Evolution: the Facts.

[megaresp]

Thanks guys. I do what I can.

Despite the assertion above that efforts such as yours make no difference on believers, I can state with 100% certainty that they do.

And I'm not the only one around here who was once a creationist, and who switched sides after discussion with a person as generous and patient as you.

 

[subterranean1]

Wrong. The gaps are very significant. The absence of intermediary samples increasingly suggests that there aren't any.

What percentage of the places* where there could currently be relevant fossils do you think has been examined by competent people?

(*Including the 'places' which are within the Earth rather than simply the current surface)

I'm assuming that you're not daft/dishonest enough to try and make a case for the current nonexistence of certain samples in collections, expand that out to 'aren't any' in a vastly wider sense, and and then try and leverage 'aren't any' to 'weren't any'.

Or to focus on a particular change you might emotionally want to have been deliberately made by some external agent, while ignoring any number of other events for which the evidence (or rather the 'lack of impossible completeness of the evidence') is essentially similar, where you should logically come to the same conclusion.

If you're being logical.

But maybe you find it harder to imagine some aliens hanging around here for tens or hundreds of millions of years pissing around with nature?

 

[Akhenaten]

Despite the assertion above that efforts such as yours make no difference on believers, I can state with 100% certainty that they do.

And I'm not the only one around here who was once a creationist, and who switched sides after discussion with a person as generous and patient as you.

Perhaps I should have been more specific in making that asserton and I now hasten to add ". . . in this particular case" to it.

Apologies to Dinwar for what could be construed as dismissing his extremely worthy effort as a waste of time.

Most certainly not my intention.

 

[Kotatsu]

Oh, you have my sympathies. This is NOT the time to move to the Desert Southwest--it's nasty weather even by the standards of the locals!

Still, if it lets me be in a room filled with lice all day and get to look at pretty much whichever lice I want to and get to describe not only new species, but even (in my judgement) new genera, I'd move into the stomach of an oxpecker.

Also, and you may know this better, there is supposedly a place near here where there's thousands of trilobites that, according to my boss, you are allowed to keep. And there are hummingbirds and California quails in my garden.

 

[Dinwar]

What percentage of the places* where there could currently be relevant fossils do you think has been examined by competent people?

This is no small problem--since Sepkoski finished his curve we've been trying to figure out what it means, and one argument is that it doesn't mean anything, because it correlates really well with the surface area and volume of rock exposed (reference). It's the sort of thing that keeps people like me up at night.

Perhaps I should have been more specific in making that asserton and I now hasten to add ". . . in this particular case" to it.

Apologies to Dinwar for what could be construed as dismissing his extremely worthy effort as a waste of time.

No need to apologize. It's always good to take a step back and ask "Why am I doing this?"

Still, if it lets me be in a room filled with lice all day

Only a biologist would think this is a good thing!

Also, and you may know this better, there is supposedly a place near here where there's thousands of trilobites that, according to my boss, you are allowed to keep.

GSA is held there every once in a while, and there's always a field trip to collect fossils. Sadly, last time it was at the same time as their discussion on mass extinctions, and overlapped with an interview for grad school. If you find any, at least post pictures please!

 

[jimbob]

I'm sorry, but for a question of this magnitude that's not even a start (I'd be less hostile if you hadn't jumped in with aliens and the like). When I start any research I read as much as I can on the topic--I'll read "several articles and a couple of books" just to start the list of references I need to track down. And again, you're artificially limiting your research, which is giving this event far more importance than it should really have (while masking the REAL question). If you look for brain size in the human family over time, you find that it shows a pretty nice geometric curve. Look at the second figure (labeled Figure 4 thanks to coming from a publication) at this link. (I haven't read the whole link, but I HAVE read the paper this is from, and the data are sound, even if the interpretation of the link is off.) Brain size increases slowly, then takes off like a rocket. Seen in that context the question isn't "Why did human brains increase so rapidly at one point in time?" but rather "Why is the rate of brain size increase increasing with time?"

Thanks for the whole post Dinwar, could you expand on the bit highlighted, please...

 

[jimbob]

I disagree with the sentiment that you're putting forward. First, one would have to narrow down what form/forms of a designer are being dealt with before a worthwhile hypothesis that is testable could be made. The ID hypothesis that you refer to is broad enough that it is unfalsifiable, therefore, it is not worthwhile. This is not to say that an intelligent force did not design or alter life on Earth, with complete certainty, rather, that the arguments and tests that can be made are not particularly useful or convincing without good positive evidence and a falsifiable premise.

Fair enough,
However we can rule out an omniscient and benign Designer.

We can also rule out a benign designer that is as competent as a human designer.

There are features that evolutionary theory can predict wouldn't happen, just as there are features which one wouldn't expect of a benign and competent designer. Let alone an omnscient and benign designer.

Evolutionary theory would predict that if there is sufficient selective advantage, certain traits would evolve independently on several occasions.

If a trait evolves in one organism its descendents may or may not have this trait, but you would not expect to see this trait being suddenly "reused" in its entirety in another, unrelated organism, as opposed to evolving independently inboth cases.

Something that evolutionary theory would predict to not occur:

Luckily we now have some examples of intelligent design:

The important point here is that this mouse has the same 700-letter sequence as the jellyfish Green Fluorescent Protein, including those parts of the sequence which are unimportant.

That wouldn't have happened by chance, so it is safe to conclude that this was an intelligent designer reusing the jellyfish GFP gene-sequence.

Lateral transimssion of genes has been observed, but the sudden appearence of a fluorescent mouse, and genes from a jellyfish without many other interveaning organisms would militate against this being natural.

An omniscient and benign designer would get things right first time, if such a designer was also competent.

So lets remove omniscience, as even Behe agrees that there has been incremental improvement...

If a competant designer manages to design something, then this designer does not waste effort redesigning the same feature from scratch every time, but reuses as much of the design as possible.

There are many examples of organisms that have independentently evolved extra sets of eyes, but didn't "reuse" their original "design" of eye. The mammal retina is poorly designed compared to the squid's. A competent designer would not waste all that effort to redisgn something and then get parts of it wrong.

So lets remove competent and benign.

That leaves us with an incompetent and/or malign designer, or none at all...

ETA:I have since been informed that the mouse was just photoshopped, but Alba the rabbit is real, so that point is valid, even though the example isn't

 

[Dinwar]

Thanks for the whole post Dinwar, could you expand on the bit highlighted, please...

The idea that brain size and intelligence are related crops up from time to time. In grad school it was a question we examined, sort of as a general "This is how you deal with complex paleo questions" issue. The authors of the paper basically measured brain cavity size and plotted it through time--fairly basic stuff, and completley uncontroversial in the paleo community. We drew a few conclusions:

1) Brain size and intelligence aren't a simple thing to address. I mean, I'm sure no one here will argue that men are smarter than women--but they have no problem arguing that modern humans are smarter than our ancestors, based on the same data.

2) Humans are diverse. This causes no end of issues in paleontology. Check out the Modern Man/Modern Woman symbols in Figure 4. The bars on there are the error bars--and several species' worth of brain sizes are encompassed within that standard deviation. It's likely that ancient humans had as much diversity as modern humans; therefore the brain sizes should only be taken as potential averages. So in reality it's difficult to say ANYTHING about brain sizes in hominids.

What happened was, this conversation jogged my memory of the figure. I can remember visual data pretty much indefinitely, but verbal data like paper names tends to be fleating for me. So I did a Google search to find the figure (which was really all I needed from the paper to prove my point). The website I linked to had the figure, so I linked to it. I didn't take the time to see what the website DID with the figure, so wanted to be clear that the figure was the only thing I was using on that website. I didn't mean to imply that the website was crackpottery; rather, I merely wanted to point out that I had not verified the interpretations of that website, so couldn't make any claims about their accuracy.

So basically I was just saying that I remembered something useful, found the first good example of it I could, and linked to it. I know the original source's methods were sound (if they weren't a few decades of grad students pouring over it would have shown it to be bad!), so I CAN vouch for the figure itself. Since that's the only part of the website I wanted, that's the only part I looked at, so I can't say anything about the website itself.

I should see if the used book store still has Gould's "Mismeasure of Man" for sale. I know it's been shown to be flawed (ironically enough, Gould made the error his book was written to attack), but it's certainly a useful introduction to the issue of brain size in hominids. ufology is drastically over-simplifying things. For that matter, so am I--measuring brain size is a tricky business, and while the methods used for that figure aren't controversial it's only because the controversy has died down. It's really hard to figure out the volume of a convoluted void, and there were a number of big debates on how to properly do it (different methods yielded different results, and were exploited by different political groups).

 

[cyborg]

1) Brain size and intelligence aren't a simple thing to address. I mean, I'm sure no one here will argue that men are smarter than women--but they have no problem arguing that modern humans are smarter than our ancestors, based on the same data.

Bad ideas about the brain have a way of persisting: bigger numbers are easier to understand than better algorithms.

It is a simply demonstrable fact that the fastest computer in the world will not become spontaneously intelligent by the mere fact it can compute fast. It will infact be as useful as a stone without some algorithm to run on it. Of course someone will object computers are not like human brains. At that point you sell them a 1 million Khz computer as better than a paltry 2 Ghz one and walk away with their money.

I'm not expecting the popular myth of "bigger brains = more intelligent because more stuff," to go away any time soon but it is at least trivially simple to show how nonsensical the idea is.

 

[Aridas]

Fair enough,
However we can rule out an omniscient and benign Designer.

Add Omnipotent and I'll agree that this can be ruled out, even if we're dealing with benign, not Omnibenevolent. With just the two qualities that you named, though, it could still be the case, given that there's nothing said about what the designer can actually do, accomplish, or when and how the designer became involved and how long they were/are involved.

It's worth remembering that, regardless how much ID was introduced with a version of the Christian God in mind, they presented it in an exceedingly vague manner that does not allow for it to be either falsified or the potential options even be reasonably narrowed down, even if it had any positive evidence.

We can also rule out a benign designer that is as competent as a human designer.

Again, limitations. Also, focus, unless you're intending benign to include an anthropocentric nature. Personally, I don't assume that humans must be the focus of a designer for it to be benign. I could still consider a designer benign, even if its only involvement with Earth was dumping a bunch of biological matter into Earth's atmosphere or onto a rock that happened to reach Earth and moving onto the projects which it was actually pursuing.

 

[jimbob]

The idea that brain size and intelligence are related crops up from time to time. In grad school it was a question we examined, sort of as a general "This is how you deal with complex paleo questions" issue. The authors of the paper basically measured brain cavity size and plotted it through time--fairly basic stuff, and completley uncontroversial in the paleo community. We drew a few conclusions:

1) Brain size and intelligence aren't a simple thing to address. I mean, I'm sure no one here will argue that men are smarter than women--but they have no problem arguing that modern humans are smarter than our ancestors, based on the same data.

2) Humans are diverse. This causes no end of issues in paleontology. Check out the Modern Man/Modern Woman symbols in Figure 4. The bars on there are the error bars--and several species' worth of brain sizes are encompassed within that standard deviation. It's likely that ancient humans had as much diversity as modern humans; therefore the brain sizes should only be taken as potential averages. So in reality it's difficult to say ANYTHING about brain sizes in hominids.

What happened was, this conversation jogged my memory of the figure. I can remember visual data pretty much indefinitely, but verbal data like paper names tends to be fleating for me. So I did a Google search to find the figure (which was really all I needed from the paper to prove my point). The website I linked to had the figure, so I linked to it. I didn't take the time to see what the website DID with the figure, so wanted to be clear that the figure was the only thing I was using on that website. I didn't mean to imply that the website was crackpottery; rather, I merely wanted to point out that I had not verified the interpretations of that website, so couldn't make any claims about their accuracy.

So basically I was just saying that I remembered something useful, found the first good example of it I could, and linked to it. I know the original source's methods were sound (if they weren't a few decades of grad students pouring over it would have shown it to be bad!), so I CAN vouch for the figure itself. Since that's the only part of the website I wanted, that's the only part I looked at, so I can't say anything about the website itself.

I should see if the used book store still has Gould's "Mismeasure of Man" for sale. I know it's been shown to be flawed (ironically enough, Gould made the error his book was written to attack), but it's certainly a useful introduction to the issue of brain size in hominids. ufology is drastically over-simplifying things. For that matter, so am I--measuring brain size is a tricky business, and while the methods used for that figure aren't controversial it's only because the controversy has died down. It's really hard to figure out the volume of a convoluted void, and there were a number of big debates on how to properly do it (different methods yielded different results, and were exploited by different political groups).

Thanks for the clarification, and the exposition.

 

[Lukraak_Sisser]

That figure also makes the whole genetic thing quite clear.
There is a variation in brainsize of about +/- 15% from average in both males and females.
This is an indication that the organ size is not due to a single gene, but rather a whole slew of genes each of which can be expressed variably (probably due to interaction with a even larger amount of genes).
Minor variations in expression level of one or more of these genes could rapidly lead to a larger average.
Given how the data points are distrubuted I don't see a sudden jump, but rather a nice curve with an upwards slope near the end.
It's not inconcievable that some of the genes are regulated by how much food the organism gets, so the increase might be a direct correlation between getting better at hunting/gathering, causing a self-strengthening increase.

 

[aggle-rithm]

I'm not expecting the popular myth of "bigger brains = more intelligent because more stuff," to go away any time soon but it is at least trivially simple to show how nonsensical the idea is.

A really good designer could make the human brain even smaller, given the amount of neurons dedicated to supressing the signals from other neurons. It would also be more energy-efficient as well.

 

[jimbob]

Fair enough,
However we can rule out an omniscient and benign Designer.

Add Omnipotent and I'll agree that this can be ruled out, even if we're dealing with benign, not Omnibenevolent. With just the two qualities that you named, though, it could still be the case, given that there's nothing said about what the designer can actually do, accomplish, or when and how the designer became involved and how long they were/are involved.

Well, assuming a designer with sufficient knowledge to actually direct life towards the current situation, they would seem to have been pretty incompetent. They could have either selected for the mammalian retina and blood supply to have been got right, or genetically engineered it and culled the rest.

I suppose a very old but rather dim species of alien is not ruled out as the designer. Though there is no evidence for any of the usual signatures of design - why do many traits look like convergent evolution as opposed to reusing a proven design from another type of life? This would be evidence against a dim but knowledgeable alien designer, as reusing design elements uses less design effort than starting from scratch again.

It's worth remembering that, regardless how much ID was introduced with a version of the Christian God in mind, they presented it in an exceedingly vague manner that does not allow for it to be either falsified or the potential options even be reasonably narrowed down, even if it had any positive evidence.

We can also rule out a benign designer that is as competent as a human designer.

Again, limitations. Also, focus, unless you're intending benign to include an anthropocentric nature. Personally, I don't assume that humans must be the focus of a designer for it to be benign. I could still consider a designer benign, even if its only involvement with Earth was dumping a bunch of biological matter into Earth's atmosphere or onto a rock that happened to reach Earth and moving onto the projects which it was actually pursuing.

I'd argue that is abiogenesis, which is not unrelated, but outwith the discussion of evolution.


I wasn't talking from a human point of view. The mammalian retina affects all mammals. Hiccups affect many vertebrates.

I would agree that this is not proof, but is strong circumstantial evidence against such an idea.

 

[Aridas]

Well, assuming a designer with sufficient knowledge to actually direct life towards the current situation, they would seem to have been pretty incompetent. They could have either selected for the mammalian retina and blood supply to have been got right, or genetically engineered it and culled the rest.

This assumes that they had the power and were involved with the process at the time. Sufficient knowledge means nothing if one doesn't have the ability or tools to apply it.

I suppose a very old but rather dim species of alien is not ruled out as the designer. Though there is no evidence for any of the usual signatures of design - why do many traits look like convergent evolution as opposed to reusing a proven design from another type of life? This would be evidence against a dim but knowledgeable alien designer, as reusing design elements uses less design effort than starting from scratch again.

This is a rather different tangent than the previous, and... my first reaction delves somewhat into the realm of "if you don't know anything about the people in question, why do you think that you can describe them even that well?" That's largely because it feels like a straw man, though. Assuming an ancient alien race was involved, that still leaves question such as motive unanswered. Earth could well just have been one of many testing grounds for various experiments, including different genetic ways to fulfill the same function. One could apply that dim label because they didn't have either the desire or capability to just use computer models to examine the effects.

I'd argue that is abiogenesis, which is not unrelated, but outwith the discussion of evolution.

I would disagree, but it's close. Either way, it was just one example of something that could potentially count as an intelligent, benign designer, given ID and your statement.

I wasn't talking from a human point of view. The mammalian retina affects all mammals. Hiccups affect many vertebrates.

I would agree that this is not proof, but is strong circumstantial evidence against such an idea.

For the record, I'm not attempting to support ID and tend to think that the currently available evidence is against it, or, at very best, is negated if one uses parsimony. I've largely been pointing out why ID is unfalsifiable, though.

 

[Paulhoff]

For the record, I'm not attempting to support ID

That is good, because one can only use assertions to support it.


Paul

 

[Acleron]

...
For the record, I'm not attempting to support ID and tend to think that the currently available evidence is against it, or, at very best, is negated if one uses parsimony. I've largely been pointing out why ID is unfalsifiable, though.

If there is evidence against it then it is falsifiable.

But in general you allocate too much honesty to the creationist/IDers. Their intelligent designer is without doubt a god and a very specific god. It is the christian god and is attributed with being supreme, it is omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent. It is thus perfect and not capable of making mistakes.

This is why they try to ascribe a function to each and every facet of the genotype and phenotype of Homo sapiens and by extension to every species. The presence of flawed structures such as the eye in humans or the presence of non-functioning DNA is just flatly denied because they are aware their hypothesis fails.

 

[Robrob]

On the subject of ID, I just realized there is a parallel between its proponents and most other CT (e.g. truthers). By working backwards from their conviction to the evidence they have locked themselves into a fundamentalist POV.

Truthers could easily claim their theory is the government "let it happen on purpose" (LIHOP) and there would be little room if any for contradiction. Instead, they are completely locked in to an insanely convoluted and complex conspiracy with thousands of moving parts to achieve "made it happen on purpose" (MIHOP).

ID proponents are the same. One could simply claim life evolved over millions of years though the hidden direction of a deity. There would be little room if any for contradiction. Instead, they are completely locked in to an insanely convoluted and complex theory with thousands of moving parts to achieve "God made it happen in seven days".

 

[Aridas]

If there is evidence against it then it is falsifiable.

There's a difference between strong evidence and weak evidence. There's strong evidence against most of the forms of ID that ID was created to support, for example, but ID is too vague for that evidence to apply to all of the concepts that meet the definitions that tend to be used. Thus, the strong evidence against the forms that the proponents want, combined with the lack of positive evidence for any of them and the more parsimonious explanations for the observations is weak evidence against ID being the case in any form. Many of the concepts that could qualify for ID are indistinguishable from other, more parsimonious explanations, though, and are thus unfalsifiable. That there's weak evidence against the overarching concept (enough to make a reasonable assumption) does not make those concepts any less unfalsifiable.

But in general you allocate too much honesty to the creationist/IDers.

I doubt that. I'm simply not condemning a concept BECAUSE of the blatant dishonesty of its proponents and origin. I'd much rather dismiss it as meaningless and without evidence, in the form that it was presented, but worthy of thought experiments to aid in understanding. Of course, I consider solipsism to be in a very similar category. Understanding why it's not useful at any level to assume that one is a brain in a jar, for example, is something that I consider to be a useful thought experiment.

Their intelligent designer is without doubt a god and a very specific god. It is the christian god and is attributed with being supreme, it is omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent. It is thus perfect and not capable of making mistakes.

That may have been the intent, as I think I've noted a time or few, but that doesn't change the concept and definition that they actually put forward in their attempt to change the way that "science" was handled.

This is why they try to ascribe a function to each and every facet of the genotype and phenotype of Homo sapiens and by extension to every species. The presence of flawed structures such as the eye in humans or the presence of non-functioning DNA is just flatly denied because they are aware their hypothesis fails.

For the forms that the loud YEC proponents want to be the case, yes. This is not necessarily the case for the forms of ID that are widely believed to be the case for the large majority of Christians, without even looking at Islam, Hinduism, or many, many other proponents of some form of ID.

 

[Dinwar]

There's a difference between strong evidence and weak evidence.

The issue is that ID--remember, it's been proven in court to merely be Creationism with a new name--has no evidence supporting it. Thus, it's not even a valid theory to consider. Technically it's not wrong, but only for the same reason that you can't say I've lost any NASCAR races--it hasn't even entered as a possible option.

I doubt that. I'm simply not condemning a concept BECAUSE of the blatant dishonesty of its proponents and origin.

That's a mistake. ID has, again, been proven in a court of law to be nothing more than a dishonest attempt to hide Creationism in order to get it into classrooms. Everything since then has been ID advocates running around trying to find a way around that simple fact.

This is not necessarily the case for the forms of ID that are widely believed to be the case for the large majority of Christians,

Christians largely believe in Deistic Evolution, not Intelligent Design. While they may appear superficially similar, they're actually two very distinct theories. ID advocates are relying on people like you to make their case for them--they deliberately chose a vague name, in the hopes that people would erroneously expand the definition of the term. Intelligent Design, as the name of a theory, is that the Christian God created the universe. That's historical fact. The concept that life originated via some other intelligence is a completely different theory.