Darwin of the Gaps

[peter2...@gmail.com]

This is the one-size-fits-all, totally unfalsifiable "explanation"
for any and all biological phenomena:

"Well, it's natural selection, y'know. Those _________ that were/had/did ___________
had a survival advantage over those who weren't/hadn't/didn't, and thus
they are the ones we see today."

The main weakness of this counterpart of "God of the Gaps" is that it does
nothing to explain how the "Those/ones" ever got to the point where they
"were/had/did _____________." This is partly because "natural selection" puts
the ones with the survival advantage in the same interbreeding population
as the ones without it. See:

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

Natural selection commits evolutionary biologists to a gradualist view of the way
evolution progresses. It also makes it clear that tenable hypotheses for how
a creature *might* have evolved entail an evolutionary sequence with few or no maladaptive steps,
and only a small percentage of neutral ones.


This brings up one of my favorite evolutionary mysteries: by what *tenable* intermediate
steps *might* bats have evolved under that constraint? Fossils are of no help here.
We lack *any* intermediate fossils between fully terrestrial mammals
and essentially modern bats. The excitement that greeted the
discovery of a fossil bat which (*gasp*) had claws at the end of its
long wing digits only serves to show how starved we are for ideas.


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

[jillery]

On Fri, 9 Dec 2022 17:54:57 -0800 (PST), "peter2...@gmail.com"
<peter2...@gmail.com> wrote:

>This is the one-size-fits-all, totally unfalsifiable "explanation"
>for any and all biological phenomena:
>
>"Well, it's natural selection, y'know. Those _________ that were/had/did ___________
>had a survival advantage over those who weren't/hadn't/didn't, and thus
>they are the ones we see today."
>
>The main weakness of this counterpart of "God of the Gaps" is that it does
>nothing to explain how the "Those/ones" ever got to the point where they
>"were/had/did _____________." This is partly because "natural selection" puts
>the ones with the survival advantage in the same interbreeding population
>as the ones without it. See:
>
>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_selection

You assert above a PRATT which is also a false equivalence. Do you
deny the existence of heritable variation in populations? If not, do
you deny that different heritable variations are more and less
beneficial in different environments? If not, that would explain how
populations "got to that point". Not sure how you *still* don't
understand this.

The above isn't remotely similar to GOTG. A designer deity wouldn't
be required to limit itself to variations of existing forms; it could
have "poofed" rabbits in the Cambrian. Instead, the fossil record
shows exactly what is expected from unguided rm/ns, OR from a God who
arbitrarily decided to make it look like it was from unguided rm/ns.

>Natural selection commits evolutionary biologists to a gradualist view of the way
>evolution progresses. It also makes it clear that tenable hypotheses for how
>a creature *might* have evolved entail an evolutionary sequence with few or no maladaptive steps,
>and only a small percentage of neutral ones.
>
>
>This brings up one of my favorite evolutionary mysteries: by what *tenable* intermediate
>steps *might* bats have evolved under that constraint? Fossils are of no help here.
>We lack *any* intermediate fossils between fully terrestrial mammals
>and essentially modern bats. The excitement that greeted the
>discovery of a fossil bat which (*gasp*) had claws at the end of its
>long wing digits only serves to show how starved we are for ideas.

You conveniently neglected to specify your meaning of "tenable", and
why you think the standard explanation is UN-"tenable". You also
conveniently neglected to specify what it is about bat evolution that
you find UN-"tenable".

By your own words, what your post lacks isn't ideas, but data, and
clear writing.

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

[Lawyer Daggett]

On Friday, December 9, 2022 at 8:55:16 PM UTC-5, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> This is the one-size-fits-all, totally unfalsifiable "explanation"
> for any and all biological phenomena:
>
> "Well, it's natural selection, y'know. Those _________ that were/had/did ___________
> had a survival advantage over those who weren't/hadn't/didn't, and thus
> they are the ones we see today."
>
> The main weakness of this counterpart of "God of the Gaps" is that it does
> nothing to explain how the "Those/ones" ever got to the point where they
> "were/had/did _____________." This is partly because "natural selection" puts
> the ones with the survival advantage in the same interbreeding population
> as the ones without it. See:
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_selection
>
> Natural selection commits evolutionary biologists to a gradualist view of the way
> evolution progresses. It also makes it clear that tenable hypotheses for how
> a creature *might* have evolved entail an evolutionary sequence with few or no maladaptive steps,
> and only a small percentage of neutral ones.

This turn of phrase of yours hasn't, in my view, improved with age.
There is an aspect in which it seems to be used as a whataboutism. That's
rather sour rhetoric but the challenges continue.

Let's begin with the broad implication of parallels between God of the Gaps
and Darwin of the Gaps. They seem to fail right out of the box. God of the Gaps
is a tagline for those arguments that proport to either support the existence of
a role for a god in those things for which we don't have a robust explanation of
a non-supernation nature. And in an allied way, the tag covers the argument
that there must be a god because it is needed to fulfill those roles, do those jobs.

In the most literal sense, nobody is asserting evidence for Charles Darwin's
existence is found in gaps of the evidence of transitions through Natural History.
And at the same time, nobody asserts that evidence for evolution exists in the
gaps in detailed understanding of the transitions from ancestor populations
to their descendants. The X of the Gaps doesn't work. In contrast, the Designer
of the Gaps seems to fit the form, as some assert a role for, and/or the existence
of a designer based upon gaps.

Well of course you don't mean Charles Darwin, you mean something else.
But what? Darwinism? That doesn't fit either. It doesn't fit if you upgrade to
neo-Darwinism or 'current evolutionary theory'. There's a semantic mismatch.
Causes, effects, subjects, logical flow ... they don't sync up, just like so
very many whataboutisms.

What is it you are invoking with your tagline?

It seems your actual complaint is that people accept a just so story in seemingly
unthinking ways. Even from the beginning, Darwin's theory was greatly lacking in
the "how", even if there was enough of the puzzle visible to propose a compelling
general account of how living things have changed over many generations.

In part, this complaint is valid. Many biologists agree. You can tell a plausible
sounding story about giraffe necks or zebra stripes and your audience will not
only believe you, they will happily believe you and indulge in the fantasy that
they authentically understand something. They'll use that knowledge/understanding
as a foundation for their next round of believing, and so erect a flimsy house.
It's not robust.

However, it doesn't fit this "Darwin of the Gaps" label. But the problem goes
beyond this literary criticism of the label. I can think of two particular problems
although I'm sure there are more that will come to me later.

First, how much does it matter if proto-giraffe populations subsequently developed
longer necks as an adaption to feed from higher in the brush canopy versus
if it was sexual selection for a dominant bull controlling a harem? Or how important
is it to know the fine genetic details controlling the many allied changes that
have produced the various species of giraffes from their comparatively common
looking ancestors? Is there really some significant problem here related to
an acceptance that such a transition is well within the capabilities of evolution
as it is understood by biologists? I don't think so.

And for the second point, let's stick with giraffes. Research looks into the genomes
(I'm doing a just-so of sorts here as a hypothetical rather than look at how
much is currently known). Say research detects a duplication of a hox gene,
some genes that have been relocated to other chromosomes, upregulation of
some mRNAs, down regulation of others, changes to a few growth hormones
and growth hormone receptors, and some changes in prevailing methylation
patterns around some of these indicated genes.

The way you seem to be telling things, we then need to provide a detailed
scenario that accounts for each of these observations, with some attached
evidence of stepwise adaptive advantages to those changes. If we don't
you seem to think we have a problem that the theory of evolution fails to
account for. Perhaps you wouldn't, but so many others seem to like to look
at an end result as a target and then go back and try to calculate a probability
that an ancestor population could get to that specific target with those
specific changes. I'll assume you wouldn't make such an obvious blunder
and then propose that the obtuse calculation producing a misleading
improbability was in some way evidence for a designer. And yet, that seems
to be beneath your complaint with your (misbegotten?) label of Darwin
of the Gaps. People who aren't especially troubled by the lack of a detailed
pathway of changes are accused of sloppily waving their hands and invoking
evolution, which you shoe-horn into a cartoonishly simplistic hyper-adaptionist
model that you assert has to be shown for a detailed path of intermediates.

That last bit is an assertion you share with Behe, and it's an absurdity.
Further, it's an absurdity that you use to assert your Designer of the Gaps
as a promoted alternative because of incomplete documentation of a
detailed evolutionary pathway.

Is your assertion that such gaps are relevant reasonable?
What significance is there to a failure to produce a detailed pathway for
how proto-giraffes evolved into modern giraffes, showing incremental
adaptive advantages at multiple stages of the transformation?

Or what is the significance of not developing a just so story? Does
a failure to produce such a pathway imply a problem for the theory of
evolution? You repeatedly suggest it does, and when one isn't forthcoming
invoke that lack as implying a role for intervention by a designer. That is
at least what I can distill from scattered arguments, delivered in fragments,
omitting bits here and there for some cryptic reason that requires you
to sometimes just "hint" at what you're thinking, and buried in a sea of
interpersonal invective which, if measured by volume, seems your
main purpose in this newsgroup.

Repeating somewhat, you invoke this Darwin of the Gaps as a sort
of short-hand for some of the arguments above, but it isn't clear which
ones (and likely I'm misrepresenting some of your intent but that's all
part of the problem of your intent not being clear).

[jillery]

On Fri, 9 Dec 2022 23:42:51 -0800 (PST), Lawyer Daggett
<j.nobel...@gmail.com> wrote:

>Repeating somewhat, you invoke this Darwin of the Gaps as a sort
>of short-hand for some of the arguments above, but it isn't clear which
>ones (and likely I'm misrepresenting some of your intent but that's all
>part of the problem of your intent not being clear).

ISTM PWP should refer to his DP as "LGM of the Gaps".

[Mark Isaak]

Spoken like an ardent creationist.

If I find a gum wrapper by a trail in the park, should I assume a person
dropped it nearby, or that God created a gum wrapper there? Since I see
no other people around and have no hope of discovering who dropped it,
you, presumably, would favor the creation by God option.

Same with bat evolution. Should we assume it occurred via natural
selection -- a mechanism which is known to operate in bats, and which is
known to be extremely effective at producing major adaptive change -- or
should we assume it was done by a god just because we don't have all the
details?

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

[Burkhard]

Based on all the evidence you supply, I would infer that a vampire was
having a quiet chew, when he suddenly turned into 62 bats (sudden loss
of opposable thumbs let him drop the wrapper, otherwise vampires are
fastidious to the point of obsession cleaning up after themselves)

[Glenn]

On Saturday, December 10, 2022 at 10:25:16 AM UTC-7, Mark Isaak wrote:
> On 12/9/22 5:54 PM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> > This is the one-size-fits-all, totally unfalsifiable "explanation"
> > for any and all biological phenomena:
> >
> > "Well, it's natural selection, y'know. Those _________ that were/had/did ___________
> > had a survival advantage over those who weren't/hadn't/didn't, and thus
> > they are the ones we see today."
> >
> > The main weakness of this counterpart of "God of the Gaps" is that it does
> > nothing to explain how the "Those/ones" ever got to the point where they
> > "were/had/did _____________." This is partly because "natural selection" puts
> > the ones with the survival advantage in the same interbreeding population
> > as the ones without it. See:
> >
> > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_selection
> >
> > Natural selection commits evolutionary biologists to a gradualist view of the way
> > evolution progresses. It also makes it clear that tenable hypotheses for how
> > a creature *might* have evolved entail an evolutionary sequence with few or no maladaptive steps,
> > and only a small percentage of neutral ones.
> >
> >
> > This brings up one of my favorite evolutionary mysteries: by what *tenable* intermediate
> > steps *might* bats have evolved under that constraint? Fossils are of no help here.
> > We lack *any* intermediate fossils between fully terrestrial mammals
> > and essentially modern bats. The excitement that greeted the
> > discovery of a fossil bat which (*gasp*) had claws at the end of its
> > long wing digits only serves to show how starved we are for ideas.
> Spoken like an ardent creationist.

Spoken by an "ardent" atheist evolutionist:

>
> If I find a gum wrapper by a trail in the park, should I assume a person
> dropped it nearby, or that God created a gum wrapper there? Since I see
> no other people around and have no hope of discovering who dropped it,
> you, presumably, would favor the creation by God option.
>

Because of the location of the gum wrapper? There is something wrong with your head.

You should assume the gum wrapper was intelligently designed, and since the designer is known, created by Man. Being a science guy, you should also realize the knowledge exists
that gum wrappers are sometimes blown by wind or some other event that cause it to move from where it was "dropped". Who dropped it is irrelevant to who created it.

[peter2...@gmail.com]

All Mark is doing here is showing how paranoid he is about me.
He's already done that with his utterly ridiculous and totally unsupported,
yea perverse, charge that I am a fascist.

> > If I find a gum wrapper by a trail in the park, should I assume a person
> > dropped it nearby, or that God created a gum wrapper there? Since I see
> > no other people around and have no hope of discovering who dropped it,
> > you, presumably, would favor the creation by God option.

Glenn has disposed of this idiotic attempt at analogy, and I expect
you, Burk, to be helpless at helping Mark out.

<snip to get to your words, Burk>

> Based on all the evidence you supply, I would infer that a vampire was
> having a quiet chew, when he suddenly turned into 62 bats (sudden loss
> of opposable thumbs let him drop the wrapper, otherwise vampires are
> fastidious to the point of obsession cleaning up after themselves)

I've supplied plenty of evidence in the past. You are trying to goad me into
doing 300+ line OP's that no one except people in adversarial roles like yours
will bother to look at closely. Mark and jillery are both pushing me
in that direction and will not cease until they've added another 300+ apiece to that.

Moreover, the three of you are also discouraging less militant anti-ID regulars from
participating by your dishonestly condescending screeds. Only Glenn, who is
opposed to all three of you, has had the backbone to call one of you (Mark Isaak) out
on the idiotic "analogy" that I left in the text up above. Deal with Glenn's demolition if you can.

But even Glenn hasn't found the most potent weapons against Mark. I'll show some
of them later today, but I have pressing family obligations until early this afternoon.


Rest assured I will thoroughly back up everything in the OP, in due time. As I keep telling
troublemakers like yourself: the mills of justice grind slowly, but they grind exceeding fine.

[The famous saying I am paraphrasing had "God" where I had "justice," but the
unabashed atheist jillery would just laugh at it, and so would you and Mark Isaak,
but the three of you still have to pay lip service to the concept of justice.]

Peter Nyikos

[erik simpson]

You suffer from what I heard described as "male answer syndrome": "If you don't know,
don't just stand there. Make something up." Fossils are no help? It's true that bat fossils
are few and far between, for obvious reasons. So what to do? What do you do? This is
another of your enignamic (secretive?) hints at something. Have you made something up,
or are you content to hope for new discoveries that might clarify matters? You clearly aren't
out there looking for the fossils.

[Mark Isaak]

Peter wrote nothing to address my argument. In fact, he deliberately
avoided it by snipping it out. I'll take that to mean he found it
irrefutable.

[Lawyer Daggett]

Maybe he's just shy.

[jillery]

The whooshing sound you hear is from Isaak's point flying over your
head. It's remarkable how you parrot Creationist PRATTs and claim to
be victimized by unabashed atheists while completely missing/ignoring
what everybody actually wrote.

>He's already done that with his utterly ridiculous and totally unsupported,
>yea perverse, charge that I am a fascist.
>
>
>> > If I find a gum wrapper by a trail in the park, should I assume a person
>> > dropped it nearby, or that God created a gum wrapper there? Since I see
>> > no other people around and have no hope of discovering who dropped it,
>> > you, presumably, would favor the creation by God option.
>
>Glenn has disposed of this idiotic attempt at analogy, and I expect
>you, Burk, to be helpless at helping Mark out.
>
><snip to get to your words, Burk>
>
>> Based on all the evidence you supply, I would infer that a vampire was
>> having a quiet chew, when he suddenly turned into 62 bats (sudden loss
>> of opposable thumbs let him drop the wrapper, otherwise vampires are
>> fastidious to the point of obsession cleaning up after themselves)
>
>
>I've supplied plenty of evidence in the past. You are trying to goad me into
>doing 300+ line OP's that no one except people in adversarial roles like yours
>will bother to look at closely. Mark and jillery are both pushing me
>in that direction and will not cease until they've added another 300+ apiece to that.

So your posts filled with transparent obfuscating spam is everybody's
fault but yours? That your post here is filled with baseless
self-serving claims and asinine ad hominems shows otherwise.

>Moreover, the three of you are also discouraging less militant anti-ID regulars from
>participating by your dishonestly condescending screeds. Only Glenn, who is
>opposed to all three of you, has had the backbone to call one of you (Mark Isaak) out
>on the idiotic "analogy" that I left in the text up above. Deal with Glenn's demolition if you can.
>
>But even Glenn hasn't found the most potent weapons against Mark. I'll show some
>of them later today, but I have pressing family obligations until early this afternoon.
>
>
>Rest assured I will thoroughly back up everything in the OP, in due time. As I keep telling
>troublemakers like yourself: the mills of justice grind slowly, but they grind exceeding fine.
>
>[The famous saying I am paraphrasing had "God" where I had "justice," but the
>unabashed atheist jillery would just laugh at it, and so would you and Mark Isaak,
>but the three of you still have to pay lip service to the concept of justice.]
>
>Peter Nyikos

Yes, go ahead and show what justice has to do with your OP. That will
take up at least 300+ lines of transparent obfuscating noise all by
itself.

[peter2...@gmail.com]

On Saturday, December 10, 2022 at 12:25:16 PM UTC-5, Mark Isaak wrote:
> On 12/9/22 5:54 PM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> > This is the one-size-fits-all, totally unfalsifiable "explanation"
> > for any and all biological phenomena:
> >
> > "Well, it's natural selection, y'know. Those _________ that were/had/did ___________
> > had a survival advantage over those who weren't/hadn't/didn't, and thus
> > they are the ones we see today."
> >
> > The main weakness of this counterpart of "God of the Gaps" is that it does
> > nothing to explain how the "Those/ones" ever got to the point where they
> > "were/had/did _____________." This is partly because "natural selection" puts
> > the ones with the survival advantage in the same interbreeding population
> > as the ones without it. See:
> >
> > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_selection
> >
> > Natural selection commits evolutionary biologists to a gradualist view of the way
> > evolution progresses. It also makes it clear that tenable hypotheses for how
> > a creature *might* have evolved entail an evolutionary sequence with few or no maladaptive steps,
> > and only a small percentage of neutral ones.
> >
> >
> > This brings up one of my favorite evolutionary mysteries: by what *tenable* intermediate
> > steps *might* bats have evolved under that constraint? Fossils are of no help here.
> > We lack *any* intermediate fossils between fully terrestrial mammals
> > and essentially modern bats. The excitement that greeted the
> > discovery of a fossil bat which (*gasp*) had claws at the end of its
> > long wing digits only serves to show how starved we are for ideas.

Burkhard only t.o. regular who can make you, Mark Isaak, look good
in comparison where evolutionary biology is concerned. I told him a bit
about the paranoia that your opening salvo represents:

> Spoken like an ardent creationist.

You are just revealing how functionally illiterate you are with this taunt.
Everything I wrote is in perfect harmony with what Stephen Jay Gould
wrote in Essays 17 and 18 in _The_Panda's_Thumb_. Do you know enough
about this book or Gould not to confuse this with _People_and_Pandas?

Here's a little teaser from Essay 18:

"Thomas Henry Huxley divided the two issues of natural selection and gradualism and warned Darwin that his strict and unwarranted adherence to gradualism might undermine his entire system. The fossil record with its abrupt transitions offers no support for gradual change, and the principle of natural selection does not require it -- selection can operate rapidly. Yet the unnecessary link that Darwin forged became a central tenet of the synthetic theory." -- *op* *cit* pp. 187 - 188

"the synthetic theory" to which Gould refers is The Modern Synthesis, a.k.a. neo-Darwinism.
Erik Simpson, who flattered you in a way that smacks of what jillery calls "tag-team" membership [1]
at least knows more about fossils than you do, and will get elaborations on the second sentence
in the above quote. And I believe that jillery [2] is slightly less a victim of Dunning-Kruger Effect
than you are, and [s]he/they will hear more about the whole quote.

[1] Not to be confused with "strange bedfellows". There is nothing strange about
you and Erik being bedfellows, nothing whatsoever. It's perfectly in character for both of you.

[2] I'm not forgetting how jillery did the tag-team bit for you and Burkhard, prostituting her
integrity by flaming ME for MY not immediately refuting everything you wrote here,
but lacking the backbone and/or knowledge to tackle Glenn's dismantling of the
paragraph from you that immediately follows:

> If I find a gum wrapper by a trail in the park, should I assume a person
> dropped it nearby, or that God created a gum wrapper there? Since I see
> no other people around and have no hope of discovering who dropped it,
> you, presumably, would favor the creation by God option.

"presumably" is libelous. Until you reply directly to Glenn's dismantling
of the preceding paragraph or get someone pinch hitting for you to do
it, there is no point in my indulging in overkill by addressing its pathetically
clueless content.

> Same with bat evolution. Should we assume it occurred via natural
> selection

Go ahead and assume it, relying fully on "Darwin of the Gaps."
I don't expect you to explain *how* it could possibly
have happened in the way specified by me:

[repeated from above:]
> > Natural selection ... makes it clear that tenable hypotheses for how

> > a creature *might* have evolved entail an evolutionary sequence with few or no maladaptive steps,
> > and only a small percentage of neutral ones.

> -- a mechanism which is known to operate in bats, and which is
> known to be extremely effective at producing major adaptive change

Not known in the case of bats evolving from animals whose fossil record
is as meager I described. [3] Not even Gould tackled it, despite his
essay in another book on whale evolution. Even there, no one tried
to envision the intermediate states until they were found. And whales
never were as great an obstacle to tenable hypotheses as bats are.


[3] I'd be more specific, but you are too clueless to make it worth the time.
Erik is the best of the sorry lot who have responded to me so far, so
unless his role model John Harshman shows up, he'll the one to do it for.

>-- or
> should we assume it was done by a god just because we don't have all the
> details?

"don't have all the details" is the Dunning-Kruger Effect talking through you again.
By its "making a worm cast [4] out of a mountain" nature, you show again
what a near-nonentity you are wrt biological evolutionary theory.

[4] "making a molehill out of a mountain" would be too generous to you.

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

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

[Mark Isaak]

Again: WE KNOW NATURAL SELECTION OCCURS IN BATS. (I suspect that "We"
includes even you.)

Again: WE KNOW NATURAL SELECTION IS EFFECTIVE -- i.e., adaptive and
powerful. (That "We" may or may not include you. It's a fact
nevertheless.)

You want, effectively, to REJECT THOSE FACTS and go with the best
explanation being something that has no facts whatsoever to recommend
it. That sounds remarkably stupid, and I, for one, want none of it.

[3] Not even Gould tackled it, despite his
> essay in another book on whale evolution. Even there, no one tried
> to envision the intermediate states until they were found. And whales
> never were as great an obstacle to tenable hypotheses as bats are.
>
>
> [3] I'd be more specific, but you are too clueless to make it worth the time.
> Erik is the best of the sorry lot who have responded to me so far, so
> unless his role model John Harshman shows up, he'll the one to do it for.
>
>> -- or
>> should we assume it was done by a god just because we don't have all the
>> details?
>
> "don't have all the details" is the Dunning-Kruger Effect talking through you again.
> By its "making a worm cast [4] out of a mountain" nature, you show again
> what a near-nonentity you are wrt biological evolutionary theory.
>
> [4] "making a molehill out of a mountain" would be too generous to you.

Nothing else in your logorrhea deserves response.

[peter2...@gmail.com]

Erik is a habitual bottom-poster. Here, as in the majority of posts where
he butts into back-and-forth between me and his congenial bedfellows,
he acts as though he were totally oblivious to what his bedfellows
[in this case, Mark Isaak and Burkhard] are doing. In this way, he illustrates
how bottom-posting facilitates sophistry and polemic and propaganda.

> > > > Spoken like an ardent creationist.

> > All Mark is doing here is showing how paranoid he is about me.
> > He's already done that with his utterly ridiculous and totally unsupported,
> > yea perverse, charge that I am a fascist.

Strictly speaking, Mark was doing even more: he was showing
how functionally illiterate he is in evolutionary biology,
since by the same standards, Stephen Jay Gould wrote like an ardent creationist
about the same topics. But Erik was not to know that when he
wrote the post to which I am replying: I only told that later to Mark himself.

Now I get to your words, Erik:

> You suffer from what I heard described as "male answer syndrome": "If you don't know,
> don't just stand there. Make something up."

You either don't know what male answer syndrome is, or you are consciously
projecting it on to me. Which is it?

Your role model, John Harshman, accused me of "sea lioning" earlier this year,
and the exact same words apply to his accusation.


> Fossils are no help?

Not at this stage, and so you resort to obfuscation to make light of this issue:

> It's true that bat fossils
> are few and far between, for obvious reasons.

You are evading the issue, you goalpost-mover. Here is what I wrote:

[repeated from *far* above:]

> > > >> We lack *any* intermediate fossils between fully terrestrial mammals
> > > >> and essentially modern bats.

THAT is the issue from which you are running like a scared rabbit.


And when I say "fully terrestrial" I mean totally lacking in patagia (gliding or flight membranes,
in case the word is unfamiliar to you). True, their existence has been conjectured in the Paleocene
dermopteran *Planetetherium*, but there are no fossils showing one.

But the main problem with it as a bat relative is that it would upend the generally accepted
mammalian tree, which puts bats into Scrotifera (Ferungulata + Chiroptera) rather than Euarchontiglires, of which Dermoptera is one of the orders. My order Primates is another.

So is your order, Lagomorpha. :) :)

> So what to do? What do you do?

Wrong tense. It is something I already did back some time in 1996 - 2001, and I tried
to use a sexual selection hypothesis to get around the maladaptive-looking intermediate
stages bat evolution seemed to call for. But your kindred spirit PZ Myers jeered at the idea,
and the only person who took it seriously was someone who claimed that sexual selection
involves sexual dimorphism, which bats don't have.

Needless to say, they couldn't come up with a maladaptive-stage-free hypothesis
for how it *might* have happened, and apparently, neither can you.


And, to hide this inability, you turned to personal insults above.
Below, you use a perennial scam by you and Harshman, a pair of loaded questions,
and an asinine comment to further hide it.

> This is another of your enignamic (secretive?) hints at something.

Liar. You and Harshman have made a scam out of using the word "hints" to
refer to straightforward, easily understood statements:

[repeated from *far* above, thanks to your bottom-posting:]
> > > >> Natural selection ... makes it clear that tenable hypotheses

> > > >> for how a creature *might* have evolved entail an evolutionary sequence with
> > > >> few or no maladaptive steps, and only a small percentage of neutral ones.

...

> > > >> This brings up one of my favorite evolutionary mysteries: by what *tenable* intermediate
> > > >> steps *might* bats have evolved under that constraint? Fossils are of no help here.
> > > >> We lack *any* intermediate fossils between fully terrestrial mammals
> > > >> and essentially modern bats.

> Have you made something up,
> or are you content to hope for new discoveries that might clarify matters?

Loaded questions, that count your chickens before they hatch.


Your asinine comment deserves a separate post, and you will get
one soon after I see that this post has appeared.

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

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

[peter2...@gmail.com]

On Monday, December 12, 2022 at 11:30:18 AM UTC-5, erik simpson wrote:

> Fossils are no help? It's true that bat fossils
> are few and far between, for obvious reasons.

As I wrote in my first reply to you, you are shamelessly confusing the issue
where fossils are concerned. There are NO fossils of proto-bats, and it is
they, not bats, whose fossils are the issue.

Mark may have been inspired by you to double down on confusing the issue
of what kind of "bat evolution" is being talked about.


<snip of things dealt with in first reply>

> You clearly aren't
> out there looking for the fossils.

Stop pandering to lurkers and regulars who haven't a clue as to how hard it is to find
fossils that are far more common than bat fossils, even in lagerstatten
that are ideal for finding them. I do believe Mark Isaak and Burkhard Schaefer
are two of the regulars to whom you are pandering in this way.

You know better: you are an avid fossil hunter, judging from the thread you began
in sci.bio.paleontology earlier this year:

Possible fossil?
https://groups.google.com/g/sci.bio.paleontology/c/PVBo-oVY13c

It was in an Ediacaran formation, and was probably a concretion by the comments
you got and made, but it would have been very exciting if it had been real,
though not as exciting as a discovery of something intermediate between
a colugo-like bat ancestor and the most primitive bat known from fossils.

I made a suggestion myself about what kind of organism it might have been,
if it had been a genuine fossil:

https://groups.google.com/g/sci.bio.paleontology/c/PVBo-oVY13c/m/HbiYlzkABQAJ
Re: Possible fossil?
Sep 5, 2022, 5:55:22 PM

Y'all decided it wasn't what I suggested, but at least I tried to help.

It comes no surprise, none whatsoever, that helping to solve any mystery that interests me
is the opposite of what you are doing here and have been doing for over three years now.

Peter Nyikos
Professor, Dept. of Mathematics

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

[peter2...@gmail.com]

"Screaming" generalities that I've known since my middle school days
is not going to do anything for your functional illiteracy where evolutionary theory is concerned.
I'll try and put a drop in the bucket below to alleviate it, but I'm afraid the significance of the drop
(by which I mean the passage from _The_Panda's_Thumb_ below) will go over your head.

For one thing, it looks like the words "the case of bats evolving from animals..." went over
your head the way similar words seemed to go over Erik's head. See what I wrote
to him if what I am saying here is still way over your head [keyword: "proto-bats"].

>
> Again: WE KNOW NATURAL SELECTION IS EFFECTIVE -- i.e., adaptive and
> powerful.

True in the case of light and dark moths and a number of other microevolutionary
experiments, but it is powerless to give anyone here except me hints
as to how it might be applied to the mega-evolutionary example of proto-bats.

>(That "We" may or may not include you. It's a fact
> nevertheless.)

(My preceding paragraph may or may not go over your head; to see which is true,
look at what I wrote in reply to Erik, starting at
`And when I say "fully terrestrial," I mean totally lacking in patagia...')

> You want, effectively, to REJECT THOSE FACTS

So did Stephen Jay Gould, who went beyond such excruciatingly
elementary facts (read: generalities) and got into specifics
that you don't hint at because you are blissfully unaware of them.

"Even though we have no direct evidence for smooth transitions, can we invent a reasonable sequence of intermediate forms -- that is, viable, functioning organisms -- between ancestors and descendants in major structutal transitions?
... On the island of Mauritius, former home of the dodo, two genera of boid snakes (a large group that includes pythons and boa constrictors) share a feature present in no other terrestrial vertebrate: the maxillary bone of the upper jaw is split into front and rear halves, connected by a movable joint. In 1970, my friend Tom Frazzetta published a paper entitled "From Hopeful Monsters to Bolyerine snakes?" He considered every preadaptive possibility he could imagine and rejected them in favor of discontinuous transition. How can a jawbone be half broken?
-- _The_Panda's_Thumb_, "Return of the Hopeful Monster" (Essay 18), p. 189


<snip of utterly baseless speculation about me>

> [3] Not even Gould tackled it, despite his
> > essay in another book on whale evolution. Even there, no one tried
> > to envision the intermediate states until they were found. And whales
> > never were as great an obstacle to tenable hypotheses as bats are.

Gould did, however, have what he believed to be a solution to the puzzle he posed
in the p. 189 passage I quoted just now. However, it only involved one evolutionary
step, while the transition from a hypothetical colugo-like ancestor to the most primitive bat
of which we have fossils requires several such steps.

I doubt that you ever cracked open a copy of _The_Panda's_Thumb_, and
I doubt that you will ever want to, so I will reveal the meaning of "such steps"
to someone else on this thread, who might even know what the word "colugo" means.

> > Erik is the best of the sorry lot who have responded to me so far, so
> > unless his role model John Harshman shows up, he'll the one to do it for.
> >
> >> -- or
> >> should we assume it was done by a god just because we don't have all the
> >> details?
> >
> > "don't have all the details" is the Dunning-Kruger Effect talking through you again.
> > By its "making a worm cast [4] out of a mountain" nature, you show again
> > what a near-nonentity you are wrt biological evolutionary theory.
> >
> > [4] "making a molehill out of a mountain" would be too generous to you.

> Nothing else in your logorrhea deserves response.

I see that, contrary to my initial expectations, you are working the opposite side
of the "goading into doing 300+ line OP's" street from your bedfellow Burkhard.
But it's all part of the intellectual prostitute game the two of you play.

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

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

[Öö Tiib]

This is combo of two refuted claims like "mousetrap can't evolve in simple
steps" and "animal with half of an eye is pointless". It all is just denial of
literally endless obvious ways how things can evolve. Also there are zero
explanations what compete ... what supposedly happened. Were bats
originally created? When? Where? Talking about how bad people are is
irrelevant as lack of such explanation can't be their fault.

[peter2...@gmail.com]

I had hoped, Mr. Tiib, that a man of Finno-Ugric background like yourself
would have more common sense, or at least a very different way
of looking at issues, than the Western European/USA jerks who have
been posting to this thread. And for years, there seemed to be a lot of
hope for that.

But in this post, you are bereft of these qualities, and are thus unlike even
Leopoldo Perdomo (a.k.a. eridanus). Part of the explanation for his
greater common sense may have been that, though Western European, he
was from an area with a very different background, and showed it.
[This was the Iberian Peninsula, which went through the longest war
in history by far: the Reconquista, 7 times as long as the Hundred Years' War.]

You are ignoring almost everything due to me above, Mr. Tiib. Are you, perhaps,
blindly following what you've seen the others (except Glenn) deceptively claiming about me?

> This is combo of two refuted claims like "mousetrap can't evolve in simple
> steps" and "animal with half of an eye is pointless".

You are trying to put a square peg of ID into the round hole
of the literal meaning of EVERYTHING I've posted to this thread so far.

Don't you realize that the "combo" to which you refer is a figment of
your imagination? that you are, in effect, dragging the good name
of Stephen Jay Gould into this imaginary "combo" of yours?
Your "half an eye" is a parody of his "half a broken jaw", and THIS
much should be obvious to you if you actually READ what he
had written before that remark.

> It all is just denial of
> literally endless obvious ways how things can evolve.

Not obvious for the terrestrial-to-flying mammal transition.
You are jumping into a thread in which you haven't tried to
understand the posts I have done so far. That is obvious
from this obviously clueless claim about "obvious"ness.

Not one of the "obvious" ways has ever been applied to the visualizing
of *possible* proto-bats that could have been intermediates in
talk.origins so far. But I aim to remedy that this week,
by showing how the best published scenario I've ever seen
by a scientist seems to have two steps which are maladaptive.

>Also there are zero explanations what compete ... what supposedly happened.

I told Erik of one: sexual selection of otherwise maladaptive stages. I am
working on a completely different one, but I'd like to see whether
anyone else here cares enough about science to try to come up with one.
That includes Glenn, to whom your next question should be directed.

> Were bats originally created? When? Where? Talking about how bad people are is
> irrelevant as lack of such explanation can't be their fault.

It's relevant to the extent that either (1) they don't give a damn about the
science that is involved, or (2) are too inept at the relevant biology AND
try to cover either their unscientific attitude or their ineptitude in
a dishonest way.

You seem to be tempted to be like them. Please try to resist the temptation.

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

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

[jillery]

On Mon, 12 Dec 2022 12:15:54 -0800 (PST), "peter2...@gmail.com"
<peter2...@gmail.com> wrote the second installment of his 300+
lines of transparent obfuscating noise:

>On Saturday, December 10, 2022 at 12:25:16 PM UTC-5, Mark Isaak wrote:
>> On 12/9/22 5:54 PM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
>> > This is the one-size-fits-all, totally unfalsifiable "explanation"
>> > for any and all biological phenomena:
>> >
>> > "Well, it's natural selection, y'know. Those _________ that were/had/did ___________
>> > had a survival advantage over those who weren't/hadn't/didn't, and thus
>> > they are the ones we see today."
>> >
>> > The main weakness of this counterpart of "God of the Gaps" is that it does
>> > nothing to explain how the "Those/ones" ever got to the point where they
>> > "were/had/did _____________." This is partly because "natural selection" puts
>> > the ones with the survival advantage in the same interbreeding population
>> > as the ones without it. See:
>> >
>> > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_selection
>> >
>> > Natural selection commits evolutionary biologists to a gradualist view of the way
>> > evolution progresses. It also makes it clear that tenable hypotheses for how
>> > a creature *might* have evolved entail an evolutionary sequence with few or no maladaptive steps,
>> > and only a small percentage of neutral ones.
>> >
>> >
>> > This brings up one of my favorite evolutionary mysteries: by what *tenable* intermediate
>> > steps *might* bats have evolved under that constraint? Fossils are of no help here.
>> > We lack *any* intermediate fossils between fully terrestrial mammals
>> > and essentially modern bats. The excitement that greeted the
>> > discovery of a fossil bat which (*gasp*) had claws at the end of its
>> > long wing digits only serves to show how starved we are for ideas.

<snip obfuscating noise for focus>

>>Spoken like an ardent creationist.
>>

>>If I find a gum wrapper by a trail in the park, should I assume a person
>>dropped it nearby, or that God created a gum wrapper there? Since I see
>>no other people around and have no hope of discovering who dropped it,
>>you, presumably, would favor the creation by God option.
>>

>>Same with bat evolution. Should we assume it occurred via natural

>>selection -- a mechanism which is known to operate in bats, and which is
>>known to be extremely effective at producing major adaptive change -- or

>>should we assume it was done by a god just because we don't have all the
>>details?
>

>"presumably" is libelous. Until you reply directly to Glenn's dismantling
>of the preceding paragraph or get someone pinch hitting for you to do
>it, there is no point in my indulging in overkill by addressing its pathetically
>clueless content.

It's truly remarkable how you write so much obfuscating noise just to
avoid answering a reasonable question.

>Go ahead and assume it, relying fully on "Darwin of the Gaps."
>I don't expect you to explain *how* it could possibly
>have happened in the way specified by me:
>
>[repeated from above:]
>> > Natural selection ... makes it clear that tenable hypotheses for how
>> > a creature *might* have evolved entail an evolutionary sequence with few or no maladaptive steps,
>> > and only a small percentage of neutral ones.

And to follow your precedent, to repeat what I responded to you in a
previous post:

You assert above a PRATT which is also a false equivalence. Do you
deny the existence of heritable variation in populations? If not, do
you deny that different heritable variations are more and less
beneficial in different environments? If not, that would explain how
populations "got to that point". Not sure how you *still* don't
understand this.

The above isn't remotely similar to GOTG. A designer deity wouldn't
be required to limit itself to variations of existing forms; it could
have "poofed" rabbits in the Cambrian. Instead, the fossil record
shows exactly what is expected from unguided rm/ns, OR from a God who
arbitrarily decided to make it look like it was from unguided rm/ns.

Will you evade the above like you did before? And like you do Isaak's
question? Where are PeeWee Peter's answers? The world wonders.

[Öö Tiib]

It is the way it appeared to me indeed. Quote about boa jaws fit into
bat evolution why?

> Don't you realize that the "combo" to which you refer is a figment of
> your imagination? that you are, in effect, dragging the good name
> of Stephen Jay Gould into this imaginary "combo" of yours?
> Your "half an eye" is a parody of his "half a broken jaw", and THIS
> much should be obvious to you if you actually READ what he
> had written before that remark.

Why have we read what he wrote when it clearly was not about bats?

> > It all is just denial of
> > literally endless obvious ways how things can evolve.
>
> Not obvious for the terrestrial-to-flying mammal transition.
> You are jumping into a thread in which you haven't tried to
> understand the posts I have done so far. That is obvious
> from this obviously clueless claim about "obvious"ness.

It *is* obvious. Our air is dense enough yet still takes noticeable
amount of energy to fly in it. Only recently we had forests
with tens of meters high trees. So there was reason and no trouble
to evolve capability to take advantage of air and wind. We see gliding
frogs, snakes, squirrels. Only gliding because no need to fly far in
forest. And that is common. We see also plenty of birds that like to
walk and only to fly rarely (like for migration). There are no problems
into either direction and to adapt towards finesse in there quickly.

>
> Not one of the "obvious" ways has ever been applied to the visualizing
> of *possible* proto-bats that could have been intermediates in
> talk.origins so far. But I aim to remedy that this week,
> by showing how the best published scenario I've ever seen
> by a scientist seems to have two steps which are maladaptive.

There are even no need for that one way until there are no problem
to see endless paths. Eh, even some fish have learned to glide after
jumping out of water just to fly away from predators. It is that simple.
All the "trouble" is that we have found no fossils and so we do not
have evidence about one or other concrete way.

> >Also there are zero explanations what compete ... what supposedly happened.
> I told Erik of one: sexual selection of otherwise maladaptive stages. I am
> working on a completely different one, but I'd like to see whether
> anyone else here cares enough about science to try to come up with one.

Bat was something like ants that fly only for sex? I do not understand. Bats
probably evolved from little nocturnal insectovores in forested area.
Echolocation fits with night and has evolved several times, capability to
hibernate fits with eating insects and has evolved several times, flight also
has been evolved (and lost) several times. No reason for sex in that
specialization.

> That includes Glenn, to whom your next question should be directed.

There will never be alternative story how bat was created some 70 mya.
No one would believe that story. That story does not fit anywhere. Even
those UFO geeks would frown upon story that Ancient Astronauts did
come and design bats 70 mya for unknown reasons.

> > Were bats originally created? When? Where? Talking about how bad people are is
> > irrelevant as lack of such explanation can't be their fault.
> It's relevant to the extent that either (1) they don't give a damn about the
> science that is involved, or (2) are too inept at the relevant biology AND
> try to cover either their unscientific attitude or their ineptitude in
> a dishonest way.

Where there was bat biology discussed? Only that we lack fossils.
Probably we lack tens of millions old fossils of hedgehog ancestors too.
What problem there is with flying squirrel patagia for example? Indeed
we do not know without fossils what precise steps there were but why
are those so badly needed?

>
> You seem to be tempted to be like them. Please try to resist the temptation.

The claims how functionally illiterate/low head/prostitutes/unscientific/
dishonest/clueless people are ... are still all irrelevant and logically
fallacious?

[peter2...@gmail.com]

Thanks for calling out Mark while I was in the midst of my weekend break.
It's amazing to see the lengths to which his allies will go to ignore the
things you wrote in rebuttal.

My approach was different: I wanted to post significant things about evolution
by Gould that harmonize beautifully with what I wrote in my OP,
which you preserved below.

In the process, I showed how willfully ignorant Mark is of all but
the most elementary things about biological evolution.
But Öö Tiib's post late yesterday evening made me aware of an
even more fundamental weakness of his. I'll tell you once I get
down to what you wrote.

On Saturday, December 10, 2022 at 8:05:16 PM UTC-5, Glenn wrote:
> On Saturday, December 10, 2022 at 10:25:16 AM UTC-7, Mark Isaak wrote:
> > On 12/9/22 5:54 PM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> > > This is the one-size-fits-all, totally unfalsifiable "explanation"
> > > for any and all biological phenomena:
> > >
> > > "Well, it's natural selection, y'know. Those _________ that were/had/did ___________
> > > had a survival advantage over those who weren't/hadn't/didn't, and thus
> > > they are the ones we see today."
> > >
> > > The main weakness of this counterpart of "God of the Gaps" is that it does
> > > nothing to explain how the "Those/ones" ever got to the point where they
> > > "were/had/did _____________." This is partly because "natural selection" puts
> > > the ones with the survival advantage in the same interbreeding population
> > > as the ones without it. See:
> > >
> > > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_selection
> > >
> > > Natural selection commits evolutionary biologists to a gradualist view of the way
> > > evolution progresses. It also makes it clear that tenable hypotheses for how
> > > a creature *might* have evolved entail an evolutionary sequence with few or no maladaptive steps,
> > > and only a small percentage of neutral ones.
> > >
> > >
> > > This brings up one of my favorite evolutionary mysteries: by what *tenable* intermediate
> > > steps *might* bats have evolved under that constraint? Fossils are of no help here.
> > > We lack *any* intermediate fossils between fully terrestrial mammals
> > > and essentially modern bats. The excitement that greeted the
> > > discovery of a fossil bat which (*gasp*) had claws at the end of its
> > > long wing digits only serves to show how starved we are for ideas.

When I say "we" are starved for ideas, I mean not just myself but the
world of science. And I refer specifically to the question I ask at the
beginning of the preceding paragraph.

> > Spoken like an ardent creationist.

> Spoken by an "ardent" atheist evolutionist:

That may be true, Glenn, but there is something else behind it: a deep, deep phobia
of finding out how little the world of science knows about the world around us.

He tries to mask it by making ridiculous comments that try to divert
attention from the mystery of bat origins. I think he knows how
ridiculous it is to ask me the following question, and even more
ridiculous to presume what he does in the following sentence,
but he is past caring about that.

> > If I find a gum wrapper by a trail in the park, should I assume a person
> > dropped it nearby, or that God created a gum wrapper there? Since I see
> > no other people around and have no hope of discovering who dropped it,
> > you, presumably, would favor the creation by God option.
> >
> Because of the location of the gum wrapper? There is something wrong with your head.

I think he knows that Paley did not presume that the *watch* was put there by God,
but like I said, he is past caring about how ridiculous he must sound
even to his ardent ally jillery. Did you notice how jillery overlooked "minor details"
like the false analogy to Paley, and how jillery threw all pretense at integrity
by calling Mark's question "reasonable".

> You should assume the gum wrapper was intelligently designed, and since the designer is known, created by Man. Being a science guy,

He's no science guy. He is a computer geek whose modest knowledge
of science means more to him than his far more meager understanding
of what science is about. He's content with high school level [if that]
formulae like the ones he "screamed" at me.

>you should also realize the knowledge exists
> that gum wrappers are sometimes blown by wind or some other event that cause it to move from where it was "dropped". Who dropped it is irrelevant to who created it.

He knows it. But he doesn't care. And the same applies to jillery.

Peter Nyikos
Professor, Dept. of Mathematics

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

[erik simpson]

Color me a little surprised. I didn't know what to expect (except for an avalanche of insults and whining),
but your speculation on possible paths evolution may have taken on the way to bats doesn't seem to me
to be particularly outrageous. I'm gratified to see no mention of Eisley's poetics or aliens, for that matter.
But why did you waste so much time and invective dancing around the subject? There are lots and always
will be gaps in fossil record. No harm done in speculating, but we're not going to learn the answers before
we get lucky with fossils.

[Mark Isaak]

On 12/12/22 5:51 PM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> On Monday, December 12, 2022 at 5:10:18 PM UTC-5, Mark Isaak wrote:
>> On 12/12/22 12:15 PM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
>>> On Saturday, December 10, 2022 at 12:25:16 PM UTC-5, Mark Isaak wrote:

[Note: I am snipping everything not on point, along with some past history.]

>>>> -- a mechanism which is known to operate in bats, and which is
>>>> known to be extremely effective at producing major adaptive change
>>>
>>> Not known in the case of bats evolving from animals whose fossil record
>>> is as meager I described.
>
>
>> Again: WE KNOW NATURAL SELECTION OCCURS IN BATS. (I suspect that "We"
>> includes even you.)
>

> [I know]

>
>> Again: WE KNOW NATURAL SELECTION IS EFFECTIVE -- i.e., adaptive and
>> powerful.
>
> True in the case of light and dark moths and a number of other microevolutionary
> experiments, but it is powerless to give anyone here except me hints
> as to how it might be applied to the mega-evolutionary example of proto-bats.

Okay, I think I understand. You are denying the power of evolution by
natural selection to create novel structures and abilities, because you
have superior knowledge to everyone else. I still have doubts that that
is, in fact, your thesis, but I will go with it until you are able to
expect your point clearly. (Note that that will require no digressions
into attacks on other people, which I doubt your ability to do.)

There are two points you still cannot deal with.

1. Evolution by natural selection *does* have the power to form novel
structures and abilities, whether you accept it or not. Evidence comes
in many forms, including traces of genetic histories, practical
engineering applications of the same principle, phyogenetics, and fossils.

2. Not knowing how something could have happened is not the same as
knowing it could not have happened. Not even close. In such cases, it
is prudent to go with the best evidence. In the case of bats, the best
evidence, by far, is that they achieved flight by darwinian evolution.

>> You want, effectively, to REJECT THOSE FACTS
>
> So did Stephen Jay Gould, who went beyond such excruciatingly
> elementary facts (read: generalities) and got into specifics
> that you don't hint at because you are blissfully unaware of them.
>
> "Even though we have no direct evidence for smooth transitions, can we invent a reasonable sequence of intermediate forms -- that is, viable, functioning organisms -- between ancestors and descendants in major structutal transitions?
> ... On the island of Mauritius, former home of the dodo, two genera of boid snakes (a large group that includes pythons and boa constrictors) share a feature present in no other terrestrial vertebrate: the maxillary bone of the upper jaw is split into front and rear halves, connected by a movable joint. In 1970, my friend Tom Frazzetta published a paper entitled "From Hopeful Monsters to Bolyerine snakes?" He considered every preadaptive possibility he could imagine and rejected them in favor of discontinuous transition. How can a jawbone be half broken?
> -- _The_Panda's_Thumb_, "Return of the Hopeful Monster" (Essay 18), p. 189

You could have just said "Yes, I want to reject those facts."

> I doubt that you ever cracked open a copy of _The_Panda's_Thumb_, and
> I doubt that you will ever want to, so I will reveal the meaning of "such steps"
> to someone else on this thread, who might even know what the word "colugo" means.

True to form, you are wrong again. And in another post, you said I am
"no science guy." But I have an advanced degree in biology (in addition
to degrees in computer science and physics). Do you?

[Bill]

Mark Isaak wrote:

...

>
> Okay, I think I understand. You are denying the power of evolution by
> natural selection to create novel structures and abilities, because you
> have superior knowledge to everyone else. I still have doubts that that
> is, in fact, your thesis, but I will go with it until you are able to
> expect your point clearly. (Note that that will require no digressions
> into attacks on other people, which I doubt your ability to do.)

While natural selection may be one way to explain biological variation, does
it exhaust all the possibilities?

Bill

[peter2...@gmail.com]

You are beginning to make sense, Öö, and I see that your confusion is partly
my fault. And so, I withdraw the loaded question I asked next:

> > You are ignoring almost everything due to me above, Mr. Tiib. Are you, perhaps,
> > blindly following what you've seen the others (except Glenn) deceptively claiming about me?
> >
> > > This is combo of two refuted claims like "mousetrap can't evolve in simple
> > > steps" and "animal with half of an eye is pointless".
> >
> > You are trying to put a square peg of ID into the round hole
> > of the literal meaning of EVERYTHING I've posted to this thread so far.

> It is the way it appeared to me indeed. Quote about boa jaws fit into
> bat evolution why?

Because of the following detail that I wrote in my OP:

[repeated from FAR above:]

> > > > > >>> by what *tenable* intermediate
> > > > > >>> steps *might* bats have evolved under that constraint?

I identified that constraint here:

> > > > > >>> Natural selection ... makes it clear that tenable hypotheses for how
> > > > > >>> a creature *might* have evolved entail an evolutionary sequence with few or no maladaptive steps,
> > > > > >>> and only a small percentage of neutral ones.

Broken boa jaws seem to pose the same difficulty of finding useful intermediate steps.
However, Stephen Jay Gould found what seems like a clever solution that made it possible
in just ONE step. And it appears that no one responding to me on this thread knows about it.

Gould then gave the example of most rodents that have cheek pouches,
have them on the inside, but some gophers have them on the outside.
This poses the same difficulty, but then he gave the same clever solution.

However, there are weighty arguments against bat wings having evolved in one big
step, or even two or three. And there, Gould's clever "saltational" trick doesn't work,
as I will try to explain below.

> > Don't you realize that the "combo" to which you refer is a figment of
> > your imagination? that you are, in effect, dragging the good name
> > of Stephen Jay Gould into this imaginary "combo" of yours?
> > Your "half an eye" is a parody of his "half a broken jaw", and THIS
> > much should be obvious to you if you actually READ what he
> > had written before that remark.

> Why have we read what he wrote when it clearly was not about bats?

Because it poses a simpler problem as a warm-up for the bigger
problem about bats. Gould solved it, but I doubt that anyone
reading it bothered to try and solve it. The bat wing problem remains unsolved.

> > > It all is just denial of
> > > literally endless obvious ways how things can evolve.
> >
> > Not obvious for the terrestrial-to-flying mammal transition.
> > You are jumping into a thread in which you haven't tried to
> > understand the posts I have done so far. That is obvious
> > from this obviously clueless claim about "obvious"ness.

And here it becomes clear that I should have spelled out things
more clearly in my OP. I should have said that the ONLY place where it poses
this problem is the origin of the *wings* of bats.

> It *is* obvious. Our air is dense enough yet still takes noticeable
> amount of energy to fly in it. Only recently we had forests
> with tens of meters high trees. So there was reason and no trouble
> to evolve capability to take advantage of air and wind. We see gliding
> frogs, snakes, squirrels. Only gliding because no need to fly far in
> forest. And that is common. We see also plenty of birds that like to
> walk and only to fly rarely (like for migration). There are no problems
> into either direction and to adapt towards finesse in there quickly.

These are obvious evolutionary pressures, not intermediate steps.

Now, it is easy to visualize how the wings of pterosaurs evolved gradually.
Beginning with a (still purely hypothetical) ancestor with patagia
(gliding/flying membranes) which are attached to the "ring finger"
(fourth digit of manus) gradually forming a usable wing
as the digit got longer and thicker, while the "little finger" (fifth, outer digit)
disappeared and cannot be found in any fossil pterosaur.

An essential detail that must not be lost sight of: all the while this was
going on, the three other digits remained useful for climbing and for getting
around easily on the ground. There are easy ways for the wing to be folded
so that it doesn't interfere with the latter.

With bats it is different. Their one free digit is the pollex ("thumb") and
while it is adequate for climbing trees, it makes getting around on the
ground extremely awkward.

> > Not one of the "obvious" ways has ever been applied to the visualizing
> > of *possible* proto-bats that could have been intermediates in
> > talk.origins so far. But I aim to remedy that this week,
> > by showing how the best published scenario I've ever seen
> > by a scientist seems to have two steps which are maladaptive.


> There are even no need for that one way until there are no problem
> to see endless paths.

Not with bats. The big problem is in visualizing steps where ground locomotion
wasn't unduly sacrificed before the wings were big enough for true flight.


CONTINUED in next reply, to be done soon after I see that this one has posted.

[Ron Dean]

On Dec 13, 2022 at 9:54:01 AM EST, "peter2...@gmail.com"

>>>> RD wrote>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>.
> I'm back (I hope) I have serious health issues that abruptly hit me, mild
> stroke, (left side) requiring carotid artery surgery. I had heart problems
> requiring stints, have thick blood. In and out of hospital 4 times past 6
> months, last time for 1 week, returned home past thursday. My dad and his dad
> (possibly) had same problems; both passed: reciently lost 1/th cousin with
> same problem. So, I don't know...........

As I recall, Darwin was distressed because of the absence of intermediate
fossils between
ancestor and descedent, that his theory predicted. This absence he believed
could be used to refute his theory. But he hoped for and expected that future
searches would fill in the gaps. And this has been the goal and major
objective of paleontology for more than a century.
So, the axiom "God of the gaps", seems to really be "evolution in the gaps".
After most major gap, the new "kinds" and stasis that's observed (Gould's) new
"species" could be seen as the result of a designers involvement. It's
analogous to workers in a hole trying to fill it in with whatever.
Furthermore, new "kinds" and stasis is _not_ in the sphere of evolution.

[peter2...@gmail.com]

On Tuesday, December 13, 2022 at 6:55:19 AM UTC-5, oot...@hot.ee wrote:
> On Tuesday, 13 December 2022 at 06:05:19 UTC+2, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:

Repeating 7 lines of text from the first reply, for context:

> > Not one of the "obvious" ways has ever been applied to the visualizing
> > of *possible* proto-bats that could have been intermediates in
> > talk.origins so far.

> There are even no need for that one way until there are no problem
> to see endless paths.

Not with bats. The big problem is in visualizing steps where ground locomotion
wasn't unduly sacrificed before the wings were big enough for true flight.

> Eh, even some fish have learned to glide after
> jumping out of water just to fly away from predators. It is that simple.
> All the "trouble" is that we have found no fossils and so we do not
> have evidence about one or other concrete way.

Wrong. Try solving the big problem of bat wings with even ONE
hypothetical path, and to see which of the "endless paths" you think will be the one.

> > >Also there are zero explanations what compete ... what supposedly happened.

> > I told Erik of one: sexual selection of otherwise maladaptive stages.

See whether you can find ONE path without maladaptive stages. I have
never seen any (see Tet Zoo account below, for instance), nor thought of one.
This is why I resorted to sexual selection to make the otherwise maladaptive
stages into stages where the most attractive (bigger!) proto-wings
won out in the race for the most "reproductive success."

> > I am working on a completely different one, but I'd like to see whether
> > anyone else here cares enough about science to try to come up with one.


> Bat was something like ants that fly only for sex?

You misunderstood what the sexual selection was all about. Does what I wrote
this time help? As to your use of ants...

Ants are tiny. There are theories about how small flaps that were used
in their remote ancestors for thermal regulation grew until the slightest breeze
could lift their ancestors into the air. Nothing like that works for bats.
If you have read Haldane's classic essay, "On Being the Right Size," I think
this will be clear.

s

>I do not understand. Bats
> probably evolved from little nocturnal insectovores in forested area.
> Echolocation fits with night and has evolved several times, capability to
> hibernate fits with eating insects and has evolved several times,

Yes, and the only mature adult discussion of proto-bats
that I have ever seen (in "Tet Zoo") focused almost exclusively
on such known, easily evolvable faculties.

The one exception (until I belatedly came along) was the second comment,
ignored in the numerous ones that followed. The second comment
talked about pictures of forelimbs that were prominently displayed in the article,
illustrating a hypothetical five step sequence in going from a colugo-like ancestor
to a modern bat. The comment said, in a polite way, that there was
a problem with two of the intermediate steps, which seemed to make
the "sacrifice" I talked about into a serious obstacle.

> flight also
> has been evolved (and lost) several times.

In insects and birds, but not in bats (let alone proto-bats), to the best of our knowledge.
And it would be irrelevant anyway to the problem of origination of wings for flight.


Remainder deleted, to be replied to later.

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

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

[broger...@gmail.com]

On Tuesday, December 13, 2022 at 1:05:19 PM UTC-5, Bill wrote:
> Mark Isaak wrote:
>
> ...
> >
> > Okay, I think I understand. You are denying the power of evolution by
> > natural selection to create novel structures and abilities, because you
> > have superior knowledge to everyone else. I still have doubts that that
> > is, in fact, your thesis, but I will go with it until you are able to
> > expect your point clearly. (Note that that will require no digressions
> > into attacks on other people, which I doubt your ability to do.)

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

> While natural selection may be one way to explain biological variation, does
> it exhaust all the possibilities?

No. Neutral drift is another mechanism.
>
> Bill

[jillery]

On Tue, 13 Dec 2022 06:54:01 -0800 (PST), "peter2...@gmail.com"
<peter2...@gmail.com> wrote even more of his 300+ lines of
obfuscating noise:

>Thanks for calling out Mark while I was in the midst of my weekend break.
>It's amazing to see the lengths to which his allies will go to ignore the
>things you wrote in rebuttal.
>
>My approach was different: I wanted to post significant things about evolution
>by Gould that harmonize beautifully with what I wrote in my OP,
>which you preserved below.

Really? Odd that PeeWee Peter's OP made no mention of Gould. OTOH
it's expected that he quotemined Gould just like other cdesign
proponentsists do.

Once again, PeeWee Peter's OP identifies a lack of *data*, not a lack
of ideas. There's a difference.

>> > Spoken like an ardent creationist.
>
>> Spoken by an "ardent" atheist evolutionist:
>
>That may be true, Glenn, but there is something else behind it: a deep, deep phobia
>of finding out how little the world of science knows about the world around us.

"little" is a relative term. Compared to what? What's the point of
leaping to conclusions based on a lack of data?

>He tries to mask it by making ridiculous comments that try to divert
>attention from the mystery of bat origins. I think he knows how
>ridiculous it is to ask me the following question, and even more
>ridiculous to presume what he does in the following sentence,
>but he is past caring about that.

Stipulating for argument's sake Isaak's comments are "ridiculous",
still not sure why PeeWee Peter devotes so much time and energy and
LINES to spam his baseless opinions, while doing nothing to actually
back them up.

>> > If I find a gum wrapper by a trail in the park, should I assume a person
>> > dropped it nearby, or that God created a gum wrapper there? Since I see
>> > no other people around and have no hope of discovering who dropped it,
>> > you, presumably, would favor the creation by God option.
>> >
>> Because of the location of the gum wrapper? There is something wrong with your head.
>
>I think he knows that Paley did not presume that the *watch* was put there by God,
>but like I said, he is past caring about how ridiculous he must sound
>even to his ardent ally jillery. Did you notice how jillery overlooked "minor details"
>like the false analogy to Paley, and how jillery threw all pretense at integrity
>by calling Mark's question "reasonable".

It's no surprise PeeWee Peter doesn't say how Isaak's question is a
false analogy, or why PeeWee Peter accuses jillery of lack of
integrity. Uncontrolled impulses?

>> You should assume the gum wrapper was intelligently designed, and since the designer is known, created by Man. Being a science guy,
>
>He's no science guy. He is a computer geek whose modest knowledge
>of science means more to him than his far more meager understanding
>of what science is about. He's content with high school level [if that]
>formulae like the ones he "screamed" at me.
>
>>you should also realize the knowledge exists
>> that gum wrappers are sometimes blown by wind or some other event that cause it to move from where it was "dropped". Who dropped it is irrelevant to who created it.
>
>He knows it. But he doesn't care. And the same applies to jillery.

An irony here is, while PeeWee Peter plants his flag on an imaginary
mountain Glenn raised, Glenn's comments are similar to how ardent
atheist evolutionists answer Paley's watchmaker analogy. Just as
Isaak's gum wrapper is known to be of human manufacture, so too is
Paley's watch known to be of human manufacture. So if Isaak's
question is symptomatic of stupidity, so too must be Paley's analogy,
as well as Glenn's reply. That would give PeeWee Peter's 300+ lines
of obfuscating noise a 3fer, even though two of them qualify as
victims of friendly-fire.

[jillery]

This topic wasn't started to provide a list of all possibilities, but
instead to make sweeping conclusions based on a recognized lack of
data.

[jillery]

On Tue, 13 Dec 2022 18:23:34 GMT, Ron Dean <rdhall...@gmail.com>
wrote:

>>>>> RD wrote>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>.
>> I'm back (I hope) I have serious health issues that abruptly hit me, mild
>> stroke, (left side) requiring carotid artery surgery. I had heart problems
>> requiring stints, have thick blood. In and out of hospital 4 times past 6
>> months, last time for 1 week, returned home past thursday. My dad and his dad
>> (possibly) had same problems; both passed: reciently lost 1/th cousin with
>> same problem. So, I don't know...........
>
>As I recall, Darwin was distressed because of the absence of intermediate
>fossils between
>ancestor and descedent, that his theory predicted. This absence he believed
>could be used to refute his theory. But he hoped for and expected that future
>searches would fill in the gaps. And this has been the goal and major
>objective of paleontology for more than a century.
>So, the axiom "God of the gaps", seems to really be "evolution in the gaps".

More accurately, that would be "taphonomy of the gaps". There's much
more evidence for evolution than fossils.

>After most major gap, the new "kinds" and stasis that's observed (Gould's) new
>"species" could be seen as the result of a designers involvement. It's
>analogous to workers in a hole trying to fill it in with whatever.
>Furthermore, new "kinds" and stasis is _not_ in the sphere of evolution.
>>
>> Peter Nyikos
>> Professor, Dept. of Mathematics
>> University of So. Carolina -- standard disclaimer--
>> http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos

[peter2...@gmail.com]

It's great to see you here, Ron. I was afraid that after three posts, one
of which was mainly to regret having posted the first, you had
disappeared again.

That goal was there, yes, but if my love of paleontology is any indication,
paleontologists are mainly fascinated by the incredible variety and richness of extinct animals,
and secondarily .by lots of other things, including the riddle of the lifestyles
of animals that are very different from existing ones [1], in addition to the goal you name.

Tragically that "goal and major objective" seems to have been abandoned
due to an ideology by which John Harshman swears. It forbids scientists
to take seriously any hypotheses about any fossil species being directly
ancestral to any other fossil species, even in the wonderful horse superfamily of Equioidea.
If he had his way, the superfamily tree in Kathleen Hunt's superb
horse family FAQ would be consigned to the wastebasket of history.

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/horses/horse_evol.html

[1] One or two differences already can give rise to a "very different" animal.
A fascinating example is *Deinotherium*, which looked like an elephant,
except for having lost its upper tusks and grown a pair of tusks
in the lower jaw, pointing down and curved backwards.

One fanciful lifestyle idea was that these tusks were used to anchor
this para-elephant to the riverbank while it slept in a river!

> So, the axiom "God of the gaps", seems to really be "evolution in the gaps".
> After most major gap, the new "kinds" and stasis that's observed (Gould's) new
> "species" could be seen as the result of a designers involvement. It's
> analogous to workers in a hole trying to fill it in with whatever.
> Furthermore, new "kinds" and stasis is _not_ in the sphere of evolution.

It's interesting to see how you are now posting like a committed creationist.
However, Gould has something to say to you too, about how speciation can
occur despite the constricting condition of natural selection having
to take place WITHIN interbreeding populations. If you have access to
_The_Panda's_Thumb_, you will find it on page 191.

If not, I'll make time tomorrow for typing out the whole passage. I can't find it online,
not even a portion of the book that includes p. 191, and I have too much on my plate today.

I do believe, by the way, that this sorry remnant of a once robust talk.origins
does not include anyone else who is aware of Gould's method, nor even cares
to find out what it is. "Darwin of the Gaps" bulks too large in their thought processes.


Peter Nyikos

[John Harshman]

It seems that way only in your head. There is absolutely no need to
hypothesize that a transitional fossil species is directly ancestral to
any other in order to fill a gap. Archaeopteryx, for example, filled
what was at the time a big gap between birds and dinosaurs, regardless
of the details of its position on the tree.

Why do you introduce erroneous complaints and a gratuitous rant about me
(and pretty much all modern paleontologists and systematists) into a
response to a creationist rather than point out that he's just wrong
about the gaps not being filled, which seems the more important message?

> It forbids scientists
> to take seriously any hypotheses about any fossil species being directly
> ancestral to any other fossil species, even in the wonderful horse superfamily of Equioidea.
> If he had his way, the superfamily tree in Kathleen Hunt's superb
> horse family FAQ would be consigned to the wastebasket of history.
>
> http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/horses/horse_evol.html
>
> [1] One or two differences already can give rise to a "very different" animal.
> A fascinating example is *Deinotherium*, which looked like an elephant,
> except for having lost its upper tusks and grown a pair of tusks
> in the lower jaw, pointing down and curved backwards.
>
> One fanciful lifestyle idea was that these tusks were used to anchor
> this para-elephant to the riverbank while it slept in a river!
>
>
>> So, the axiom "God of the gaps", seems to really be "evolution in the gaps".
>> After most major gap, the new "kinds" and stasis that's observed (Gould's) new
>> "species" could be seen as the result of a designers involvement. It's
>> analogous to workers in a hole trying to fill it in with whatever.
>> Furthermore, new "kinds" and stasis is _not_ in the sphere of evolution.
>
> It's interesting to see how you are now posting like a committed creationist.
> However, Gould has something to say to you too, about how speciation can
> occur despite the constricting condition of natural selection having
> to take place WITHIN interbreeding populations. If you have access to
> _The_Panda's_Thumb_, you will find it on page 191.

Gould's view of speciation and morphological evolution is almost
certainly wrong and never managed to convince many evolutionary
biologists. There are better explanations for stasis and punctuation.

> If not, I'll make time tomorrow for typing out the whole passage. I can't find it online,
> not even a portion of the book that includes p. 191, and I have too much on my plate today.
>
> I do believe, by the way, that this sorry remnant of a once robust talk.origins
> does not include anyone else who is aware of Gould's method, nor even cares
> to find out what it is. "Darwin of the Gaps" bulks too large in their thought processes.

Odd. You don't seem to be joking there.

[Öö Tiib]

On Tuesday, 13 December 2022 at 20:55:18 UTC+2, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> On Tuesday, December 13, 2022 at 6:55:19 AM UTC-5, oot...@hot.ee wrote:
> > On Tuesday, 13 December 2022 at 06:05:19 UTC+2, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> Repeating 7 lines of text from the first reply, for context:
> > > Not one of the "obvious" ways has ever been applied to the visualizing
> > > of *possible* proto-bats that could have been intermediates in
> > > talk.origins so far.
> > There are even no need for that one way until there are no problem
> > to see endless paths.
> Not with bats. The big problem is in visualizing steps where ground locomotion
> wasn't unduly sacrificed before the wings were big enough for true flight.
> > Eh, even some fish have learned to glide after
> > jumping out of water just to fly away from predators. It is that simple.
> > All the "trouble" is that we have found no fossils and so we do not
> > have evidence about one or other concrete way.
> Wrong. Try solving the big problem of bat wings with even ONE
> hypothetical path, and to see which of the "endless paths" you think will be the one.

Purely speculating here but for example: First step similar to evolution of flying
squirrel, colugos, Petauridae, and Anomaluridae having plagiopatagium for
gliding but leaving still capability to climb about as easily. Then perhaps strenghtening
the muscles for air navigating in air then evolving propatagium and propatagium
for bigger surface, then weakening climbing capability on behalf of two
dactylopatagiums that gradually took over from plagiopatagium. That left only
one finger for climbing.

> > > >Also there are zero explanations what compete ... what supposedly happened.
>
> > > I told Erik of one: sexual selection of otherwise maladaptive stages.
> See whether you can find ONE path without maladaptive stages. I have
> never seen any (see Tet Zoo account below, for instance), nor thought of one.
> This is why I resorted to sexual selection to make the otherwise maladaptive
> stages into stages where the most attractive (bigger!) proto-wings
> won out in the race for the most "reproductive success."

In my speculative steps we had nocturnal insectovore who did live on trees,
gained capability to move between trees, learned to hunt flying insects during
gliding (perhaps using echolocation), improved the air navigation to catch
insects better, then with gradual loss of importance of climbing improved
its flight. Other bats with other diets evolved from it later.

> > > I am working on a completely different one, but I'd like to see whether
> > > anyone else here cares enough about science to try to come up with one.
>
>
> > Bat was something like ants that fly only for sex?
> You misunderstood what the sexual selection was all about. Does what I wrote
> this time help? As to your use of ants...
>
> Ants are tiny. There are theories about how small flaps that were used
> in their remote ancestors for thermal regulation grew until the slightest breeze
> could lift their ancestors into the air. Nothing like that works for bats.
> If you have read Haldane's classic essay, "On Being the Right Size," I think
> this will be clear.

I see no issue there as flying squirrel, colugos, Petauridae, and Anomaluridae
have gained their patagiums through what is apparently convergent evolution.
The tens of meters high trees take quite energy to climb up and down and
desire to get from one grove to other without going to ground perhaps to search
food or escape predators is strong pressure enough to carry
patagium with.

>
> s
> >I do not understand. Bats
> > probably evolved from little nocturnal insectovores in forested area.
> > Echolocation fits with night and has evolved several times, capability to
> > hibernate fits with eating insects and has evolved several times,
> Yes, and the only mature adult discussion of proto-bats
> that I have ever seen (in "Tet Zoo") focused almost exclusively
> on such known, easily evolvable faculties.

Scientists do not want to speculate. As there are no fossils but we see multiple
different pieces of patagium it has to be far from one step. Now what steps
there were depends how the animal did live and what problems each step
helped to simplify. But as we have no fossil of protobat we have to make all
that story up. I did it only for sake of discussion, it is totally fictional story.

>
> The one exception (until I belatedly came along) was the second comment,
> ignored in the numerous ones that followed. The second comment
> talked about pictures of forelimbs that were prominently displayed in the article,
> illustrating a hypothetical five step sequence in going from a colugo-like ancestor
> to a modern bat. The comment said, in a polite way, that there was
> a problem with two of the intermediate steps, which seemed to make
> the "sacrifice" I talked about into a serious obstacle.

I haven't read it but that is probably very similar to my speculation above ...
five patagiums so (for simplicity) five semi-randomly ordered steps.

> > flight also
> > has been evolved (and lost) several times.
> In insects and birds, but not in bats (let alone proto-bats), to the best of our knowledge.
> And it would be irrelevant anyway to the problem of origination of wings for flight.

And so the niche is usually taken as insects have far shorter generations and
birds and other flying dinosaurs were there before. Somehow bat found a niche
to improve above simple gliding. Without fossils we don't know how it exactly
coincided that bat managed to gain its upper wing.

[Glenn]

Speaking about what is in your head, fossils are not hypotheses or hypothetical.

[peter2...@gmail.com]

This insulting comment is turned into a straw man by the broadened use of the qualifier,
"in order to fill a gap." IOW, you are following a well worn trail, trod in almost every post
of RonO, of beginning a paragraph with a dramatic personal allegation, and then dropping the subject.

> There is absolutely no need to
> hypothesize that a transitional fossil species is directly ancestral to
> any other in order to fill a gap. Archaeopteryx, for example, filled
> what was at the time a big gap between birds and dinosaurs, regardless
> of the details of its position on the tree.

You are using the benefit of cladistic "hindsight" where the term "tree"
refers to a phylogenetic tree, which puts every species at the tip of some twig.

This is in contrast to an evolutionary tree. While some of them put species
at various nodes, others put larger taxa at nodes, arriving at what is
often termed a "bubble tree".

Archie filled the gap of which you speak as a species in a bubble the size
of a Linnean bird family [1], and the rest of that kind of bubble tree showed
that some family member was hypothesized to be ancestral to all the rest of Aves.
This it did in the usual way, with a line segment emanating from that family and
connecting up indirectly to all bird taxa, and nothing else.

[1] originally as two genera,*Archaeopteryx* (the London specimen) and *Archaeorinis*
(the Berlin specimen). Incidentally, it was obvious to everyone that they belonged in the same family,
before it was decided to put them into the same species.

> Why do you introduce erroneous complaints

There are none, but you might think "ideology" is erroneous because you
look upon the prohibitions I describe as being "objective" and "scientific."
But THAT is what is really erroneous.

> and a gratuitous rant about me (and pretty much all modern paleontologists and systematists)

It was your insult up there that was the REALLY gratuitous rant. More importantly,
I believe that most modern paleontologists just "go along to get along"
with the systematists who deal with extant species and who vastly outnumber the
( mostly vertebrate) paleontologists and botanists who really care about systematics.

Phylogenetic trees make perfect sense for extant species, hence the fondness
of that majority for them, but they are less and less useful the further back in earth
history one goes, and evolutionary bubble trees give the reader a much better and quickly
understood overall evolutionary picture.

> response to a creationist rather than point out that he's just wrong
> about the gaps not being filled, which seems the more important message?

Because many gaps are NOT being filled, including the ones for bat origins
and pterosaur origins. In both cases, there are no fossils of gap-fillers
even in your sense of the word, between fully terrestrial animals with
no sign of patagia, and full fledged fliers.

If you just "point out that he's just wrong", you lose credibility, but you don't care,
because you know as well as I do that creationism is doomed to eventual
near-oblivion of the sort that flat-earthers have. What you *should*
care about is to try and find a way to show Ron Dean that he is wrong,
because that near-oblivion is probably not going to happen within any of our lifetimes.

I like to do that one small step at a time, to let him know that I care about
any legitimate objections he might have to the current evolutionary dogmas.

About one of your dogmas, I wrote:

> > It forbids scientists
> > to take seriously any hypotheses about any fossil species being directly
> > ancestral to any other fossil species, even in the wonderful horse superfamily of Equioidea.
> > If he had his way, the superfamily tree in Kathleen Hunt's superb
> > horse family FAQ would be consigned to the wastebasket of history.
> >
> > http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/horses/horse_evol.html

Strangely enough, you had nothing to say about this.


<snip of things that had nothing to do with you, and to which you also didn't comment>

[to Ron Dean, I said]

> > It's interesting to see how you are now posting like a committed creationist.
> > However, Gould has something to say to you too, about how speciation can
> > occur despite the constricting condition of natural selection having
> > to take place WITHIN interbreeding populations. If you have access to
> > _The_Panda's_Thumb_, you will find it on page 191.

> Gould's view of speciation and morphological evolution is almost
> certainly wrong and never managed to convince many evolutionary
> biologists.

How can you be so sure? You obviously haven't polled them yourself.

> There are better explanations for stasis and punctuation.

I see you haven't a clue as to what p. 191 is all about.

Don't YOU have a copy of _The_Panda's_Thumb_? If not, I am amazed: you are missing out on
what I hope will be many hours of pleasure once you do get your hands on a copy.

> > If not, I'll make time tomorrow for typing out the whole passage. I can't find it online,
> > not even a portion of the book that includes p. 191, and I have too much on my plate today.
> >
> > I do believe, by the way, that this sorry remnant of a once robust talk.origins
> > does not include anyone else who is aware of Gould's method, nor even cares
> > to find out what it is. "Darwin of the Gaps" bulks too large in their thought processes.

> Odd. You don't seem to be joking there.

Do you think you are an exception? so far, you aren't an exception to the first sentence.
I do agree, however, that if anyone here is an exception to the last sentence, you are one.
But your high-handed "point out that he's just wrong" suggests otherwise.

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

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

[John Harshman]

I will confess that I don't know what you're trying to say there. What
is the dramatic personal allegation? I'm just saying that you are wrong,
and then I go on to explain why you're wrong.

>> There is absolutely no need to
>> hypothesize that a transitional fossil species is directly ancestral to
>> any other in order to fill a gap. Archaeopteryx, for example, filled
>> what was at the time a big gap between birds and dinosaurs, regardless
>> of the details of its position on the tree.
>
> You are using the benefit of cladistic "hindsight" where the term "tree"
> refers to a phylogenetic tree, which puts every species at the tip of some twig.

I don't know what you mean by cladistic "hindsight".

> This is in contrast to an evolutionary tree. While some of them put species
> at various nodes, others put larger taxa at nodes, arriving at what is
> often termed a "bubble tree".
>
> Archie filled the gap of which you speak as a species in a bubble the size
> of a Linnean bird family [1], and the rest of that kind of bubble tree showed
> that some family member was hypothesized to be ancestral to all the rest of Aves.
> This it did in the usual way, with a line segment emanating from that family and
> connecting up indirectly to all bird taxa, and nothing else.

And I don't know what your point was in bringing up bubble trees etc.

> [1] originally as two genera,*Archaeopteryx* (the London specimen) and *Archaeorinis*
> (the Berlin specimen). Incidentally, it was obvious to everyone that they belonged in the same family,
> before it was decided to put them into the same species.
>
>
>> Why do you introduce erroneous complaints
>
> There are none, but you might think "ideology" is erroneous because you
> look upon the prohibitions I describe as being "objective" and "scientific."
> But THAT is what is really erroneous.
>
>> and a gratuitous rant about me (and pretty much all modern paleontologists and systematists)
>
> It was your insult up there that was the REALLY gratuitous rant. More importantly,
> I believe that most modern paleontologists just "go along to get along"
> with the systematists who deal with extant species and who vastly outnumber the
> ( mostly vertebrate) paleontologists and botanists who really care about systematics.

Is your belief founded on anything other than your own prejudice?

> Phylogenetic trees make perfect sense for extant species, hence the fondness
> of that majority for them, but they are less and less useful the further back in earth
> history one goes, and evolutionary bubble trees give the reader a much better and quickly
> understood overall evolutionary picture.

Your opinion, which almost nobody currently in the field (any field)
agrees with. Are they all just cowards or wimps?

>> response to a creationist rather than point out that he's just wrong
>> about the gaps not being filled, which seems the more important message?
>
> Because many gaps are NOT being filled, including the ones for bat origins
> and pterosaur origins. In both cases, there are no fossils of gap-fillers
> even in your sense of the word, between fully terrestrial animals with
> no sign of patagia, and full fledged fliers.

But are not most gaps of Darwin's day now filled?

> If you just "point out that he's just wrong", you lose credibility, but you don't care,
> because you know as well as I do that creationism is doomed to eventual
> near-oblivion of the sort that flat-earthers have. What you *should*
> care about is to try and find a way to show Ron Dean that he is wrong,
> because that near-oblivion is probably not going to happen within any of our lifetimes.

So why aren't you trying to show that he's wrong?

> I like to do that one small step at a time, to let him know that I care about
> any legitimate objections he might have to the current evolutionary dogmas.

What legitimate objections?

> About one of your dogmas, I wrote:
>
>>> It forbids scientists
>>> to take seriously any hypotheses about any fossil species being directly
>>> ancestral to any other fossil species, even in the wonderful horse superfamily of Equioidea.
>>> If he had his way, the superfamily tree in Kathleen Hunt's superb
>>> horse family FAQ would be consigned to the wastebasket of history.
>>>
>>> http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/horses/horse_evol.html
>
> Strangely enough, you had nothing to say about this.

Didn't see a need; it was effectively responded to by my preceding
comment. You should pay attention to the flow.

> <snip of things that had nothing to do with you, and to which you also didn't comment>
>
> [to Ron Dean, I said]
>>> It's interesting to see how you are now posting like a committed creationist.
>>> However, Gould has something to say to you too, about how speciation can
>>> occur despite the constricting condition of natural selection having
>>> to take place WITHIN interbreeding populations. If you have access to
>>> _The_Panda's_Thumb_, you will find it on page 191.
>
>> Gould's view of speciation and morphological evolution is almost
>> certainly wrong and never managed to convince many evolutionary
>> biologists.
>
> How can you be so sure? You obviously haven't polled them yourself.

I have read the scientific literature on the subject, which ought to be
indicative.

>> There are better explanations for stasis and punctuation.
>
> I see you haven't a clue as to what p. 191 is all about.
>
> Don't YOU have a copy of _The_Panda's_Thumb_? If not, I am amazed: you are missing out on
> what I hope will be many hours of pleasure once you do get your hands on a copy.

I will admit that I didn't look it up. I was assuming that your
description was accurate. So what are we talking about?

>>> If not, I'll make time tomorrow for typing out the whole passage. I can't find it online,
>>> not even a portion of the book that includes p. 191, and I have too much on my plate today.
>>>
>>> I do believe, by the way, that this sorry remnant of a once robust talk.origins
>>> does not include anyone else who is aware of Gould's method, nor even cares
>>> to find out what it is. "Darwin of the Gaps" bulks too large in their thought processes.
>
>> Odd. You don't seem to be joking there.
>
> Do you think you are an exception? so far, you aren't an exception to the first sentence.
> I do agree, however, that if anyone here is an exception to the last sentence, you are one.
> But your high-handed "point out that he's just wrong" suggests otherwise.

Still haven't looked at page 191, so I may not in fact know what you're
talking about. And I'm not sure that different copies of the book would
have the same page numbers. Perhaps it's best if you said what you're
talking about, or perhaps quoted as you suggested, or both. But I don't
think there's any possible meaning of "Gould's method" that I wouldn't
know about; I just don't currently have a way to know which of many
possibilities is intended.

[Ron Dean]

On Dec 13, 2022 at 3:31:01 PM EST, "peter2...@gmail.com"

<peter2...@gmail.com> wrote:

> It's great to see you here, Ron. I was afraid that after three posts, one
> of which was mainly to regret having posted the first, you had
> disappeared again.
>

Thank you Peter, I sencerely appreciate this welcoming.

Okay, I appreciate that, but isn't science suppose to be neutral, nonpartisan
going to wherever the evidence leads? If a goal is set at the beginning and
the search endeavors
to find positive evidence leading specifically toward proving the objective,
is this science?
If this, is the case, how can one rely on science? Case in point: stasis:
according to Gould,
stasis had been observed in the fossil record, since before Darwin, but it was
passed off as "no data",_ by people looking for support of this goal.

>
Tragically that "goal and major objective" seems to have been abandoned
> due to an ideology by which John Harshman swears. It forbids scientists
> to take seriously any hypotheses about any fossil species being directly
> ancestral to any other fossil species, even in the wonderful horse superfamily
> of Equioidea.
> If he had his way, the superfamily tree in Kathleen Hunt's superb
> horse family FAQ would be consigned to the wastebasket of history.
>

That raises the question, given the scarcity of intermediate fossils between
most ancestor and descendant and given the objective goal, when an
intermediate is found; how is one to
know, for certain, that the finding is not just the "best in the field"?
>
> http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/horses/horse_evol.html
>
As I remember, Dr. J.J. Simpson had problems with the depiction of horse
evolution.

>
> [1] One or two differences already can give rise to a "very different" animal.
> A fascinating example is *Deinotherium*, which looked like an elephant,
> except for having lost its upper tusks and grown a pair of tusks
> in the lower jaw, pointing down and curved backwards.
>
> One fanciful lifestyle idea was that these tusks were used to anchor
> this para-elephant to the riverbank while it slept in a river!
>
>

This, of course, is just a guess, a hypothesis and simply a "just-so-story".

>
>> So, the axiom "God of the gaps", seems to really be "evolution in the gaps".
>> After most major gap, the new "kinds" and stasis that's observed (Gould's) new
>> "species" could be seen as the result of a designers involvement. It's
>> analogous to workers in a hole trying to fill it in with whatever.
>> Furthermore, new "kinds" and stasis is _not_ in the sphere of evolution.
>
> It's interesting to see how you are now posting like a committed creationist.
>

! do not subscribe to the fundamentalist creation scenario. As far as I'm
concern,
creationism is strictly religious in nature. I think Intelligent design best
fits the evidence
so far discovered, by scientist and it can be seen as a deliberate, purposeful
and intential design.

> However, Gould has something to say to you too, about how speciation can
> occur despite the constricting condition of natural selection having
> to take place WITHIN interbreeding populations. If you have access to
> _The_Panda's_Thumb_, you will find it on page 191.
>
> If not, I'll make time tomorrow for typing out the whole passage. I can't find
> it online,
> not even a portion of the book that includes p. 191, and I have too much on my
> plate today.
>

I own the book "Panda" Thumb", I located what you referred to: so he argues
that a "key" - a large change that serves to shift a possessor toward a new
mode of life and if it's successful, may require a large set of collateral
alterations, involving morphological and behavioral which
may arise through traditional gradual route provided the key adaptation forces
a profound shift in selective pressure.

I understand what he is saying, but it's theory and it occurs to me, that the
large number of co - alterations should be subject to be weeded out, by
natural selecton, if they individually serve a purpose, then when other
mutations co-join; this is expecting unguided random
processes to give rise to new forms. I think it takes quite a lot of trust to
accept that this as a good explanation: especially, given the rarity of
beneficial mutations and the immense number of mutations that are weeded out
by natural selection. I don't know~!

[Ron Dean]

On Dec 13, 2022 at 2:51:08 PM EST, "jillery" <69jp...@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Tue, 13 Dec 2022 18:23:34 GMT, Ron Dean <rdhall...@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>>>>>> RD wrote>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>.
>>> I'm back (I hope) I have serious health issues that abruptly hit me, mild
>>> stroke, (left side) requiring carotid artery surgery. I had heart problems
>>> requiring stints, have thick blood. In and out of hospital 4 times past 6
>>> months, last time for 1 week, returned home past thursday. My dad and his dad
>>> (possibly) had same problems; both passed: reciently lost 1/th cousin with
>>> same problem. So, I don't know...........
>>
>> As I recall, Darwin was distressed because of the absence of intermediate
>> fossils between
>> ancestor and descedent, that his theory predicted. This absence he believed
>> could be used to refute his theory. But he hoped for and expected that future
>> searches would fill in the gaps. And this has been the goal and major
>> objective of paleontology for more than a century.
>> So, the axiom "God of the gaps", seems to really be "evolution in the gaps".
>
>
> More accurately, that would be "taphonomy of the gaps". There's much
> more evidence for evolution than fossils.
>

I know Jill, but since history of life is _recorded_ in the strata of the
earth;
if evolution does not fit or assimilate with fossil history as recorded in
stone,
then evolution is challenged if not refuted.
>
As for taphonomy of the gaps: if it's not iidentified as transitional, that
lived, died, decayed and was buried, there exist a gap, which remains
to be filled.

to determine how an organism lived, died, decayed
and was buried, it must first be found and if this is discovered, then it's
not a gap.

[Ron Dean]

On Dec 13, 2022 at 6:38:37 PM EST, "John Harshman" <john.h...@gmail.com>
wrote:

[Ron Dean]

On Dec 13, 2022 at 6:38:37 PM EST, "John Harshman" <john.h...@gmail.com>
wrote:

> On 12/13/22 12:31 PM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
>> It's great to see you here, Ron. I was afraid that after three posts, one
>> of which was mainly to regret having posted the first, you had
>> disappeared again.
>>
>> On Tuesday, December 13, 2022 at 1:25:19 PM UTC-5, Ron Dean wrote:
>>> On Dec 13, 2022 at 9:54:01 AM EST, "peter2...@gmail.com"
>>> <peter2...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>

(snip)

I consider myself an advocate of intelligent design(ID) which, in fact is
_not_ predicated upon religions dogma, doctrine or materials. But rather ID is
based (unlike creationism) upon the evidence discovered by anthropologist
and scientific researcher.
While an IDist can point to evidence which could be observed and _intrepreted_
as supporting the ID paradigm, OTOH - ID can not point to any scientific
evidence
which points to the _identity_ of a designer.

I am aware that there are people who believe that design is by the hand of
their
God(s). But that's belief or their faith ~ it is not based on intrepretation
of any
known scientific evidence. Until proven wrong, I'm convinced that when
observed
scientific evidence can be interpreted in support of an idea, this is not
religious
in nature. I think to claim otherwise comes across as propagand,
missinformation purposefully and unfairly aimed at refuting Intelligent
design.

That's a problem I have with evolution. An example, of my thoughts is
the BAT. There are hundreds and hundreds, if not a thousand of bat
fossils, that have been found that can be observed, touched and physically
examined. These are real and fact. However, the origin of bats is unknown:
transitional fossils are unobservable cannot be touched or examined:
This is where excuses, explanation hypothesis, theory, conjecture and
just-so-stories can come into play and frequently does.

I think thie_observed_Vs_unobserved_ describes and characterizes evolution.
I think books could be written on this topic.

[Martin Harran]

On Wed, 14 Dec 2022 05:53:20 GMT, Ron Dean <rdhall...@gmail.com>

wrote:

>On Dec 13, 2022 at 3:31:01 PM EST, "peter2...@gmail.com"
><peter2...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> It's great to see you here, Ron. I was afraid that after three posts, one
>> of which was mainly to regret having posted the first, you had
>> disappeared again.
>>
>Thank you Peter, I sencerely appreciate this welcoming.
>>
>> On Tuesday, December 13, 2022 at 1:25:19 PM UTC-5, Ron Dean wrote:
>>> On Dec 13, 2022 at 9:54:01 AM EST, "peter2...@gmail.com"
>>> <peter2...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Thanks for calling out Mark while I was in the midst of my weekend break.
>>>> It's amazing to see the lengths to which his allies will go to ignore the
>>>> things you wrote in rebuttal.
>>>>
>>>> My approach was different: I wanted to post significant things about evolution
>>>> by Gould that harmonize beautifully with what I wrote in my OP,
>>>> which you preserved below.
>>>>
>>>> In the process, I showed how willfully ignorant Mark is of all but
>>>> the most elementary things about biological evolution.

>>>> But 嘱 Tiib's post late yesterday evening made me aware of an

Can you name any leading proponent of Intelligent Design who does not
regard God as the Intelligent Designer?

>so far discovered, by scientist and it can be seen as a deliberate, purposeful
>and intential design.

Does it not strike you as odd that Gould, on whom you so heavily draw,
totally rejected Intelligent Design, stating in The Panda's Thumb that
"Odd arrangements and funny solutions are the proof of evolution-paths
that a sensible God would never tread but that a natural process,
constrained by history, follows perforce."

[Athel Cornish-Bowden]

On 2022-12-14 05:53:20 +0000, Ron Dean said:


[ … ]

> That goal was there, yes, but if my love of paleontology is any indication,
>> paleontologists are mainly fascinated by the incredible variety and richness
>> of extinct animals,
>> and secondarily .by lots of other things, including the riddle of the
>> lifestyles
>> of animals that are very different from existing ones [1], in addition to the
>> goal you name.
>>
> Okay, I appreciate that, but isn't science suppose to be neutral, nonpartisan
> going to wherever the evidence leads?

Who supposes that? I'm always struck by the romantic view of people who
don't do any science of how science is "supposed" to be.

[ … ]


--
Athel -- French and British, living in Marseilles for 36+ years; mainly
in England until 1987.

[jillery]

On Wed, 14 Dec 2022 06:26:38 GMT, Ron Dean <rdhall...@gmail.com>

wrote:

>On Dec 13, 2022 at 2:51:08 PM EST, "jillery" <69jp...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On Tue, 13 Dec 2022 18:23:34 GMT, Ron Dean <rdhall...@gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>>>>>> RD wrote>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>.
>>>> I'm back (I hope) I have serious health issues that abruptly hit me, mild
>>>> stroke, (left side) requiring carotid artery surgery. I had heart problems
>>>> requiring stints, have thick blood. In and out of hospital 4 times past 6
>>>> months, last time for 1 week, returned home past thursday. My dad and his dad
>>>> (possibly) had same problems; both passed: reciently lost 1/th cousin with
>>>> same problem. So, I don't know...........
>>>
>>> As I recall, Darwin was distressed because of the absence of intermediate
>>> fossils between
>>> ancestor and descedent, that his theory predicted. This absence he believed
>>> could be used to refute his theory. But he hoped for and expected that future
>>> searches would fill in the gaps. And this has been the goal and major
>>> objective of paleontology for more than a century.
>>> So, the axiom "God of the gaps", seems to really be "evolution in the gaps".
>>
>>
>> More accurately, that would be "taphonomy of the gaps". There's much
>> more evidence for evolution than fossils.
>>
>I know Jill, but since history of life is _recorded_ in the strata of the
>earth;

To be accurate, only a small fraction of the history of life is
recorded in the strata of the Earth. By analogy, fossils are like
snapshots taken by an estranged uncle of you growing up. You can't
reconstruct a complete history from such photos any more than you can
from fossils.

>if evolution does not fit or assimilate with fossil history as recorded in
>stone, then evolution is challenged if not refuted.

Of course, evolution *does* fit with the fossil history, you just
refuse to accept it.

>As for taphonomy of the gaps: if it's not iidentified as transitional, that
>lived, died, decayed and was buried, there exist a gap, which remains
>to be filled.

All fossils are transitional, in the sense they capture one instant of
one organism of one population in its evolution through time.

> to determine how an organism lived, died, decayed
>and was buried, it must first be found and if this is discovered, then it's
>not a gap.

To the contrary, every time a new fossil is found - mirabile dictu -
two new gaps are created, although smaller than before. Better to
focus on what is known, the fossils that separate the gaps, as well as
what is unknown, the gaps themselves.

[jillery]

On Wed, 14 Dec 2022 08:11:48 GMT, Ron Dean <rdhall...@gmail.com>

Which researchers? What evidence? And no, Gould isn't one of them.

>While an IDist can point to evidence which could be observed and _intrepreted_
>as supporting the ID paradigm, OTOH - ID can not point to any scientific
>evidence
>which points to the _identity_ of a designer.

Nobody cares about the _identity_ of a designer. What ID advocates
need to do is describe a designer's *features* that allow it to design
those things claimed for it, while preventing it from designing things
that it hasn't done.

My understanding is bat fossils are one of the least common.

>However, the origin of bats is unknown:
>transitional fossils are unobservable cannot be touched or examined:
>This is where excuses, explanation hypothesis, theory, conjecture and
>just-so-stories can come into play and frequently does.

Identify and cite those just-so-stories you allege.

>I think thie_observed_Vs_unobserved_ describes and characterizes evolution.
>I think books could be written on this topic.

ISTM your comment above is odd, coming right after your argument based
almost entirely on unobserved fossils.

>>> If not, I'll make time tomorrow for typing out the whole passage. I can't
>>> find it online,
>>> not even a portion of the book that includes p. 191, and I have too much on
>>> my plate today.
>>>
>>> I do believe, by the way, that this sorry remnant of a once robust talk.origins
>>> does not include anyone else who is aware of Gould's method, nor even cares
>>> to find out what it is. "Darwin of the Gaps" bulks too large in their thought
>>> processes.
>>
>> Odd. You don't seem to be joking there.

[broger...@gmail.com]

What would a transitional fossil look like? Say, a transitional fossil between different species of extinct horses, or between reptiles and mammals?

[Lawyer Daggett]

On Tuesday, December 13, 2022 at 3:35:19 PM UTC-5, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> On Tuesday, December 13, 2022 at 1:25:19 PM UTC-5, Ron Dean wrote:

mega snip

[ topic 1 ]

> That goal was there, yes, but if my love of paleontology is any indication,
> paleontologists are mainly fascinated by the incredible variety and richness of extinct animals,
> and secondarily .by lots of other things, including the riddle of the lifestyles
> of animals that are very different from existing ones [1], in addition to the goal you name.

[ topic 2]

> Tragically that "goal and major objective" seems to have been abandoned
> due to an ideology by which John Harshman swears. It forbids scientists
> to take seriously any hypotheses about any fossil species being directly
> ancestral to any other fossil species, even in the wonderful horse superfamily of Equioidea.
> If he had his way, the superfamily tree in Kathleen Hunt's superb
> horse family FAQ would be consigned to the wastebasket of history.
>
> http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/horses/horse_evol.html

< snip >

[topic 3]

> It's interesting to see how you are now posting like a committed creationist.
> However, Gould has something to say to you too, about how speciation can
> occur despite the constricting condition of natural selection having
> to take place WITHIN interbreeding populations. If you have access to
> _The_Panda's_Thumb_, you will find it on page 191.
>
> If not, I'll make time tomorrow for typing out the whole passage. I can't find it online,
> not even a portion of the book that includes p. 191, and I have too much on my plate today.
>
> I do believe, by the way, that this sorry remnant of a once robust talk.origins
> does not include anyone else who is aware of Gould's method, nor even cares
> to find out what it is. "Darwin of the Gaps" bulks too large in their thought processes.
>
>
> Peter Nyikos
> Professor, Dept. of Mathematics -- standard disclaimer--
> Univ. of So. Carolina at Columbia
> http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos

3 points for 3 topics. Only the 3rd should occupy any sustained attention.

1. You really should try to understand how it sounds when you start talking
about your "love of paleontology" as part of a screed about how you are
different from this riff-raff who you habitually insult.

2. I've challenged you before about your claim regards Harshman and
your only response was to resort to calling me a bootlicker. Specifically,
I agree he says cladistics and in particular cladistic analysis disclaims
the ability to identify a direct ancestor. But you warp and pervert this
to

> due to an ideology by which John Harshman swears. It forbids scientists
> to take seriously any hypotheses about any fossil species being directly
> ancestral to any other fossil species, even in the wonderful horse superfamily of Equioidea.

??? "any hypothesis" ???
You have to know that is a lie. You've been called out on that being a lie.
You've been asked to provide evidence for that specific claim. Not
for a claim about how cladistics works, but for this absurd recasting
to assert a broad claim about some near-religious devotion to rejecting
__any_hypothesis_. I'm so tempted to add in the parenthetical (not even
from me, Professor Nyikos who has a great love of paleontology. Because
that's how you come across)

3. Now you, Peter, will reject the above as something you will term
"hateful rhetoric" and so summarily dismiss it. You do that if it
helps you sleep at night. But to the third point, please do stop and
consider.

I have here in my hand my copy of The Panda's Thumb. It's a 1992
Norton paperback edition. My fist copy was loaned out and
never returned. In my edition page 191 is within the chapter
"Return of the Hopeful Monster". The top of the page begins
"born from Zeus". This isn't obscure (the ensuing passages) and
I'm sure discussion can be found within older posts. I wouldn't be
surprised if I could dig out some of the current caste in talk.origins
being involved in related threads. Now to the point.

You assert that some group of current contributors are completely
unaware of Gould's ideas, have never read them or considered them.
And yet I expect many have. Then they read your assessment that you
believe

> I do believe, by the way, that this sorry remnant of a once robust talk.origins
> does not include anyone else who is aware of Gould's method, nor even cares
> to find out what it is. "Darwin of the Gaps" bulks too large in their thought processes.

And so here I sit (or stand, it's more healthy) reading you make yet
another claim about me (repeat across the sorry remnant). We have rather
clear knowledge that your belief is wrong.

How do you think that colors the way your beliefs about other people
are weighed?

The answer is obvious but do pause. Let it sink in. Hold that
thought a bit more, don't just dismiss it. Own the result.

Now repeat that with another claim about my motivations that
I know, from personal knowledge, to be wrong. And repeat it
again. And repeat it across the "sorry remnant".

You own that. You make repeated false claims about me. You
make repeated false claims about others. You react to people
not believing your false claims by believing that they are not
being sincere. You dig that hole deeper and deeper.

You own it, but you deny it. Maybe you can think about it over
your upcoming break. You could come back and say that you
plan to make a fresh start and spend less time with personal
accusations and invective. What's the worst that could happen?

[broger...@gmail.com]

What would a transitional fossil look like? Say a transitional fossil between a couple of extinct species of horses or between reptiles and mammals? It's all very well to say there are no transitional fossils by scoffing at anything anyone proposes as one, but it would be helpful if you would say what you think a transitional fossil ought to be like, if there were to be such a thing.

[Ron Dean]

On Dec 14, 2022 at 9:55:48 AM EST, "broger...@gmail.com"

> a couple of extinct species of horses or between reptiles and mammals? all

> very well to say there are no transitional fossils by scoffing at anything
> anyone proposes as one, but it would be helpful if you would say what you
> think a transitional fossil ought to be like, if there were to be such a
> thing.
>

When there are animals that are virtually1) little or no different in skelital
configuration from ancient ancestors, called living fossils: 2) the
preponderance of stasis in the fossil record. and 3) the argmenting gaps in
the record, occuring as new fossil species are discovered, it challenges
evolutionary change.
Compared to the known fossil species during Darwins time, a huge number of new
fossil species are known, most of which are preceded by gaps.
It raises the question, when a transitional fossil is offered, how is one
_know_ that it's a real intermediate ancestor between species and _not_ the
best in the field?

[broger...@gmail.com]

Yes, that's why I am asking you, what sort of fossil, if it were found, would you consider to be a transitional fossil? If you cannot define what a transitional fossil would look like, if there were one, then saying that there are not any is not very illuminating.

[Ron Dean]

I agree, nevertheless, there are millions of animal species, discovered fully
formed and
were well fitted for survival both and extinct that are known. But the "finely
graded fossils"
predicted by Darwin's theory are few and far between. Given the slow gradual
change
over vast spans of time, one would expect the intermediates to exceed or far
surpass
the species that are fixed or static during their tenure on the planet.

During Darwin time, the absence of these sequences of finely graduates
intermediate
would refute his theory.
But given that the numbers of kown extinct species vastly exceed what was
known during Darwin's time, the gaps in the fossil record have increased. I
think this fact alone (by virtue of Darwin's reasoning) should be accepted as
having refuted his theory.

>
>
>> if evolution does not fit or assimilate with fossil history as recorded in
>> stone, then evolution is challenged if not refuted.
>
>
> Of course, evolution *does* fit with the fossil history, you just
> refuse to accept it.
>

I think if this were true, there would have been no need for Gould and
Eldredge's
endeavor to put forth punk eek. This I think was their effort tp interface
Darwin's
theory with the real fossil record.

[Ron Dean]

The late Steven J. Gould was an paleontologist, a evolutionary biologist and
science historian.

>
>> While an IDist can point to evidence which could be observed and _intrepreted_
>> as supporting the ID paradigm, OTOH - ID can not point to any scientific
>> evidence
>> which points to the _identity_ of a designer.
>
>
> Nobody cares about the _identity_ of a designer. What ID advocates
> need to do is describe a designer's *features* that allow it to design
> those things claimed for it, while preventing it from designing things
> that it hasn't done.
>

All one can determine about the designer is it's forward thinking,
intelligent and at one time, it's involvement. Can you name things it
should have done but didn't?

That may be, but I read that there hundreds of bat fossils have been found.

>
>
>> However, the origin of bats is unknown:
>> transitional fossils are unobservable cannot be touched or examined:
>> This is where excuses, explanation hypothesis, theory, conjecture and
>> just-so-stories can come into play and frequently does.
>
>
> Identify and cite those just-so-stories you allege.

...
The neck of the giraffe, how it got its long neck.

>
>
>> I think thie_observed_Vs_unobserved_ describes and characterizes evolution.
>> I think books could be written on this topic.
>
>

> ISTM your comment: that' odd, coming right after your argument based

> almost entirely on unobserved fossils.
>

That was my problem: fossils that can be observed, touched and examined are
real and fact, but the intermediate forms leading up to and preceding any
given
species, extinct or alive is too frequently unobserved. These are gaps in the
fossil
record. And the gaps are the domain of evolution this is the origin of....,
because
evolutionist labors to fill in the gaps with transitional fossil forms. So,
from this
recognization, it's evolution that's in the gaps, the designer(god) is before
and
after the gaps.

[peter2...@gmail.com]

Giving you the benefit of the doubt (not that you deserve it -- you don't)
I assume "3rd" refers to point, not topic.

> 1. You really should try to understand how it sounds when you start talking
> about your "love of paleontology"

As usual, you act as though you were appointed spokesperson for
the majority of t.o. participants. And you do it from astride your Altihippus.

The effect on YOU is negative, regardless of what you write next, I believe:
you don't like being reminded that you almost never give any sign of being interested
in paleontology, one of the three most important on-topic resources in talk.origins.

> as part of a screed about how you are
> different from this riff-raff who you habitually insult.

"habitually insult"= call out for dishonesty, hypocrisy, unfairness, etc. when it occurs, which is
very frequently.

"riff-raff" = you and a number of other people like Mark Isaak, with whom you are in the good.

Mark has recently deleted a description I gave of intelligent design by humans to avert
the extinction of red crabs on Christmas Island, including the url for the webpage,
then lied that it was an example of natural selection.

I took this outrageous lie, together with Mark's reaction when being caught
red-handed, to mean that Mark thinks lying is nothing to be ashamed of.

I do believe you are secretly happy about that: for once, someone has made
your behavior look good in comparison.


I know you hate it when I split replies, but I suspect too many readers
skip over posts that are longer than a tweet on Twitter. And I have already exceeded that limit.


TO BE CONTINUED


Peter Nyikos

[Martin Harran]

Here is a simple way for you to refute him speaking for the majority -
identify any regular participants in t.o. other than Glenn who support
your various claims (and even Glenn is only an occasional supporter as
far as I can see).

[peter2...@gmail.com]

A shameless lie by jillery: Gould's research record is outstanding, as a look at Wikipedia
makes clear.

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

One does not get to be a full Professor at Harvard without an excellent research
record, and the following sounds like they gave him an endowed chair professorship:

"In 1982, Harvard awarded him the title of Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology."
[*op* *cit*]

> >
> The late Steven J. Gould was an paleontologist, a evolutionary biologist and
> science historian.

He was arguably the greatest expositor of science in his generation, the only serious
competitor being Isaac Asimov. Personally, I find Gould far more interesting and
much less self-centered than Asimov. Gould was also much more willing to expose the
blemishes of scientists than Asimov, and he was also very fair to creationists
and even to kooks like Velikovsky.

That might account for jillery throwing him under the bus like [s]he/they did above.

> >> While an IDist can point to evidence which could be observed and _intrepreted_
> >> as supporting the ID paradigm, OTOH - ID can not point to any scientific
> >> evidence
> >> which points to the _identity_ of a designer.
> >
> >
> > Nobody cares about the _identity_ of a designer. What ID advocates
> > need to do is describe a designer's *features* that allow it to design
> > those things claimed for it, while preventing it from designing things
> > that it hasn't done.

> >
> All one can determine about the designer is it's forward thinking,
> intelligent and at one time, it's involvement. Can you name things it
> should have done but didn't?

Excellent comeback, except that you limited it to one designer;
it could have been a number of them. Even if you believe in the Christian God,
the job of some design could have been delegated to angels,
and if so, it probably took the form of guided evolution.

Be that as it may, you are quite right in not endowing it with any superhuman,
let alone supernatural abilities.

The designers I hypothesize as influencing the origin and evolution of life on earth
are of an intelligence comparable to ours, but I do assume a technology
a few centuries in advance of ours.

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

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

[Lawyer Daggett]

On Wednesday, December 14, 2022 at 1:50:21 PM UTC-5, martin...@gmail.com wrote:
> On Wed, 14 Dec 2022 10:06:58 -0800 (PST), "peter2...@gmail.com"
> <peter2...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> >On Wednesday, December 14, 2022 at 8:05:20 AM UTC-5, Lawyer Daggett wrote:


> Here is a simple way for you to refute him speaking for the majority -
> identify any regular participants in t.o. other than Glenn who support
> your various claims (and even Glenn is only an occasional supporter as
> far as I can see).

FYI, I don't mean to be authoritatively speaking for others. I have no right to.
What I do have is the experience of having my own impressions and then
seeing others express those or very similar opinions. That gets followed
very often by somebody proclaiming that he doesn't believe that those others
are being sincere. I usually keep that to myself.

Why one might ask? Because in my experience, "me too" posts are generally
counter-productive. They are even more counter-productive when included in
an exchange with someone who has a greater than 20 year history of complaining
about people forming insincere alliances against them. It's a type of engineered
'heads I win, tails you lose' scenario. Nobody supports a person, you claim they
are alone, others support their view, it's proof of a conspiracy. None-the-less,
Peter had essentially invited me to respond to his accusations against Mark
so I'll address that soon. And while I can't speak for others, if any are reading
this, I expect their reaction to be a bit of shaking of the head about how
ultimately pointless it all is, how it detracts from useful content, and how
nothing good will come of it. That is, I expect the consensus reaction to be
"let it go, walk away,".

[erik simpson]

I won't comment about consensus reaction here, but I concurr with your last sentence.
Just a few minutes ago I was composing a response to another of Peter's assumptions
about what I read, know or feel about something or sombody, but my daemon spoke up
and said "fuggetaboutit". For once I took the advice. The little "trash" icon beckons.

[Lawyer Daggett]

And your belief here is wrong again. I understood what I believed to be Mark's point,
and your example of eradicating an ant population to save endangered crabs was
off point. Specifically, it wasn't intelligent design research. That doesn't mean it wasn't
an intelligent thing to do. Or that environmentalists didn't design their approach. It
was intelligent, and it was designed, but in no legitimate way was it "intelligent design"
research.

His point, a point many make, is that "intelligent design research" has to work towards
some of the goals of challenging the hypothesis that a phenomenon occurred as the
result of a designed intervention. Nobody questions that humans can intervene with
plans to induce changes, whether by selective breeding or introduction or eradication
of some species
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LuiK7jcC1fY&t=28s (the gorillas freeze in the winter)

You respond as if you made some decisive point and get offended that Mark waves
it away. You wave away his dismissal and insist he pay attention to you and what
you continue to imagine to be a compelling point. In my experience, this is common
with you where you are very attached to what are, to you, compelling arguments. Others
are not so compelled. They bypass what they consider to be irrelevancies and return
to their point. In turn, you are dismissive of their points, often deleting them, and go
back to your point.

There's a common expression for this: talking past each other. As I usually have
stronger agreement with your antagonists arguments (often having previously made
them or similar arguments myself), I find myself in greater agreement with them.
And when you stomp your foot, make claims of insincerity, and essentially demand
that people address your posts (to the extent that you often resort to responding
to your own nested text as much or more than to your antagonists), it does not
improve your reputation in my eyes.

Short version: he didn't completely ignore your argument, he dismissed it as
unresponsive in any meaningful way, and I agree with him. I point it out because
you seem to care.

[John Harshman]

I believe you have misunderstood what jillery is saying, which I believe
is that Gould isn't a scientific researcher who discovered evidence for ID.

[jillery]

On Wed, 14 Dec 2022 11:04:28 -0800 (PST), "peter2...@gmail.com"
<peter2...@gmail.com> continued to add to his 300+ lines of
obfuscating noise:

>On Wednesday, December 14, 2022 at 1:00:20 PM UTC-5, Ron Dean wrote:

<snip for focus, a futile effort when PeeWee Peter is involved>

>> >> I consider myself an advocate of intelligent design(ID) which, in fact is
>> >> _not_ predicated upon religions dogma, doctrine or materials. But rather ID is
>> >> based (unlike creationism) upon the evidence discovered by anthropologist
>> >> and scientific researcher.
>> >
>> >
>> > Which researchers? What evidence? And no, Gould isn't one of them.
>
>A shameless lie by jillery: Gould's research record is outstanding, as a look at Wikipedia
>makes clear.

PeeWee Peter's comment above is a transparent self-parody. The only
question is whether the self-parody is intentional. Even a
superficial reading shows that jillery didn't suggest Gould wasn't a
researcher, but instead that Gould wasn't the type of researcher which
R.Dean describes.

It's almost certain PeeWee Peter will ignore this post also.

[peter2...@gmail.com]

On Tuesday, December 13, 2022 at 7:15:19 PM UTC-5, oot...@hot.ee wrote:
> On Tuesday, 13 December 2022 at 20:55:18 UTC+2, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> > On Tuesday, December 13, 2022 at 6:55:19 AM UTC-5, oot...@hot.ee wrote:
> > > On Tuesday, 13 December 2022 at 06:05:19 UTC+2, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> > Repeating 7 lines of text from the first reply, for context:
> > > > Not one of the "obvious" ways has ever been applied to the visualizing
> > > > of *possible* proto-bats that could have been intermediates in
> > > > talk.origins so far.
> > > There are even no need for that one way until there are no problem
> > > to see endless paths.
> > Not with bats. The big problem is in visualizing steps where ground locomotion
> > wasn't unduly sacrificed before the wings were big enough for true flight.
> > > Eh, even some fish have learned to glide after
> > > jumping out of water just to fly away from predators. It is that simple.
> > > All the "trouble" is that we have found no fossils and so we do not
> > > have evidence about one or other concrete way.

That, by the way, is what more than one person has claimed on this thread; but it does
seem that now you realize there are two major and distinct problems here.
Of course, if we had enough intermediate fossils, like with whales,
we would not need to think about the one we are focused on here.


> > Wrong. Try solving the big problem of bat wings with even ONE
> > hypothetical path, and to see which of the "endless paths" you think will be the one.

> Purely speculating here but for example: First step similar to evolution of flying
> squirrel, colugos, Petauridae, and Anomaluridae having plagiopatagium for
> gliding but leaving still capability to climb about as easily.

Yes, and we do not even have proto-bat fossils like that, as I pointed out to Erik.
Pterosaurs are in the same boat, as I pointed out to John Harshman.

By the way, this is a talk* newsgroup, and it is appropriate, when using
technical terms, to give a reference for them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patagium
[Excerpt:]
The patagium of a bat has four distinct parts:

Propatagium: the patagium present from the neck to the first digit.
Dactylopatagium: the portion found within the digits.
Plagiopatagium: the portion found between the last digit and the hindlimbs.
Uropatagium: the posterior portion of the flap between the two hindlimbs.
[end of excerpt]

However, not all bats have all of these. Megachiropterans ("megabats") do not have
uropatagia, in many if not all cases.

Moreover, the the Wikipedia entry on bats seems to be in disagreement with
the entry I quoted from the one on patagia. It makes it sound like bats don't have propatagia:

"The patagium is the wing membrane; it is stretched between the arm and finger bones, and down the side of the body to the hind limbs and tail."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bat#Wings_and_flight


>Then perhaps strenghtening
> the muscles for air navigating in air then evolving propatagium and propatagium

Here you are using the word "propatagium" twice; was that intentional?
Whatever the answer, we need to figure out which of the two Wikipedia articles is correct
about whether they exist or not.


> for bigger surface, then weakening climbing capability on behalf of two
> dactylopatagiums that gradually took over from plagiopatagium.

Wait! The plagiopatagium is very much a part of the wing, and takes up
about as much area as the two dactylopatagiums.

Do you envision the two dactylopatagiums growing simultaneously,
or first one and then the other? If you want to maintain maximum feasible climbing ability,
you are forced to have first the rear one, and then the front one to
develop. Also, do you want to have the plagiopatagium to develop
extensively along with the "little finger" before the rear dactylopatagium
starts developing in earnest?


>That left only
> one finger for climbing.


> > > > >Also there are zero explanations what compete ... what supposedly happened.
> >
> > > > I told Erik of one: sexual selection of otherwise maladaptive stages.
> > See whether you can find ONE path without maladaptive stages. I have
> > never seen any (see Tet Zoo account below, for instance), nor thought of one.
> > This is why I resorted to sexual selection to make the otherwise maladaptive
> > stages into stages where the most attractive (bigger!) proto-wings
> > won out in the race for the most "reproductive success."


<snip of things to be talked about in separate post, probably only tomorrow>


> five patagiums so (for simplicity) five semi-randomly ordered steps.

Four for most or all megabats, and three if there is no propatagium after all.

By the way, I see you have noticed that there is no real patagium between the second
and third digits of bats, only a very narrow membrane holding them together.

This is common to all bats, and once I realized that, I immediately rejected the hypothesis that
was popular at one time, that megabats and microbats evolved flight separately.
That one feature would be an astronomically improbable character to evolve independently.


> > > flight also
> > > has been evolved (and lost) several times.

> > In insects and birds, but not in bats (let alone proto-bats), to the best of our knowledge.
> > And it would be irrelevant anyway to the problem of origination of wings for flight.

> And so the niche is usually taken as insects have far shorter generations and
> birds and other flying dinosaurs were there before. Somehow bat found a niche
> to improve above simple gliding.

In a word: nocturnal.

It is generally believed that proto-bats came along only after the K-Pa extinction,
so pterosaurs and other flying dinosaurs would not enter into the picture.
As for insects, ability to catch them in air with wings is one at which bats
are far better than any insect.

By the way, why do you mention shorter generations?


> Without fossils we don't know how it exactly
> coincided that bat managed to gain its upper wing.

Yes, we can only judge what is possible, not what actually happened.
And there are still lots of details to figure out before we can make
even a preliminary judgment. I hope we can "brainstorm" together
to try and figure them out.

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

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

[Martin Harran]

On Wed, 14 Dec 2022 11:12:30 -0800 (PST), Lawyer Daggett
<j.nobel...@gmail.com> wrote:

>On Wednesday, December 14, 2022 at 1:50:21 PM UTC-5, martin...@gmail.com wrote:
>> On Wed, 14 Dec 2022 10:06:58 -0800 (PST), "peter2...@gmail.com"
>> <peter2...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> >On Wednesday, December 14, 2022 at 8:05:20 AM UTC-5, Lawyer Daggett wrote:
>
>
>> Here is a simple way for you to refute him speaking for the majority -
>> identify any regular participants in t.o. other than Glenn who support
>> your various claims (and even Glenn is only an occasional supporter as
>> far as I can see).
>
>FYI, I don't mean to be authoritatively speaking for others. I have no right to.

Correct, you have no authority to speak for others. That, however,
does not negate the fact that your opinion almost certainly reflects
the opinion of the vast majority of regular participants here
regarding Peter and his increasingly inane claims.

[Martin Harran]

On Wed, 14 Dec 2022 17:58:18 GMT, Ron Dean <rdhall...@gmail.com>

I'd really like to see your response to wnat i said in my "Fine Tuning
- A Religious Perspective" post on a new thread.

[peter2...@gmail.com]

This post is addressed to Ron Dean. It is piggybacked on a post by Harshman
of which only one line is preserved, but that one line is given quite a lengthy on-topic reply.

> >>> On Tuesday, December 13, 2022 at 1:25:19 PM UTC-5,

or some time earlier and reposted here, Ron Dean wrote:


> >>>>>>>> RD wrote>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>.

> >>>>> I'm back (I hope) I have serious health issues that abruptly hit me, mild
> >>>>> stroke, (left side) requiring carotid artery surgery. I had heart problems
> >>>>> requiring stints, have thick blood. In and out of hospital 4 times past 6
> >>>>> months, last time for 1 week, returned home past thursday. My dad and his dad
> >>>>> (possibly) had same problems; both passed: reciently lost 1/th cousin with
> >>>>> same problem. So, I don't know...........

I'm very sorry to learn these details, Ron, but also relieved to see how you are well enough
to be posting again. I'll do my best to help make this stint of yours as stress-free as I can.

To that end, let me suggest that you only read my posts if they are in direct reply to one of yours.
There has to be a lot of correcting by me of others for deceitful behavior,
otherwise guileless people will wonder as I did when I was new to the kind of forum
that we are in. I thought:

"Why doesn't he respond to these derogatory allegations, if he is innocent of the things they claim about him?"

There is no need for you to see the corrections I make, if you are no longer
as naive as I was back then. They will sometimes have to be very forceful,
and you might also be stressed by seeing the depths to which some regulars here sink.


<snip to get past some nastiness that you have not yet seen, I think>


> > Because many gaps are NOT being filled, including the ones for bat origins
> > and pterosaur origins. In both cases, there are no fossils of gap-fillers
> > even in your sense of the word, between fully terrestrial animals with
> > no sign of patagia, and full fledged fliers.


Here comes Harshman's one line response to the preceding paragraph:

On 12:00 AM EST (ca. 20 hours ago), John Harshman wrote:

> But are not most gaps of Darwin's day now filled?

"filled" is misleading. The majority of gaps in Vertebrata may have been split into two or more
smaller gaps, but not the gaps that I brought up above.

Granted, those gaps might be smaller than what they were
in Darwin's day, when the fully terrestrial animals preceding
full fledged bats were somewhat less known than they are
now. But even today, there are very few promising leads that
make us better off than in Darwin's day.

One somewhat promising fossil is that of a fully terrestrial animal
with no sign of patagia that has been hypothesized to be transitional between pterosaurs and reptiles
known in Darwin's day, but there are still some difficulties with it.
But paleontologists are so starved for any progress that it was BIG news.
I did an OP in sci.bio.paleontology on the day the news came out:

https://groups.google.com/g/sci.bio.paleontology/c/jALARK3lN2E/m/8WSod3TUFQAJ
Subject: Today's News on Pterosaur Origins
Oct 5, 2022, 3:38:54 PM

Ironically, Harshman never showed up on that thread. And Erik Simpson, his faithful
friend, did one brief congratulations on my "scoop" and disappeared from the thread.

But the thread did not die. Daud Deden and I had a very friendly discussion lasting 18 posts on it.
I think it was un-technical enough that you might enjoy reading it, Ron.

I say this to you because, alas, Daud has decided to take a half-year posting break from sci.bio.paleontology,
and if what we wrote there can excite you, I'd love to have you post there from time to time.

I don't mind telling you, Ron, that Ialready miss Daud very much,
and it's less than a week since he did his OP titled "Bye for now".

The rest of Harshman's post featured completely un-helpful comments, including some
mildly nasty ones, so I snipped them.

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

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

[peter2...@gmail.com]

On Wednesday, December 14, 2022 at 12:55:19 AM UTC-5, Ron Dean wrote:
> On Dec 13, 2022 at 3:31:01 PM EST, "peter2...@gmail.com"

> <peter2...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > It's great to see you here, Ron. I was afraid that after three posts, one
> > of which was mainly to regret having posted the first, you had
> > disappeared again.
> >

> Thank you Peter, I sencerely appreciate this welcoming.

I did a long reply to you earlier this evening, piggybacked on a post of Harshman's,
where I saw the details of your health history that you gave us. Here is a url for it:

https://groups.google.com/g/talk.origins/c/WATJ1V2lWcI/m/LrEo6wy7AwAJ

It has a special message for you near the end.


> > On Tuesday, December 13, 2022 at 1:25:19 PM UTC-5, Ron Dean wrote:


<big skip to get to your words>

> >> As I recall, Darwin was distressed because of the absence of intermediate
> >> fossils between
> >> ancestor and descedent, that his theory predicted. This absence he believed
> >> could be used to refute his theory. But he hoped for and expected that future
> >> searches would fill in the gaps. And this has been the goal and major
> >> objective of paleontology for more than a century.
> >
> > That goal was there, yes, but if my love of paleontology is any indication,
> > paleontologists are mainly fascinated by the incredible variety and richness
> > of extinct animals,
> > and secondarily .by lots of other things, including the riddle of the
> > lifestyles of animals that are very different from existing ones [1], in addition to the
> > goal you name.
> >

> Okay, I appreciate that, but isn't science suppose to be neutral, nonpartisan
> going to wherever the evidence leads?

That's the ideal, but "honored more in the breach than in the observance" as
Shakespeare put it in "Hamlet."

>If a goal is set at the beginning and the search endeavors
> to find positive evidence leading specifically toward proving the objective,
> is this science?

Yes, if the work is untainted by any form of deceit or unfairness.
Ideally, someone with a different hypothesis would come along
and show evidence in the opposite direction, if there is any.
But this ideal is seldom achieved if the evidence in the opposite
direction is not accepted by some well-known journal.

J.L.B. Smith, professionally a chemist and arguably the greatest
amateur ichthyologist of the 20th century, wrote the following in
the foreword to one of my favorite books:

"The general public is apt to regard people like leading scientists or cabinet ministers as almost superhuman and beyond or above ordinary human emotions. They are not, emphatically not, and to scale the heights a man must be prepared to wage an unending, bitter battle with those persistent fundamental weaknesses that constantly plague us all."
-- --J.L.B. Smith, _The Search Beneath the Sea_, Henry Holt and Company, 1956.
Also published under the title _Old Fourlegs_ in London by Longman, Green.

This is the book where he wrote about his great discovery of the living coelacanth,
of a fish family that had been believed to have become extinct in the great catastrophe
that killed the dinosaurs and most of the species of animals then living on earth.

> If this, is the case, how can one rely on science?

By being very, very discerning. Without the proper understanding, this can be a daunting task.

> Case in point: stasis:
> according to Gould,
> stasis had been observed in the fossil record, since before Darwin, but it was
> passed off as "no data",_ by people looking for support of this goal.

Yes. After reading Harshman's totally unhelpful retort to my inquiry about this state
of affairs, I'm wondering whether the reaction to Gould's theory is tainted by
envy on the one hand and his outspokenness on the other. The outspokenness
is reminiscent of J.L.B. Smith's words, and fuels the envy of Gould's magnificent
accomplishments and honors.

Be that as it may, it's obvious from Harshman's reaction to what I said about Gould's
astute hypothesis on p. 191 of _The_Panda's_Thumb_,
that he has a very inadequate understanding of the length and breath and depth
of Gould's research and scholarly writing. What Gould does on that page is
to give an ingenious idea of HOW speciation could occur, as distinct from
WHERE and under what circumstances it is likely to occur, as Punctuated Equilibrium doe[s.

It's good to see that you have a copy! it saves me a lot of typing.

> >
> >Tragically that "goal and major objective" seems to have been abandoned

> > due to an ideology by which John Harshman swears. It forbids scientists

> > to take seriously any hypotheses about any fossil species being directly
> > ancestral to any other fossil species, even in the wonderful horse superfamily
> > of Equioidea.
> > If he had his way, the superfamily tree in Kathleen Hunt's superb
> > horse family FAQ would be consigned to the wastebasket of history.
> >

> That raises the question, given the scarcity of intermediate fossils between
> most ancestor and descendant and given the objective goal, when an
> intermediate is found; how is one to
> know, for certain, that the finding is not just the "best in the field"?

Well, first of all, we are talking about hypothesized ancestry of X to Z,
and ideally there would be a Y that fits in between them,
with X ancestral to Y and Y ancestral to Z.

Scientifically, the best that we can hope for in almost all cases is the concept of
a Prime Candidacy for direct descent from species A to species B. This is a pair of fossil skeletons
that are essentially complete [1] and in which there are no characters
in B that can be construed as disqualifying its direct descent from A.

In those terms, we'd want Y to be a Prime Candidate for descent from X, and also
a Prime Candidate for ancestry to Z.

[1] one may have to combine two or more skeletons from the same species to represent A,
and the same for B, as long as there is no question in each case that these skeletons
are in the same species.

This happens over much of the horse family tree, except that in most cases, we have
to use "genus" instead of "species". But this is often a matter of dispute between
"lumpers" and "splitters". Anyway, you can read about it in Kathleen Hunt's finely
detailed FAQ.

> > http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/horses/horse_evol.html
> >
> As I remember, Dr. J.J. Simpson had problems with the depiction of horse
> evolution.

I'm not familiar with it. Can you recall what it was? If you mean George Gaylord Simpson,
Kathleen Hunt shows him as being very happy with it.

> >
> > [1] One or two differences already can give rise to a "very different" animal.
> > A fascinating example is *Deinotherium*, which looked like an elephant,
> > except for having lost its upper tusks and grown a pair of tusks
> > in the lower jaw, pointing down and curved backwards.
> >
> > One fanciful lifestyle idea was that these tusks were used to anchor
> > this para-elephant to the riverbank while it slept in a river!
> >
> >

> This, of course, is just a guess, a hypothesis and simply a "just-so-story".

Yes, I don't think even the originator took it seriously, but only as a joke
to underscore how lost the best paleontologists were for good ideas.

> >
> >> So, the axiom "God of the gaps", seems to really be "evolution in the gaps".
> >> After most major gap, the new "kinds" and stasis that's observed (Gould's) new
> >> "species" could be seen as the result of a designers involvement. It's
> >> analogous to workers in a hole trying to fill it in with whatever.
> >> Furthermore, new "kinds" and stasis is _not_ in the sphere of evolution.
> >
> > It's interesting to see how you are now posting like a committed creationist.
> >

> ! do not subscribe to the fundamentalist creation scenario. As far as I'm
> concern,
> creationism is strictly religious in nature. I think Intelligent design best
> fits the evidence

> so far discovered, by scientist and it can be seen as a deliberate, purposeful
> and intential design.

I'm relieved to hear that!

> > However, Gould has something to say to you too, about how speciation can
> > occur despite the constricting condition of natural selection having
> > to take place WITHIN interbreeding populations. If you have access to
> > _The_Panda's_Thumb_, you will find it on page 191.
> >

> > If not, I'll make time tomorrow for typing out the whole passage. I can't find
> > it online,
> > not even a portion of the book that includes p. 191, and I have too much on my
> > plate today.
> >

> I own the book "Panda" Thumb", I located what you referred to: so he argues
> that a "key" - a large change that serves to shift a possessor toward a new
> mode of life and if it's successful, may require a large set of collateral
> alterations, involving morphological and behavioral which
> may arise through traditional gradual route provided the key adaptation forces
> a profound shift in selective pressure.
>
> I understand what he is saying, but it's theory and it occurs to me, that the
> large number of co - alterations should be subject to be weeded out, by
> natural selecton,

Unless they enhance survival by bringing the whole animal into greater
harmony with the big surprise mutation. You seem to be saying this below yourself:

> if they individually serve a purpose, then when other
> mutations co-join; this is expecting unguided random
> processes to give rise to new forms. I think it takes quite a lot of trust to
> accept that this as a good explanation: especially, given the rarity of
> beneficial mutations and the immense number of mutations that are weeded out
> by natural selection. I don't know~!

I understand your reluctance to go too far in this direction, but I think you can
be happy with the horse family and all the evidence for evolution from
Hyracotherium/Eohippus to Equus, given by Kathleen Hunt.

Michael Behe puts the limits of unguided evolution roughly within the family level,
as do quite a lot of creationists who set their own dividing line between
microevolution (evolution within "kind") and macroevolution there. This is at odds with the official
definition of macroevolution by scientists, but it is a useful alternative definition
in their eyes, and should be respected as such.

Peter Nyikos
Professor, Dept. of Mathematics

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

[Mark Isaak]

On 12/13/22 10:26 PM, Ron Dean wrote:
> On Dec 13, 2022 at 2:51:08 PM EST, "jillery" <69jp...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On Tue, 13 Dec 2022 18:23:34 GMT, Ron Dean <rdhall...@gmail.com>

>> wrote:
>>
>>>>>>> RD wrote>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>.
>>>> I'm back (I hope) I have serious health issues that abruptly hit me, mild
>>>> stroke, (left side) requiring carotid artery surgery. I had heart problems
>>>> requiring stints, have thick blood. In and out of hospital 4 times past 6
>>>> months, last time for 1 week, returned home past thursday. My dad and his dad
>>>> (possibly) had same problems; both passed: reciently lost 1/th cousin with
>>>> same problem. So, I don't know...........
>>>

>>> As I recall, Darwin was distressed because of the absence of intermediate
>>> fossils between
>>> ancestor and descedent, that his theory predicted. This absence he believed
>>> could be used to refute his theory. But he hoped for and expected that future
>>> searches would fill in the gaps. And this has been the goal and major
>>> objective of paleontology for more than a century.

>>> So, the axiom "God of the gaps", seems to really be "evolution in the gaps".
>>
>>

>> More accurately, that would be "taphonomy of the gaps". There's much
>> more evidence for evolution than fossils.
>>
> I know Jill, but since history of life is _recorded_ in the strata of the
> earth;

> if evolution does not fit or assimilate with fossil history as recorded in
> stone,
> then evolution is challenged if not refuted.

Oddly, that argument does not seem to be accorded any validity when it
comes to challenging or refuting biblical creation.

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

[Mark Isaak]

On 12/14/22 8:02 AM, Ron Dean wrote:
> On Dec 14, 2022 at 9:55:48 AM EST, "broger...@gmail.com"
> <broger...@gmail.com> wrote:

Welcome back, Ron. It's good to see you here again.

>> What would a transitional fossil look like? Say a transitional fossil between
>> a couple of extinct species of horses or between reptiles and mammals? all
>> very well to say there are no transitional fossils by scoffing at anything
>> anyone proposes as one, but it would be helpful if you would say what you
>> think a transitional fossil ought to be like, if there were to be such a
>> thing.
>>
> When there are animals that are virtually1) little or no different in skelital
> configuration from ancient ancestors, called living fossils:

You do realize, I hope, that there is nothing in the theory of evolution
that says species *have to* change. And those living fossils are on the
order of one out of every 100,000 species.

> 2) the preponderance of stasis in the fossil record.

I don't understand this argument. The number of fossil organisms is
enough to show that most of the species that ever lived are extinct now.
And those fossils appear at all different times over more than a
billion years. The fossil record is anything but static.

You are probably referring to some fossils that stay around unchanged
for a long time. Again, there is nothing in the theory of evolution
that says species have to change. And if the organism is adapted to its
environment and the environment does not change, then there is a good
argument to be made that evolution *predicts* a period of stasis.
(There would still be drift, but that would mostly be offset by
stabilizing selection, at least in gross features.)

> and 3) the argmenting gaps in the record, occuring as new fossil
> species are discovered, it challenges evolutionary change.

I know of no gaps that challenge evolutionary change. Gaps are expected
in the fossil record. They are expected more for certain types of
creatures (e.g. without skeletons) and for creatures in certain types of
habitats (e.g. alpine forests), but fossilization is rare enough even
for 1000-pound dinosaur femurs that any preservation of any ancient
species is certain to be hit-or-miss.

> Compared to the known fossil species during Darwins time, a huge number of new
> fossil species are known, most of which are preceded by gaps.
> It raises the question, when a transitional fossil is offered, how is one
> _know_ that it's a real intermediate ancestor between species and _not_ the
> best in the field?

*All* fossils are preceded (and followed) by gaps, usually of an extent
at best known very approximately. Sometimes (very rarely) the extent
can be narrowed down to as little as a year, but that's still a gap.
The only maybe exceptions are fossil assemblages, where multiple
organisms died and were fossilized simultaneously, but then you have
gaps on either side of those events. That's how it works. The
existence of gaps tells you nothing.

Fossils can challenge particular evolutionary hypotheses (e.g., Did
dinosaur X evolve from group A or group B?), but I don't know of any
fossils, nor any lack of fossils, which are not consistent with the
theory of evolution. Rather, they *support* evolution, because they
show a sequence of change in life over time which is entirely consistent
with our other evidence and with the theory of evolution on the whole.

[Ron Dean]

On Dec 14, 2022 at 10:55:33 PM EST, "Mark Isaak"

I do not defend biblical creation. But I do defend intelligent design. I'm
convinced
that scientific evidence can be intrepreted in support of deliberate,
purposeful design
in nature and this implies a designer, which demands a answer. But I know of
no
evidence that points to the Identity of the designer.

[John Harshman]

That's the old joke about creationists, not even something I think real
creationists do. "Filling one gap makes two more gaps". Do you really
want to propose that?

I wasn't talking about bats or pterosaurs but about all the various gaps
throughout life. My point is that you can't make a general case from
those two unusual examples.

> Granted, those gaps might be smaller than what they were
> in Darwin's day, when the fully terrestrial animals preceding
> full fledged bats were somewhat less known than they are
> now. But even today, there are very few promising leads that
> make us better off than in Darwin's day.
>
> One somewhat promising fossil is that of a fully terrestrial animal
> with no sign of patagia that has been hypothesized to be transitional between pterosaurs and reptiles
> known in Darwin's day, but there are still some difficulties with it.
> But paleontologists are so starved for any progress that it was BIG news.
> I did an OP in sci.bio.paleontology on the day the news came out:
>
> https://groups.google.com/g/sci.bio.paleontology/c/jALARK3lN2E/m/8WSod3TUFQAJ
> Subject: Today's News on Pterosaur Origins
> Oct 5, 2022, 3:38:54 PM
>
> Ironically, Harshman never showed up on that thread. And Erik Simpson, his faithful
> friend, did one brief congratulations on my "scoop" and disappeared from the thread.
>
> But the thread did not die. Daud Deden and I had a very friendly discussion lasting 18 posts on it.
> I think it was un-technical enough that you might enjoy reading it, Ron.
>
> I say this to you because, alas, Daud has decided to take a half-year posting break from sci.bio.paleontology,
> and if what we wrote there can excite you, I'd love to have you post there from time to time.
>
> I don't mind telling you, Ron, that Ialready miss Daud very much,
> and it's less than a week since he did his OP titled "Bye for now".
>
> The rest of Harshman's post featured completely un-helpful comments, including some
> mildly nasty ones, so I snipped them.

I suppose I should, by the same reasoning, have snipped everything you
just said.

[Mark Isaak]

What you call an "outrageous lie" was, in fact, an honest mistake borne
from assuming you had a point to make that was not blatantly obvious
already.

Which underscores one of Lawyer Daggett's points. Whenever you make a
specific claim about me, I see plainly that you are wrong. (For another
example, refer to your assertion that I had probably not read _The
Panda's Thumb_.)

Now, try to think like a mathematician. When you are wrong 100% of the
time on all samples that can be checked, what may the examiner infer
about other samples, that is, all those times you say something about
someone else?

[Mark Isaak]

On 12/14/22 9:58 AM, Ron Dean wrote:
> On Dec 14, 2022 at 7:11:13 AM EST, "jillery" <69jp...@gmail.com> wrote:

[snip to one point]

>>
>> Nobody cares about the _identity_ of a designer. What ID advocates
>> need to do is describe a designer's *features* that allow it to design
>> those things claimed for it, while preventing it from designing things
>> that it hasn't done.
>>
> All one can determine about the designer is it's forward thinking,
> intelligent and at one time, it's involvement. Can you name things it
> should have done but didn't?

Design (in the sense used in "intelligent design") is *defined by* the
designer and what the designer does. If you do not have at least
hypothetical answers to how the designer works, then the problem is not
that you don't know the designer; the problem is that you are not
talking about design at all. You are just using the word to mean "any
pattern", not "a purposeful arrangement" (which requires something with
a purpose and a means to arrange).

[jillery]

So sometimes you and Daggett reply, and sometimes you don't, just like
everybody else. What's the problem with that?

[jillery]

On Wed, 14 Dec 2022 17:58:18 GMT, Ron Dean <rdhall...@gmail.com>

Correct. Steven J. Gould *also* publicly and repeatedly repudiated
those who claimed PE refuted evolution and/or supported ID. That's
why Gould isn't one of those you describe.

Now, what about your alleged evidence? You didn't mention that. And
no, PE is neither evidence against evolution nor evidence for ID.

>>> While an IDist can point to evidence which could be observed and _intrepreted_
>>> as supporting the ID paradigm, OTOH - ID can not point to any scientific
>>> evidence
>>> which points to the _identity_ of a designer.
>>
>>
>> Nobody cares about the _identity_ of a designer. What ID advocates
>> need to do is describe a designer's *features* that allow it to design
>> those things claimed for it, while preventing it from designing things
>> that it hasn't done.
>>
>All one can determine about the designer is it's forward thinking,
>intelligent and at one time, it's involvement. Can you name things it
>should have done but didn't?

Do you understand that saying what a presumptive designer did and
didn't do is an obligation of those who make that presumption? That
would be you, not me.

That may be. So how do you think the *number* of bat fossils informs
evolution?

>>> However, the origin of bats is unknown:
>>> transitional fossils are unobservable cannot be touched or examined:
>>> This is where excuses, explanation hypothesis, theory, conjecture and
>>> just-so-stories can come into play and frequently does.
>>
>>
>> Identify and cite those just-so-stories you allege.
>...
>The neck of the giraffe, how it got its long neck.

There are lots of stories about how giraffes got their long neck. You
forgot to cite any one which you regard as a just-so story.

>>> I think thie_observed_Vs_unobserved_ describes and characterizes evolution.
>>> I think books could be written on this topic.
>>
>>

>>ISTM your comment above is odd, coming right after your argument based

>>almost entirely on unobserved fossils.
>
>That was my problem: fossils that can be observed, touched and examined are
>real and fact, but the intermediate forms leading up to and preceding any
>given species, extinct or alive is too frequently unobserved. These are gaps in the
>fossil record. And the gaps are the domain of evolution this is the origin of....,
>because evolutionist labors to fill in the gaps with transitional fossil forms. So,
>from this recognization, it's evolution that's in the gaps, the designer(god) is before
>and after the gaps.

How is it possible that intermediate forms are "too often unobserved"
when almost all fossils are intermediate forms? Perhaps you could
specify what you mean by "intermediate form".

[Athel Cornish-Bowden]

On 2022-12-15 09:48:38 +0000, jillery said:
>>>
>> The late Steven J. Gould was an paleontologist, a evolutionary biologist and
>> science historian.
>
>
> Correct. Steven J. Gould *also* publicly and repeatedly repudiated
> those who claimed PE refuted evolution and/or supported ID. That's
> why Gould isn't one of those you describe.
>
> Now, what about your alleged evidence? You didn't mention that. And
> no, PE is neither evidence against evolution nor evidence for ID.

[ … ]

>
>> That was my problem: fossils that can be observed, touched and examined are
>> real and fact, but the intermediate forms leading up to and preceding any
>> given species, extinct or alive is too frequently unobserved. These are
>> gaps in the
>> fossil record. And the gaps are the domain of evolution this is the
>> origin of....,
>> because evolutionist labors to fill in the gaps with transitional
>> fossil forms. So,
>> from this recognization, it's evolution that's in the gaps, the
>> designer(god) is before
>> and after the gaps.
>
>
> How is it possible that intermediate forms are "too often unobserved"
> when almost all fossils are intermediate forms? Perhaps you could
> specify what you mean by "intermediate form".

Until 2005 or so no fossils of chimpanzees or gorillas were known. Does
that mean that before 2005 one could argue that the great apes had not
evolved, but just appeared one day when the designer decided to place
them ready-made in the rain forests and savannas of Africa? In suppose
some might have argued thus, but I wouldn't have.


--
Athel -- French and British, living in Marseilles for 36+ years; mainly
in England until 1987.

[Öö Tiib]

I meant uropatagium too but somehow repeated propatagium twice, sorry.

>
> > for bigger surface, then weakening climbing capability on behalf of two
> > dactylopatagiums that gradually took over from plagiopatagium.
>
> Wait! The plagiopatagium is very much a part of the wing, and takes up
> about as much area as the two dactylopatagiums.

It perhaps took more area at first. To glide to particular direction big enough
patagium is needed (and can be one), to micro-control it well enough (to catch
something) multiple segments help, then for to actively fly requirements
change again. There is efficiency competition when going into new
niche and that can make evolution faster. It will become stuck only if
local optimum is good enough to exhaust niche.

>
> Do you envision the two dactylopatagiums growing simultaneously,
> or first one and then the other? If you want to maintain maximum feasible climbing ability,
> you are forced to have first the rear one, and then the front one to
> develop. Also, do you want to have the plagiopatagium to develop
> extensively along with the "little finger" before the rear dactylopatagium
> starts developing in earnest?

The start of dactylopatagia is that programmed death of cells between
fingers during embryonic development of paw have to be turned off. So
first step can be to have all 4, then adjust the sizes can be next steps.

>
>
> >That left only
> > one finger for climbing.
>
>
> > > > > >Also there are zero explanations what compete ... what supposedly happened.
> > >
> > > > > I told Erik of one: sexual selection of otherwise maladaptive stages.
> > > See whether you can find ONE path without maladaptive stages. I have
> > > never seen any (see Tet Zoo account below, for instance), nor thought of one.
> > > This is why I resorted to sexual selection to make the otherwise maladaptive
> > > stages into stages where the most attractive (bigger!) proto-wings
> > > won out in the race for the most "reproductive success."
>
>
> <snip of things to be talked about in separate post, probably only tomorrow>
>
>
> > five patagiums so (for simplicity) five semi-randomly ordered steps.
>
> Four for most or all megabats, and three if there is no propatagium after all.
>
> By the way, I see you have noticed that there is no real patagium between the second
> and third digits of bats, only a very narrow membrane holding them together.
>
> This is common to all bats, and once I realized that, I immediately rejected the hypothesis that
> was popular at one time, that megabats and microbats evolved flight separately.
> That one feature would be an astronomically improbable character to evolve independently.

I think bats have no much difficulty to spread so there are no reason to evolve
multiple times. Most likely one successful in something specie spread fast all
over and then was present to extend to other available niches. Evolution also
ensures that parts that lose importance (in that other niche) can degenerate
quickly.

>
> > > > flight also
> > > > has been evolved (and lost) several times.
>
> > > In insects and birds, but not in bats (let alone proto-bats), to the best of our knowledge.
> > > And it would be irrelevant anyway to the problem of origination of wings for flight.
>
> > And so the niche is usually taken as insects have far shorter generations and
> > birds and other flying dinosaurs were there before. Somehow bat found a niche
> > to improve above simple gliding.
>
> In a word: nocturnal.
>
> It is generally believed that proto-bats came along only after the K-Pa extinction,
> so pterosaurs and other flying dinosaurs would not enter into the picture.
> As for insects, ability to catch them in air with wings is one at which bats
> are far better than any insect.

Yes. Major echolocation takes evolving sophisticated ears and that might
be more difficult for bird than for mammal. Birds only support their eyes
with echolocation. Predatory insects have disadvantages in speed of
metabolism, body size and mental capabilities.

>
> By the way, why do you mention shorter generations?

Clock tick of evolution is generation. Faster ticking clock means quicker
evolution. One point mutation can change only a bit. Animal can not gain
new activity by just evolving its gut bacteria. It needs to change body. That
takes number of generations of tiny changes to sum up. Therefore insect
with its short generations has advantage. So where limitations of insect
are no problem there we see variety of those.

> > Without fossils we don't know how it exactly
> > coincided that bat managed to gain its upper wing.
>
> Yes, we can only judge what is possible, not what actually happened.
> And there are still lots of details to figure out before we can make
> even a preliminary judgment. I hope we can "brainstorm" together
> to try and figure them out.

Yes, that data is needed for determining actual path. My speculative
path of gliding mammal -> better control -> flight in unoccupied but
complicated niche feels plausible for 10 millions years to get bat but
can be wrong without data.

[jillery]

Your comments above describe similar reasoning some in this topic
apply to bats. Both are conclusions at best based on a *lack* of
data, at worst based on denying the data that exists. Either way
isn't scientific.

[peter2...@gmail.com]

You reveal below how little you know about ID as Behe and other leading theorists and
researchers (like Scott Minnich) treat science.

> I believe you have misunderstood what jillery is saying, which I believe
> is that Gould isn't a scientific researcher who discovered evidence for ID.

Jillery may be ignorant enough to think the way you are thinking here.
No one who knows that Behe makes tremendous use of scientific facts
that were not intended to promote ID and may even be hostile to ID would
think that way.

It's an intellectual analogue of exaptation, which you and almost every one
of your fans here knows about, but this analogy is so novel to you and everyone
here that it will take a long time before more than one or two can wrap their
minds around it. I believe Ron Dean will be one of the first, while you lag far behind.

> > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Jay_Gould
> >
> > One does not get to be a full Professor at Harvard without an excellent research
> > record, and the following sounds like they gave him an endowed chair professorship:
> >
> > "In 1982, Harvard awarded him the title of Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology."
> > [*op* *cit*]
> >
> >
> >>>
> >> The late Steven J. Gould was an paleontologist, a evolutionary biologist and
> >> science historian.
> >
> > He was arguably the greatest expositor of science in his generation, the only serious
> > competitor being Isaac Asimov. Personally, I find Gould far more interesting and
> > much less self-centered than Asimov. Gould was also much more willing to expose the
> > blemishes of scientists than Asimov, and he was also very fair to creationists
> > and even to kooks like Velikovsky.
> >
> > That might account for jillery throwing him under the bus like [s]he/they did above.

I thought I would never see the expository skills of Gould again when he passed away in 2002.
Imagine my surprise, then, to discover them displayed again in Chapters 2 and 3 of a 2007
book, in a lively and immensely informative exposition, on malaria and the "trench warfare"
between various mutations of humans to fight it, and the far more numerous mutations
of the parasite, *Plasmodium* *falciparum*, that causes it.

Bill Rogers, our resident expert on malaria, would be green with envy at the skill with which it is done,
but he'll almost certainly never look at it, because the book is _The_Edge_of_Evolution_ ,
and the author is Michael Behe.

Peter Nyikos
Professor, Dept. of Mathematics

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

[erik simpson]

I really doubt BIll Rogers is unaware of Behe's fantastic presentation, and even more
greatly doubt he is any color of envy of that kind of "skill".

[peter2...@gmail.com]

<snip of irrelevant text to get to Erik's bottom-post>

> I really doubt BIll Rogers is unaware of Behe's fantastic presentation,

Do you also doubt that Bill Rogers is unaware of most of my posts in the last three
years, despite having me in a *de* *facto* killfile?

Be that as it may, I'm surprised to see you use the term "fantastic presentation"
to describe Behe's exposition. Unless you are being sarcastic, it's by far
the highest praise I've seen of anything Behe (or I, for that matter) wrote by an anti-ID zealot.

>and even more
> greatly doubt he is any color of envy of that kind of "skill".

The scare quotes make me suspect that you *were* being sarcastic
about something you've never read.

Be that as it may, I meant what I said seriously. No one who reads what Bill writes
in reply to his namesake "Freon" Bill or to Ron Dean would think there is any
ability there to give a fantastic presentation.

And one can only write so many times with verve about the tiny fraction of abiogenesis
that is ruled by organic chemistry before biochemistry takes over. Bill Rogers
has confined himself to that portion while MarkE kept hoping in vain for him
to address the huge stretch where biochemistry rules.


Peter Nyikos

[Lawyer Daggett]

That post had the nutritional value of an advertisement for a cheeseburger.
Seriously, what do you imagine it contributed?

There's a gratuitous backhand slap at Jillery with little seeming purpose other than
the personal joy you seem to have at calling others ignorant. Then a puzzling sentence.

> No one who knows that Behe makes tremendous use of scientific facts
> that were not intended to promote ID and may even be hostile to ID would
> think that way.

It's a curious non-sequitur with an ill-defined antecedent for "that way".
Best I can manage is that you assert 1. Behe is, by definition, doing Intelligent Design
research. 2. Behe uses facts obtained from non-ID research. And this somehow makes
a connection to Gould being an ID researcher because he used scientific facts too.

It's argumentative without actually making a coherent argument. Why bother?

Then, we're treated to this:

>
> It's an intellectual analogue of exaptation, which you and almost every one
> of your fans here knows about, but this analogy is so novel to you and everyone
> here that it will take a long time before more than one or two can wrap their
> minds around it. I believe Ron Dean will be one of the first, while you lag far behind.

What analogue? Something about Gould's discussion of PunkEek being like exaptation?
How so? In what way? No explanation, just some cryptic comments as an excuse to
then insult people who haven't read your mind about things that you didn't say much
about. Why?

I won't keep this going but have to note that you add some words about your admiration
for Gould's expository skills. The irony of you doing so, while writing as you do, is not lost.
Then again, you have great praise for Behe. Knowing something about the systems
he wrote about in DBB, and having read that, I can't agree. His skill, such as it is, is to
take a well understood system and make them seem complex. He has a rather transparent
zeal for doing exactly that, as fits his agenda. And I think your agenda too.

I tend to favor those who can make things seem simple without over-simplifying.

[Lawyer Daggett]

*ding*ding*ding*

How much more obvious does he need to be?

[erik simpson]

Your new "holy book" was published in 2007. Some water has passed under the bridge since then.

[John Harshman]

It's should be clear to anyone that Peter lives in a world all his own.

[J. J. Lodder]

peter2...@gmail.com <peter2...@gmail.com> wrote:

This is a very unfortunate comparison indeed.
The 'god of the gaps' is a natural born loser.
He has to retreat with every gap filled,
and he can only lose credibility.

Your 'Darwin of the gaps' can only win,
with every gap filled being yet another triumph
for science and evolution.

You really should rethink this,

Jan

[erik simpson]

Unfortunately, he's not alone there, but the company is pretty problematic.

[Ron Dean]

On Dec 14, 2022 at 8:31:08 PM EST, "peter2...@gmail.com"

I can deal with nasty people, I've come t realize that some people have
adopted a strong
paradigm. And Paradigms take precedence and priority over everything; opinion,
theory,
data and facts. Consequently, some people, unable to deal with the issue,
become abusive
and engage in "shooting the messenger".

>
>>> Because many gaps are NOT being filled, including the ones for bat origins
>>> and pterosaur origins. In both cases, there are no fossils of gap-fillers
>>> even in your sense of the word, between fully terrestrial animals with
>>> no sign of patagia, and full fledged fliers.
>
>
> Here comes Harshman's one line response to the preceding paragraph:
>
> On 12:00 AM EST (ca. 20 hours ago), John Harshman wrote:
>
>> But are not most gaps of Darwin's day now filled?
>
> "filled" is misleading. The majority of gaps in Vertebrata may have been split
> into two or more
> smaller gaps, but not the gaps that I brought up above.
>
> Granted, those gaps might be smaller than what they were
> in Darwin's day, when the fully terrestrial animals preceding
> full fledged bats were somewhat less known than they are
> now. But even today, there are very few promising leads that
> make us better off than in Darwin's day.
>

I question this. There were comparatively fewer known species, both living and
fossilized,
in Darwin's day than known today So, if this is the case, one would expect
gaps in
the record would be even more prevalent today than Darwin knew about.

These are names except, Harshman that I am unfamiliar with. So, I have no
opinion. I responded
to Harshmann with something, I thought might bring the fire down me: but
nothing!~

[Glenn]

On Wednesday, December 14, 2022 at 1:55:20 AM UTC-7, martin...@gmail.com wrote:
> On Wed, 14 Dec 2022 05:53:20 GMT, Ron Dean <rdhall...@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> >On Dec 13, 2022 at 3:31:01 PM EST, "peter2...@gmail.com"

> ><peter2...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >> It's great to see you here, Ron. I was afraid that after three posts, one
> >> of which was mainly to regret having posted the first, you had
> >> disappeared again.
> >>

> >Thank you Peter, I sencerely appreciate this welcoming.
> >>

> >> On Tuesday, December 13, 2022 at 1:25:19 PM UTC-5, Ron Dean wrote:
> >>> On Dec 13, 2022 at 9:54:01 AM EST, "peter2...@gmail.com"
> >>> <peter2...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >>>

> >>>> Thanks for calling out Mark while I was in the midst of my weekend break.
> >>>> It's amazing to see the lengths to which his allies will go to ignore the
> >>>> things you wrote in rebuttal.
> >>>>
> >>>> My approach was different: I wanted to post significant things about evolution
> >>>> by Gould that harmonize beautifully with what I wrote in my OP,
> >>>> which you preserved below.
> >>>>
> >>>> In the process, I showed how willfully ignorant Mark is of all but
> >>>> the most elementary things about biological evolution.
> >>>> But 嘱 Tiib's post late yesterday evening made me aware of an
> >>>> even more fundamental weakness of his. I'll tell you once I get
> >>>> down to what you wrote.
> >>>>
> >>>> On Saturday, December 10, 2022 at 8:05:16 PM UTC-5, Glenn wrote:
> >>>>> On Saturday, December 10, 2022 at 10:25:16 AM UTC-7, Mark Isaak wrote:
> >>>>>> On 12/9/22 5:54 PM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> >>>>>>> This is the one-size-fits-all, totally unfalsifiable "explanation"
> >>>>>>> for any and all biological phenomena:
> >>>>>>>
> >>>>>>> "Well, it's natural selection, y'know. Those _________ that were/had/did
> >>>>>>> ___________
> >>>>>>> had a survival advantage over those who weren't/hadn't/didn't, and thus
> >>>>>>> they are the ones we see today."
> >>>>>>>
> >>>>>>> The main weakness of this counterpart of "God of the Gaps" is that it does
> >>>>>>> nothing to explain how the "Those/ones" ever got to the point where they
> >>>>>>> "were/had/did _____________." This is partly because "natural selection" puts
> >>>>>>> the ones with the survival advantage in the same interbreeding population
> >>>>>>> as the ones without it. See:
> >>>>>>>
> >>>>>>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_selection
> >>>>>>>
> >>>>>>> Natural selection commits evolutionary biologists to a gradualist view of
> >>>>>>> the way
> >>>>>>> evolution progresses. It also makes it clear that tenable hypotheses for how
> >>>>>>> a creature *might* have evolved entail an evolutionary sequence with few or
> >>>>>>> no maladaptive steps,
> >>>>>>> and only a small percentage of neutral ones.
> >>>>>>>
> >>>>>>>
> >>>>>>> This brings up one of my favorite evolutionary mysteries: by what *tenable*
> >>>>>>> intermediate
> >>>>>>> steps *might* bats have evolved under that constraint? Fossils are of no
> >>>>>>> help here.
> >>>>>>> We lack *any* intermediate fossils between fully terrestrial mammals
> >>>>>>> and essentially modern bats. The excitement that greeted the
> >>>>>>> discovery of a fossil bat which (*gasp*) had claws at the end of its
> >>>>>>> long wing digits only serves to show how starved we are for ideas.
> >>>>
> >>>> When I say "we" are starved for ideas, I mean not just myself but the
> >>>> world of science. And I refer specifically to the question I ask at the
> >>>> beginning of the preceding paragraph.
> >>>>
> >>>>>> Spoken like an ardent creationist.
> >>>>
> >>>>> Spoken by an "ardent" atheist evolutionist:
> >>>>
> >>>> That may be true, Glenn, but there is something else behind it: a deep, deep
> >>>> phobia
> >>>> of finding out how little the world of science knows about the world around us.
> >>>>
> >>>> He tries to mask it by making ridiculous comments that try to divert
> >>>> attention from the mystery of bat origins. I think he knows how
> >>>> ridiculous it is to ask me the following question, and even more
> >>>> ridiculous to presume what he does in the following sentence,
> >>>> but he is past caring about that.
> >>>>
> >>>>>> If I find a gum wrapper by a trail in the park, should I assume a person
> >>>>>> dropped it nearby, or that God created a gum wrapper there? Since I see
> >>>>>> no other people around and have no hope of discovering who dropped it,
> >>>>>> you, presumably, would favor the creation by God option.
> >>>>>>
> >>>>> Because of the location of the gum wrapper? There is something wrong with
> >>>>> your head.
> >>>>
> >>>> I think he knows that Paley did not presume that the *watch* was put there by
> >>>> God,
> >>>> but like I said, he is past caring about how ridiculous he must sound
> >>>> even to his ardent ally jillery. Did you notice how jillery overlooked "minor
> >>>> details"
> >>>> like the false analogy to Paley, and how jillery threw all pretense at
> >>>> integrity
> >>>> by calling Mark's question "reasonable".
> >>>>
> >>>>> You should assume the gum wrapper was intelligently designed, and since the
> >>>>> designer is known, created by Man. Being a science guy,
> >>>>
> >>>> He's no science guy. He is a computer geek whose modest knowledge
> >>>> of science means more to him than his far more meager understanding
> >>>> of what science is about. He's content with high school level [if that]
> >>>> formulae like the ones he "screamed" at me.
> >>>>
> >>>>> you should also realize the knowledge exists
> >>>>> that gum wrappers are sometimes blown by wind or some other event that cause
> >>>>> it to move from where it was "dropped". Who dropped it is irrelevant to who
> >>>>> created it.
> >>>>
> >>>> He knows it. But he doesn't care. And the same applies to jillery.

> >>>>>>> RD wrote>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>.
> >>>> I'm back (I hope) I have serious health issues that abruptly hit me, mild
> >>>> stroke, (left side) requiring carotid artery surgery. I had heart problems
> >>>> requiring stints, have thick blood. In and out of hospital 4 times past 6
> >>>> months, last time for 1 week, returned home past thursday. My dad and his dad
> >>>> (possibly) had same problems; both passed: reciently lost 1/th cousin with
> >>>> same problem. So, I don't know...........
> >>>

> >>> As I recall, Darwin was distressed because of the absence of intermediate
> >>> fossils between
> >>> ancestor and descedent, that his theory predicted. This absence he believed
> >>> could be used to refute his theory. But he hoped for and expected that future
> >>> searches would fill in the gaps. And this has been the goal and major
> >>> objective of paleontology for more than a century.
> >>
> >> That goal was there, yes, but if my love of paleontology is any indication,
> >> paleontologists are mainly fascinated by the incredible variety and richness
> >> of extinct animals,
> >> and secondarily .by lots of other things, including the riddle of the
> >> lifestyles
> >> of animals that are very different from existing ones [1], in addition to the
> >> goal you name.
> >>

> >Okay, I appreciate that, but isn't science suppose to be neutral, nonpartisan

> >going to wherever the evidence leads? If a goal is set at the beginning and

> >the search endeavors
> >to find positive evidence leading specifically toward proving the objective,
> >is this science?

> >If this, is the case, how can one rely on science? Case in point: stasis:

> >according to Gould,
> >stasis had been observed in the fossil record, since before Darwin, but it was
> >passed off as "no data",_ by people looking for support of this goal.
> >>

> >Tragically that "goal and major objective" seems to have been abandoned

> >> due to an ideology by which John Harshman swears. It forbids scientists

> >> to take seriously any hypotheses about any fossil species being directly
> >> ancestral to any other fossil species, even in the wonderful horse superfamily
> >> of Equioidea.
> >> If he had his way, the superfamily tree in Kathleen Hunt's superb
> >> horse family FAQ would be consigned to the wastebasket of history.
> >>

> >That raises the question, given the scarcity of intermediate fossils between
> >most ancestor and descendant and given the objective goal, when an
> >intermediate is found; how is one to
> >know, for certain, that the finding is not just the "best in the field"?
> >>

> >> http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/horses/horse_evol.html
> >>
> >As I remember, Dr. J.J. Simpson had problems with the depiction of horse
> >evolution.
> >>

> >> [1] One or two differences already can give rise to a "very different" animal.
> >> A fascinating example is *Deinotherium*, which looked like an elephant,
> >> except for having lost its upper tusks and grown a pair of tusks
> >> in the lower jaw, pointing down and curved backwards.
> >>
> >> One fanciful lifestyle idea was that these tusks were used to anchor
> >> this para-elephant to the riverbank while it slept in a river!
> >>
> >>

> >This, of course, is just a guess, a hypothesis and simply a "just-so-story".
> >>

> >>> So, the axiom "God of the gaps", seems to really be "evolution in the gaps".
> >>> After most major gap, the new "kinds" and stasis that's observed (Gould's) new
> >>> "species" could be seen as the result of a designers involvement. It's
> >>> analogous to workers in a hole trying to fill it in with whatever.
> >>> Furthermore, new "kinds" and stasis is _not_ in the sphere of evolution.
> >>
> >> It's interesting to see how you are now posting like a committed creationist.
> >>

> >! do not subscribe to the fundamentalist creation scenario. As far as I'm
> >concern,
> >creationism is strictly religious in nature. I think Intelligent design best
> >fits the evidence

> Can you name any leading proponent of Intelligent Design who does not
> regard God as the Intelligent Designer?

Notwithstanding what "leading" does for you, yes. Can you name any leading proponent of evolution who is not an atheist? You idiot, people can believe anything they want, but "God" isn't part of Intelligent Design theory. Everything you say just adds supports to the fact that you are an atheist. It is why your lame crap is tolerated here.

> >so far discovered, by scientist and it can be seen as a deliberate, purposeful
> >and intential design.

> Does it not strike you as odd that Gould, on whom you so heavily draw,
> totally rejected Intelligent Design, stating in The Panda's Thumb that
> "Odd arrangements and funny solutions are the proof of evolution-paths
> that a sensible God would never tread but that a natural process,
> constrained by history, follows perforce."

> >
> >> However, Gould has something to say to you too, about how speciation can
> >> occur despite the constricting condition of natural selection having
> >> to take place WITHIN interbreeding populations. If you have access to
> >> _The_Panda's_Thumb_, you will find it on page 191.
> >>

> >> If not, I'll make time tomorrow for typing out the whole passage. I can't find
> >> it online,
> >> not even a portion of the book that includes p. 191, and I have too much on my
> >> plate today.
> >>

> >I own the book "Panda" Thumb", I located what you referred to: so he argues
> >that a "key" - a large change that serves to shift a possessor toward a new
> >mode of life and if it's successful, may require a large set of collateral
> >alterations, involving morphological and behavioral which
> >may arise through traditional gradual route provided the key adaptation forces
> >a profound shift in selective pressure.
> >
> >I understand what he is saying, but it's theory and it occurs to me, that the
> >large number of co - alterations should be subject to be weeded out, by

> >natural selecton, if they individually serve a purpose, then when other

> >mutations co-join; this is expecting unguided random
> > processes to give rise to new forms. I think it takes quite a lot of trust to
> >accept that this as a good explanation: especially, given the rarity of
> >beneficial mutations and the immense number of mutations that are weeded out
> >by natural selection. I don't know~!
> >>

> >> I do believe, by the way, that this sorry remnant of a once robust talk.origins
> >> does not include anyone else who is aware of Gould's method, nor even cares
> >> to find out what it is. "Darwin of the Gaps" bulks too large in their thought
> >> processes.
> >>
> >>

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

[John Harshman]

On 12/14/22 12:11 AM, Ron Dean wrote:

And I see that elsewhere you have hinted that you would like a reply.

> On Dec 13, 2022 at 6:38:37 PM EST, "John Harshman" <john.h...@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>

>> On 12/13/22 12:31 PM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
>>> It's great to see you here, Ron. I was afraid that after three posts, one
>>> of which was mainly to regret having posted the first, you had
>>> disappeared again.
>>>

>>> On Tuesday, December 13, 2022 at 1:25:19 PM UTC-5, Ron Dean wrote:
>>>> On Dec 13, 2022 at 9:54:01 AM EST, "peter2...@gmail.com"
>>>> <peter2...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>

> (snip)

>>>>> ry.
>>>>>>>> RD wrote>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>.
>>>>> I'm back (I hope) I have serious health issues that abruptly hit me, mild
>>>>> stroke, (left side) requiring carotid artery surgery. I had heart problems
>>>>> requiring stints, have thick blood. In and out of hospital 4 times past 6
>>>>> months, last time for 1 week, returned home past thursday. My dad and his dad
>>>>> (possibly) had same problems; both passed: reciently lost 1/th cousin with
>>>>> same problem. So, I don't know...........
>>>>
>>>> As I recall, Darwin was distressed because of the absence of intermediate
>>>> fossils between
>>>> ancestor and descedent, that his theory predicted. This absence he believed
>>>> could be used to refute his theory. But he hoped for and expected that future
>>>> searches would fill in the gaps. And this has been the goal and major
>>>> objective of paleontology for more than a century.
>>>
>>> That goal was there, yes, but if my love of paleontology is any indication,
>>> paleontologists are mainly fascinated by the incredible variety and richness
>>> of extinct animals,
>>> and secondarily .by lots of other things, including the riddle of the
>>> lifestyles
>>> of animals that are very different from existing ones [1], in addition to the
>>> goal you name.
>>>

>>> Tragically that "goal and major objective" seems to have been abandoned
>>> due to an ideology by which John Harshman swears.
>>

>> It seems that way only in your head. There is absolutely no need to
>> hypothesize that a transitional fossil species is directly ancestral to
>> any other in order to fill a gap. Archaeopteryx, for example, filled
>> what was at the time a big gap between birds and dinosaurs, regardless
>> of the details of its position on the tree.
>>
>> Why do you introduce erroneous complaints and a gratuitous rant about me
>> (and pretty much all modern paleontologists and systematists) into a
>> response to a creationist rather than point out that he's just wrong
>> about the gaps not being filled, which seems the more important message?
>>
> I consider myself an advocate of intelligent design(ID) which, in
> fact is _not_ predicated upon religions dogma, doctrine or materials.
> But rather ID is based (unlike creationism) upon the evidence

> discovered by anthropologist and scientific researcher. While an

> IDist can point to evidence which could be observed and
> _intrepreted_ as supporting the ID paradigm, OTOH - ID can not point
> to any scientific evidence which points to the _identity_ of a
> designer.

What's your opinion on universal common descent? Are all species related
or are there separate, unrelated "kinds"?

Your notion that ID is based on evidence is charmingly naive.

> I am aware that there are people who believe that design is by the
> hand of their God(s). But that's belief or their faith ~ it is not
> based on intrepretation of any known scientific evidence. Until
> proven wrong, I'm convinced that when observed scientific evidence
> can be interpreted in support of an idea, this is not religious in
> nature. I think to claim otherwise comes across as propagand,
> missinformation purposefully and unfairly aimed at refuting
> Intelligent design.

Observed scientific evidence can only be interpreted in support of ID if
you wish very hard, and this generally requires a religious bias, in my
experience. It's conceivable that you are one of the rare exceptions who
can squint on his own. But that remains to be seen.

>>> It forbids scientists
>>> to take seriously any hypotheses about any fossil species being directly
>>> ancestral to any other fossil species, even in the wonderful horse
>>> superfamily of Equioidea.
>>> If he had his way, the superfamily tree in Kathleen Hunt's superb
>>> horse family FAQ would be consigned to the wastebasket of history.
>>>

>>> http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/horses/horse_evol.html

>>>
>>> [1] One or two differences already can give rise to a "very different" animal.
>>> A fascinating example is *Deinotherium*, which looked like an elephant,
>>> except for having lost its upper tusks and grown a pair of tusks
>>> in the lower jaw, pointing down and curved backwards.
>>>
>>> One fanciful lifestyle idea was that these tusks were used to anchor
>>> this para-elephant to the riverbank while it slept in a river!
>>>
>>>

>>>> So, the axiom "God of the gaps", seems to really be "evolution in the gaps".
>>>> After most major gap, the new "kinds" and stasis that's observed (Gould's) new
>>>> "species" could be seen as the result of a designers involvement. It's
>>>> analogous to workers in a hole trying to fill it in with whatever.
>>>> Furthermore, new "kinds" and stasis is _not_ in the sphere of evolution.
>>>
>>> It's interesting to see how you are now posting like a committed creationist.

>>> However, Gould has something to say to you too, about how speciation can
>>> occur despite the constricting condition of natural selection having
>>> to take place WITHIN interbreeding populations. If you have access to
>>> _The_Panda's_Thumb_, you will find it on page 191.
>>

>> Gould's view of speciation and morphological evolution is almost
>> certainly wrong and never managed to convince many evolutionary
>> biologists. There are better explanations for stasis and punctuation.
>>
> That's a problem I have with evolution. An example, of my thoughts is
> the BAT. There are hundreds and hundreds, if not a thousand of bat
> fossils, that have been found that can be observed, touched and physically

> examined. These are real and fact. However, the origin of bats is unknown:

> transitional fossils are unobservable cannot be touched or examined:
> This is where excuses, explanation hypothesis, theory, conjecture and
> just-so-stories can come into play and frequently does.

Actually, there are very few bat fossils, and most of them are just
teeth. I think you are mistaken. We certainly don't have the data we
need to tell the course of bat evolution. But we do have what we need to
tell that they did evolve and what their closest relatives are, mostly
from DNA sequences.

> I think thie_observed_Vs_unobserved_ describes and characterizes evolution.
> I think books could be written on this topic.

No, it's too vague a statement to write a book on. Perhaps if you
fleshed it out. What do you think we can't know, and what do you think
we can?

>>> If not, I'll make time tomorrow for typing out the whole passage. I can't
>>> find it online,
>>> not even a portion of the book that includes p. 191, and I have too much on
>>> my plate today.
>>>

>>> I do believe, by the way, that this sorry remnant of a once robust talk.origins
>>> does not include anyone else who is aware of Gould's method, nor even cares
>>> to find out what it is. "Darwin of the Gaps" bulks too large in their thought
>>> processes.
>>

[peter2...@gmail.com]

There was an unmarked snip here of quite a lot of material, including praise of Gould's
almost unparalleled expository skills, along with my personal opinion of why he was
better than his only real contemporary rival, Isaac Asimov.

> > I thought I would never see the expository skills of Gould again when he passed away in 2002.
> > Imagine my surprise, then, to discover them displayed again in Chapters 2 and 3 of a 2007
> > book, in a lively and immensely informative exposition, on malaria and the "trench warfare"
> > between various mutations of humans to fight it, and the far more numerous mutations
> > of the parasite, *Plasmodium* *falciparum*, that causes it.
> >
> > Bill Rogers, our resident expert on malaria, would be green with envy at the skill with which it is done,
> > but he'll almost certainly never look at it, because the book is _The_Edge_of_Evolution_ ,
> > and the author is Michael Behe.

> That post had the nutritional value of an advertisement for a cheeseburger.

I do believe it will have that effect on you, since you are an exemplar of the adage,
"A mind is a terrible thing to waste."

> Seriously, what do you imagine it contributed?

A reminder of how hopelessly biased you and jillery and about ten other people
I could name are, for one thing.

Going further back up, there is an analogy with exaptation that I expect the jillerybot to mindlessly
react to with the formula, "You assert a false equivalence." [I'm not sure about
the word "assert"; I don't pay much attention to Pavlov-dog-style simulations of human thought.]

> There's a gratuitous backhand slap at Jillery

Nothing gratuitous about it. I was simply under the (mistaken?) impression
that Mastermind Jillery [1] knows about the exaptation-analogous strategy
that whooshed over your head.

Hence Gould's every research accomplishment and honor that he got for research was fair game.

Judging from the wiki entry, there is a gold mine of evolutionary developmental biology
that can be mined profitably by ID exaptors. There is a little glimpse of its richness
on the page (191) of _The_Panda's_Thumb_ that Harshman is willfully clueless about,
with more a few pages later. There is also a lot about neoteny in other essays in the book.

[1] utterly unlike the jillerybot, Mastermind Jillery is an infinitely more skillful propagandist
than you can ever aspire to be, who reveals this talent once in a blue moon, or less.
I was oblivious to it for at least four years before I was made dramatically aware of it.

> with little seeming purpose other than
> the personal joy you seem to have at calling others ignorant.

See, you are as inept at propaganda as a kid one-fifth your age,
which I estimate by the revelation in sci.bio.paleontology that you
were around in 1996 during the clash between Ed Conrad and PZ Myers.
Besides the amateurishness of the two-line insult, it ignores the fact
that I was accusing jillery of *dishonesty*, not ignorance.

And so I ask once again: are you the same person who
posted under the name "Jon Richfield" around that time?
I can recall no one else around back then whose style closely resembles yours.


CONTINUED in next reply to this benighted post of yours, to be done later this evening.


Peter Nyikos

[Lawyer Daggett]

On Thursday, December 15, 2022 at 6:40:21 PM UTC-5, Ron Dean wrote:

Hey there Ron. I have a proposal. Please hear me out.

I believe you are sincere in your beliefs and are even willing to challenge
them to some respect. Challenging an idea to see if it stands up to data
and analysis is the very heart of science. Maybe we can facilitate that.

Of course, talk.origins has both advantages and disadvantages to airing
ideas. Things might be improved by some self-imposed structure.

At the moment, you have introduced a few ideas related to 1.) the fossil record
as it relates to evolution, 2.) what is expected, 3.) what is observed, 4.) commentary
from Gould, and then things get messy. My enumeration may be suboptimal.

But I assert that some enumeration of significant topics might be productive.
Perhaps we could have a preliminary, somewhat neutral discussion of what some
of the important sub-topics are. Then, maybe, we could have some focused discussion
on distinct sub-topics. We might even introduce a few ground rules about how to
ignore counter-productive contributions that are poisoned with inter-personal invective
and otherwise tangential commentary. Naturally, everyone is always free to ignore the
noise but an explicit agreement upfront that we should do so might make it easier for
some to suck it up and ignore insults, which would improve things all around.

Waddayathink? We take a bit of time rolling out ideas about carving out different
topics of focus, and then launch a few threads focused on individual topics. Maybe
not completely one at a time but something less than all at once. Give it a thought, or two.

[peter2...@gmail.com]

> > >fits the evidence.

The following comment shows how Martin has nothing to contribute to
on-topic discussion: he immediately gets stuck into private opinions
for which he has no documentary evidence. Hence the necessity of
asking a question instead of making an assertion.

> > Can you name any leading proponent of Intelligent Design who does not
> > regard God as the Intelligent Designer?
>
> Notwithstanding what "leading" does for you, yes. Can you name any leading proponent of evolution who is not an atheist?

Your term "proponent of evolution" is careless; the expression that hits the spot is "foe of ID."
With leading atheistic foes like PZ Myers, Lawrence Moran, and Donald Prothero, one can hardly
go wrong with it, methinks.

I am a proponent of evolution myself, but I keep an open mind about it
having been guided by a supernatural intelligent agent. However, I
prefer hypotheses of human level agents to speculation about supernatural ones.

You idiot, people can believe anything they want, but "God" isn't part of Intelligent Design theory. Everything you say just adds supports to the fact that you are an atheist. It is why your lame crap is tolerated here.

Nah, being an apostate Catholic is adequate for that.

> > >so far discovered, by scientist and it can be seen as a deliberate, purposeful
> > >and intential design.

> > Does it not strike you as odd that Gould, on whom you so heavily draw,
> > totally rejected Intelligent Design, stating in The Panda's Thumb that
> > "Odd arrangements and funny solutions are the proof of evolution-paths
> > that a sensible God would never tread but that a natural process,
> > constrained by history, follows perforce."

That was Gould's private opinion about creationism, not about ID. Like so many
otherwise astute scientists, he was probably under the mistaken impression
that ID was simply a cover for creationism.

But Behe was quite explicit about how the designer[s] could have been
quite imperfect while being supernatural. This is something that is below
most t.o. regulars' radar screen, and not just Martin's.

And it would take an astronomically superhuman, if not supernatural power and intelligence
to alter evolution even in its imperfect form to produce the astounding
richness and rich variety of living things that we see today.

It is only with an omni-whatever God for comparison that such an incredibly talented
entity could be disparaged in the way Gould did, and a number of t.o. regulars do.
(Mark Isaak comes to mind.)

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

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

PS I've left in the rest, so that one can see how shallow Martin's
participation is where on-topic issues are concerned: he didn't
participate at all below.

[peter2...@gmail.com]

On Thursday, December 15, 2022 at 5:10:21 PM UTC-5, J. J. Lodder wrote:
> peter2...@gmail.com <peter2...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> This is a very unfortunate comparison indeed.

Why didn't you leave it in? You have made it very difficult to discuss it intelligently.

> The 'god of the gaps' is a natural born loser.

So is "Darwin of the Gaps" without the deeper insight into the "hows"
of evolution that Gould wrote about, and which Ron Dean and I have started discussing.

I suggest that you follow our conversation about that. We have the great
advantage of having _The_Panda's_Thumb_ at our fingertips. Do you?

> He has to retreat with every gap filled,
> and he can only lose credibility.

Not as long as we keep becoming aware of hithertofore unsuspected gaps,
especially going back to unicellular life. The origin of meiosis is something
I've never seen discussed in a scientific paper or book; have you?

John Harshman and I discussed it a couple of years ago and got nowhere
with it. We couldn't even decide whether meiosis came from mitosis,
or vice versa. To keep the thread alive, we had to fall back on where it first
showed up in the eukaryotic family tree, but rooting the tree turned out
to be a task that scientists were still working on.

> Your 'Darwin of the gaps' can only win,
> with every gap filled being yet another triumph
> for science and evolution.

WRONG! you are confusing the undeniable fact of evolution of eumetazoans
(and maybe of all eukaryotes) from a common ancestor, with Darwinism,
which is just a theory of microevolution. It has a very long way to go before
we have a theory of evolution worthy of the name "theory".

> You really should rethink this,

It is you who need to do some rethinking. Here is an analogy for you.

Even if it *is* all that is responsible for the vast panorama of life on earth,
Darwin of the Gaps is about as useful for understanding that panorama
as a theory of cell-to-cell signaling is for understanding human motives.

Both are atomistic attempts whose futility in the respective settings should be obvious.
Both are deadly to creative thinking in the given directions.

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

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

[peter2...@gmail.com]

I wonder, though, how the treachery of jillery affected you last year;
you seem to have become distressed at the tremendous contrast with
jillery's earlier reasonable-seeming behavior.

Now you are hearing two siren songs, one by John Harshman and one by
"Lawyer Daggett". As long as you have become inured by your experience
with jillery, and think you can take such treachery in your stride, I think you might
accept one invitation or even both. But do keep both eyes open.

> >>> Because many gaps are NOT being filled, including the ones for bat origins
> >>> and pterosaur origins. In both cases, there are no fossils of gap-fillers
> >>> even in your sense of the word, between fully terrestrial animals with
> >>> no sign of patagia, and full fledged fliers.
> >
> >
> > Here comes Harshman's one line response to the preceding paragraph:
> >
> > On 12:00 AM EST (ca. 20 hours ago), John Harshman wrote:
> >
> >> But are not most gaps of Darwin's day now filled?
> >
> > "filled" is misleading. The majority of gaps in Vertebrata may have been split
> > into two or more
> > smaller gaps, but not the gaps that I brought up above.
> >
> > Granted, those gaps might be smaller than what they were
> > in Darwin's day, when the fully terrestrial animals preceding
> > full fledged bats were somewhat less known than they are
> > now. But even today, there are very few promising leads that
> > make us better off than in Darwin's day.
> >
> I question this. There were comparatively fewer known species, both living and
> fossilized, in Darwin's day than known today So, if this is the case, one would expect
> gaps in the record would be even more prevalent today than Darwin knew about.

Yes, and I told Jan Lodder a little while ago about the gap represented the origin of meiosis.
some aspects of it were never suspected until our knowledge of unicellular eukaryotes
advanced in the last twenty years. And their Pre-Cambrian fossil record is almost nonexistent.

> >
> > One somewhat promising fossil is that of a fully terrestrial animal
> > with no sign of patagia that has been hypothesized to be transitional between
> > pterosaurs and reptiles
> > known in Darwin's day, but there are still some difficulties with it.
> > But paleontologists are so starved for any progress that it was BIG news.
> > I did an OP in sci.bio.paleontology on the day the news came out:
> >
> > https://groups.google.com/g/sci.bio.paleontology/c/jALARK3lN2E/m/8WSod3TUFQAJ
> > Subject: Today's News on Pterosaur Origins
> > Oct 5, 2022, 3:38:54 PM
> >
> > Ironically, Harshman never showed up on that thread. And Erik Simpson, his
> > faithful
> > friend, did one brief congratulations on my "scoop" and disappeared from the
> > thread.
> >
> > But the thread did not die. Daud Deden and I had a very friendly discussion
> > lasting 18 posts on it.
> > I think it was un-technical enough that you might enjoy reading it, Ron.
> >
> > I say this to you because, alas, Daud has decided to take a half-year posting
> > break from sci.bio.paleontology,
> > and if what we wrote there can excite you, I'd love to have you post there
> > from time to time.
> >

> > I don't mind telling you, Ron, that I already miss Daud very much,

> > and it's less than a week since he did his OP titled "Bye for now".
> >
> > The rest of Harshman's post featured completely un-helpful comments, including
> > some mildly nasty ones, so I snipped them.
> >
> These are names except, Harshman that I am unfamiliar with. So, I have no
> opinion. I responded to Harshmann with something, I thought might bring the fire down me:
> but nothing!~

That isn't Harshman's style. HIs general strategy is to start out sounding very
reasonable in his first response on any given thread, and to very subtly deteriorate the tone
of his responses. At some point I call him out for baiting me in one way
or the other, and then he acts the wounded innocent.

Somewhat paradoxically, he is something of a control freak, almost always wanting to be top dog
in his discussions with me. He and jillery used to get into tiffs fairly
frequently, and I sensed that each one was testing the mettle of the other.


Peter Nyikos

[peter2...@gmail.com]

On Thursday, December 15, 2022 at 4:00:22 PM UTC-5, Lawyer Daggett wrote:

> On Thursday, December 15, 2022 at 2:55:21 PM UTC-5, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> > On Wednesday, December 14, 2022 at 4:20:20 PM UTC-5, John Harshman wrote:
> > > On 12/14/22 11:04 AM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> > > > On Wednesday, December 14, 2022 at 1:00:20 PM UTC-5, Ron Dean wrote:
> > > >> On Dec 14, 2022 at 7:11:13 AM EST, "jillery" <69jp...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > > >>
> > > >>> On Wed, 14 Dec 2022 08:11:48 GMT, Ron Dean <rdhall...@gmail.com>
> > > >>> wrote:

> > > I believe you have misunderstood what jillery is saying, which I believe
> > > is that Gould isn't a scientific researcher who discovered evidence for ID.
>
> > Jillery may be ignorant enough to think the way you are thinking here.
> > No one who knows that Behe makes tremendous use of scientific facts
> > that were not intended to promote ID and may even be hostile to ID would
> > think that way.
> >
> > It's an intellectual analogue of exaptation, which you and almost every one
> > of your fans here knows about, but this analogy is so novel to you and everyone
> > here that it will take a long time before more than one or two can wrap their
> > minds around it. I believe Ron Dean will be one of the first, while you lag far behind.
> > > > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Jay_Gould

I've left a lot of text in up there for context, and now I snip a good bit to get to
where I left off in my first reply. This includes some text that I called an
unmarked snip in my first reply, which turns out to have been snipped by myself.

> Then a puzzling sentence.

> > No one who knows that Behe makes tremendous use of scientific facts
> > that were not intended to promote ID and may even be hostile to ID would
> > think that way.

> It's a curious non-sequitur with an ill-defined antecedent for "that way".

Stop trying to sound perceptive. It was a clear sequel to its antecedent, which was:

"Jillery may be ignorant enough to think the way you are thinking here."

> Best I can manage is that you assert 1. Behe is, by definition, doing Intelligent Design
> research.

Why the clumsy jillery-style "by definition"? It's out of place here.

2. Behe uses facts obtained from non-ID research. And this somehow makes
> a connection to Gould being an ID researcher because he used scientific facts too.

Crikey, what drivel! I'd be mortified if anyone caught me writing or talking like that.

Look at what I wrote about the gold mine of evolutionary developmental biology
in my first reply for a clue as to how to write in a mature adult fashion about this issue.
Since that would cramp your style, I invite you to at least think about what
you can read about Gould and his role in it here:

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

In case the term isn't familiar to you: it's the same thing as "evo-devo."

> It's argumentative without actually making a coherent argument. Why bother?

Wrong. Maybe what I wrote this time around will make some sense to you,
but that depends on how determined you are to sound clever.

>
> Then, we're treated to this:
> >
> > It's an intellectual analogue of exaptation, which you and almost every one
> > of your fans here knows about, but this analogy is so novel to you and everyone
> > here that it will take a long time before more than one or two can wrap their
> > minds around it. I believe Ron Dean will be one of the first, while you lag far behind.

> What analogue?

Re-read the text that precedes it, intact, at the very beginning of this post, and stop
asking silly questions.


<lots of silly questions snipped here>

Like I said, it may take you a long time to wrap your mind around it.

>
> I won't keep this going but have to note that you add some words about your admiration
> for Gould's expository skills.

Fully deserved ones. Have you ever read _The_Panda's_Thumb_ or _Ever Since Darwin_
or any other books of essays? have you even LOOKED at any of them?


Remainder deleted, to be replied to later if it seems to be called for.

Peter Nyikos
Professor, Dept. of Mathematics

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

[erik simpson]

On Thursday, December 15, 2022 at 6:10:21 PM UTC-8, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> On Thursday, December 15, 2022 at 5:10:21 PM UTC-5, J. J. Lodder wrote:

...

> Not as long as we keep becoming aware of hithertofore unsuspected gaps,
> especially going back to unicellular life. The origin of meiosis is something
> I've never seen discussed in a scientific paper or book; have you?
>

The origins of meiosis is still controversial, but there a substantial literature.
A simple google search provides lots of references.

There is even https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_and_function_of_meiosis

[erik simpson]

On Thursday, December 15, 2022 at 6:45:21 PM UTC-8, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
...

> Yes, and I told Jan Lodder a little while ago about the gap represented the origin of meiosis.
> some aspects of it were never suspected until our knowledge of unicellular eukaryotes
> advanced in the last twenty years. And their Pre-Cambrian fossil record is almost nonexistent.

You really don't keep up well. Here's Andy Knoll, Fisher Professor of Natural History at Harvard University
(went to Lehigh University, but fortunately wasn't unduly influenced by Behe).

"Eukaryotic organisms in Proterozoic oceans"
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1578724/

[Ron Dean]

The crucial point I think, is that Intelligent design observes evidence in
nature that
comes across to many as deliberat, purposeful design (appearent design or the
illusion of design - Dawkins). But no one can point to any scientific evidence
that
provides the identity of the designer. This is where ID ends and faith begins
for
some people.

[Martin Harran]

On Thu, 15 Dec 2022 18:43:14 -0800 (PST), "peter2...@gmail.com"
<peter2...@gmail.com> wrote:

>On Thursday, December 15, 2022 at 6:40:21 PM UTC-5, Ron Dean wrote:
>> On Dec 14, 2022 at 8:31:08 PM EST, "peter2...@gmail.com"
>> <peter2...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>

[...]

>I wonder, though, how the treachery of jillery affected you last year;
>you seem to have become distressed at the tremendous contrast with
>jillery's earlier reasonable-seeming behavior.
>
>Now you are hearing two siren songs, one by John Harshman and one by
>"Lawyer Daggett". As long as you have become inured by your experience
>with jillery, and think you can take such treachery in your stride, I think you might
>accept one invitation or even both. But do keep both eyes open.
>

[...]

Ron, this from the guy warning you about nasty people. You might want
to think about that.

[Martin Harran]

On Thu, 15 Dec 2022 16:26:57 -0800 (PST), Glenn <GlennS...@msn.com>
wrote:

>On Wednesday, December 14, 2022 at 1:55:20 AM UTC-7, martin...@gmail.com wrote:
>> On Wed, 14 Dec 2022 05:53:20 GMT, Ron Dean <rdhall...@gmail.com>
>> wrote:

[…]

>> >! do not subscribe to the fundamentalist creation scenario. As far as I'm
>> >concern,
>> >creationism is strictly religious in nature. I think Intelligent design best
>> >fits the evidence
>> Can you name any leading proponent of Intelligent Design who does not
>> regard God as the Intelligent Designer?
>
>Notwithstanding what "leading" does for you, yes.

Why don't you name some then?

>Can you name any leading proponent of evolution who is not an atheist?

Pope Francis, Ken Miller, Francis Collins, John Polkinghorne - do you
need any more?

>You idiot, people can believe anything they want, but "God" isn't part of Intelligent Design theory.

So you disagree with people like Phillip Johnson, William Dembski,
Stephen Meyer …

>Everything you say just adds supports to the fact that you are an atheist. It is why your lame crap is tolerated here.

No, Glenn, you are the lame crap expert around here.

[…]