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Evolution a hoax?

caniswalensis said:
I will have to admit I am personally wrong about the unique morphology of cetacian earbones.

I am not sure that falsifies all of evolution though.

You will get the satisfaction of seeing me yelp like a pup and run away with my tail betwwen my legs, at least. :D
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Don't have to go away.

The approach I find more interesting in all this stuff is to consider how data is viewed and approached.

Science is about understanding, not belief. I think many evolutionists or proponents of evolution would gain more understanding if they actually listened to criticism instead of always attacking it and usually also trying to impugn the character of their critics.

Edit to add: Pakicetus actually did not have a full cetacean ear, btw.
 
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What link? The macroevolution.net link?

Because if so, that's a pretty blatant lie. It has only a single, small, comparative skull comparison, using drawings from 1898 and 1904!
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It's worse. The authors demonstrate an unforgivable (in this context) ignorance of taxonomy in the first paragraph--the discussion NEEDS to be at much greater depth. And what's with discussing the Paleocene? It's pretty much the definition of a survivor fauna (wasn't until 10-15 years ago that we found reefs in the Paleocene, for example). There's certainly not enough here to justify a multi-tens of millions of years lazurous taxa.

My initial impression? Ameturish, lacks sufficient depth to make the claims it's making, and generally hopelessly out of their depth.
 
randman said:
Don't have to go away.

The approach I find more interesting in all this stuff is to consider how data is viewed and approached.

Science is about understanding, not belief. I think many evolutionists or proponents of evolution would gain more understanding if they actually listened to criticism instead of always attacking it and usually also trying to impugn the character of their critics.

Edit to add: Pakicetus actually did not have a full cetacean ear, btw. My point related more to that creature than cetaceans as a whole.
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I was just making a joke about running, but thank you kindly for your polite invitation not to do so. I genuinely appreciate that.

I happen to agree with the whole of of your middle paragraph. I know some people that believe that evolution is true, but can't tell you why. that is ther business but they are missing out on so much interesting stuff by just accepting it with no critical thought.

back on the ear thing, Ambulocetus did have a ful cetacian ear, which shared unique characteristics with every other cetacian in it's lineage, and also with the non-cetacian ear of Pakicetus. Those characteristics are found nowhere else in the animal kingdom.

When I think of the long line of generation after generation of these creatures, slowly gradually changing. That they started on those distant shores and arrived in the here and now, so transformed as to be unrecognizable to their ancient kin. It is truly breathtaking in it’s scope.
 
caniswalensis said:
back on the ear thing, Ambulocetus did have a ful cetacian ear, which shared unique characteristics with every other cetacian in it's lineage, and also with the non-cetacian ear of Pakicetus. Those characteristics are found nowhere else in the animal kingdom.
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And Pakicetus has a recognizably intermediate form of that ear, partway between that of later Cetaceans like Ambulocetus and the ear of land mammals.
 
Science is about understanding, not belief. I think many evolutionists or proponents of evolution would gain more understanding if they actually listened to criticism instead of always attacking it and usually also trying to impugn the character of their critics.
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This isn't even close to how things work in the Real World. In reality, the area you want to discuss is vicious, and blanket insults is the LEAST you can expect. There are still fist-fights over taxonomy. It wasn't that long ago that explosives were used in these disputes (the Bone Wars). What you're doing is akin to stepping into a mellee and crying foul because someone stubbed your toe. :rolleyes:

Worse, you're trying to overthrow very well-supported ideas. This will ALWAYS make you enemies. It's the nature of the game. While it sounds nice and pretty and happy to say "We shouldn't attack people who disagree with us", it ignores the fact that science in general, and paleontology in particular, attacks EVERYONE. We evicerate theories, and more than occasionally insult the person proposing them, often when we agree with them.

You want to discuss taxonomy and paleontology? Cool. Have a thick skin and body armor. I'm not saying this to scare you, or to justify it, or anything like that--just letting the bystandards know that what you are in fact doing is demanding a double standard, and one in which people without the common decensy to learn the subject are treated more gently than those who have spent their lifetime building a vast knowledge of it. It's the simple facts: we are an easy-going bunch, us scientists, but we're not exactly known for holding back criticism.
 
caniswalensis said:
I was just making a joke about running, but thank you kindly for your polite invitation not to do so. I genuinely appreciate that.

I happen to agree with the whole of of your middle paragraph. I know some people that believe that evolution is true, but can't tell you why. that is ther business but they are missing out on so much interesting stuff by just accepting it with no critical thought.

back on the ear thing, Ambulocetus did have a ful cetacian ear, which shared unique characteristics with every other cetacian in it's lineage, and also with the non-cetacian ear of Pakicetus. Those characteristics are found nowhere else in the animal kingdom.

When I think of the long line of generation after generation of these creatures, slowly gradually changing. That they started on those distant shores and arrived in the here and now, so transformed as to be unrecognizable to their ancient kin. It is truly breathtaking in it’s scope.
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Ah, so the story inspires you.....but is it true?

Btw, Ambulocetus did not have a "full" cetacian ear either, and care to point out the specific "characteristics....found nowhere else in the animal kingdom"?

I think it's useful to consider so-called convergent genetic evolution whereby similar gene sequences are to have evolved independently in, say bats and whales, for echolocation. The casual observer may not see this a problem for evolutionists, but when you think about it a little more, it's a major issue.

Why?

First, it's very unlikely but that's not my main point. If nearly identical genetic sequences can emerge independently, then similar genetic sequences do not necessarily indicate common ancestry. When evos say, well, "we know" (a common phrase) or "have long known" such and such share a common ancestor based on a similar genetic sequence, that's incorrect because they don't know and perhaps CANNOT know.
 
First, it's very unlikely but that's not my main point. If nearly identical genetic sequences can emerge independently, then similar genetic sequences do not necessarily indicate common ancestry. When evos say, well, "we know" (a common phrase) or "have long known" such and such share a common ancestor based on a similar genetic sequence, that's incorrect because they don't know and perhaps CANNOT know.
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Further lies. This is discussed amply in "On the Origin of the Phyla" as well as http://folk.uio.no/ohammer/past/. The link is to PAST, a freeware statistical package used extensively by paleontologists for taxonomic research, and includes several sections getting into the theory of cladistics and phylogeny, which include discussions of exactly what randman says "evos" don't understand.

I'd say it's ignorance--this is an obscure topic--but there's no justification for ranting about how little a group understands about their own paradigm when you can't be bothered to learn what they understand. randman is battling straw men, and if he were intellectually honest he'd know it.
 
randman said:
Except it doesn't.
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Except you are right but unable to read:
Evolution of cetaceans
Indohyus is a small deer-like creature, which lived about 48 million years ago in Kashmir.[4] It belongs to the artiodactyls family Raoellidae, and is believed to be the closest sister group of Cetacea.[1] About the size of a raccoon or domestic cat, this herbivorous creature shared some of the traits of whales, most notably the involucrum, which is the diagnostic characteristic of any cetacean, and is not found in any other species.[1]
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(emphasis added)

The land mammals that is the ancestor of whales (and has the distinctive ear structure) were the pakicetids.
 
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aggle-rithm said:
If there's a default to fall back on, it would be something like Lamarckism, which at least has some scientific basis (although it's demonstrably wrong, of course -- but being wrong doesn't seem to present a problem to these people).
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That's probably who randman keeps posting his misquotes of Grasse, despite being shown, long ago, that this is wrong.
 
Freindly, lively debate, guys.
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That's part of my point: People who don't read scientific papers and don't show up to conferances don't understand what is meant by "friendly, lively debate", at least not as scientists understand it. Scientists have this image of a stoic, formal, polite, detached person presenting dry facts. In reality, passions run high. Nothing said thus far would be out of place at a bar outside of GSA--and I've heard much, much, much worse. And the stories I've heard make what I've witnessed myself look downright docile. randman has demonstrated an inability to handle the type of criticism a scientist expects, and then has the audacity to tell us how to debate.
 
randman said:
First, it's very unlikely but that's not my main point. If nearly identical genetic sequences can emerge independently, then similar genetic sequences do not necessarily indicate common ancestry. When evos say, well, "we know" (a common phrase) or "have long known" such and such share a common ancestor based on a similar genetic sequence, that's incorrect because they don't know and perhaps CANNOT know.
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This isn't exactly something earthshattering and unknown in evolutionary science. Indeed, the fact that closely-related species can develop the same phenotype via changes in different genes, while distantly-related species can develop the same phenotype via changes in the same genes, has been known for a while now. Both can even appear in the same phenotype across the same species.

To take echolocation as an example, both echolocating bats and echolocating cetaceans show convergent evolution in the Prestin gene (which confers heightened auditory sensitivity to high frequencies in the mammalian ear), while they show almost no similarity at all in the FoxP2 gene (which is linked to speech development in humans, vocal learning in animals, and the sensorimotor performance required for things like echolocating clicks). In fact, while bats show an an extremely high variation in FoxP2 among different species, the genomic variation neatly matches bat phylogenetic variation and echolocation type variation. And yet, there is almost no variation in FoxP2 among cetaceans - all cetacean species, whether echolocating or not, have the same single variant of FoxP2, and that variant matches none of the versions of the sequence possessed by any bat species. In other words, bats and dolphins have a convergently similar sequence for the Prestin gene in echolocation, but while bats have gone off and evolved a use for FoxP2 in echolocation, dolphins don't use it at all (the above paper speculates that this is because bats use their mouths in echolocation, requiring seriomotor adeptness, while dolphins resonate through their melon for echolocation and so don't have to meet the same seriomotor requirement).

EDIT: As an added bonus, the Prestin gene paper contains evidence for the convergent evolution in dolphins being driven by natural selection.
 
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Bill Thompson said:
Gravity is just a theory too, you know.
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I find it very hard to believe the Earth has just enough gravity to keep me comfortably attached to the ground - without either crushing me into meatloaf or sending me wildly sailing through the air with every step I take - without the intervention of some higher intelligence.
 
Dinwar said:
That's part of my point: People who don't read scientific papers and don't show up to conferances don't understand what is meant by "friendly, lively debate", at least not as scientists understand it. Scientists have this image of a stoic, formal, polite, detached person presenting dry facts. In reality, passions run high. Nothing said thus far would be out of place at a bar outside of GSA--and I've heard much, much, much worse. And the stories I've heard make what I've witnessed myself look downright docile. randman has demonstrated an inability to handle the type of criticism a scientist expects, and then has the audacity to tell us how to debate.
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I won't argue your facts, but I will respectfully point out that we are not in a bar, or at a conference, and most of us are not scientists. You can frame or justify it any way you want, but we are on a discussion forum. Whether you look docile compared to someone who gets in a screaming match in a bar somewhere is immaterial.

It is a forum with a set of rules, and every member here has agreed to follow them. One rule says we must be civil. Another says that we should keep our comments restricted to the argument, not the arguer.

Calling someone a liar based on personal incredulity alone not only breaks both of those rules, it is bad logic as well.

I don’t really have a beef with you, but I felt like I should point this out.


Regards, Canis
 
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