Golden spider find demonstrates how neo-Darwinism leads to “impoverished science”: Physicist

I'm sure he was. But I was just going to be a jerk :) Mung

Sure, the find is recent. But I took Mr Dulle to be asking how long it is believed to have been a fossil. Ilion

It’s not clear to me how old this new fossil find is.

Ilion. That was a much bettter response than the one I was going to give, which would have been to quote from the OP: In “A golden orb-weaver spider from the Middle Jurassic” (4/21/11), David Tyler at manchester U comments on a recent find Seemed to me the find was fairly recent. Mung

"Here, we report the largest known fossil spider, Nephila jurassica sp. nov., from Middle Jurassic (approx. 165 Ma) strata of Daohugou, Inner Mongolia, China ..." Ilion

It's not clear to me how old this new fossil find is. Does anyone know? jasondulle

A previous blog expressed some frustration at Neodarwinian evolutionists who file stasis in a box that says: no environmental change, no selection pressures, no evolution. The problem with this is that so many potentially interesting questions are never asked – and the result is an impoverished science.

What are some of these potentially interesting questions? Heinrich

For bornagain77: Your last comment about fitness gain in stressed environments is very interesting. I would like to add that some of the most remarkable fitness gains observed (and touted by some as perhaps the best evidence we have of 'evolution in action') is in antibiotic resistance. Those environments are certainly "stressed". However, it is important to note that the examples usually given are of humanly developed and purified antibiotics. This kind of stress is a very un-natural selection force, because human antibiotics are developed intelligently and intentionally for the express purpose of wiping out a certain kind of living creature. Nature never does this. I think therefore that with antibiotic resistance we are seeing artificially exaggerated selective pressure, which consequently artificially exaggerates what even this admittedly micro-evolutionary process could conceivably do in a completely natural environment, experiencing solely natural stresses. moonmips

further note: “The First Rule of Adaptive Evolution”: Break or blunt any functional coded element whose loss would yield a net fitness gain - Michael Behe - December 2010 Excerpt: In its most recent issue The Quarterly Review of Biology has published a review by myself of laboratory evolution experiments of microbes going back four decades.,,, The gist of the paper is that so far the overwhelming number of adaptive (that is, helpful) mutations seen in laboratory evolution experiments are either loss or modification of function. Of course we had already known that the great majority of mutations that have a visible effect on an organism are deleterious. Now, surprisingly, it seems that even the great majority of helpful mutations degrade the genome to a greater or lesser extent.,,, I dub it “The First Rule of Adaptive Evolution”: Break or blunt any functional coded element whose loss would yield a net fitness gain.(that is a net 'fitness gain' within a 'stressed' environment i.e. remove the stress from the environment and the parent strain is always more 'fit') http://behe.uncommondescent.com/2010/12/the-first-rule-of-adaptive-evolution/ bornagain77

As to this; 'So this particular living fossil exhibits stasis at the genus level and raises again the issue of what can be learned from the phenomenon of stasis.' What is to be learned is that 'top down' design at the genus level. With all 'beneficial adaptations' leading to sub-speciation from the genus level (or higher), to come at a cost of the information that was originally in the parent (genus) species! Thus conforming to the principle of genetic entropy which Darwinists have NEVER violated! Don Patton - Entropy, Information, and The 'Deteriorating' Fossil Record - video http://www.vimeo.com/17050184 Thermodynamic Argument Against Evolution - Thomas Kindell - video http://www.metacafe.com/watch/4168488 "If complex organisms ever did evolve from simpler ones, the process took place contrary to the laws of nature, and must have involved what may rightly be termed the miraculous." R.E.D. Clark, Victoria Institute (1943), p. 63. "there are no known violations of the second law of thermodynamics. Ordinarily the second law is stated for isolated systems, but the second law applies equally well to open systems." John Ross, Chemical and Engineering News, 7 July 1980 "...the quantity of entropy generated locally cannot be negative irrespective of whether the system is isolated or not." Arnold Sommerfel, Thermodynamics And Statistical Mechanics, p.155 The foundational rule for biology, Genetic Entropy, which can draw its foundation in science from the twin pillars of the Second Law of Thermodynamics and from the Law of Conservation of Information (Dembski, Marks) (Abel - Null Hypothesis), can be stated something like this: "All beneficial adaptations away from a parent species for a sub-species, which increase fitness to a particular environment, will always come at a loss of the optimal functional information that was originally created in the parent species genome." Evolution vs. Genetic Entropy - video http://www.metacafe.com/watch/4028086 Since material processes cannot produce information, Where did the information come from? John 1:1-3 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. Fossil record: "The sweep of anatomical diversity reached a maximum right after the initial diversification of multicellular animals. The later history of life proceeded by elimination not expansion." Stephen J. Gould, Harvard, Wonderful Life, 1989, p.46 Further facts that conform to the principle of genetic entropy: "According to a ‘law’ formulated by E. D. Cope in 1871, the body size of organisms in a peculiar evolutionary lineage tends to increase. But Cope’s rule has failed the most comprehensive test applied to it yet."(body sizes tend to get smaller over time rather than larger) Stephen Gould, Harvard, Nature, V.385, 1/16/97 "Also that mammalian life was richer in kinds, of larger sizes, and had a more abundant expression in the Pliocene than in later times." Von Engeln & Caster Geology, p.19 "Alexander Kaiser, Ph.D., of Midwestern University’s Department of Physiology,,, was the lead author in a recent study to help determine why insects, once dramatically larger than they are today, have seen such a remarkable reduction in size over the course of history." Science Daily, 8/8/07 bornagain77

And what does that say about the Neutral Theory? Mung