"Natural selection is the only mechanism of adaptive evolution"

You are saying that the fact that an ecological niche is already fill means that more organisms should evolve to fill that niche.

No, that's not what I said. Go back, read and learn.
 
It's pretty obvious he knows he's being dishonest, but the entertainment value is high.

So it's dishonest to talk about facts when you guys don't have a good answer. Grasse was just a crackpot and so is anyone that doesn't follow evo orthodoxy?

And you call that science....
 
I keep asking him where his scholarship is published. Turning a well-established and accepted scientific theory on its ear would get you published, right? Or is he parroting ID/Creationist apologetics? Maybe he just watched Expelled.
So Pierre Grasse and the many ID scientists, they don't count because, you know, they don't agree with us and we prefer to label anyone that disagrees "dishonest", "stupid", "lying", etc, etc,....the fact their track record of predictive results beats our's (evos) doesn't mean anything.

It's not facts we're talking of but whether one agrees with Darwinism. That's the measure of truth.

And some of you claim that's real science.....
 
The eukaryotic bacteria got there first. Organelles gave them the edge in mobility and symbiotic colonization.

It is NOT impossible for other forms of bacteria to do the same. But, it is more difficult for them to get there, since the eukaryotes dominate that "territory".

This is not merely a story. The science behind it vastly more well-developed than other ideas including (but not limited to) creationist ones.

We even have math to work out how likely bacterial agents are to emerge into larger colonies, based on genetic distribution.

If you still think that I.D. is such a superior science, how can it explain why we see different phases of bacterial agents ranging from single cells to tight self-sustaining colonies to sponges to fungi to larger animals, etc.?

At which points did the I.D. intervene?

Why does the I.D. love bacteria sooo much, that it made many, many more types of it, than it did humans and other animals?

We want scientific answers, if you don't mind.

What new discoveries about life can we anticipate in light of your answers?
ID has a much better track record than evolutionism. By your questions, it's clear you don't understand ID so why bother trying to explain it to you?

I doubt you would listen.

The short answer is both creationists and IDers have no beef with variation around a range. Men like Pierre Grasse did not call that a myth. He just pointed out it was a myth to use that as evidence for darwinism.

Don't you think using a form that has not evolved any major new forms in something like a billion years as evidence for macroevolution is a little bit screwy?

If I insisted because I could prove men walk that this proves men walk to the moon, would that make sense?
 
I've made a similar thread about the way evos will create mythologies and images around ideas that they may have about animals in the past. It really bugs me when they do this. Like if you go into a museum and they have a small pile of bones but they use it to put together this dinosaur and then they have it posed like it's attacking something. This bugs me because we don't really know if the animal was a predator or a scavenger etc.

But the onus is on the people putting together the displays and publishing the magazines etc.

It has nothing to do with the actual scientific research. Those issues are usually more dry.

I explained to randman on page one of another thread I think, that he is confusing the way the information is shared with the layman, as the actual science.

I doubt very much a scientist working with whale fossils, even cares or needs to see an artists conception of the whale based on the fossil. He or she is probably more interested in the bones themselves.

It's the "sharing with the public" part where a lot of randman's complaints seem to come up. And I do agree that science should be more careful about presenting misinformation to the public in an effort to share science.

What you wind up with are people like randman who actually think they know what they are talking about because they can source information and have read information on the topic.

It's their own fault really.
You never read the papers suggesting Pakicetus was fully aquatic, did you? It's not just the way it's presented. It's in the science itself, which is why Pierre Grasse described it as deceit, either unconscious and in some cases conscious. Those are his words, not mine.

The simple reality is science should be about promoting a careful and judicious analysis of the facts, not always promoting wild overstatements and illogic as has often been the case with evolutionists.
 
No. Real science makes educated guesses all the time. Otherwise it wouldn't progress at all. I guess you don't understand science either.

There is a difference in an educated guess and wild overstatements. Pakicetus should never have been presented as an aquatic creature. The data was not there. Nor should it be promoted as ancestral to whales, much less an actual whale. The data isn't sufficient to make that claim.
 
Have scientists from the Discovery Institute or similar ever contributed in such a way to the correction of our ideas about evolution?
Yea, the ID and creationist team did "bust them" so to speak just as they did for 130 years with Haeckel. The fact evos don't listen, even on a simple case of faked data (Haeckel) and then act surprised and amazed when one of their own finally says, yea, it was faked should tell any reasonable person a whole lot about the state of science in the evo camp.

But as if evident here, evos generally want to defend at all costs, even if that means ignoring criticism and pretending it doesn't exist.
 
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ID has a much better track record than evolutionism.
What the hell else kind of track record could it have? "God did it" doesn't leave much wiggle room. There's nothing to change.

By your questions, it's clear you don't understand ID so why bother trying to explain it to you?

"God did it"

Explanation over.
 
Certainly the question "Did prokaryotes stop evolving into novel organisms which, if we knew about then, would have been declared different taxa?" is both legit and valid. The question "Why did bacteria stop evolving into novel organisms which, if we knew about then, would have been declared different taxa?" is not, as it presupposes that that is the case, and needs to be preceded by a thorough analysis of the data before it can be asked. The significance of the second question -- which is the one you ask -- is precisely nil, until the first question has unequivocally been answered, "Yes".



Randman is, of course, correct. That is why we only see one kind of flying organism, one kind of swimming organism, and one kind of walking organism.



These quotes are from 1973 (1), 1929, and 1951, respectively. They are therefore not necessarily relevant to a discussion on modern evolutionary theory, as they are from before much of the genetic, paleontological, and theoretical work that today forms much of the basis of said theory was carried out.



You have made this statement before, and it is not less of a wrong conclusion this time. Grassé and the other pre-1973 authors you and Davison cite are not necessarily idiots, but they certainly -- indeed necessarily -- based their arguments and conclusions on the data available to them at the time, and on how biology and evolutionary theory was understood at the time. This is not necessarily the same as how these matters are understood today, and thus it is irrelevant what they wrote or believed, as they didn't have access to the same data that we have today. I believe you cannot show that Grassé, Bateson, Berg, Broom, Goldschmidt and Schindewolf -- the authors on whom Davison allegedly bases his claims, which is more or less by definition the same as the ones on which randman bases his -- would have drawn the same conclusions had they lived today, but feel free to prove me wrong.



Of course they do. They do it all the time, likely, especially as the industrial sector keeps finding new compounds that they can dump in nature. However, finding and occupying a niche does in no way imply evolving multicellularity, let alone evolving into a creature like a mammal or a reptile. There are several reasons for this.

First of all, as several people have told you, evolutionary theory does not oblige a given organism to evolve into a resemblance of any other organism. This is true even on such a basic level as multicellularity. If a certain niche could be filled by either a multicellular organism or a unicellular organism, and both organisms would initially (that is, prior to specialization for that particular niche) fill this niche equally well, the unicellular organism is no more obliged to evolve into a multicellular one than the multicellular one is to evolve into a unicellular one. Certainly there is a possibility that it may happen, but it is in no way a requirement, and it is certainly not expected.

On a less fundamental level, we of course find parallelism and convergence all over the animal kingdom (and possibly the other kingdoms as well, but I am less familiar with these, and will leave them out unless prompted to include them). However, almost invariably these examples are either spatially or temporarily isolated from each other, or have been over evolutionary time. We expect that a given taxon in the general case will over time become more specialized for the niche it occupies, or for a part of it. Therefore, upon discovering a novel niche for a given taxon, it is not necessarily its privilege to occupy it, as it may already be occupied by members of a different taxon. This taxon is likely to be better adapted to this particular niche than your taxon is, why an additional factor of some sort of required for your taxon to succeed in occupying that niche.

Bluntly, one might say that it is typically a case of "first come, first serve", where any subsequent colonizer of a given niche (absent any extinction of its previous tenant) would need an additional factor of some sort in order to make it prevail. This could be as simple as a resistance to a toxin or a parasite, an ability to switch between the novel niche and another one, or a behavioural, reproductive, or morphological difference between the two taxa that allows one to supplant the other. We expect that the difficulty for an organism to supplant another in a given niche typically would (again absent extinction) increase over time, provided the niche is sufficiently stable.

However, there is at least one factor that may prove this expectation to be flawed, and that is the fact that evolution, while capable of producing a high amount of variation, nonetheless is typically obliged to operate within certain limits. The most obvious, and most relevant, of these limits, is that evolution is expected to operate only on extant material. Evolution may modify existing material -- sometimes substantially, as in the transition from fin to foot to hand to wing -- but more sensational changes in morphology and other traits would typically be expected to require more sensational changes in genetics. For instance, it has been noted (e.g. by Christensen, 1980) that there is a clear correlation in Annelids between a transition from sexual to asexual reproduction, dissolution or severe modification of sexual organs, and polyploidization.

That is not to say that evolution is bound to change a taxon within narrow limits as in "horses changing into other horses". It is more a case of evolution being bound to change a taxon based on what is already present, but these already present features can be changed a lot, or even made to disappear, as in sexual organs of many Annelids, legs in snakes and whales, and teeth in birds. This means that evolution could change a present-day bird into something that would not be classified as a bird any longer by a lay-person (but still technically be a bird, because of the way taxonomy works), but it could not change into something which would require it to have 19 legs, external gills, or unicellularity, without a correspondingly sensational change in the genome.

This is relevant in that evolution in bacteria would be expected to be limited by the same factors as evolution in metazoans: it is forced to operate on what already exists. It is certainly possible for bacteria to evolve multicellularity, but it is not at all expected, as long as the problems connected with filling any given novel niche that bacteria are exposed to, and successfully out-competing any other taxa seeking to do the same, can be solved within the framework of unicellularity. This is what we expect would happen, as modifications of the existing framework is easier (and more likely) than the adoption of a radically novel framework.

This also implies that if a novel taxon in a certain niche has less constraint in the forms it may take -- or even just shorter generation times for evolution to operate on -- it may under some circumstances outcompete an established taxon in the same niche, if that taxon has more evolutionary constraint or longer generation times. Such constraint could be, for instance, that of the size required to fit all the organs needed for the established taxon's particular mode of utilization of the niche.

While considering this, you should still bear in mind that there is no point in multicellularity for the sake of multicellularity. There is no innate drive towards multicellularity in nature, and neither multicellularity nor unicellularity are by definition "better", "higher" or "more desirable" than the other. Multicellularity has occurred at least once, perhaps many times, but there is no single piece of evidence that multicellularity is a necessary result of evolution, regardless of how much time you allow to pass.

On top of this is the fact that the probability of two taxa to evolve into a sufficiently similar morphology decreases with the phylogenetic distance between these taxa. Apart from on a very basic, and primitively defined, bauplan-level (where "worms" are "worms"), we expect to find parallelism and convergence (2) only in relatively closely related taxa. "Mammals", for instance, is a sufficiently small and homogenous taxon for us to expect that convergence between different and relatively distantly related subtaxa could be common, and that is what we find. We might expect the same within, for instance, Lumbriculida, Charadriiformes, and other smaller taxa. We don't expect it to be very common to find convergence between a mollusc and a money, as the last common ancestor is too removed, and if we find convergence between such distantly related taxa, we expect the similarity to be on a more fundamental level (e.g. having a shell, having antenna, having egg cocoons) and be dissimilar in the details.

The most amusing part is, of course, that if Davison's ideas were correct, we would expect to find these things. As all organisms would contain all the information required to form all other organisms, a simple rearrangement would be all that was necessary for bacteria to change into non-bacteria. This I believe is a necessary consequence of his "Ontogeny" paper. You then use the lack of evidence for this process as evidence against evolutionary theory, which claims the process is unlikely, and, implicitly, as evidence for Davison's alternative theory, under which the process is an inevitable conclusion. That is almost as mind-twisting as your claims on phylogenies.



The question certainly gives an informative insight into how little biology you know.

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(1) Note that it says 1977 on Grassé's work. This, however, refers to the English translation. Until it has been demonstrated that this translation differs widely from the original version in that it takes into account facts and theories from the intervening years, it is safest to assume that 1973 is the accurate date for determining what data Grassé incorporated in that particular work.
(2) I here follow some people whose name escape me at the moment in making "parallelism" and "convergence" distinctive terms, with the former meaning, approximately, evolution of a homologous feature in two sister taxa or almost-sister taxa in the same direction after isolation. For instance, if a population of warblers is isolated on an island without the sexual selection pressures being changed, these could develop patterns and plumages similar to those on the mainland (their sister population) within the same time frame, without this being convergence. I believe this distinction, though perhaps not very common, is nonetheless useful.
comments...you stated

Randman is, of course, correct. That is why we only see one kind of flying organism, one kind of swimming organism, and one kind of walking organism.

Thanks for saying I am correct but we don't see only one kind of flying organism, one kind of swimming organism and one kind of walking organism.

Take the niche of swimming and being an aquatic creature. There were already sharks and fish in the ocean when evos say mammals evolved and filled that same niche. There is no real evidence that something else cannot find a niche. That's a fantasy, and there is no environmental reason for bacteria to have not evolved a line of larger forms similar to fish, mammals, etc,....

Unless perhaps it is precisely because of microevolution (their ability to evolve so fast) that prevents macroevolution, which is what Grasse is getting at. Microevolution does not add up to macroevolution. Natural selection is a conservative process, not a macroevolutionary one for larger forms.

Bluntly, one might say that it is typically a case of "first come, first serve", where any subsequent colonizer of a given niche (absent any extinction of its previous tenant) would need an additional factor of some sort in order to make it prevail.

So how in the world did mammals become aquatic? Isn't it the very fact the niche was filled, fish and organisms in the water, that enabled as evos envision it, for whales to evolve and feed on them?

Your thinking is way too linear and simplistic. There is no reason for bacteria not to have evolved larger forms if microevolution and environmental pressures and niche opportunities are the mechanisms for evolving major new forms. You can say all day long you believe one thing or another, but the simple fact is over one billion years and they still haven't done it.

All the studies in the past 30 years don't change that one whit.
 
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I'm still not understanding the logic here.

Because the mechanisms behind evolution are not yet completely understood, and our understanding of them has evolved (snicker) significantly since Darwin's time, evolution doesn't exist? That's really what this sounds like, and it's ridiculous.

We don't fully understand the mechanisms behind how and why cancer tumors metastasize, but we can see that they do. Do tumors not exist because our understanding of the mechanisms behind them change?
 
Thanks for saying I am correct but we don't see only one kind of flying organism, one kind of swimming organism and one kind of walking organism.

Sarcasm isn't your strong suit, is it?

Take the niche of swimming and being an aquatic creature. There were already sharks and fish in the ocean when evos say mammals evolved and filled that same niche. There is no real evidence that something else cannot find a niche. That's a fantasy, and there is no environmental reason for bacteria to have not evolved a line of larger forms similar to fish, mammals, etc,....

There is no "niche of swimming and being an aquatic creature". Whales don't fill the same niche that fish and sharks do.

So how in the world did mammals become aquatic? Isn't it the very fact the niche was filled, fish and organisms in the water, that enabled as evos envision it, for whales to evolve and feed on them?

No, because whales evolved to fill a niche that had been occupied (which is why there were no whales before), but had been emptied due to an extinction event.
 
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That's a fantasy, and there is no environmental reason for bacteria to have not evolved a line of larger forms similar to fish, mammals, etc,...
As already requested, you have yet to show why they should. This is your assertion.
 
So it's dishonest to talk about facts when you guys don't have a good answer. Grasse was just a crackpot and so is anyone that doesn't follow evo orthodoxy?

And you call that science....

Beat that strawman and ignore the scientific discussion. I am happy to discuss science, even with you, but you do make arguments that you know to be false...that is dishonest.
 
Yea, the ID and creationist team did "bust them" so to speak just as they did for 130 years with Haeckel. The fact evos don't listen, even on a simple case of faked data (Haeckel) and then act surprised and amazed when one of their own finally says, yea, it was faked should tell any reasonable person a whole lot about the state of science in the evo camp.

You're ignoring that it's very possible for creationists to have disliked Haeckel (& others like him) for completely wrong reasons. The fact that science has long since discarded his ideas does not mean that creationists were right all along.

And the fact that creationists have lied so persistently, as demonstrated by ANTPogo's excellent thread about Haeckel, is very revealing. I had heard those accusations about how textbooks still teach Haeckel, and always assumed it was just a weakness of textbooks & the school system. I didn't realize, until ANTPogo took the time and effort to investigate it, that those accusations were fabricated. The more I see of this debate, the less charitable I feel about the motivations and ethics of creationists.
 
More responses to Kot's comments:

On top of this is the fact that the probability of two taxa to evolve into a sufficiently similar morphology decreases with the phylogenetic distance between these taxa. Apart from on a very basic, and primitively defined, bauplan-level (where "worms" are "worms"), we expect to find parallelism and convergence (2) only in relatively closely related taxa. "Mammals", for instance, is a sufficiently small and homogenous taxon for us to expect that convergence between different and relatively distantly related subtaxa could be common, and that is what we find.

That's an interesting claim. Has it been tested? Certainly, you guys say mammals developed into similar morphology in the sense of being swimming creatures?

How about bats, insect and birds all being able to fly?

How about parasites and bacteria both occupying intestinal tracts?

I just don't see any evidence at all of your claim. It's a hypothesis that can be safely discounted by the very facts we see so many different taxon in the same niche essentially, and often one occupying that niche does exactly what I stated, it opens the door for others. No fish and organisms in the ocean would likely mean no whales, right?

So there is an interdependence on this niche question. That's why men like Pierre Grasse said biologists need to move away from the myth of evolution, accepting so many unproven postulates as if the evidence is there when it is not. The evidence disagrees with what you and evos here have said, for example, that once a niche is filled, it's harder for something else to come in.

Well, with whales and aquatic mammals, the opposite is the case. The very fact the niche was filled enabled the opportunity for mammals to evolve into being aquatic creatures, assuming that is the case in the first place. The other possibility, of course, is they didn't evolve at all from land mammals or were simply an original created kind (special creation).

But if you accept that mammals evolved into whales, for example, then you have to say it's precisely because others evolved into the niche of aquatic life first.
 
Sarcasm isn't your strong suit, is it?



There is no "niche of swimming and being an aquatic creature". Whales don't fill the same niche that fish and sharks do.



No, because whales evolved to fill a niche that had been occupied (which is why there were no whales before), but had been emptied due to an extinction event.
So bacteria were never around for extinction events or local environmental catastrophes?

The fact is the niche of aquatic life being filled enabled whales to evolve according to evos and so disproves your point. Of course, you can say it's a different niche and well, that would be true of any major new forms evolving from bacteria too. Either way, your claim and logic doesn't work.
 
Well, with whales and aquatic mammals, the opposite is the case. The very fact the niche was filled enabled the opportunity for mammals to evolve into being aquatic creatures, assuming that is the case in the first place. The other possibility, of course, is they didn't evolve at all from land mammals or were simply an original created kind (special creation).

But if you accept that mammals evolved into whales, for example, then you have to say it's precisely because others evolved into the niche of aquatic life first.

You have no idea what a niche is, do you?

Here. Learn.
 

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