Darwinian Debating Device #5: The False Quote Mining Charge
| October 16, 2014 | Posted by Barry Arrington under Darwinian Debating Devices |
UPDATE: UD has started a new “Darwinian Debating Devices” category. I am re-publishing this post to add it to the category.
One of the Darwinists’ favorite tactics is the “False Quote Mining Charge.” For those who do not know what “quote mining” is:
Quote mining is the deceitful tactic of taking quotes out of context in order to make them seemingly agree with the quote miner’s viewpoint or to make the comments of an opponent seem more extreme or hold positions they don’t in order to make their positions easier to refute or demonize. It’s a way of lying.
In summary, to accuse someone of quote mining is to accuse them of lying. It is a serious charge. Let us examine a recent example of the charge to illustrate.
In Origin of Species Darwin wrote this about the lack of transitional fossils in the fossil record:
But just in proportion as this process of extermination has acted on an enormous scale, so must the number of intermediate varieties, which have formerly existed, be truly enormous. Why then is not every geological formation and every stratum full of such intermediate links? Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely graduated organic chain; and this, perhaps, is the most obvious and serious objection which can be urged against my theory. The explanation lies, as I believe, in the extreme imperfection of the geological record.
In a prior thread I asked Alan Fox the following question:
Are you suggesting that the fossil record now reveals the “finely graduated organic chain” that in Origin Charles Darwin predicted would be ultimately revealed as the fossil record was explored further?
He replied:
As far as it reveals anything, yes. The current record is certainly not incompatible with gradual evolution over vast periods of time.
I replied:
Again, leading Darwinists disagree:
Darwin’s prediction of rampant, albeit gradual, change affecting all lineages through time is refuted. The record is there, and the record speaks for tremendous anatomical conservatism. Change in the manner Darwin expected is just not found in the fossil record.
Niles Eldredge and Ian Tattersall, The Myth of Human Evolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 45-46.
In response, in three separate comments, Mr. Fox charged me with quote mining:
Nice selection from the Bumper Book of Quote-mines, Barry
The quote-mine lifted (and I bet not by Barry) from a book implies that Eldredge has a problem with evolutionary theory.
Returning to the thread topic and Barry’s quote mine of Eldredge:
Let us summarize:
1. I quoted Darwin for the proposition that the fossil record should show a “finely graduated organic chain” and the fact that is does not show any such chain is the strongest objection to his theory.
2. I asked Alan Fox whether he believed the fossil record does show such a chain, and he said yes and that the record was not incompatible with gradual evolution.
3. I quoted Eldredge for the proposition that “Change in the manner Darwin expected is just not found in the fossil record.” VERY IMPORTANT: When I quoted Eldredge I called him a “leading Darwinist.”
4. Alan begins screaming “Quote mine”!
Now let’s go back to the beginning. To accuse someone of quote mining is to accuse them of quoting a source out of context to make it appear as though they agree with you when they don’t. It is a form of lying.
The proposition that I was advancing was that the fossil record has not turned out as Darwin expected. Alan disagreed. I quoted Eldredge to support my claim. Alan accused me of quoting Eldredge out of context to support my claim. This means Alan was accusing me of taking Eldredge’s words out of context to support my claim when in context they do not. He then said that I implied Eldredge has a problem with evolutionary theory. Bottom line: He accused me of lying and gross deceit.
But the truth is that I did not quote Eldredge out of context. Eldredge wrote that change in the manner Darwin expected is just not found in the fossil record, and that is exactly what he meant. Nothing in the context of the quotation changes that. He has never changed his views.
I never implied that Eldredge had a problem with evolutionary theory. Indeed, the whole point of quoting him is that his is an admission against interest. I called him a “leading Darwinist.” Alan’s charge is not only false it is imbecilic. He said I implied that a leading proponent of a theory has a problem with the theory, and that is absurd on its face.
In summary, Alan Fox should be ashamed of himself. He came onto these pages and falsely accused me of lies and deceit. He is now in the moderation sandbox and will not come out until he apologizes.
134 Responses to Darwinian Debating Device #5: The False Quote Mining Charge
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I believe Alan’s deeply immersed at the moment in the study of nothing, the fecundity of nothing, with his fellow-naturalists.
Just some quick questions: Which texts or books of Niles Eldredge have you read? Have you read “The Myths of Human Evolution” (or at least some chapters) and spotted the quote – or did you get the quotation from a secondary source?
Evolutionists have often protested ‘unfair’ to quoting an evolutionist as if he were against evolution itself. So let it be said from the outset that the vast majority of authorities quoted are themselves ardent believers in evolution. But that is precisely the point… The foundations of the evolutionary edifice are hardly likely to be shaken by a collection of quotes from the many scientists who are biblical creationists. In a court of law, an admission from a hostile witness is the most valuable. Quoting the evolutionary palaeontologist who admits the absence of in-between forms, or the evolutionary biologist who admits the hopelessness of the mutation/selection mechanism, is perfectly legitimate if the admission is accurately represented in its own right, regardless of whether the rest of the article is full of hymns of praise to all the other aspects of evolution. ~ Andrew Snelling
DiEb in 2.
I am the one who has been falsely accused of misrepresenting a quotation from Eldredge. I am the one who has been falsely called a liar. Your “attack the victim” comment is utterly shameless. There really does appear to be no bounds to the Darwinists’ perfidy.
Sorry, but you came up with this quote of Eldredge in your article. I don’t think that it is especially perfidious to ask how this quotation came to your attention.
This series of threads is a god-awful mess. You guys are confusing several things:
1. The issue of whether or not tiny transitions between very-closely-related species are common. This is the issue that the “punctuated equilibria” literature deals with. This is the source of most of the Gould & Eldredge quotes which you creationists ignorantly, incomprehendingly quote-mine. Whether or not smooth transitions covering these tiny transitions — they are basically “within-kind” transitions in creationist-speak — are common doesn’t prove anything one way or the other about what creationists care about, which is whether or not transitions exist between highly different groups.
2. As I said, a separate question is whether or not there are plenty of fossils demonstrating transitions between major groups. There are. Gould agrees. Eldredge agrees.
Quoting these guys talking about #1, to try and deny #2, is either incompetent or dishonest. Take your pick.
Heck, even young-earth creationist Kurt Wise agrees:
http://pandasthumb.org/archive.....ation.html
================
[p. 218]
In various macroevolutionary models, stratomorphic intermediates might be expected to be any one or more of several different forms: –
(a) inter-specific stratomorphic intermediates;
(b) stratomorphic intermediate species;
(c} higher-taxon stratomorphic intermediates; and
(d) stratomorphic [intermediate] series.
As an example (and to provide informal definitions), if predictions from Darwin’s theory were re-stated in these terms, one would expect to find: –
(a) numerous stratomorphic intermediates between any ancestor-descendent species pair (numerous interspecific stratomorphic intermediates);
(b) species which were stratomorphic intermediates between larger groups (stratomorphic intermediate species);
(c} taxonomic groups above the level of species which were stratomorphic intermediates between other pairs of groups (higher-taxon stratomorphic intermediates); and
(d) a sequence of species or higher taxa in a sequence where each taxon is a stratomorphic intermediate between the taxa stratigraphically below and above it (stratomorphic series).
With this vocabulary as a beginning, the traditional transitional forms issue can be gradually transformed into a non-traditional form, more suitable to the creationist researcher.
It is a Very Good Evolutionary Argument
Of Darwinism’s four stratomorphic intermediate expectations, that of the commonness of inter-specific stratomorphic intermediates has been the most disappointing for classical Darwinists. The current lack of any certain inter-specific stratomorphic intermediates has, of course, led to the development and increased acceptance of punctuated equilibrium theory. Evidences for Darwin’s second expectation – of stratomorphic intermediate species – include such species as Baragwanathia27 (between rhyniophytes and lycopods), Pikaia28 (between echinoderms and chordates), Purgatorius29 (between the tree shrews and the primates), and Proconsul30 (between the non-hominoid primates and the hominoids). Darwin’s third expectation – of higher-taxon stratomorphic intermediates – has been confirmed by such examples as the mammal-like reptile groups31 between the reptiles and the mammals, and the phenacdontids32 between the horses and their presumed ancestors. Darwin’s fourth expectation – of stratomorphic series – has been confirmed by such examples as the early bird series,33 the tetrapod series,34,35 the whale series,36 the various mammal series of the Cenozoic37 (for example, the horse series, the camel series, the elephant series, the pig series, the titanothere series, etc.), the Cantius and
[p. 219]
Plesiadapus primate series,38 and the hominid series.39 Evidence for not just one but for all three of the species level and above types of stratomorphic intermediates expected by macroevolutionary theory is surely strong evidence for macroevolutionary theory. Creationists therefore need to accept this fact. It certainly CANNOT said that traditional creation theory expected (predicted) any of these fossil finds.
[p. 221]
REFERENCES
5. Wise, K. P., 1994. Australopithecus ramidus and the fossil record. CEN Tech. J., 8(2):160-165.
[…]
27. Stewart, W. N. and Rothwell, G. W., 1993. Paleobotany and the Evolution of Plants, Second Edition, Cambridge Universily Press, Cambridge, England, pp. 114-115.
28. Gould, S. J., 1989. Wonderful Ufe: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History, Norton, New York, pp. 321-323.
29. Carroll, R. L., 1988. Vertebrate Paleontology and Evolution, Freeman, New York, p. 467.
30. Carroll, Ref. 29, p. 473.
31. Hopson, J. A,, 1994. Synapsid evolution and the radiation of noneutherian mammals. In: Major Features of Vertebrate Evolution [Short Courses in Paleontology Number 71, D. R. Porthero [sic] and R. M. Schoch (eds), Paleontological Society, Knoxville, Tennasee, pp. 190-219.
32. Carroll, Ref. 29, pp. 527-530.
33. Ostrom, 1. H., 1994. On the origin of birds and of avian flight. In: Major Features of Vertebrate Evolution [Short Courses in Paleonlology Number 71, D. R. Prothero and R. M. Schoch (eds), Paleontological Society. Knoxville, Tennessee, pp. 160-177.
34. Thomson, K. S., 1994. The origin of the tetrapods. In: Major Features of Vertebrate Evolution [Short Courses in Paleontology Number 71, D. R. Prothero and R. M. Schoch (eds), Paleontological Society, Knoxville, Tennessee, pp. 85-107.
35. Ahlberg, P. E. and Milner, A. R., 1994. Theorigin and early diversification of tetrapods. Nature, 368: 507-514.
36. Gingerich, Ref. 1; Could, Ref. 2; Zimmer. Ref. 3.
37. Carroll, Ref. 29, pp. 527-549.
38. Gingerich, P. D., 1983. Evidence for evolution from the vertebrate fossil record. Journal of Geological Education, 31:140-144.
39. For example, as listed in Wise, Ref. 5.
[source: pp. 218-219 of: Kurt P. Wise (1995). “Towards a Creationist Understanding of ‘Transitional Forms.’” Creation Ex Nihilo Technical Journal, 9(2), 216-222. (caps original)
[Note: The full article is online here under the “Ape-men…” circle:
http://www.bryancore.org/anniversary/building.html
In fairness, Wise goes on to claim that this evidence is “explainable” under the creation model, postulating as an alternative the scientific model that “God created organisms according to His nature” (p. 219), which apparently leads to the expectation of “high homoplasy” – because God, I assume, likes homoplasy. — NJM]
================
3. Yet another separate question from all of this is what Darwin actually thought about what evolution did. The punk-eek people liked to portray themselves as revolutionary, and thus represented Darwin as an ultra-smooth-constant-rate proponent, but this seems unlikely based on a careful reading of Darwin.
4. The question of what Darwin thought evolution did is different from the question of how Darwin thought evolution would look in the fossil record. He pointed out, basically accurately, how gappy the fossil record is. He is still right about that, and although we have lots of transitional fossils between major groups, we will never have a complete record, and never will. The Punk Eek peoples’ real contribution, rhetoric aside, was to point out that there are small sections of rock, typically covering only a few million years, with very good fossil near-continuous records, and often (how much is still debated), in this situation, you will see one species suddenly replaced by a very closely-related, very similar, sister species. I didn’t realize, until I read the literature, that the differences between these species are much smaller than you creationists think. Usually it takes an expert to tell them apart. The decades of creationist/ID abuse of Punk Eek quotes, through basically willful misunderstanding, is an intellectual travesty.
NickMatkze_UD wrote:
Yes, indeed! In fact, I’ve heard that in a number of cases the differences between these species is not actually visible, but their classification depends entirely on the strata in which they’re found!
The presumption is that of necessity there must be some subtle differences between them due to the millions of years time difference, once again both relying on and proving the fact of evolution.
Besides, Gould and Eldridge say some of the darnedest things that, if not taken in the context of all the most current literature, could easily be misinterpreted by people who don’t have the benefit of doctorates in evolutionary theory.
So really, the best thing is just to trust the experts, because it can get complicated and confusing, especially when new discoveries haven’t yet been integrated to the consensus.
For example, it’s definitely too early to draw any conclusions from the recent discovery of the Bunnysaurus lagomorphi found in what was originally thought to be the Cambrian . . . 😉
-Q
“The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology.”
Stephen Jay Gould
Box writes,
This is a quote about punctuated equilibria, about tiny transitions between sister species. Re-read my post. Gould was infuriated at creationist quote-mining, and so wrote:
Gould apparently grumbles:
Hilarious!
So, we can find transitional forms between chihuahuas and bears, but not between whales and other whales or dolphins or porpoises?
So, every species (ok, genus) is a shot-in-the-dark punctuated miracle?
Polar bear -> *POOF* -> blue whale
Raccoon -> *POOF* -> porpoise
Yeah, right.
-Q
NickMatzke_UD, contrary to what you imagine to be conclusive proof for ‘bottom up’ Darwinian evolution from the fossil record, the fact of the matter is that the fossil record reveals a ‘top down’, disparity precedes diversity, pattern for the history of life instead of a bottom up Darwinian picture.
etc.. etc.. etc..
Besides that highly embarrassing fact for you Nick, the main point I would like to point out to you NickMatzke_UD, as I did this morning,,,
http://www.uncommondescent.com.....ent-482405
,,,is the fact that you do not even have a viable mechanism in neo-Darwinism (Random Variation and Natural Selection) to explain the origination of fundamentally new body plans even if the fossil record had revealed the bottom up progression that you imagine it to do. For instance,,
Moreover Nick, body plan information is not even reducible to a ‘bottom up’ materialistic scenario in the first place as is envisioned by Darwinists:
To reiterate Nick in case you missed it:
Verse and Music:
A Listener’s Guide to the Meyer-Marshall Debate: Focus on the Origin of Information Question
Casey Luskin – December 4, 2013
Excerpt: “There is always an observable consequence if a dGRN (developmental gene regulatory network) subcircuit is interrupted. Since these consequences are always catastrophically bad, flexibility is minimal, and since the subcircuits are all interconnected, the whole network partakes of the quality that there is only one way for things to work. And indeed the embryos of each species develop in only one way.” –
Eric Davidson
http://www.evolutionnews.org/2.....79811.html
“Quote mining is the deceitful tactic of taking quotes out of context in order to make them seemingly agree with the quote miner’s viewpoint . . .”
Eldredge wrote: “Change in the manner Darwin expected is just not found in the fossil record.”
Barry Arrington quoted Eldredge to support the proposition that change in the manner Darwin expected is just not found in the fossil record.
Nick Matzke accuses Barry Arrington of “ignorantly, uncomprehendingly quote-mining” Eldredge.
But in order for Matzke’s accusation to be valid, the Eldredge quote would have had to mean, in context, something other than “change in the manner Darwin expected is just not found in the fossil record.”
Yet, in context, the Eldredge quotation means exactly: “change in the manner Darwin expected is just not found in the fossil record.”
Therefore, by definition, Barry Arrington did not quote mine Eldredge.
Which means that Nick Matzke’s quote mining accusation is “either incompetent or dishonest. Take your pick.”
Barry,
I pointed out 4 distinct issues. You are mixing them all together through misinterpretation of Eldredge’s quote. You are interpreting Eldredge as talking about all aspects of the fossil record, whereas he was just talking about continuous, smooth transitions between sister species over very short evolutionary distances. Deal with this, or you don’t have an argument.
In summary, to accuse someone of quote mining is to accuse them of lying. It is a serious charge.
It should be noted that it is far easier to cast aspersions and have your opponent defend his integrity rather than attempt the yeomans task of explaining away the substance of the point he made. (Too much explaining and onlookers may get the impression my position is weaker than I let on)
Nick Matzke
Good for you. I pointed out one distinct issue: “Change in the manner Darwin expected is just not found in the fossil record.”
You accused me of quote mining, which, as I showed beyond the slightest doubt in [14] is “either incompetent or dishonest. Take your pick.”
Deal with this, i.e., your incompetence or your dishonesty.
Barry Arrington:
Hilarious. Oh, how they wish they could shut you up the way they shut everybody up in the schools by force of law. You just got to love the internet and what it does for freedom of speech.
I am making a simple argument, you guys are not addressing it. This kind of thing is why creationists/IDists are not taken seriously.
Funny. Now you know how it feels.
Taken seriously by whom? By the crackpots who have hijacked education?
Bravo bornagain77.
NickMatzke_UD complained:
Sorry, but it’s a target-rich environment of speculation, where the only evidences are speculations by more eminent natural philosophers. Darwin’s hypothesis made sense at the time, and explained genetic drift. But neither the math, the genetics, nor the fossil record support Darwin’s extrapolation.
PE is attractive, but is missing a driving mechanism, thus reducing it to wishful thinking. Maybe DNA transfer with bacteria and viruses as agents/vectors might be the answer, but the evidence so far is sparse (bacteria recently being found to be able to incorporate DNA from dead organisms).
Without smaller transitions, linking only major groups is logically ridiculous. You’d have to show that a bear evolved into a whale in one generation. Since whales and bears have not been observed mating, this transition would have had to occur spontaneously thousands of times. This is really no less miraculous than claiming God did it.
The reading would have had to be totally in the blank areas between the lines because Darwin was solidly uniformitarian.
At the time, Darwin had faith that the fossil record, as more work was done, would validate his hypothesis. Unfortunately, it didn’t. I’d speculate that Darwin, if he were alive today, would say something like
“In my best judgement based on my observations, I had supposed Nature to slowly and almost imperceptibly breed the good into the better. While She most certainly does breed out the weak and defective races, the fossil record, genetic studies, and the mathematics of mutation have convinced me that Nature must avail herself of some other natural mechanism to draw out new alleles. I have set myself to discover such mechanisms, for surely there are several.”
And that’s the difference between a great scientist and the also-rans.
-Q
In Origin Darwin writes:
“Many species once formed never undergo any further change … and the periods, during which species have undergone modification, though long as measured by years, have probably been short in comparison with the periods during which they retain the same form.”
I don’t think much reading between the lines is necessary to see that Darwin didn’t believe that the rate of change was constant.
And so I think Eldredge was wrong in saying that Darwin expected a constant change affecting all lineages through time, and didn’t anticipate anatomical conservatism.
So Darwin’s theory can accommodate gradualness, stasis, and abruptness in the fossil record with no threat to the theory. Man that is some kind of theory you guys got there. A theory that can explain one set of facts as well as it can explain an opposite set of facts just can’t be beat. (although some might hold that it just can’t be science for it to do as such)
yet we find ‘conservatively’ that the fossil record at the Cambrian looks like this:
Darwin also stated this:
Yet today, due to the advance of science, we can find many such cases,,,
Moreover, the number of completely new genes and proteins to be ‘explained away’ by Darwinists has recently exploded per each new species that has been sequenced:
Here is another quote of interest from Darwin:
Yet this “strongest single class of facts in favor of my theory” is in fact found to have been a strongly fraudulent class of facts:
In fact developmental pathways, much contrary to what Darwin would have presupposed, are now found to be vastly different even between closely related species
Yet changes to developmental pathways early in embryonic development (precisely the changes needed by Darwinism to explain new body plans; Paul Nelson) are, by far, the most likely have a catastrophic effect on the organism:
Nick @19:
And I am also making a simple argument, to wit that you falsely accused me of deceit through quote mining. And you are not dealing with it. (BTW, the way to deal with it would be to apologize for your boorish behavior.)
@Barry Arrington
Close, but no cigar. N. Matzke is telling you that you are using the quotation out of its scope, or, as he says:
This would be indeed quote-mining even in one of the points of the definition you have been giving (…”to make the comments of an opponent seem more extreme or hold positions they don’t …). But I’d rather like you to answer my questions above:
DiEb @ 27:
This is idiotic. You really are shameless.
Now you owe me an apology for joining those who suggest I have engaged in deceitful quote mining, and you are now in mod until you apologize.
Again, the proposition for which I was quoting Eldredge is extremely narrow: “Change in the manner Darwin expected is just not found in the fossil record.” Call this proposition “X.” Eldredge, in context, meant exactly proposition “X.”
Now, Matzke comes along and says Barry is quote mining Eldredge because while Eldredge did in fact intend to advance proposition “X” he didn’t mean to advance proposition “Y.”
If, as you say, Matzke is telling me I am using the quotation out of its scope, then he is simply wrong. I am using the proposition to advance proposition “X” and not proposition “Y.” Eldredge and I mean exactly the same thing — and nothing more.
[snip]
UD Editors: This was not an apology for falsely accusing Barry Arrington of quote mining DiEb. Which part of “you will remain in mod until you apologize for your false accusation” do you not understand?
Barry did not indicate that he interpreted Eldridge as talking about the general condition of the fossil record. However he would (also) be right if he did – Nick Matzke is wrong about Eldridge.
The next quote shows that Eldridge refers to the general condition of the fossil record. Niles Eldridge and I. Tattersall, The Myths Of Human Evolution, 1982:
You’re a joke. When you are caught in pseudo-intellectual nonsense you begin the equivocation game, hoping that we will simply see your wall of absurd text and cower away.
Strawmen, bold assertions followed by “you fools don’t understand” are all that is in your proverbial tool chest.
Sorry, Captain Literature Bluff, your nonsense is transparent.
This is a discussion of how species change. Species are the smallest units of analysis for paleontologists. It says nothing about changes in higher groups, e.g. hominids, whales, mammals, tetrapods. Eldredge, like Gould, thinks transitional fossils are common across those larger evolutionary distances, just not across the tiniest transition between one species and its closest sister species.
These words mean specific things to actual scientists in the field. You can’t just blend it all into a mash and assume they mean whatever you want it to mean. Kurt Wise gets it. He lays out 4 different versions of transitional fossils, and notes which one involves the punctuated equilibria pattern that Gould & Eldredge were talking about. Why can’t you guys do as well as Kurt Wise?
Species are the only unit of analysis. Organisms exist and inner breed and then constitute a population. They are then called a species. (understanding that the term “species” is a little mushy.) There is no other real classification because the higher levels do not really represent any real unit. They are all just species.
All are mental concept to associate different species with each other under the assumption that at one time there might have been a common ancestor. But it is an assumption, not a fact. Maybe a good assumption but still an assumption
So the higher classification are all artificial constructs. So when one says that there are transitions that are common across those larger evolutionary distances, it just means there is an awful lot of missing transitions with an occasional species showing up that is similar to a previous one. There is still a lot of missing transitions.
Is this wrong?
Nick Matzke,
Do you agree with the following statement?
“Change in the manner Darwin expected is just not found in the fossil record.”
Niles Eldredge and Ian Tattersall, The Myth of Human Evolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 45-46
If the answer is “yes,’ then you agree with the very narrow proposition I was advancing, and it follows that your charge of quote mining (i.e., lying) was boorish and false. If you deny it, please cite whatever evidence you have that change in the manner Darwin expected is found in the fossil record.
Prediction: Nick will evade.
If you don’t like the higher groups, that’s fine, we can just talk about morphological distance. What the Punk Eek people were saying is that across tiny morphological distances — those between sister species, often species so close it takes an expert to tell them apart — there are few smooth, absolutely continuous transitions. Instead, you often get one species, then another closely-related species, often “suddenly”, geologically speaking. Just how often this is found is still debated — there are cases in mammals and other things with extremely good fossil records where you
But this amount of morphological distance is really quite small. It is clearly change that creationists would all dismiss as “within the kind” evolution. So making some big stew out of quotes talking about transitions missing at this ultra-fine scale doesn’t help creationists at all, they’ve already accepted that this kind of evolution is trivial and happens all the time! (And the young-earthers would say it happened in just a thousand years!) It’s difference-in-dog-breeds-type evolution.
Across larger morphological distances — the morphological distances between whales and hippos, mammals and reptiles, between the euarthropod phylum and the onychophoran phylum — fossils with intermediate fossils are well-known and reasonably common. They are of course, only expected near the time and place when the groups are evolving, not “everywhere” or any random time/place someone chooses to look. There are no hominids in the Cambrian, and no proto-arthropods in the Pleistocene.
Kurt Wise, and Gould, point out that transitionals at this scale are common. But the people posting here just play ostrich and stick their heads in the sand to avoid admitting the point.
The grammar is wrong. 🙂 But, yes, there are still a lot of missing transitions. Everyone admits the fossil record isn’t perfect. But, there are a lot of found transitions as well. Some of the major ones in the past 30 years include dinosaurs-to-birds, origin of whales, origin of tetrapods, and origin of arthropods. Kurt Wise lists more in that quote.
My prediction in 34 is confirmed.
I was high 99th percentile in math but in the mid 70’s in verbal. So I live with the fact that I do not write well, getting tense, case, number, quantifiers and person frequently wrong.
So this is true. What we have are species and nothing else, and that is all that ever exists. Species appear at different geological times that have similar morphological characteristics and are assumed related because of this. The assumption is that those that appeared at a later time descended from the prior species by some form of naturalistic process that created this different species. Sometimes these species are associated with each other with terms such as genera, family, etc. But they are still just mental constructs.
Sometimes the morphological distinctions are quite small but sometimes they are quite large and this latter case would often require substantial changes in the genome to account for the large morphological differences. (I understand that sometimes small changes in the genome can lead to large morphological differences) And transitions between these large morphological differences requiring substantial changes in the genome are generally not available even though the fossil record during the intermediate time frame provides examples of large numbers of other unrelated species. These other fossils are just not thought related to the transition in question.
That means there was opportunity for the missing transitions to be fossilized but for whatever reasons it just rarely if ever happens. (I am well aware of most of the arguments for the rarity of fossilization)
Is this essentially correct except for grammar?
Jerry @ 37: “Is this essentially correct except for grammar?”
Yes, that’s pretty much it. Which is why honest Darwinists admit that the fossil record does not, overall, support the theory.
Mark Ridley, “Who Doubts Evolution?” New Scientist 90 (June 25, 1981): 830-1, 830-32 (emphasis mine).
Under Ridley’s reasoning, I suppose he would have to exclude Nick from the “real evolutionist” category since he uses the fossil record as evidence in favor of the theory of evolution.
I assume that no anti-ID person (for the lack of a better term) disputes this assessment. And if they do not dispute this, then they must understand why the pro-ID person takes many of the positions that they do. So the term “IDiots” is misplaced especially since the ID people have apparently analyzed the implications of the fossil record accurately. (and they are not the only one to have analyzed the fossil record and have come to the same conclusions.)
This analysis of the fossil record is reinforced by an analysis of the necessary steps that would be required in the genome to produce such morphological changes. And that these genomic changes also have no record of arising by naturalistic means. It does not assume they didn’t but that there is no evidence that they did arise naturalistically or even could.
ID maintains that it is extremely unlikely that these genomic changes could take place in any reasonable time through naturalistic processes. That should be the next area of discussion to follow up on for why there is a lack of transitions in the fossil record. Everything ID supports is internally consistent while those who oppose ID have to rely on unknown events or wishful thinking to justify their position.
I assume that this is mainly correct except for grammar.
@Nick Matzke
So, embarrassing as the fossil record may be with regard to species, it does offer transitional forms between higher taxonomic ranks. G.G.Simpson and others strongly disagree with you:
“It is a feature of the known fossil record that most taxa appear abruptly. They are not, as a rule, led up to by a sequence of almost imperceptibly changing forerunners such as Darwin believed should be usual in evolution… This phenomenon becomes more universal and more intense as the hierarchy of categories is ascended. Gaps among known species are sporadic and often small. Gaps among known orders, classes and phyla are systematic and almost always large.”G.G.Simpson.
“Every paleontologist knows that most new species, genera, and families, and that nearly all categories above the level of family appear in the record suddenly and are not led up to by known, gradual, completely continuous transitional sequences.” George Gaylord Simpson (evolutionist), The Major Features of Evolution, New York, Columbia University Press, 1953 p. 360.
“The point emerges that if we examine the fossil record in detail, whether at the level of orders or of species, we find’ over and over again’ not gradual evolution, but the sudden explosion of one group at the expense of another.” Derek V. Ager – Paleontologist, (Department of Geology & Oceanography, University College, Swansea, UK)
more …
These are 60-year old quotes!! Dinobirds, whales with legs, many new transitional-proto-tetrapods, transitional-proto-arthropods, etc. were all discovered since the 1980s! Act like a scholar if you want to be treated like one.
Barry writes,
I didn’t see this before my previous post.
You are dodging the question of context. You can’t abstract quotes out of their relevant context, not if you are doing scholarship. Avoiding the relevant context is quote-mining. It is the practice of “proof-texting” Biblical fundamentalists, perhaps, but not serious scholarship.
If you want a direct answer, you need to specify, when Eldredge says “Change in the manner Darwin expected is just not found in the fossil record”, whether you think Eldredge is talking about transitions between very similar species, or transitions at all timescales across all degrees of morphological difference. My prediction: you will avoid the question of relevant context, as you have been avoiding it throughout the thread.
This doesn’t look like it’s out of context. It looks like Ridley is just wrong. It is wrong enough that I wouldn’t be surprised that there were letters published in New Scientist saying so back in 1981. Probably Ridley, a journalist, was confused by some of the rhetoric tossed about when cladistic methods was being introduced back then. He wasn’t the only one.
Have you guys ever thought about the reasons your quotes are so often ancient?
Ah, my bad, the quote is by british zoologist Mark Ridley, not british journalist Matt Ridley. It still looks like something confused by the early cladistics debates.
Nick @ 42:
A double dodge. But I’ll continue to play along.
“whether you think Eldredge is talking about. . .”
For you to answer my question it is simply not relevant what I think Eldredge is talking about. I did not ask you whether you agree with me. I asked you whether you agreed with Eldredge.
I will ask you again. Eldredge says that change in the manner Darwin expected is just not found in the fossil record. Do you agree with Eldredge?
Nick, you are not fooling anyone you know. The fact of the matter is that Eldredge is right. Change in the manner Darwin expected is just not found in the fossil record. What’s more, you know he is right, but you refuse to admit it.
Why do you refuse to admit something that is so glaringly obvious? I can only speculate, but I suppose it is because your cognitive dissonance coping strategies won’t let you admit that St. Charles was ever wrong about anything, even when you know he was.
Arrington:
Barry, he will never admit it because he’s being watched by his Darwinist cheerleaders on other forums. Those lonely souls are pathologically obsessed with what goes on here, especially when you’re involved in the discussion. It’s a personal thing to them. And it’s hilarious.
Mapou: “especially when you’re involved in the discussion”
Really? I had no idea. Why do you say this?
What other forums? If I had fans, I’d take a look, but I don’t know where they are!
Take a look at this link: Antievolution.org.
It’s a riot.
M: For some reason, I took a moment. I see a certain OA imagines that it is fun to try to paint targets around people. Speaks volumes to the nihilism we are dealing with. Isn’t there a law out there on stalking online? Or, do such think that hiding behind or enabling anonymity or false names allows them to imagine they have a right — might makes right — to do what they think they can get away with? I guess folks like this are known by the company they keep and the behaviour they enable or carry out. Nihilists, exactly as charged. KF
NickMatzke_UD at 41 states:
Well, Well, Well, those are some pretty strong statements Nick. With exclamation points no less! Must be some pretty strong evidence to back up your claims! You don’t mind if we take a look under the hood of what trying to sell to see if it lives up to your billing do you?
As to your first sentence:
which you stated in regard to these quotes that were given to you:
Well has the situation changed much for Darwinists since then? Not according to these following quotes and studies:
Well that doesn’t seem to support Nick’s contention that things have changed drastically over the last 60 years in regards to the fossil record since G.G. Simpson made his quotes! Well lets see what Nick’s next sentence was:
As to Dinobirds:
Well, that doesn’t seem to help Nick either. Let’s check his next example:
This is actually a funny example for Nick to cite:
As to the supposed whale fossil sequence, the following video has one of the leading experts on supposed ‘whale evolution’ admitting that the fossil series that is popularly portrayed in museums, textbooks, and on the web, is misleading:
The following video also shows how fraudulent Darwinists can be with this fossil evidence:
In the following video, Dr. Richard Sternberg shows, using population genetics, that the Darwinian origin of whales is mathematically impossible:
Well, that certainly did not help Nick established his preferred Darwinian position in the least (and actually seems to have hurt his claim of being an esteemed ‘scholar’). ,,, Suffice it for now (unless he presses the matter further) to say that Nick’s claims for proto-tetrapods, and proto-arthropods are equally as imaginary as the preceding examples were as to providing any real support for his a-priorily preferred Darwinian position.
PS: There is a false assertion that I have tried to post a comment to TSZ over the past several months. I don’t know if that is identity theft enabled by the earlier misbehaviour, but that does not speak well of both TSZ and AE. We are dealing with nihilists.
bornagain77 @52,
Be gentle on poor Nick, will you?
kairosfocus @53,
Don’t let those guys get under your skin. They’re like whining little demons, the Beavises and Buttheads of Darwinism and materialism.
M: Thanks for allowing me to find out the continued cyber stalking and target- on- the- back painting being carried out by these nihilist lowlifes. They, and those who enable them need to realise what they are doing and what it marks them as. We all need to face some not so pleasant facts about what we are dealing with when we see this sort of behaviour. KF
Hehe! Abandon previous quote mines and lay out new quote mines! Having abandoned the Punk-Eek quote mines, you switched to 60-year old Simpson quotes. Having abandoned those, you switch to quote-mining pre-cladistic Cambrian Explosion literature from the 1980s, ignoring even the discussion on UD over the past few days showing that transitional fossils exist even between Cambrian phyla. Most of these were discovered after the 1980s, and they weren’t comprehensively analyzed until David Legg’s paper in 2013, which is what we were discussing.
To that, you add some kooky quotes from young-earth creationists like David Tyler. You expect this to impress anyone who knows anything about scholarship? The only thing you forgot is the gospel music link!
I don’t know what you’re smoking that makes endless, random pasting of off-topic quote mines, plus music (!), a reasonable activity, but whatever it is, I want some!
NickMatzke_UD, those quotes you are griping about are snipped from your very own post at 41.
OOOPS! Guess I should ask you if I’m allowed to talk about what you yourself are talking about in your own posts before I comment on it? I don’t seem to recall you being given that power on this blog,, my fuehrer!
Moreover, regardless of what you imagine that cladistic analysis has done for ‘explaining away’ the Cambrian explosion, the fact of the matter is that you were also recently shown to be severely disingenuous towards the evidence in that line of thought as well:
Moreover those ‘kooky quotes’ from David Tyler, are actually a summary comment on a 2011 Douglas H. Erwin paper
Nick, I guess you were too busy trying to get your ad hominem out about Dr. Tyler to actually read the paper? So much for intellectual honesty on your part!
So thus to sum up, your beloved cladistic analysis is shown to be completely useless ass to meaningfully explaining anything about the Cambrian explosion save to deceive yourself and others that you have actually explained anything meaningful about the Cambrian explosion, which come to think of it, given your long history of literature bluffing, I firmly believe you find to be an appealing quality of cladistic analysis. Throw on top of that your ad hominem attack of Dr. Tyler and me and I guess that pretty much sums up the negative contribution you have made to the furtherance of knowledge on this thread.,,, Oh wait, didn’t you requested some gospel music?:
I guess your post wasn’t completely useless after all! 🙂
bornagain77:
😀
NickMatzke @ 32 claims
What about subspecies? Actually species are not really “units” at all, and their classification is often controversial (lumpers and splitters). It was once hoped that analysis of similarity in proteins would settle some of the classification issues, but the results made no sense, so the anticipated method was simply abandoned.
So what’s the transitional species between bears and whales? Or do whales come from wolves? Or from pakicetus based on similarity of the inner ear (but no similarity of teeth or baleen)? Again, we are treated to a 19th century fantasy that substitutes “Millions of years ago” for “Once upon a time.”
Darwinism artificially lines up similarities in selected features of animals in a some non-unique sequence, and claims ancestry.
It’s as if you took all electronic devices and arranged them in a “Tree of Life” based purely on physical appearance rather than their electronics . . . and then concluded that cell phones “evolved” from pocket calculators.
Get it?
-Q
Mister Matzke,
I don’t know whether or not you are right that transitional fossils have been found such that Darwin’s prediction has been satisfied. it would take me quite a while to go through the source material.
However there is something odd about what you are claiming in these comments. You argued that the Mr. Arrington’s quotations of Gould and Eldridge were misleading because the “sudden” appearances they were referring to were very subtle, such that they would be classified as “microevolution” by creationists.
When faced with quotations describing gaps in the fossil record beyond subtle species change you wrote:
Here is what I don’t understand. Gould and Eldridge first presented their idea in 1971 and published in 1972. You are claiming that they were referring to very subtle gaps but are admitting that there were still many large gaps into the 1980s. If it is true that much of the transitional work is of relatively recent vintage, why would Gould and Eldridge be only discussing the very subtle?
You seem to think that all of these quotes are about the same topic. They aren’t.
There are a large number of interesting questions in science. They get divided up quite finely.
When we look just at the field of evolutionary biology, there is a long list of topics that scientists find interesting. Some of them are things that creationists care about, and some of them aren’t, and some of them are things that creationists think are important, but only because they don’t understand what they are reading.
So “evolution” isn’t just one thing. All sorts of things evolve. Some of the major topics are:
population genetics — how allele frequencies change in gene pools (populations)
speciation research — how and why gene pools / populations split to form new species
macroevolution — the dynamics of species originations and extinctions through time; e.g. why do species numbers go up and down, why are some clades more diverse than others, why are there more species in the tropics than in the temperate zone, etc.
Each of these subfields has a set of techniques, study systems, etc. And these are just three among hundreds of topics.
The punctuated equilibrium literature which started in the 1970s is basically about speciation, and specifically about how speciation appears in the fossil record. It is not particularly relevant to the origin of the many animal groups in the Cambrian, which is its own major topic. Statements about “transitional fossils” in one context don’t tell you much at all about the existence of transitional fossils in the other context. And, both topics have themselves changed significantly since the 1970s and 1980s, so people can’t just wantonly quote mine the old literature and pretend that it represents the modern data.
Typically paleontologists say that what we identify as subspecies in species living today would be indistinguishable if all we had was fossils. This is a generalization, there are always exceptions, but this is a pretty good generalization.
Everything in science is an approximation, but — sure they are units. They get described, named, and counted, and there is a huge body of work studying how they originate, persist, and die.
This part is definitely true, although it depends on the group and the number and completeness of the fossils. Of course, if evolution is true and species aren’t fixed but instead evolve into each other, then we would expect ambiguities, especially when we aren’t looking at species in a single time and place, but instead look across millions of years and across the globe.
This part is bizarre and indicates you don’t know what you’re talking about. Allozyme research was very important in the early days of molecular systematics, although these days it has mostly been replaced by DNA sequencing. Protein sequences, though, are routinely used in phylogenetics. I have published several such papers myself.
and
are essentially the same thing. The second just adds extinction but not origins and why some species may beget more species than others. Am I wrong?
Also isn’t there another dimension to the term “macro-evolution” that many will add. This is the investigation of the origin of complex functional novelties (my term and it may not be the best description but most know what it being referred to.)
I doubt most who are pro-ID are interested in the way you have delineated the terms “speciation” and “macro-evolution” and would not debate too much over these processes. But they would be very interested in the formation of anything really novel in a new species. Is there a better term than macro-evolution to describe this more complex process?
And as far as the fossil record is concerned are there examples of these transitions taking place that is clearly illustrating the process of these novelties developing or unfolding?
I meant to say.
NickMatzke_UD, master of Darwinian obfuscation, is asked to clarify a point??? This ought to be entertaining 🙂
Here is a brief history of Nick Matzke’s work on ‘clarifying’ issues. (aka literature bluffing)
http://www.uncommondescent.com.....ent-482236
Here are a few site that call into question Matke’s scholarship and integrity:
http://www.uncommondescent.com.....ent-482194
as to Matzke’s claim here:
yet
Not quite the ringing endorsement Matzke needs to sell his bunk is it?
Nick Matzke: Still waiting for answer! Your silence is speaking volumes.
Barry said:
I certainly hope he hasn’t dashed away (like usual) yet. Watching his implosion has been entertaining.
Heh, you guys are ridiculous. I explained the context issue very carefully, you are still avoiding addressing the context issue, because to do so would be to admit that the Eldredge quote is being misused when taken out of context.
Yes. It’s similar to the difference between studying the process of birth in humans, and studying human population demographics, why different countries have different population densities, etc.
Another common usage of “macroevolution” is looking at traits across a phylogeny — i.e. across multiple species. Basically, “microevolution” is stuff within species, “macroevolution” is stuff across species. But this isn’t really about “bigness of difference”, even though creationists universally misinterpret it that way. You could look at the macroevolution of feather color across a phylogeny, just as you could look at the macroevolution of live birth or some other “major adaptation”.
So, studies of the origin of “complex functional novelties” should probably be referred to as “study of complex functional novelties”. Sometimes these studies are macroevolutionary (when they occur across a phylogeny), but they sometimes could be microevolutionary (when they occur inside a population). E.g., live birth is a polymorphism *within* some species, i.e. some members of the species lay eggs, and other members of the same species have live young. In this case, you have a “major difference” but it is a microevolutionary study.
Well, that’s one of my main points around these parts. Creationists/IDists basically make up their own definitions of words, don’t realize that these are technical scientific terms that scientists are using in a very specific way, and then because of this difference the creationists/IDists read quotes and misinterpret what they mean, because they don’t understand what is actually going on in the professional field. Then they make lists of the quotes, endlessly repeat them, convince naive audiences in church basements that they know what they are talking about etc. It’s all pretty silly once you do know the ins and outs of what the professionals are talking about.
Hey bornagain,
Do you think Prothero thinks there are lots of transitional fossils, and that transitional fossils support evolution? Check his 2007 book Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why it Matters.
Matzke: “I explained the context issue very carefully . . .”
And I explained very carefully that I am asking you whether you agreed with Eldredge, not with me. I am pretty sure you are not too stupid to understand that that means I am asking you whether you agree with Eldredge’s statement as Eldredge meant it to be understood in the context in which he made it.
So, once again, do you agree with Eldredge’s statement as Eldredge meant it to be understood in the context in which he made it?
Prediction: Further bobbing, weaving and evasions from Matzke.
Nick Matzke,
Are you saying that discoveries since the 1980s dramatically changed the general perspective on the incomplete state of the fossil record; above the rank of species? So, are you saying in effect that before the 1980s Simpson’s observations were supported by the evidence at that time?
By the way Nick, you probably noticed I have not put you in mod for refusing to answer. The reason? Because your refusal to answer a simple question makes you look like the fool that you are, and that is, in some ways, better than having you answer the question, because it serves further to discredit all the nonsense you spew on these pages. Thanks!
NickMatzke_UD @73:
Well, since you love to play the date game, anybody else can play it too. bornagain77 posted a quote @67 by Prothero dated February 2012 that supersedes your 2007 date (strange that you don’t provide a quote) by five years. So which one should we accept as Prothero’s current view on the matter, eh?
By the way, transitional fossils do support evolution but which one, Darwinian evolution or Design evolution? I choose the latter. What does not support Darwinian evolution is the lack of a fine graduation in the fossil record between major taxa. This finding is actually very strong evidence for design evolution.
This is the first time that you’ve specified “in the context which which [Eldredge] made it”. In that context, Eldredge’s statement was only partially true, then and now. The evidence for the punctuated equilibrium pattern in the fossil record of those small species-to-species transitions is mixed. Some groups show it, some groups don’t, and in some groups (like hominids), for parts of their record we don’t have enough fossil specimens to really do the relevant statistical tests properly.
In Homo erectus and Homo sapiens, there are several cases of traits (like brain size and tooth size) where you have hundreds of dated fossils within species through time, and you can see the change in those traits happening quite gradually, i.e. not in a punctuated pattern. For earlier parts of the hominid record, we probably don’t have a continuous-enough fossil record to tell the difference.
The case is often similar with other mammals. Terrestrial vertebrates in general have spottier fossil records than marine invertebrates. People like Prothero are advocates of punk-eek patterns in mammal fossils, but other fossil mammologists like Gingerich are not. The pattern seems to be more common in marine invertebrates, but here too there are exceptions.
In any case, the question of whether or not there are smooth transitions between closely related, extremely similar fossil species is distinct from the question of whether or not there are transitional fossils writ large, between major extant groups. There are lots of such fossils, and they are strong evidence for evolution. Prothero would say so (he wrote a book specifically saying this, specifically to creationists!), Eldredge would say so, Gould would say so, even Kurt Wise says so!
So: would you agree it would be a mis-use of the Eldredge quote to imply that there are no transitional fossils?
“Design evolution” is a term you invented just now. I’ve never seen it before. Please tell us what you think happened in evolutionary history, under “design evolution”.
NickMatzke_UD claimed
Apparently then, neither did the (evolutionary) Biology professor with whom I discussed this with. No, it was made clear to me that unless you cherry pick the data, proteins are not a good way to resolve taxonomic issues. I’m surprised that you seem to think so.
Routinely used in phylogenetics? Really? Please provide the links?
Sorry, looks like you’re busted.
-Q
NickMatzke_UD you ask:
I have no doubt that Prothero thinks, i.e. believes/imagines, there are lots of transitional fossils, and I have no doubt that he would be a true Darwinist (i.e. an atheist) no matter what the evidence said to the contrary. But the fact of the matter is that his very own research has left him, and every one he has given his presentation to, without, quote/unquote, “a good explanation yet for such widespread stasis despite the obvious selective pressures of changing climate.” For me this is rock solid proof that Darwinism is first and foremost, as Dr Hunter would say, metaphysically-driven and is not driven by what the evidence actually says as should rightly be done in science. Moreover, I remember Prothero got fairly well embarrassed in his debate with Stephen Meyer in 2009, in which, among other things, the fossil record around the Cambrian era was touched upon:
I would also like to point out the extreme stasis observed for bacteria going back as far as we can in the fossil record:
Verse and Music:
Supplemental note as to the complete lack of empirical evidence for neo-Darwinian claims:
here is a short note as to the informational complexity Darwinism is trying to explain with the unguided ‘random’ process that Dr. Behe highlighted:
NickMatzke_UD @79:
It’s a term I’ve been using for over two decades. It’s a common term among human designers, especially in fashion design, interior design, architectural design, automobile design, software and video game design, smart phone design, etc.
What we observe among designers is that, over time, designs evolve and can be classified hierarchically, as in a tree. The difference between the Darwinian tree of life and the Intelligent Design tree of life is that the former is purely nested by the necessity imposed by common descent whereas the latter is non-nested. This is means that ID predicts that (distant lifeforms very high in the tree of life) will be found to have horizontal gene sharing. We already knew this by observing distantly related species but this is what the genetic records of various species are also beginning to reveal.
The future looks very bleak for Darwinism. Y’all got it coming, though.
You were misunderstanding him. Are you trying to say that proteins are not a good way to tell apart closely related species? If so, you should say that, it’s sort of correct, although not completely. “Taxonomic issues” involves everything from species distinctions to large-scale phylogeny. Proteins are particularly useful for the latter.
Here’s one I just did:
http://www.pnas.org/content/ea.....3110.short
It’s not hard to check that protein phylogenetics is a thing:
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=%22protein+phylogenetics%22
Heck, even allozyme data:
https://www.google.com/search?btnG=1&pws=0&q=%22protein+phylogenetics%22#pws=0&q=allozyme+phylogeny
Really? You’re using an article entitled “Proteins help solve taxonomy riddle” to argue that proteins aren’t used on taxonomy issues?
All the article is saying is that collagen isn’t good for closely related species. Collagen is just one protein. There are thousands of different proteins. Some evolve slowly, some evolve quickly. You use the quicker ones for more recent divergences and the slower ones for more ancient divergences. If you are studying both at once, you include some of both in the analysis.
Like I said, you don’t know what you’re talking about. Why do creationists feel they can make confident pronouncements about evolution when they get absolutely basic, introductory, obvious-if-you-bothered-to-think-about-it-for-even-a-second things wrong?
Funny the entire ID movement never decided to use it, then.
If it’s non-nested, it’s not a hierarchy or a tree. But you said it was both hierarchical and a tree. Methinks you need to work on your description a bit.
Nick Matzke,
Nick, are you saying that discoveries since the 1980s dramatically changed the general perspective on the incomplete state of the fossil record; above the rank of species? So, are you saying in effect that before the 1980s Simpson’s observations were supported by the evidence at that time?
NickMatzke_UD:
A monumental mistake on the part of the ID movement, in my opinion. But I understand why they chose to distance themselves from this. It’s because the fundamentalist undercurrent within the ID movement has blinded them. I am a Christian but certainly not a fundamentalist.
You don’t understand hierarchies then. Multiple class inheritance is used in object-oriented software design all the time. Why is it not hierarchical? In a non-nested tree, a design still inherits functionality from parent designs. Besides, why even claim, as Darwinists do, that the Darwinian tree of life is purely nested if the converse is not possible?
You’re losing it, Matzke. These truths are more than you can bear. 😀
Follow up on #85
It is important to this discussion about ‘quote mining’ whether the evidence supports Simpson’s observations. Because if this is indeed the case, it doesn’t really matter what the context was when Eldridge wrote “change in the manner Darwin expected is just not found in the fossil record.”
My point is that Eldridge wrote this before the discovery of Matzke’s game changing transitional fossils. So Eldridge would also be right if the context was not confined to ‘transitions between very similar species’, as Matzke claims, but included higher groups – it would be on par with the consensus view at that time.
This renders the allegation of quote mining invalid or inappropriate at best.
The converse is theoretically possible, but it wouldn’t be a tree, it would be a network or web or some such. Hierarchies have groups within groups. Simple inheritance doesn’t necessarily mean you have hierarchy/trees, e.g. inheritance within sexual populations isn’t treelike, since everyone has two parents. You could make a tree of just the father relationships, or a tree of just the mother relationships, but when you stick them together you’d have a network. (Which, BTW, shows that a non-tree pattern does not particularly indicate intelligence was involved.)
Nick to Q’s statement here:
States in reply:
That sure sounds like you are saying that you are allowed to cherry pick whatever sequences you need to make your tree work to me! Isn’t that special! Reminds me of this recent yeast study:
Well all I can say is,,,
But is there any real empirical evidence demonstrating that proteins can evolve (quick or slow), as Nick presupposes, so as to allow Darwinists such unfettered latitude in the reconstruction of their hypothetical trees? None that I am aware of!
Where
Here is a note on the severe dissimilarities that are being found. Dissimilarities that Nick will most likely never ever admit to, and will most likely deny to his dying day until he meets the Lord:
Verse and Music:
Of note:
A New Model for Evolution: A Rhizome – Didier Raoult – May 2010
Excerpt: Thus we cannot currently identify a single common ancestor for the gene repertoire of any organism.,,, Overall, it is now thought that there are no two genes that have a similar history along the phylogenic tree.,,,Therefore the representation of the evolutionary pathway as a tree leading to a single common ancestor on the basis of the analysis of one or more genes provides an incorrect representation of the stability and hierarchy of evolution. Finally, genome analyses have revealed that a very high proportion of genes are likely to be newly created,,, and that some genes are only found in one organism (named ORFans). These genes do not belong to any phylogenic tree and represent new genetic creations.
http://darwins-god.blogspot.co.....izome.html
Didier Raoult, who authored the preceding paper, has been referred to as ‘Most Productive and Influential Microbiologist in France’. Here is what he had to say about Darwinism:
The “Most Productive and Influential Microbiologist in France” Is a Furious Darwin Doubter – March 2012
Excerpt: Controversial and outspoken, Raoult last year published a popular science book that flat-out declares that Darwin’s theory of evolution is wrong.
http://www.evolutionnews.org/2.....57081.html
I would say that we have been accumulating transitional fossils since the mid-1800s. Archaeopteryx was discovered in the 1860s, the transitional fossil horses and rhinos in the late 1800s, the “mammal-like reptiles” and some proto-tetrapods in the first half of the 1900s, and various hominids were available by 1950. So there were various transitional fossils known to Simpson, and he discusses them quite well, if you bother to go read his work. E.g. he points out that the earliest rhinos and the earliest horses are almost indistinguishable from each other, i.e. no different than two closely-related species in the same genus.
But, major fossil discoveries kept coming, and at an increasing pace. Olduvai gorge and Homo habilis, african Homo erectus, etc. were described in the 1960s, and hundreds of more specimens have followed. The whale stuff started in a big way in the 1980s. The feathered dinosaurs were mostly the 1990s. The Chengjiang arthropods were discovered in the 1990s but are only just now getting thoroughly described and analyzed. And all of the other cases I mentioned (tetrapods, mammals, etc.) have gotten much more filled in in recent decades.
So, quoting ancient quotes on the fossil record is just bad practice, since we have much more data now. But, even in the 1950s, there were a number of significant transitional fossils and series, which Simpson knew about, acknowledged, and described, although you don’t get that when you quote-mine him like this. Even mined quotes posted here don’t say there are no transitional fossils, if you read carefully. There were some known transitional fossils back then, there are more now.
There are still some big gaps left. Bats are one where we have almost nothing in the way of transitional forms. But birds, mammals, hominids, whales, Cambrian arthropods, tetrapods, angiosperms, dugongs, giraffes, horses, canids, turtles, have all been conquered, with a series of fossils available for each. Back in the 1950s the coverage was much more spotty, or there would just be one spectacular fossil for a particular transition, like Archaeopteryx.
Really, this whole thread would just melt away if people just got up off their tushes and went and read Prothero’s book Evolution: What the fossils say and why it matters.
If you want to know why the youth are melting away from fundamentalism/conservative evangelicalism, it’s shenanigans like the ones people are pulling here. Transparently crude quote-mining is only convincing to people who don’t bother to google these topics.
Archaeopteryx was discovered in the 1860s,
etc.. etc.. etc..
Seems someone needs to update their notes!
micro-RNAs and Non-Falsifiable Phylogenetic Trees – (Excellent Research) video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qv-i4pY6_MU
Phylogeny: Rewriting evolution – Tiny molecules called microRNAs are tearing apart traditional ideas about the animal family tree. – Elie Dolgin – 27 June 2012
Excerpt: “I’ve looked at thousands of microRNA genes, and I can’t find a single example that would support the traditional tree,” he says. “…they give a totally different tree from what everyone else wants.” (Phylogeny: Rewriting evolution, Nature 486,460–462, 28 June 2012) (molecular palaeobiologist – Kevin Peterson)
Mark Springer, (a molecular phylogeneticist working in DNA states),,, “There have to be other explanations,” he says.
Peterson and his team are now going back to mammalian genomes to investigate why DNA and microRNAs give such different evolutionary trajectories. “What we know at this stage is that we do have a very serious incongruence,” says Davide Pisani, a phylogeneticist at the National University of Ireland in Maynooth, who is collaborating on the project. “It looks like either the mammal microRNAs evolved in a totally different way or the traditional topology is wrong.
http://www.nature.com/news/phy.....on-1.10885
pdf:
http://www.nature.com/polopoly.....86460a.pdf
Nature Article Finds MicroRNAs are “Tearing Apart Traditional Ideas about the Animal Family Tree” – Casey Luskin June 29, 2012
Excerpt: When Peterson started his work on the placental [mammal] phylogeny, he had originally intended to validate the traditional mammal tree, not chop it down. As he was experimenting with his growing microRNA library, he applied it to mammals because their tree was so well established that they seemed an ideal test. Alas, the data didn’t cooperate. If the traditional tree was correct, then an unprecedented number of microRNA genes would have to have been lost, and Peterson considers that highly unlikely. “The microRNAs are totally unambiguous,” he says, “but they give a totally different tree from what everyone else wants.”,,, Maybe the reason that different genes yield different evolutionary trees is because there isn’t a single unified tree of life to be found. In other words, perhaps universal common ancestry is simply wrong.
http://www.evolutionnews.org/2.....61471.html
NickMatzke_UD retaliated with
No, I wasn’t misunderstanding him. Our discussion was specifically about the taxonomy of some kangaroo rats that he collected and released—if I had meant phylogenetics, I would have said so.
Yes. The authors thought this was unusual.
And some are sensitive to heat, such as mentioned in your paper. But of course you know that collagen is not “just” another protein.
The cool thing is that Darwinists get to arrange them in any convenient order, discarding the results as needed. So where are the intermediate stages between any two proteins? How do they change in small increments? What came before collagen?
One of your search links stated:
Emphasis added. This is not going where the evidence leads. It’s cherry picking. You get to line up the things that support your theory, and reject the data that doesn’t agree. This is pathetic.
As I said, Darwinism artificially lines up similarities in selected features of animals in a some non-unique sequence, and claims ancestry.
Not only is this technique non-scientific, it prevents you from making some really cool discoveries as to how and why certain proteins have come to differ.
-Q
NickMatzke @ 78:
In my essay I advance a proposition, to wit, that change in the manner Darwin expected – whatever that is – is just not found in the fossil record.
I quote world-renowned Darwinists Niles Eldredge and Ian Tattersall to support my thesis. They wrote: “Change in the manner Darwin expected is just not found in the fossil record.”
Quote mining is the deceitful tactic of taking quotes out of context in order to make them seemingly agree with the quote miner’s viewpoint. It is a form of lying.
You accuse me of lying through quote mining for using the Eldredge/Tattersall quotation.
In order for your accusation to be true, it must be true that I took the Eldredge/Tattersall quotation out of context to make it seem like they supported the proposition I was advancing – i.e., that change in the manner Darwin expected is just not found in the fossil record – when they did not.
But the fact of the matter is that Eldredge and Tattersall meant exactly that. I did not quote them out of context. I did not make it seem as though they agreed with my viewpoint when they did not.
I asked you of you agreed with what they said. After evading the question for a couple of days, you finally admitted you believe the statement: “was only partially true, then and now.
So, it turns out that your problem with Eldredge and Tattersall. You just don’t think they are right. Your “quote mine” attack was not based on the fact that I misrepresented Eldredge and Tatersall. It was based entirely on your personal opinion that the view that they (and I) was advancing is wrong.
It follows that your accusation that I engaged in lying by quote mining is false.
Now it is time for you to do the right thing and admit you were wrong and apologize.
You need to admit that transitions between closely-related species and transitions between major groups are different things, and that Eldredge was talking about the former.
Oh noes! Minor differences in results between two analyses! Therefore common ancestry is wrong! These are all closely-related salamanders on any analysis. They are all on the same little branch of the tree of life, and there is no particular guarantee that one random old-fashioned dataset (allozymes) and old-fashioned techniques (UPGMA and distance methods) will perfectly resolve every last detail. You might as well be arguing that the Earth is flat because maps from the 1800s aren’t quite perfect. Call me when some analyses put some salamanders inside frogs and other salamanders inside mammals. That would be a really significant disagreement.
Matzke, you erect a strawman because no one here has claimed that there are no transitional fossils at all. What is being said is that there are far too little transitional fossils to meet Darwinian expectations. ‘Some known transitional fossils’ is not enough by a longshot within this context.
The quotes below by G.G.Simpson are addressing this problem and I don’t understand how presenting them qualifies as quote mining.
I believe that the Elderidge quote, “Change in the manner Darwin expected is just not found in the fossil record”, is to be understood in that very same context: indeed there are some known transitional fossils, but there are far too little to meet Darwinian expectations.
And, like I argued in posts #85 and #87, even if Eldridge’s context was confined to the rank of species, it would not matter, because in ‘the era before the game changing discoveries’ his statements would also be accurate with regard to higher groups.
Matzke @ 96:
No, you need to admit that your accusation that I engaged in deceitful quote mining was boorish and morally inexcusable. Nick, I know you are a moral relativist, but even relatively speaking wouldn’t you admit that accusing someone of lying when they did not is wrong? Again, the only right thing for you to do is to man up, admit you were wrong and apologize. I won’t be holding my breath.
Your statement above would have some force if I had ever argued that transitions between closely-related species and transitions between major groups are different things. I did not. I argued only that change in the manner Darwin expected did not occur, and that is what Eldredge said.
Again, your refusal to admit the obvious is helpful. When you burn your credibility on obvious things – as you are doing here – it ramifies when you discuss more subtle things. The thousands of people who read these pages each day are right now watching you bob, weave, evade and dissemble, and they know that is exactly what you are doing. Your cred it toast. Do you think your cred will magically rematerialize next time you engage on a more substantive matter? As the Brits say, “not bloody likely.”
As long as you keep refusing to admit the context of the Eldredge quote, you will be guilty of quote-mining when you use it to argue that the fossil record doesn’t support evolution. It wasn’t deliberately deceptive when you first did it, since presumably you were just unaware of the context and the different aspects of the fossil record (transitional fossils covering tiny transitions between sister species versus transitional fossils covering major transitions between major groups). But, the more you refuse to acknowledge this distinction, after you’ve been informed of it, the more you look like you are deliberately ignoring relevant information and context, just to avoid admitting having made an error. It’s not lying, I don’t think, just an emotional reaction to being shown up.
Side note: we’ve already been over what Darwin said he expected from the fossil record, and Eldredge got that bit wrong. Eldredge’s “admission” wasn’t really “an admission against interest.” Eldredge’s interest was in promoting the punctuated equilibria idea. Very often, scientists will set up their new idea as being a correction to some previous authority. The more famous the better, because the more famous the authority is, the more famous your proposed correction is. Sometimes scientists get a little carried away and a little less than careful when they do think, particularly with Darwin, when they think they know what he said on a particular topic, but didn’t research it carefully.
Mr. Matzke,
I have a question for you that if answered should help settle a lot of misunderstandings. The answer may not be currently available but it is certainly within current technology to answer. You said that horses and rhinos were essentially the same species at one time in the past.
I would think this would make a fantastic dissertation, examining the genomes of these two species. How long ago did they part? What changes to the genome took place between the two? What proteins/control processes differ between the two species?
One could even speculate on an unicorn which if a rhino is close to a horse, has the tusk or horn sticking out of the middle of the head. Why couldn’t a horse develop the same trait?
I am not being facetious but it seems to me that this would be an extremely useful analysis to bolster one sides point of view versus the other. As I said there must be the origin of new proteins in each and then one could speculate on how these proteins arose and if there are any intermediaries in other species.
I am a big supporter of ID but am far from one who believes each species was created and that natural processes are probably at work to modify species. But the question is just how much can these natural processes do? So I am fascinated by how much is known.
I would think the rhino/horse ancestry would be a good place to start as well as some others that may have live examples of each. Rhinos and horses do not come together in the classification scheme till the class level which is pretty high up the ladder. Some of the others you mentioned have long since disappeared. I would think the various carnivore would also be a good place to look or just how variation exist within ungulate which is also pretty high on the classification scheme. There must have been a sequence in the history of life to lead to all these distinctions. They must be written in the genome.
You mean “too few transitional fossils.”
They are quote-mining because Simpson was writing in the 1950s, and the record of transitional fossils has improved dramatically since then. Most of the transitional fossils for the origin of most of these:
…were discovered after the 1950s. (Of this group, the only good ones back then were really mammals and horses, I believe.)
Anyway, unless you develop some fair statistical argument about how many transitional fossils are expected, and how many we have, the claim about having “too few” is just a dodge to avoid admitting the fact that we have lots of transitional fossils covering lots of major transitions.
That’s not one dissertation, but several! You could do divergence times with just a few genes, in fact I bet this has been done. I don’t think they’ve done whole-genome sequences for either yet. Even having the whole genome sequence wouldn’t answer all your questions yet, since just having the genome doesn’t tell you the details of how it works to produce development. Minimally, you’d want transcriptomes throughout development as well. It’s imaginable but it’s a large project!
What? Unicorn horns are supposed to come out of the forehead and be super long and skinny. I believe they are actually derived from narwhal whales, and in narwhals those are actually teeth/tusks, not horns. In Cambridge they actually have a narwhal with two tusks, one from each side of the jaw. Rhino horns come out of the nose and are basically made of keratin I think.
Actually, horses and rhinos are both in the order perissodactyls, within class mammals, on the Linnaean system. I think the earliest rhino relative is Hyrachyus, and the earliest horse is Hyracotherium, so googling those would provide an entry to the literature.
Here’s Prothero on rhino/horse evolution:
http://books.google.com/books?.....38;f=false
Contrary to the misinformation Matzke would (once again) like to disseminate, the fact is that the popular evolutionary myth of ‘Horse evolution’ is also severely misleading:
“The construction of the whole Cenozoic family tree of the horse is therefore a very artificial one, since it is put together from non-equivalent parts, and cannot therefore be a continuous transformation series”.
Dr. Heribert Nilsson – Evolutionist – Former Director of the Swedish Botanical Institute.
Darwin vs. the Fossils
Excerpt: “A team of 22 international researchers led by Ludovic Orlando of the University of Lyon in France did one of the first-ever comprehensive comparisons of ancient DNA (aDNA) from fossil equids (including horses, donkeys and zebras). These specimens came from 4 continents. The results were so shocking, they call for an almost complete overhaul of the horse series. For one thing, they concluded that many specimens relegated to separate species are actually variations on the same species. For another, they found that for evolution to be true there had to be sudden bursts of diversification – Cambrian-like explosions within the horse family – contrary to Darwin’s prohibition of great and sudden leaps.”
http://www.creationsafaris.com.....#20091211a
“The results, published June 20 in the journal Science Express, come from a study of 19 groups of mammals that either are extinct or, in the case of horses, elephants, rhinos and others, are in decline from a past peak in diversity. All are richly represented in the fossil record and had their origins sometime in the last 66 million years, during the Cenozoic Era.”
http://www.uncommondescent.com.....xtinction/
The evolution of the horse?
http://creation.com/horse-evolution
The non-evolution of the horse
http://creation.com/the-non-evolution-of-the-horse
“Whales, bats, horses, primates, elephants, hares, squirrels, etc., all are as distinct at their first appearance as they are now. There is not a trace of a common ancestor, much less a link with any reptile, the supposed progenitor.”
Harold Coffin – Zoologist – “A View Of Life”
As well, the favorite evolutionary myth of the Giraffe’s neck slowly getting longer appears to be quite a ‘stretch’ of the truth from what the fossil record actually says:
“No data from giraffes then (in Darwin’s time) existed to support one theory of causes over another, and none exists now.”… ancestral species are relatively short necked, and spotty evidence gives no insight into how the long-necked species arose.””The standard story, in fact, is both fatuous and unsupported.” – Stephen Jay Gould
http://www.weloennig.de/Giraffe.pdf
The Evolution of the Long-Necked Giraffe (Giraffa camelopardalis L.) – What do we really know? – Wolf-Ekkehard Lönnig
http://www.weloennig.de/Giraff.....nglish.pdf
Pt. 1: Another Evolutionary Icon: The Long-Necked Giraffe – Dr. Wolf-Ekkehard Lönnig – podcast
http://intelligentdesign.podom.....0_09-07_00
Here is another article by Wolf-Ekkehard Lönnig:
Geneticist W.-E. Loennig replies to Darwinist Nick Matzke: – September 2011
http://www.uncommondescent.com.....-heats-up/
Psalm 50:10-11
For every beast of the forest is Mine, The cattle on a thousand hills. I know every bird of the mountains, And everything that moves in the field is Mine.
Nick Matzke,
I take it that you agree with me that it does not constitute quote-mining in the sense that the quotes are taken out of context. Given your claim that the fossil record has been dramatically improved since the 1950s (and especially since the 1980s), it is safe to assume that the quotes are indeed an accurate reflection of G.G.Simpson position back in the 1950s. Your definition of quote-mining seems to me rather flexible at best.
Again, I believe that the Elderidge quote, “Change in the manner Darwin expected is just not found in the fossil record”, is to be understood in the context of the era in which he expressed his observation. An era with the knowledge of some transitional fossils, but far too few to meet Darwinian expectations.
You claim that, since the time that Eldridge wrote his sentence, there has been a dramatic improvement of the fossil record. However you cannot have it both ways: if there has been a dramatic improvement of the fossil record since the 80s then Eldridge observed many gaps in the fossil record at the moment of his writing. Given the dramatic improvement of the fossil record Eldridge – back in the early 80s – could not have been in agreement with the proposition that there are “plenty of fossils demonstrating transitions between major groups”, as you claim in post #6.
Matzke @88:
This is pathetic, man. You call yourself a scientist? You are acting like an uneducated moron. Computer programmers have been creating class hierarchies with multiple inheritance for decades. You don’t know what a network is if you comparing class hierarchies to networks. Multiple inheritance is comparable to a graft from one branch of the tree to another. But then again, this semantic argument is just a subterfuge on your part since this is not the point of my argument.
Wow. This is truly infuriating. You are not only ignorant of class hierarchies, you are willing to lie on top of it. Do you get paid for this or are you just doing this for brownie points? How do you figure that it does not take intelligence to use multiple inheritance? How is Darwinian evolution going to use multiple inheritance since it is constrained by common descent? You know, there was a time when this kind of academic shenanigans was punished by prison sentences.
PS. Matzke, you are a lying sack of feces, from my perspective. You are beneath the dignity of the human race. This is my last response to you.
Whoo! That’s a pretty strong reaction to an academic point about trees versus networks.
They are taken out of context, if they are used to assert what the fossil record looks like today, which is how they are always used by creationists, and how they were originally used here on UD.
Also: Eldredge not Eldridge, and you are confusing Simpson’s statements about transitional fossils between major groups from the 1950s, with Eldredge’s statements about transitional fossils between extremely similar similar species in the 1980s. Simpson’s broad statements from the 1950s are the ones that are severely out of date because of the discovery of new transitional fossils between major groups. But finding more transitional fossils between major groups doesn’t particularly effect Eldredge’s punctuated equilibria debate about transitionals between extremely similar sister species. As I mentioned before, Eldredge looks to be wrong about what Darwin thought, and the evidence was, and is, mixed about the commonality of the punctuated equilibria pattern between extremely similar sister species.
Everyone on UD should stop responding to Matzke, in my opinion. His purpose here is to inflate his ego and be a general nuisance to ID advocates. He’s lucky this is not my forum. I would have booted him out a long time ago and as unceremoniously as possible.
Nick Matzke
Nick, a “quote mine” is a passage that leads the reader to believe that an author’s meaning is different from what the one he actually intended. The quote Barry selected faithfully represents the author’s intended meaning. It has nothing to do with the meaning that you intend; it’s all about the authors intentions.
Quotes from past luminaries are not “mined” simply because they do not reflect reality as you perceive it now; they are mined if they do not reflect reality as the author perceived it then. It is up to the reader, not you, to decide if those quotes are obsolete.
To save face, just say this: “Barry, I am persuaded that the men you quote have oversimplified a complex problem and I can make a good case for it, but although I believe my convictions are well-founded, I should not have accused you of quote mining. It isn’t true and I am sorry.”
Let’s look at the context together, Niles Eldredge and I. Tattersall, The Myths Of Human Evolution, 1982:
So far Eldredge is speaking about the fossil record in general, right?
Still general remarks about the fossil record. There is no indication that he restricts his remarks to the level of species – nor did Darwin.
Still no hint that we should confine Eldredge remarks to the ranks of species.
Ok, here it is: ‘species’. But on what grounds are we to conclude that the preceding general talk about the fossil record was in fact confined to the rank of species? How does the remark that species are conservative and static entities throughout long periods of time abrogate the preceding general remarks about the fossil record?
Eldredge rounds up, speaking again in general terms about the fossil record as a whole. If he is only talking about “transitional fossils between extremely similar species” and is unaware of other problems in the fossil record, as you claim he is, then Eldredge is the worst writer ever.
NickMatzke_UD,
Previously, I quoted the following:
To which you responded:
Oh noes? 😉 It’s funny how “minor differences” in Science can lead to big discoveries. And you went on to say
I understand what your trying to say, and I don’t disagree with you in principle! But, you go on to say
Now you’re throwing legitimate data under the bus, and marginalizing the work of previous scientists. This is exactly the cherry picking that I object to. I’m sure there’s some mechanism to be discovered here! Maybe it’s minor, or maybe it will prove to be major.
Now you’re just flailing. Please don’t squirm. I’m actually trying to help you. I’m not trying to turn you into a creationist. I’m just trying to pry Darwin’s cold, dead hands from your throat.
-Q
I doubt it. The study you quote is Wiens 2000, it just deals with trying a flurry of phylogenetic methods, many of them very old and rarely used, on allozyme data. Many of these methods were not really designed for allozyme data, which is fairly crude in comparison to sequence data.
You are just tossing around random statements and quotes in order to defend your original, indefensible and quite silly statement:
…which you followed up with a statement that choosing slow or fast proteins was “cherry-picking”. It’s no more cherry picking than it is cherry-picking to use Carbon-14 to date archeological material, and using Uranium-Lead dating to date Cambrian material. Or using telescopes to look at planets and microscopes to look at tiny things.
And anyway, like I said, if one is super-concerned about picking slow versus fast proteins, just put them both in the analysis. It’s easy, although it’s a bit of a waste of time and computer resources to people who know what they are doing.
No, he’s talking about tracing single species through the fossil record. Most species only last for a few million years or less, so most “punctuated equilibria” studies look at the history of species in single formations, where you can literally walk up a hill and sample different layers over a few hundred thousand or a few million years, and compare the same species in these different layers.
Nope — he says “individual kinds of fossils”, this is just another way of referring to individual species, in a semi-popular work. Unless you think it is plausible that he is referring to the creationist definition of “kinds”?
We’ve already had such hints. Plus, if you know the field at all, you know that punctuated equilibria is one of Eldredge’s major career interests.
Like I said…
First, there were other hints just in the quotes you gave, secondly, Eldredge’s interests are well-known, and third, it is false and obviously false that anything other than species remained “recognizably the same” through their fossil record. Mammal-like reptiles, horses, etc., had long series of fossils that were well-known in the 1980s and well-before, and the early members are not the same as the later ones.
Fourth, there would be some indication that Eldredge was switching topics, if he switched to talking about species transitions from larger sorts of transitions.
“All lineages” means “every single species”. He is indeed making a general statement, but it is a general statement about how species-to-species transitions look in the fossil record, not a general statement about any transition of any sort looks in the fossil record.
Just in case it’s still not clear, check out what Eldredge says about “gaps” in Niles Eldredge (2001), The Triumph of Evolution: And the Failure of Creationism.
I’ve posted a long review of the quote-mining issue to Barry’s new thread:
http://www.uncommondescent.com.....e-with-me/
It’s in moderation because of the links. I will continue the discussion over there.
This confinement is simply not in text.
BTW the distinction you make between the species level and higher orders suddenly seems utterly ridiculous to me. You say (#32):
The fossil record shows us that the expected gradual change of species is lacking, but what certainly is lacking is an abundant and gradual array of intermediate fossils between, let’s say, hippos and whales. So what is your point exactly?
Querius got it right early on in the discussion:
Beautiful quote from Q,,,
I wonder if Matzke could trouble us with a precise falsification criteria for sequence comparisons:
The Mystery of Extreme Non-Coding Conservation – No Plausible Speculations – Cornelius Hunter – Nov. 2013
Excerpt: Consider this new paper from the Royal Society on “The mystery of extreme non-coding conservation” that has been found across many genomes. Years ago an evolution professor told me, in defending the claim that evolution is falsifiable, that if functionally unconstrained yet highly similar DNA sequences were found in different species, then evolution would be false. A few years later that is exactly what was discovered. In fact, the DNA sequences were extremely similar and even identical in different species,,, Did the professor agree that evolution was false? Not at all. For the fact of evolution goes far deeper than scientific findings and failed predictions.,,,
Here is how the paper summarizes these findings of extreme sequence conservation:
“… despite 10 years of research, there has been virtually no progress towards answering the question of the origin of these patterns of extreme conservation. A number of hypotheses have been proposed, but most rely on modes of DNA : protein interactions that have never been observed and seem dubious at best. As a consequence, not only do we still lack a plausible mechanism for the conservation of CNEs—we lack even plausible speculations.”
http://darwins-god.blogspot.co.....oding.html
I’m not going to play any more, folks. There is no point trying to explain things if Barry won’t allow the explanations to be posted. Cheers, Nick
@Nick
Typical. Do you tire of being a stereotype of pseudo-intellectuals? Why should Barry indulge your obvious continued pettifogging and reluctance to address the ACTUAL point without meaningless equivocation?
You’ve made an absolute FOOL of yourself, and one better believe I am copying all of your remarks to send out to anyone who will read them. I suppose, to this end, I should thank you.
TSErick @ 120. Just so.
If Nick had an ounce of humility or honor, he would simply admit that he had mistakenly assumed Mr. Arrington meant something other than what he said, apologize, and then perhaps make a point about what he thinks those who use these quotes are mistaken about in their conceptualization of the fossil record.
Like so many Darwinists, Nick insists that he knows what his adversaries mean whether they admit it or not, and makes cases against what is in his mind, not against their actual argument. Which is why he didn’t have to read Darwin’s Doubt carefully to write a critical review of it; in Nick’s mind, he knew what Meyer was thinking before Meyer even wrote the book.
Barry Arrington
Perhaps the forum would benefit from another sidebar menu, with entries indexed, linkable and ordered by poster name, in which concise summaries of their record of intellectual dishonesty (with links to original posts) would be documented and available for browsing and citation.
There are numerous examples of multi-thread train wrecks in which intellectually dishonest people expose themselves, but the casual lurker might never find them, nor appreciate the sweeping scale of the habitual deceit and incompetence – unless it is organized and indexed, similar to FAQs.
The entries could be written by anyone as a post appended to any thread, with the post designated as a candidate for the intellectual dishonesty archive, and then forum moderators could promote the post to the archive if they felt a compelling demonstration, worthy of exposure to the public, had been made.
I doubt it would reduce the level or frequency of intellectual dishonesty, but it would certainly make exposing its’ perpetrators less time consuming and repetitive.
It could be called ‘Heads on Pikes”, or some such.
WJM @ 122. Indeed. Why does he do it?
Of course, we cannot know for sure. But it seems to me that he brings a quasi-religious zeal to the table. Like many a deluded religious zealot before him, perhaps he thinks evil is not evil if it is in the service of a “greater good.” His god is Neo-Darwinism. Perhaps he believes that deceit, diversion and dissembling are acceptable tactics in the service of his god. Or maybe he’s just a scumbag. Who can tell?
Charles, interesting idea. I certainly think we need to add “quote mining” to the FAQ. The dishonest use of that pejorative seems almost automatic to the Darwinists, and the lurkers need to know what they are up to.
Barry Arrington @ 124
They are like small children who, when caught with cookie-crumbed lips by their mothers, insist the family dog ate the cookies. Childrens’ lies and intellects are undeveloped, having only been vetted by their playmates and having themselves been stymied by their playmates commensurately undeveloped lies, they quite literally fail to grasp and anticipate how transparent they are to their mothers.
They are like flat-earthers who insist the flat road ahead of them remains unrefuted by an image of our “blue marble” from space. Their argument is more an emotional bulwark against embarassment, perceived enemies and dragons, than a calm anlytical appraisal of the differences in the two kinds of information.
When most of the intellectual challenge you receive is kowtowing from your students (who depend on your good graces to extract some return on their investment in “higher” education) or indifferent “peer reviewers” (who depend on editors’ good graces to get published themselves), when all you’ve done for most of your “academic” life is engage with other academics who think like you, you cease to think critically. When you cease to think critically, you loose the ability to think outside the box in which you’ve put yourself.
There is also the possibility of (a point I made on the Ubermensch thread) they have been so ‘succesfully maladaptive’ at avoiding truth for so long that they’ve cognitively imapired their brains/minds: they quite literally may have lost some cognitive ability to comprehend “politically incorrect” facts. They seemingly can’t with intellectual honesty, discuss concepts they don’t agree with.
Dishonesty reduces applied intelligence: re-wires the brain
Clever Sillies – Why the high IQ lack common sense
We all know numerous bandwidth-sucking examples of such personalities, whose minds when trapped in intellectual cul-de-sac’s of their own making, instead of admitting “I understand your point”, pour smoke out their cybernetic ears and freezeup in a BSOD….. well, until they pop up on the next UD thread for another round of “whack a mole”.
That’s it! Just ban the psychopath. That will hit him where it hurts. UD don’t need people like Matzke and should not indulge them. They waste our time because they have nothing to teach us. Ban them at the slightest hint of pathology.
I believe UD should publish everything that Matzke has said. There has been some very useful admissions here by him and interesting questions that flow from what he said. This is actually longer than I had originally intended
First, there are no close transitions. My guess is that they would say that we would not know one because it would look like the original. However, this is a cop out as there must be a point where there should be transitions that could be distinguished from an ancestor. Each substantial new feature/characteristics should have some sort of ancestor that is different from the supposed descendant on this trait. A whole bunch of new stuff should not just appear but individual traits should show up as the change.
Second, we were then told there were transitions but only from those that are far apart on any type of morphological scale. Are these really transitions? Or just a different species that appeared in the fossil record. There has to be some way of assessing just how much or how little these transitions vary from predecessors and ancestors. How many new traits are involved in these supposed transitions? Until that is done it may be specious to classify something as a transition. I know very little about paleontology so I assume they have some way of doing this and that they report it in their studies.
Third, there is not taxonomic hierarchy that is real. There are just species and any tree of life or hierarchical system is a mental construct. This does not mean that two different organisms are not descendant from a common ancestral population, it just means that when we evaluate transitions there is in reality just one species, a transition, between two other species, an ancestor and a descendant.
So when Matzke said that there were transitions between upper parts of the taxonomic hierarchy it really means that there were innumerable number of transitions missing that should be there. One can argue over the differences between the relevant species as to just how many transitions are missing.
A key bit of information is whether the intervening geological strata produced fossils or not. If a large number of fossils were recovered from the intervening geological layers then that would say that more transitions should have been found. If new organisms just suddenly appeared it would seem to indicate that there is no naturalistic process that produced them. Science does not know a process that produces new species quickly. (it can be argued it does not have a slow process either) It is always possible that the fossilization did not occur but the presence of lots of other fossils would undermine that possibility.
Matzke also pointed to an entire issue of a journal on transitions. My guess that would be definitive on just what is known. I haven’t the time to read this nor would i probably understand a lot of it but it may answer a lot of the questions posed.
Let me suggest what should be in the fossil record to validate the naturalistic process. There should be one species at some time in the past. Then there should be fossils of this species along with fossils of this species slightly different. There then should be examples of each variation either remaining the same or one slowly diverging from the original along side the species that does not change. (as one population gets separated from the other) Why because stasis is the norm according to the paleontologists but there is change possible when populations get separated. So we should have numerous example of stasis along with divergence proceeding in the same strata.
Are horses and rhino such examples? What other ones are there? Why isn’t there stasis as well as change throughout the fossil record? Horses and rhnio are very different or are they? Just how different are they and does either species have a capacity that is truly new or different that one day could lead to say they would produce a new phylum?
So I think the process was fruitful and more should be encouraged. There is nothing to be afraid of.
I’m probably more generous regarding Professor Matzke than I should be . . . but he reminds me of several professors that I had in college.
There are several problems that cause communication disconnects:
1. Darwinism makes sense. It’s a reasonable and compelling explanation for speciation and a “tree of life.”
2. As more data was collected over the decades, it became obvious that there were limits to evolution in velocity (Haldane’s dilemma), complexity (compare protoplasm and coacervates to ribosomes), and the “magical” generation of chemical cycles and body plans.
3. Darwinism was indiscriminately applied to social sciences and morality. People chose sides and fought bitterly for their ideology (of course, battles also occur within scientific disciplines).
4. Evolution has become a paradigm, and all new discoveries and publications must corroborate tiny parts of the theory. New discoveries typically are found to be “surprising” (such as Mary Schweitzer’s work), but need to be carefully rationalized, melded into the massive body of published work, disputed, or ignored.
5. Professor Matzke is an expert in his field, and it’s easy for him, or anyone else with a field of expertise, to project their own self–confidence into other fields.
6. Professor Matzke interacts with people who do not have expertise in his field, and assumes that they are bumpkins. This is also easy for anyone to fall into, myself included.
7. The conversation can easily become adversarial because people won’t admit to losing an argument (as in Monty Python’s Dead Parrot skit), people don’t argue “fair,” and people misunderstand (or twist) what the other person is writing, which might be unclear or overly long–winded. No one’s immune.
8. There are a lot dumb arguments, weak theories, speculation, and outright fakery around.
Personally, I don’t mind being challenged, because in a civil conversation, sloppy thinking is exposed, and everyone can learn new things—as long as the dialogue is kept civil and honest.
And I can naively try to pry Darwin’s cold dead hands from Professor Matzke’s throat—after all a strong theory can and should be challenged with new data. 😉
-Q
Yes I’ve seen this schtick a million times.
You quote an evolutionist (a hostile witness) that supports your argument. (e.g. lack of darwinian gradualism in the fossil record)
Your opponent then accuses you of claiming that the quoted evolutionist doubted evolution.
It’s a false quote-mine accusation + strawman combo.
They have to kick up dust like this to distract from the task of dealing with those awkward moments when prominent evolutionists spoke honestly.
Probably some self-defense denial mechanism. Maybe in their hearts they just can’t believe Gould et al. uttered those blasphemies?
“Probably some self-defense denial mechanism. Maybe in their hearts they just can’t believe Gould et al. uttered those blasphemies?”
That will never happen at UD. Blasphemers are banned.
I will admit that I was sympathetic to Nick up until about halfway through the thread, which I read over the course of two days. Mind you, I was not “with him” in the sense of agreeing with him, but I did feel he was making reasonably decent arguments and being a good sport.
When he started to dance around certain statements he had made previously and admit under fire that they were half-true or absolute assertions were actually contextually determined, my tolerance began to waver.
And when he finally made this comment:
“They are quote-mining because Simpson was writing in the 1950s, and the record of transitional fossils has improved dramatically since then.”
I lost patience.
“Quote mining” apparently means to cite anyone who damages Nick’s argument. If Nick can argue the quote away, and prove that it actually means the opposite of what it says, then it is a form of “quote-mining”.
The underlying assumption is that all scientists are equally in concord about all facets of evolution, so anyone who breaks ranks is only seeming to do so, or is really only breaking ranks on some very abstruse point which appears nowhere in their writing.
As a history major, I do not think Nick really understands what “context” means either. At least, it does not mean what Nick seems to think it means.
He has used the term interchangeably in at least two different senses (literary context and historical context) which are not alike. If a person is going to be so textually imprecise then literally anything can be viewed as “out of context”. Context then becomes merely a pretext for serving steaming helpings of Red Herring.
Matzke #102
LOL
I think this is worthy of its own post.
The term “quote mine” is so sophomoric. A professional like Nick does himself a disservice by using such a stupid term. The term is just a propaganda term to deflect quotes that the Darwinist/evolution advocate cannot deal with.
If a quote is out of context then the person should say “that’s out of context” and show why the quote is out of context. Even though if you look up the meaning and that the term means “out of context” it is very rarely used like that and is just thrown around casually and is just used to say that you have commited a crime for quoting an Evolutionist who said something that your debate opponent is not pleased with and cannot deny that it was said.
If your debate opponent says “out of context” then they have to show it and prove their point. Just using the term quote mine is much easier because it is a negative term that dismisses what is posted and infers that there is something wrong with a quote without specifying what is wrong.
This term can mean whatever the Evolutionist wants, but it really is a moronic term for a professional to use as a debating tactic.