled to your own facts.

[Ron.Dean]

On 7/14/23 11:08 AM, jillery wrote:
> On Fri, 14 Jul 2023 04:09:02 -0400, "Ron.Dean"
> <rondean...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> I know, but I'm unconvinced that that there is any reasonable
>> evolutionary pathway
>> back into the early Cambrian or the Ediacaran. I've recall the reasons
>> given of the virtual absence of ancestors of the Cambrian complex
>> animals, low oxygen, the environment wasn't conducive for highly complex
>> animals bodies. I've read ice sheets that covered the globe so massive
>> erosion occurred with the melting. I think this is a very controversial
>> subject.
>>
>> https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12542-021-00568-5
>> <https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12542-021-00568-5>
>

I read this one reference. From this site, there were no
evidence of fossil linkages back to common ancestors or progenitors.
In fact, near the beginning you find this comment,"the question is
centered over poverty of fossils in the Precambrian" ..."it's still
poorly understood."
It goes on to say " most living animal phyla made their appearance
during the first 20 million years of the Cambrian. In reference to
Ediacurian faunta "they lacked diagnostic features of metazoans and
difficult to to link to Cambrian fauna or living phyla"?.

Towards the end of the article you find this question: "why do no new
phyla arise in subsequent evolutionary radiations?"

>
> Question 1: How would you describe a "reasonable evolutionary
> pathway"? >

I would not, I do not think there is any linkages between phyla. For
evolution to occur from a common ancestor, would require several
crossovers between various intermediary phyla.
I believe that most phyla arose during the Cambrian, and I think each
phyla is set in stone. But, I can acknowledge that changes occur within
phyla.
In view of the fact that 98%+ of all species that ever lived went
extinct, I question that there is any way to determined
which intermediate links survived to give rise to later descendants.

>
> Question 2: What evidence do you have that shows Cambrian forms were
> designed by a purposeful agent?
>

It's generally possible to recognize design by observation, however,
the explanation which is frequently used to disqualify observed
design is the human involvement in known designs. Another disqualifying
characteristic often used is the denial of observed design.
It occurs to me that the space vehicle Voyager 1 is now far beyond
our solar system and into interstellar space.
Suppose, an intelligent agent, from an advanced civilization, were to
find Voyager 1, would he dismiss it as designed, because the designer is
unknown. Or would the observation of design be sufficient to it.
for my civilized agent? I it were to employ the same criteria as we
do. It would not. It would find some way to prove it some how to be the
result of natural processes.

>

[John Harshman]

On 7/14/23 1:09 AM, Ron.Dean wrote:
> On 7/12/23 7:59 PM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
>> On Wednesday, July 12, 2023 at 5:15:37 PM UTC-4, Ron.Dean wrote:
>>> <https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/score-onefor-punk-eek/
>>
>>> For me, personally I believe there is an example of deliberate,
>>> purposeful
>>> design on a universal scale with functions designs for meeting long
>>> range objectives. This involved long term planning, design and setting
>>> up universal programs for the formation of animal body forms parts:
>>> shapes organs,limbs etc.. This occurred at one brief period of time
>>> (geologically) at a period called the Cambrian about 485 million years
>>> ago and during what is called the Cambrian explosion
>>
>> You need to do a bit more homework before making such comments;
>> 485 million years ago was the END of the Cambrian, which began ca. 539
>> mya,
>> with the Cambrian explosion itself, when almost all phyla known from
>> fossils
>> appeared, ended around 510 mya and began about 20 million years earlier.
>>
> Okay, I was a bit careless regarding the date of the Cambrian Explosion.
> I've been informer time after time after time that this did not happen
> during the early Cambrian.

I don't know who would have informed you of that, but they're wrong.

>> You really should buy or borrow a copy of Stephen Meyer's book,
>> _Darwin's_Doubt_,
>> where some nice summaries of the Cambrian explosion itself can be found
>> and quickly read. The majority of the book is about various attempts
>> to explain
>> the explosion without relying on intelligent design, and how they fall
>> short.
>>
> As a general rule, referencing Intelligent Design writers is met with
> disdain. And you are accused of appealing to "creationist" sources. In
> this way, they "shoot the messenger" and by so doing, whatever you write
> then stands discredited.

As a general rule, the disdain is well desserved. And so it is in the
current case. Whether Meyer is a creationist is not entirely clear,
though he has on occasion questioned whether humans are related to other
apes. But nothing you write has been discredited because of the source;
it's been discredited because it's factually wrong.

>> John Harshman loves to claim that the best book on the Cambrian
>> explosion is the one by Erwin and Valentine, but it only gives more
>> details
>> than Meyer's book about the events of the explosion, and doesn't attempt
>> to explain how it occurred nor why nothing remotely like it has
>> happened since then.
>>
>  I looked up this book on amazon. For a boo, it's just too expensive. I
> live about 30 miles from the library, so unless I have another reason
> fpr going into town.....

Well worth the 30 miles.

>>>   where vast numbers
>>> of multicellular animal fossils are found in the strata. Almost all of
>>> modern phyla are represented in fossils at this period of time, with
>>> only a very few appearing later
>>
>> ... in the fossil record. Harshman didn't cut you any slack on this one.
>>
> I know, but I'm unconvinced that that there is any reasonable
> evolutionary pathway
> back into the early Cambrian or the Ediacaran. I've recall the reasons
> given of the virtual absence of ancestors of the Cambrian complex
> animals, low oxygen, the environment wasn't conducive for highly complex
> animals bodies. I've read ice sheets that covered the globe so massive
> erosion occurred with the melting. I think this is a very controversial
> subject.
>
> https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12542-021-00568-5
> <https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12542-021-00568-5>

Naked links are not conducive to good discussion. And what you say is a
jumble of falsities and things that happened too early to be relevant to
the Cambrian explosion.

>>> These modern phyla appeared abruptly in the fossil record with no fossil
>>> paths or intermediates leading back to the common ancestor of these 30+
>>> distinct modern phyla.
>>
>> Bill Rogers claimed that you had been given links to the scientific
>> literature
>> "describing just such fossils" but that was a blatant equivocation.
>>
>> For one thing, no one has any idea what the last common ancestor of
>> any of the following
>> looked like:
>>
>> eumetazoans [sponges and placozoans excluded]
>>
>> bilaterians
>>
>> protostomes vs deuterostomes
>>
>> ecdysozoans vs lophotrochozoans
>>
>> These are successively smaller groups of phyla that you would do well to
>> familiarize yourself with, since Bill Rogers and others keep
>> copying such equivocations from each other.
>>
> But, is there any bona fide links between any of the Cambrian phyla to
> these phyla? According to the article, the affinities are still of small
> shelly fossils.

What article? What are "these phyla"? If you refer to eumetazoans, etc.,
those aren't phyla. They're higher groups containing many phyla. The
small, shelly fauna contains organisms that belong to these groups but
not to any modern phylum. That's what intermediates look like.

>> Second, only a small handful were true intermediates between modern phyla
>> and the smallest of the above listed groups containing them. Most are
>> "small shellies"
>> and most of those are too fragmentary to even classify them.
>>
> Are you saying these small Shelly creatures are considered progenitors
> of Cambrian Phyla?
> According to this::
>
> shttps://www.researchgate.net/publication/326486991_The_Cambrian_explosion_in_Iran_new_insights_from_small_shelly_fossils_of_the_Ediacaran-Cambrian_transition_in_the_Soltanieh_and_Alborz_Mountains <https://www.researchgate.net/publication/326486991_The_Cambrian_explosion_in_Iran_new_insights_from_small_shelly_fossils_of_the_Ediacaran-Cambrian_transition_in_the_Soltanieh_and_Alborz_Mountains>.

According to this, what?

>>> This is where intelligent design, seems to be the best of the two
>>> explanation. And especially from an engineers perspective.
>>
>> There is a strong case to be made for this, but you need to keep
>> articulating it;
>> you've only made a start here.
>>
> I understand the "new science of evo devo", IE evolutionary development
> in biology is called the 3/rd field of biology is said by biologist,
> Amoung the first discovery of these homeopox genes (Hox)
> genes were with fruit flies. Sean Carroll it as evidence proving common
> descent beyond any challenge. But this is in keeping with his own world
> view. These master control genes because of their ancient appearance,
> their highly conserved nature throughout time and the universality of
> this family of genes throughout time and the animal kingdom could
> certainly be interpreted as evidence of design.

You need to slow down and concentrate on typing complete, coherent
sentences. You can of course interpret anything you like as anything you
like, but do you have actual reasons why what we see would be expected
from design rather than evolution?

When you say "design", what do you mean? Are you referring to separate
creation of species?

> https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/3650071/The-new-science-of-Evo-Devo.html
>
>
> <https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/3650071/The-new-science-of-Evo-Devo.html>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qAHDHvGBMug&t=14s
>
> It was commonly believed that the various animal body were expressed
> each by its own unique set of genes. Another case is the eye was
> believed to have evolved about 40 times independently over millions
> years of time. But this is challenged by the evo devo.
>
> The evidence that the same Homeboy genes controls body form, limbs and
> organs the development throughout the animal kingdom is demonstrated by
> this one organ (the eye) experiment.

I love the idea of Homeboy genes.

[broger...@gmail.com]

.....

> It's generally possible to recognize design by observation, however,
> the explanation which is frequently used to disqualify observed
> design is the human involvement in known designs. Another disqualifying
> characteristic often used is the denial of observed design.
> It occurs to me that the space vehicle Voyager 1 is now far beyond
> our solar system and into interstellar space.
> Suppose, an intelligent agent, from an advanced civilization, were to
> find Voyager 1, would he dismiss it as designed, because the designer is
> unknown. Or would the observation of design be sufficient to it.
> for my civilized agent? I it were to employ the same criteria as we
> do. It would not. It would find some way to prove it some how to be the
> result of natural processes.

We recognize design, because we know *something* about the designer. We do not need to know the designer's name address and social security number. If we see something that looks like it was designed and built by humans, we have a pretty good idea about what sort of designer it was. Humans build monuments, cities, airplanes, etc. We have some fairly clear ideas (and in some cases very detailed documentation) of how the things were designed and built. We know that humans are around and that they do such things.

In the case of biological organisms, never mind universes with carefully tweaked physical constants, we have no independent evidence of any designer capable of designing and building such things. That is a situation completely different from finding a stone monument in the jungle somewhere and not knowing what human culture built it.

In the case of various science fiction scenarios, and SETI, we are most definitely *not* searching just for things whose origins we cannot explain. We search for things that we imagine would have been designed by some alien civilization with significant commonalities with our own. If some alien civilization came across Voyager 1, they would recognize it as a spacecraft because, *they* themselves build spacecraft, not because they could not imagine how random collisions of atoms in interstellar space could have produced such a thing.

When you invoke design in the complete absence of independent evidence of the designer, all you are doing is slapping a label on your ignorance. It tells you nothing about how the allegedly designed object came to be.

For example, we do not know how life got started on earth. I say "we don't know," you say "the designer designed it." What have you learned? Nothing at all. Did the designer poof it into existence from nothing? Did the designer push around pre-existing molecules that had come into being following the normal physical laws of the universe, but needed a push to get together to form the first self-replicating RNA? Did the designer just design a set of physical laws for the universe that produce life without any further intervention? You cannot answer any of those questions. So the "It must be designed but we know nothing about the designer," argument that you make tells you absolutely nothing - you might better say "I don't know." and leave it at that.

[Burkhard]

Eh, no? That makes no sense whatsoever. Me and my great cousin have a common ancestor, that does not mean that there were "crossoevers" between our parents.

> I believe that most phyla arose during the Cambrian, and I think each
> phyla is set in stone. But, I can acknowledge that changes occur within
> phyla.
> In view of the fact that 98%+ of all species that ever lived went
> extinct, I question that there is any way to determined
> which intermediate links survived to give rise to later descendants.
> >
> > Question 2: What evidence do you have that shows Cambrian forms were
> > designed by a purposeful agent?
> >
> It's generally possible to recognize design by observation,

yup. Go to any architect's or engineer's office, and you can indeed observe design: you see plans, models, drawings, prototypes, discarded models that did not work etc etc . We observe how a task is formulated, or a need articulated, and then attempts made to match this requirement. Where is your equivalent observation when it comes to species?

>however,
> the explanation which is frequently used to disqualify observed
> design is the human involvement in known designs. Another disqualifying
> characteristic often used is the denial of observed design.
> It occurs to me that the space vehicle Voyager 1 is now far beyond
> our solar system and into interstellar space.
> Suppose, an intelligent agent, from an advanced civilization, were to
> find Voyager 1, would he dismiss it as designed, because the designer is
> unknown. Or would the observation of design be sufficient to it.
> for my civilized agent? I it were to employ the same criteria as we
> do. It would not. It would find some way to prove it some how to be the
> result of natural processes.

Depends entirely how similar they are to use, and how that on that basis they can form reliable theories about our plans, goals and intentions when building the spacecraft, and if they use similar tools in their civilisation so that they can form theories about the way we build them I'd say, If they are more radically different from us, they probably won't and may not even recognise it as a separate object. If they identify it as a separate object, it would then depend if they have a good theory that explains sufficiently similar objects that are the result of natural processes.
>
> >

[Ralph Page]

On Fri, 14 Jul 2023 04:09:02 -0400, "Ron.Dean" <rondean...@gmail.com>
wrote:

>On 7/12/23 7:59 PM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:

I'm curious about why you think these is no reasonable evolutionary
pathway. Do you think the modern phyla could have arisen via evolution if
there were more time?

[jillery]

Question 1 is a follow-up to your statement "I'm unconvinced that
there is any reasonable evolutionary pathway". If you don't know what
"a reasonable evolutionary pathway" looks like, then you have no way
to recognize one even if someone rubbed your nose in it, and you would
just reflexively handwave away anything and everything that anybody
claims is one.

>I believe that most phyla arose during the Cambrian, and I think each
>phyla is set in stone. But, I can acknowledge that changes occur within
>phyla.
>In view of the fact that 98%+ of all species that ever lived went
>extinct, I question that there is any way to determined
>which intermediate links survived to give rise to later descendants.
>>
>> Question 2: What evidence do you have that shows Cambrian forms were
>> designed by a purposeful agent?
>>
>It's generally possible to recognize design by observation, however,
>the explanation which is frequently used to disqualify observed
>design is the human involvement in known designs. Another disqualifying
>characteristic often used is the denial of observed design.
>It occurs to me that the space vehicle Voyager 1 is now far beyond
>our solar system and into interstellar space.
>Suppose, an intelligent agent, from an advanced civilization, were to
>find Voyager 1, would he dismiss it as designed, because the designer is
>unknown. Or would the observation of design be sufficient to it.
>for my civilized agent? I it were to employ the same criteria as we
>do. It would not. It would find some way to prove it some how to be the
>result of natural processes.

Once again, I stipulate life demonstrates design, in the sense of
mechanisms with functions. So design isn't the question. Instead,
the question is if the design was created by a purposeful agent. What
evidence do you have for that?

[DB Cates]

I wonder about the fixation on Phyla. Determining what phylum an ancient
fossil belongs to is often very difficult and requires a lot of
specialized knowledge. And I doubt Dean would accept that all members of
a particular phylum, one having very many members, are all related by
descent. Consider chordata, do you really think he would accept that he
is related to the invertebrate chordates? Move him up the tree to find
where he *does* accept common ancestry, then try to expand that acceptance.
--
--
Don Cates ("he's a cunning rascal" PN)

[broger...@gmail.com]

He likes gaps, but he is uninterested in constructing a theory of the designer that accounts for all of the gaps that he sees.

[peter2...@gmail.com]

On Friday, July 14, 2023 at 4:10:39 AM UTC-4, Ron.Dean wrote:
> On 7/12/23 7:59 PM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> > On Wednesday, July 12, 2023 at 5:15:37 PM UTC-4, Ron.Dean wrote:
> >> <https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/score-onefor-punk-eek/
> >
> >> For me, personally I believe there is an example of deliberate, purposeful
> >> design on a universal scale with functions designs for meeting long
> >> range objectives. This involved long term planning, design and setting
> >> up universal programs for the formation of animal body forms parts:
> >> shapes organs,limbs etc.. This occurred at one brief period of time
> >> (geologically) at a period called the Cambrian about 485 million years
> >> ago and during what is called the Cambrian explosion
> >
> > You need to do a bit more homework before making such comments;
> > 485 million years ago was the END of the Cambrian, which began ca. 539 mya,

> > while the Cambrian explosion itself, when almost all phyla known from fossils

> > appeared, ended around 510 mya and began about 20 million years earlier.
> >
> Okay, I was a bit careless regarding the date of the Cambrian Explosion.
> I've been informer time after time after time that this did not happen
> during the early Cambrian.

To be precise: the earliest of three divisions of the early Cambrian.
Most of the modern phyla were done deals by the end of the third division.

> >
> > You really should buy or borrow a copy of Stephen Meyer's book, _Darwin's_Doubt_,
> > where some nice summaries of the Cambrian explosion itself can be found
> > and quickly read. The majority of the book is about various attempts to explain
> > the explosion without relying on intelligent design, and how they fall short.

Prothero, a specialist on ungulates, did some childish name-dropping
in his highly dishonest "review" of Meyer's book, by giving three names for the
three main divisions of the early Cambrian. It turns out that the Erwin and Valentine
book [see below], which Prothero touted in his "review" [read: hatchet job],
said that these divisions were unworkable because they were based
on Siberian strata that could not be correlated with other strata in the world.

Wikipedia still uses the old names that Prothero parroted, illustrating how
even in uncontroversial science matters, it isn't wholly reliable.

> As a general rule, referencing Intelligent Design writers is met with
> disdain. And you are accused of appealing to "creationist" sources. In
> this way, they "shoot the messenger" and by so doing, whatever you write
> then stands discredited.

Fortunately, there are sometimes intelligent design arguments that
appear in anti-ID sources without the authors realizing it.
And these pose good opportunities for us.

One example was long ago, in the book _The_Blind_Watchmaker_, by
Dawkins. He described some computer experiments that mutated
simulations of flowers, picking the most interesting ones for the
next generation, and ended up with pictures that resembled insects.

Of course, "most interesting" is not a biological concept, but requires
a subjective intelligence. This flaw was pointed out to Dawkins
soon enough, and several teams of researchers came up with
experiments that used actual simulated competition for resources,
and there were some clear winners in one such experiment.
Another ID foe, Daniel Dennett, showed a film of it on a visit
to our campus two or three decades ago. Very interesting.


But now, an example from just a few months ago: the OOL specialist
Jack Szostak did a 55 minute lecture back in March where he
described an experiment with the same flaws as Dawkins's,
and one other: where Dawkins had no idea what the final outcome
would be, Szostak described an experiment where they did
intelligent design selection with a specific goal in mind:

"so what we were able to do pretty easily was build libraries of on the order of
10 to the 15th different random sequences made in DNA transcribed into
RNA and then take that set of sequences and subject it
to a selection okay, so enriching for the ones that do what we want and throwing away the ones
that don't and then amplifying those survivors with or without adding a little bit more variation and going
around and around this cycle, going around and around that cycle,
uh until the population is taken over by molecules that do uh what we want okay"

-- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U841Zrd4C5g
between ca. 13 and 13.5 minutes into the video

This video is being discussed by me in a thread where the video was introduced in the OP by jillery:
https://groups.google.com/g/talk.origins/c/zLkSPbLfklc/m/kDJB_bJBAgAJ
Re: Szostak on abiogenesis

I was rather complimentary, and am saving the above bombshell for a later post.

> >
> > John Harshman loves to claim that the best book on the Cambrian
> > explosion is the one by Erwin and Valentine, but it only gives more details
> > than Meyer's book about the events of the explosion, and doesn't attempt
> > to explain how it occurred nor why nothing remotely like it has happened since then.
> >
> I looked up this book on amazon. For a boo, it's just too expensive. I
> live about 30 miles from the library, so unless I have another reason
> fpr going into town.....

I bought a copy as a present for my brother-in-law, who loves science as
much as I do, but made a point to read most of it before giving it to him.


Concluded in another post to this thread, to be done later today if time permits;
if not, then Monday.

Peter Nyikos
Professor, Dept. of Mathematics

Univ. of South Carolina -- standard disclaimer--
http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos

[John Harshman]

Nobody knows what R. Dean would accept in terms of common descent,
because he won't say. He attacks evolution but refuses to spell out his
alternative. I've asked him many times, and he's always ignored the
question. Safer that way, I suppose.

[Ron.Dean]

On 7/14/23 3:23 PM, John Harshman wrote:
> On 7/14/23 1:09 AM, Ron.Dean wrote:
>> On 7/12/23 7:59 PM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
>>> On Wednesday, July 12, 2023 at 5:15:37 PM UTC-4, Ron.Dean wrote:
>>>> <https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/score-onefor-punk-eek/

<snip>

>>>> These modern phyla app,snip>

>>> These are successively smaller groups of phyla that you would do well to
>>> familiarize yourself with, since Bill Rogers and others keep
>>> copying such equivocations from each other.
>>>
>> But, is there any bona fide links between any of the Cambrian phyla to
>> these phyla? According to the article, the affinities are still of
>> small shelly fossils.
>
> What article? What are "these phyla"? If you refer to eumetazoans, etc.,
> those aren't phyla. They're higher groups containing many phyla. The
> small, shelly fauna contains organisms that belong to these groups but
> not to any modern phylum. That's what intermediates look like.
>

not my cite

>
>>> Second, only a small handful were true intermediates between modern
>>> phyla
>>> and the smallest of the above listed groups containing them. Most are
>>> "small shellies"
>>> and most of those are too fragmentary to even classify them.
>>>
>> Are you saying these small Shelly creatures are considered progenitors
>> of Cambrian Phyla?
>> According to this::
>>
>> shttps://www.researchgate.net/publication/326486991_The_Cambrian_explosion_in_Iran_new_insights_from_small_shelly_fossils_of_the_Ediacaran-Cambrian_transition_in_the_Soltanieh_and_Alborz_Mountains <https://www.researchgate.net/publication/326486991_The_Cambrian_explosion_in_Iran_new_insights_from_small_shelly_fossils_of_the_Ediacaran-Cambrian_transition_in_the_Soltanieh_and_Alborz_Mountains>.
>
> According to this, what?
>

not my cite.

>
>>>> This is where intelligent design, seems to be the best of the two
>>>> explanation. And especially from an engineers perspective.
>>>
>>> There is a strong case to be made for this, but you need to keep
>>> articulating it;
>>> you've only made a start here.
>>>
>> I understand the "new science of evo devo", IE evolutionary

>> development in biology. It is called the 3/rd field of biology.

>> Among the first discovery of these homeopox genes (Hox)
>> genes were with fruit flies. Sean Carroll calls this evidence proving
>> common descent, beyond any challenge. But this is in keeping with his
>> own world view. These master control genes, because of their ancient
>> appearance, their highly conserved nature, throughout time. And the
>> universality of this family of genes in all animals of the animal k>> kingdom could certainly be interpreted as evidence of design.

>
> You need to slow down and concentrate on typing complete, coherent
> sentences. You can of course interpret anything you like as anything you
> like, but do you have actual reasons why what we see would be expected
> from design rather than evolution?
>

Sorry, couldn't sleep so, I tried this.

>
> When you say "design", what do you mean? Are you referring to separate
> creation of species?
>

I think these homeobox genes can be trace back at least to the Cambrian.
And I believe the emergence of these genes enabled the building
and formation of animal bodies, organs, limbs etc. of the metazoans at
the time of Cambrian explosion. These are the same master control genes
that control the physical lay-out, from head to toe and the formation of
animal bodies at the present time. As an engineer, I am amazed at the
intricate, far-reaching, effectiveness, elegance and the stability of
these master control gene over such a vast span of time. It just seems
too much for mindless, random, thoughtless trial and error processes to
have evolved this masterpiece of "design". It just seems that there must
have been a purposeful objective forward looking designer.
I will admit when it comes to biology I and out of my element. But
what biologist describe as ancient, highly conserved, and universal
throughout the animal kingdom, this seems convincing. Of course,
biologist see this as convincing proof of common ancestory.

>
>> https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/3650071/The-new-science-of-Evo-Devo.html
>>
>>
>> <https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/3650071/The-new-science-of-Evo-Devo.html>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qAHDHvGBMug&t=14s
>>
>> It was commonly believed that the various animal body were expressed
>> each by its own unique set of genes. Another case is the eye was
>> believed to have evolved about 40 times independently over millions
>> years of time. But this is challenged by the evo devo.
>>
>> The evidence that the same Homeboy genes controls body form, limbs and
>> organs the development throughout the animal kingdom is demonstrated
>> by this one organ (the eye) experiment.
>
> I love the idea of Homeboy genes.
>

You can thank the spell corrector. It did not love homeobox genes.

[peter2...@gmail.com]

The bottom line here is that modern evolutionary theory cannot cope with it either,
making biologists powerless to explain mega-evolution that involves such huge transitions as the
one from fully aquatic fish to fully land-based reptiles in the short time it took.

Unfortunately, your reply makes you look a lot worse than them:

> All I can gather from this reply is that I've said something you don't
> like.

All I can gather from your retort is that you are so helpless in the face of
this bottom line, which is so central to talk.origins, that you have blotted it out of your mind.

As someone (whose shenanigans you don't concern yourself with) loves to say,

How sad is that?

> And you snipped out most of what I said,

I kept the ONE line that you had added this time around.
I wanted to impress the bottom line on you
before getting down to details.

>so it's hard to know just
> what you don't like and what you don't like about what you snipped or
> even what you left in,

You are making a radical about-face from the usual taunts that
are hurled at me for addressing statements in earlier posts.
One of the juiciest ones was nominated for a Chez Watt earlier this week:

" . . . your posts where you hop about like a
demented hare from poster to poster and up and down attribute levels
like a yo-yo in the hands of somebody that is drunk."

> since you only say that you don't like it.

All through the last dozen years, one of your favorite taunts
against me has been, "It's all about you, isn't it?"

Thanks for making it so abundantly clear that you've been
projecting all this time.

>
> I have to say that your return is disappointing, since you are falling
> back immediately into your old ways.

I see you haven't lost your knack for acting like a control freak.

Peter Nyikos
Professor, Dept. of Mathematics -- standard disclaimer--

University of So. Carolina at Columbia
http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos

[John Harshman]

The main reason I see that biology can't explain the history of life is
that so much of it is contingent on factors that can't be recovered: the
particular mutations that happened in populations and the particular
environmental factors that populations experienced, both lost to time.
You seem to mean something else, not that evolutionary theory can't
explain events but that the events are not possible given evolutionary
theory, i.e. that they happened more quickly than would be conceivable
given the theory. Can you back up that claim?

> Unfortunately, your reply makes you look a lot worse than them:

Is there any reason to call me an idiot in the course of a reply?

>> All I can gather from this reply is that I've said something you don't
>> like.
>
> All I can gather from your retort is that you are so helpless in the face of
> this bottom line, which is so central to talk.origins, that you have blotted it out of your mind.

You are going to have to back up the claim before it can have any substance.

> As someone (whose shenanigans you don't concern yourself with) loves to say,
>
> How sad is that?

I have no idea who you're talking about, and I don't see why you bother
to reference yet another uninvolved party. Can't you at least try to be
a better person after your hiatus?

>> And you snipped out most of what I said,
>
> I kept the ONE line that you had added this time around.
> I wanted to impress the bottom line on you
> before getting down to details.

Go ahead and do so, then.

>> so it's hard to know just
>> what you don't like and what you don't like about what you snipped or
>> even what you left in,
>
> You are making a radical about-face from the usual taunts that
> are hurled at me for addressing statements in earlier posts.
> One of the juiciest ones was nominated for a Chez Watt earlier this week:
>
> " . . . your posts where you hop about like a
> demented hare from poster to poster and up and down attribute levels
> like a yo-yo in the hands of somebody that is drunk."

Enough with the pointless digressions. The proper thing to do would be
to reply to the post itself rather than to replies to replies to
replies. Simple.

>> since you only say that you don't like it.
>
> All through the last dozen years, one of your favorite taunts
> against me has been, "It's all about you, isn't it?"
>
> Thanks for making it so abundantly clear that you've been
> projecting all this time.

???

>> I have to say that your return is disappointing, since you are falling
>> back immediately into your old ways.
>
> I see you haven't lost your knack for acting like a control freak.

I merely suggest that you try to moderate your behavior. You are free
not to do so, but the suggestions if followed would make you a better
poster and present you in a better light. You would benefit.

[John Harshman]

What do you mean by "according to this"?

>>>>> This is where intelligent design, seems to be the best of the two
>>>>> explanation. And especially from an engineers perspective.
>>>>
>>>> There is a strong case to be made for this, but you need to keep
>>>> articulating it;
>>>> you've only made a start here.
>>>>
>>> I understand the "new science of evo devo", IE evolutionary
>>> development in biology. It is called the 3/rd field of biology.
>
>>> Among the first discovery of these homeopox genes (Hox)
>>> genes were with fruit flies. Sean Carroll calls this evidence proving
>>> common descent, beyond any challenge. But this is in keeping with his
>>> own world view. These master control genes, because of their ancient
>>> appearance, their highly conserved nature, throughout time. And the
>>> universality of this family of genes in all animals of the animal k>>
>>> kingdom could certainly be interpreted as evidence of design.
>
>>
>> You need to slow down and concentrate on typing complete, coherent
>> sentences. You can of course interpret anything you like as anything
>> you like, but do you have actual reasons why what we see would be
>> expected from design rather than evolution?
>>
> Sorry, couldn't sleep so, I tried this.

Probably better done with a clear head, if you want to be understood and
have any consideration for anyone reading you.

>> When you say "design", what do you mean? Are you referring to separate
>> creation of species?
>>
> I think these homeobox genes can be trace back at least to the Cambrian.
> And I believe the emergence of these genes enabled the building
> and formation of animal bodies, organs, limbs etc. of the metazoans at
> the time of Cambrian explosion. These are the same master control genes
> that control the physical lay-out, from head to toe and the formation of
> animal bodies at the present time. As an engineer, I am amazed at the
> intricate, far-reaching, effectiveness, elegance and the stability of
> these  master control gene over such a vast span of time. It just seems
> too much for mindless, random, thoughtless  trial and error processes to
> have evolved this masterpiece of "design". It just seems that there must
> have been a purposeful objective forward looking designer.
> I will admit when it comes to biology I and out of my element. But
> what biologist describe as ancient, highly conserved, and universal
> throughout the animal kingdom, this seems convincing. Of course,
> biologist see this as convincing proof of common ancestory.

That's nice, but it doesn't seem to have anything to do with my
question. Perhaps you could have another go at it.

>>> https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/3650071/The-new-science-of-Evo-Devo.html
>>>
>>>
>>> <https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/3650071/The-new-science-of-Evo-Devo.html>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qAHDHvGBMug&t=14s
>>>
>>> It was commonly believed that the various animal body were expressed
>>> each by its own unique set of genes. Another case is the eye was
>>> believed to have evolved about 40 times independently over millions
>>> years of time. But this is challenged by the evo devo.
>>>
>>> The evidence that the same Homeboy genes controls body form, limbs
>>> and organs the development throughout the animal kingdom is
>>> demonstrated by this one organ (the eye) experiment.
>>
>> I love the idea of Homeboy genes.
>>
> You can thank the spell corrector. It did not love homeobox genes.

I guessed as much. It's a wonderful typo.

[Mark Isaak]

On 7/14/23 4:11 PM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
>>>

>>> This applies *a fortiori* to the widespread definition of "evolution" as "change of frequency
>>> of alleles in a population." Moreover, we might as well go beyond the case of the Cambrian
>>> explosion to the grand panoply of organisms that are the result of over 3 billion years
>>> of evolution in the more common meaning of the word, the one that creationists cannot cope with.
>
> The bottom line here is that modern evolutionary theory cannot cope with it either,
> making biologists powerless to explain mega-evolution that involves such huge transitions as the
> one from fully aquatic fish to fully land-based reptiles in the short time it took.

Define "cope."

As far as I can see, modern evolutionary (and related earth history)
theory copes with it just fine, as science copes with all hard problems:
It describes what is known and what is unknown, and it gives various
tentative and incomplete hypotheses to test and build upon.

It is the creationists who link the Cambrian with existential crisis.
I'd say they are the ones who can't cope. Perhaps I'm overgeneralizing,
but it seems creationists cannot cope with large unknowns in anything.

--
Mark Isaak
"Wisdom begins when you discover the difference between 'That
doesn't make sense' and 'I don't understand.'" - Mary Doria Russell

[jillery]

On Fri, 14 Jul 2023 14:45:49 -0700 (PDT), "peter2...@gmail.com"
<peter2...@gmail.com> wrote:

>On Friday, July 14, 2023 at 4:10:39?AM UTC-4, Ron.Dean wrote:
>> On 7/12/23 7:59 PM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:

Your objection above is a PRATT. The above is analogous to artificial
selection, in the sense that the selection is intelligent, but the
mechanism which created what to select was random, which was Dawkins'
point.

Well, at least this time you cited what you're talking about. However,
your alleged "bombshell" suffers the same logical flaw as your Dawkins
PRATT above. Again, the experimenters did the selecting, but what
they selected from was randomly generated, the very point of these
experiments. That makes your "bombshell" just another self-parody.

>> > John Harshman loves to claim that the best book on the Cambrian
>> > explosion is the one by Erwin and Valentine, but it only gives more details
>> > than Meyer's book about the events of the explosion, and doesn't attempt
>> > to explain how it occurred nor why nothing remotely like it has happened since then.
>> >
>> I looked up this book on amazon. For a boo, it's just too expensive. I
>> live about 30 miles from the library, so unless I have another reason
>> fpr going into town.....
>
>I bought a copy as a present for my brother-in-law, who loves science as
>much as I do, but made a point to read most of it before giving it to him.
>
>
>Concluded in another post to this thread, to be done later today if time permits;
>if not, then Monday.
>
>
>Peter Nyikos
>Professor, Dept. of Mathematics
>Univ. of South Carolina -- standard disclaimer--
>http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos

Do your employers know you associate them with a parody of yourself?

[Ron Dean]

broger...@gmail.com wrote:

> On Wednesday, July 12, 2023 at 5:15:37 PM UTC-4, Ron.Dean wrote:
>> <https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/score-onefor-punk-eek/>For
>> me, personally I believe there is an example of deliberate, purposeful

>> design on a universal scale with functions and designs for meeting long

>> range objectives. This involved long term planning, design and setting

>> up universal programs for the formation of animal body forms and parts,
>> shapes, organs, limbs etc.. This occurred at one brief period of time

>> (geologically) at a period called the Cambrian about 485 million years

>> ago and during what is called the Cambrian explosion where vast numbers

>> of multicellular animal fossils are found in the strata. Almost all of
>> modern phyla are represented in fossils at this period of time, with
>> only a very few appearing later

>> These modern phyla appeared abruptly in the fossil record with no fossil
>> paths or intermediates leading back to the common ancestor of these 30+
>> distinct modern phyla.
>>
>>
>>

>> his is where intelligent design, seems to be the best of the two

>> explanation. And especially from an engineers perspective. numbers

>
> You know the article you linked to has absolutely nothing to do with the evolution of animal phyla in the Cambrian, right?
>

This was an on-going header and somehow the link got misplaced. My
mention of 485 was a careless mistake. It should have been 541 and 530.
(this according to Britannica.)
Or 543 - 533 (from Biologos) another link states 530 - 52o myo (National
Center for Science education - NCSE)
> And you keep saying that "These modern phyla appeared abruptly in the fossil record with no fossil paths of intermediate leading back to the common ancestor of these 30+ modern phyla" even though I and others have given you links to the scientific literature describing just such fossils.
>
I've read every cite that I saw, I have seen nothing that provides the
30+ paths back to a common ancestor or any fraction of these phyla
links going back to a common ancestor. But. I have read numerous
arguments explaining why the poverty of predecessors. And I will admit
due to the length of some articles and time I did not read the entire
article. Another problem I have is that my education was not in biology.
So, I do not understand everything with 100% certainity as to the
meaning. If there is something the you think provides the linkage back
this common ancestor, please provide actual quotes and references.

>
> It is positively bizarre that you keep repeated things that you should, by now, know to be false, especially since the actual truth provides no reason at all not to believe in a designer if you want to.
>

I disagree, I do not _know_ that everything or anything you've offered
is _truth_. Opinion, suppositions, hypothesis, theories do not qualify
as irrefutable truth. Nothing is beyond challenge.

[broger...@gmail.com]

On Saturday, July 15, 2023 at 8:05:40 PM UTC-4, Ron Dean wrote:
> broger...@gmail.com wrote:
> > On Wednesday, July 12, 2023 at 5:15:37 PM UTC-4, Ron.Dean wrote:
> >> <https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/score-onefor-punk-eek/>For
> >> me, personally I believe there is an example of deliberate, purposeful
> >> design on a universal scale with functions and designs for meeting long
> >> range objectives. This involved long term planning, design and setting
> >> up universal programs for the formation of animal body forms and parts,
> >> shapes, organs, limbs etc.. This occurred at one brief period of time
> >> (geologically) at a period called the Cambrian about 485 million years
> >> ago and during what is called the Cambrian explosion where vast numbers
> >> of multicellular animal fossils are found in the strata. Almost all of
> >> modern phyla are represented in fossils at this period of time, with
> >> only a very few appearing later
> >> These modern phyla appeared abruptly in the fossil record with no fossil
> >> paths or intermediates leading back to the common ancestor of these 30+
> >> distinct modern phyla.
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> his is where intelligent design, seems to be the best of the two
> >> explanation. And especially from an engineers perspective. numbers
> >
> > You know the article you linked to has absolutely nothing to do with the evolution of animal phyla in the Cambrian, right?
> >
> This was an on-going header and somehow the link got misplaced.

Well, either that, or you just read the title and the first paragraph or so of the article and noticed the hype, but not the fact that the only experiment it dealt with was an in vitro evolution experiment in the bacterium E. coli. An interesting experiment, but, despite the title and hype, not related to either punctuated equilibrium or the Cambrian explosion.

>My
> mention of 485 was a careless mistake. It should have been 541 and 530.
> (this according to Britannica.)
> Or 543 - 533 (from Biologos) another link states 530 - 52o myo (National
> Center for Science education - NCSE)
> > And you keep saying that "These modern phyla appeared abruptly in the fossil record with no fossil paths of intermediate leading back to the common ancestor of these 30+ modern phyla" even though I and others have given you links to the scientific literature describing just such fossils.
> >
> I've read every cite that I saw, I have seen nothing that provides the
> 30+ paths back to a common ancestor or any fraction of these phyla
> links going back to a common ancestor. But. I have read numerous
> arguments explaining why the poverty of predecessors. And I will admit
> due to the length of some articles and time I did not read the entire
> article. Another problem I have is that my education was not in biology.
> So, I do not understand everything with 100% certainity as to the
> meaning. If there is something the you think provides the linkage back
> this common ancestor, please provide actual quotes and references.
> >
> > It is positively bizarre that you keep repeated things that you should, by now, know to be false, especially since the actual truth provides no reason at all not to believe in a designer if you want to.
> >
> I disagree, I do not _know_ that everything or anything you've offered
> is _truth_. Opinion, suppositions, hypothesis, theories do not qualify
> as irrefutable truth. Nothing is beyond challenge.

The articles I linked to showed you examples of bilaterians occurring before the Cambrian, whereas you had repeatedly claimed that they appeared only during the Cambrian explosion. Since bilaterians are clearly related to descendants like deuterostomes and protostomes and thus to the modern phyla descended from them, it is incorrect to claim that most or all of the modern phyla appear in the Cambrian without precursors.

What do find incorrect about the arguments for the paucity of fossils from >500 million years ago? Especially considering the sorts of organisms we are talking about.

And in any case, why do you think a designer powerful enough to create a universe with precisely tuned physical constants designed to allow life to survive, and a system of mutation, drift and selection, effective at producing new species, would muck up the job of designing the physical laws of the universe so badly that in order to get modern phyla to appear he had to intervene on multiple occasions half a billion years ago (and then had to return intermittently over the ensuing half billion years to produce new orders and families within those phyla)? What makes you think God couldn't have done all the design work up front, and designed physical laws and fine tuned constants so that the origin of life and all its subsequent evolution unfolded naturally from the original design of the universe? Why do you think you know that God's intelligence has limits and what those limits are?

[Ron Dean]

John Harshman wrote:
> On 7/14/23 3:45 PM, Ron.Dean wrote:

>> On 7/14/2,
[snip]

To answer your question: no, I was not claiming a separate design for each
species. I tried to answer my thought in the above paragraph. But I did
not come across very well. The truth is, the discovery of this "third
field of biology',
called the "Evolutionary Developmental Biology", which as of yet, I
do not
have a very deep understanding. But I know enough, that it seems to go
against
the special concept of design that I have held for maybe two decades.
This
new science goes by several labels by biologist: "Master Control Genes",
"the
science of evo devo" a "toolkit" and "the hox family of genes".
This new science of evo devo comes across to me, as hard, solid data,
facts that's
inescapable and actually has been demonstrated in a lab, so the reality
of this toolkit
has been _observed_ and so this new science of evo devo is undeniable.

But this is new to me, I had thought of evolution as hypothetical,
theoretical, just -so-stories, hope, supposition and un-observed and
un-observable. But what I learned lately has answered
more of my questions and issues than anything that I've encountered in
the past.

Not that I've given up on deliberate, purposeful design, but I cannot
rule out or
discount evolution, because of what has been _actually_observed_. So, for me
I'm not as convinced or committed as I've been. So, At this point, I'm
taking a leave
of talk origins.

[Burkhard]

That's strange - seeing that people introduced that concept in discussion with you over a decade ago like here:
https://groups.google.com/g/talk.origins/c/E0RdBun56Ak/m/wZCUYO7XWHMJ

and by 2019 at least, a mere 9 years later, you too seem to have discovered it for your purposes:
https://groups.google.com/g/talk.origins/c/x6-WYJILk5A/m/0qOFSTflBgAJ

at the time you were informed that far from being "new", it has been around since the 1970s....

[John Harshman]

And he still didn't answer the question.

[Ron.Dean]

You and your cousin are of the same phyla, so no cross over required.
But from a single ancestor to humanns there are several phyla that the
evolutionary pate would need to take.

>
>> I believe that most phyla arose during the Cambrian, and I think each
>> phyla is set in stone. But, I can acknowledge that changes occur within
>> phyla.
>> In view of the fact that 98%+ of all species that ever lived went
>> extinct, I question that there is any way to determined
>> which intermediate links survived to give rise to later descendants.
>>>
>>> Question 2: What evidence do you have that shows Cambrian forms were
>>> designed by a purposeful agent?
>>>
>> It's generally possible to recognize design by observation,
>
> yup. Go to any architect's or engineer's office, and you can indeed observe design: you see plans, models, drawings, prototypes, discarded models that did not work etc etc . We observe how a task is formulated, or a need articulated, and then attempts made to match this requirement. Where is your equivalent observation when it comes to species?
>

You do not see this at the cite of the pyramids.

>
>> however,
>> the explanation which is frequently used to disqualify observed
>> design is the human involvement in known designs. Another disqualifying
>> characteristic often used is the denial of observed design.
>> It occurs to me that the space vehicle Voyager 1 is now far beyond
>> our solar system and into interstellar space.
>> Suppose, an intelligent agent, from an advanced civilization, were to
>> find Voyager 1, would he dismiss it as designed, because the designer is
>> unknown. Or would the observation of design be sufficient to it.
>> for my civilized agent? I it were to employ the same criteria as we
>> do. It would not. It would find some way to prove it some how to be the
>> result of natural processes.
>
> Depends entirely how similar they are to use, and how that on that basis they can form reliable theories about our plans, goals and intentions when building the spacecraft, and if they use similar tools in their civilisation so that they can form theories about the way we build them I'd say, If they are more radically different from us, they probably won't and may not even recognise it as a separate object. If they identify it as a separate object, it would then depend if they have a good theory that explains sufficiently similar objects that are the result of natural processes.
>

I think if they were intelligent critters, regardless of the degree of
likeness to us, I believe they would recognize design.
>>
>>>
>

[broger...@gmail.com]

........................

> > yup. Go to any architect's or engineer's office, and you can indeed observe design: you see plans, models, drawings, prototypes, discarded models that did not work etc etc . We observe how a task is formulated, or a need articulated, and then attempts made to match this requirement. Where is your equivalent observation when it comes to species?
> >
> You do not see this at the cite of the pyramids.

You'd be surprised that Egyptian archaeology has not been idle for the past 100 years. There are quarries associated with the Pyramids, tool marks on the stones, tombs of artisans involved in the construction, a chronological sequence of pyramids showing improvements in the engineering, lots of specific evidence of human design and construction - independent of the characteristics of the pyramids themselves.

There is even contemporaneous written documentation, in the form of one of the oldest recover papyri, of the travels of a court employee tasked with importing raw materials for the final stages of construction.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/ancient-egypt-shipping-mining-farming-economy-pyramids-180956619/

[Burkhard]

You misunderstand the analogy. Your argument seems to say that if two entities share a common ancestor, then there is a crossover between them too, which does indeed make no sense at all.

> But from a single ancestor to humanns there are several phyla that the
> evolutionary pate would need to take.
> >
> >> I believe that most phyla arose during the Cambrian, and I think each
> >> phyla is set in stone. But, I can acknowledge that changes occur within
> >> phyla.
> >> In view of the fact that 98%+ of all species that ever lived went
> >> extinct, I question that there is any way to determined
> >> which intermediate links survived to give rise to later descendants.
> >>>
> >>> Question 2: What evidence do you have that shows Cambrian forms were
> >>> designed by a purposeful agent?
> >>>
> >> It's generally possible to recognize design by observation,
> >
> > yup. Go to any architect's or engineer's office, and you can indeed observe design: you see plans, models, drawings, prototypes, discarded models that did not work etc etc . We observe how a task is formulated, or a need articulated, and then attempts made to match this requirement. Where is your equivalent observation when it comes to species?
> >
> You do not see this at the cite of the pyramids.

quite on the contrary, we have tools, and even models of tools - and the cporresponding tool marks. Try https://martin-odler.com/publications/book/
and then we have depictions of the actual design work, here one of the architects taking measurements: https://archaeopress.files.wordpress.com/2017/03/picture_3.jpg?w=398&h=600

> >
> >> however,
> >> the explanation which is frequently used to disqualify observed
> >> design is the human involvement in known designs. Another disqualifying
> >> characteristic often used is the denial of observed design.
> >> It occurs to me that the space vehicle Voyager 1 is now far beyond
> >> our solar system and into interstellar space.
> >> Suppose, an intelligent agent, from an advanced civilization, were to
> >> find Voyager 1, would he dismiss it as designed, because the designer is
> >> unknown. Or would the observation of design be sufficient to it.
> >> for my civilized agent? I it were to employ the same criteria as we
> >> do. It would not. It would find some way to prove it some how to be the
> >> result of natural processes.
> >
> > Depends entirely how similar they are to use, and how that on that basis they can form reliable theories about our plans, goals and intentions when building the spacecraft, and if they use similar tools in their civilisation so that they can form theories about the way we build them I'd say, If they are more radically different from us, they probably won't and may not even recognise it as a separate object. If they identify it as a separate object, it would then depend if they have a good theory that explains sufficiently similar objects that are the result of natural processes.
> >
> I think if they were intelligent critters, regardless of the degree of
> likeness to us, I believe they would recognize design.

For all that we know, it could be that the way the planets are organised in our solar system, their distances, relative size and weight, and elemental composition, spells out "If you had bought an Orbital here, you'd be home by now" in Intergalactic.


> >>
> >>>
> >

[Bob Casanova]

In the category "Universal Advertising":

>For all that we know, it could be that the way the planets are organised in our solar system, their distances, relative size and weight, and elemental composition, spells out "If you had bought an Orbital here, you'd be home by now" in Intergalactic.

--

Bob C.

"The most exciting phrase to hear in science,
the one that heralds new discoveries, is not
'Eureka!' but 'That's funny...'"

- Isaac Asimov

[Ron Dean]

broger...@gmail.com wrote:
> On Sunday, July 16, 2023 at 12:35:42 PM UTC-4, Ron.Dean wrote:
>> On 7/14/23 4:10 PM, Burkhard wrote:
>>> On Friday, July 14, 2023 at 7:15:40 PM UTC+1, Ron.Dean wrote:
>>>> On 7/14/23 11:08 AM, jillery wrote:
>>>>> On Fri, 14 Jul 2023 04:09:02 -0400, "Ron.Dean"
>>>>> <rondean...@gmail.com> wrote:

<sniP>
>>>>>> https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12542-021-00568-5
>>>>>> <https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12542-021-00568-5>
>>>>>
I took the time to research this information. I think It's foolish to
accept any information at face value. These Precambrian fossils were
from China, so I decided to learn what I could regarding this
information. As I pointed out before there's nothing beyond challenge.
One should look at both sides. Pertaining to the China find, there is
this observation:
(quote) "Such find might meet some common expectations of small, simple
bilatrians emerging after world wide glaciation of the Neoproterozoic.
The interpretation is not well founded, however because it fails to take
into account taxonomy (changes of the organism after death) and
diagnosis (changes in sediment after deposit)."
>
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1101338
>>
also I found this"
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.330.6012.1740
And this:
>
https://www.gsoc.org/news/2020/5/12/fakefossilsarticle
More:
https://fakefossils.webs.com/fakechinesefossils.ht
>>
Now Lucy:
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn27325-baboon-bone-found-in-famous-lucy-skeleton/
>>
Smithsonian says no to Lucy:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/smithsonian-says-no-to-lucy-21338295/

[Ron Dean]

[Martin Harran]

On Fri, 14 Jul 2023 04:09:02 -0400, "Ron.Dean"
<rondean...@gmail.com> wrote:

[… snip for focus …]

>As a general rule, referencing Intelligent Design writers is met with
>disdain. And you are accused of appealing to "creationist" sources. In
>this way, they "shoot the messenger" and by so doing, whatever you write
>then stands discredited.

[…]

> Sean Carroll [claims] it as evidence proving common
>descent beyond any challenge. But this is in keeping with his own world
>view.

Aren't you shooting the messenger yourself?

[broger...@gmail.com]

Yes, some people have faked fossils, or misinterpreted them. In those cases, it's been paleontologists who have identified the problems. I am not impressed by the quote you gave (can't find the source), because the author confuses "taxonomy" the grouping of organisms into clades, and "taphonomy" which includes changes to the organism after death.

And I don't get your argument - some Chinese researchers faked fossils, therefore all Chinese researchers fake fossils? In any case the paper from Australia in 2020 describing the current oldest bilaterian fossil was not from China, nor is there any reason to think it was faked.

https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2001045117

And just in the past week there's a reported discovery of an Ediacaran tunicate, ancestor to vertebrates.

https://www.science.org/content/article/half-billion-year-old-sea-squirt-could-push-back-origins-vertebrates-including-humans

Although it's got nothing to do with Ediacaran bilaterians, don't believe everything you read on anti-evolution websites about Lucy. Some of those things you read might even count as PRATTs

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucy_(Australopithecus)

"Work at the American Museum of Natural History uncovered a possible Theropithecus vertebral fragment that was found mixed in with Lucy's vertebrae, but confirmed the remainder belonged to her."

Perhaps you interpreted the headline "Smithsonian says no to Lucy," to represent a scientific rejection of the fossil. If you actually read the article, you'd see that it was a question of international agreements about removing fossils from the countries in which they were discovered.The following is from the article, explaining why the Smithsonian would not be exhibiting Lucy...

"From the outset, the plan to bring 'Lucy' to the U.S. ignored an existing international resolution signed by scientific representatives from 20 countries, including Ethiopia and the U.S. The resolution calls for museums--in fact, all scientific institutions--to support the care of early human fossils in their country of origin, and to make displays in other countries using excellent fossil replicas.

It's especially distressing to museum professionals I've talked with in Africa that 'Lucy' has been removed from Ethiopia for six years, and that a U. S. museum has been involved in doing so. The decision to remove 'Lucy' from Ethiopia also goes against the professional views of Ethiopian scientists in the National Museum of Ethiopia, the institution mandated to safeguard such irreplaceable discoveries."

[broger...@gmail.com]

Ah, OK, found it. The confusion between taxonomy and taphonomy was yours, not the authors' of the commentary. Fine, but the fossil you are referring to is not one of the ones I cited for you. And the commentary contains no suggestion of fraud or fake fossils, just normal disagreement about the interpretation.

[Burkhard]

On Monday, July 17, 2023 at 6:10:42 AM UTC+1, Ron Dean wrote:
> Ron Dean wrote:
> > broger...@gmail.com wrote:
> >> On Sunday, July 16, 2023 at 12:35:42 PM UTC-4, Ron.Dean wrote:
> >>> On 7/14/23 4:10 PM, Burkhard wrote:
> >>>> On Friday, July 14, 2023 at 7:15:40 PM UTC+1, Ron.Dean wrote:
> >>>>> On 7/14/23 11:08 AM, jillery wrote:
> >>>>>> On Fri, 14 Jul 2023 04:09:02 -0400, "Ron.Dean"
> >>>>>> <rondean...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > <sniP>
> https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12542-021-00568-5
> https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12542-021-00568-5>
> >>>>>>
> I took the time to research this information. I think It's foolish to
> accept any information at face value. These Precambrian fossils were
> from China, so I decided to learn what I could regarding this
> information. As I pointed out before there's nothing beyond challenge.
> One should look at both sides. Pertaining to the China find, there is
> this observation:
> (quote) "Such find might meet some common expectations of small, simple
> bilatrians emerging after world wide glaciation of the Neoproterozoic.
> The interpretation is not well founded, however because it fails to take
> into account taxonomy (changes of the organism after death) and
> diagnosis (changes in sediment after deposit)."
> >>
> https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1101338

I assume you mean taphonomy? And you should have read the whole piece:

"The objects illustrated and described by Chen et al. (1) may well be
eukaryotic microfossils, but their reconstructed morphology as bilaterians is an
artifact generated by cavities being lined by diagenetic crusts"

So the author agrees that these are pre-cambrian fossils, just disagrees on parts of the interpretation of their internal structure - hardly surprising given that we are talking here about extremely small, extremely simple organisms from a really long time ago.

The author of your piece btw also is the author of this much more recent piece:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/bies.201600120

From the abstract: "Furthermore, despite challenges provided by incomplete preservation, a paucity of phylogenetically informative characters, and uncertain expectations of the anatomy of early animals, a number of Neoproterozoic fossils can reasonably be interpreted as metazoans"

The entire paper, which also starts with the Darwin quote, argues that the problem is really not as massive as it has been made out to be.

> >>
> also I found this"
> https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.330.6012.1740
> >>
> And this:
> https://www.gsoc.org/news/2020/5/12/fakefossilsarticle

These have nothing to do with the paper(s) above. Sure, wherever there are private collectors, there will be fakes - with fossils as with art, or for that matter old whisky https://scotchwhisky.com/magazine/in-depth/26048/fake-whisky-how-worried-should-we-be/

But they affect pieces that appeal to private collectors: big, dinosaur-type ones. There is no market for the microscopically small pre-cambrian organisms that we are discussing here

> >>
> More:
> https://fakefossils.webs.com/fakechinesefossils.ht
> >>
> Now Lucy:
>
> https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn27325-baboon-bone-found-in-famous-lucy-skeleton/
>
> >>
> Smithsonian says no to Lucy:
>
> https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/smithsonian-says-no-to-lucy-21338295/

I'm not sure why you think this has any bearing on the issue? This is (probably, the paper does not say so explicitly) about the interpretation of the ICOM Code of Ethics for Natural History Museums, part of the ongoing debate about the treatment of human remains in a museum context. There is now widespread agreement to repatriate human ancestral remains to their countries of origin if the local culture requires this. In 2011 e.g. 2011, the Natural History Museum in London repatriated skulls and a jawbone from the Torres Strait archipelago to their “originating community” - that required at the time a clever bit of lawyering, as UK Museums are prohibited by law to give up permanently parts of their collections, and in this case the Human Tissue Act 2004 was used as legal basis to create an exception. Similar repatriation efforts are ongoing globally, and part of the new regulatory framework also proscribes that human remains that have not been moved to foreign museums already should stay in their country, and also not normally travel in exhibitions.

The question then became if something as old as Lucy, i.e. species other than Homo Sapiens, are also covered by this framework. Most US Museums at the time said no, the Smithsonian and a few other that yes and refused to host the exhibition. Why you think this has any bearing on the discussion in TO I have absolutely no idea.

[jillery]

On Sun, 16 Jul 2023 23:07:01 -0400, Ron Dean
<rondean...@gmail.com> wrote:

>broger...@gmail.com wrote:

>> On Sunday, July 16, 2023 at 12:35:42?PM UTC-4, Ron.Dean wrote:
>>> On 7/14/23 4:10 PM, Burkhard wrote:

>>>> On Friday, July 14, 2023 at 7:15:40?PM UTC+1, Ron.Dean wrote:
>>>>> On 7/14/23 11:08 AM, jillery wrote:
>>>>>> On Fri, 14 Jul 2023 04:09:02 -0400, "Ron.Dean"
>>>>>> <rondean...@gmail.com> wrote:
><sniP>
>>>>>>> https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12542-021-00568-5
>>>>>>> <https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12542-021-00568-5>
>>>>>>
>I took the time to research this information. I think It's foolish to
>accept any information at face value. These Precambrian fossils were
>from China, so I decided to learn what I could regarding this
>information. As I pointed out before there's nothing beyond challenge.
>One should look at both sides. Pertaining to the China find, there is
>this observation:
>(quote) "Such find might meet some common expectations of small, simple
>bilatrians emerging after world wide glaciation of the Neoproterozoic.
>The interpretation is not well founded, however because it fails to take
>into account taxonomy (changes of the organism after death) and
>diagnosis (changes in sediment after deposit)."
> >
>https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1101338

The full article can't be read without payment or membership. However,
the bit that can be read are arcane criticisms related to
interpretation of specific fossils. It's unlikely the full article
questions anything about Precambrian fossil forms being ancestral to
Cambrian phyla.

>also I found this"
>https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.330.6012.1740
>And this:
> >
>https://www.gsoc.org/news/2020/5/12/fakefossilsarticle

How do fake fossils inform your point or this topic?


>More:
>https://fakefossils.webs.com/fakechinesefossils.ht

http status 404: The requested resource () is not available.


>Now Lucy:
>https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn27325-baboon-bone-found-in-famous-lucy-skeleton/


Did you read who discovered that baboon bone? Here's a hint: It
wasn't a cdesign proponentsist.

>Smithsonian says no to Lucy:
>https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/smithsonian-says-no-to-lucy-21338295/

The above refers to a controversy over transferring rare artifacts
from their country of origin. It has nothing whatever to do with
anything posted to this topic, nevermind anything to do with Cambrian
phyla.

These results don't support your claim that you took your time to
research this information. It better supports the conclusion that a
mith is as good as a mile.

[Ron Dean]

If fossils come from China, except for the need

overwhelming desire for them to be real, they would have, otherwise,
been taken with a grain of salt.
>
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-fake-fossils-pervert-paleontology-excerpt/

>
>>>>
>> also I found this"
>> https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.330.6012.1740
>>>>
>> And this:
>> https://www.gsoc.org/news/2020/5/12/fakefossilsarticle
>
> These have nothing to do with the paper(s) above.
>

I disagree, because of the overall picture, they should be suspect. It's
coming more and more apparent that China is a fossil mill.

Sure, wherever there are private collectors, there will be fakes - with
fossils as with art, or for that matter old whisky
https://scotchwhisky.com/magazine/in-depth/26048/fake-whisky-how-worried-should-we-be/
>
> But they affect pieces that appeal to private collectors: big, dinosaur-type ones. There is no market for the microscopically small pre-cambrian organisms that we are discussing here

>Actually, the entire issue rest on the problem of fake fossils from
China. Due to the fact that your fossils are from China, and China is a
fossil mill, they should be suspect. Not to mention that China
is where the majority of feathered dinosaurs originate.

>
>
>>>>
>> More:
>> https://fakefossils.webs.com/fakechinesefossils.ht
>>>>
>> Now Lucy:
>>
>> https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn27325-baboon-bone-found-in-famous-lucy-skeleton/
>>>>
>> Smithsonian says no to Lucy:
>>
>> https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/smithsonian-says-no-to-lucy-21338295/
>
> I'm not sure why you think this has any bearing on the issue? This is (probably, the paper does not say so explicitly) about the interpretation of the ICOM Code of Ethics for Natural History Museums, part of the ongoing debate about the treatment of human remains in a museum context. There is now widespread agreement to repatriate human ancestral remains to their countries of origin if the local culture requires this. In 2011 e.g. 2011, the Natural History Museum in London repatriated skulls and a jawbone from the Torres Strait archipelago to their “originating community” - that required at the time a clever bit of lawyering, as UK Museums are prohibited by law to give up permanently parts of their collections, and in this case the Human Tissue Act 2004 was used as legal basis to create an exception. Similar repatriation efforts are ongoing globally, and part of the new regulatory framework also proscribes that human remains that have not been moved to foreign museums already should stay in their country, and also not normally travel in exhibitions.
>
> The question then became if something as old as Lucy, i.e. species other than Homo Sapiens, are also covered by this framework. Most US Museums at the time said no, the Smithsonian and a few other that yes and refused to host the exhibition. Why you think this has any bearing on the discussion in TO I have absolutely no idea.

> I feel this will be rejected because of the source, nevertheless as an
alternative source by David Milton, PhD in cell biology from Brown
University. In my opinion there is too much investment from an evolution
POV for Lucy to get a fair evaluation or determination.

Lucy's actual remains did not included hands or feet and reconstructions
are commonly presented with human or near-human hands and feet despite
the fact that other skeletons of the same creature have hands and feet
which are clearly those of an ape, with curved fingers for moving about
in trees. Mary Leakey in fact had found clear tracks of human footprints
in the same strata and location as Lucy's remains and the assumption is
that at least one australopithicus MUST have had human feet.
>
https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-backroom/1651429/posts
>
How did Lucy die? according another article she had broken bones
indication, she fell from a height
probably a tree, Since no hands or feet were found, she is provided
with human like feet. However,
if she fell from a tree, it's more likely that she had ape hands and feet.
>
https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/australopithecus-afarensis-lucy-species.html

There are several frauds in evolution, by scientist dedicated to proving
evolution Haeckeks depictions of embryos, Piltdown man, Nabraska man,
probably Java man
>
https://evolutionisntscience.wordpress.com/evolution-frauds/

[peter2...@gmail.com]

On Saturday, July 15, 2023 at 12:15:40 AM UTC-4, Mark Isaak wrote:
> On 7/14/23 4:11 PM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> >>>
> >>> This applies *a fortiori* to the widespread definition of "evolution" as "change of frequency
> >>> of alleles in a population." Moreover, we might as well go beyond the case of the Cambrian
> >>> explosion to the grand panoply of organisms that are the result of over 3 billion years
> >>> of evolution in the more common meaning of the word, the one that creationists cannot cope with.
> >
> > The bottom line here is that modern evolutionary theory cannot cope with it either,
> > making biologists powerless to explain mega-evolution that involves such huge transitions as the
> > one from fully aquatic fish to fully land-based reptiles in the short time it took.

> Define "cope."

It means being able to go beyond the widespread definition I quoted in explaining how life on
earth got to be the fantastically varied thing it is. Trying to use that definition, or the Modern Synthesis
(a.k.a. neo-Darwinism) to explain it is like trying to explain everything we do, including this
intelligent conversation we are having, in terms of cell-to-cell chemical signaling.

>
> As far as I can see, modern evolutionary (and related earth history)
> theory copes with it just fine, as science copes with all hard problems:
> It describes what is known and what is unknown, and it gives various
> tentative and incomplete hypotheses to test and build upon.

That description doesn't begin to do justice to the complexity of THIS hard problem.
More than one leading cosmologist has noted that, compared to it, the evolution of
stars and galaxies is child's play, because only a few physical laws are needed for
an amazing amount of insight into how it happens.

In the other direction, even this hard problem is child's play compared to the origin
of life as we know it, from 20 amino acids and five nucleotides to the most primitive
free-living prokaryotes. After half a century of effort, we have been able to synthesize
the amino acids and nucleotides under simulated prebiotic conditions.

However, these are only on the first two floors of my metaphorical 100 story skyscraper
that life as we know it had to ascend. I talk about it in the post I linked for Ron Dean:

https://groups.google.com/g/talk.origins/c/zLkSPbLfklc/m/kDJB_bJBAgAJ
Re: Szostak on abiogenesis

Jul 14, 2023, 4:30:40 PM

>
> It is the creationists who link the Cambrian with existential crisis.
> I'd say they are the ones who can't cope. Perhaps I'm overgeneralizing,
> but it seems creationists cannot cope with large unknowns in anything.

I don't think they have a problem with understanding stellar evolution.
The first university course in astronomy at my university explains that in great detail.

Of course, most creationists don't take such courses, and neither do most university science majors,
but the more intelligent ones would not have a problem with that, or even with
teaching themselves from a good textbook of astronomy.

Peter Nyikos
Professor, Dept. of Mathematics -- standard disclaimer--

University of So. Carolina in Columbia
http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos

[peter2...@gmail.com]

Not all multicellular fossils of possible animals of ca. 1-gigayear age are from China.
Here is an example, with lots of nice photos, from Northern Scotland:

https://www.cell.com/action/showPdf?pii=S0960-9822%2821%2900424-3

I discussed this with several people in sci.bio.paleontology a bit over two years ago:

https://groups.google.com/g/sci.bio.paleontology/c/2KXAzM6x-q4/m/Nc8Q2U5jAQAJ
Billion year old fossils of an exciting new sort
May 28, 2021, 10:07:55 PM

[Yeah, almost a month before the putative date of the article. I haven't tried to figure that one out.]

Two months later, there was a popularization of another discovery, in which the author,
science journalist Michael Price, seemed to be oblivious to this earlier discovery:

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/07/do-these-fossilized-structures-belong-earth-s-first-animals

Despite the overambitious title, reflected in the url, the only issue that the article
talks about is the question of whether these are sponges. What I want to stress is
that these aren't from China, and predate the Ediacaran organisms, as the following excerpt shows:

"Elizabeth Turner, the study's sole author and a geologist at Laurentian University, first discovered the fossils as a graduate student in the '90s, when working in a remote part of the rugged Mackenzie Mountains that separate the Yukon and the Northwest Territory. The ancient reef, which was formed by photosynthetic bacteria known as cyanobacteria, has been dated using a number of geological methods to be about 890 million years old. There are no roads near the site; to collect samples, Turner had to helicopter in and engage in a bit of "sketchy" mountaineering, she says."

> >
> https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-fake-fossils-pervert-paleontology-excerpt/
> >
> >>>>
> >> also I found this"
> >> https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.330.6012.1740
> >>>>
> >> And this:
> >> https://www.gsoc.org/news/2020/5/12/fakefossilsarticle
> >
> > These have nothing to do with the paper(s) above.
> >
> I disagree, because of the overall picture, they should be suspect. It's
> coming more and more apparent that China is a fossil mill.
> Sure, wherever there are private collectors, there will be fakes - with
> fossils as with art, or for that matter old whisky
> https://scotchwhisky.com/magazine/in-depth/26048/fake-whisky-how-worried-should-we-be/
> >
> > But they affect pieces that appeal to private collectors: big, dinosaur-type ones. There is no market for the microscopically small pre-cambrian organisms that we are discussing here

Also, I seriously doubt that the amazing Chengjiang fossils, covered by both
Stephen Meyer in _Darwin's Doubt_ and by Erwin and Valentine in the book
that Harshman cares about, are fakes. They've been studied by so many leading
paleontologists. So I don't know why you are so concerned
about the existence of Chinese fakes on this thread.

> >Actually, the entire issue rest on the problem of fake fossils from
> China. Due to the fact that your fossils are from China, and China is a
> fossil mill, they should be suspect. Not to mention that China
> is where the majority of feathered dinosaurs originate.
> >
> >
> >>>>
> >> More:
> >> https://fakefossils.webs.com/fakechinesefossils.ht
> >>>>
> >> Now Lucy:
> >>
> >> https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn27325-baboon-bone-found-in-famous-lucy-skeleton/

JTEM has some strong feelings about Lucy. I'd invite him here, except that his signal-to-noise
ratio is so low, he may be a handicap to discussions of Lucy rather than an asset.

Peter Nyikos
Professor, Dept. of Mathematics -- standard disclaimer--

Univ. of South Carolina at Columbia
http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos

PS I have left in what you left in below. I am too busy with attending an online conference
to look at your links about Lucy today.

[peter2...@gmail.com]

On Sunday, July 16, 2023 at 5:55:42 PM UTC-4, Bob Casanova wrote:
> In the category "Universal Advertising":
> >For all that we know, it could be that the way the planets are organised in our solar system, their distances, relative size and weight, and elemental composition, spells out "If you had bought an Orbital here, you'd be home by now" in Intergalactic.

Now THIS is in the old Chez Watt tradition. Lots of fun, no spite, no nastiness.

Peter Nyikos

[peter2...@gmail.com]

This is my second and final reply to your post here, Ron.

On Friday, July 14, 2023 at 4:10:39 AM UTC-4, Ron.Dean wrote:

> On 7/12/23 7:59 PM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> > On Wednesday, July 12, 2023 at 5:15:37 PM UTC-4, Ron.Dean wrote:
> >> <https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/score-onefor-punk-eek/
> >
> >> For me, personally I believe there is an example of deliberate, purposeful

> >> design on a universal scale with functions designs for meeting long

> >> range objectives. This involved long term planning, design and setting

> >> up universal programs for the formation of animal body forms parts:
> >> shapes organs,limbs etc.. This occurred at one brief period of time

> >> (geologically) at a period called the Cambrian

<snip of things covered in first reply>

> >> where vast numbers
> >> of multicellular animal fossils are found in the strata. Almost all of
> >> modern phyla are represented in fossils at this period of time, with
> >> only a very few appearing later
> >
> > ... in the fossil record. Harshman didn't cut you any slack on this one.

I looked at Stephen Meyer's breakdown of phyla, and you aren't quite as far off
as I thought you were.

Meyer lists 36 phyla, of which 27 are known from fossils, 9 not.

Of the ones known from fossils:
3 are modern phyla from the pre-Cambrian: Porifera for sure, Mollusca and Cnidaria probably;
4 are modern phyla with first known fossils from well after the Cambrian.

The remaining 20 are known first from the Cambrian, but three are extinct. There is a fourth
about which there was some controversy at the time the book was written of whether
it is a separate phylum or a subphylum of Mollusca.

I'm at my office, so I can't be much more detailed until I get home.

Harshman might have a list from the Erwin and Valentine book that may
give slightly different numbers.

> I know, but I'm unconvinced that that there is any reasonable
> evolutionary pathway

> back into the [first part of the] early Cambrian or the Ediacaran.

There may be an exception or two among the "small shellies," but
they are too fragmentary to bear the load of 20 phyla.

> I've recall the reasons
> given of the virtual absence of ancestors of the Cambrian complex
> animals, low oxygen, the environment wasn't conducive for highly complex
> animals bodies. I've read ice sheets that covered the globe so massive
> erosion occurred with the melting. I think this is a very controversial
> subject.
>
> https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12542-021-00568-5
> <https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12542-021-00568-5>

Trivia: this was published two years to the day (!) before you cited it in your post.

> >> These modern phyla appeared abruptly in the fossil record with no fossil
> >> paths or intermediates leading back to the common ancestor of these 30+
> >> distinct modern phyla.

That's a slight exaggeration, but by using the word "intermediates" rather
than the much more ambiguous "transitionals," you've outflanked almost
all the criticism that has been leveled at comments like these.


> > Bill Rogers claimed that you had been given links to the scientific literature
> > "describing just such fossils" but that was a blatant equivocation.

In fact, it was a serious misrepresentation, as the following excerpt from
the article you linked shows:

"Disparity is the diversity of animal forms or body plans, which can be measured by use of Linnaean ranks and a variety of quantitative approaches (Erwin 2007). Each body plan or a high-rank clade, e.g., a phylum, has a set of distinctive features. It has long been recognized that in no case is a morphological continuum found across a broad range of body plan morphologies nor do phyla resemble each other more closely during their early fossil histories (Valentine 2004). Simply there are morphological gaps between phyla. By analyzing the timing of appearance of Linnaean rank taxa in the fossil record, paleontologists realized that the limits on animal disparity were early in animal evolutionary history (e.g., Erwin et al. 1987).

"By the reinterpretation of the Burgess Shale fauna, Gould (1989: fig. 3.72) suggested a pattern of rapid, maximal disparity in the early history followed by later removal of most groups (stem groups) by extinction that leaves large morphological gaps among high-rank clades. This pattern is applicable to high-rank clades and metazoans as a whole. Particularly, he argued that that the morphological disparity of arthropods at a single locality (Burgess Shale) surpassed all extant arthropods, which inspired considerable efforts to understand disparity.

"Subsequent quantitative studies have shown that most clades achieved their maximal disparity (or morphological breadth) during a short time interval close to their first appearance in the fossil record in the early Cambrian (see a review in Erwin 2007; Hughes et al. 2013). A more recent study by mapping of fossil and living metazoan morphospace demonstrated that the majority of phylum-level clades achieved maximal initial disparity in the Cambrian and that the overall disparity was already very broad in the early history of animal evolution, although the envelope of disparity explored by the Metazoa has increased through geological time (Deline et al. 2018). It is worth mentioning that new discoveries of weird forms in Cambrian deposits would increase the morphological breadth of Cambrian animals (e.g., Zeng et al. 2020)."

I've put in two paragraph breaks. The middle paragraph especially puts the lie to what Bill Rogers wrote, with:
"later removal of most groups (stem groups) by extinction that leaves large morphological gaps among high-rank clades."

What little remains of fossils of those stem groups is almost all in the "small shellies,"
and most of those are too fragmentary to classify them.

> Are you saying these small Shelly creatures are considered progenitors
> of Cambrian Phyla?

Considered by anti-ID zealots, yes, but most of it is wishful thinking.

> According to this::
>
> https://www.researchgate.net/publication/326486991_The_Cambrian_explosion_in_Iran_new_insights_from_small_shelly_fossils_of_the_Ediacaran-Cambrian_transition_in_the_Soltanieh_and_Alborz_Mountains

You never finished your sentence, confusing John Harshman no end.

I wasn't able to access anything but the abstract. It mentions a lot of species but gives no
hint of where they fit into the tree leading from the LCA of the novel Cambrian phyla to the
phyla themselves.

Since the article was written three years before the Springer article from which
I quoted, I'd say the burden of proof of rescuing Bill Rogers from an outright
lie is on your critics.

Peter Nyikos
Professor, Dept. of Mathematics -- standard disclaimer--

University of So. Carolina at Columbia
http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos

PS Stephen Meyer goes into a lot of detail about homeobox genes in his book
_Darwin's Doubt_. If Erwin and Valentine go into more detail, I'd like to
see Harshman show that. I've left in what you wrote about them below.

> >
> >> This is where intelligent design, seems to be the best of the two
> >> explanation. And especially from an engineers perspective.
> >
> > There is a strong case to be made for this, but you need to keep articulating it;
> > you've only made a start here.
> >
> I understand the "new science of evo devo", IE evolutionary development

> in biology is called the 3/rd field of biology is said by biologist,
> Amoung the first discovery of these homeopox genes (Hox)
> genes were with fruit flies. Sean Carroll it as evidence proving common

> descent beyond any challenge. But this is in keeping with his own world

> view. These master control genes because of their ancient appearance,
> their highly conserved nature throughout time and the universality of
> this family of genes throughout time and the animal kingdom could

> certainly be interpreted as evidence of design.
>
>

> https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/3650071/The-new-science-of-Evo-Devo.html
>
>
> <https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/3650071/The-new-science-of-Evo-Devo.html>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qAHDHvGBMug&t=14s
>
>
>
> It was commonly believed that the various animal body were expressed
> each by its own unique set of genes. Another case is the eye was
> believed to have evolved about 40 times independently over millions
> years of time. But this is challenged by the evo devo.
>
> The evidence that the same Homeboy genes controls body form, limbs and
> organs the development throughout the animal kingdom is demonstrated by
> this one organ (the eye) experiment.
> >
>

> file:///Users/rdhallman224/Desktop/Evolution:%20Library:%20Walter%20Gehring:%20Master%20Control%20Genes%20and%20the%20Evolution%20of%20the%20Eye.html
> <file:///Users/rdhallman224/Desktop/Evolution:%20Library:%20Walter%20Gehring:%20Master%20Control%20Genes%20and%20the%20Evolution%20of%20the%20Eye.html>

> >
> > Peter Nyikos
> > Professor, Dept. of Mathematics -- standard disclaimer--

> > University of South Carolina
> > http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos
> >

[jillery]

On Mon, 17 Jul 2023 10:24:02 -0700 (PDT), "peter2...@gmail.com"
<peter2...@gmail.com> wrote:

>Jul 14, 2023, 4:30:40?PM

>
>>
>> It is the creationists who link the Cambrian with existential crisis.
>> I'd say they are the ones who can't cope. Perhaps I'm overgeneralizing,
>> but it seems creationists cannot cope with large unknowns in anything.
>
>I don't think they have a problem with understanding stellar evolution.
>The first university course in astronomy at my university explains that in great detail.
>
>Of course, most creationists don't take such courses, and neither do most university science majors,
>but the more intelligent ones would not have a problem with that, or even with
>teaching themselves from a good textbook of astronomy.

Right, like Jason Lisle for example:
<https://answersingenesis.org/bios/jason-lisle/>
**************************************
Dr. Lisle has authored a number of books and articles. His books
include Taking Back Astronomy and The Ultimate Proof of Creation, and
he coauthored Old-Earth Creationism on Trial with Tim Chaffey. He is
also a contributing author for the Answers Books volumes I and II. Dr.
Lisle’s articles include the Logical Fallacy Series, Contradictions,
“Evolution: The Anti-science,” “Atheism: An Irrational Worldview,” and
many others including our popular web feedbacks.
****************************************

Dr. Lisle also acts as if he has expertise in anthropology:
<https://youtu.be/LQJw0nStX5k?t=0>

[Mark Isaak]

On 7/17/23 10:24 AM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> On Saturday, July 15, 2023 at 12:15:40 AM UTC-4, Mark Isaak wrote:
>> On 7/14/23 4:11 PM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>> This applies *a fortiori* to the widespread definition of "evolution" as "change of frequency
>>>>> of alleles in a population." Moreover, we might as well go beyond the case of the Cambrian
>>>>> explosion to the grand panoply of organisms that are the result of over 3 billion years
>>>>> of evolution in the more common meaning of the word, the one that creationists cannot cope with.
>>>
>>> The bottom line here is that modern evolutionary theory cannot cope with it either,
>>> making biologists powerless to explain mega-evolution that involves such huge transitions as the
>>> one from fully aquatic fish to fully land-based reptiles in the short time it took.
>
>> Define "cope."
>
> It means being able to go beyond the widespread definition I quoted in explaining how life on
> earth got to be the fantastically varied thing it is. Trying to use that definition, or the Modern Synthesis
> (a.k.a. neo-Darwinism) to explain it is like trying to explain everything we do, including this
> intelligent conversation we are having, in terms of cell-to-cell chemical signaling.

So, if I understand you, the scientific field of abiogenesis can cope
with abiogenesis, but evolution narrowly construed cannot. I have no
problem with that. Evolution cannot "cope" with quasars or economic
cycles, either; there are other sciences for coping with them.

>> As far as I can see, modern evolutionary (and related earth history)
>> theory copes with it just fine, as science copes with all hard problems:
>> It describes what is known and what is unknown, and it gives various
>> tentative and incomplete hypotheses to test and build upon.
>
> That description doesn't begin to do justice to the complexity of THIS hard problem.

What better way to do justice to a hard problem than to note that it is
hard, note that it is unsolved, and keep trying to solve it anyway? The
creationist alternative, to make up shit, is, in my opinion, the
opposite of doing justice to the problem. Your alternative, which seems
to be admitting that the problem is hard and unsolved and then giving
up, is only a little better.

[peter2...@gmail.com]

On Tuesday, July 18, 2023 at 10:45:45 AM UTC-4, Mark Isaak wrote:
> On 7/17/23 10:24 AM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> > On Saturday, July 15, 2023 at 12:15:40 AM UTC-4, Mark Isaak wrote:
> >> On 7/14/23 4:11 PM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> >>>>>
> >>>>> This applies *a fortiori* to the widespread definition of "evolution" as "change of frequency
> >>>>> of alleles in a population." Moreover, we might as well go beyond the case of the Cambrian
> >>>>> explosion to the grand panoply of organisms that are the result of over 3 billion years
> >>>>> of evolution in the more common meaning of the word, the one that creationists cannot cope with.
> >>>
> >>> The bottom line here is that modern evolutionary theory cannot cope with it either,
> >>> making biologists powerless to explain mega-evolution that involves such huge transitions as the
> >>> one from fully aquatic fish to fully land-based reptiles in the short time it took.
> >
> >> Define "cope."
> >
> > It means being able to go beyond the widespread definition I quoted in explaining how life on
> > earth got to be the fantastically varied thing it is. Trying to use that definition, or the Modern Synthesis
> > (a.k.a. neo-Darwinism) to explain it is like trying to explain everything we do, including this
> > intelligent conversation we are having, in terms of cell-to-cell chemical signaling.

> So, if I understand you, the scientific field of abiogenesis can cope
> with abiogenesis, but evolution narrowly construed cannot.

No, it's WORSE where abiogenesis is concerned. It has no theory, not even one as primitive as neo-Darwinism.
Its way of attempting to cope is to postulate the existence of an RNA World somewhere along the line.
But until we get a better idea of how to get to a sophisticated level of RNA World, or how to get
from it to life as we know it, we are floundering.

I'll be saying more about this in reply to Lawyer Daggett, because the magnitude
of our ignorance about OOL is relevant to what Daggett said to Ron Dean a few days ago.

> I have no
> problem with that. Evolution cannot "cope" with quasars or economic
> cycles, either; there are other sciences for coping with them.

I'm afraid you are missing the point of what I wrote about stellar evolution.

> >> As far as I can see, modern evolutionary (and related earth history)
> >> theory copes with it just fine, as science copes with all hard problems:
> >> It describes what is known and what is unknown, and it gives various
> >> tentative and incomplete hypotheses to test and build upon.
> >
> > That description doesn't begin to do justice to the complexity of THIS hard problem.

> What better way to do justice to a hard problem than to note that it is
> hard, note that it is unsolved, and keep trying to solve it anyway?

By doing a better job figuring out where the main problems lie.

MarkE has tried to interest y'all in the RNA World problems, but he keeps
getting insulted by demands that he read the latest information
about OOL, in the direction of producing compounds far more
primitive than the ones needed for progress in RNA World problems.

> The creationist alternative, to make up shit, is, in my opinion, the
> opposite of doing justice to the problem.

I've defined "cope" for you. Now it's your turn to define "shit."
Please try to also give us some idea of how you define "creationist".

> Your alternative, which seems
> to be admitting that the problem is hard and unsolved and then giving
> up, is only a little better.

I'm not giving up, far from it; people who make light of the difficulties are
the ones who are giving up.

Whom have you seen lately, besides myself and participants suspected of being
creationists or trolls, who avoids saying things like the following?


"We still don't know *all* the details of how life evolved 'from rocks'."

"Huge progress is being made every day."

"The gaps become smaller and smaller and there is only room left for a tiny 'god of the gaps'."

Peter Nyikos
Professor, Dept. of Mathematics

University of So. Carolina -- standard disclaimer--
http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos

[Ron Dean]

I think I was wrong about this. These phyla apparently were prior to the
Cambrian. I knew there were a few phyla after the Cambrian Explosion.
My only question is where were they first found.
In my searches I was unable to learn the answer to this.

>
> What do find incorrect about the arguments for the paucity of fossils from >500 million years ago? Especially considering the sorts of organisms we are talking about.
>
>
> And in any case, why do you think a designer powerful enough to create a universe with precisely tuned physical constants designed to allow life to survive, and a system of mutation, drift and selection, effective at producing new species, would muck up the job of designing the physical laws of the universe so badly that in order to get modern phyla to appear he had to intervene on multiple occasions half a billion years ago (and then had to return intermittently over the ensuing half billion years to produce new orders and families within those phyla)? What makes you think God couldn't have done all the design work up front, and designed physical laws and fine tuned constants so that the origin of life and all its subsequent evolution unfolded naturally from the original design of the universe? Why do you think you know that God's intelligence has limits and what those limits are?
>

I think a good case could be made, for just what you describe. There is
no justifiable reason to think that there is an on-going intervention,
in earth life over the vast span of time.

[peter2...@gmail.com]

You are unusually kind to Jason Lisle below. He's a dogmatic YEC,
and he has almost as little respect for those who disagree with him
as you do for those who disagree with you.

> Right, like Jason Lisle for example:
> <https://answersingenesis.org/bios/jason-lisle/>
> **************************************
> Dr. Lisle has authored a number of books and articles. His books
> include Taking Back Astronomy and The Ultimate Proof of Creation, and
> he coauthored Old-Earth Creationism on Trial with Tim Chaffey. He is
> also a contributing author for the Answers Books volumes I and II. Dr.
> Lisle’s articles include the Logical Fallacy Series, Contradictions,
> “Evolution: The Anti-science,” “Atheism: An Irrational Worldview,” and
> many others including our popular web feedbacks.
> ****************************************

A red flag went up when I read the words "Taking Back Astronomy",
after having read the words in his bio. From your linked webpage:

"He did graduate work at the University of Colorado where he earned a Master’s degree and a PhD in Astrophysics. While there, Dr Lisle used the SOHO spacecraft to investigate motions on the surface of the sun as well as solar magnetism and subsurface weather. His thesis was entitled “Probing the Dynamics of Solar Supergranulation and its Interaction with Magnetism.” Among other things, he discovered a previously unknown polar alignment of supergranules (solar convection cells), and discovered evidence of solar giant cells."

I found out enough from the following webpage of his to be able to
make the negative comments that I did above.

https://answersingenesis.org/astronomy/the-age-of-the-universe-part-1/

He takes a while to get down to the biggest and most frequent objection to a young universe,
but he gives himself away with his haughty attitude:

"There are galaxies in the universe that are incredibly far away. These distances are so extreme that even light would take billions of years to travel from these galaxies to the earth. Yet, we do see these galaxies; this indicates that the light has traveled from there to here. Since this process is supposed to take billions of years, the universe must be at least billions of years old—much older than the biblical time scale. It is argued that distant starlight therefore supports the big-bang story of origins.
...
"The point here is to show that the objection itself is vacuous. The argument that distant starlight disproves the biblical account of creation and supports an old “big-bang” universe is based on faulty reasoning."

By "the biblical account" he means that God made the world in *literally* six 24-hour days,
and that the order in which it happened is correct, rather than the order which paleontologists
and astronomers have figured out it happened. This is omphalism at its near worst.

> Dr. Lisle also acts as if he has expertise in anthropology:
> <https://youtu.be/LQJw0nStX5k?t=0>

I'll pass on this for now. What really gets me at this point is that someone can say such things
as what I quoted above, while being so well versed in astrophysics.

Peter Nyikos
Professor, Dept. of Mathematics -- standard disclaimer--

Univ. of So. Carolina at Columbia
http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos

[peter2...@gmail.com]

On Tuesday, July 18, 2023 at 5:15:44 PM UTC-4, Ron Dean wrote:
> broger...@gmail.com wrote:
> > On Saturday, July 15, 2023 at 8:05:40 PM UTC-4, Ron Dean wrote:
> >> broger...@gmail.com wrote:


> >>> And you keep saying that "These modern phyla appeared abruptly in the fossil record with no fossil paths of intermediate leading back to the common ancestor of these 30+ modern phyla" even though I and others have given you links to the scientific literature describing just such fossils.

As I have said repeatedly, I think Bill is bluffing here.
And he does nothing below to dispel this impression.

> >> I've read every cite that I saw, I have seen nothing that provides the
> >> 30+ paths back to a common ancestor or any fraction of these phyla
> >> links going back to a common ancestor.

What was wrong with the links with which Bill alleges you were provided?

>> > But. I have read numerous
> >> arguments explaining why the poverty of predecessors. And I will admit
> >> due to the length of some articles and time I did not read the entire
> >> article. Another problem I have is that my education was not in biology.
> >> So, I do not understand everything with 100% certainity as to the
> >> meaning. If there is something the you think provides the linkage back
> >> this common ancestor, please provide actual quotes and references.
> >>>
> >>> It is positively bizarre that you keep repeated things that you should, by now, know to be false, especially since the actual truth provides no reason at all not to believe in a designer if you want to.
> >>>
> >> I disagree, I do not _know_ that everything or anything you've offered
> >> is _truth_. Opinion, suppositions, hypothesis, theories do not qualify
> >> as irrefutable truth. Nothing is beyond challenge.


> > The articles I linked to showed you examples of bilaterians occurring before the Cambrian, whereas you had repeatedly claimed that they appeared only during the Cambrian explosion.

Do you know what articles Bill Rogers is talking about here?
The only bilateral Precambrian animal of which I know is *Kimberella*,
and what Bill says above and below, applied to it, would indeed be true *IF* it is
a true bilaterian and not some animal that attained a bilateral symmetry
independent of Bilaterians.

>Since bilaterians are clearly related to descendants like deuterostomes and protostomes and thus to the modern phyla descended from them, it is incorrect to claim that most or all of the modern phyla appear in the Cambrian without precursors.
> >
> I think I was wrong about this. These phyla apparently were prior to the
> Cambrian.

Which phyla are you talking about now? Kimberella MAY be a mollusc,
but opinion on this is very divided.

> I knew there were a few phyla after the Cambrian Explosion.
> My only question is where were they first found.
> In my searches I was unable to learn the answer to this.

If I recall correctly, the two places where *Kimberella* fossils have been found --
Australia and the White Sea -- were very distant from each other back then,
as they indeed are now. It was Austratlia where they were first found,
and for a while they were thought to be jellyfish -- whose symmetry is radial,
not bilateral!

> >
> > What do find incorrect about the arguments for the paucity of fossils from >500 million years ago? Especially considering the sorts of organisms we are talking about.
> >

At this point, Bill Rogers abruptly changed the whole topic, and so I will make a separate reply
after I get home -- it's already past my usual dinner time.

Sneak preview: you gave up WAY too easily. There were enough holes
in Bill's hackneyed "village atheist" level argument to sail a battleship through.

Peter Nyikos
Professor, Dept. of Mathematics -- standard disclaimer--

Univ. of So. Carolina in Columbia
http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos

[jillery]

On Tue, 18 Jul 2023 17:13:16 -0400, Ron Dean
<rondean...@gmail.com> wrote:

>broger...@gmail.com wrote:

>> On Saturday, July 15, 2023 at 8:05:40?PM UTC-4, Ron Dean wrote:
>>> broger...@gmail.com wrote:

Either there is a good case for both on-going intervention and initial
intervention, or for neither, as they are the same case.

[jillery]

On Tue, 18 Jul 2023 15:05:09 -0700 (PDT), "peter2...@gmail.com"
<peter2...@gmail.com> wrote:

To the contrary, I present Jason Lisle to contradict *your* claim
above about "intelligent creationists". Even you recognize his
"Taking Back Astronomy" is the very opposite of a good textbook.

And since you mention it, I have deep respect for those who actually
disagree with me. It's those like you, who exercise their inner troll
like you do above, who deserve no respect.

The above is about as close a retraction as I expect from you.

[John Harshman]

Namacalathus and Cloudina come to mind immediately. Others are Cambrian
but before what Ron considers the explosion, i.e. the sudden appearance
of many fossil taxa around 520ma, in the Chengjiang fauna. That, of
course, is a taphonomic event, not an evolutionary one, but he takes the
fossil record at face value.

>> Since bilaterians are clearly related to descendants like deuterostomes and protostomes and thus to the modern phyla descended from them, it is incorrect to claim that most or all of the modern phyla appear in the Cambrian without precursors.
>>>
>> I think I was wrong about this. These phyla apparently were prior to the
>> Cambrian.
>
> Which phyla are you talking about now? Kimberella MAY be a mollusc,
> but opinion on this is very divided.

It's usually considered a primitive lophotrochozoan, outside the extant
phyla.

>> I knew there were a few phyla after the Cambrian Explosion.
>> My only question is where were they first found.
>> In my searches I was unable to learn the answer to this.
>
> If I recall correctly, the two places where *Kimberella* fossils have been found --
> Australia and the White Sea -- were very distant from each other back then,
> as they indeed are now. It was Austratlia where they were first found,
> and for a while they were thought to be jellyfish -- whose symmetry is radial,
> not bilateral!
>
>>>
>>> What do find incorrect about the arguments for the paucity of fossils from >500 million years ago? Especially considering the sorts of organisms we are talking about.
>>>
>
> At this point, Bill Rogers abruptly changed the whole topic, and so I will make a separate reply
> after I get home -- it's already past my usual dinner time.
>
> Sneak preview: you gave up WAY too easily. There were enough holes
> in Bill's hackneyed "village atheist" level argument to sail a battleship through.

Everybody loves your little hints about how very clever and
knowledgeable you will be shown to be, and of course how very stupid and
ignorant others will.

[broger...@gmail.com]

.........................................

> Either there is a good case for both on-going intervention and initial
> intervention, or for neither, as they are the same case.

Maybe I'm not following your point.

Case 1. I design and build a clock radio, set it to turn on the radio at 8:00 tomorrow morning and leave it in your kitchen. At 8:00 the radio turns on.
Case 2. I design and build a non-clock radio and leave it in your kitchen. At 8:00 tomorrow I come to your kitchen and turn on the radio.

It seems to me that the cases are distinguishable, specifically that the first involves an initial intervention, whereas the second involves and initial intervention and a subsequent one.

[broger...@gmail.com]

In case I misunderstood, here's another difference. Evidence that nobody entered your kitchen at 8:00 would be a good case against the second situation, but not against the first.

[peter2...@gmail.com]

On Tuesday, July 18, 2023 at 5:15:44 PM UTC-4, Ron Dean wrote:
> broger...@gmail.com wrote...

...about a topic for which he is ill-equipped, unlike the topic he
talked about up to the line before the following:

> > And in any case, why do you think a designer powerful enough to create a universe with precisely tuned physical constants designed to allow life to survive, and a system of mutation, drift and selection, effective at producing new species, would muck up the job of designing the physical laws of the universe so badly that in order to get modern phyla to appear

"muck up the job", even given Bill's atheism, is disingenuous.
The physical laws are magnificently intelligible, quite unlike the incredibly
intricate laws that would be necessary to guarantee that life would
evolve to produce intelligent beings on a planet with as primitive resources as earth had in the beginning.

Einstein once said that the most incomprehensible thing about the universe
is that it is comprehensible [read: to the very finite minds of physicists and cosmologists].
This is perfectly in line with what the Bible says about man being
made to the image and likeness of God.

> he had to intervene on multiple occasions half a billion years ago (and then had to return intermittently over the ensuing half billion years to produce new orders and families within those phyla)?

Bill is completely ignoring the fact that the fine tuning, etc. was of a very simple sort
compared to the immense complexity of any natural process of getting to the first prokaryote.
This has been acknowledged by the best analysts of fine tuning, including Martin Rees,
author of the magnificently written book, _Just_Six_Numbers_.

> What makes you think God couldn't have done all the design work up front, and designed physical laws and fine tuned constants so that the origin of life and all its subsequent evolution unfolded naturally from the original design of the universe?

Atheists like Bill know that anyone who believes in a creator that is omnipotent,
omniscient, and omnibenevolent is severely handicapped in arguments against atheism.
Fortunately, the Bible paints a very different picture of God.

> Why do you think you know that God's intelligence has limits and what those limits are?

What makes Bill Rogers think that God wants to deprive himself of all the fun of playing
with the things he created? The agnostic, William James, gave us the image of God
playing a sort of supernatural chess with the devil, knowing he would win in the end
but not foreseeing every move.

Evidently Bill never thought of why God could possibly have behaved in the way depicted in the Bible,
getting all involved with human beings after, supposedly, maintaining a hands-off
attitude towards the whole universe for over 13 billion years.

Bill acts as though he were oblivious to the way the NT shows
God's only-begotten Son doing so much while he dwelt among us. Why was it necessary
for Christ to be crucified and to rise from the dead, eh?

> I think a good case could be made, for just what you describe. There is
> no justifiable reason to think that there is an on-going intervention,
> in earth life over the vast span of time.

You gave up too easily, Ron. Aren't you a Christian?

Peter Nyikos
Professor, Dept. of Mathematics

Univ. of So. Carolina -- standard disclaimer--
http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos

[jillery]

On Tue, 18 Jul 2023 18:00:06 -0700 (PDT), "broger...@gmail.com"
<broger...@gmail.com> wrote:

>On Tuesday, July 18, 2023 at 7:50:44?PM UTC-4, broger...@gmail.com wrote:

The discussion above involves two cases:

1. A supernatural agent created life, and life evolved following the
laws of nature without any additional tinkering from that agent.

2. A supernatural agent created life, and continues to tinker with
life in order to reach some arbitrary and unspecified goal.

Yes, the two cases are distinguishable. No, that distinction doesn't
inform their common presumption of a supernatural agent. Both cases
presume a supernatural agent. There is as much evidence for a
supernatural agent for the first case as for the second case.

Fine-tuning relates to the above two cases:

3. A supernatural agent created the unverse, and the universe evolved
following the laws of nature without any additional tinkering from
that agent. Life is one of many phenomena which follow from the laws
of nature.

4. A supernatural agent created the universe, and continues to tinker
with the universe in order to reach some arbitrary and unspecified
goal. Life is one of many phenomena which follow from that tinkering.

As written, 3 and 4 subsume 1 and 2 and are analogous. AOTA presume a
supernatural agent. Yes, I distinguished AOTA. No, that distinction
doesn't inform their common presumption of a supernatural agent. There
is as much evidence for a supernatural agent regardless of the case.

I acknowledge we don't know the cause of the unverse. IMO to presume
a supernatural agent caused the universe is as reasonable as any other
presumption, as all are placeholder labels for our ignorance. OTOH
when you can only presume its existence, to quibble over when/if it
did/didn't tinker is pointless. You might as well argue over how many
angels can fit on the head of a pin. Such arguments violate
epistemology.

[broger...@gmail.com]

I agree that there's no evidence for a supernatural agent. There is still an important distinction between the two cases. Arguing for a supernatural agent on the grounds that its tinkering repeatedly over time was necessary for the world to turn out the way it has, and in particular, trying to use gaps in scientific explanation as evidence for the supernatural agent, will inevitably draw you into conflict with science and the reality it describes. Simply saying that things are the way they are because a supernatural agent set the universe up in the beginning so that they would come out that way, makes no predictions that conflict with science - someone making that claim agrees that the natural laws are the natural laws, they are just putting a name on whatever it is that caused them to be what they are. It is essentially no more than the value judgement "Hey, the world is cool. I like it." So I think the case for a supernatural designer who set things up cleverly and let them work themselves out on their own is, if not stronger, less weak, than one that depends on ongoing intervention, because it cannot draw you into conflict with science.

[peter2...@gmail.com]

It will be interesting to see whether jillery dares to tackle my second reply to Ron Dean
to the benighted part of Bill's post that I've left in below.

I mean, besides pointing out that I carelessly put in only one > attribution mark
in the margin while tackling sundry pieces of Bill's long paragraph.

On Wednesday, July 19, 2023 at 4:10:45 AM UTC-4, jillery wrote:
> On Tue, 18 Jul 2023 18:00:06 -0700 (PDT), "broger...@gmail.com"
> <broger...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> >On Tuesday, July 18, 2023 at 7:50:44?PM UTC-4, broger...@gmail.com wrote:
> >> On Tuesday, July 18, 2023 at 7:25:44?PM UTC-4, jillery wrote:
> >> > On Tue, 18 Jul 2023 17:13:16 -0400, Ron Dean
> >> > <rondean...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >> >
> >> > >broger...@gmail.com wrote:

> >> > >> And in any case, why do you think a designer powerful enough to create a universe with precisely tuned physical constants designed to allow life to survive, and a system of mutation, drift and selection, effective at producing new species, would muck up the job of designing the physical laws of the universe so badly that in order to get modern phyla to appear he had to intervene on multiple occasions half a billion years ago (and then had to return intermittently over the ensuing half billion years to produce new orders and families within those phyla)? What makes you think God couldn't have done all the design work up front, and designed physical laws and fine tuned constants so that the origin of life and all its subsequent evolution unfolded naturally from the original design of the universe? Why do you think you know that God's intelligence has limits and what those limits are?
> >> > >>
> >> > >I think a good case could be made, for just what you describe. There is
> >> > >no justifiable reason to think that there is an on-going intervention,
> >> > >in earth life over the vast span of time.

> >> .........................................
> >> > Either there is a good case for both on-going intervention and initial
> >> > intervention, or for neither, as they are the same case.
> >> Maybe I'm not following your point.
> >>
> >> Case 1. I design and build a clock radio, set it to turn on the radio at 8:00 tomorrow morning and leave it in your kitchen. At 8:00 the radio turns on.
> >> Case 2. I design and build a non-clock radio and leave it in your kitchen. At 8:00 tomorrow I come to your kitchen and turn on the radio.
> >>
> >> It seems to me that the cases are distinguishable, specifically that the first involves an initial intervention, whereas the second involves and initial intervention and a subsequent one.
> >
> >In case I misunderstood, here's another difference. Evidence that nobody entered your kitchen at 8:00 would be a good case against the second situation, but not against the first.

> The discussion above involves two cases:
>
> 1. A supernatural agent created life, and life evolved following the
> laws of nature without any additional tinkering from that agent.

The basic laws of physics, and the initial conditions of which we are aware,
do not include the kinds of laws that Bill Rogers envisions.
I doubt that the human mind is capable of formulating physical laws that make
life on earth, let alone intelligent life, inevitable.

> 2. A supernatural agent created life, and continues to tinker with
> life in order to reach some arbitrary and unspecified goal.

Get real. The "unspecified" goal is all around you, although
all the computers in the world could not store a specification
of all the things this planet has in it. And who are we to say
that human beings could have evolved without a hefty fraction of
those things?

> Yes, the two cases are distinguishable. No, that distinction doesn't
> inform their common presumption of a supernatural agent.

What do you mean by "inform"? If it only means what you
say in the next sentence, you've rendered your preceding sentence superfluous.

>Both cases
> presume a supernatural agent. There is as much evidence for a
> supernatural agent for the first case as for the second case.

HOGWASH! As I keep emphasizing, the Modern Synthesis (neo-Darwinism)
is pathetically inadequate to even explain how evolution got us to
the "unspecified" goal from the first prokaryotes, let alone show that it had to happen.
And, as I remarked to Mark Isaak, abiogenesis (OOL) is in even more
embryonic a condition.

The playing field is level between ID and naturalistic explanations,
once you take into account the fact that modern forms of ID have
had less than one-sixth of the time to develop than mainstream evolutionary theory.
Only the addition of "supernatural" makes the field less than level,
but that is a far cry from your benighted "as much evidence."


Peter Nyikos

Professor, Dept. of Mathematics -- standard disclaimer--

Univ. of South Carolina at Columbia
http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos

PS I've got a lot on my plate today, but I've left in the sophomoric
stuff you wrote below, in case someone wants to argue in favor of it
while addressing anything I wrote above.

[Lawyer Daggett]

On Wednesday, July 19, 2023 at 8:35:46 AM UTC-4, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> It will be interesting to see whether jillery dares to tackle my second reply to Ron Dean
> to the benighted part of Bill's post that I've left in below.

Insults are poor substitutes for arguments (ref. "benighted").

.
We have above a naked assertion, followed by a declaration of incredulity.
Why bother? It's huff and puff and little else.

And then there's the odd specification of "life on earth". Other things
written make it seem like you are implying that we were the a priori
anointed planet.

> > 2. A supernatural agent created life, and continues to tinker with
> > life in order to reach some arbitrary and unspecified goal.

> Get real. The "unspecified" goal is all around you, although
> all the computers in the world could not store a specification
> of all the things this planet has in it. And who are we to say
> that human beings could have evolved without a hefty fraction of
> those things?

Is that supposed to be meaningful?
In the first place, what do you imagine to be the significance of this
metric of all the computers in the world? Seems like none, or alternatively
completely arbitrary and capricious.
.
Next, there's apparently some assertion about a specification that
includes our exact circumstances as we experience them now. This
is an extremely poorly taken assertion respective to a christian
world view. In particular, it would by implication remove the possibility
of free will to have your specification include you having your current
personal circumstances.

So what "circumstances" and specifications do you imagine are
relevant here? Are you specifying homo sapiens sapiens with a
dominant phenotype of 10 fingers and toes? Specific historical
events? That's all nonsensical. Are you specifying certain large
bolide collisions, or a lack of them at critical times? The timing of
Earthquakes?

Beyond that, you specifically referenced "human beings". What a
conceit! You are usually more careful and instead reference
"intelligent life" (apparently you think humans qualify, and qualify
uniquely on Earth). For the record, it seems presumptuous to
assert that we are the target, certainly without knowledge of what
might arise 50 or so million years in the future.

Ultimately, the "goal" remains unspecified, and to the extent that
you assert it to be humans, it is as suggested, arbitrary.
.

> > Yes, the two cases are distinguishable. No, that distinction doesn't
> > inform their common presumption of a supernatural agent.

> What do you mean by "inform"? If it only means what you
> say in the next sentence, you've rendered your preceding sentence superfluous.

Perhaps you should ask for further clarification rather if you don't get it.

.
> >Both cases
> > presume a supernatural agent. There is as much evidence for a
> > supernatural agent for the first case as for the second case.

> HOGWASH! As I keep emphasizing, the Modern Synthesis (neo-Darwinism)
> is pathetically inadequate to even explain how evolution got us to
> the "unspecified" goal from the first prokaryotes, let alone show that it had to happen.
> And, as I remarked to Mark Isaak, abiogenesis (OOL) is in even more
> embryonic a condition.

That isn't compelling. In particular, how do you get from "we don't know"
to "looks like supernatural intervention". The only way I see to force that
is to assert that we are so smart and well informed that we would know
how things happened naturally if they did so in a likely manner. That's
a dubious and unsupported conjecture.

.
> The playing field is level between ID and naturalistic explanations,
> once you take into account the fact that modern forms of ID have
> had less than one-sixth of the time to develop than mainstream evolutionary theory.
> Only the addition of "supernatural" makes the field less than level,
> but that is a far cry from your benighted "as much evidence."

Another arbitrary and capricious claim. Your specification of
"modern forms of ID" is a fantasy. That topic has been begun many
times and you never seem to stick with it, especially when confronted
chapter and verse with counters to you many claims. Again and
again you abandon those threads to chase a butterfly.

But more interestingly, you're responding to a comment about evidence
for the supernatural. You respond by comparing the theory of evolution
to whatever you mean by "modern forms of ID".
SAT study time.
natural :: supernatural
evolution :: 'modern forms of ID'
.

>
> PS I've got a lot on my plate today, but I've left in the sophomoric
> stuff you wrote below, in case someone wants to argue in favor of it
> while addressing anything I wrote above.

I have to laugh respective to your multiple recent comments about
how you were going to respond to some comments of mine later in
the day but: "oh look, a butterfly".

[erik simpson]

On Tuesday, July 18, 2023 at 4:10:44 PM UTC-7, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:

> > > The articles I linked to showed you examples of bilaterians occurring before the Cambrian, whereas you had repeatedly claimed that they appeared only during the Cambrian explosion.
> Do you know what articles Bill Rogers is talking about here?
> The only bilateral Precambrian animal of which I know is *Kimberella*,
> and what Bill says above and below, applied to it, would indeed be true *IF* it is
> a true bilaterian and not some animal that attained a bilateral symmetry
> independent of Bilaterians.
> >Since bilaterians are clearly related to descendants like deuterostomes and protostomes and thus to the modern phyla descended from them, it is incorrect to claim that most or all of the modern phyla appear in the Cambrian without precursors.

Consider: https://www.pnas.org/doi/pdf/10.1073/pnas.2001045117
"Discovery of the oldest bilaterian from the Ediacaran of South Australia"

Predates Kimberella, but not by much.

[Mark Isaak]

On 7/18/23 10:37 AM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> On Tuesday, July 18, 2023 at 10:45:45 AM UTC-4, Mark Isaak wrote:
>> On 7/17/23 10:24 AM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
>>> On Saturday, July 15, 2023 at 12:15:40 AM UTC-4, Mark Isaak wrote:
>>>> On 7/14/23 4:11 PM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> This applies *a fortiori* to the widespread definition of "evolution" as "change of frequency
>>>>>>> of alleles in a population." Moreover, we might as well go beyond the case of the Cambrian
>>>>>>> explosion to the grand panoply of organisms that are the result of over 3 billion years
>>>>>>> of evolution in the more common meaning of the word, the one that creationists cannot cope with.
>>>>>
>>>>> The bottom line here is that modern evolutionary theory cannot cope with it either,
>>>>> making biologists powerless to explain mega-evolution that involves such huge transitions as the
>>>>> one from fully aquatic fish to fully land-based reptiles in the short time it took.
>>>
>>>> Define "cope."
>>>
>>> It means being able to go beyond the widespread definition I quoted in explaining how life on
>>> earth got to be the fantastically varied thing it is. Trying to use that definition, or the Modern Synthesis
>>> (a.k.a. neo-Darwinism) to explain it is like trying to explain everything we do, including this
>>> intelligent conversation we are having, in terms of cell-to-cell chemical signaling.
>
>> So, if I understand you, the scientific field of abiogenesis can cope
>> with abiogenesis, but evolution narrowly construed cannot.
>
> No, it's WORSE where abiogenesis is concerned. It has no theory, not even one as primitive as neo-Darwinism.

So? Would it "cope" better if it made something up some fiction just so
it would have something to say?

You are blaming science for not knowing everything from the beginning.
That's not its job, though. Its job is to figure things out. That
isn't always easy.

>> I have no
>> problem with that. Evolution cannot "cope" with quasars or economic
>> cycles, either; there are other sciences for coping with them.
>
> I'm afraid you are missing the point of what I wrote about stellar evolution.

That's for sure. I cut that part because I had (and still have) no idea
why you put it in the post.

>>>> As far as I can see, modern evolutionary (and related earth history)
>>>> theory copes with it just fine, as science copes with all hard problems:
>>>> It describes what is known and what is unknown, and it gives various
>>>> tentative and incomplete hypotheses to test and build upon.
>>>
>>> That description doesn't begin to do justice to the complexity of THIS hard problem.
>
>> What better way to do justice to a hard problem than to note that it is
>> hard, note that it is unsolved, and keep trying to solve it anyway?
>
> By doing a better job figuring out where the main problems lie.

And you honestly think abiogenesis researchers are more deficient in
that area than creationists are?

>> The creationist alternative, to make up shit, is, in my opinion, the
>> opposite of doing justice to the problem.
>
> I've defined "cope" for you. Now it's your turn to define "shit."
> Please try to also give us some idea of how you define "creationist".

Stuff that satisfies one's biases and preferences but is not firmly
based on evidence.

> > Your alternative, which seems
>> to be admitting that the problem is hard and unsolved and then giving
>> up, is only a little better.
>
> I'm not giving up, far from it; people who make light of the difficulties are
> the ones who are giving up.

As you should know by now, you are not good at judging social
situations. The people you say are "making light of the difficulties"
are not doing so; they are pointing out that there is more to the story
than just the difficulties. Because creationists (and you) have a
tendency to point only at the half of the glass that is empty.

[peter2...@gmail.com]

On Wednesday, July 19, 2023 at 9:50:46 AM UTC-4, Lawyer Daggett wrote:
> On Wednesday, July 19, 2023 at 8:35:46 AM UTC-4, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:

> > It will be interesting to see whether jillery dares to tackle my second reply to Ron Dean
> > to the benighted part of Bill's post that I've left in below.

What applies to jillery applies to you, her closest ally since Thrinaxodon/Oxaena
vanished without saying good-bye. ["closest" is relative: your minor tiffs aren't
as bad as others I have seen from any competitor for the dubious honor.]

> Insults are poor substitutes for arguments (ref. "benighted").

What you call "insults" make great supplements for a thorough refutation that no
one has touched with a ten foot pole yet.

Refute it if you can. Otherwise, you are guilty of huff and puff,
as Bill Rogers already is, inasmuch as you haven't touched my
piecemeal refutation of his "shit" *sensu* Mark Isaak.

The laws Bill had in mind in his insincere "description" of God may
be as impossible as a solution in positive integers to
x^3 + y^3 = z^3. Care to argue otherwise?

>
> And then there's the odd specification of "life on earth". Other things
> written make it seem like you are implying that we were the a priori
> anointed planet.

Other things I've written put the lie to this baseless, derogatory accusation.
If life on earth is the only life of any sort in our universe, we are
the *a posteriori* "annointed" planet. If life is common all through
the universe, then that makes the postulated laws all the more difficult for
the human mind to grasp.

> > > 2. A supernatural agent created life, and continues to tinker with
> > > life in order to reach some arbitrary and unspecified goal.
>
> > Get real. The "unspecified" goal is all around you, although
> > all the computers in the world could not store a specification
> > of all the things this planet has in it. And who are we to say
> > that human beings could have evolved without a hefty fraction of
> > those things?
> Is that supposed to be meaningful?

> In the first place, what do you imagine to be the significance of this
> metric of all the computers in the world?

It's a valid metric, using a well-understood benchmark.

> Seems like none, or alternatively
> completely arbitrary and capricious.

It seems like you are caviling for the sake of arbitrary and capricious caviling.

IOW, grandstanding for the amusement of my other critics.


I have to prepare for a remote lecture I'll be giving on some
fascinating topology that Richard Norman would be able to
understand, but he seemed to be one of a kind.

So I'm not replying this week any more to empty cavils by you.

I've deleted them all, leaving a misconception:

[...]

> > PS I've got a lot on my plate today, but I've left in the sophomoric
> > stuff you wrote below, in case someone wants to argue in favor of it
> > while addressing anything I wrote above.

> I have to laugh respective to your multiple recent comments about
> how you were going to respond to some comments of mine later in
> the day but: "oh look, a butterfly".

I expressed a hope each time, not a promise. Rest assured I will reply,
no later than Monday

Peter Nyikos
Professor, Dept. of Mathematics

Univ. of So. Carolina -- standard disclaimer--
http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos

PS I note that you didn't comment on jillery's stuff that I left in.

[Glenn]

"This does not mean that Ikaria could not be a potential bilaterian worm, but the case is far from established. Even if the attribution should turn out to be correct, the headlines — “Ancestor of all animals identified” — would be nonsense."

https://evolutionnews.org/2020/03/ancestor-of-all-animals-in-555-million-year-old-ediacaran-sediments/

[Glenn]

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2001045117

Figure 1A all blurry, might be a UFO!

"Here, we describe the fossil Ikaria wariootia, one of the oldest bilaterians identified from South Australia."

This claim alone should have failed peer review.

[peter2...@gmail.com]

On Wednesday, July 19, 2023 at 12:00:45 PM UTC-4, Mark Isaak wrote:
> On 7/18/23 10:37 AM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> > On Tuesday, July 18, 2023 at 10:45:45 AM UTC-4, Mark Isaak wrote:
> >> On 7/17/23 10:24 AM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> >>> On Saturday, July 15, 2023 at 12:15:40 AM UTC-4, Mark Isaak wrote:
> >>>> On 7/14/23 4:11 PM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> >>>>>>>
> >>>>>>> This applies *a fortiori* to the widespread definition of "evolution" as "change of frequency
> >>>>>>> of alleles in a population." Moreover, we might as well go beyond the case of the Cambrian
> >>>>>>> explosion to the grand panoply of organisms that are the result of over 3 billion years
> >>>>>>> of evolution in the more common meaning of the word, the one that creationists cannot cope with.
> >>>>>
> >>>>> The bottom line here is that modern evolutionary theory cannot cope with it either,
> >>>>> making biologists powerless to explain mega-evolution that involves such huge transitions as the
> >>>>> one from fully aquatic fish to fully land-based reptiles in the short time it took.
> >>>
> >>>> Define "cope."
> >>>
> >>> It means being able to go beyond the widespread definition I quoted in explaining how life on
> >>> earth got to be the fantastically varied thing it is. Trying to use that definition, or the Modern Synthesis
> >>> (a.k.a. neo-Darwinism) to explain it is like trying to explain everything we do, including this
> >>> intelligent conversation we are having, in terms of cell-to-cell chemical signaling.
> >
> >> So, if I understand you, the scientific field of abiogenesis can cope
> >> with abiogenesis, but evolution narrowly construed cannot.
> >
> > No, it's WORSE where abiogenesis is concerned. It has no theory, not even one as primitive as neo-Darwinism.

You made an unmarked deletion at this point. I had continued:

"Its way of attempting to cope is to postulate the existence of an RNA World somewhere along the line.
But until we get a better idea of how to get to a sophisticated level of RNA World, or how to get
from it to life as we know it, we are floundering."

Did you delete it because you don't know anything about RNA World? Don't be bashful,
I'll be glad to tell you more about it. Let me just say here that it starts at about
the 20th floor of the metaphoric 100 floor skyscraper, with a crude method of
replicating long strings of RNA nucleotides inside lipid vesicles, and ends at about the 80th floor
with "life as we don't know it" in the form of cells very much like prokaryotes,
but using ribozymes instead of protein enzymes.

But then come the last 20 floors, to the roof which represents the first prokaryotes,
where these ribozymes are almost all replaced by protein enzymes despite
a Catch-22 that I have occasionally written about. Would you like to see what that is?

> So? Would it "cope" better if it made something up some fiction just so
> it would have something to say?

People keep making up fiction about how random mutation of RNA molecules and subsequent
unspecified events will automatically favor the strings of nucleotides that are more effective at
carrying out myriads of functions that are useful for progress towards the first prokaryote
and beyond.

But nobody seems able to describe an analogue of the natural selection in populations
of whole organisms that makes any sense. So it looks like these people are doing it to have
something to say.

> You are blaming science for not knowing everything from the beginning.

Nonsense. You are just showing that you are the kindred spirit of those who say things
of which you made another unmarked snip:

[REPOST:]

"We still don't know *all* the details of how life evolved 'from rocks'."

"Huge progress is being made every day."

"The gaps become smaller and smaller and there is only room left for a tiny 'god of the gaps'."

[End of repost]

> That's not its job, though. Its job is to figure things out.

You sure know how to belabor the obvious while ducking the issue of how pathetically
little "science" [1] has been able to figure out about abiogenesis so far.

[1] read: the scientists who actively research OOL

> That isn't always easy.

Vague generalities like these are completely unproductive of insight into anything.


<snip of things to be dealt with in the next reply to this post>

> >>>> As far as I can see, modern evolutionary (and related earth history)
> >>>> theory copes with it just fine, as science copes with all hard problems:
> >>>> It describes what is known and what is unknown, and it gives various
> >>>> tentative and incomplete hypotheses to test and build upon.
> >>>
> >>> That description doesn't begin to do justice to the complexity of THIS hard problem.
> >
> >> What better way to do justice to a hard problem than to note that it is
> >> hard, note that it is unsolved, and keep trying to solve it anyway?
> >
> > By doing a better job figuring out where the main problems lie.

> And you honestly think abiogenesis researchers are more deficient in
> that area than creationists are?

No, but I think the current crop of talk.origins anti-ID regulars is more deficient
than the best of them are: they are motivated to seek out the places where the
biggest problems are, and y'all are not.

Remainder deleted, to be replied to later, perhaps only Friday afternoon,
after the end of the math research conference to which I am contributing an
on-line talk tomorrow.


Peter Nyikos
Professor, Dept. of Mathematics -- standard disclaimer--
U. of South Carolina at Columbia
http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos

[peter2...@gmail.com]

On Wednesday, July 19, 2023 at 2:20:45 PM UTC-4, Glenn wrote:
> On Wednesday, July 19, 2023 at 7:45:46 AM UTC-7, erik simpson wrote:
> > On Tuesday, July 18, 2023 at 4:10:44 PM UTC-7, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> >
> > > > > The articles I linked to showed you examples of bilaterians occurring before the Cambrian, whereas you had repeatedly claimed that they appeared only during the Cambrian explosion.
> > > Do you know what articles Bill Rogers is talking about here?
> > > The only bilateral Precambrian animal of which I know is *Kimberella*,
> > > and what Bill says above and below, applied to it, would indeed be true *IF* it is
> > > a true bilaterian and not some animal that attained a bilateral symmetry
> > > independent of Bilaterians.

> > > >Since bilaterians are clearly related to descendants like deuterostomes and protostomes and thus to the modern phyla descended from them, it is incorrect to claim that most or all of the modern phyla appear in the Cambrian without precursors.

> > Consider: https://www.pnas.org/doi/pdf/10.1073/pnas.2001045117
> > "Discovery of the oldest bilaterian from the Ediacaran of South Australia"
> >
> > Predates Kimberella, but not by much.

> "This does not mean that Ikaria could not be a potential bilaterian worm, but the case is far from established.

Yes, the history of such claims about Precambrian animals is an extensive one:
1. claims that Rangeomorphs were sea pens [false]
2. claims that Dickinsonia was an annelid [pretty much discredited]
3 and beyond: claims that various Ediacaran fossils were of jellyfish, including Kimberella
[nobody thinks that about Kimberella any more].

>Even if the attribution should turn out to be correct, the headlines — “Ancestor of all animals identified” — would be nonsense."

Of course, and John Harshman would agree if he thought about the claim in isolation from who quoted
that sentence (you) and your source. In fact, the ideology to which he subscribes forbids any claim
of direct ancestry between animals known only from fossils in a peer-reviewed science article.
[So much for Eohippus/Hyracotherium being the ancestor of modern horses, for instance.]

> https://evolutionnews.org/2020/03/ancestor-of-all-animals-in-555-million-year-old-ediacaran-sediments/

Peter Nyikos
Professor, Dept. of Mathematics -- standard disclaimer--

U. of South Carolina at Columbia
http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos

PS Harshman and Simpson have gone on record as claiming you are best ignored.
After all, comments like your riposte here to the latter would be embarrassing to them otherwise.

[jillery]

On Wed, 19 Jul 2023 03:05:28 -0700 (PDT), "broger...@gmail.com"
<broger...@gmail.com> wrote:

>I agree that there's no evidence for a supernatural agent. There is still an important distinction between the two cases. Arguing for a supernatural agent on the grounds that its tinkering repeatedly over time was necessary for the world to turn out the way it has, and in particular, trying to use gaps in scientific explanation as evidence for the supernatural agent, will inevitably draw you into conflict with science and the reality it describes. Simply saying that things are the way they are because a supernatural agent set the universe up in the beginning so that they would come out that way, makes no predictions that conflict with science - someone making that claim agrees that the natural laws are the natural laws, they are just putting a name on whatever it is that caused them to be what they are. It is essentially no more than the value judgement "Hey, the world is cool. I like it." So I think the case for a supernatural designer who set things up cleverly and let them work themselves out on their own is, if not stronger, less weak, than one that depends on ongoing intervention, because it cannot draw you into conflict with science.

IIUC we completely agree. The distinction between cases 3 and 4 is
important. As I said, I have no more problem presuming a supernatural
agent as causal agent of the universe as I do any other, as all are
mere placeholder labels for our ignorance. My problem is with
applying supernatural agency to other gaps in our knowledge, as in
case 2. That's bad epistemology in the sense there's nothing
inconsistent with life and the natural laws of physics, and bad
theology, in the sense that it implies a supernatural agent that's
either incompetent or fickle.

My comments above are entirely consistent with my previous comments.
WRT the origin of life, either there is a good case for both 1.
on-going intervention and 2. initial intervention, or for neither, as
they are the same case. That 1 and 2 are distinguishable doesn't
alter that distinction's bad epistemology and theology.

[jillery]

On Wed, 19 Jul 2023 05:30:44 -0700 (PDT), "peter2...@gmail.com"
trolled:

>PS I've got a lot on my plate today, but I've left in the sophomoric
>stuff you wrote below, in case someone wants to argue in favor of it
>while addressing anything I wrote above.

Your comment above is an example of not-disagreement, but instead mere
insult for the sake of it, a feature common among willfully stupid
trolls. And since you consider what I wrote sophomoric, I have no
motivation to reply to your mindless noise. May you live in
interesting times.

[Ron Dean]

broger...@gmail.com wrote:

> On Saturday, July 15, 2023 at 8:05:40 PM UTC-4, Ron Dean wrote:
>> broger...@gmail.com wrote:

It seems from this article you reference to Deuerostomes has been
updated and reinterpreted
>
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.01.182915v1
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abe2741
>
Based on what I've read protostomes originated about 600 million years
ago. There is two types.
1) lopotrococzoa whhich includs Leeches, earthworms, squid octopus
snails and slugs.
2)Ecdysozoa
which includes arthropods, nemotodes and lardogrades.
But like the typical nature of evolution, there is absolutely no
observable links between the
dozen or so separate and distinct animals that can be traced back
through connecting linkages.

> What do find incorrect about the arguments for the paucity of fossils from >500 million years ago? Especially considering the sorts of organisms we are talking about.
>> And in any case, why do you think a designer powerful enough to
create a universe with precisely tuned physical constants designed to
allow life to survive, and a system of mutation, drift and selection,
effective at producing new species, would muck up the job of designing
the physical laws of the universe so badly that in order to get modern
phyla to appear he had to intervene on multiple occasions half a billion
years ago (and then had to return intermittently over the ensuing half
billion years to produce new orders and families within those phyla)?
What makes you think God couldn't have done all the design work up
front, and designed physical laws and fine tuned constants so that the
origin of life and all its subsequent evolution unfolded naturally from
the original design of the universe? Why do you think you know that
God's intelligence has limits and what those limits are?
>

I see evidence of deliberate purposeful design where ever I look and
design infers a designer, but I see no evidence pointing to the identity
of the designer. If a person believes the designer
is God, this is strictly by _faith_ not evidence.

[Mark Isaak]

On 7/19/23 2:24 PM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> On Wednesday, July 19, 2023 at 12:00:45 PM UTC-4, Mark Isaak wrote:
>> On 7/18/23 10:37 AM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
>>> On Tuesday, July 18, 2023 at 10:45:45 AM UTC-4, Mark Isaak wrote:
>>>> On 7/17/23 10:24 AM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
>>>>> On Saturday, July 15, 2023 at 12:15:40 AM UTC-4, Mark Isaak wrote:
>>>>>> On 7/14/23 4:11 PM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>> This applies *a fortiori* to the widespread definition of "evolution" as "change of frequency
>>>>>>>>> of alleles in a population." Moreover, we might as well go beyond the case of the Cambrian
>>>>>>>>> explosion to the grand panoply of organisms that are the result of over 3 billion years
>>>>>>>>> of evolution in the more common meaning of the word, the one that creationists cannot cope with.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> The bottom line here is that modern evolutionary theory cannot cope with it either,
>>>>>>> making biologists powerless to explain mega-evolution that involves such huge transitions as the
>>>>>>> one from fully aquatic fish to fully land-based reptiles in the short time it took.
>>>>>
>>>>>> Define "cope."
>>>>>
>>>>> It means being able to go beyond the widespread definition I quoted in explaining how life on
>>>>> earth got to be the fantastically varied thing it is. Trying to use that definition, or the Modern Synthesis
>>>>> (a.k.a. neo-Darwinism) to explain it is like trying to explain everything we do, including this
>>>>> intelligent conversation we are having, in terms of cell-to-cell chemical signaling.
>>>
>>>> So, if I understand you, the scientific field of abiogenesis can cope
>>>> with abiogenesis, but evolution narrowly construed cannot.
>>>
>>> No, it's WORSE where abiogenesis is concerned. It has no theory, not even one as primitive as neo-Darwinism.
>
> You made an unmarked deletion at this point.

And I make it again, because the deleted part is irrelevant to the point.

We already know that the problem of abiogenesis is unsolved. The next
question for you is: So what?

That is not a rhetorical question. So what?

I think you want to say, So divine intervention! but realize that
nothing anyone has said can support such a conclusion, so you keep
stopping just short of saying that and hope others will make that
mistake on their own.

>> So? Would it "cope" better if it made something up some fiction just so
>> it would have something to say?
>
> People keep making up fiction about how random mutation of RNA molecules and subsequent
> unspecified events will automatically favor the strings of nucleotides that are more effective at
> carrying out myriads of functions that are useful for progress towards the first prokaryote
> and beyond.

Why do you say it is fiction? There is a great deal of evidence that
the combination of imperfect replication and natural selection leads to
more effective functions. The only fiction I see is your calling the
idea a fiction.

> But nobody seems able to describe an analogue of the natural selection in populations
> of whole organisms that makes any sense. So it looks like these people are doing it to have
> something to say.

I'm trying to find relevance again and failing. Are you talking about
abiogenesis, stellar evolution, or the latest butterfly you happened to
catch a glimpse of?

[snip more stuff like these that are completely unproductive of insight
into anything]

>>>> What better way to do justice to a hard problem than to note that it is
>>>> hard, note that it is unsolved, and keep trying to solve it anyway?
>>>
>>> By doing a better job figuring out where the main problems lie.
>
>> And you honestly think abiogenesis researchers are more deficient in
>> that area than creationists are?
>
> No, but I think the current crop of talk.origins anti-ID regulars is more deficient
> than the best of them are: they are motivated to seek out the places where the
> biggest problems are, and y'all are not.

I'll repeat, albeit in different words, that you are often unaware of
what problems are being addressed by the people you refer to.

[jillery]

On Wed, 19 Jul 2023 22:15:09 -0400, Ron Dean
<rondean...@gmail.com> wrote:

>broger...@gmail.com wrote:

>> On Saturday, July 15, 2023 at 8:05:40?PM UTC-4, Ron Dean wrote:
>>> broger...@gmail.com wrote:

You keep saying that but never identify evidence that shows deliberate
purposeful design. Your comments above are just the latest example.
Even if there are no observable links among protostomes, you *still*
don't say how that shows deliberate purposeful design.

>and design infers a designer,

Once again, it does not. Design in the sense you use here describes
functional processes, which you know unguided natural processes are
capable of creating. Claiming these things are caused by "deliberate
purposeful design" presumes your presumptive designer has regularly
tweaked, and continues to tweak, functional processes into existence.

>but I see no evidence pointing to the identity
>of the designer. If a person believes the designer
>is God, this is strictly by _faith_ not evidence.

Once again, the identity of your presumptive purposeful designer
doesn't inform how the evidence shows purposeful design. Your
arguments are classic circularity. How many times are you going to
post things like this?

[Glenn]

I have concluded that you aren't nearly as smart as you think you are, jillery.

[broger...@gmail.com]

....

> I see evidence of deliberate purposeful design where ever I look and
> design infers a designer, but I see no evidence pointing to the identity
> of the designer. If a person believes the designer
> is God, this is strictly by _faith_ not evidence.

You posted this paragraph before several times. So I will repeat - nobody is asking you for the exact identity of the designer. However, when you say that there is no evidence for links between different groups of animals, and offer that as evidence for design, you imply that the designer intervened to produce all those animals separately at multiple different times. When you say that you think the physical constants are fine-tuned, and cite that fine tuning as evidence for design, you imply that the designer (1) has the power to change the physical constants and (2) was active something like 14 billion years ago. And every time you cite something unexplained as being evidence for a designer, you imply that the designer caused the unexplained thing to happen. So even though your evidence does not identify the designer by name, it implies all sorts of things about what he did and when he did it. Yet you make no effort to integrate the actual fossil evidence, and genetic evidence, and all the we actually do know about the history of life on earth with all the characteristics that your designer must have (assuming the things you cite as evidence of design are in fact evidence of design).

A few posts back, you said you were pretty OK with the idea that the designer did all the design work up front - meaning that he carefully designed physical laws and set physical constants so that it would produce a universe in which life would arise and diversify as a result of those laws. Have you changed you mind about that?

[jillery]

On Thu, 20 Jul 2023 03:30:51 -0700 (PDT), Glenn <GlennS...@msn.com>
wrote:

>I have concluded that you aren't nearly as smart as you think you are, jillery.

Really? I smell delusions of mind-reading.

[Ron Dean]

peter2...@mail.com wrote:
> On Friday, July 14, 2023 at 4:10:39 AM UTC-4, Ron.Dean wrote:

>> On 7/12/23 7:59 PM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
>>> On Wednesday, July 12, 2023 at 5:15:37 PM UTC-4, Ron.Dean wrote:
>>>> <https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/score-onefor-punk-eek/
>>>
>>>> For me, personally I believe there is an example of deliberate, purposeful

>>>> design on a universal scale with functions designs for meeting long

>>>> range objectives. This involved long term planning, design and setting

>>>> up universal programs for the formation of animal body forms parts:
>>>> shapes organs,limbs etc.. This occurred at one brief period of time

>>>> (geologically) at a period called the Cambrian about 485 million years
>>>> ago and during what is called the Cambrian explosion
>>>

>>> You need to do a bit more homework before making such comments;
>>> 485 million years ago was the END of the Cambrian, which began ca. 539 mya,
>>> while the Cambrian explosion itself, when almost all phyla known from fossils
>>> appeared, ended around 510 mya and began about 20 million years earlier.
>>>
>> Okay, I was a bit careless regarding the date of the Cambrian Explosion.
>> I've been informer time after time after time that this did not happen
>> during the early Cambrian.
>
> To be precise: the earliest of three divisions of the early Cambrian.
> Most of the modern phyla were done deals by the end of the third division.
>
>>> You really should buy or borrow a copy of Stephen Meyer's book, _Darwin's_Doubt_,
>>> where some nice summaries of the Cambrian explosion itself can be found
>>> and quickly read. The majority of the book is about various attempts to explain
>>> the explosion without relying on intelligent design, and how they fall short.
>
In a conversation with my boss, and long time friend, Rob H., I
mentioned Darwin's Doubt.
He had the book, so I've borrowed it.
>
> Prothero, a specialist on ungulates, did some childish name-dropping
> in his highly dishonest "review" of Meyer's book, by giving three names for the
> three main divisions of the early Cambrian. It turns out that the Erwin and Valentine
> book [see below], which Prothero touted in his "review" [read: hatchet job],
> said that these divisions were unworkable because they were based
> on Siberian strata that could not be correlated with other strata in the world.
>
> Wikipedia still uses the old names that Prothero parroted, illustrating how
> even in uncontroversial science matters, it isn't wholly reliable.
>
>
>> As a general rule, referencing Intelligent Design writers is met with
>> disdain. And you are accused of appealing to "creationist" sources. In
>> this way, they "shoot the messenger" and by so doing, whatever you write
>> then stands discredited.
>
> Fortunately, there are sometimes intelligent design arguments that
> appear in anti-ID sources without the authors realizing it.
> And these pose good opportunities for us.
>
True, There is a statement "Biologist must constantly keep in mind
that what we see was not design, but but rather evolved". - Crick
There is this "Biology is the study of complicated that give the
appearance of
having been designed for a purpose". Then he stated. "there is no designer
therefore no design". -Dawkins
>
> One example was long ago, in the book _The_Blind_Watchmaker_, by
> Dawkins. He described some computer experiments that mutated
> simulations of flowers, picking the most interesting ones for the
> next generation, and ended up with pictures that resembled insects.
>
> Of course, "most interesting" is not a biological concept, but requires
> a subjective intelligence. This flaw was pointed out to Dawkins
> soon enough, and several teams of researchers came up with
> experiments that used actual simulated competition for resources,
> and there were some clear winners in one such experiment.
> Another ID foe, Daniel Dennett, showed a film of it on a visit
> to our campus two or three decades ago. Very interesting.
>
What was the film about: I can guess. One propensity anti-ID people have
is the determination to link scientific creationism and ID. I
understand this,
it serves their purpose. By doing so, they don't have to deal with the
scientific
foundation or the evidence of intelligent design. Of course they try to
undermine every argument for design in nature in every case, upon the
grounds that there is no design by a supernatural designer to make a c
comparison. and every design we can know about is attributed to humans.
In the real world what we see as design is "apparent design" or it's the
"illusion of design". - Dawkins
>
> But now, an example from just a few months ago: the OOL specialist
> Jack Szostak did a 55 minute lecture back in March where he
> described an experiment with the same flaws as Dawkins's,
> and one other: where Dawkins had no idea what the final outcome
> would be, Szostak described an experiment where they did
> intelligent design selection with a specific goal in mind:
>
> "so what we were able to do pretty easily was build libraries of on the order of
> 10 to the 15th different random sequences made in DNA transcribed into
> RNA and then take that set of sequences and subject it
> to a selection okay, so enriching for the ones that do what we want and throwing away the ones
> that don't and then amplifying those survivors with or without adding a little bit more variation and going
> around and around this cycle, going around and around that cycle,
> uh until the population is taken over by molecules that do uh what we want okay"
>
I had some thoughts of Darwin and the scientific method.
The science is suppose to be indifferent, impersonal
non-emotional and objective. The scientific method as I
understand is observation, hypothesism experimentation,
and finally a conclusion. If it's a failure, then a new
hypothesis etc.. if experiment successful a theory
explains it! And if it's a legitimate scientific hypothesis
it's falsifiable.

Which brings me to Darwin and his motivation. In order to
graduate, Darwin had to read Wm. Paley's "Evidences.... "
This work impressed him; he claimed, there were portions
he could recite from memory. It might be just
be wild speculation on my part, but I cannot refrain from
questioning Darwin, but how safe is this? A Chinese scientist,
during a lecture in California was warned about the direction
he seemed to be going.
To which he remarked, "in China we can criticize Darwin, but
you better not criticize the government. But in the US you
can criticize the government, but you better not criticize Darwin".- Chen

At the time, Paley attributed the scientific observations, he saw as
evidence of God.
I'm sorry, but I cannot help, but suspect that Paley's evidence
pointing to God inspired Darwin to address scientific observations, as
did Paley, but with the purpose of writing God out of the picture.
Darwin needed an instrument to accomplish his goal. He devised
a concept, where as nature, in the form random mutations and natural
selection became his God replacement.

I honesty think, it's been the objective and the goal of Darwin's
followers,
from the beginning, to _find_ supporting evidence for Darwin's
theory. Can this be objective?
And I think finding evidence to support evolution has been their goal of
for the past 150 years. If so, where does this leave truth.

If in searching for supporting evidence the searcher comes across evidence
that does not align with their goal. It's seen as "no data" or explained
away.
And where does this leave the search for truth?

This certainly can apply to the "flat earth" proponents. They start
out with a
goal or and objective. Then they set out to prove their objective.
And like evolutionist they start from the beginning with a goal in mind.
Prove
the earth is flat. IOW real science starts with observation, then ends
with a conclusion.
It does not start with a conclusion, then set out to find evidence to
support the
conclusion. I do not believe this is science.




> -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U841Zrd4C5g
> between ca. 13 and 13.5 minutes into the video
>
> This video is being discussed by me in a thread where the video was introduced in the OP by jillery:

> https://groups.google.com/g/talk.origins/c/zLkSPbLfklc/m/kDJB_bJBAgAJ
> Re: Szostak on abiogenesis
>

> I was rather complimentary, and am saving the above bombshell for a later post.
>
>
>>>
>>> John Harshman loves to claim that the best book on the Cambrian
>>> explosion is the one by Erwin and Valentine, but it only gives more details
>>> than Meyer's book about the events of the explosion, and doesn't attempt
>>> to explain how it occurred nor why nothing remotely like it has happened since then.
>>>
>> I looked up this book on amazon. For a book, it's just too expensive. I
>> live about 30 miles from the library, so unless I have another reason
>> for going into town.....
>
> I bought a copy as a present for my brother-in-law, who loves science as
> much as I do, but made a point to read most of it before giving it to him.
>
>
> Concluded in another post to this thread, to be done later today if time permits;
> if not, then Monday.

>
>
> Peter Nyikos
> Professor, Dept. of Mathematics

> Univ. of South Carolina -- standard disclaimer--
> http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos
>

[John Harshman]

You may want to consult various analyses of the book, including this one:

https://doubt848.rssing.com/chan-58294206/latest-article6.php

Are you familiar with the term "pareidolia"?

No need to be sorry for things you can't help, but yes, this is wild
speculation, free of any evidence, and requires you to suppose that
Darwin was systematically lying.

> I honesty think, it's been the objective and the goal  of Darwin's
> followers,
> from the beginning, to  _find_ supporting evidence for Darwin's
> theory. Can this be objective?
> And I think finding evidence to support evolution has been their goal of
>  for the past 150 years. If so, where does this leave truth.

Again, you assert more about the motivations of all sorts of people,
with zero evidence. Is this really a good thing to do?

> If in searching for supporting evidence the searcher comes across evidence
> that does not align with their goal. It's seen as "no data" or explained
> away.
> And where does this leave the search for truth?
>
>  This certainly can apply to the "flat earth" proponents. They start
> out with a
> goal or and objective. Then they set out  to prove their objective.
> And like evolutionist they start from the beginning with a goal in mind.
> Prove
> the earth is flat. IOW real science starts with observation, then ends
> with a conclusion.
> It does not start with a conclusion, then set out to find evidence to
> support the
> conclusion. I do not believe this is science.

It certainly wouldn't be. But you present a caricature of evolutionary
biology, based on nothing whatsoever.

I ask you once again: if the history of life is not one of evoluton,
what is it? You won't say. If you're going to talk about evidence you
need two hypotheses to compare. You can't just compare X with "some
unstated thing that isn't X". This is not science.

[Glenn]

Darwin's claims certainly were not based on evidence, nor was it "evolution", but rather random mutation and natural selection. You would claim that there is real science to support the claim that life developed in that manner from the simplest cells to the most complex lifeforms, but many people just don't see it. I certainly don't.

[peter2...@gmail.com]

It was impressive: some virtual "animals" got good at stealing
resources from others whose bodies were not sufficiently equipped
for getting them back.

> One propensity anti-ID people have
> is the determination to link scientific creationism and ID. I
> understand this,
> it serves their purpose. By doing so, they don't have to deal with the
> scientific
> foundation or the evidence of intelligent design. Of course they try to
> undermine every argument for design in nature in every case, upon the
> grounds that there is no design by a supernatural designer to make a c
> comparison.

Comparison is not the be-all and end-all of theories in general.
In fact, this oft-repeated "reasoning" is illogical, given examples like the following.

Physicists have come up with the concept of "fields" to solve such
old problems as the incompatibility of the corpuscular and wave
theories of light, and the amazing fact that any two electrons
have identical mass, charge, and any other detectable properties.

One would naturally expect no two electrons (defined as the negative
sub-particles of atoms) to be exactly alike, just as no two snowflakes are exactly alike.

Physicists have come up with the theory of an electron field permeating all
our universe, which can be made to produce electron-positron pairs
seemingly from nothing, and the hypothesized properties of the field
are supposed to make it automatic that every pair produced in this way
has the identical properties of every other pair.

> and every design we can know about is attributed to humans.

Humans haven't experienced anything in their lives that behaves anything
like those fields. Yet physicists have decided that fields exist with those
staggering properties.

> In the real world what we see as design is "apparent design" or it's the
> "illusion of design". - Dawkins

Dawkins was just expressing his atheistic conviction, nothing more.

> >
> > But now, an example from just a few months ago: the OOL specialist
> > Jack Szostak did a 55 minute lecture back in March where he
> > described an experiment with the same flaws as Dawkins's,
> > and one other: where Dawkins had no idea what the final outcome
> > would be, Szostak described an experiment where they did
> > intelligent design selection with a specific goal in mind:
> >
> > "so what we were able to do pretty easily was build libraries of on the order of
> > 10 to the 15th different random sequences made in DNA transcribed into
> > RNA and then take that set of sequences and subject it
> > to a selection okay, so enriching for the ones that do what we want and throwing away the ones
> > that don't and then amplifying those survivors with or without adding a little bit more variation and going
> > around and around this cycle, going around and around that cycle,
> > uh until the population is taken over by molecules that do uh what we want okay"
> >
> I had some thoughts of Darwin and the scientific method.
> The science is suppose to be indifferent, impersonal
> non-emotional and objective. The scientific method as I
> understand is observation, hypothesism experimentation,
> and finally a conclusion.

That's an idealized version of research, which amounts to a myth
as to how it is actually conducted. Notice how Szostak never states
the hypothesis that his team was testing, if any.

But then, a great deal of scientific research does not begin
with a hypothesis, but is of a nature, "Let's try this and see what happens."
A great deal of my mathematical research has been like this.

> If it's a failure, then a new
> hypothesis etc.. if experiment successful a theory
> explains it! And if it's a legitimate scientific hypothesis
> it's falsifiable.
>
> Which brings me to Darwin and his motivation. In order to
> graduate, Darwin had to read Wm. Paley's "Evidences.... "
> This work impressed him; he claimed, there were portions
> he could recite from memory. It might be just
> be wild speculation on my part, but I cannot refrain from
> questioning Darwin, but how safe is this? A Chinese scientist,
> during a lecture in California was warned about the direction
> he seemed to be going.

> To which he remarked, "in China we can criticize Darwin, but
> you better not criticize the government. But in the US you
> can criticize the government, but you better not criticize Darwin".- Chen

This attitude especially pervaded talk.origins back while Trump
was president. Did you ever see my Chez Watt, "Hitler
compared favorably to Trump"? It was taken from a post
where some good points of Hitler were recalled, and there were
no unambiguously bad points recalled. Unlike now, when there
has been so much acrimony over Chez Watts, nobody uttered
a peep of criticism, not even the person whom I was quoting.

>
> At the time, Paley attributed the scientific observations, he saw as
> evidence of God.
> I'm sorry, but I cannot help, but suspect that Paley's evidence
> pointing to God inspired Darwin to address scientific observations, as
> did Paley, but with the purpose of writing God out of the picture.
> Darwin needed an instrument to accomplish his goal. He devised
> a concept, where as nature, in the form random mutations and natural
> selection became his God replacement.

I'm not sure that was his goal from the beginning. Don't forget,
Alfred Russel Wallace came up with the same scientific theory
independently of Darwin, yet he also believed that supernatural
entities had occasionally intervened in the origin and evolution of life:

`He stated that something in "the unseen universe of Spirit" had interceded at least three times in history: the creation of life from inorganic matter; the introduction of consciousness in the higher animals; and the generation of the higher mental faculties in humankind. He believed that the raison d'être of the universe was the development of the human spirit.[147]'
-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Russel_Wallace

The last sentence is a bit strange, given Wallace's interest in the possibility of extraterrestrial life,
also talked about in the long Wikipedia entry.

> I honesty think, it's been the objective and the goal of Darwin's
> followers,
> from the beginning, to _find_ supporting evidence for Darwin's
> theory. Can this be objective?

There is nothing wrong with gathering evidence against something
you dislike, as long as you are scrupulously honest about the evidence
you find. It's even permissible to avoid mentioning other things you find,
as long as they do not undermine what you do mention.

> And I think finding evidence to support evolution has been their goal of
> for the past 150 years. If so, where does this leave truth.
>
> If in searching for supporting evidence the searcher comes across evidence
> that does not align with their goal. It's seen as "no data" or explained
> away.

That is indeed dishonest, when it occurs.

> And where does this leave the search for truth?
>
> This certainly can apply to the "flat earth" proponents. They start
> out with a
> goal or and objective. Then they set out to prove their objective.
> And like evolutionist they start from the beginning with a goal in mind.
> Prove
> the earth is flat. IOW real science starts with observation, then ends
> with a conclusion.
> It does not start with a conclusion, then set out to find evidence to
> support the
> conclusion. I do not believe this is science.

Whether it is science does not depend on the motivation,
but only on the reasoning from the data.


Peter Nyikos
Professor, Dept. of Mathematics -- standard disclaimer--
University of South Carolina
http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos

PS Have you looked at the thread I linked for you [see below] yet?
I've been neglecting that thread to keep abreast of this one,
and of the math conference I've been attending on line.
But I will return to it, now that I've given the lecture for
which I was scheduled, a little over an hour ago.

[peter2...@gmail.com]

This from someone who jeered at what I wrote about Bill Rogers's
incompetent post about God, but was unable to refute anything
I wrote about it. You twisted my criticism into (nonexistent) praise
of myself, but here you are advertising just how clever you think you were.


Fact is, your "analysis" is riddled with distortions of what goes on in the book, and includes some
illogical attempts at refutation. To take just one *very short* example:

"A major claim in this chapter is the idea of “top-down” appearance: phyla appearing before families, families before species, etc. He dismisses the idea that this is an artifact of classification, but makes no real argument."

Strangely enough, Erwin and Valentine endorse this so strongly, you
may have a hard time believing they wrote it. Meyer quotes a paper by
them, so you may have missed it due to it not being in their book that you've
been praising so highly. I'll give a more complete cite tomorrow; I'm still
in my office and can't access Meyer's book here.

You continued:

> "But phyla were defined based on extant species as the broadest classifications, and so must arise earliest in the history of life, before lower-level groups that they contain. "

This makes no sense whatsoever. Phyla are distinguished from each other by
measures of truly major disparity. Pre-Cambrian phyla were few, not because
the species were few, but because the degree of disparity of the species
did not warrant more phyla.

I think you've been so mesmerised by the slogan, "Ranks are arbitrary"
that you may have a hard time wrapping your mind around what Erwin and Valentine
wrote in their paper.

One phylum, Porifera, was the lone metazoan phylum for a long time, and I would
not be surprised if it turned out that it contained many lower-level groups before any
other metazoan phyla arose. So the part beginning with "and so must arise" is essentially vacuous.

You continued:
His counter is that these early taxa all have the distinctive features of their modern relatives. Oddly enough, he frequently cites one of my favorite papers, Budd & Jensen 2000, which shows that nearly all Cambrian taxa are at best stem-members of their respective groups."

This doesn't undermine Meyer's counter, as long as they share the same body plan.
Being stem members means that they are closer to the crown members than are
the members, extant or extinct, of any other phylum. So "Oddly enough" is unwarranted.


Remainder deleted, to be replied to later. It's time to head for home
and to a rather belated dinner.


Peter Nyikos

Professor, Dept. of Mathematics -- standard disclaimer--

U. of South Carolina in Columbia
http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos

[Burkhard]

On Thursday, July 20, 2023 at 5:15:46 PM UTC+1, Ron Dean wrote:
<snip>

This is just incredible....

> >
> I had some thoughts of Darwin and the scientific method.
> The science is suppose to be indifferent, impersonal
> non-emotional and objective. The scientific method as I
> understand is observation, hypothesism experimentation,
> and finally a conclusion. If it's a failure, then a new
> hypothesis etc.. if experiment successful a theory
> explains it! And if it's a legitimate scientific hypothesis
> it's falsifiable.
>
> Which brings me to Darwin and his motivation. In order to
> graduate, Darwin had to read Wm. Paley's "Evidences.... "

OK, first point: You frequently complain that people speculate about your motives rather than the objective evidence that you (think you) post. Yet it is consistently you and you alone who tries to undermine arguments and evidence by wild speculations about the motives of the people who make them. Here a case in point, impugning Darwin's professional character by wild speculations about his motives. So at the very least, you are a hypocrite.

But it does not stop there. Pretty every single point you make to support your speculation is provably wrong, as a matter of historical record. Here the first one.Darwin did not have to read Paley's Natural Theology or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity in order to graduate. The Evidences had stopped being part of the mandatory curriculum in Cambridge over a decade before Darwin studied there, Darwin had to read Moral and Political Philosophy, and the Evidences of Christianity , neither of which was about biology.

> This work impressed him; he claimed, there were portions
> he could recite from memory. It might be just
> be wild speculation on my part, but I cannot refrain from
> questioning Darwin, but how safe is this?

Oh poor persecuted you.... It is of course perfectly safe to question Darwin. What you risk of course if if you make up stuff and tell lies, people will call you out for them ...

A Chinese scientist,
> during a lecture in California was warned about the direction
> he seemed to be going.
> To which he remarked, "in China we can criticize Darwin, but
> you better not criticize the government. But in the US you
> can criticize the government, but you better not criticize Darwin".- Chen
>
> At the time, Paley attributed the scientific observations, he saw as
> evidence of God.
> I'm sorry, but I cannot help, but suspect that Paley's evidence
> pointing to God inspired Darwin to address scientific observations, as
> did Paley, but with the purpose of writing God out of the picture.
> Darwin needed an instrument to accomplish his goal. He devised
> a concept, where as nature, in the form random mutations and natural
> selection became his God replacement.

And here the lies start in earnest. And I don't use that term lightly, and not just for people who are more than unusual ignorant or undereducated. But we have been over this before, less than two years ago. From his diaries and correspondence, we know that he started t think along these lines long before he lost his faith, and that far from motivating him, it was for him a serious problem that delayed the publication of his work.

And you know all this, because we go over this pretty much every 2 years or so: yo post your provably false claims, they get refuted, you seem to accept this, just to post the very same falsehoods a few years later again - here an example form 2017
https://groups.google.com/g/talk.origins/c/ZeYE62JZtGo/m/B-SOOtSQAwAJ

And you even accepted that every single part of your speculation was made up shit. And I quote you:

"I can acknowledge that Darwin did not, at the beginning set out to
undermine and discredit Paley's views. Since, this was _not_ his
objective initially, then I was wrong regarding the "outside the
scientific method" comment.

https://groups.google.com/g/talk.origins/c/XU6CFmjsavg/m/FwKW-LxJBAAJ

And yet, here we are again, you engaging in the same character assassination, even though you know that these claims are factually wqromg. Do you intend to male IDlers/creationists look bad? Because you do a sterling job of achieving just that

[Ron Dean]

I was in reference to the new science of evo devo and it's impact on our
understanding.

[Glenn]

Tracing Wiki's refs finds Wallace writing:

"To us, the whole purpose, the only raison d'être of the world--with all its complexities of physical structure, with its grand geological progress, the slow evolution of the vegetable and animal kingdoms, and the ultimate appearance of man--was the development of the human spirit in association with the human body."

If I read this right in context, the "to us" is intentionally omitted from the Wiki article. Note that the word used was "world" here, not "universe", and I don't see a link to belief in the possibility of ETs not being included in a universal purpose.
I could be wrong, but it matters not.

[John Harshman]

This is what is commonly known as "sea-lioning". The fact that I wrote
it is hardly relevant to whether it's a useful critique.

> Fact is, your "analysis" is riddled with distortions of what goes on in the book, and includes some
> illogical attempts at refutation.

So you allege, but you would have to back that up with more than one
example. Further, your sole example isn't looking good.

> To take just one *very short* example:

> "A major claim in this chapter is the idea of “top-down” appearance: phyla appearing before families, families before species, etc. He dismisses the idea that this is an artifact of classification, but makes no real argument."
>
> Strangely enough, Erwin and Valentine endorse this so strongly, you
> may have a hard time believing they wrote it. Meyer quotes a paper by
> them, so you may have missed it due to it not being in their book that you've
> been praising so highly. I'll give a more complete cite tomorrow; I'm still
> in my office and can't access Meyer's book here.

I would be interested in a more complete explanation of what you're
talking about here. So far, there's not enough to respond to. You can't
be bothered to include a citation?

> You continued:
>
>> "But phyla were defined based on extant species as the broadest classifications, and so must arise earliest in the history of life, before lower-level groups that they contain."
>
> This makes no sense whatsoever. Phyla are distinguished from each other by
> measures of truly major disparity. Pre-Cambrian phyla were few, not because
> the species were few, but because the degree of disparity of the species
> did not warrant more phyla.

None of this is talking about Pre-Cambrian phyla. Meyer's discussion of
phyla is all about extant ones, and that's all that's relevant. The
point is that if we have groups within groups, the most inclusive groups
must occur first. Is that not true?

> I think you've been so mesmerised by the slogan, "Ranks are arbitrary"
> that you may have a hard time wrapping your mind around what Erwin and Valentine
> wrote in their paper.

Wouldn't know, until I see the paper.

> One phylum, Porifera, was the lone metazoan phylum for a long time, and I would
> not be surprised if it turned out that it contained many lower-level groups before any
> other metazoan phyla arose. So the part beginning with "and so must arise" is essentially vacuous.

Still not relevant. The point is about phyla and their included taxa,
not about included taxa in different phyla. There may be a coherent
point related to what you say here, but you haven't managed it yet.

> You continued:
> His counter is that these early taxa all have the distinctive features of their modern relatives. Oddly enough, he frequently cites one of my favorite papers, Budd & Jensen 2000, which shows that nearly all Cambrian taxa are at best stem-members of their respective groups."
>
> This doesn't undermine Meyer's counter, as long as they share the same body plan.
> Being stem members means that they are closer to the crown members than are
> the members, extant or extinct, of any other phylum. So "Oddly enough" is unwarranted.

"Body plan" is notoriously hard to define and to reduce to particulars.
Body plans are not unitary things, and are not assembled all at once. Do
anomalocariids have the arthropod body plan? Any stem taxon must lack at
least one of the features of the crown group. So where does the body
plan begin?

> Remainder deleted, to be replied to later.

You say that a lot, but often you don't actually reply later.

[Ron Dean]

Seeing a image in a cloud, such as a person, or thing.
>
As an atheist, atheism is his paradigm, which takes precedence and priority
over evidence, data, facts everything.

That's my problem with evolution. no evidence where there should
be vast amounts of evidence, such as large numbers of intermediates
between species.
Perhaps 500,000 or more, fully formed and developed species
are found in the fossil record. I think if evolution held any water,
the intermediates would vastly outnumber the recognized fossil species.
Why is this not the case? If hundreds of thousands of species are
conserved in the strata, why are the much larger numbers of intermediates
not conserved in the strata?

Even in punctuated equilibrium, punctuation must leave 10's of
thousands of intermediates even in these "isolates".

I did not say Darwin was lying. I just think he was influenced by
Paley and was challenged to come up with a natural explanation.

>>> I honesty think, it's been the objective and the goal  of Darwin's
>> followers,
>> from the beginning, to  _find_ supporting evidence for Darwin's
>> theory. Can this be objective?
>> And I think finding evidence to support evolution has been their goal of
>>   for the past 150 years. If so, where does this leave truth.
>
> Again, you assert more about the motivations of all sorts of people,
> with zero evidence. Is this really a good thing to do?
>

The evidence is the fact that in order to receive his ab degree he had to
read Paley.

I think evolutionist owe a debt of gratitude to Paley.
I realize that Wallace was about to publish a comparable book, so,
Darwin after
setting on his work for a couple decades , he rushed to publish before
Wallace.

>> If in searching for supporting evidence the searcher comes across
>> evidence that does not align with their goal. It's seen as "no data" or

>> explained away. (no data was from Gould)

>> And where does this leave the search for truth?
>>
>>   This certainly can apply to the "flat earth" proponents. They start
>> out with a
>> goal or and objective. Then they set out  to prove their objective.
>> And like evolutionist they start from the beginning with a goal in
>> mind. Prove
>> the earth is flat. IOW real science starts with observation, then ends
>> with a conclusion.
>> It does not start with a conclusion, then set out to find evidence to
>> support the
>> conclusion. I do not believe this is science.
>
> It certainly wouldn't be. But you present a caricature of evolutionary
> biology, based on nothing whatsoever.
>

Maybe so, but it is the philosophical basis for real science methodology.
https://www.techtarget.com/whatis/definition/scientific-method
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method

>
> I ask you once again: if the history of life is not one of evoluton,
> what is it? You won't say. If you're going to talk about evidence you
> need two hypotheses to compare. You can't just compare X with "some
> unstated thing that isn't X". This is not science.
>

There is not reason I cannot take issue with X and not offer an
alternative X
I can dispute and argue against with alchemy and not offer an alternative
explanation, as to how I would turn lead into gold.

[peter2...@gmail.com]

On Thursday, July 20, 2023 at 6:45:46 PM UTC-4, Burkhard wrote:
> On Thursday, July 20, 2023 at 5:15:46 PM UTC+1, Ron Dean wrote:
> <snip>
>
> This is just incredible....

Yes, but also for reasons to which you are oblivious, Burkhard.

> > >
> > I had some thoughts of Darwin and the scientific method.
> > The science is suppose to be indifferent, impersonal
> > non-emotional and objective. The scientific method as I
> > understand is observation, hypothesism experimentation,
> > and finally a conclusion. If it's a failure, then a new
> > hypothesis etc.. if experiment successful a theory
> > explains it! And if it's a legitimate scientific hypothesis
> > it's falsifiable.
> >
> > Which brings me to Darwin and his motivation. In order to
> > graduate, Darwin had to read Wm. Paley's "Evidences.... "

> OK, first point: You frequently complain that people speculate about your motives rather than the objective evidence that you (think you) post.

I think John Harshman has him beat by a country mile in that regard.
If you have doubts, I can give you at least three examples just from this thread.
I alluded to one of them in the reply I did to him in my preceding post,
about two hours ago:

https://groups.google.com/g/talk.origins/c/0XgjzJpuiMA/m/xHlFy-ITBgAJ

> Yet it is consistently you and you alone who tries to undermine arguments and evidence by wild speculations about the motives of the people who make them.

Get real. What I said above about Harshman also applies to jillery; only the
actual examples are different.

And you did that to me recently. You confidently asserted that I reported
a student for cheating because it was my duty to do so. Yet this was
way back in the 1980's, before I even became aware of any such requirement.
In fact, we faculty were given wide leeway in judging for ourselves how
serious an infraction was, and to assign a penalty accordingly.
The accused party had a right to appeal, but they almost never did out
of fear that they might be jumping out of the frying pan into the fire.

The truth is that I reported students for the reason I gave: they were giving
themselves an unfair advantage over others -- an explanation that
your bureaucratic mentality evidently made you disbelieve.

> Here a case in point, impugning Darwin's professional character by wild speculations about his motives. So at the very least, you are a hypocrite.

Where's your evidence that Darwin only came by his skepticism
about God after he made his discoveries? In my own reply
to Ron, I merely reminded him of the way Wallace was NOT
swayed by his discoveries.

>
> But it does not stop there. Pretty every single point you make to support your speculation is provably wrong, as a matter of historical record. Here the first one.Darwin did not have to read Paley's Natural Theology or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity in order to graduate. The Evidences had stopped being part of the mandatory curriculum in Cambridge over a decade before Darwin studied there, Darwin had to read Moral and Political Philosophy, and the Evidences of Christianity , neither of which was about biology.

Books are full of inaccurate information about famous people, and many people
are unfortunate enough to have been taught out of them or come across them
rather than across books with accurate information. There is a famous example about
Hannibal supposedly being made by his father to swear to be an eternal enemy
of Rome. That is because countless books rely on Livy's version, rather than
the very different version given by Polybius, who was reporting a personal
interview he had with Hannibal.

Do Germans have a concept equivalent to giving the other guy the benefit of the doubt?
You really make me wonder whether they do.

> > This work impressed him; he claimed, there were portions
> > he could recite from memory. It might be just
> > be wild speculation on my part, but I cannot refrain from
> > questioning Darwin, but how safe is this?

> Oh poor persecuted you....

Inappropriate preamble, akin to Harshman's perennial abuse of the meaning of the word "paranoid".

> It is of course perfectly safe to question Darwin. What you risk of course if if you make up stuff and tell lies, people will call you out for them ...

Your aggressive attacks belie both halves of this comment, the second being
baseless innuendo at this point.

> A Chinese scientist,
> > during a lecture in California was warned about the direction
> > he seemed to be going.
> > To which he remarked, "in China we can criticize Darwin, but
> > you better not criticize the government. But in the US you
> > can criticize the government, but you better not criticize Darwin".- Chen
> >
> > At the time, Paley attributed the scientific observations, he saw as
> > evidence of God.
> > I'm sorry, but I cannot help, but suspect that Paley's evidence
> > pointing to God inspired Darwin to address scientific observations, as
> > did Paley, but with the purpose of writing God out of the picture.
> > Darwin needed an instrument to accomplish his goal. He devised
> > a concept, where as nature, in the form random mutations and natural
> > selection became his God replacement

> And here the lies start in earnest.

I think you are not interpreting the context properly. Ron began with a
suspicion, and his intended meaning was that IF his suspicion
is correct, THEN Darwin needed an instrument...

>And I don't use that term lightly, and not just for people who are more than unusual ignorant or undereducated.

Bill Rogers made a serious misrepresentation of something Ron had supposedly been *repeatedly* told,
and he used it to come down just as hard on Ron as you are doing now.

Unlike Bill, you do give documentation below, but you overplay your hand.

> But we have been over this before, less than two years ago. From his diaries and correspondence, we know that he started t think along these lines long before he lost his faith, and that far from motivating him, it was for him a serious problem that delayed the publication of his work.
>
> And you know all this, because we go over this pretty much every 2 years or so: yo post your provably false claims, they get refuted, you seem to accept this, just to post the very same falsehoods a few years later again - here an example form 2017
> https://groups.google.com/g/talk.origins/c/ZeYE62JZtGo/m/B-SOOtSQAwAJ

This is redundant evidence: you simply repeated here what you wrote there, without
any documentation of your claims.

By the way, I saw no sign that Ron was aware of this 2021 post of yours. You
really ought to date your references. The following was from 2018:

> And you even accepted that every single part of your speculation was made up shit.

Your talents as a pejorative-loving spin doctor are impressive. Only someone with
an agenda similar to that which Ron suspected Darwin of would behave like you do here.

And I quote you:


>
> "I can acknowledge that Darwin did not, at the beginning set out to
> undermine and discredit Paley's views. Since, this was _not_ his
> objective initially, then I was wrong regarding the "outside the
> scientific method" comment.
>
> https://groups.google.com/g/talk.origins/c/XU6CFmjsavg/m/FwKW-LxJBAAJ
>
> And yet, here we are again, you engaging in the same character assassination, even though you know that these claims are factually wqromg. Do you intend to male IDlers/creationists look bad? Because you do a sterling job of achieving just that

You lack a sense of proportion. I could document far worse behavior by Harshman
and jillery, but I suspect you would live up to a nickname that I gave Harshman about
a decade ago, one he lives up to all the time:

Don'tWanna HearAboutIt.


Peter Nyikos

PS you had nothing to say about what I kept in below, but I corrected
several parts of what Dean wrote there t without engaging in character assassination like you did above.

[Ron Dean]

Burkhard wrote:
> On Thursday, July 20, 2023 at 5:15:46 PM UTC+1, Ron Dean wrote:
> <snip>
>
> This is just incredible....
>>>
>> I had some thoughts of Darwin and the scientific method.
>> The science is suppose to be indifferent, impersonal
>> non-emotional and objective. The scientific method as I
>> understand is observation, hypothesism experimentation,
>> and finally a conclusion. If it's a failure, then a new
>> hypothesis etc.. if experiment successful a theory
>> explains it! And if it's a legitimate scientific hypothesis
>> it's falsifiable.
>>
>> Which brings me to Darwin and his motivation. In order to
>> graduate, Darwin had to read Wm. Paley's "Evidences.... "
>
> OK, first point: You frequently complain that people speculate about your motives rather than the objective evidence that you (think you) post. Yet it is consistently you and you alone who tries to undermine arguments and evidence by wild speculations about the motives of the people who make them. Here a case in point, impugning Darwin's professional character by wild speculations about his motives. So at the very least, you are a hypocrite.
>

I did _not_ intend this as impugning Darwin's character. However, if
his intent was to write
Paley's God out of the picture, then he succeeded. As a atheist, one
should appreciate Darwin
for this.

>
> But it does not stop there. Pretty every single point you make to support your speculation is provably wrong, as a matter of historical record. Here the first one.Darwin did not have to read Paley's Natural Theology or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity in order to graduate.


The Evidences had stopped being part of the mandatory curriculum in
Cambridge over a decade before Darwin studied there, Darwin had to read
Moral and Political Philosophy, and the Evidences of Christianity ,
neither of which was about biology.
>

This is what Darwin wrote in his autobiography (quote) "In order to pass
the B.A. examination, it was, also, necessary to get up Paley’s
‘Evidences of Christianity,’ and his ‘Moral Philosophy.’ ... The logic
of this book and as I may add of his ‘Natural Theology’ gave me as much
delight as did Euclid...."
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/23/science/a-creationists-influence-on-darwin.html

>
>> This work impressed him; he claimed, there were portions
>> he could recite from memory. It might be just
>> be wild speculation on my part, but I cannot refrain from
>> questioning Darwin, but how safe is this?
>

> Oh poor persecuted you., ... It is of course perfectly safe to question Darwin. What you risk of course if if you make up stuff and tell lies, people will call you out for them ...
>
I'm a big boy, I cannot be persecuted! I do not intentionally lie. When
I'm mistaken, I sincerely appreciate being _shown_ where I am.

>
> A Chinese scientist,
>> during a lecture in California was warned about the direction
>> he seemed to be going.
>> To which he remarked, "in China we can criticize Darwin, but
>> you better not criticize the government. But in the US you
>> can criticize the government, but you better not criticize Darwin".- Chen
>>
>> At the time, Paley attributed the scientific observations, he saw as
>> evidence of God.
>> I'm sorry, but I cannot help, but suspect that Paley's evidence
>> pointing to God inspired Darwin to address scientific observations, as
>> did Paley, but with the purpose of writing God out of the picture.
>> Darwin needed an instrument to accomplish his goal. He devised
>> a concept, where as nature, in the form random mutations and natural
>> selection became his God replacement.
>
> And here the lies start in earnest. And I don't use that term lightly, and not just for people who are more than unusual ignorant or undereducated. But we have been over this before, less than two years ago. From his diaries and correspondence, we know that he started t think along these lines long before he lost his faith, and that far from motivating him, it was for him a serious problem that delayed the publication of his work.
>
> And you know all this, because we go over this pretty much every 2 years or so: yo post your provably false claims, they get refuted, you seem to accept this, just to post the very same falsehoods a few years later again - here an example form 2017
> https://groups.google.com/g/talk.origins/c/ZeYE62JZtGo/m/B-SOOtSQAwAJ
>
> And you even accepted that every single part of your speculation was made up shit. And I quote you:
>
> "I can acknowledge that Darwin did not, at the beginning set out to
> undermine and discredit Paley's views. Since, this was _not_ his
> objective initially, then I was wrong regarding the "outside the
> scientific method" comment.
<

I read a lot more and I have changed my mind.
Natural Theology – Paley and Darwin
Posted on 04/01/2012 by Jon Garvey
(quote) "My main impression, though, is of the great similarity between
the book and Darwin’s Origin. I came away with the strong impression
that the later work was largely intended as a rebuttal of Paley’s book.
This close literary relationship would hardly be surprising, since
Darwin always acknowledged his early dependence on Natural Theology. "
https://potiphar.jongarvey.co.uk/2012/01/04/natural-theology-paley-and-darwin/
There is more than this, but it should suffice.

>
> https://groups.google.com/g/talk.origins/c/XU6CFmjsavg/m/FwKW-LxJBAAJ
>
> And yet, here we are again, you engaging in the same character assassination, even though you know that these claims are factually wqromg. Do you intend to male IDlers/creationists look bad? Because you do a sterling job of achieving just that
>

Science is supposed to be objective, independent, impersonal and
indifferent. Why are you emotional?
Fact of the matter, so far I've justified my argument!

[John Harshman]

I see how you turned that around. Clever. But you miss the argument. You
can see design in the undesigned if you're looking for it. And no,
atheism doesn't take precedence over evidence, etc. That's insulting.

Darwin explained why that sort of evidence should not be expected.
Eldredge and Gould had a similar explanation, though they didn't seem to
realize it. So this expectation is your strawman.

> Perhaps 500,000 or more, fully formed and developed species
> are found in the fossil record.  I think if evolution held any water,
> the intermediates would vastly outnumber the recognized fossil species.
> Why is this not the case? If hundreds of thousands of species are
> conserved in the strata, why are the much larger numbers of intermediates
> not conserved in the strata?

How do you distinguish a fully formed species from a partially formed
one? And you should remember that "hundreds of thousands" is a small
percentage of extant species and a microscopically small percentage of
all the species that have ever existed.

Further, the absent intermediates, as Gould points out, are between
closely similar species, not between higher taxa. Do you think that
speciation doesn't happen and that all species are separately created,
or arise by saltation, or what? Are your opinions consistent with the
fossil record? Have you ever though of that?

>  Even in punctuated equilibrium, punctuation must leave 10's of
> thousands of intermediates even in  these "isolates".

True, but how many of those would be preserved in the fossil record?
That's the point of peripheral isolates: they're less likely to be
preserved than are widespread species.

> I did not say Darwin was lying. I just think he was influenced  by
> Paley and was challenged to come up with a natural explanation.

It requires him to have a motive other than what he claimed, and a
reaction to Paley other than what he claimed. That's lying. Own your claims.

>>>> I honesty think, it's been the objective and the goal  of Darwin's
>>> followers,
>>> from the beginning, to  _find_ supporting evidence for Darwin's
>>> theory. Can this be objective?
>>> And I think finding evidence to support evolution has been their goal of
>>>   for the past 150 years. If so, where does this leave truth.
>>
>> Again, you assert more about the motivations of all sorts of people,
>> with zero evidence. Is this really a good thing to do?
>>
> The evidence is the fact that in order to receive his ab degree he had to
> read Paley.

Turns out not to be the case. And that has nothing to do with his
motives anyway.

>  I think evolutionist owe a debt of gratitude to Paley.
> I realize that Wallace was about to publish a comparable book, so,
> Darwin after
> setting on his work for a couple decades , he rushed to publish before
> Wallace.

No, Wallace was not about to publish a comparable book. He merely sent
Darwin a copy of his paper on natural selection, which encouraged Darwin
to abandon a long book ("Natural Selection") and write a shorter one
("Origin of Species"). Do you know much about the history of biology?

>>> If in searching for supporting evidence the searcher comes across
>>> evidence that does not align with their goal. It's seen as "no data"
>>> or explained away. (no data was from Gould)
>>> And where does this leave the search for truth?
>>>
>>>   This certainly can apply to the "flat earth" proponents. They start
>>> out with a
>>> goal or and objective. Then they set out  to prove their objective.
>>> And like evolutionist they start from the beginning with a goal in
>>> mind. Prove
>>> the earth is flat. IOW real science starts with observation, then
>>> ends with a conclusion.
>>> It does not start with a conclusion, then set out to find evidence to
>>> support the
>>> conclusion. I do not believe this is science.
>>
>> It certainly wouldn't be. But you present a caricature of evolutionary
>> biology, based on nothing whatsoever.
>>
> Maybe so, but it is the philosophical basis for real science methodology.
>  https://www.techtarget.com/whatis/definition/scientific-method
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method

You are confused. I was agreeing with "this is not science", and
disagreeing that you have correctly represented how evolutionary biology
works. There's no need to explain the scientific method (or methods) to me.

>> I ask you once again: if the history of life is not one of evoluton,
>> what is it? You won't say. If you're going to talk about evidence you
>> need two hypotheses to compare. You can't just compare X with "some
>> unstated thing that isn't X". This is not science.
> >
> There is not reason I cannot take issue with X and not offer an
> alternative X
> I can dispute and argue against  with alchemy and not offer an alternative
> explanation, as to how I would turn lead into gold.

That's not the data, since you can't turn lead into gold. You can argue
against alchemy by showing that it's incompatible with the data, but you
need to show what is compatible with the data for all but the very
simplest matters. So far we don't even know what you're arguing against.
Does speciation happen? Is there common descent at any level, and if so
what? Does natural selection even exist, and if so what do you think it
can and can't explain? If the fossil record is incompatible with
evolution, what is it compatible with?

I can see how you wouldn't want to expose your views, because that makes
them vulnerable to testing with data, and you wouldn't like the results.
But is that an honorable way to act?

[Athel Cornish-Bowden]

On 2023-07-21 01:14:36 +0000, Ron Dean said:

[ … ]

> I think evolutionist owe a debt of gratitude to Paley.
> I realize that Wallace was about to publish a comparable book, so, Darwin after
> setting on his work for a couple decades , he rushed to publish before Wallace.

Why don't you read what actually happened before rushing to accuse
Darwin? Why don't people who want to suggest that Darwin stole
Wallace's idea bother to find out what Wallace himself thought?


--
athel cb : Biochemical Evolution, Garland Science, 2016

[Martin Harran]

On Thu, 20 Jul 2023 12:12:54 -0400, Ron Dean
<rondean...@gmail.com> wrote:

[… snip for focus]

>At the time, Paley attributed the scientific observations, he saw as
>evidence of God.
>I'm sorry, but I cannot help, but suspect that Paley's evidence
>pointing to God inspired Darwin to address scientific observations, as
>did Paley, but with the purpose of writing God out of the picture.
>Darwin needed an instrument to accomplish his goal. He devised
>a concept, where as nature, in the form random mutations and natural
>selection became his God replacement.
>
>I honesty think, it's been the objective and the goal of Darwin's
>followers,
>from the beginning, to _find_ supporting evidence for Darwin's
>theory. Can this be objective?
>And I think finding evidence to support evolution has been their goal of
> for the past 150 years. If so, where does this leave truth.

I'm fairly sure I asked you this before but I don't think you
responded to it.

Ken Miller has arguably done more than anyone else to undermine
Intelligent Design. He is a seriously committed Catholic. How do you
see him wanting to write God out of the picture?

Francis Collins led the Human Genome Project and retired from science
to develop his evangelical beliefs. He returned to science at the
request of Bill Clinton to become director of the National Institutes
of Health but is still totally committed to his Christian beliefs. How
do you see him wanting to write God out of the picture?

I wouldn't attempt to place myself on the level of those two guys but
at least I'm a committed Christian who is here and available for
questioning. Do you think my acceptance of ToE somehow means I want to
write God out of the picture?

You say you have read and continue to read widely. Have you read
Miller's book or Collins's book? They are a bit dated now but I still
highly recommend them to get the perspective of biologists who fully
accept the ToE but are committed religious believers.

Ken Miller: Finding Darwin's God: A Scientist's Search for Common
Ground Between God and Evolution
https://www.amazon.com/Finding-Darwins-God-Scientists-Evolution/dp/0061233501

Francis Collins: The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence
for Belief
https://www.amazon.com/Language-God-Scientist-Presents-Evidence/dp/1416542744


[…]

[jillery]

On Thu, 20 Jul 2023 18:50:30 -0700 (PDT), "peter2...@gmail.com"
<peter2...@gmail.com> wrote:

>On Thursday, July 20, 2023 at 6:45:46?PM UTC-4, Burkhard wrote:

>> On Thursday, July 20, 2023 at 5:15:46?PM UTC+1, Ron Dean wrote:
>> <snip>
>>
>> This is just incredible....
>
>Yes, but also for reasons to which you are oblivious, Burkhard.
>
>> > >
>> > I had some thoughts of Darwin and the scientific method.
>> > The science is suppose to be indifferent, impersonal
>> > non-emotional and objective. The scientific method as I
>> > understand is observation, hypothesism experimentation,
>> > and finally a conclusion. If it's a failure, then a new
>> > hypothesis etc.. if experiment successful a theory
>> > explains it! And if it's a legitimate scientific hypothesis
>> > it's falsifiable.
>> >
>> > Which brings me to Darwin and his motivation. In order to
>> > graduate, Darwin had to read Wm. Paley's "Evidences.... "
>
>> OK, first point: You frequently complain that people speculate about your motives rather than the objective evidence that you (think you) post.
>
>I think John Harshman has him beat by a country mile in that regard.
>If you have doubts, I can give you at least three examples just from this thread.
>I alluded to one of them in the reply I did to him in my preceding post,
>about two hours ago:
>
>https://groups.google.com/g/talk.origins/c/0XgjzJpuiMA/m/xHlFy-ITBgAJ
>
> > Yet it is consistently you and you alone who tries to undermine arguments and evidence by wild speculations about the motives of the people who make them.
>
>Get real. What I said above about Harshman also applies to jillery; only the
>actual examples are different.

Your comments above are just your latest example of your compulsive
asinine allusions. You don't even try to back them up, and even if
true, they don't inform this topic or anything anybody said in it.

>And you did that to me recently. You confidently asserted that I reported
>a student for cheating because it was my duty to do so. Yet this was
>way back in the 1980's, before I even became aware of any such requirement.
>In fact, we faculty were given wide leeway in judging for ourselves how
>serious an infraction was, and to assign a penalty accordingly.
>The accused party had a right to appeal, but they almost never did out
>of fear that they might be jumping out of the frying pan into the fire.
>
>The truth is that I reported students for the reason I gave: they were giving
>themselves an unfair advantage over others -- an explanation that
>your bureaucratic mentality evidently made you disbelieve.
>
>
>> Here a case in point, impugning Darwin's professional character by wild speculations about his motives. So at the very least, you are a hypocrite.
>
>Where's your evidence that Darwin only came by his skepticism
>about God after he made his discoveries? In my own reply
>to Ron, I merely reminded him of the way Wallace was NOT
>swayed by his discoveries.

Where's your evidence that Darwin's skepticism about God informs
anything anybody said above?

>> But it does not stop there. Pretty every single point you make to support your speculation is provably wrong, as a matter of historical record. Here the first one.Darwin did not have to read Paley's Natural Theology or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity in order to graduate. The Evidences had stopped being part of the mandatory curriculum in Cambridge over a decade before Darwin studied there, Darwin had to read Moral and Political Philosophy, and the Evidences of Christianity , neither of which was about biology.
>
>Books are full of inaccurate information about famous people, and many people
>are unfortunate enough to have been taught out of them or come across them
>rather than across books with accurate information. There is a famous example about
>Hannibal supposedly being made by his father to swear to be an eternal enemy
>of Rome. That is because countless books rely on Livy's version, rather than
>the very different version given by Polybius, who was reporting a personal
>interview he had with Hannibal.
>
>Do Germans have a concept equivalent to giving the other guy the benefit of the doubt?
>You really make me wonder whether they do.
>
>
>> > This work impressed him; he claimed, there were portions
>> > he could recite from memory. It might be just
>> > be wild speculation on my part, but I cannot refrain from
>> > questioning Darwin, but how safe is this?
>
>> Oh poor persecuted you....
>
>Inappropriate preamble, akin to Harshman's perennial abuse of the meaning of the word "paranoid".
>
>> It is of course perfectly safe to question Darwin. What you risk of course if if you make up stuff and tell lies, people will call you out for them ...
>
>Your aggressive attacks belie both halves of this comment, the second being
>baseless innuendo at this point.

Baseless innuendos are your stock in trade, as your own words
demonstrate.

>> A Chinese scientist,
>> > during a lecture in California was warned about the direction
>> > he seemed to be going.
>> > To which he remarked, "in China we can criticize Darwin, but
>> > you better not criticize the government. But in the US you
>> > can criticize the government, but you better not criticize Darwin".- Chen
>> >
>> > At the time, Paley attributed the scientific observations, he saw as
>> > evidence of God.
>> > I'm sorry, but I cannot help, but suspect that Paley's evidence
>> > pointing to God inspired Darwin to address scientific observations, as
>> > did Paley, but with the purpose of writing God out of the picture.
>> > Darwin needed an instrument to accomplish his goal. He devised
>> > a concept, where as nature, in the form random mutations and natural
>> > selection became his God replacement
>
>> And here the lies start in earnest.
>
>I think you are not interpreting the context properly. Ron began with a
>suspicion, and his intended meaning was that IF his suspicion
>is correct, THEN Darwin needed an instrument...

R.Dean's suspicion IS incorrect. More to the point, he has raised
this suspicion many times before, and was provided documentation each
time that showed his suspicion incorrect. So he has no good reason to
raise this suspicion now as if he was never informed that his
suspicion is incorrect. You would know this if you had any idea what
you're talking about. But you don't and are proud of it.

Once again, you post more of your asinine allusions. You don't even
try to back them up, and even if true, they don't inform this topic or
anything anybody said in it.

<snip uncommented text>

--
You're entitled to your own opinions.

You're not entitled to your own facts.

[jillery]

On Thu, 20 Jul 2023 15:44:02 -0700 (PDT), Burkhard
<b.sc...@ed.ac.uk> wrote:

Thank you for posting your comments above. They needed to be said. If
you hadn't, I would have, and then other posters would exercise their
inner trolls and accuse me of being mean.

[broger...@gmail.com]

On Thursday, July 20, 2023 at 12:15:46 PM UTC-4, Ron Dean wrote:

<big snip to focus on one point>

> I honesty think, it's been the objective and the goal of Darwin's
> followers,
> from the beginning, to _find_ supporting evidence for Darwin's
> theory. Can this be objective?
> And I think finding evidence to support evolution has been their goal of
> for the past 150 years. If so, where does this leave truth.

Ron, have you ever met a biologist? I have worked with many, and I can assure you that no biologist these days is out there trying to find support for the theory of evolution. They may be working on questions concerning how some particular organism evolved, or how one group relates to another, or the relative importance of drift versus selection, but nobody in the field thinks that the broad outlines of the theory of evolution need bolstering with further evidence. In the same way that nobody is out there trying to prove that (in the right mass and velocity range) Newtonian physics is correct.

You are, I think, projecting, a lot. Whether or not evolution is correct is, for you, linked somehow to whether or not God exists. You don't really care about the details of how living things originated and developed - I say that, because if you did care, you'd have tried to come up with a model that integrated all the things you think the designer was required for and produce a hypothetical story of how life diversified over time, explaining when the designer acted and what he did, based on all the things you feel current science cannot account for. But you don't really care about that. Your main focus is on what you think the truth of evolution would mean for believing in God. And you project that focus onto others. I can assure you that biologists do not wake up in the morning thinking "Damn, if I can just crack abiogenesis, I can put this whole God business to rest." They (we) just don't.

There is nothing incompatible between belief in God and acceptance of evolution. The are people who believe in God who reject evolution. There are people who believe in God who accept evolution. There are people who don't believe in God who accept evolution. There may even be a few people who do not believe in God who reject evolution, although the primary reason people reject evolution is that it contradicts specific tenet's of their particular sect's faith.

For a long while I was a Christian; fellow Christians who had "accepted Jesus Christ as their personal Lord and Savior" never did so, in my experience, because they found scientific explanations of abiogenesis too incomplete; they did so for much more personal reasons having to do with their own life experience. Likewise, atheists that I know didn't become atheists because evolution provides a better explanation for nested hierarchies than creationism, they did so because of theodicy, or disillusionment with the behavior of religious people they know.

So, whether or not evolution is true may be a central issue for you, because of its relationship to your faith, but it's just not that way for biologists. For them (us) the broad outlines of evolution are settled, it's the details of particular cases that are interesting. And we definitely are not out there looking for evidence to support evolution so that we can discredit theism. Your focus is your own - but surely you can recognize that many people do not share it.
<snip>

[Martin Harran]

On Thu, 20 Jul 2023 18:50:30 -0700 (PDT), "peter2...@gmail.com"
<peter2...@gmail.com> wrote:

>On Thursday, July 20, 2023 at 6:45:46?PM UTC-4, Burkhard wrote:[...]

>
>Do Germans have a concept equivalent to giving the other guy the benefit of the doubt?
>You really make me wonder whether they do.

Yet again, you try to imply character deficiencies in Burkhard due to
his German ethnicity. Another reminder, as if one were needed, of just
how obnoxious a piece of shit you really are.

[...]