No, not if you go back further. This is just evidence of biologists, though many won't admit it, beginning to come around to ideas initially promoted in ID and others such as men like Pierre Grasse. Biology is likely undergoing a paradigm shift and part of that is a deemphasis on NeoDarwinian mechanisms and arguments.
That, of course, does not mean mainstream biologists are abandoning common descent.
Ah, so you're moving the goalposts. Instead of saying that "evos" never predicted the ENCODE findings, they
were predicted...but only by biologists who are "coming around" to ID.
Except that's not the case at all. Because the article in Genome Research names those scientists who predicted what you said they didn't predict: Piero Carninci and Jan-Fang Cheng. And as even a brief search in Pub Med shows, in the more than half a decade since their initial "predictions" were published, they've continued to author paper after paper, all of which continue to confirm and add to the pile of evidence behind the Synthetic Model. Neither of them are any closer to the bogus idea of ID than they were before.
And look, they're still
making
predictions.
(EDIT:And, uh, you
are aware that even
if "front loading" were, by some impossible happenstance, true...that there would still have to be "common descent", with all modern living things descending from a single ancestor, in order for it to explain what it's purporting to explain. Right?)
First off, who said anything about "vaunted epigenetics." That's just one example of what I am talking of.
Actually, it's not, because you didn't actually use it as an example
of anything. You didn't say anything
at all about it, least of all why you think epigenetics is in any way problematic or challenging for the Synthetic Model, even when asked directly.
Because epigenetics is actually helping our view of evolution become far more accurate than ever before, and not by contradicting and replacing what we knew before, but by enhancing it and filling in the gaps in our knowledge.
For instance, since Susumo Ohno first postulated the 2R hypothesis of genome duplication back in 1970, every time it was probed and explored and examined during the controversy regarding it during the decades since, it's held up. However, despite the firm base it rests on, there were still questions regarding the specifics of how it happened, even with all the other experimental verification, because of the problem of gene loss rate. The paper I previously cited for you was one step towards solving that mystery, with its discovery that the rate of gene duplication that leads to functional divergence instead of being dropped from the genome being far higher than anyone had previously thought.
What sealed the deal, though, was the discovery of the role epigenetics played in increasing this rate. This is what all those papers by Rodin et al were about (Rodin even dedicated a number of these papers to the memory of Ohno, who passed away in 2000 before the breakthrough was published).
So, whereas before we knew that Ohno was right, but we weren't quite sure
why, now we know why he was right as well.
Thanks to epigenetics.
Secondly, you err in not looking back further at the history of evolutionary thought. Sure, evos are coming around and abandoning some things others had long told them were wrong.
No, they're asking themselves questions and finding out the answers for themselves, adding to an ever-increasing, increasingly-accurate pool of knowledge regarding the evolution of life on Earth.
This is the way science
works, you know.
Do you really think evos had not used the argument of pseudogenes as very strong evidence for common descent?
Is that what you are saying?
You're doing it again, throwing out vague and meaningless statements. This is the same thing you did by throwing epigenetics into the discussion without giving any details whatsoever about why you think it matters.
If you want to discuss the history of knowledge and hypotheses regarding pseudogenes in the Synthetic Model, start by giving the specific argument that was advanced, who advanced it, where they said it, and what you think is wrong with it.
Then we can talk about it.
This kind of reminds of the Haeckel fiasco. I learned Haeckel forged his drawings from a botany professor at NC State back in the 80s when he gave a talk on another campus. For years, every evo I ran into said there was no way, that this is tantamount to accusing evos of a conspiracy.
I find that very surprising, since Haeckel was accused of fraud as far back as the mid-1870's (and there is a persistent, though false, Creationist claim that he was actually convicted of such back then). Michael Richardson even repeated this claim in the 1998 paper you cite below, though when called on it in a letter to the journal
Science, where his paper was first published, he retracted it after confessing he only read about that claim in a newspaper and didn't follow up to locate a primary source.
In any case, Haeckel himself changed some of his drawings in later editions of his book, in response to criticisms like these.
With the advent of the internet, it became so widely known, it was an embarrassment and so Richardson did his study in the late 90s and came out saying it was "one of the biggest fakes in all biology." He also stated in his paper that embrylogists relied on Haeckel as their principal data-set and assumed his stuff was accurate.
Except that the embryologist Michael Richardson only said that Haeckel had falsified
some of his drawings, not all, and still thought Haeckel's basic idea, though not the specific conclusions he drew (or the drawings he made) were both accurate and important.
In 2001, Richardson was
even more direct about Haeckel's contributions to embryology despite the controversy over his drawings:
One of the central, unresolved controversies in biology concerns the distribution of primitive versus advanced characters at different stages of vertebrate development. This controversy has major implications for evolutionary developmental biology and phylogenetics. Ernst Haeckel addressed the issue with his Biogenetic Law, and his embryo drawings functioned as supporting data. We re-examine Haeckel's work and its significance for modern efforts to develop a rigorous comparative framework for developmental studies. Haeckel's comparative embryology was evolutionary but non-quantitative. It was based on developmental sequences, and treated heterochrony as a sequence change. It is not always clear whether he believed in recapitulation of single characters or entire stages. The Biogenetic Law is supported by several recent studies – if applied to single characters only. Haeckel's important but overlooked alphabetical analogy of evolution and development is an advance on von Baer. Haeckel recognized the evolutionary diversity in early embryonic stages, in line with modern thinking. He did not necessarily advocate the strict form of recapitulation and terminal addition commonly attributed to him. Haeckel's much-criticized embryo drawings are important as phylogenetic hypotheses, teaching aids, and evidence for evolution. While some criticisms of the drawings are legitimate, others are more tendentious. In opposition to Haeckel and his embryo drawings, Wilhelm His made major advances towards developing a quantitative comparative embryology based on morphometrics. Unfortunately His's work in this area is largely forgotten. Despite his obvious flaws, Haeckel can be seen as the father of a sequence-based phylogenetic embryology.
Richardson himself, by the way, had some things to say regarding people like you who took his criticism of Haeckel as evidence against evolution.
In a letter to the journal
Science written the same year his criticism of Haeckel was published, he wrote:
Our work has been used in a nationally televised debate to attack evolutionary theory, and to suggest that evolution cannot explain embryology. We strongly disagree with this viewpoint. Data from embryology are fully consistent with Darwinian evolution. Haeckel's famous drawings are a Creationist cause celebre. Early versions show young embryos looking virtually identical in different vertebrate species. On a fundamental level, Haeckel was correct: All vertebrates develop a similar body plan (consisting of notochord, body segments, pharyngeal pouches, and so forth). This shared developmental program reflects shared evolutionary history. It also fits with overwhelming recent evidence that development in different animals is controlled by common genetic mechanisms.
Unfortunately, Haeckel was overzealous. When we compared his drawings with real embryos, we found that he showed many details incorrectly. He did not show significant differences between species, even though his theories allowed for embryonic variation. For example, we found variations in embryonic size, external form, and segment number which he did not show. This does not negate Darwinian evolution. On the contrary, the mixture of similarities and differences among vertebrate embryos reflects evolutionary change in developmental mechanisms inherited from a common ancestor.
...
These conclusions are supported in part by comparisons of developmental timing in different vertebrates . This work indicates a strong correlation between embryonic developmental sequences in humans and other eutherian mammals, but weak correlation between humans and some "lower" vertebrates. Haeckel's inaccuracies damage his credibility, but they do not invalidate the mass of published evidence for Darwinian evolution. Ironically, had Haeckel drawn the embryos accurately, his first two valid points in favor of evolution would have been better demonstrated.
So you might want to try a different tack. This one's a dead end for you.
Now how could they do that. There had been sustained criticism and debunking of Haeckel for well over 100 years. I even knew as a student, not a biology student, that they were fakes. How is it the working scientists in the field did not?
They did know about it. That's why Haeckel's drawings haven't been used as positive evidence since...well, Haeckel's own day.
Answer: they don't listen to criticism and data if it's not from an evolutionist.
No, they did. They not only listened to Richardson, but to all the others who wrote about Haeckel and his drawings (PubMed gives sixteen pages of results when you search for "Haeckel").
Now, as I predicted, I said just wait. I bet there is so much outcry over this in a few years evos will be back to touting Haeckel in some way and not mentioning the "fake" and "fraud" remarks so much. This wasn't the first expose of recapitulation being based on faked data. The process has repeated itself for over 100 years.
As shown above, your shocking expose of recapitulation not only leaves something to be desired, it entirely misses the point of the controversy regarding Haeckel's drawings and what the entire view of recapitulation really was (and is).
Well, by 2005, Richardson lent his name or wrote in a peer-reviewed paper that what he formerly derided as "one of the biggest fakes in all biology" and as "fraud" were now actually "good teaching aides."
No, not "by 2005". As I showed you above, he didn't say what you think he said about Haeckel, and he thought the same way all the way back when he first wrote his criticism that you're so grossly misusing.
I'd like to see what 2005 paper you're specifically referring to here, though, to see where that three word sentence fragment is in context.
Here's a list of Richardson's papers. If you could, please let me know which of those papers is the one in question.
