TOWARDS A SCIENTIFIC THEORY OF MACROEVOLUTION

[Peter Nyikos]

As it now stands, evolutionary theory is really microevolutionary theory.
This is exemplified by the popular definition of "evolution," enshrined in
the Talk.Origins Archive FAQ, of change in frequency of alleles in a population.

All too many anti-creationists think they have scored some victory over
a creationist when they have "pointed out" that the creationist him/herself
has acknowledged that evolution has taken place, according to this definition.


And so it will remain, I believe, as long as evolutionary theorists
are hamstrung by an unnatural definition of the words "natural selection",
which also has its meaning confined within mere individual populations.

Why would anyone think this could lead to understanding the vast panorama
of evolution that has taken place on earth? It's like expecting
to understand human physiology and medical treatment exclusively on the
basis of individual cell-to-cell signaling. Or perhaps just in terms
of the interactions of atoms and molecules.


And yet, it seems like it would be easy to break out of this "egg"
into the wide world of macroevolution. For instance: after the end
of the Jurassic, pterosaurs underwent a steady decline as birds
came to take over more and more ecological niches from them.
Bird diversity burgeoned while pterosaur diversity declined to where,
by the end of the Cretaceous, the *smallest* pterosaurs that were still
hanging on were at least as large as the largest birds.

That is an example of what *I* would *also* call "natural selection",
bursting free of the confines of selection between members of
the same population, and also of selection between different species
in the same family or order or even class.

Once examples like these start being analyzed by evolutionary theorists,
we may expect other macroevolutionary phenomena to be better understood,
such as coevolution and the aftermaths of the great extinctions.


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

[John Harshman]

On 3/27/19 11:37 AM, Peter Nyikos wrote:
> As it now stands, evolutionary theory is really microevolutionary theory.
> This is exemplified by the popular definition of "evolution," enshrined in
> the Talk.Origins Archive FAQ, of change in frequency of alleles in a population.
>
> All too many anti-creationists think they have scored some victory over
> a creationist when they have "pointed out" that the creationist him/herself
> has acknowledged that evolution has taken place, according to this definition.
>
>
> And so it will remain, I believe, as long as evolutionary theorists
> are hamstrung by an unnatural definition of the words "natural selection",
> which also has its meaning confined within mere individual populations.
>
> Why would anyone think this could lead to understanding the vast panorama
> of evolution that has taken place on earth? It's like expecting
> to understand human physiology and medical treatment exclusively on the
> basis of individual cell-to-cell signaling. Or perhaps just in terms
> of the interactions of atoms and molecules.
>
>
> And yet, it seems like it would be easy to break out of this "egg"
> into the wide world of macroevolution. For instance: after the end
> of the Jurassic, pterosaurs underwent a steady decline as birds
> came to take over more and more ecological niches from them.
> Bird diversity burgeoned while pterosaur diversity declined to where,
> by the end of the Cretaceous, the *smallest* pterosaurs that were still
> hanging on were at least as large as the largest birds.

I doubt you can back this up rigorously or, even if you can, confidently
make a causal connection.

> That is an example of what *I* would *also* call "natural selection",
> bursting free of the confines of selection between members of
> the same population, and also of selection between different species
> in the same family or order or even class.

This is what's usually called species selection. Do you think use of
that term has held evolutionary biology back?

> Once examples like these start being analyzed by evolutionary theorists,
> we may expect other macroevolutionary phenomena to be better understood,
> such as coevolution and the aftermaths of the great extinctions.

How would one go about analyzing that? It seems a very vague program.
Perhaps you could flesh it out. So far it seems like just-so stories
based on claimed patterns in the fossil record. That sort of thing was
popular years ago, before Gould and colleagues introduced a bit of
statistical rigor into the field, so this seems like another plea to go
back to the good old days rather than any attempt at advancing.

Now, what you're talking about is considering interspecies competition
as a factor in evolution, which seems reasonable. But why single that
out from all the other environmental pressures? We should of course
consider environmental effects, as well as exaptation, incumbency, and
available pathways in evolution. The problem is coming up with a general
theory and rules to cover all the vastly different individual
situations. We may have to be content with descriptive work on this for
quite some time.

[*Hemidactylus*]

Peter Nyikos <nyi...@bellsouth.net> wrote:
> As it now stands, evolutionary theory is really microevolutionary theory.
> This is exemplified by the popular definition of "evolution," enshrined in
> the Talk.Origins Archive FAQ, of change in frequency of alleles in a population.
>
> All too many anti-creationists think they have scored some victory over
> a creationist when they have "pointed out" that the creationist him/herself
> has acknowledged that evolution has taken place, according to this definition.
>

Yeah well you might wanna introduce speciation at some point in the
conversation, no?

>
> And so it will remain, I believe, as long as evolutionary theorists
> are hamstrung by an unnatural definition of the words "natural selection",
> which also has its meaning confined within mere individual populations.
>

Weren’t Gould and other workers already known for discussions of
hierarchical selection and critical of the genocentric selectionist view?
Even the extrapolationist Mayr, who invented PE, ridiculed so call beanbag
theories.

But then you can’t ignore the importance of genetic drift and founder group
isolation.

>
> Why would anyone think this could lead to understanding the vast panorama
> of evolution that has taken place on earth? It's like expecting
> to understand human physiology and medical treatment exclusively on the
> basis of individual cell-to-cell signaling. Or perhaps just in terms
> of the interactions of atoms and molecules.
>

Cell-cell interactions are important to development no? And development has
what to say about evolution (paging Garstang)?

>
> And yet, it seems like it would be easy to break out of this "egg"
> into the wide world of macroevolution. For instance: after the end
> of the Jurassic, pterosaurs underwent a steady decline as birds
> came to take over more and more ecological niches from them.
> Bird diversity burgeoned while pterosaur diversity declined to where,
> by the end of the Cretaceous, the *smallest* pterosaurs that were still
> hanging on were at least as large as the largest birds.
>
> That is an example of what *I* would *also* call "natural selection",
> bursting free of the confines of selection between members of
> the same population, and also of selection between different species
> in the same family or order or even class.
>

What about the lowly, obnoxious pocket gopher making a discrete leap in
morphology with external pouches. That seems tractable.

>
> Once examples like these start being analyzed by evolutionary theorists,
> we may expect other macroevolutionary phenomena to be better understood,
> such as coevolution and the aftermaths of the great extinctions.
>

What was it you were saying about creationists above and why?

[erik simpson]

A superficial scan of the Wikipedia entry on Pterosaurs reveals a number of
recent studies on pterosaur diversity (and size distribution) of Cretaceous
pterosaurs that suggest that any apparent declines are probably taxonomic
artifacts, and offer little to no support to the idea that avian competition
was a significant effect. Small pterosaurs were present during the
Maastrichtian.

[John Harshman]

Perhaps "taphonomic artifacts"?

[erik simpson]

Indeed.

[Peter Nyikos]

I am closely following above what Dr. Matthew Lamanna said in an in-depth
answer to my question, where I specifically asked about what I wrote
in the last two lines.

I was in Pittsburgh last weekend, and by sheer blind luck I encountered
a guided tour in the Carnegie Museum that was led by none other than
this world-famous dinosaur specialist. He gave an affirmative answer
to my question, and he gave the whole audience of about twenty people
a window into the world of pterosaurs.

He noted that they had their heyday in the Jurassic, when there were
pterosaurs small enough to comfortably "perch on my shoulder" but that
[motioning with his two hands] during the Cretaceous, they declined
while the birds replaced them. He was of the opinion that the birds
had, indeed, out-competed the smaller pterosaurs.

Lamanna also said something you and I have long known about: the birds
that survived the end-of-Cretaceous disaster were just a small minority
of all the birds that existed at that time. All the birds we see today
are descended from that small minority.

> > That is an example of what *I* would *also* call "natural selection",
> > bursting free of the confines of selection between members of
> > the same population, and also of selection between different species
> > in the same family or order or even class.
>
> This is what's usually called species selection.

Can you find me an article that backs you up on this? What I've read
about it suggests that it is also hamstrung by the legacy of Charles
Darwin It talks about "fitness of species" as to how many "offspring
species" they produce. This is a very naive idea, since "fitness" only
talks about number of immediate offspring that grow to reproductive age.
What I'm talking about is "fitness over eons of more and more
remote descendants."

> Do you think use of
> that term has held evolutionary biology back?

That's a rather peculiar question. Species selection isn't part of the "Modern
Synthesis," and even the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis (EES) seems ambivalent
about it.

Also, "evolutionary biology" encompasses a lot more than "evolutionary
THEORY." The latter doesn't talk about WHAT happened during evolution
so much as HOW and WHY evolution took the form it did.

>
> > Once examples like these start being analyzed by evolutionary theorists,
> > we may expect other macroevolutionary phenomena to be better understood,
> > such as coevolution and the aftermaths of the great extinctions.


> How would one go about analyzing that?

I cannot predict what kind of analysis will emerge once theorists
shed their inhibitions about talking on a scale that does justice
to the amazing diversity (in the natural layman's sense, not in the
hidebound sense of "number of species") of life on earth.


What you wrote below seems rather hidebound also, and I'd like to hear
from others before thinking more about it.

Peter Nyikos
Professor, Dept. of Mathematics -- standard disclaimer--
University of South Carolina

http://www.math.sc.edu/~nyikos/

[erik simpson]

On Wednesday, March 27, 2019 at 1:30:03 PM UTC-7, Peter Nyikos wrote:
> On Wednesday, March 27, 2019 at 3:10:03 PM UTC-4, John Harshman wrote:

> <....>

> > This is what's usually called species selection.
>
> Can you find me an article that backs you up on this? What I've read
> about it suggests that it is also hamstrung by the legacy of Charles
> Darwin It talks about "fitness of species" as to how many "offspring
> species" they produce. This is a very naive idea, since "fitness" only
> talks about number of immediate offspring that grow to reproductive age.
> What I'm talking about is "fitness over eons of more and more
> remote descendants."
>

Is this an actual request, or some kind of rhetorical device? Try Google (I
know, USC doesn't 'provide' Google) on "species selction"or "group selection".
David Jablonski has an excellent review with emphasis on paleontology.

[John Harshman]

Can't say I've ever heard of him. But what does it matter whether he's
world-famous or not?

> He gave an affirmative answer
> to my question, and he gave the whole audience of about twenty people
> a window into the world of pterosaurs.

What question was that, exactly? I see an assertion, but not a question.

> He noted that they had their heyday in the Jurassic, when there were
> pterosaurs small enough to comfortably "perch on my shoulder" but that
> [motioning with his two hands] during the Cretaceous, they declined
> while the birds replaced them. He was of the opinion that the birds
> had, indeed, out-competed the smaller pterosaurs.

Great, but can anyone actually back this up rigorously? I doubt it.

> Lamanna also said something you and I have long known about: the birds
> that survived the end-of-Cretaceous disaster were just a small minority
> of all the birds that existed at that time. All the birds we see today
> are descended from that small minority.

We don't actually know that. We don't really know how many bird species
survived, and we don't know how many species there were before the
extinction. What we know is that only species belonging to Aves (or
Neornithes) survived.

>>> That is an example of what *I* would *also* call "natural selection",
>>> bursting free of the confines of selection between members of
>>> the same population, and also of selection between different species
>>> in the same family or order or even class.
>>
>> This is what's usually called species selection.
>
> Can you find me an article that backs you up on this?

I suggest that you read the book Macroevolution, by Steven Stanley.

> What I've read
> about it suggests that it is also hamstrung by the legacy of Charles
> Darwin It talks about "fitness of species" as to how many "offspring
> species" they produce. This is a very naive idea, since "fitness" only
> talks about number of immediate offspring that grow to reproductive age.
> What I'm talking about is "fitness over eons of more and more
> remote descendants."

I don't know how to respond to this.

>> Do you think use of
>> that term has held evolutionary biology back?
>
> That's a rather peculiar question. Species selection isn't part of the "Modern
> Synthesis," and even the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis (EES) seems ambivalent
> about it.
>
> Also, "evolutionary biology" encompasses a lot more than "evolutionary
> THEORY." The latter doesn't talk about WHAT happened during evolution
> so much as HOW and WHY evolution took the form it did.

I mentioned this because you seemed fixated on the term "natural
selection", with its interpretation as being individual selection only
that was the problem.

>>> Once examples like these start being analyzed by evolutionary theorists,
>>> we may expect other macroevolutionary phenomena to be better understood,
>>> such as coevolution and the aftermaths of the great extinctions.
>
>> How would one go about analyzing that?
>
> I cannot predict what kind of analysis will emerge once theorists
> shed their inhibitions about talking on a scale that does justice
> to the amazing diversity (in the natural layman's sense, not in the
> hidebound sense of "number of species") of life on earth.

I don't see any such inhibitions. Perhaps you are not familiar with the
literature on this subject, much of which comes from paleontologists.

> What you wrote below seems rather hidebound also, and I'd like to hear
> from others before thinking more about it.

Sure, as long as you eventually manage to think.

[Peter Nyikos]

On Wednesday, March 27, 2019 at 3:20:02 PM UTC-4, *Hemidactylus* wrote:
> Peter Nyikos <nyi...@bellsouth.net> wrote:
> > As it now stands, evolutionary theory is really microevolutionary theory.
> > This is exemplified by the popular definition of "evolution," enshrined in
> > the Talk.Origins Archive FAQ, of change in frequency of alleles in a population.
> >
> > All too many anti-creationists think they have scored some victory over
> > a creationist when they have "pointed out" that the creationist him/herself
> > has acknowledged that evolution has taken place, according to this definition.
> >
> Yeah well you might wanna introduce speciation at some point in the
> conversation, no?

Yes, but the irony is, there need not be any speciation of birds
involved for quite some time in the example I give below. It
is enough to hypothesize that the pterosaur-stimulated discovery
of a new food source by the right kind of bird would lead to a
burgeoning of that particular bird population. And, of course,
many very different populations (and genera and families, for that
matter) can be involved in discrete burgeonings.

Bizarrely enough, Dr. Dr. Kleinman's amateurish talk about
"the mutation must amplify" is more relevant to this scenario
than anything you write below.

> > And so it will remain, I believe, as long as evolutionary theorists
> > are hamstrung by an unnatural definition of the words "natural selection",
> > which also has its meaning confined within mere individual populations.
> >
> Weren't Gould and other workers already known for discussions of
> hierarchical selection and critical of the genocentric selectionist view?

Don't ask me. Wikipedia isn't very helpful about putting meat
on the bare bones of hierarchical selection theory. Maybe Harshman
can be helpful, assuming he isn't as dismissive
of Gould's theory of hierarchical selection as he is about PE.

> Even the extrapolationist Mayr, who invented PE, ridiculed so call beanbag
> theories.

As usual, you are rambling about topics without getting specific
about what "beanbag theories" (and, for that matter, hierarchical selection)
are all about.

> But then you can't ignore the importance of genetic drift and founder group
> isolation.

I can't ignore a lot of things, but I might engage you in
discussion about them if you were to tell me their relevance
to macroevolution. AFAIK, these two things are firmly in the
realm of microevolution.

> >
> > Why would anyone think this could lead to understanding the vast panorama
> > of evolution that has taken place on earth? It's like expecting
> > to understand human physiology and medical treatment exclusively on the
> > basis of individual cell-to-cell signaling. Or perhaps just in terms
> > of the interactions of atoms and molecules.
> >
> Cell-cell interactions are important to development no? And development has
> what to say about evolution (paging Garstang)?

You can page anyone you want, but you are just on a reductionist
binge here, the exact opposite of what is called for in a theory
of macroevolution.

Or, for that matter, in a theory of macroeconomics. At least economists
have gotten halfway decent with their macro-theory. But then, as Behe
perceptively says in his latest book, evolutionary theory has a lot
tougher subject matter than economic theory.

> > And yet, it seems like it would be easy to break out of this "egg"
> > into the wide world of macroevolution. For instance: after the end
> > of the Jurassic, pterosaurs underwent a steady decline as birds
> > came to take over more and more ecological niches from them.
> > Bird diversity burgeoned while pterosaur diversity declined to where,
> > by the end of the Cretaceous, the *smallest* pterosaurs that were still
> > hanging on were at least as large as the largest birds.
> >
> > That is an example of what *I* would *also* call "natural selection",
> > bursting free of the confines of selection between members of
> > the same population, and also of selection between different species
> > in the same family or order or even class.
> >
> What about the lowly, obnoxious pocket gopher making a discrete leap in
> morphology with external pouches. That seems tractable.

But still hidebound. I am talking about one whole huge class of animals
supplanting another. Had birds not diversified as much as they did,
none of them might have made it past the K-Pg great extinction.

> >
> > Once examples like these start being analyzed by evolutionary theorists,
> > we may expect other macroevolutionary phenomena to be better understood,
> > such as coevolution and the aftermaths of the great extinctions.
> >
> What was it you were saying about creationists above and why?

A goad to make people here think about evolution on a grand scale.
Apparently you weren't sufficiently goaded.


Peter Nyikos
Professor, Department of Math. -- standard disclaimer --

[Alan Kleinman MD PhD]

On Wednesday, March 27, 2019 at 2:15:02 PM UTC-7, Peter Nyikos wrote:
> On Wednesday, March 27, 2019 at 3:20:02 PM UTC-4, *Hemidactylus* wrote:
> > Peter Nyikos <nyi...@bellsouth.net> wrote:
> > > As it now stands, evolutionary theory is really microevolutionary theory.
> > > This is exemplified by the popular definition of "evolution," enshrined in
> > > the Talk.Origins Archive FAQ, of change in frequency of alleles in a population.
> > >
> > > All too many anti-creationists think they have scored some victory over
> > > a creationist when they have "pointed out" that the creationist him/herself
> > > has acknowledged that evolution has taken place, according to this definition.
> > >
> > Yeah well you might wanna introduce speciation at some point in the
> > conversation, no?
>
> Yes, but the irony is, there need not be any speciation of birds
> involved for quite some time in the example I give below. It
> is enough to hypothesize that the pterosaur-stimulated discovery
> of a new food source by the right kind of bird would lead to a
> burgeoning of that particular bird population. And, of course,
> many very different populations (and genera and families, for that
> matter) can be involved in discrete burgeonings.
>
> Bizarrely enough, Dr. Dr. Kleinman's amateurish talk about
> "the mutation must amplify" is more relevant to this scenario
> than anything you write below.

Professor Nomathos can't explain microevolution but now he's going to come up with a theory of macroevolution. Here you go Professor Nomathos, a little help for your theory:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Mac

[Peter Nyikos]

There is no mention of scholarly studies about either topic, only
of some discoveries from which some conclusions are drawn by
the Wikipedia authors themselves.

The situation calls for much more than a superficial scan.
See example below in connection with "Maastrichtian."

> > of Cretaceous
> > pterosaurs that suggest that any apparent declines are probably taxonomic
> > artifacts, and offer little to no support to the idea that avian competition
> > was a significant effect.

What is anyone supposed to expect from an entry in Wikipedia?
The talk is loose and jumps to conclusions on the basis of a few
genera, most of which are not even identified:

This suggests that late Cretaceous pterosaur faunas were far
more diverse than previously thought, possibly not even
having declined significantly from the early Cretaceous.

> > Small pterosaurs were present during the
> > Maastrichtian.

I have not been able to confirm this based on what the Wikipedia
entry says at the point Erik is talking about.
Its only use of "Maastrichtian," which is what
I was EXPLICITLY confining myself to above, is in the ambiguous
"Campanian/Maastrichtian" and none of the genera specified at that point
are from the latter.

However, I did find one use of the word in the title of a paper [62] and
when I found "[62]" in the text, it referred to *Alcione*, a small
nyctosaurid not mentioned in the part Erik was referring to,
nor identified as "small" in the two places where it is talked about
in the article.

Another example of superficiality in Wikipedia.


> Perhaps "taphonomic artifacts"?

Yes, that's what Erik meant. The Wikipedia entry used the term "strong bias"
against fossils of small animals. One issue, though, is the extent to which
this bias is due to fossil collectors having a strong bias towards collecting
spectacular fossils, other things being equal. Also, to amateur fossil
hunters selling them to hobbyists rather than donating them to museums.
[Or, sometimes, unable to sufficiently interest the local museums in them.]

Peter Nyikos
Professor, Department of Math. -- standard disclaimer --

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

[*Hemidactylus*]

Peter Nyikos <nyi...@bellsouth.net> wrote:
> On Wednesday, March 27, 2019 at 3:20:02 PM UTC-4, *Hemidactylus* wrote:
>> Peter Nyikos <nyi...@bellsouth.net> wrote:
>>> As it now stands, evolutionary theory is really microevolutionary theory.
>>> This is exemplified by the popular definition of "evolution," enshrined in
>>> the Talk.Origins Archive FAQ, of change in frequency of alleles in a population.
>>>
>>> All too many anti-creationists think they have scored some victory over
>>> a creationist when they have "pointed out" that the creationist him/herself
>>> has acknowledged that evolution has taken place, according to this definition.
>>>
>> Yeah well you might wanna introduce speciation at some point in the
>> conversation, no?
>
> Yes, but the irony is, there need not be any speciation of birds
> involved for quite some time in the example I give below. It
> is enough to hypothesize that the pterosaur-stimulated discovery
> of a new food source by the right kind of bird would lead to a
> burgeoning of that particular bird population. And, of course,
> many very different populations (and genera and families, for that
> matter) can be involved in discrete burgeonings.
>

You’re focusing too big picture for me. I’m a mundane meat and potatoes
guy. I prefer my macro thought grounded in facilitating speciation events.

>
> Bizarrely enough, Dr. Dr. Kleinman's amateurish talk about
> "the mutation must amplify" is more relevant to this scenario
> than anything you write below.
>

How so?

>
>>> And so it will remain, I believe, as long as evolutionary theorists
>>> are hamstrung by an unnatural definition of the words "natural selection",
>>> which also has its meaning confined within mere individual populations.
>>>
>> Weren't Gould and other workers already known for discussions of
>> hierarchical selection and critical of the genocentric selectionist view?
>
> Don't ask me. Wikipedia isn't very helpful about putting meat
> on the bare bones of hierarchical selection theory. Maybe Harshman
> can be helpful, assuming he isn't as dismissive
> of Gould's theory of hierarchical selection as he is about PE.
>

Have you read Gould’s brick?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Evolutionary_Theory

You might find it useful.

>
>> Even the extrapolationist Mayr, who invented PE, ridiculed so call beanbag
>> theories.
>
> As usual, you are rambling about topics without getting specific
> about what "beanbag theories" (and, for that matter, hierarchical selection)
> are all about.
>

The joke is related to Mayr’s rendition of peripatric speciation which was
one of the influences on the formulation of PE. Tell you the truth, I am
not huge on PE or hierarchical selection. Peripatry I liked and the perhaps
long outdate notion put forward by Mayr of genetic revolutions (not to be
confused with systemic mutations). Beanbag genetics was a bugbear of
Mayr’s:

“Evolutionary change was essentially presented as an input or output of
genes, as in the adding of certain beans to a beanbag and the withdrawing
of others” Mayr
quoted here:
http://www.genetics.org/content/167/3/1041

>
>> But then you can't ignore the importance of genetic drift and founder group
>> isolation.
>
> I can't ignore a lot of things, but I might engage you in
> discussion about them if you were to tell me their relevance
> to macroevolution. AFAIK, these two things are firmly in the
> realm of microevolution.
>

Well a small removed population may by chance carry a biased sampling of
traits from the larger population, so it is already different. If isolated
(sans gene flow from parent population) it may be well on its way to
eventual speciation and selection will alter its traits over time relevant
to parochial ecology. This is the notion of incipience. Over time species
subset into subspecies that are noticeably different and common garden
experiments may rule out ecophenotypic variation.

>
>>>
>>> Why would anyone think this could lead to understanding the vast panorama
>>> of evolution that has taken place on earth? It's like expecting
>>> to understand human physiology and medical treatment exclusively on the
>>> basis of individual cell-to-cell signaling. Or perhaps just in terms
>>> of the interactions of atoms and molecules.
>>>
>> Cell-cell interactions are important to development no? And development has
>> what to say about evolution (paging Garstang)?
>
> You can page anyone you want, but you are just on a reductionist
> binge here, the exact opposite of what is called for in a theory
> of macroevolution.
>

Really? Garstang wrote poetry about evolution and did other stuff:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Garstang

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/21833594/

>
> Or, for that matter, in a theory of macroeconomics. At least economists
> have gotten halfway decent with their macro-theory. But then, as Behe
> perceptively says in his latest book, evolutionary theory has a lot
> tougher subject matter than economic theory.
>
>
>>> And yet, it seems like it would be easy to break out of this "egg"
>>> into the wide world of macroevolution. For instance: after the end
>>> of the Jurassic, pterosaurs underwent a steady decline as birds
>>> came to take over more and more ecological niches from them.
>>> Bird diversity burgeoned while pterosaur diversity declined to where,
>>> by the end of the Cretaceous, the *smallest* pterosaurs that were still
>>> hanging on were at least as large as the largest birds.
>>>
>>> That is an example of what *I* would *also* call "natural selection",
>>> bursting free of the confines of selection between members of
>>> the same population, and also of selection between different species
>>> in the same family or order or even class.
>>>
>> What about the lowly, obnoxious pocket gopher making a discrete leap in
>> morphology with external pouches. That seems tractable.
>
> But still hidebound. I am talking about one whole huge class of animals
> supplanting another. Had birds not diversified as much as they did,
> none of them might have made it past the K-Pg great extinction.
>

Pocket gopher morphology is more tunnel bound and interesting.

>
>>>
>>> Once examples like these start being analyzed by evolutionary theorists,
>>> we may expect other macroevolutionary phenomena to be better understood,
>>> such as coevolution and the aftermaths of the great extinctions.
>>>
>> What was it you were saying about creationists above and why?
>
> A goad to make people here think about evolution on a grand scale.
> Apparently you weren't sufficiently goaded.
>

Actually I applaud your goading. Good job.

[*Hemidactylus*]

I would much rather read a task oriented Peter’s views on macroevolution
than your tedious silly digressions. I hope he ignores you so yet another
thread doesn’t get hijacked and go off the tracks into oblivion. Go stick
to another topic you already polluted that I can ignore.

[Peter Nyikos]

On Wednesday, March 27, 2019 at 6:10:04 PM UTC-4, Alan Kleinman MD PhD wrote:
> On Wednesday, March 27, 2019 at 2:15:02 PM UTC-7, Peter Nyikos wrote:
> > On Wednesday, March 27, 2019 at 3:20:02 PM UTC-4, *Hemidactylus* wrote:
> > > Peter Nyikos <nyi...@bellsouth.net> wrote:
> > > > As it now stands, evolutionary theory is really microevolutionary theory.
> > > > This is exemplified by the popular definition of "evolution," enshrined in
> > > > the Talk.Origins Archive FAQ, of change in frequency of alleles in a population.
> > > >
> > > > All too many anti-creationists think they have scored some victory over
> > > > a creationist when they have "pointed out" that the creationist him/herself
> > > > has acknowledged that evolution has taken place, according to this definition.
> > > >
> > > Yeah well you might wanna introduce speciation at some point in the
> > > conversation, no?
> >
> > Yes, but the irony is, there need not be any speciation of birds
> > involved for quite some time in the example I give below. It
> > is enough to hypothesize that the pterosaur-stimulated discovery
> > of a new food source by the right kind of bird would lead to a
> > burgeoning of that particular bird population. And, of course,
> > many very different populations (and genera and families, for that
> > matter) can be involved in discrete burgeonings.
> >
> > Bizarrely enough, Dr. Dr. Kleinman's amateurish talk about
> > "the mutation must amplify" is more relevant to this scenario
> > than anything you write below.

Admittedly, that was a backhanded compliment, but still a lot
better than what most people here say about you, Kleinman.
You don't seem to appreciate that fact:

> Professor Nomathos can't explain microevolution

Translation: Professor Nyikos has caught onto a scam by Kleinman,
which consists of badgering others to make Kleinman's biggest dream a
reality. This dream consists of producing an analysis of the
Kishony and Lenski experiments that will be accepted by a respected
journal instead of the vanity press journal with which he has
published a tabloid-level introduction to the mathematics of
those experiments.

Kleinman, I have demolished your lie that your high school level math
proves that rmns could not account for feathers appearing in descendants
of reptiles. I even played in your ballpark of *targeted* mutations,
and *microevolution* at play in successive changes.

Your problem is that you are too mesmerized by the gargantuan numbers
in a single glorified petri dish of bacteria and cannot grasp the third grade
level idea of those "amplifications" encompassing a million generations
of a population averaging between 10,000 and 100,000.

You are afraid to think along those lines because you are afraid
to think about the age of the earth -- or, at least, you are afraid
to talk about it in talk.origins.

And that fear stems in turn from your unwillingness to let people
here know whether you are a creationist, or whether you were merely
calling yourself that years ago in a blog, so as to get people there
more responsive to your questions and speculations.

Your purpose, then as now, was to get others to do your math for you.

> but now he's going to come up with a theory of macroevolution.

Nah, just with some ideas for professional biologists to flesh
out. Microevolutionary theory has been about two centuries in
the making, and I don't expect macroevolutionary theory to
get past the "toddler" stage in my lifetime.

But that would be a big improvement over the embryonic stage where
it now stands, and I'd be very happy if I could contribute to it
in some modest measure.


<snip kindergarten level taunt by Dr. Dr. Snake Oil>

> > > > And so it will remain, I believe, as long as evolutionary theorists
> > > > are hamstrung by an unnatural definition of the words "natural selection",
> > > > which also has its meaning confined within mere individual populations.

I've snipped a lot here to get to something for you to think
about, since you seem to be a better Dr. Dr. than Dr. Dr. Howler Monkey [1].

> > > What was it you were saying about creationists above and why?
> >
> > A goad to make people here think about evolution on a grand scale.
> > Apparently you weren't sufficiently goaded.

You CERTAINLY wern't sufficiently goaded, but you ought to at least
try and come up with another on-topic taunt, now that your
"reptiles growing feathers" taunt has been dismantled.

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

[1] That's an example of damning with faint praise if there
ever was one. Too bad you weren't interested enough in the
following OP to realize that it IS praise, be it ever so faint:

https://groups.google.com/d/msg/talk.origins/0zFuROg-mzA/FpTBPw84BAAJ
Subject: OT: Another Dr. Dr. Joins Talk.origins (also sci.bio.paleontology)
Date: Wed, 20 Mar 2019 09:56:21 -0700 (PDT)
Message-ID: <8c92e806-f7c4-48ce...@googlegroups.com>

[jillery]

On Wed, 27 Mar 2019 11:37:52 -0700 (PDT), Peter Nyikos
<nyi...@bellsouth.net> wrote:

>As it now stands, evolutionary theory is really microevolutionary theory.
>This is exemplified by the popular definition of "evolution," enshrined in
>the Talk.Origins Archive FAQ, of change in frequency of alleles in a population.
>
>All too many anti-creationists think they have scored some victory over
>a creationist when they have "pointed out" that the creationist him/herself
>has acknowledged that evolution has taken place, according to this definition.
>
>And so it will remain, I believe, as long as evolutionary theorists
>are hamstrung by an unnatural definition of the words "natural selection",
>which also has its meaning confined within mere individual populations.

As long as Creationists think adaptation is different from evolution,
and micro-evolution and macro-evolution have different causes, and
rely on baramins and kinds, they will remain incapable of constructing
a coherent argument about the subject.

>Why would anyone think this could lead to understanding the vast panorama
>of evolution that has taken place on earth? It's like expecting
>to understand human physiology and medical treatment exclusively on the
>basis of individual cell-to-cell signaling. Or perhaps just in terms
>of the interactions of atoms and molecules.
>
>
>And yet, it seems like it would be easy to break out of this "egg"
>into the wide world of macroevolution. For instance: after the end
>of the Jurassic, pterosaurs underwent a steady decline as birds
>came to take over more and more ecological niches from them.
>Bird diversity burgeoned while pterosaur diversity declined to where,
>by the end of the Cretaceous, the *smallest* pterosaurs that were still
>hanging on were at least as large as the largest birds.
>
>That is an example of what *I* would *also* call "natural selection",
>bursting free of the confines of selection between members of
>the same population, and also of selection between different species
>in the same family or order or even class.
>
>Once examples like these start being analyzed by evolutionary theorists,
>we may expect other macroevolutionary phenomena to be better understood,
>such as coevolution and the aftermaths of the great extinctions.
>
>
>Peter Nyikos
>Professor, Dept. of Mathematics -- standard disclaimer--
>University of South Carolina
>http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos/

--
I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.

Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Attributed to Voltaire

[*Hemidactylus*]

Task focus not people. Level 4 grumpy cat out of 10.

[Alan Kleinman MD PhD]

Professor Nomathos, you still don't understand how microevolution works.

>
>
> > Professor Nomathos can't explain microevolution
>
> Translation: Professor Nyikos has caught onto a scam by Kleinman,
> which consists of badgering others to make Kleinman's biggest dream a
> reality. This dream consists of producing an analysis of the
> Kishony and Lenski experiments that will be accepted by a respected
> journal instead of the vanity press journal with which he has
> published a tabloid-level introduction to the mathematics of
> those experiments.

If you think you have a better understanding of the Lenski or Kishony experiment, present your math. But you won't because you are Professor Nomathos.

>
> Kleinman, I have demolished your lie that your high school level math
> proves that rmns could not account for feathers appearing in descendants
> of reptiles. I even played in your ballpark of *targeted* mutations,
> and *microevolution* at play in successive changes.

At least Burkhart has figured out that mutations are random events. Have you figured this out yet Professor Nomathos?

>
> Your problem is that you are too mesmerized by the gargantuan numbers
> in a single glorified petri dish of bacteria and cannot grasp the third grade
> level idea of those "amplifications" encompassing a million generations
> of a population averaging between 10,000 and 100,000.

I have no problem with the idea of a population of 10,000 or 100,000 replicating for a million generations. That gives you about 10 to 100 billion replications. Under the right circumstances, that give about 10 to a 100 beneficial mutations that can be accumulated if you are talking about only a single selection pressure environment. If you are talking about two selection pressures acting, that's not enough replications for a single evolutionary step. And if you want to talk about a population replicating for lots of generations, try to understand the Lenski experiment. His population grows from a million to 100 million daily (about 8 generations) and this been going on for 80,000 generations.

>
> You are afraid to think along those lines because you are afraid
> to think about the age of the earth -- or, at least, you are afraid
> to talk about it in talk.origins.

You are too stupid to understand what a sample space is. You must have flunked your course in introductory probability theory and it explains why you don't understand that mutations are random events. Do you even understand that the mutation rate is a probability? Have you been taking lessons in probability theory from SpongeRon OPants? Now, I have learned a word from Elmer Fudd, "logorrhea". And it is time to
<snip Professor Nomathos's logorrhea>

[*Hemidactylus*]

jillery <69jp...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, 27 Mar 2019 11:37:52 -0700 (PDT), Peter Nyikos
> <nyi...@bellsouth.net> wrote:
>
>> As it now stands, evolutionary theory is really microevolutionary theory.
>> This is exemplified by the popular definition of "evolution," enshrined in
>> the Talk.Origins Archive FAQ, of change in frequency of alleles in a population.
>>
>> All too many anti-creationists think they have scored some victory over
>> a creationist when they have "pointed out" that the creationist him/herself
>> has acknowledged that evolution has taken place, according to this definition.
>>
>> And so it will remain, I believe, as long as evolutionary theorists
>> are hamstrung by an unnatural definition of the words "natural selection",
>> which also has its meaning confined within mere individual populations.
>
>
> As long as Creationists think adaptation is different from evolution,
> and micro-evolution and macro-evolution have different causes, and
> rely on baramins and kinds, they will remain incapable of constructing
> a coherent argument about the subject.
>

I’m confused. I thought adaptation as a result of selection of beneficial
variation wasn’t a complete (or totalizing in pomo parlance) explanation of
evolution. Founders can present biased samples to impact future generations
and small populations are subject to sampling error. Neutral alleles can
fluctuate toward fixation or elimination sans selection.

I think once you get into the higher taxonomic echelons structure becomes a
predominate factor that strongly influences if not determines evolutionary
potential. This is where Goethe and Richard Owen take off their gloves and
brutalize hapless Rev Paley and his naive functionalism. If Peter focused
on these much deeper issues he would stand on firmer ground, but such
structural and modular thematics are important at the level of evolving
molecules too, not just morphology.

[John Harshman]

On 3/27/19 4:10 PM, Peter Nyikos wrote:

If you actively want this thread to be hijacked, continue responding to
Kleinman.

[John Harshman]

On 3/27/19 2:11 PM, Peter Nyikos wrote:

> pterosaur-stimulated discovery of a new food source

What does this mean?

> Don't ask me. Wikipedia isn't very helpful about putting meat
> on the bare bones of hierarchical selection theory.

I suggest going straight to the source: Gould's brick, The Structure of
Evolutionary Theory.

[Peter Nyikos]

A reminder: I am boycotting all posts by Erik Simpson for the rest of 2019,
for reasons explained here:

https://groups.google.com/d/msg/talk.origins/6NKAJVC9ibI/nO4Xri2UBgAJ
Subject: Boycott of Erik Simpson and `Oxyaena' ATTN: DIG
Date: Mon, 4 Mar 2019 09:03:14 -0800 (PST)
Message-ID: <eafd9791-05a9-4533...@googlegroups.com>

and here, on the same Subject: line, and on the same date:

https://groups.google.com/d/msg/talk.origins/6NKAJVC9ibI/GCuqml2fBgAJ
Message-ID: <d1820a6a-25a8-4859...@googlegroups.com>

Except for occasional reminders like this, done in direct follow-up
to the posts of Erik, this boycott works like a killfile.

In particular, it does not exclude replying to people who leave in
text from Erik, nor commenting on statements by Erik that were left
in by them. An excellent example was where I replied right on
this "MACROEVOLUTION" thread to a three word reply by Harshman
to Erik. I made a detailed critique of Erik's superficial comments
about an entry in Wikipedia that Harshman had left in but had nothing
to say about.


Peter Nyikos

[John Harshman]

The thing to do here would be to look up the actual references. Have you
tried that?

>>> Small pterosaurs were present during the
>>> Maastrichtian.
>
> I have not been able to confirm this based on what the Wikipedia
> entry says at the point Erik is talking about.
> Its only use of "Maastrichtian," which is what
> I was EXPLICITLY confining myself to above, is in the ambiguous
> "Campanian/Maastrichtian" and none of the genera specified at that point
> are from the latter.
>
> However, I did find one use of the word in the title of a paper [62] and
> when I found "[62]" in the text, it referred to *Alcione*, a small
> nyctosaurid not mentioned in the part Erik was referring to,
> nor identified as "small" in the two places where it is talked about
> in the article.
>
> Another example of superficiality in Wikipedia.
>
>
>> Perhaps "taphonomic artifacts"?
>
> Yes, that's what Erik meant. The Wikipedia entry used the term "strong bias"
> against fossils of small animals. One issue, though, is the extent to which
> this bias is due to fossil collectors having a strong bias towards collecting
> spectacular fossils, other things being equal. Also, to amateur fossil
> hunters selling them to hobbyists rather than donating them to museums.
> [Or, sometimes, unable to sufficiently interest the local museums in them.]

Please stop responding to posts at second hand. You could easily have
responded directly to Eric and made this whole thing just a bit more
readable. The source of the bias is not especially relevant. Whether it
exists is the question, and if so it calls your conclusions into question.

[John Harshman]

On 3/27/19 4:34 PM, jillery wrote:
> On Wed, 27 Mar 2019 11:37:52 -0700 (PDT), Peter Nyikos
> <nyi...@bellsouth.net> wrote:
>
>> As it now stands, evolutionary theory is really microevolutionary theory.
>> This is exemplified by the popular definition of "evolution," enshrined in
>> the Talk.Origins Archive FAQ, of change in frequency of alleles in a population.
>>
>> All too many anti-creationists think they have scored some victory over
>> a creationist when they have "pointed out" that the creationist him/herself
>> has acknowledged that evolution has taken place, according to this definition.
>>
>> And so it will remain, I believe, as long as evolutionary theorists
>> are hamstrung by an unnatural definition of the words "natural selection",
>> which also has its meaning confined within mere individual populations.
>
> As long as Creationists think adaptation is different from evolution,
> and micro-evolution and macro-evolution have different causes, and
> rely on baramins and kinds, they will remain incapable of constructing
> a coherent argument about the subject.

I certainly think both of those things. Adaptation is different from
evolution; that is, adaptive evolution is only a subset of evolution.
And I think there are distinct macroevolutionary causes, though much
macroevolution results from microevolutionary causes.

But those are the least of the reasons why creationists can't construct
a coherent argument. I'd put the 6000-year-old earth and global flood
way ahead.

[John Harshman]

That's a distinction without a difference, and just shows how absurd
your "boycott" is. Don't be such a douche.

[John Harshman]

On 3/27/19 11:37 AM, Peter Nyikos wrote:

Oh, you might like Darwinism: Refutation of a Myth by Soren Lovtrup.
(It's not creationist, oddly enough. Lovtrup was a real scientist.) He
was attempting to construct laws of macroevolution, though he wasted
much of the book just obsessing over what a twit Darwin was. I think he
was out to lunch, but you should see for yourself.

[Alan Kleinman MD PhD]

Why don't you teach Professor Nomathos how microevolution works before you develop your theory of Big MACroevolution? Whoops, I forgot, you don't have to understand how microevolution works to get a PhD in evolutionary biology. Don't let me interrupt your logorrhea carnival.

[jillery]

On Wed, 27 Mar 2019 18:54:45 -0500, *Hemidactylus*
<ecph...@allspamis.invalid> wrote:

>jillery <69jp...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Wed, 27 Mar 2019 11:37:52 -0700 (PDT), Peter Nyikos
>> <nyi...@bellsouth.net> wrote:
>>
>>> As it now stands, evolutionary theory is really microevolutionary theory.
>>> This is exemplified by the popular definition of "evolution," enshrined in
>>> the Talk.Origins Archive FAQ, of change in frequency of alleles in a population.
>>>
>>> All too many anti-creationists think they have scored some victory over
>>> a creationist when they have "pointed out" that the creationist him/herself
>>> has acknowledged that evolution has taken place, according to this definition.
>>>
>>> And so it will remain, I believe, as long as evolutionary theorists
>>> are hamstrung by an unnatural definition of the words "natural selection",
>>> which also has its meaning confined within mere individual populations.
>>
>>
>> As long as Creationists think adaptation is different from evolution,
>> and micro-evolution and macro-evolution have different causes, and
>> rely on baramins and kinds, they will remain incapable of constructing
>> a coherent argument about the subject.
>>
>I’m confused. I thought adaptation as a result of selection of beneficial
>variation wasn’t a complete (or totalizing in pomo parlance) explanation of
>evolution. Founders can present biased samples to impact future generations
>and small populations are subject to sampling error. Neutral alleles can
>fluctuate toward fixation or elimination sans selection.

You're not confused, I stated what I meant poorly. Of course,
adaptation and evolution are not the same. I should have written "as
long as Creationists think adaptation and evolution have different
causes..."

Many Creationists argue that micro-evolution is non-genetic
adaptation, as if the size and shape of finch beaks aren't controlled
by genes. What they don't understand is that individuals can adapt
non-genetically, but are stuck with the genes they are born with. Only
populations evolve.

Other Creationists recognize that micro-evolution is genetic, but
argue such minor genetic adaptations are limited to working within
predetermined kinds or baramin. To the best of my knowledge, they
never explain why those genetic changes they accept at the micro-
level, magically stop at the macro- level.

>I think once you get into the higher taxonomic echelons structure becomes a
>predominate factor that strongly influences if not determines evolutionary
>potential. This is where Goethe and Richard Owen take off their gloves and
>brutalize hapless Rev Paley and his naive functionalism. If Peter focused
>on these much deeper issues he would stand on firmer ground, but such
>structural and modular thematics are important at the level of evolving
>molecules too, not just morphology.

What you say above depends on his intentions. My impression is he
will turn this topic into an apologia for ID and/or Creationism. I
hope I'm wrong, but if that happens, these deeper issues will drown.

[jillery]

Based on Nyikos the peter's own posts, my impression is he will derail
his own topic, and sooner rather than later.

[Peter Nyikos]

Not only did you hear about him, we discussed one of the papers
of which he was the lead author in sci.bio.paleontology. Since it was
five years ago, I can't really fault you for not remembering. Here
is part of what we discussed about the paper; I'm quoting from
a reply by you to me below:

______________________________ excerpt_________________

On 3/24/14 6:43 PM, nyi...@bellsouth.net wrote:
> On Monday, March 24, 2014 6:57:58 PM UTC-4, John Harshman wrote:

>> On 3/24/14 2:52 PM, nyi...@bellsouth.net wrote:

>>> Lamanna MC, Sues H-D, Schachner ER, Lyson TR. A New Large-Bodied
>>> Oviraptorosaurian Theropod Dinosaur from the Latest Cretaceous of Western
>>> North America. PLoS ONE, 2014 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0092022
>
>>> http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0092022
>
>>> This article is very detailed as to anatomy, with comparisons to Avimimus,
>>> Caudipteryx, and many other genera. It puts *Anzu wyliei* into the family
>>> Caenagnathidae.
>
> <snip to get to quote from article>
>
>>> "Whereas nearly all recent analyses have interpreted oviraptorosaurs as
>>> non-avian maniraptorans, a few others have postulated these theropods as
>>> basal birds [27]-[29] or as the sister taxon of Scansoriopterygidae
>>> [30], [31], a clade of unusual Jurassic maniraptorans that are frequently
>>> placed as basal avians [32], [33]."

>>> Curiously enough, there is not a single reference to any of those
>>> "recent analyses". And their displayed trees tell a VERY different
>>> story from anything above.
>
>>> They put Avimimus as the sister taxon of Oviraptorosauroidea, then
>>> Caudipterygidae as the sister group of the resulting clade,
>>> and Archaeopteryx as sister taxon of THAT clade!
>
>>> In short, these critters aren't even basal avians -- they are highly
>>> derived avians. [With lots of primitive characters, to be sure:
>>> *Anzu wyliei* still retains the long tail and long three-digit
>>> manus of Archaeopteryx.]
>
>>> And here is frosting on the cake: one of Harshman's cladophile heroes
>>> long ago described Caenagnathids as birds!
>
>>> Cracraft, J. 1971. Caenagnathiformes: Cretaceous birds convergent in jaw
>>> mechanism to dicynodont reptiles. Journal of Paleontology 45:805-809.
>
> <snip for focus>
>
>>> In fairness, I should add that some of the popularizers might have feared
>>> that calling *Anzu wyliei* a bird could have resulted in a storm of
>>> protest by anti-Feduccia zealots. Perhaps that also is why the authors
>>> of the PLOS ONE article never even mentioned Archaeopteryx in the text
>>> of their article. But you can find "Archie" in all three displayed
>>> phylogenetic trees, exactly where I said you would find it.
>
>> This is so buried in weirdness that it's hard to figure out what your
>> message is,

======================= end of 1st excerpt=============================

As usual, you were searching for some overarching "message" instead
of responding directly to my easily understood points, one by one.

Unfortunately, I didn't save the archival data, and I'm too busy
with posts by Hemidactylus to do a search for the post itself tonight.

Anyway, I responded to that unjustified use of the word "weirdness,"
to which you retorted in your usual high-handed manner:

_______________________________2nd excerpt_________________________

> No more weirdness than that embodied in the eagerness with which you latch onto
> the following periphereal details:
>
>> except that you don't like "cladophiles" and "anti-Feduccia
>> zealots".
>
> A good while back, I took you to task for a torrent of off-topic
> anti-Feduccia zealotry in which various "camp followers" of yours
> enthusiastically joined.

I'm sure you did.

==================================== end of second excerpt====================

By the way, you love to falsely claim that "cladophile" is pejorative,
when the etymology is not pejorative at all [compare "bibliophile"].
More importantly, the definition is something of which you are PROUD: the refusal
to countenance phylogenetic taxa and the insistence that every single
fossil be put on the tips of phylogenetic trees, with no ancestor-descendant
relationship anywhere on the whole Tree of Life.


> But what does it matter whether [Lamanna's]
> world-famous or not?

What does it matter whether you still haven't found employment in what you
do best--constructing and analyzing the phylogenetic trees that I described
above?

<one pointless question deserves another>

> > He gave an affirmative answer
> > to my question, and he gave the whole audience of about twenty people
> > a window into the world of pterosaurs.
>
> What question was that, exactly? I see an assertion, but not a question.

Start contributing something really constructive to the idea of what a
scientific theory of macroevolution might include, and maybe I'll
find the motivation to answer this nitpicky question of yours.

Anyway, thanks only marginally to Erik Simpson, I found a counterexample
to Matthew Lamanna's reply to me, so I'll try to contact him about it. I also
have some questions about some other things in that Plosone article for him,
but that'll wait until (and if) he replies to my comment.


I'll respond to the rest of this post of yours tomorrow or Friday. Other posts,
including one or two by you, take priority.

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

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

[Peter Nyikos]

On Wednesday, March 27, 2019 at 9:40:02 PM UTC-4, jillery wrote:
> On Wed, 27 Mar 2019 18:54:45 -0500, *Hemidactylus*
> <ecph...@allspamis.invalid> wrote:
>
> >jillery <69jp...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >> On Wed, 27 Mar 2019 11:37:52 -0700 (PDT), Peter Nyikos
> >> <nyi...@bellsouth.net> wrote:
> >>
> >>> As it now stands, evolutionary theory is really microevolutionary theory.
> >>> This is exemplified by the popular definition of "evolution," enshrined in
> >>> the Talk.Origins Archive FAQ, of change in frequency of alleles in a population.
> >>>
> >>> All too many anti-creationists think they have scored some victory over
> >>> a creationist when they have "pointed out" that the creationist him/herself
> >>> has acknowledged that evolution has taken place, according to this definition.
> >>>
> >>> And so it will remain, I believe, as long as evolutionary theorists
> >>> are hamstrung by an unnatural definition of the words "natural selection",
> >>> which also has its meaning confined within mere individual populations.
> >>
> >>
> >> As long as Creationists think adaptation is different from evolution,
> >> and micro-evolution and macro-evolution have different causes, and
> >> rely on baramins and kinds, they will remain incapable of constructing
> >> a coherent argument about the subject.

These shortcomings of creationists are very widely known, if imperfectly
(see Hemi's next comment), but my point had to do with inept arguments against
them for which e.g. Laurence Moran's favorite definition of "evolution"
is largely to blame.

> >I’m confused. I thought adaptation as a result of selection of beneficial
> >variation wasn’t a complete (or totalizing in pomo parlance) explanation of
> >evolution. Founders can present biased samples to impact future generations
> >and small populations are subject to sampling error. Neutral alleles can
> >fluctuate toward fixation or elimination sans selection.
>
>
> You're not confused, I stated what I meant poorly. Of course,
> adaptation and evolution are not the same. I should have written "as
> long as Creationists think adaptation and evolution have different
> causes..."
>
> Many Creationists argue that micro-evolution is non-genetic
> adaptation,

Can you name anyone who argues like this besides the late (?) Ray Martinez?

> as if the size and shape of finch beaks aren't controlled
> by genes. What they don't understand is that individuals can adapt
> non-genetically, but are stuck with the genes they are born with. Only
> populations evolve.
>
> Other Creationists recognize that micro-evolution is genetic, but
> argue such minor genetic adaptations are limited to working within
> predetermined kinds or baramin.

One of the people creationists most respect, Henry M. Morris, wrote that
there is tremendous variation within *min* [he didn't use the neologism
"baramin"] and that the exact meaning of *min* is a matter for future
research. He further said that in some cases it might include whole
genera, and rarely, families.

Morris probably wouldn't have had any trouble accepting horses and donkeys
as part of the same *min*; Martinez, on the other hand, admitted
(though not in those words) that this issue was beyond his pay grade.

On the other hand, he would probably be chagrined at the overwhelming
evidence, just from fossils, that horses and tapirs and rhinos are
all part of the same *min*. I hope God, if there is a God, broke the
news to him very soon after he died in 2006.

> To the best of my knowledge, they
> never explain why those genetic changes they accept at the micro-
> level, magically stop at the macro- level.

That knife cuts both ways: Hemidactylus sees no reason to get
involved with the grand pageant of evolution since its humblest
prokaryotic beginnings. He's happy with modest little advances
like the cheeks of the pocket gopher.

And speaking of logorrhea: Hemi's opus on that level of macroevolution
was 331 lines long. No wonder his is the only post on the thread
he linked in reply to a post of mine on the "Siense lernin" [*sic*] thread.

>
> >I think once you get into the higher taxonomic echelons structure becomes a
> >predominate factor that strongly influences if not determines evolutionary
> >potential. This is where Goethe and Richard Owen take off their gloves and
> >brutalize hapless Rev Paley and his naive functionalism.

Dawkins saw Paley as anything but hapless in _The Blind Watchmaker_.
He said that Paley's arguments were never adequately dealt with until
Darwin's 1859 book finally answered them.

But then, perhaps Hemi sees Dawkins as a traitor to the cause of atheism
because he named a probability of the existence of a creator/designer
of the universe close to mine. :-)

[Seriously, Dawkins did give a figure in the same ballpark as my 10% -- 7%
or 9%, I forget which.]

> >If Peter focused
> >on these much deeper issues he would stand on firmer ground, but such
> >structural and modular thematics are important at the level of evolving
> >molecules too, not just morphology.
>
>
> What you say above depends on his intentions. My impression is he
> will turn this topic into an apologia for ID and/or Creationism.

Get real. You are as bad as Simpson and Hemidactylus and Harshman with their
paranoid suspicions about me being a closet creationist.

Harshman showed how much of a control freak he is less than a month
ago on this issue. When I asked him whether he still harbored such
suspicions, he said he wouldn't dignify my question with an answer.

> I hope I'm wrong, but if that happens, these deeper issues will drown.

Deeper issues which you haven't even tried to discuss
with me so far. Dare I hope that you will start some time?

Peter Nyikos
Professor, Dept. of Mathematics

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

[John Harshman]

Uh-oh. You've derailed your own thread already.

[Oxyaena]

On 3/27/2019 11:40 PM, Peter Nyikos wrote:

[snip irrelevant backbiting about Hemi]

>
> But then, perhaps Hemi sees Dawkins as a traitor to the cause of atheism
> because he named a probability of the existence of a creator/designer
> of the universe close to mine. :-)

"Atheist cause?" You've got to be *fucking* kidding me, there is no
atheist cause, that's like saying that non-stamp collectors have a
cause, not stamp collecting. An atheist is anyone who doesn't believe in
a god, nothing more. Grow up.

>
> [Seriously, Dawkins did give a figure in the same ballpark as my 10% -- 7%
> or 9%, I forget which.]

Cite, or it didn't happen.

>
>
>>> If Peter focused
>>> on these much deeper issues he would stand on firmer ground, but such
>>> structural and modular thematics are important at the level of evolving
>>> molecules too, not just morphology.
>>
>>
>> What you say above depends on his intentions. My impression is he
>> will turn this topic into an apologia for ID and/or Creationism.
>
> Get real. You are as bad as Simpson and Hemidactylus and Harshman with their
> paranoid suspicions about me being a closet creationist.

No one can out-match you for suspecting we're all in a grand conspiracy
out to get you.

[snip yet more irrelevant and snide insults about other people]


--
"Step back and smell the ashes." - Unknown

http://oxyaena.coffeecup.com/

[Oxyaena]

On 3/27/2019 7:37 PM, Alan Kleinman MD PhD wrote:
[snip Dr Dr's logorrhea]
>

On a long enough timescale *anything* can happen, and luckily population
sizes are sufficient for a long enough duration of time for such a thing
to happen. Face it, Kleinman, improbable things happen. Littlewood's
law comes to mind.

[Oxyaena]

Peter's utterly *incapable* of NOT being a douche. Asking him to not be
one will just make him even more of one.

[*Hemidactylus*]

Oxyaena <oxy...@baal.hammon> wrote:
> On 3/27/2019 11:40 PM, Peter Nyikos wrote:
>
> [snip irrelevant backbiting about Hemi]
>>
>> But then, perhaps Hemi sees Dawkins as a traitor to the cause of atheism
>> because he named a probability of the existence of a creator/designer
>> of the universe close to mine. :-)
>
> "Atheist cause?" You've got to be *fucking* kidding me, there is no
> atheist cause, that's like saying that non-stamp collectors have a
> cause, not stamp collecting. An atheist is anyone who doesn't believe in
> a god, nothing more. Grow up.
>

Did you miss the Four Horsemen and all the subsequent books and media
appearances?

>>
>> [Seriously, Dawkins did give a figure in the same ballpark as my 10% -- 7%
>> or 9%, I forget which.]
>
> Cite, or it didn't happen.
>

Dawkins has this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectrum_of_theistic_probability

He’s a 6 on scale of 7. Or a 6.9.

[Ernest Major]

On 27/03/2019 22:29, Peter Nyikos wrote:
> However, I did find one use of the word in the title of a paper [62] and

> when I found "[62]" in the text, it referred to*Alcione*, a small

> nyctosaurid not mentioned in the part Erik was referring to,
> nor identified as "small" in the two places where it is talked about
> in the article.

Also see figure 20 of that paper, which refers to a small pteranodontian
from the Maastrichian Hell Creek Formation.

--
alias Ernest Major

[Ernest Major]

On 27/03/2019 22:31, *Hemidactylus* wrote:
> The joke is related to Mayr’s rendition of peripatric speciation which was
> one of the influences on the formulation of PE. Tell you the truth, I am
> not huge on PE or hierarchical selection. Peripatry I liked and the perhaps
> long outdate notion put forward by Mayr of genetic revolutions (not to be
> confused with systemic mutations). Beanbag genetics was a bugbear of
> Mayr’s:

I liked Mayr's idea of genetic revolutions, but I understand that it has
not been borne out by subsequent research (except for the limited case
of genomic shock). Mayr's concept of the founder effect was not just
statistical sampling of the source population's gene pool in the
founding population, but also a change in selection pressures due to
genes interacting with a reduced number of allele variants at the same
and other loci.

--
alias Ernest Major

[Ernest Major]

On 27/03/2019 20:29, Peter Nyikos wrote:
> I cannot predict what kind of analysis will emerge once theorists
> shed their inhibitions about talking on a scale that does justice
> to the amazing diversity (in the natural layman's sense, not in the
> hidebound sense of "number of species") of life on earth.

Do you intend to refer here to disparity? (I find Gould's distinction
between disparity and diversity helpful.)

--
alias Ernest Major

[Bob Casanova]

On Wed, 27 Mar 2019 17:06:53 -0700 (PDT), the following
appeared in talk.origins, posted by Peter Nyikos
<nyi...@bellsouth.net>:

>A reminder: I am boycotting all posts by Erik Simpson for the rest of 2019

I'm sure he's devastated...
--

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

[erik simpson]

I am desolate. Actually, I think it's funny. Peters still "answers" me as
much as he ever did, but it's more difficult as he has to do it while pretending
to respond to someone else. That makes him even harder to understand and it
makes him look silly, but I doubt he's aware of that.

[jillery]

On Wed, 27 Mar 2019 20:40:12 -0700 (PDT), Peter Nyikos

Sure, Steady Eddie, Ken Ham and AIG. They claim that all the
information for a kind existed at the time of its creation, and
micro-evolution is merely a "reshuffling" without loss of existing
genetic information within individuals. Thus, living things are free
to adapt within a kind, but can never beget a completely different
kind, as that requires completely new information.

AFAICT they don't explain how such shuffling changes a phenotype, or
why such shuffling happens in just the right way at just the right
time to cause a beneficial change.

My understanding is that's an entirely different knife. Those modest
little advances necessarily add up over time into large macro changes.

>And speaking of logorrhea: Hemi's opus on that level of macroevolution
>was 331 lines long. No wonder his is the only post on the thread
>he linked in reply to a post of mine on the "Siense lernin" [*sic*] thread.
>
>>
>> >I think once you get into the higher taxonomic echelons structure becomes a
>> >predominate factor that strongly influences if not determines evolutionary
>> >potential. This is where Goethe and Richard Owen take off their gloves and
>> >brutalize hapless Rev Paley and his naive functionalism.
>
>Dawkins saw Paley as anything but hapless in _The Blind Watchmaker_.
>He said that Paley's arguments were never adequately dealt with until
>Darwin's 1859 book finally answered them.
>
>But then, perhaps Hemi sees Dawkins as a traitor to the cause of atheism
>because he named a probability of the existence of a creator/designer
>of the universe close to mine. :-)
>
>[Seriously, Dawkins did give a figure in the same ballpark as my 10% -- 7%
>or 9%, I forget which.]
>
>
>> >If Peter focused
>> >on these much deeper issues he would stand on firmer ground, but such
>> >structural and modular thematics are important at the level of evolving
>> >molecules too, not just morphology.
>>
>>
>> What you say above depends on his intentions. My impression is he
>> will turn this topic into an apologia for ID and/or Creationism.
>
>Get real. You are as bad as Simpson and Hemidactylus and Harshman with their
>paranoid suspicions about me being a closet creationist.

If you're a closet creationist, then learn to close the door when
you're cross-dressing.

>Harshman showed how much of a control freak he is less than a month
>ago on this issue. When I asked him whether he still harbored such
>suspicions, he said he wouldn't dignify my question with an answer.
>
>
>> I hope I'm wrong, but if that happens, these deeper issues will drown.
>
>Deeper issues which you haven't even tried to discuss
>with me so far. Dare I hope that you will start some time?

One more time, unlike other posters, I will not enable your use of
"deeper issues" as a vehicle to post your irrelevant spew. If you
really hope as you say, you will forego the latter. Not sure how even
you fail to understand this.

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

[Mark Isaak]

On 3/27/19 11:37 AM, Peter Nyikos wrote:
> As it now stands, evolutionary theory is really microevolutionary theory.
> This is exemplified by the popular definition of "evolution," enshrined in
> the Talk.Origins Archive FAQ, of change in frequency of alleles in a population.
>

> [snip something like species selection as macroevolution]

I'm starting to think of macroevolution as two different subjects. One
is patterns of evolution above the species level, such as Peter
described with pterosaurs. The second is mechanisms of isolating
populations into species.

And each of these different subjects can also be broken down into other
quite different subjects. Speciation, for example, surely includes
geographical isolation plus random-walk divergence. But another
mechanism is the adaptation of genetic isolating mechanisms to keep
separate populations of the (originally) same species which have become
optimally adapted to two slightly different conditions. Other
mechanisms for speciation also exist, which work in still different ways.

On the subject of patterns above species level, the one that intrigues
me is why the evolutionary tree is so bushy in some places and sparse in
others. Why does this order of insects have half a million species, and
that order have only three? Part of the answer seems to be that some
evolutionary innovations are more useful than others. Holometabolism,
for one, was a big deal, and helps to explain the speciosity of beetles,
leps, flies, and wasps (but again, why not of Mecoptera?). The flip
side of this pattern, though, is, I think, equally important: Why three
species of Mantophasmatodea, rather than zero? Why is Ginkgo biloba
doing fine, except in the sense of having close relatives?

Macroevolution, then, is not one thing, but several, and different and
disparate theories will be needed to encompass everything the word includes.

--
Mark Isaak eciton (at) curioustaxonomy (dot) net
"Omnia disce. Videbis postea nihil esse superfluum."
- Hugh of St. Victor

[Oxyaena]

On 3/28/2019 7:55 AM, *Hemidactylus* wrote:
> Oxyaena <oxy...@baal.hammon> wrote:
>> On 3/27/2019 11:40 PM, Peter Nyikos wrote:
>>
>> [snip irrelevant backbiting about Hemi]
>>>
>>> But then, perhaps Hemi sees Dawkins as a traitor to the cause of atheism
>>> because he named a probability of the existence of a creator/designer
>>> of the universe close to mine. :-)
>>
>> "Atheist cause?" You've got to be *fucking* kidding me, there is no
>> atheist cause, that's like saying that non-stamp collectors have a
>> cause, not stamp collecting. An atheist is anyone who doesn't believe in
>> a god, nothing more. Grow up.
>>
> Did you miss the Four Horsemen and all the subsequent books and media
> appearances?

Those are the "New Atheists," they don't speak for all atheists.

>>>
>>> [Seriously, Dawkins did give a figure in the same ballpark as my 10% -- 7%
>>> or 9%, I forget which.]
>>
>> Cite, or it didn't happen.
>>
> Dawkins has this:
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectrum_of_theistic_probability
>
> He’s a 6 on scale of 7. Or a 6.9.
>
>
>
>
>

[Alan Kleinman MD PhD]

On Thursday, March 28, 2019 at 4:45:02 AM UTC-7, Oxyaena wrote:
> On 3/27/2019 7:37 PM, Alan Kleinman MD PhD wrote:
> [snip Dr Dr's logorrhea]
> >
>
> On a long enough timescale *anything* can happen, and luckily population
> sizes are sufficient for a long enough duration of time for such a thing
> to happen. Face it, Kleinman, improbable things happen. Littlewood's
> law comes to mind.

How long will it take you to learn introductory probability theory?

[Peter Nyikos]

Probably without intending to, Ernest Major has advanced this thread
beyond the OP with his one post further than it had been advanced
before by all other posts by all other participants combined,
including myself.

Thank you very much for asking this question, Ernest. It made me
realize just how important the concept of disparity is to any
theory of macroevolution.

I did indeed intend disparity, but that word conveys a different
impression to the average person, generally a negative one.
"Biodiversity" is closer to Gould's sense of disparity and does
have positive connotations.

Disparity has to do with morphological and genetic "distance"
between taxa of organisms. Do you know of any attempts to
quantify:

(1) The disparity between two given species, or

(2) The disparity within a taxon?

Item (2) poses a great challenge. The maximum distance, in the sense of (1),
within the taxon is one measure, but a very crude one. Obviously
a phylum like Arthropoda has far more disparity in it than a phylum
with just a few species, of which one pair is as disparate as the
most disparate pair of species in Arthropoda. A multidimensional
plot of species wrt various characters seems to be called for,
but there would have to be hundreds of dimensions.

And that means abandoning all hope of having a single number to
measure total disparity.


Even biologists have trouble with the concept of disparity.
Donald Prothero, a paleontologist specializing in ungulates,
once tried to make light of the Cambrian Explosion (which was
in the Early Cambrian) by writing that there was more diversity
in a single order of trilobites of the later Cambrian, than
in all the animals of the Cambrian explosion.

This was highly misleading, of course, because "diversity," in
the biological sense, has only to do with sheer number of species.
There is more "diversity" in one family of beetles, *Staphylinidae,*
than in the whole class Mammalia; perhaps even than in the whole
phylum Chordata. But I don't think any biologist would seriously claim
that this family of beetles is more disparate than our whole phylum.

What makes the Cambrian explosion so unique is the tremendous disparity
between the animals of different phyla. And there were over 20 animal phyla
represented by the end of the Cambrian explosion, with more disparity in the
average phylum than in the whole class of trilobites.


If we could quantify the disparity of the kingdom Animalia at the
end of the Cambrian explosion, we would then be on our way to
solving other mysteries of macroevolution:

1. How to account for such a great explosion in disparity in
so short a time?

2. Were there any explosions of disparity even one-tenth as great
as the Cambrian explosion, in a similarly short time?
The great extinctions come to mind, especially the two that
are immortalized as inaugurating new eras: the Mesozoic,
inaugurated by the end-of-Permian extinction, and the Cenozoic,
inaugurated by the end-of-Cretaceous explosion.

However, the Cambrian explosion upstaged both of them in
that respect: it ushered in a whole eon, the Phanerozoic.
It was, to be sure, inaugurated by what passed for a great
extinction in those bygone days, an extinction of the distinctive
Ediacaran organisms. [I will NOT say "Ediacaran fauna" because there
is no agreement on any Ediacaran besides Kimberella as to them
being animals. There is a highly respected hypothesis that many
of them were giant protists.]


Peter Nyikos

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

PS Thanks again, Ernest. I was actually contemplating taking Friday
off in the hopes that some "new blood" would come to this thread
during my three days' absence. Now it might not be necessary.

[Peter Nyikos]

On Thursday, March 28, 2019 at 4:15:02 PM UTC-4, Alan Kleinman MD PhD wrote:
> On Thursday, March 28, 2019 at 4:45:02 AM UTC-7, Oxyaena wrote:
> > On 3/27/2019 7:37 PM, Alan Kleinman MD PhD wrote:

> > [snip Dr Dr's logorrhea]

> >
> > On a long enough timescale *anything* can happen, and luckily population
> > sizes are sufficient for a long enough duration of time for such a thing
> > to happen. Face it, Kleinman, improbable things happen. Littlewood's
> > law comes to mind.

> How long will it take you to learn introductory probability theory?

I'll let Oxyaena answer that. What's amusing about her post is that
she did not quantify "long enough," probably because that would have revealed
that she is not just an atheist in her self-serving and atheism-serving
sense of the word, but in the usual everyday sense of someone who
decidedly believes that there is no God or god.

The point is, no one has ever tried to figure out just how much time
was really needed for the Cambrian explosion on the basis of rmns.
Readers besides you are invited to read my reply to Ernest Major
for some clue as to what this might entail. I know you aren't interested.

There are more scientists who believe in common descent guided
in strategic places by intelligent supernatural entities (God, angels, etc.)
than there are scientists who believe in creation ex nihilo of
millions of species. For them, as for the bona fide creationists,
the time required for the Cambrian explosion is not a problem at all.

What's funny is that the atheists here are so much in love with
the myth that microevolution is all we need know,
that they aren't even interested in how the
Cambrian explosion can be accounted for by rmns alone in the time it took.

If you are an atheist, more in tune with the atheist Fred Hoyle
than with the idea of supernatural beings, then you fall into
this category, but for an entirely different reason. I've mentioned
that reason often enough for me not to have to repeat it here.


Peter Nyikos
Professor, Department of Math. -- standard disclaimer --
Univ. of South Carolina at Columbia
http://www.math.sc.edu/~nyikos/

[Oxyaena]

On 3/28/2019 4:14 PM, Alan Kleinman MD PhD wrote:
> On Thursday, March 28, 2019 at 4:45:02 AM UTC-7, Oxyaena wrote:
>> On 3/27/2019 7:37 PM, Alan Kleinman MD PhD wrote:
>> [snip Dr Dr's logorrhea]
>>>
>>
>> On a long enough timescale *anything* can happen, and luckily population
>> sizes are sufficient for a long enough duration of time for such a thing
>> to happen. Face it, Kleinman, improbable things happen. Littlewood's
>> law comes to mind.
> How long will it take you to learn introductory probability theory?

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Littlewood's_law

[Oxyaena]

On 3/28/2019 5:28 PM, Peter Nyikos wrote:
> On Thursday, March 28, 2019 at 4:15:02 PM UTC-4, Alan Kleinman MD PhD wrote:
>> On Thursday, March 28, 2019 at 4:45:02 AM UTC-7, Oxyaena wrote:
>>> On 3/27/2019 7:37 PM, Alan Kleinman MD PhD wrote:
>
>>> [snip Dr Dr's logorrhea]
>
>>>
>>> On a long enough timescale *anything* can happen, and luckily population
>>> sizes are sufficient for a long enough duration of time for such a thing
>>> to happen. Face it, Kleinman, improbable things happen. Littlewood's
>>> law comes to mind.
>
>> How long will it take you to learn introductory probability theory?
>
> I'll let Oxyaena answer that. What's amusing about her post is that
> she did not quantify "long enough," probably because that would have revealed

Don't quit your day job, buddy, you're so far off the mark that the mark
may as well not even exist, as usual. We are talking in the abstract,
why would I have to specify any particular length of time?

> that she is not just an atheist in her self-serving and atheism-serving
> sense of the word, but in the usual everyday sense of someone who
> decidedly believes that there is no God or god.

You'd be better off *not* harping on things you have *zero* clue about,
asshole. I see no reason to believe *in* a god, and there's nothing
inherently wrong with believing there is no god either, either way when
one prays all we get is a startling silence, and we have perfectly
natural reasons to explain existence without resorting to a divinity.
The God of the Gaps is a fallacy, Peter, even *you* should know that.

>
> The point is, no one has ever tried to figure out just how much time
> was really needed for the Cambrian explosion on the basis of rmns.
> Readers besides you are invited to read my reply to Ernest Major
> for some clue as to what this might entail. I know you aren't interested.

Bullshit, you *don't* know that. You can't read minds, dipshit, stop
pretending that you do. And you wonder why you piss so many people off.

>
> There are more scientists who believe in common descent guided
> in strategic places by intelligent supernatural entities (God, angels, etc.)
> than there are scientists who believe in creation ex nihilo of
> millions of species. For them, as for the bona fide creationists,
> the time required for the Cambrian explosion is not a problem at all.
>
> What's funny is that the atheists here are so much in love with
> the myth that microevolution is all we need know,
> that they aren't even interested in how the
> Cambrian explosion can be accounted for by rmns alone in the time it took.

Again, you *don't* know that. You really have no idea how deep the hole
your digging right now is, do you?

>
> If you are an atheist, more in tune with the atheist Fred Hoyle
> than with the idea of supernatural beings, then you fall into
> this category, but for an entirely different reason. I've mentioned
> that reason often enough for me not to have to repeat it here.

Yet Fred Hoyle believed in intelligent design, I doubt he would've been
comfortable being called an "atheist."

>
>
> Peter Nyikos
> Professor, Department of Math. -- standard disclaimer --
> Univ. of South Carolina at Columbia
> http://www.math.sc.edu/~nyikos/
>

[John Harshman]

On 3/28/19 1:27 PM, Peter Nyikos wrote:

You should check out Mike Foote's work.

Here's a start: https://geosci.uchicago.edu/people/michael-foote/

> Item (2) poses a great challenge. The maximum distance, in the sense of (1),
> within the taxon is one measure, but a very crude one. Obviously
> a phylum like Arthropoda has far more disparity in it than a phylum
> with just a few species, of which one pair is as disparate as the
> most disparate pair of species in Arthropoda. A multidimensional
> plot of species wrt various characters seems to be called for,
> but there would have to be hundreds of dimensions.
>
> And that means abandoning all hope of having a single number to
> measure total disparity.

How about the volume of a multidimensional solid? How about some kind of
average or median distance from the taxon centroid? Just spitballing here.

> Even biologists have trouble with the concept of disparity.
> Donald Prothero, a paleontologist specializing in ungulates,
> once tried to make light of the Cambrian Explosion (which was
> in the Early Cambrian) by writing that there was more diversity
> in a single order of trilobites of the later Cambrian, than
> in all the animals of the Cambrian explosion.
>
> This was highly misleading, of course, because "diversity," in
> the biological sense, has only to do with sheer number of species.
> There is more "diversity" in one family of beetles, *Staphylinidae,*
> than in the whole class Mammalia; perhaps even than in the whole
> phylum Chordata. But I don't think any biologist would seriously claim
> that this family of beetles is more disparate than our whole phylum.
>
> What makes the Cambrian explosion so unique is the tremendous disparity
> between the animals of different phyla. And there were over 20 animal phyla
> represented by the end of the Cambrian explosion, with more disparity in the
> average phylum than in the whole class of trilobites.
>
>
> If we could quantify the disparity of the kingdom Animalia at the
> end of the Cambrian explosion, we would then be on our way to
> solving other mysteries of macroevolution:
>
> 1. How to account for such a great explosion in disparity in
> so short a time?

How short a time? When do you propose to begin the explosion, and when
do you propose to end it?

> 2. Were there any explosions of disparity even one-tenth as great
> as the Cambrian explosion, in a similarly short time?
> The great extinctions come to mind, especially the two that
> are immortalized as inaugurating new eras: the Mesozoic,
> inaugurated by the end-of-Permian extinction, and the Cenozoic,
> inaugurated by the end-of-Cretaceous explosion.

> However, the Cambrian explosion upstaged both of them in
> that respect: it ushered in a whole eon, the Phanerozoic.
> It was, to be sure, inaugurated by what passed for a great
> extinction in those bygone days, an extinction of the distinctive
> Ediacaran organisms. [I will NOT say "Ediacaran fauna" because there
> is no agreement on any Ediacaran besides Kimberella as to them
> being animals. There is a highly respected hypothesis that many
> of them were giant protists.]

Actually, many Ediacaran taxa are also known from the Cambrian. You may
remember Ben Waggoner, who found some of them. Now, are arbitrary
divisions of time anything to count magnitude of events by?

[John Harshman]

So the question is what innovations result in adaptive radiations.

[Peter Nyikos]

On Thursday, March 28, 2019 at 9:25:02 AM UTC-4, Ernest Major wrote:
> On 27/03/2019 22:29, Peter Nyikos wrote:

> > However, I did find one use of the word in the title of a paper [62] and

> > when I found "[62]" in the text, it referred to *Alcione*, a small

> > nyctosaurid not mentioned in the part Erik was referring to,
> > nor identified as "small" in the two places where it is talked about
> > in the article.
>
> Also see figure 20 of that paper, which refers to a small pteranodontian
> from the Maastrichian Hell Creek Formation.

Again a two-liner from you set me looking deeper, Ernest, and this time I hit
pay dirt, where before, I just got going on a spate of ideas of my own.
Your small pteranodontian [no name given in Fig. 20, but a closer study
of the article might enlighten us] is actually the only exception in
that picture of Late Maastrichtian birds and pterosaurs to the following
general summary:

Birds did not drive pterosaurs extinct directly. Rather than competing,
pterosaurs and birds appear to engage in size-based niche partitioning,
avoiding competition. No known Late Cretaceous birds exceeded 2 m in
wingspan or a few kg in mass [18,91]. Meanwhile, Late Cretaceous pterosaurs
were mostly large bodied, ranging from 2 to over 10 m in wingspan [18],
with the possible exception of Piksi.
https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.2001663

"possible" here refers to the lack of consensus as to whether Piksi was
a pterosaur at all. Note the lack of overlap in wingspan. This is borne out
with fig. 20: all pterosaurs are larger than all the birds, except for that
one "Hell Creek pteranodontian". Even *Alcione* had a wingspan a wee bit larger
than the largest bird wingspan shown -- yet another case of "small" not providing
much insight into actual size.


Some more details follow immediately after the above quote.

This pattern holds in marine ecosystems, where small Ichthyornithes
coexisted with large pteranodontids and nyctosaurids, and terrestrial
habitats, where small birds [18,91] lived alongside large and giant
azhdarchids (Fig 20). Birds apparently outcompeted pterosaurs at small sizes,
but the absence of large (>5 kg) birds suggests that the birds could not
compete with pterosaurs at large size; here, pterosaurs dominated.
This is not to say that no large birds or small pterosaurs existed,
but they must have been rare to escape discovery.

I'll take this March 2018 account over the sloppily written Wikipedia entry any day.
Professional paleontologist Matt Lamanna is essentially vindicated.

> --
> alias Ernest Major

Just curious, Ernest: is your alias inspired by the name Ernst Mayr?

Peter Nyikos
Professor, Dept. of Mathematics

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

[Peter Nyikos]

Before Ernst Mayr showed up, the pickings on this thread had gotten pretty
slim, and I was contemplating quitting this thread a day before my usual
weekend break, right after answering this post of yours, Hemi. It was the
best of a mediocre-to-bad bunch.

On Wednesday, March 27, 2019 at 6:35:02 PM UTC-4, *Hemidactylus* wrote:
> Peter Nyikos <nyi...@bellsouth.net> wrote:

> > On Wednesday, March 27, 2019 at 3:20:02 PM UTC-4, *Hemidactylus* wrote:

> >> Peter Nyikos <nyi...@bellsouth.net> wrote:
> >>> As it now stands, evolutionary theory is really microevolutionary theory.
> >>> This is exemplified by the popular definition of "evolution," enshrined in
> >>> the Talk.Origins Archive FAQ, of change in frequency of alleles in a population.
> >>>

> >>> All too many anti-creationists think they have scored some victory over
> >>> a creationist when they have "pointed out" that the creationist him/herself
> >>> has acknowledged that evolution has taken place, according to this definition.
> >>>

> >> Yeah well you might wanna introduce speciation at some point in the
> >> conversation, no?
> >
> > Yes, but the irony is, there need not be any speciation of birds
> > involved for quite some time in the example I give below. It
> > is enough to hypothesize that the pterosaur-stimulated discovery
> > of a new food source by the right kind of bird would lead to a
> > burgeoning of that particular bird population. And, of course,
> > many very different populations (and genera and families, for that
> > matter) can be involved in discrete burgeonings.

> You’re focusing too big picture for me. I’m a mundane meat and potatoes
> guy. I prefer my macro thought grounded in facilitating speciation events.

> > Bizarrely enough, Dr. Dr. Kleinman's amateurish talk about
> > "the mutation must amplify" is more relevant to this scenario
> > than anything you write below.
> >
> How so?

Very simple. Watching pterosaurs catch and/or eat something naturally
suggests to a species with half a brain that it would make good food
for them too. Once it sinks in that a good source is there for the
asking, either by direct hunting/gathering or by stealing, the population
can be expected to grow many-fold. This is what Kleinman stubbornly refers
to a particular strain "amplifying." He is inordinately proud of the fact
that, all by himself, he thought of the following idea, on the level
of an average middle school child (or bright 7-year-old) who has ever gambled.

Like any middle school kid noticing that the probability of a pair in
poker goes up when playing seven-card stud instead of five-card stud,
Kleinman noticed that as the population goes up, the probability
of any given mutation goes up with it. Having brilliantly thought up
the word "amplification" for increase in population, Kleinman naturally
is beside himself with self-admiration.


But here is something *you* need to take to heart: there need not
be any "natural selection" for there to be a big "class level selection"
favoring birds over pterosaurs. All it might take is a "behavioral
evolution" by all the birds in a population, in some form of competition
with the pterosaurs of roughly the same size and habits, where they come out ahead.

"A rising tide lifts all boats," as they say. As to why they
come out ahead, I'd say the bipedal birds have a distinct advantage
on the ground over the rather badly splayed quadrupeds that the
pterosaurs were.

> >>> And so it will remain, I believe, as long as evolutionary theorists
> >>> are hamstrung by an unnatural definition of the words "natural selection",
> >>> which also has its meaning confined within mere individual populations.
> >>>

> >> Weren't Gould and other workers already known for discussions of
> >> hierarchical selection and critical of the genocentric selectionist view?
> >
> > Don't ask me. Wikipedia isn't very helpful about putting meat
> > on the bare bones of hierarchical selection theory. Maybe Harshman
> > can be helpful, assuming he isn't as dismissive
> > of Gould's theory of hierarchical selection as he is about PE.
> >
> Have you read Gould’s brick?
>
> https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Evolutionary_Theory
>
> You might find it useful.

Only in the sense that the webpage supports my suspicion that hierarchical
selection, like species selection, is just a mimic of natural selection that
substitutes species for individuals, and never contemplates higher groups.
Linking on "hierarchical selection" in the page you linked above took me to:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_of_selection

Here we find the following:

As a theoretical introduction to what is at stake vis-a-vis
units of selection, Lewontin writes:

The generality of the principles of natural selection means that
any entities in nature that have variation, reproduction, and heritability
may evolve. ...the principles can be applied equally to genes, organisms,
populations, species, and at opposite ends of the scale, prebiotic molecules
and ecosystems." (1970, pp. 1-2)

Note how Lewontin seems to say species are supposed to be one end of the scale;
genera presumably are already off the scale.


<snip talk mostly about PE>

> >>> Why would anyone think this could lead to understanding the vast panorama
> >>> of evolution that has taken place on earth? It's like expecting
> >>> to understand human physiology and medical treatment exclusively on the
> >>> basis of individual cell-to-cell signaling. Or perhaps just in terms
> >>> of the interactions of atoms and molecules.
> >>>

> >> Cell-cell interactions are important to development no? And development has
> >> what to say about evolution (paging Garstang)?
> >
> > You can page anyone you want, but you are just on a reductionist
> > binge here, the exact opposite of what is called for in a theory
> > of macroevolution.
> >
> Really? Garstang wrote poetry about evolution

So does Jonathan, but he doesn't get any respect for it.


> and did other stuff:
>
> https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Garstang
>
> https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/21833594/

Sorry, you won't get me to click on a link unless you give some clue
as to its contents.


> > Or, for that matter, in a theory of macroeconomics. At least economists
> > have gotten halfway decent with their macro-theory. But then, as Behe
> > perceptively says in his latest book, evolutionary theory has a lot
> > tougher subject matter than economic theory.

> >
> >
> >>> And yet, it seems like it would be easy to break out of this "egg"
> >>> into the wide world of macroevolution. For instance: after the end
> >>> of the Jurassic, pterosaurs underwent a steady decline as birds
> >>> came to take over more and more ecological niches from them.
> >>> Bird diversity burgeoned while pterosaur diversity declined to where,
> >>> by the end of the Cretaceous, the *smallest* pterosaurs that were still
> >>> hanging on were at least as large as the largest birds.

With only one generally acknowledged exception, see my reply to
Ernest Major.


Pursuant to what I wrote at the beginning: on the "Siense lernin" thread,
I invited Burkhard over to this thread, but you ran interference for
him by beating him to a reply, and I haven't seen any replies from him
to me since. So I guess you killed any idea of him coming over here
and discussing something as irrelevant to "Burk belongs here"
as evolutionary theory.


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

> >>> That is an example of what *I* would *also* call "natural selection",
> >>> bursting free of the confines of selection between members of
> >>> the same population, and also of selection between different species
> >>> in the same family or order or even class.
> >>>
> >> What about the lowly, obnoxious pocket gopher making a discrete leap in
> >> morphology with external pouches. That seems tractable.
> >
> > But still hidebound. I am talking about one whole huge class of animals
> > supplanting another. Had birds not diversified as much as they did,
> > none of them might have made it past the K-Pg great extinction.
> >
> Pocket gopher morphology is more tunnel bound and interesting.
> >
> >>>
> >>> Once examples like these start being analyzed by evolutionary theorists,
> >>> we may expect other macroevolutionary phenomena to be better understood,
> >>> such as coevolution and the aftermaths of the great extinctions.
> >>>
> >> What was it you were saying about creationists above and why?
> >
> > A goad to make people here think about evolution on a grand scale.
> > Apparently you weren't sufficiently goaded.
> >
> Actually I applaud your goading. Good job.

[Peter Nyikos]

On Wednesday, March 27, 2019 at 8:15:02 PM UTC-4, John Harshman wrote:
> On 3/27/19 3:29 PM, Peter Nyikos wrote:
> > On Wednesday, March 27, 2019 at 3:40:03 PM UTC-4, John Harshman wrote:
> >> On 3/27/19 12:29 PM, erik simpson wrote:

> >>> A superficial scan of the Wikipedia entry on Pterosaurs reveals a number of
> >>> recent studies on pterosaur diversity (and size distribution)
> >
> > There is no mention of scholarly studies about either topic, only
> > of some discoveries from which some conclusions are drawn by
> > the Wikipedia authors themselves.
> >
> > The situation calls for much more than a superficial scan.
> > See example below in connection with "Maastrichtian."
> >
> >>> of Cretaceous
> >>> pterosaurs that suggest that any apparent declines are probably taxonomic
> >>> artifacts, and offer little to no support to the idea that avian competition
> >>> was a significant effect.
> >
> > What is anyone supposed to expect from an entry in Wikipedia?
> > The talk is loose and jumps to conclusions on the basis of a few
> > genera, most of which are not even identified:
> >
> > This suggests that late Cretaceous pterosaur faunas were far
> > more diverse than previously thought, possibly not even
> > having declined significantly from the early Cretaceous.
>
> The thing to do here would be to look up the actual references. Have you
> tried that?

I did, but not the ones that are related to this benighted comment in the Wiki text.
Thanks to a constructive comment by Ernest Major, I found out just
how benighted it is. But I don't think you are interested in the details,
since your "interest" in this whole issue of pterosaur-bird interplay in
macroevolution has been one of caviling and nitpicking.


> >>> Small pterosaurs were present during the
> >>> Maastrichtian.

"Small" turns out to have been a most unhelpful adjective, and anyone
interested enough in this issue can find out why by reading my reply
to Ernest Major's helpful comment about the ONE known pterosaur that is
smaller than the largest birds that lived in the Maastrichtian.


<snip for focus>


> > Yes, that's what Erik meant. The Wikipedia entry used the term "strong bias"
> > against fossils of small animals. One issue, though, is the extent to which
> > this bias is due to fossil collectors having a strong bias towards collecting
> > spectacular fossils, other things being equal. Also, to amateur fossil
> > hunters selling them to hobbyists rather than donating them to museums.
> > [Or, sometimes, unable to sufficiently interest the local museums in them.]


Your lack of interest in this topic is clear from the way you indulged
in gross insincerity before addressing it:

> Please stop responding to posts at second hand.

Please stop being so obnoxious. You knew [1] that I was boycotting Erik
for the rest of 2019, yet you feigned ignorance of that fact
in the first half of the following sentence:

> You could easily have
> responded directly to Eric and made this whole thing just a bit more
> readable.

The second half of your sentence is almost 100% bogus. The only distinction
between responding directly and what I actually did was that there
is one more attribution mark ("chevron") in the left hand margin in the part
where I was addressing Erik's remarks. The one paragraph where I addressed
you came after I was done with them.

[1] You even participated a fair amount on the thread where I announced the boycott
of Erik and Oxyaena, two people towards whom you have shown flagrant
favoritism for close to a year now in sci.bio.paleontology.
Here is a post from that thread in which you managed to show how
insincere you are about three things: your feigned dislike of
threads being hijacked; your feigned dislike of insults; and your
feigned dislike of off-topic comments:

https://groups.google.com/d/msg/talk.origins/6NKAJVC9ibI/lXJXFCn2BgAJ
Subject: Re: Boycott of Erik Simpson and `Oxyaena' ATTN: DIG
Date: Fri, 8 Mar 2019 17:44:37 -0800
Message-ID: <eL2dnWvOCZYYhx7B...@giganews.com>


> The source of the bias is not especially relevant. Whether it
> exists is the question, and if so it calls your conclusions into question.

Unfortunately for you, they are not just my conclusions. If you were to read
my reply to Ernest, you would find that out.

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

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

PS Your usual response to comments like my preceding one is along the
lines of "If you have something to tell me, say it in direct reply to me." But I've told you all that I want to say to you here.

[Ernest Major]

Wikipedia tells us that Fred Hoyle was a self-declared atheist.

--
alias Ernest Major

[Peter Nyikos]

On Wednesday, March 27, 2019 at 8:20:02 PM UTC-4, John Harshman wrote:
> On 3/27/19 5:06 PM, Peter Nyikos wrote:
> > A reminder: I am boycotting all posts by Erik Simpson for the rest of 2019,
> > for reasons explained here:
> >
> > https://groups.google.com/d/msg/talk.origins/6NKAJVC9ibI/nO4Xri2UBgAJ

> > Subject: Boycott of Erik Simpson and `Oxyaena' ATTN: DIG

> > Date: Mon, 4 Mar 2019 09:03:14 -0800 (PST)
> > Message-ID: <eafd9791-05a9-4533...@googlegroups.com>
> >
> > and here, on the same Subject: line, and on the same date:
> >
> > https://groups.google.com/d/msg/talk.origins/6NKAJVC9ibI/GCuqml2fBgAJ
> > Message-ID: <d1820a6a-25a8-4859...@googlegroups.com>
> >
> > Except for occasional reminders like this, done in direct follow-up
> > to the posts of Erik, this boycott works like a killfile.
> >
> > In particular, it does not exclude replying to people who leave in
> > text from Erik, nor commenting on statements by Erik that were left
> > in by them. An excellent example was where I replied right on
> > this "MACROEVOLUTION" thread to a three word reply by Harshman
> > to Erik. I made a detailed critique of Erik's superficial comments
> > about an entry in Wikipedia that Harshman had left in but had nothing
> > to say about.
>
> That's a distinction without a difference, and just shows how absurd
> your "boycott" is.

Stop being so disingenuous about how killfiles work.

If you had a sense of humor where you and Erik and Oxyaena (whom I am also
boycotting in the same way) are concerned, you would be amused by
the aftermath of the second post I linked up there. It was done
in reply to Panthera Tigris Altaica, and it outlines, with links to
three sci.bio.paleontolotgy posts, just how liberally Erik indulged
in snips in promotion of trumped-up charges against me.

And here is where your lack of humor is going to kick in: for
the rest of that thread, it was as though almost every post by
Erik and Oxyaena were being boycotted after that one reply to Erik by
Panthera. One of the rare exceptions was by you. But the irony is,
you didn't leave a single word by Erik in, but did exactly
what you hypocritically "pleaded with me" not to do in the first post
I link (and quote from) below--you responded to my post at second hand.

https://groups.google.com/d/msg/talk.origins/MAgP4bAfV40/1BUDQPuCBwAJ
Subject: Re: TOWARDS A SCIENTIFIC THEORY OF MACROEVOLUTION
Date: Fri, 29 Mar 2019 05:41:31 -0700 (PDT)
Message-ID: <55d70882-7f1b-4a08...@googlegroups.com>

> Don't be such a douche.

So much for your opportunistic "dislike" of insults. If ever the
term "douche" applied to anyone, it applies to your "plea"
in the post I linked just now:

__________________________excerpt from reply to you__________

> Please stop responding to posts at second hand.

Please stop being so obnoxious. You knew [1] that I was boycotting Erik
for the rest of 2019, yet you feigned ignorance of that fact
in the first half of the following sentence:

> You could easily have
> responded directly to Eric and made this whole thing just a bit more
> readable.

The second half of your sentence is almost 100% bogus. The only distinction
between responding directly and what I actually did was that there
is one more attribution mark ("chevron") in the left hand margin in the part
where I was addressing Erik's remarks. The one paragraph where I addressed
you came after I was done with them.

[1] You even participated a fair amount on the thread where I announced the boycott
of Erik and Oxyaena, two people towards whom you have shown flagrant
favoritism for close to a year now in sci.bio.paleontology.
Here is a post from that thread in which you managed to show how
insincere you are about three things: your feigned dislike of
threads being hijacked; your feigned dislike of insults; and your
feigned dislike of off-topic comments:

https://groups.google.com/d/msg/talk.origins/6NKAJVC9ibI/lXJXFCn2BgAJ
Subject: Re: Boycott of Erik Simpson and `Oxyaena' ATTN: DIG
Date: Fri, 8 Mar 2019 17:44:37 -0800
Message-ID: <eL2dnWvOCZYYhx7B...@giganews.com>

======================= end of excerpt =============================


Peter Nyikos

[Peter Nyikos]

On Friday, March 29, 2019 at 12:15:03 AM UTC-4, Peter Nyikos wrote:
> Before Ernst Mayr showed up,

Wow, was I ever absent-minded when I wrote that! I meant Ernest Major.

> the pickings on this thread had gotten pretty
> slim, and I was contemplating quitting this thread a day before my usual
> weekend break,

Here I only meant quitting for the weekend, in hopes that someone new
would show up. But then Ernest showed up.


By the way, some people might wonder why I lavished so much praise
on Ernest's first post to this thread. I had gotten so discouraged
by the kind of crap I was being hit with [see my replies to two
obnoxiously hypocritical posts by Harshman this morning] that Ernest's
brief but sincere comment was like the difference between night and day.

And, with the load taken off my mind, I waxed on at length about
the relevance of disparity to macroevolution, attributing the
inspiration for it to Ernest. If I had it to do over again,
my comments would be more in line with Ernest's modest
but still quite helpful contribution.


Peter Nyikos

[Peter Nyikos]

On Wednesday, March 27, 2019 at 4:55:03 PM UTC-4, John Harshman wrote:
> On 3/27/19 1:29 PM, Peter Nyikos wrote:
> > On Wednesday, March 27, 2019 at 3:10:03 PM UTC-4, John Harshman wrote:

> >> On 3/27/19 11:37 AM, Peter Nyikos wrote:
> >>> As it now stands, evolutionary theory is really microevolutionary theory.
> >>> This is exemplified by the popular definition of "evolution," enshrined in
> >>> the Talk.Origins Archive FAQ, of change in frequency of alleles in a population.
> >>>
> >>> All too many anti-creationists think they have scored some victory over
> >>> a creationist when they have "pointed out" that the creationist him/herself
> >>> has acknowledged that evolution has taken place, according to this definition.
> >>>
> >>>

> >>> And so it will remain, I believe, as long as evolutionary theorists
> >>> are hamstrung by an unnatural definition of the words "natural selection",
> >>> which also has its meaning confined within mere individual populations.
> >>>

> >>> Why would anyone think this could lead to understanding the vast panorama
> >>> of evolution that has taken place on earth? It's like expecting
> >>> to understand human physiology and medical treatment exclusively on the
> >>> basis of individual cell-to-cell signaling. Or perhaps just in terms
> >>> of the interactions of atoms and molecules.
> >>>
> >>>

> >>> And yet, it seems like it would be easy to break out of this "egg"
> >>> into the wide world of macroevolution. For instance: after the end
> >>> of the Jurassic, pterosaurs underwent a steady decline as birds
> >>> came to take over more and more ecological niches from them.
> >>> Bird diversity burgeoned while pterosaur diversity declined to where,
> >>> by the end of the Cretaceous, the *smallest* pterosaurs that were still
> >>> hanging on were at least as large as the largest birds.

So far, one probable exception has turned up, but all the
birds and all other pterosaurs in fig. 20 of the following
March 2018 paper hew to the above generalization. And there are
a lot of both, and they are all from Late Maastrichtian:

https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.2001663

In addition, fig. 16 gives a remarkably detailed phylogenetic tree
of Pterosauria, from the Late Triassic to the Late Maastrichtian.


<snip for focus>

> >>> That is an example of what *I* would *also* call "natural selection",
> >>> bursting free of the confines of selection between members of
> >>> the same population, and also of selection between different species
> >>> in the same family or order or even class.
> >>

> >> This is what's usually called species selection.
> >
> > Can you find me an article that backs you up on this?
>
> I suggest that you read the book Macroevolution, by Steven Stanley.

Since you don't give a clue as to whether anything I had written below
about species selection is cast into doubt by anything in it,
I will pass on your suggestion.

BTW, I knew about Steven Stanley from my university's standard biology
textbook which I was following closely above. I does not mention anyone
else who might have picked up his ball and run with it, and the
Wikipedia entry to which "species selection" took me does not mention
any "biological units" beyond the species level:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_of_selection



> > What I've read
> > about it suggests that it is also hamstrung by the legacy of Charles
> > Darwin It talks about "fitness of species" as to how many "offspring
> > species" they produce. This is a very naive idea, since "fitness" only
> > talks about number of immediate offspring that grow to reproductive age.
> > What I'm talking about is "fitness over eons of more and more
> > remote descendants."
>
> I don't know how to respond to this.

This seems to confirm that you recommended Stanley's book to me sight
unseen.


> >> Do you think use of
> >> that term has held evolutionary biology back?
> >
> > That's a rather peculiar question. Species selection isn't part of the "Modern
> > Synthesis," and even the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis (EES) seems ambivalent
> > about it.
> >
> > Also, "evolutionary biology" encompasses a lot more than "evolutionary
> > THEORY." The latter doesn't talk about WHAT happened during evolution
> > so much as HOW and WHY evolution took the form it did.
>
> I mentioned this because you seemed fixated on the term "natural
> selection", with its interpretation as being individual selection only
> that was the problem.

I don't know how to make sense of your use of "fixated." Do you?

> >>> Once examples like these start being analyzed by evolutionary theorists,
> >>> we may expect other macroevolutionary phenomena to be better understood,
> >>> such as coevolution and the aftermaths of the great extinctions.
> >

> >> How would one go about analyzing that?

> >
> > I cannot predict what kind of analysis will emerge once theorists
> > shed their inhibitions about talking on a scale that does justice
> > to the amazing diversity (in the natural layman's sense, not in the
> > hidebound sense of "number of species") of life on earth.
>

> I don't see any such inhibitions.

You saw plenty of it from Donald Prothero, on the mis-named "skepticblog".
You might remember how he censored everything by me and all but two things
by you, including a question of yours that he ducked while rambling
on about other things. But he deleted the post where you had pointed
out that your question was unanswered. Moreover, both of us were banned
from Skepticblog, presumably because we hadn't shown sufficient respect
for Prothero [shades of "The Godfather"].


> Perhaps you are not familiar with the
> literature on this subject, much of which comes from paleontologists.

Judging from your treatment of Stanley's book, neither are you.


> > What you wrote below seems rather hidebound also, and I'd like to hear
> > from others before thinking more about it.
>
> Sure, as long as you eventually manage to think.

A completely appropriate end to a sow's ear by yourself. I lost
interest in making a silk purse out of it by the time I got
through talking about that remarkable PLOSbiology paper.


<snip unproductive rambling by you from an earlier post>

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

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

[John Harshman]

Yes, that paper is interesting. Please stop responding to deeply nested
bits. It makes things hard to read. Especially, please stop responding
to your own deeply nested bits.

>>>>> That is an example of what *I* would *also* call "natural selection",
>>>>> bursting free of the confines of selection between members of
>>>>> the same population, and also of selection between different species
>>>>> in the same family or order or even class.
>>>>
>>>> This is what's usually called species selection.
>>>
>>> Can you find me an article that backs you up on this?
>>
>> I suggest that you read the book Macroevolution, by Steven Stanley.
>
> Since you don't give a clue as to whether anything I had written below
> about species selection is cast into doubt by anything in it,
> I will pass on your suggestion.

Suit yourself.

> BTW, I knew about Steven Stanley from my university's standard biology
> textbook which I was following closely above. I does not mention anyone
> else who might have picked up his ball and run with it, and the
> Wikipedia entry to which "species selection" took me does not mention
> any "biological units" beyond the species level:
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_of_selection

Have you considered that what might be called "clade selection" may just
be multiple instances of species selection? Interclade competition is
just a set of interspecific competitions, each just a set of
inter-individual competitions. Would you agree?

>>> What I've read
>>> about it suggests that it is also hamstrung by the legacy of Charles
>>> Darwin It talks about "fitness of species" as to how many "offspring
>>> species" they produce. This is a very naive idea, since "fitness" only
>>> talks about number of immediate offspring that grow to reproductive age.
>>> What I'm talking about is "fitness over eons of more and more
>>> remote descendants."
>>
>> I don't know how to respond to this.
>
> This seems to confirm that you recommended Stanley's book to me sight
> unseen.

If somehow I gave that impression, let me correct it now: I have read
Stanley's book.

>>>> Do you think use of
>>>> that term has held evolutionary biology back?
>>>
>>> That's a rather peculiar question. Species selection isn't part of the "Modern
>>> Synthesis," and even the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis (EES) seems ambivalent
>>> about it.
>>>
>>> Also, "evolutionary biology" encompasses a lot more than "evolutionary
>>> THEORY." The latter doesn't talk about WHAT happened during evolution
>>> so much as HOW and WHY evolution took the form it did.
>>
>> I mentioned this because you seemed fixated on the term "natural
>> selection", with its interpretation as being individual selection only
>> that was the problem.
>
> I don't know how to make sense of your use of "fixated." Do you?

Yes. What I mean is that you seem to believe the usage of the term is
somehow important and may even be what's holding evolutionary biology back.

>>>>> Once examples like these start being analyzed by evolutionary theorists,
>>>>> we may expect other macroevolutionary phenomena to be better understood,
>>>>> such as coevolution and the aftermaths of the great extinctions.
>>>
>>>> How would one go about analyzing that?
>>>
>>> I cannot predict what kind of analysis will emerge once theorists
>>> shed their inhibitions about talking on a scale that does justice
>>> to the amazing diversity (in the natural layman's sense, not in the
>>> hidebound sense of "number of species") of life on earth.
>>
>> I don't see any such inhibitions.
>
> You saw plenty of it from Donald Prothero, on the mis-named "skepticblog".
> You might remember how he censored everything by me and all but two things
> by you, including a question of yours that he ducked while rambling
> on about other things. But he deleted the post where you had pointed
> out that your question was unanswered. Moreover, both of us were banned
> from Skepticblog, presumably because we hadn't shown sufficient respect
> for Prothero [shades of "The Godfather"].

This seems nothing more than an attack on a third party not present. I
can't see what it has to do with what we were talking about.

>> Perhaps you are not familiar with the
>> literature on this subject, much of which comes from paleontologists.
>
> Judging from your treatment of Stanley's book, neither are you.

?

>>> What you wrote below seems rather hidebound also, and I'd like to hear
>>> from others before thinking more about it.
>>
>> Sure, as long as you eventually manage to think.
>
> A completely appropriate end to a sow's ear by yourself. I lost
> interest in making a silk purse out of it by the time I got
> through talking about that remarkable PLOSbiology paper.

You are killing off your own thread with irrelevant asides, personal
attacks, and offhand dismissals.

[John Harshman]

You are killing your own thread. Could you help it if you tried?

[Peter Nyikos]

Wishful thinking is good up to a point, but you are overdoing it here.

I am advancing the theme of macroevolution at the fastest pace that
the raw material presented to me allows. I even advanced it in my first
reply to you today, which you seem to be giving the "I only see those posts
that I want to see" treatment while glomming onto later posts like this one.

> Could you help it if you tried?

I could, but I've got the goods on you above in a way
that you are unable to do anything about. It's about time
someone gave you your just deserts.

I gave them to you on another thread, too. I caught you telling
two lies on the post from which the following excerpt is taken.
Your self-appointed pinch hitter, Mark Isaak, has been tying
himself up in knots while trying to exonerate you from them.
Meanwhile you have completely ignored (at least publicly) the spectacle.

But Mark snipped the following excerpt, which is beyond his pay grade.

____________________________ excerpt from reply to you____________________

> This is one of your main problems, seeing the world in terms of cliques
> and ingroups,

The world is doing just fine, thank you. And if you think talk.origins is a
representative sample of the big outside world, then you have far more
serious delusions than you've ever (falsely) attributed to me.

I am still grateful for the way you (and Erik and Norman) helped me to
make sci.bio.paleontology a clique-and-ingroup free society in
April 2015 - late 2017, but first Erik and then Oxyaena and then you
made it into just another miniature talk.origins.

I stuck to our agreement for several months after it was clear that it meant nothing
to you anymore. You had told a bare-faced, utterly despicable lie about me [more
precisely: about what you believed about me], but I decided to let you back
out of it gracefully by instead attributing it to "a moderate case of Alzheimer's."


And even after you made it clear that you resented this lifeline thrown to you,
I still stuck to the letter of our agreement. The final break came when
I started inquiring about your perennial search for a job really to your liking,
and you first accused me of [having violated] our agreement all through the post,
and then disappeared from the thread when I asked you to explain in what
way I had done that.

Oxyaena stayed behind to attack me on your behalf, but never breathed
a word about the agreement.

That was when I finally decided that it was hopeless to expect you to return
to our agreement. Since then, I've been just as hard on you in s.b.p. as I
am here in talk.origins.

_____________________________________________ end of excerpt
from
https://groups.google.com/d/msg/talk.origins/0zFuROg-mzA/xenq3Y-mBAAJ
Subject: Re: OT: Another Dr. Dr. Joins Talk.origins (also sci.bio.paleontology)
Date: Thu, 21 Mar 2019 19:44:50 -0700 (PDT)
Message-ID: <e54cd701-1ce9-4c17...@googlegroups.com>


You and Erik and Oxyaena are habitually dishonest, hypocritical and cowardly,
but the other two are probably too amoral to realize it, and you may
be too amoral too. But it's time the people in the two newsgroups
knew about the depths to which you periodically sink, whether they
choose to do anything about it or not.

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

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

[Oxyaena]

Yet he believed in intelligent design, and he gave no indications he
believed non-supernatural entities like aliens created life on Earth.
Hoyle was a crank anyways.

[John Harshman]

Ask yourself whether any of that post had anything to do with
macroevolution. (Hint: no.) You aren't doing yourself any good with
these long off-topic diatribes.

[Bob Casanova]

On Thu, 28 Mar 2019 08:14:48 -0700 (PDT), the following
appeared in talk.origins, posted by erik simpson
<eastsi...@gmail.com>:

>On Thursday, March 28, 2019 at 8:10:03 AM UTC-7, Bob Casanova wrote:
>> On Wed, 27 Mar 2019 17:06:53 -0700 (PDT), the following
>> appeared in talk.origins, posted by Peter Nyikos
>> <nyi...@bellsouth.net>:
>>
>> >A reminder: I am boycotting all posts by Erik Simpson for the rest of 2019
>>
>> I'm sure he's devastated...

>I am desolate.

Yeah, I thought I heard "OH, THE HORROR!!!" from you... ;-)

>Actually, I think it's funny. Peters still "answers" me as
>much as he ever did, but it's more difficult as he has to do it while pretending
>to respond to someone else. That makes him even harder to understand and it
>makes him look silly, but I doubt he's aware of that.

And he's been told quite a few times how difficult his
convoluted posts are to follow, with their multiple
recursions into excerpts from exchanges dating back
sometimes years. As you note, it seems he can't understand
that, or simply doesn't care if his rants are understood.

(Now I expect some comment about my "dishonest" portrayal,
or some such idiocy, since no comment about his traits is
ever made sincerely.)

[Bob Casanova]

On Thu, 28 Mar 2019 20:41:40 -0400, the following appeared
in talk.origins, posted by Oxyaena <oxy...@baal.hammon>:

>On 3/28/2019 4:14 PM, Alan Kleinman MD PhD wrote:
>> On Thursday, March 28, 2019 at 4:45:02 AM UTC-7, Oxyaena wrote:
>>> On 3/27/2019 7:37 PM, Alan Kleinman MD PhD wrote:
>>> [snip Dr Dr's logorrhea]
>>>>
>>>
>>> On a long enough timescale *anything* can happen, and luckily population
>>> sizes are sufficient for a long enough duration of time for such a thing
>>> to happen. Face it, Kleinman, improbable things happen. Littlewood's
>>> law comes to mind.

>> How long will it take you to learn introductory probability theory?
>
>https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Littlewood's_law

Expect denial of relevance; he's a polymath in his own mind:

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Dunning-Kruger_effect

[Mark Isaak]

Yes, "adaptive radiations" was the term I was trying to remember.

That's one of the questions. Others are: How greatly to adaptive
radiations differ from a null hypothesis of random diversification? Why
do some clades never or hardly ever radiate? Or do they diversify and
then get trimmed back?

[John Harshman]

It turns out that it's very hard to demonstrate, using a phylogenetic
tree, whether one clade has significantly more species than its sister
clade, or which node of many nearby nodes might be the place where a
"key innovation" happened that sparked a radiation. The null model of
random speciation has too large a confidence interval. This has been
discussed in the literature with reference to the passerine radiation.
Or is it an oscine radiation? And if there's a key innovation, what
might it be?

[Ernest Major]

Macroevolution: Pattern and Process (as recommended by John) has (IIRC)
a fair bit on adaptive radiations.

Insects are the most speciose group of arthropods (and of animals in
general), birds are the most speciose group of tetrapods, and bats are
the second most speciose mammal order. Perhaps there's something about
flight.

--
alias Ernest Major

[erik simpson]

I wonder if Howler Monkey will ever see this zinger. It takes the concept of
"obtuse" to levels it has hardly ever reached in my experience. But perhaps
it's just "a mild case of autism".

[Peter Nyikos]

This is a perfect example of your arrogant "Do as I say, not as I do"
attitude. If YOU ask yourself what you were doing
with the following off-topic, insulting, thread-hijacking post,
your extreme narcissism will kick in with "I'm the illustrious John
Harshman, and I am doing myself good with it."

https://groups.google.com/d/msg/talk.origins/6NKAJVC9ibI/lXJXFCn2BgAJ
Subject: Re: Boycott of Erik Simpson and `Oxyaena' ATTN: DIG
Date: Fri, 8 Mar 2019 17:44:37 -0800
Message-ID: <eL2dnWvOCZYYhx7B...@giganews.com>

You are despicable.


Peter Nyikos

[Peter Nyikos]

On Friday, March 29, 2019 at 2:35:03 PM UTC-4, Bob Casanova wrote:
> On Thu, 28 Mar 2019 08:14:48 -0700 (PDT), the following
> appeared in talk.origins, posted by erik simpson
> <eastsi...@gmail.com>:
>
> >On Thursday, March 28, 2019 at 8:10:03 AM UTC-7, Bob Casanova wrote:
> >> On Wed, 27 Mar 2019 17:06:53 -0700 (PDT), the following
> >> appeared in talk.origins, posted by Peter Nyikos
> >> <nyi...@bellsouth.net>:
> >>
> >> >A reminder: I am boycotting all posts by Erik Simpson for the rest of 2019
> >>
> >> I'm sure he's devastated...
>
> >I am desolate.

Erik is sarcastic. As were you.

> Yeah, I thought I heard "OH, THE HORROR!!!" from you... ;-)

Thanks for confirming that Erik is sarcastic here.

> >Actually, I think it's funny.

What Erik claims to think is funny is the following bare-faced lie
by himself:

> Peters still "answers" me as
> >much as he ever did, but it's more difficult as he has to do it while pretending
> >to respond to someone else.

There is no pretense, see below. I always address the other person as
well, like here, thereby killing two birds with one stone. I usually
couldn't do that when Erik wasn't being boycotted.

Also, I get to do it a lot less, because people know that
I am not expected to set the record straight
about Erik and Oxyaena's virulently derogatory comments about me
when no one answers the offending post.

And so I waste a lot less time on Erik and Oxyaena than I used to.

Back on the thread where I announced the boycott, I was freed
of this burden by and large, because almost all posts by
Erik and Oxyaena went unanswered.

Harshman is not naive, and neither is Erik, and neither
are you, Bob, and so you know these things even if, by a hideously
minuscule chance, you did not know one or the other of them before.

And so, Harshman's claim that my boycott was "absurd" was the
height of insincerity.

> > That makes him even harder to understand and it
> >makes him look silly, but I doubt he's aware of that.

Erik is ignoring the fact that the people who DO reply to his
posts are enabling me to tell the person the real lowdown
on what Erik is up to. If that person is someone like you,
Casanova, I'm letting other readers see how that person is playing
"see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil" wrt Erik AT BEST
and aiding, abetting, and comforting him at the worst.

In your case, this time around, it's a vivid example of the
former but hardly an example of the latter.


OTOH when someone like Glenn replies to Erik or Oxyaena,
that person might well be able to make good use of the information
that I provide.

> And he's been told quite a few times how difficult his
> convoluted posts are to follow,

This post isn't convoluted; almost none of the replies
that Erik is misrepresenting are.

Even Harshman didn't dare claim that my reply to him which
was mostly about Erik's marginally helpful comment on "small pterosaurs,"
was convoluted. He just "pleaded" with me not to "reply to posts
second hand". That was another glaring example of "Do as I say,
not as I do" by Harshman, and another example of the double standards
that are second nature to him.

> with their multiple
> recursions into excerpts from exchanges dating back
> sometimes years.

Let's just stick to what has happened since the boycott began,
shall we?

> As you note, it seems he can't understand
> that, or simply doesn't care if his rants are understood.

Again, you are talking pre-boycott here, or at least NOT
in the category of me talking about Erik's screeds in reply
to someone else's post.

> (Now I expect some comment about my "dishonest" portrayal,

Nah, I see no dishonesty from you here. Your words are in stunning
contrast to Erik's flagrantly dishonest, insincere portrayal.

> or some such idiocy, since no comment about his traits is
> ever made sincerely.)

Quite the master of sarcastic hyperbole, aren't you? Too bad
any bright middle schooler can master it too.


By the way, Bob, you always have the option, when replying
to Erik, of deleting stuff by him, thereby keeping me from
attacking it. Harshman actually deleted EVERYTHING Erik wrote
in a post where he replied to me "second hand".


HANW.


TGIF.


Peter Nyikos

[Oxyaena]

In the category of "Truth, Justice, and the American Way"

> I could, but I've got the goods on you above in a way
> that you are unable to do anything about. It's about time
> someone gave you your just deserts.

[Oxyaena]

On 3/29/2019 2:33 PM, Bob Casanova wrote:
> On Thu, 28 Mar 2019 20:41:40 -0400, the following appeared
> in talk.origins, posted by Oxyaena <oxy...@baal.hammon>:
>
>> On 3/28/2019 4:14 PM, Alan Kleinman MD PhD wrote:
>>> On Thursday, March 28, 2019 at 4:45:02 AM UTC-7, Oxyaena wrote:
>>>> On 3/27/2019 7:37 PM, Alan Kleinman MD PhD wrote:
>>>> [snip Dr Dr's logorrhea]
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> On a long enough timescale *anything* can happen, and luckily population
>>>> sizes are sufficient for a long enough duration of time for such a thing
>>>> to happen. Face it, Kleinman, improbable things happen. Littlewood's
>>>> law comes to mind.
>
>>> How long will it take you to learn introductory probability theory?
>>
>> https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Littlewood's_law
>
> Expect denial of relevance; he's a polymath in his own mind:
>
> https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Dunning-Kruger_effect
>

Even more prescient, I know the guys who wrote that article. See my
userpage here:

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/User:Oxyaena

I`m proud to call myself one of the RatWiki crew.

Shameless self promotion aside, is anybody surprised that the Good DrDr
still hasn't responded to this post? I would be honestly shocked if they
were.

[*Hemidactylus*]

Peter Nyikos <nyi...@bellsouth.net> wrote:
>
[snip]

>
> By the way, Bob, you always have the option, when replying
> to Erik, of deleting stuff by him, thereby keeping me from
> attacking it. Harshman actually deleted EVERYTHING Erik wrote
> in a post where he replied to me "second hand".
>
>
> HANW.
>
>
> TGIF.
>

Peter, this is grumpy cat level 7.5 out of 10. It does nothing towards a
macroevolutionary science. I would get more edification from my Goldschmidt
books. You were going in a positive direction riffing on Ernest Major in
this thread with disparity. More of that. Or return to my unworthy
ineptitude in covering Behe’s theory of mind chapter. You kinda left Burk
and I hanging in the other thread.

[*Hemidactylus*]

*Hemidactylus* <ecph...@allspamis.invalid> wrote:
> Peter Nyikos <nyi...@bellsouth.net> wrote:
>>
> [snip]
>>
>> By the way, Bob, you always have the option, when replying
>> to Erik, of deleting stuff by him, thereby keeping me from
>> attacking it. Harshman actually deleted EVERYTHING Erik wrote
>> in a post where he replied to me "second hand".
>>
>>
>> HANW.
>>
>>
>> TGIF.
>>
> Peter, this is grumpy cat level 7.5 out of 10.

Actually I’m calibrating the detector and got a bad reading. It was a 6 out
of 10.

[Burkhard]

ssssh!! While I'm grateful for John's sacrifice, I've no intention to
emulate it. So while he serves as punchbag while Peter has one more of
his little moments, we can continue with a proper discussion.....

[*Hemidactylus*]

Oxyaena <oxy...@baal.hammon> wrote:
> On 3/28/2019 7:55 AM, *Hemidactylus* wrote:
>> Oxyaena <oxy...@baal.hammon> wrote:
>>> On 3/27/2019 11:40 PM, Peter Nyikos wrote:
>>>
>>> [snip irrelevant backbiting about Hemi]
>>>>
>>>> But then, perhaps Hemi sees Dawkins as a traitor to the cause of atheism
>>>> because he named a probability of the existence of a creator/designer
>>>> of the universe close to mine. :-)
>>>
>>> "Atheist cause?" You've got to be *fucking* kidding me, there is no
>>> atheist cause, that's like saying that non-stamp collectors have a
>>> cause, not stamp collecting. An atheist is anyone who doesn't believe in
>>> a god, nothing more. Grow up.
>>>
>> Did you miss the Four Horsemen and all the subsequent books and media
>> appearances?
>
> Those are the "New Atheists," they don't speak for all atheists.
>
But there are atheist causes, otherwise there wouldn’t be an organization
called American Atheists. The New Atheist cause itself has fractured a bit.

[erik simpson]

Honest, Peter. I'm not pulling your tail to get a rise out of you, at least not
now. Tkae a look at the reactions you're getting and try to tell yourself
you're NOT looking silly.

[jillery]

Yes, but over issues having nothing to do with atheism.

--
I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.

Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Attributed to Voltaire

[jillery]

On Fri, 29 Mar 2019 18:14:22 -0400, Oxyaena <oxy...@baal.hammon>
wrote:

>In the category of "Truth, Justice, and the American Way"
>
>> I could, but I've got the goods on you above in a way
>> that you are unable to do anything about. It's about time
>> someone gave you your just deserts.

That didn't take long at all. Is anybody surprised.

[Oxyaena]

On 3/29/2019 6:11 PM, Peter Nyikos wrote:
[snip the usual bad faith style of arguing from Nyikos]

>
> OTOH when someone like Glenn replies to Erik or Oxyaena,
> that person might well be able to make good use of the information
> that I provide.

Glenn, the guy who calls me "brain-dead" on a regular basis? Your
morality is *indeed* subjective, given you freak out over me insulting
Daud or Mario but don't even bat an eye at Glenn's frankly ableist insults.

[snip yet more bad faith]
>
>
> HANW.

HANW

>
>
> TGIF.
>
>
> Peter Nyikos
>

Apparently you don't want your employer being associated with these
hateful, borderline defamatory rants of yours. I wonder why.

[Peter Nyikos]

Looks like I might be able to end today, and a week of posting,
on a positive note.

On Thursday, March 28, 2019 at 9:15:02 PM UTC-4, John Harshman wrote:
> On 3/28/19 1:27 PM, Peter Nyikos wrote:

> > Probably without intending to, Ernest Major has advanced this thread
> > beyond the OP with his one post further than it had been advanced
> > before by all other posts by all other participants combined,
> > including myself.
> >
> > On Thursday, March 28, 2019 at 10:20:02 AM UTC-4, Ernest Major wrote:

> >> On 27/03/2019 20:29, Peter Nyikos wrote:
> >>> I cannot predict what kind of analysis will emerge once theorists
> >>> shed their inhibitions about talking on a scale that does justice
> >>> to the amazing diversity (in the natural layman's sense, not in the
> >>> hidebound sense of "number of species") of life on earth.
> >>

> >> Do you intend to refer here to disparity? (I find Gould's distinction
> >> between disparity and diversity helpful.)
> >
> > Thank you very much for asking this question, Ernest. It made me
> > realize just how important the concept of disparity is to any
> > theory of macroevolution.
> >
> > I did indeed intend disparity, but that word conveys a different
> > impression to the average person, generally a negative one.
> > "Biodiversity" is closer to Gould's sense of disparity and does
> > have positive connotations.
> >
> > Disparity has to do with morphological and genetic "distance"
> > between taxa of organisms. Do you know of any attempts to
> > quantify:
> >
> > (1) The disparity between two given species, or
> >
> > (2) The disparity within a taxon?

> > Item (2) poses a great challenge. The maximum distance, in the sense of (1),
> > within the taxon is one measure, but a very crude one. Obviously
> > a phylum like Arthropoda has far more disparity in it than a phylum
> > with just a few species, of which one pair is as disparate as the
> > most disparate pair of species in Arthropoda. A multidimensional
> > plot of species wrt various characters seems to be called for,
> > but there would have to be hundreds of dimensions.
> >
> > And that means abandoning all hope of having a single number to
> > measure total disparity.
>
> How about the volume of a multidimensional solid?

Say! that's a good idea. One might think you are channeling Richard
Norman, but he would almost certainly have used the word "hypervolume."

One small difficulty...
Except for very small taxa, this would mean having many times as
many species as characters -- just the opposite of current practice
among those who make phylogenetic trees. But this in turn would mean
that most of the species are inside the convex hull of the morphospace.
[Richard Norman understood convex hulls well: they are the (n-1)-dimensional
"surface" of the n-dimensional solid you had in mind.] The hypervolume
only depends on the number of species (or whatever) on the surface.

So we may need another measure as well; sometimes one would be
better, sometimes another.


> How about some kind of
> average or median distance from the taxon centroid?

Not sure what you mean by this. It sounds rather one-dimensional.

> Just spitballing here.

For once, I think you are being too modest.

> > Even biologists have trouble with the concept of disparity.
> > Donald Prothero, a paleontologist specializing in ungulates,
> > once tried to make light of the Cambrian Explosion (which was
> > in the Early Cambrian) by writing that there was more diversity
> > in a single order of trilobites of the later Cambrian, than
> > in all the animals of the Cambrian explosion.
> >
> > This was highly misleading, of course, because "diversity," in
> > the biological sense, has only to do with sheer number of species.
> > There is more "diversity" in one family of beetles, *Staphylinidae,*
> > than in the whole class Mammalia; perhaps even than in the whole
> > phylum Chordata. But I don't think any biologist would seriously claim
> > that this family of beetles is more disparate than our whole phylum.
> >
> > What makes the Cambrian explosion so unique is the tremendous disparity
> > between the animals of different phyla. And there were over 20 animal phyla
> > represented by the end of the Cambrian explosion, with more disparity in the
> > average phylum than in the whole class of trilobites.
> >
> >
> > If we could quantify the disparity of the kingdom Animalia at the
> > end of the Cambrian explosion, we would then be on our way to
> > solving other mysteries of macroevolution:
> >
> > 1. How to account for such a great explosion in disparity in
> > so short a time?
>
> How short a time?

The usual estimate is about 20 million years. Producing more
novel body plans than in all the rest of earth history.


> When do you propose to begin the explosion, and when
> do you propose to end it?

Such proposals are not up to me.


> > 2. Were there any explosions of disparity even one-tenth as great
> > as the Cambrian explosion, in a similarly short time?
> > The great extinctions come to mind, especially the two that
> > are immortalized as inaugurating new eras: the Mesozoic,
> > inaugurated by the end-of-Permian extinction, and the Cenozoic,
> > inaugurated by the end-of-Cretaceous explosion.
>
> > However, the Cambrian explosion upstaged both of them in
> > that respect: it ushered in a whole eon, the Phanerozoic.
> > It was, to be sure, inaugurated by what passed for a great
> > extinction in those bygone days, an extinction of the distinctive
> > Ediacaran organisms. [I will NOT say "Ediacaran fauna" because there
> > is no agreement on any Ediacaran besides Kimberella as to them
> > being animals. There is a highly respected hypothesis that many
> > of them were giant protists.]
>
> Actually, many Ediacaran taxa are also known from the Cambrian.

Which ones?


> You may
> remember Ben Waggoner, who found some of them.

I still recall his diagnosis of a "strangely scrunched Kimberella"
that others thought was a chordate. He bet his oldest daughter on it,
and it looks like he won the bet.

Peter Nyikos
Professor, Dept. of Mathematics

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

[John Harshman]

It's odd. There must be some relationship between dispersal ability's
countervailing effects; it encourages colonization of new areas but
paradoxically would discourage geographic isolation. Perhaps the ability
to expand vertically and so partition a single space more finely?

[John Harshman]

And it's another off-topic post. You truly are your own worst enemy.

[John Harshman]

Why would that be?

> -- just the opposite of current practice
> among those who make phylogenetic trees. But this in turn would mean
> that most of the species are inside the convex hull of the morphospace.
> [Richard Norman understood convex hulls well: they are the (n-1)-dimensional
> "surface" of the n-dimensional solid you had in mind.] The hypervolume
> only depends on the number of species (or whatever) on the surface.
>
> So we may need another measure as well; sometimes one would be
> better, sometimes another.
>
>
>> How about some kind of
>> average or median distance from the taxon centroid?
>
> Not sure what you mean by this. It sounds rather one-dimensional.

I'm unclear on your difficulty. Surely you know what a centroid is, and
what a distance is. Of course the measure is one-dimensional, but it's a
summary of the size of that multidimensional solid you like above.

I think it's important to discuss it and define what you think the
Cambrian explosion is. I have my own opinion on the subject if you're
interested.

>>> 2. Were there any explosions of disparity even one-tenth as great
>>> as the Cambrian explosion, in a similarly short time?
>>> The great extinctions come to mind, especially the two that
>>> are immortalized as inaugurating new eras: the Mesozoic,
>>> inaugurated by the end-of-Permian extinction, and the Cenozoic,
>>> inaugurated by the end-of-Cretaceous explosion.
>>
>>> However, the Cambrian explosion upstaged both of them in
>>> that respect: it ushered in a whole eon, the Phanerozoic.
>>> It was, to be sure, inaugurated by what passed for a great
>>> extinction in those bygone days, an extinction of the distinctive
>>> Ediacaran organisms. [I will NOT say "Ediacaran fauna" because there
>>> is no agreement on any Ediacaran besides Kimberella as to them
>>> being animals. There is a highly respected hypothesis that many
>>> of them were giant protists.]
>>
>> Actually, many Ediacaran taxa are also known from the Cambrian.
>
> Which ones?

Don't recall offhand, but it would be reasonably easy to google.

>> You may
>> remember Ben Waggoner, who found some of them.
>
> I still recall his diagnosis of a "strangely scrunched Kimberella"
> that others thought was a chordate. He bet his oldest daughter on it,
> and it looks like he won the bet.

But do you recall his publication of an Ediacaran fauna in the Cambrian?
Try this: Hagadorn, J. W., Fedo, C. M., and Waggoner, B. M. 2000.
Ediacara-type biotas from the Cambrian of the southwestern United
States. Journal of Paleontology 74(4): 731-740.

[Peter Nyikos]

I wonder what percentage of the world's atheists would be proud
to be associated with such a pathologically self-righteous person
as yourself.


Peter Nyikos

[Oxyaena]

On 3/29/2019 11:57 PM, Peter Nyikos wrote:
[snip clutter]

>
> I wonder what percentage of the world's atheists

What is with this irrational hatred of atheists of yours?

> would be proud
> to be associated with such a pathologically self-righteous person
> as yourself.

Mote beam eye.

>
>
> Peter Nyikos
>

Once again you don't want your employers associated with these hateful
screeds of yours. I wonder why.

[jillery]

You sound hostile.

[jillery]

On Fri, 29 Mar 2019 21:40:02 -0400, Oxyaena <oxy...@baal.hammon>
wrote:

>On 3/29/2019 6:11 PM, Peter Nyikos wrote:
>[snip the usual bad faith style of arguing from Nyikos]
>>
>> OTOH when someone like Glenn replies to Erik or Oxyaena,
>> that person might well be able to make good use of the information
>> that I provide.
>
>Glenn, the guy who calls me "brain-dead" on a regular basis? Your
>morality is *indeed* subjective, given you freak out over me insulting
>Daud or Mario but don't even bat an eye at Glenn's frankly ableist insults.
>
>[snip yet more bad faith]
>>
>>
>> HANW.
>
>HANW
>
>>
>>
>> TGIF.
>>
>>
>> Peter Nyikos
>>
>
>Apparently you don't want your employer being associated with these
>hateful, borderline defamatory rants of yours. I wonder why.

Nyikos the peter admitted that he uses the above .sig when he's
posting off-topic comments. Of course, almost all of his posts
include off-topic comments, so that's a distinction without a
difference.

[Jonathan]

On 3/27/2019 2:37 PM, Peter Nyikos wrote:


> As it now stands, evolutionary theory is really microevolutionary theory.
> This is exemplified by the popular definition of "evolution," enshrined in
> the Talk.Origins Archive FAQ, of change in frequency of alleles in a population.
>

Exactly correct. As if figuring out how to make a paint brush
leads them to believe they can now understand the Mona Lisa.

And they can't seem to grasp why in some 50 years the
concept has barely advanced despite stunning advances
in technology, data and researchers.



> All too many anti-creationists think they have scored some victory over
> a creationist when they have "pointed out" that the creationist him/herself
> has acknowledged that evolution has taken place, according to this definition.
>
>
> And so it will remain, I believe, as long as evolutionary theorists
> are hamstrung by an unnatural definition of the words "natural selection",
> which also has its meaning confined within mere individual populations.
>


Thing is, complexity science is the new macro evolutionary
theory of evolution. And it's a universal or abstract
explanation to boot, which means it applies to far more
than just life, but to the physical universe, mind and
even spirit equally as well.

This ng and much of science are 'heliocentric' zealots
in the age of 'Copernicus'. Linear devotees in the
age of non-linear dynamics.

And most here and in science in general are too lazy
to take a look at the new way and do what is
needed to find a generalized solution to creation
and speciation, which is to start over from scratch
from an entirely new scientific world view/frame of
reference.

The text on emergence cited below would take a slow
reader an hour to get through, yet even that's too
much for a 'heliocentric' devotee to learn the
new scientific method and how nature really works.


> Why would anyone think this could lead to understanding the vast panorama
> of evolution that has taken place on earth?



An objective or reductionist world view, a cause-and-effect
frame where we begin with the parts to understand the whole
is the problem, it's the brick wall to finding a generalized
theory of creation and speciation, the macro solution.

If we desire deterministic accuracy we must simplify
nature to such an extent the model no longer represents
reality in any meaningful way.

So for a complete and accurate view of a coevolutionary
system we would need to quantify not only the life involved
....completely, but also the environment...completely.

All of reality, and more to the point ALL AT THE SAME TIME.

Needless to say that is impossible, not to mention
all of reality is CONSTANTLY CHANGING, another
intractable brick wall of reductionism.

So the best one can hope for in a reductionist or
objective frame would be a happy medium, where the
amount of data gathered is limited so that it doesn't
overwhelm deterministic methods, but enough to get
a vague idea of how the coevolutionary system
behaves.

As a result we can proceed no further than painting
by numbers in our quest to understand the Mona Lisa.

And that's as far as a reductionist method can proceed, a
brick wall of grossly incomplete models of nature
that will never produce a generalized theory of
creation and speciation.

BUT THERE IS A WAY TO HURDLE this brick wall of
gathering all the data at the same time, even
the one-off non-linear events.

And it's quite simple.

We expand to ever greater wholes instead of reducing
to ever simpler parts.

We INVERSE the scientific world view, and we have
to be rigorous and inverse cause-and- effect mindset
into EFFECT-THEN-CAUSE.

ALL of reality, while constantly changing and
the one-off are entirely reflected in the /output/.

100% of reality is reflected in the /effects/.

SO instead of starting with causes as our primary
source of information about the whole, we start
with the effects as our primary source of knowledge
about the parts.

AND VOILA!

All the brick walls of objective determinism
fall away at once. All of them.

With the science of effects, or the concept of
emergence, we now have a simple and entirely
universal theory of creation and speciation.

One concept for not merely life, but the universe
and mind as well. One concept for all.

I'll give you the solution to the problem you pose
below using emergence.



> It's like expecting
> to understand human physiology and medical treatment exclusively on the
> basis of individual cell-to-cell signaling. Or perhaps just in terms
> of the interactions of atoms and molecules.
>
>
> And yet, it seems like it would be easy to break out of this "egg"
> into the wide world of macroevolution. For instance: after the end
> of the Jurassic, pterosaurs underwent a steady decline as birds
> came to take over more and more ecological niches from them.
> Bird diversity burgeoned while pterosaur diversity declined to where,
> by the end of the Cretaceous, the *smallest* pterosaurs that were still
> hanging on were at least as large as the largest birds.
>
> That is an example of what *I* would *also* call "natural selection",
> bursting free of the confines of selection between members of
> the same population,



There is already a theory for this it's called
Type 3 tunneling emergence or adaptive emergence.



From the well-written text...


5.3 b) Tunneling – Adaptive Emergence with multiple feedback


There are many reasons for the slow or sudden appearance of
complexity. If something emerges very suddenly or fast, it
has for instance often been blocked before by an obstacle
or barrier, e.g. a jam, a dogma, or barrier or a system border.

A large ecosystem consists of thousands of species and
their corresponding ecological niches and habitats, many
of them interacting with each other. It usually consists
of many different plants, animals, and various micro-organisms
like bacteria that are linked by a very complex network.

If we consider a global ecosystem like the earth as a whole,
we can notice numerous types of feedbacks and constraints
which make up together a very complex system. As the history
of our Earth shows, the evolution of such a system is certainly
not a linear, smooth and continuous process. It is marked by
abrupt, unsteady changes and jumps in complexity.

The different levels of complexity and organization in life
forms are associated with evolutionary transitions.
Evolutionary transitions characterize the crossing of large
fitness gaps and fitness barriers.

Evolution waits until major events like massive catastrophes
break and reduce these fitness barriers or agents are able
to tunnel through them. Catastrophes act as catalysts, if
they accelerate the transition to higher forms of complexity
through a sudden, dramatic increase of challenges in
the environment.

The tunneling through fitness barriers is possible through
the borrowing of complexity, similar to the borrowing of energy
during a tunneling process in Quantum

This form of emergence in adaptive and evolutionary systems
is directly related to (mass) extinctions and dramatic or
catastrophic events in the environment. Catastrophes in
natural systems can be comets or asteroid impacts,
volcanoes, earthquakes, ice ages, droughts or floods.

If there are catastrophic events or fluctuations which are
unpredictable and neither too common nor too rare, then
these catastrophes can enhance evolution and
accelerate adaptation. Therefore this form of emergence
can be named adaptive emergence.

It is an example of type IIIb emergence, and appears in a
complex adaptive system (CAS) with multiple feedbacks and
many constraint generating processes. It is associated with
the appearance of completely new roles and the dramatic
change of already existing “ecological” niches.


PLEASE TAKE NOTE of the following line i.e /universal/ application.


Type IIIb emergence is also responsible for sudden scientific
and mental revolutions...
https://arxiv.org/ftp/nlin/papers/0506/0506028.pdf



> and also of selection between different species
> in the same family or order or even class.
>
> Once examples like these start being analyzed by evolutionary theorists,
> we may expect other macroevolutionary phenomena to be better understood,
> such as coevolution and the aftermaths of the great extinctions.
>
>
> Peter Nyikos
> Professor, Dept. of Mathematics -- standard disclaimer--
> University of South Carolina
> http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos/
>



Once one understands emergence, the next lesson
would be to define the new 'subjective' mathematics
for observing nature that hurdles the brick wall
of the part/whole duality that exists in all of
nature.

As in parts and systems have distinctly different
sets of behaviors.

Yet every part is a system unto itself.

Are you a part to a greater system or
a system unto yourself?

How can we untangle that duality without
ending up with an infinite sequence
of parts and wholes.


--

https://twitter.com/Non_Linear1


s

[Bob Casanova]

On Fri, 29 Mar 2019 15:11:18 -0700 (PDT), the following

That wasn't hyperbole, Sparky, it was a notation of exactly
how you've treated nearly every sincere comment I've made
regarding your posting style and your (apparent)
psychological traits.

>By the way, Bob, you always have the option, when replying
>to Erik, of deleting stuff by him, thereby keeping me from
>attacking it. Harshman actually deleted EVERYTHING Erik wrote
>in a post where he replied to me "second hand".

I rest my case.

>HANW.

Yeah, whatever...

>TGIF.
--

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

[Bob Casanova]

On Fri, 29 Mar 2019 18:14:22 -0400, the following appeared
in talk.origins, posted by Oxyaena <oxy...@baal.hammon>:

>In the category of "Truth, Justice, and the American Way"
>
>> I could, but I've got the goods on you above in a way
>> that you are unable to do anything about. It's about time
>> someone gave you your just deserts.

Dammit, why does no one ever mention *un*just deserts? The
Gobi seems to qualify...

[Oxyaena]

On 3/30/2019 1:33 PM, Bob Casanova wrote:
> On Fri, 29 Mar 2019 18:14:22 -0400, the following appeared
> in talk.origins, posted by Oxyaena <oxy...@baal.hammon>:
>
>> In the category of "Truth, Justice, and the American Way"
>>
>>> I could, but I've got the goods on you above in a way
>>> that you are unable to do anything about. It's about time
>>> someone gave you your just deserts.
>
> Dammit, why does no one ever mention *un*just deserts? The
> Gobi seems to qualify...
>

Or Antarctica...

[Bob Casanova]

On Sat, 30 Mar 2019 18:13:59 -0400, the following appeared

in talk.origins, posted by Oxyaena <oxy...@baal.hammon>:

>On 3/30/2019 1:33 PM, Bob Casanova wrote:
>> On Fri, 29 Mar 2019 18:14:22 -0400, the following appeared
>> in talk.origins, posted by Oxyaena <oxy...@baal.hammon>:
>>
>>> In the category of "Truth, Justice, and the American Way"
>>>
>>>> I could, but I've got the goods on you above in a way
>>>> that you are unable to do anything about. It's about time
>>>> someone gave you your just deserts.
>>
>> Dammit, why does no one ever mention *un*just deserts? The
>> Gobi seems to qualify...
>>
>
>Or Antarctica...

True, although most wouldn't consider Antarctica to be a
desert, even though it qualifies nicely.

[Alan Kleinman MD PhD]

On Thursday, March 28, 2019 at 2:30:03 PM UTC-7, Peter Nyikos wrote:

> On Thursday, March 28, 2019 at 4:15:02 PM UTC-4, Alan Kleinman MD PhD wrote:
> > On Thursday, March 28, 2019 at 4:45:02 AM UTC-7, Oxyaena wrote:
> > > On 3/27/2019 7:37 PM, Alan Kleinman MD PhD wrote:
>
> > > [snip Dr Dr's logorrhea]
>
> > >
> > > On a long enough timescale *anything* can happen, and luckily population
> > > sizes are sufficient for a long enough duration of time for such a thing
> > > to happen. Face it, Kleinman, improbable things happen. Littlewood's
> > > law comes to mind.
>
> > How long will it take you to learn introductory probability theory?
>

> I'll let Oxyaena answer that. What's amusing about her post is that
> she did not quantify "long enough," probably because that would have revealed
> that she is not just an atheist in her self-serving and atheism-serving
> sense of the word, but in the usual everyday sense of someone who
> decidedly believes that there is no God or god.
What Oxyaena doesn't understand that she is calling for many low probability events to occur. What probability theory gives is the ability to predict the frequency of random events to occur and these predictions become more accurate as the random experiment is run more often. That's why Kishony can say it takes a billion replications for each of the beneficial mutations to occur in his experiment. And we can predict how many drugs are necessary to make a durable treatment for hiv. The mutation rate is simply the frequency of success in a binomial probability problem. If you are running two or more binomial probability problems simultaneously, the mathematics is straight forward to predict the probability of success.
>
> The point is, no one has ever tried to figure out just how much time
> was really needed for the Cambrian explosion on the basis of rmns.
> Readers besides you are invited to read my reply to Ernest Major
> for some clue as to what this might entail. I know you aren't interested.
I'll do the math for any real, measurable and repeatable experiment of rmns (adaptation). It is easy.
>
> There are more scientists who believe in common descent guided
> in strategic places by intelligent supernatural entities (God, angels, etc.)
> than there are scientists who believe in creation ex nihilo of
> millions of species. For them, as for the bona fide creationists,
> the time required for the Cambrian explosion is not a problem at all.
My training as an engineer has taught me to "run the numbers". Lot's of things on the surface look plausible but do the math and the measurements.
>
> What's funny is that the atheists here are so much in love with
> the myth that microevolution is all we need know,
> that they aren't even interested in how the
> Cambrian explosion can be accounted for by rmns alone in the time it took.
What atheist understands how microevolution works. What biologist understands how microevolution works. You won't get the correct explanation from John Elmer Fudd Harshman and he has a PhD in evolutionary biology. And if you think you are going to build a theory of macroevolution without understanding microevolution, you only deceive yourself.
>
> If you are an atheist, more in tune with the atheist Fred Hoyle
> than with the idea of supernatural beings, then you fall into
> this category, but for an entirely different reason. I've mentioned
> that reason often enough for me not to have to repeat it here.
I know you can do math, you found an error in Hoyle's work. Now try to understand what Hoyle was trying to model is competition, not adaptation. Then you might start understanding how to address the mathematics of microevolution.
>
>
> Peter Nyikos
> Professor, Department of Math. -- standard disclaimer --
> Univ. of South Carolina at Columbia
> http://www.math.sc.edu/~nyikos/

[Alan Kleinman MD PhD]

On Thursday, March 28, 2019 at 5:45:02 PM UTC-7, Oxyaena wrote:

> On 3/28/2019 4:14 PM, Alan Kleinman MD PhD wrote:
> > On Thursday, March 28, 2019 at 4:45:02 AM UTC-7, Oxyaena wrote:
> >> On 3/27/2019 7:37 PM, Alan Kleinman MD PhD wrote:
> >> [snip Dr Dr's logorrhea]
> >>>
> >>
> >> On a long enough timescale *anything* can happen, and luckily population
> >> sizes are sufficient for a long enough duration of time for such a thing
> >> to happen. Face it, Kleinman, improbable things happen. Littlewood's
> >> law comes to mind.
> > How long will it take you to learn introductory probability theory?
>

> https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Littlewood's_law
There you go, you now have your basis for the ToE. Too bad you can't predict anything with it. Of course, if you want to explain the Kishony and Lenski experiments with Littlewood's law, go for it and get it published while you are at it. On the other hand, if you actually want to predict how evolution works, take a course in introductory probability theory.

[Peter Nyikos]

On Friday, March 29, 2019 at 6:45:03 PM UTC-4, Burkhard wrote:

> *Hemidactylus* wrote:

> > Or return to my unworthy
> > ineptitude in covering Behe's theory of mind chapter. You kinda left Burk
> > and I hanging in the other thread.

> ssssh!! While I'm grateful for John's sacrifice, I've no intention to
> emulate it.

I have no idea what you mean by "John's sacrifice," Burk. John
certainly isn't sacrificing himself for the cause of atheism
by being openly hypocritical, and not caring who knows it.

I'd be severely disillusioned with you if you did emulate
John in that respect, Burk. Are you an atheist yourself, by the way?

> So while he serves as punchbag while Peter has one more of
> his little moments,

Poor baby. There wouldn't have been any punching if John
hadn't hypocritically tried to browbeat me into sticking
to the topic of macroevolution while giving everyone else a
free pass, including himself, to post on anything they
want to post on. [and also hypocritical about my boycott of Erik Simpson,
but that's another story.]

And the supreme irony is, I have more than once praised
talk.origins for (*inter* *alia*) being a place where one can
discuss and debate almost anything, speaking their mind on it
without being censored.

So as long as people do it with integrity, they get a free pass from me.
And so, John's claim that I am my "own worst enemy" for not
hewing to macroevolution is a pure farce.

> we can continue with a proper discussion.....

You get a free pass from both John and me to go on discussing
whatever you want here, Burk.

Nevertheless, I am a bit disappointed that, despite
my invitation to you on the other thread to be helpful
on this one, you chose not to talk about macroevolution or,
indeed, anything germane to the charter of talk.origins.


Yes, Hemi is right up there about my having temporarily left that other
thread. However, you also owe me a reply on that thread. And speaking
of Behe, here is an excerpt from my last reply to you that is being
ignored by you:

_______________________ excerpt with you going first ______________

> >>> Now I happen to also not rate Behe particularly highly, and more
> >>> specifically just don't accept that he has any form of ID theory, but
> >>> that's a different story.
> >>
> >> I'd like to hear more of this story of yours. Since you have no trouble
> >> cranking out 200+ line posts, you should be able to tell me lots.

Did you read any of this, Burkhard? Will the "different story"
go with you to your grave?

================================================ end of excerpt
from
https://groups.google.com/d/msg/talk.origins/xY-_PFiVD_c/IubVdaRkBgAJ
Subject: Re: Sciense lernin
Date: Wed, 27 Mar 2019 12:32:07 -0700 (PDT)
Message-ID: <96181f69-932c-4317...@googlegroups.com>

Now, I do admit to being remiss in replying to YOUR last reply to me.
But it's probably just as well: this weekend was my first
chance to delve deeply into accounts of the nationwide college admissions
scandal. And they cast quite a strong light on some things we were talking
about on that sub-thread. So I will be replying to that post of yours
some time this week.

How high a priority I put on that reply depends in part on how you behave
on this thread, and on whether you plan to reply to the post I have
linked above.


Peter Nyikos
Professor of Mathematics at
the original USC -- standard disclaimer--
http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos/

[Bill Rogers]

On Monday, April 1, 2019 at 10:05:03 AM UTC-4, Alan Kleinman MD PhD wrote:
<snip>

> I'll do the math for any real, measurable and repeatable experiment of rmns (adaptation). It is easy.

<snip>

Great. Glad you are so willing. One of your favorite examples is triple therapy for HIV. You love to ask, "Well why does triple therapy work, even though HIV can develop resistance to a single drug within a week?" And if someone says, HIV triple therapy is not a good model for evolution in nature, because the regimen is designed to kill the virus (unless it got 3 specific mutations all at once) you respond that triple therapy doesn't completely eliminate the virus, it's just that the multiple selection pressures keep it from evolving triple resistance. Just like, in your view, multiple selection pressure in nature would prevent, just for example, reptiles from evolving into birds.

So, since you've offered, please show the math for the HIV triple therapy case. And I mean a real model, not just a binomial calculator for the probability of at least one triple success in N trials.

Take the mutation rate. Estimate the fitnesses for all the possible wt, single double and triple mutants. Set up the equations for how the sizes of the populations of each genotype will change over time, taking into account the sizes of each population, the fitnesses, and the mutation rates. By all means use absolute fitnesses. Set up the equations and solve them. It's easy; you said so yourself. You've got a degree in engineering and you've learned to make mathematical models and run the numbers.

So show us how your model leads to a stable population of virus which persists but in which triple resistance does not arise. And just saying
"Multiplication rule of probabilities" and waving your hands is not a model. Go ahead. You said it was easy.

If you just wave your hands, or tell me to do the problem myself after I've taken a probability course or tell me to go solve malaria, everybody will see that your
"I'll do the math for any real, measurable and repeatable experiment of rmns (adaptation). It is easy." was an empty boast.

[Peter Nyikos]

On Sunday, March 31, 2019 at 3:35:03 PM UTC-4, Bob Casanova wrote:
> On Sat, 30 Mar 2019 18:13:59 -0400, the following appeared
> in talk.origins, posted by Oxyaena <oxy...@baal.hammon>:
>
> >On 3/30/2019 1:33 PM, Bob Casanova wrote:
> >> On Fri, 29 Mar 2019 18:14:22 -0400, the following appeared
> >> in talk.origins, posted by Oxyaena <oxy...@baal.hammon>:
> >>
> >>> In the category of "Truth, Justice, and the American Way"

The sneering addition of "and the American way" underscores
the fact that Oxyaena has no need of truth or justice if
either impacts negatively on her. Shylock, in Shakespeare's
"The Merchant of Venice" comes to mind.

> >>>> I could, but I've got the goods on you above in a way
> >>>> that you are unable to do anything about. It's about time
> >>>> someone gave you your just deserts.
> >>
> >> Dammit, why does no one ever mention *un*just deserts? The
> >> Gobi seems to qualify...
> >>
> >
> >Or Antarctica...
>
> True, although most wouldn't consider Antarctica to be a
> desert, even though it qualifies nicely.

I believe that is true in the strict scientific sense, including
large tracts of Antarctica that are ice-free due to very low
precipitation.

Oxyaena's self-serving attitude towards truth and justice
is clear from the post that precipitated my boycott of
Oxyaena, and of Erik as her accessory both before and after the fact.
Here was my direct reply to it, leaving nothing out:

_________________________ begin included post____________________

On Wednesday, February 27, 2019 at 8:20:16 PM UTC-5, Oxyaena wrote:
> On 2/27/2019 4:52 PM, Peter Nyikos wrote:
> > On Wednesday, February 27, 2019 at 2:51:49 PM UTC-5, Oxyaena wrote:
> >> On 2/27/2019 1:30 PM, Peter Nyikos wrote:
> >> [snip libel]
> >
> > Almost all snips by you have such bogus (and in this case, libelous)
> > claims attached to them. As I wrote in
> > reply to you over in talk.origins:
> >
> > Oxyaena, like Harshman, can't bear to look at herself in a metaphoric
> > mirror, just as the "God" character in "Steambath" couldn't bear to look at
> > himself in a real one.
> >
> >
> >> Point me to where I stated that Wegener was a crackpot.
> >
> > "stated" is a dishonest straw-man word. Read my reply
> > to Erik, whose lead you are blindly following.
>
> Maybe if you didn't have your lying head shoved so far up your ass you
> could actually see daylight.
>
> >
> >
> >> I stated that he
> >> was ridiculed
> >
> > Still blindly following Erik's spin-doctoring.
>
> Spin-doctoring? Here's a repost of the events, kindly provided by Erik:
>
> "<Peter>
>
> The word "science" is misused here. Individual scientists deserve the
> credit. The world of scientists was very much against Wegener, who
> was thought to be a crackpot in great measure because he wasn't
> a professional geologist.
>
> https://groups.google.com/d/msg/sci.bio.paleontology/Jbunj0MWiJY/s90yzwWfGQAJ
>
> <Oxyaena>
>
> No, the biggest reason he was thought to be a crackpot was because he
> provided no working mechanism by which continental drift could have
> occurred by. Tectonics wouldn't be discovered until over three decades
> after his death.
>
> https://groups.google.com/d/msg/sci.bio.paleontology/Jbunj0MWiJY/rReiJnClGQAJ
>
> <erik simpson>
>
> Exactly. The notion of granitic continents plowing their way through
> basaltic
> ocean basins IS absurd. The discovery of tectonic plates resoved the
> difficulty.
>
> https://groups.google.com/d/msg/sci.bio.paleontology/Jbunj0MWiJY/rh7h4rCqGQAJ
>
> <Peter>
>
> You are indulging in speculation here. I seriously doubt that this was
> the MAIN reason he was called a crackpot. If it WAS, then the
> mainstream geologists were ignoramuses where the wider world of
> science was concerned.
>
> https://groups.google.com/d/msg/sci.bio.paleontology/Jbunj0MWiJY/OOdtzFy0GQAJ
>
> <Peter>
>
> Now Oxyaena says, in effect, that Wegener WAS a crackpot for
> a *scientific* reason that she attributes to professional geologists:
>
> <Oxyaena>"
>
>
> >
> >
> >> for not proposing a mechanism,
> >
> > At least you got THAT part right. Erik was too deep into
> > spin-doctoring, so he instead wrote:
> >
> > > was based on the unphysical mechanisms proposed for
> > > "continental drift".
> >
> >
> >> then you started libeling
> >> me by stating I had called him a crackpot.
> >
> > "called him" is your libelous distortion of what
> > I actually wrote.
>
> "Now Oxyaena says, in effect, that Wegener WAS a crackpot for
> a *scientific* reason that she attributes to professional geologists:"
>
> Lying fucker, I should report you to your university, actually I will.
> This has gone on *far* too long.

Ah, is this what you read into Erik's reply
to Hemidactylus about whether there is someone
"higher up" [or words to that effect]?

Keep in mind that you may lose your status as
"a very private person" if you do. And you
have even admitted to freely lying about yourself
in a truly sick way of maintaining that "private
person" status.

In the past, you tried to censor me in talk.origins
by appealing to DIG in a thread whose title
addressed him by name. Jillery said you had no grounds
for it, and you have no legitimate grounds for complaint
now either.

I've weathered worse storms, including a threat to
sue me by one Lynda Wilson, sent to my department
and also posted to talk.abortion where my alleged
"libel" took place. I replied there
that if she tried to sue me, she would not only lose
the lawsuit, but would likely be hit by a counter-suit for
frivolous lawsuit. And I added that anyone supporting
her in talk.abortion might be charged as accessory
after the fact to her lawsuit.

That shut up everyone shedding crocodile tears for her,
and she soon disappeared from talk.abortion and never
returned during the time I was there.

> >> Stop lying and admit to your
> >> fault, or are you too immature to do even *that*?
> >
> > I am mature enough not to emulate the people who "confessed" to crimes they did not commit in the Moscow Show Trials.
>
> You're not the victim here, you lying sack of shit, I AM.

You can't be any sort of victim unless you are foolish
enough to sue me for libel. And then Erik Simpson
would probably be sued as an accessory for frivolous
lawsuit BEFORE the fact.


>
> [snip libel]

You are too "chickenshit" [a word with which you are in love]
even to leave in the words of the alleged libel.


BTW, do you STILL think you don't hate me?


Peter Nyikos

======================================================== end of post
archived at
https://groups.google.com/d/msg/sci.bio.paleontology/sdGjUKuSxZM/wjsVmGjrBgAJ
Date: Fri, 1 Mar 2019 10:41:40 -0800 (PST)
Message-ID: <fc89fcb0-94ea-4fa8...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: Parsimony & Imagination in two newsgroups

[Bill Rogers]

On Monday, April 1, 2019 at 11:25:03 AM UTC-4, Peter Nyikos wrote:
> On Sunday, March 31, 2019 at 3:35:03 PM UTC-4, Bob Casanova wrote:
> > On Sat, 30 Mar 2019 18:13:59 -0400, the following appeared
> > in talk.origins, posted by Oxyaena <oxy...@baal.hammon>:
> >
> > >On 3/30/2019 1:33 PM, Bob Casanova wrote:
> > >> On Fri, 29 Mar 2019 18:14:22 -0400, the following appeared
> > >> in talk.origins, posted by Oxyaena <oxy...@baal.hammon>:
> > >>
> > >>> In the category of "Truth, Justice, and the American Way"
>
> The sneering addition of "and the American way" underscores
> the fact that Oxyaena has no need of truth or justice if
> either impacts negatively on her.

Either that, or it was just a quotation from the opening of the old Superman TV show.