Well just whati was crtitcizing on the other post... transitionals.
Ok first of all remember if Dawkin's had a better example of transitionals he would be displaying it. This is their smoking gun but there are two big problems with the wale transitions.
First this does nothign to support Darwin's tree of life hypothsis. The tree of life shows how simple things starting off in the water turn into more complex things on the the land. Ironic that the one smoking gun for evolution would infact be in a sense a "devolution" from a large land dwelling creature- which lost functions like legss for walking and teeth- and transformed into a sea living creature. Reverse evolution- and although new adaptations have clearly been devolved or evolved here- the overall complexity has remained very much consistent in this example. There has been loss of function and new functions have arisen. But more interestingly overall the body plan has remained very much the same- thus the evolutionary changes are more minimal than Darwinists lead us to think.Frost122585
August 12, 2009
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Nobel Laureate Christian de Duve has called for “a rejection of improbabilities so incommensurably high that they can only be called miracles, phenomena that fall outside the scope of scientific inquiry.” DNA, RNA, proteins and other elaborate large molecules must then be set aside as participants in the origin of life. Inanimate nature provides us with a variety of mixtures of small molecules, whose behavior is governed by scientific laws, rather than by human intervention.
He also talks about a subject inextricably tied to theory of evolution if you're a believer in the science of materialism - abiogenesis. You can not say abiogenesis "has nothing to do with theory of evolution" if you are a materialist, because they would both then be sub-branches of the science of materialism. (Which would be the science of the evolution of matter with the caveat that thought and/or information isn't causative in the slightest way).
"The analogy that comes to mind is that of a golfer, who having played a golf ball through an 18-hole course, then assumed that the ball could also play itself around the course in his absence. He had demonstrated the possibility of the event; it was only necessary to presume that some combination of natural forces (earthquakes, winds, tornadoes and floods, for example) could produce the same result, given enough time. No physical law need be broken for spontaneous RNA formation to happen, but the chances against it are so immense, that the suggestion implies that the non-living world had an innate desire to generate RNA. The majority of origin-of-life scientists who still support the RNA-first theory either accept this concept (implicitly, if not explicitly) or feel that the immensely unfavorable odds were simply overcome by good luck."lamarck
August 12, 2009
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You know what I don't see? Maybe I'm just not looking, but I'd like to see some math go into how many mutations are needed to go from the first step beyond abiogenesis to humans. And contrast this to the known time frame per the fossil record. Is not enough data known about mutations to do this? Seems like such an easy way to expose neodarwinism. Even if a lot of approximation is needed, it seems like something worthwhile.
Just take out harmonious mutations being needed, entropy, and IC structures and focus on amount of mutations based on the overwhelmingly most common mutation we observe today, which is single nucleotide. Or whatever kind gives favors darwinian evolution best.
I saw a youtube vid by an arab biology student one time which I'm having trouble finding, but he says that all the mutations on earth up till now don't account for the amount needed for a single cell formation. I don't know if he's correct or not but he sure sounded smart.lamarck
August 12, 2009
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"a hippo turns into a whale."
Gil, to be fair to them, they are not saying a hippo turned into a whale but some cloven forrest animal turned into both a hippo and a whale sort of like some type of unknown ape turned into both a chimp and a human.
There must be a water gene somewhere in both the hippo and the whale.jerry
August 12, 2009
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"Well, Jerry, additional information on whale evolution is but a click away."
You should write Sir Richard and help him out on this or write to the University of Nebraska and tell them how bad their video is and you have the information to make their analysis a little bit credible. As it is now, it looks like Dawkins is a mole for ID.jerry
August 12, 2009
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A few million years, a few million individuals, and a few million nucleotides being zapped by cosmic rays to produce errors in the genetic code, and voilà: a hippo turns into a whale.
How could any rational person take this transparent fantasy seriously?
Are guys like Dawkins completely out of contact with reality and modern science? Of course they are, or they wouldn't make such preposterous, mathematically absurd, empirically-negated claims (as Behe elucidated in The Edge).
This is not hard. Throwing trash into computer programs does not make them better, no matter how much time is allowed. Living systems are fundamentally based on information and information-processing machinery.
The Darwnian mechanism is a quaint, 19th-century throwback to an era gone by, at a time when nothing substantial was known about living systems. Its defense is based not on science, logic, or evidence, but on an attempt to defend an archaic and nihilistic worldview.GilDodgen
August 12, 2009
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Paul Burnett,
Well, I think we can excuse Simmons for not having the names of all those whale "ancestors" at his fingertips---he's a doctor, not a paleontologist. Furthermore, no one is surprised that PZ posted an entirely self-serving account of the episode in his blog. What does he do when he gets creamed in a debate? He pretends it just didn't happen.herb
August 12, 2009
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Jerry, Dawkins and all of them predict point mutations by and large brought us from rocks to rock stars. So Dawkins is going to need to pull a million rabbits to be convincing. He knows this of course.
Someone posted a great quote from Gould the other day, I can't remember where.
But basically, the breadth of our understanding of the picture that the fossil record has given us up till now;
even if 90% of the fossil types are yet to be discovered, rules out any headway ever being made on missing links.
IE. We already know that we'll never get a neodarwin validation from the fossil record because so much has already been discovered from different strata and it amounts to no real linkage.
I don't know what to think of the fossil record myself.lamarck
August 12, 2009
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Well, Jerry, additional information on whale evolution is but a click away.Doomsday Smith
August 12, 2009
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"herb" (#3) wrote: "I remember listening to Dr. Geoffrey Simmons of the Discovery Institute destroy PZ Myers on the subject of whale evolution in a radio debate a year or two ago. I can’t find a link now, but believe me, it was one for the ages."
Dr Myers apparently thought so too - see http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2008/01/was_that_fun_or_what.php for his recollection of the "debate," wherein Dr. Simmons showed a general lack of scholarship and professed ignorance of well-known intermediates in whale evolution.PaulBurnett
August 12, 2009
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This video smells a little off. It has got to be a set up. Such a weak presentation must be a faux sandbagging of Sir Richard. He must have better skeletons in his closet.
What we have is 12 to 20 million years between each and the nostril thing has got to be a trap for the future. As soon as one points outs how ridiculous it is, someone will pull out a couple more that will be better.
Who wants to take odds that this video is a trick to entice people to complain about its vacuousness and then they pull a couple rabbits out of the hat. Oh, I mean whales. But in the end it will still be weak but the attention will be on those who objected not the lack of evidence and the weak argument.jerry
August 12, 2009
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This it?
https://uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/dr-geoff-simmons-vs-pz-myers-debate/IRQ Conflict
August 12, 2009
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I remember listening to Dr. Geoffrey Simmons of the Discovery Institute destroy PZ Myers on the subject of whale evolution in a radio debate a year or two ago. I can't find a link now, but believe me, it was one for the ages.herb
August 12, 2009
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"The opportune appearance of mutations permitting animals and plants to meet their needs seems hard to believe. Yet the Darwinian theory is even more demanding: a single plant, a single animal would require thousands and thousands of lucky, appropriate events. Thus, miracles would become the rule: events with an infinitesimal probability could not fail to occur .... There is no law against day dreaming, but science must not indulge in it." Pierre P. Grasse - past President of the French Academie des Sciences
As well His claim for Genetic Similarity Confirmation is falsified:
"Why Darwin was wrong about the tree of life," New Scientist (January 21, 2009)
Excerpt: Even among higher organisms, “the problem was that different genes told contradictory evolutionary stories,”,,,“despite the amount of data and breadth of taxa analyzed, relationships among most [animal] phyla remained unresolved.” ,,,,Carl Woese, a pioneer of evolutionary molecular systematics, observed that these problems extend well beyond the base of the tree of life: “Phylogenetic incongruities [conflicts] can be seen everywhere in the universal tree, from its root to the major branchings within and among the various taxa to the makeup of the primary groupings themselves.”,,,“We’ve just annihilated the (Darwin's) tree of life.”
http://www.evolutionnews.org/2009/05/a_primer_on_the_tree_of_life_p_1.html#more
This following article shows that the "same exact genes" have actually been shown to produce "completely different" adult structures:
A Primer on the Tree of Life (Part 4)
excerpt: "In sharks, for example, the gut develops from cells in the roof of the embryonic cavity. In lampreys, the gut develops from cells on the floor of the cavity. And in frogs, the gut develops from cells from both the roof and the floor of the embryonic cavity. This discovery—that homologous structures can be produced by different developmental pathways—contradicts what we would expect to find if all vertebrates share a common ancestor. - from the textbook Explore Evolution
http://www.evolutionnews.org/2009/05/a_primer_on_the_tree_of_life_p_3.html#more
This following study reveals that genes can't even be resolved to the hypothetical mammalian tree of life.
A article in - Trends in Ecology and Evolution - concluded
“the wealth of competing morphological, as well as molecular proposals of the prevailing phylogenies of the mammalian orders would reduce the mammalian tree to an unresolved bush, the only consistent clade probably being the grouping of elephants and sea cows.
W. W. De Jong, “Molecules remodel the mammalian tree,” - Trends in Ecology and Evolution, Vol 13(7), pgs. 270-274 (July 7, 1998).
i.e. research is finding there is zero meaningful linearity to be had between protein amino acid sequences and protein coding genetic sequences of different "kinds"....bornagain77
August 12, 2009
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Dr. David Berlinski: What Does It Take for Change? (Clip 5)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DRqdvhL3pgM
Whales - Designed or Evolved? - Marc Surtees - video
http://edinburghcreationgroup.org/whales.xml
In A Whale of Trouble
http://www.scienceagainstevolution.org/v3i11f.htm
Whale Tale Two
http://www.scienceagainstevolution.org/v6i2f.htm#newbornagain77