Study: Species are “compact clusters in the vastness of empty sequence space.”

26 Replies to “Study: Species are “compact clusters in the vastness of empty sequence space.””

1. 1
   bornagain77 says:

   May 29, 2018 at 2:12 pm

   The preceding study, in over the top fashion, also confirms what Michael Denton had found over 30 years ago in his book “Evolution: A Theory in Crisis”. Specifically Michael Denton found that, “However, the most striking feature of the matrix is that every identifiable subclass is isolated and distinct. Every sequence can be unambiguously assigned to a particular subclass. No sequence or group of sequences can be designated as intermediate with respect to other groups. All the sequences of each subclass are equally isolated from the members of another group. Transitional or intermediate classes are completely absent from the matrix. 4”

   Cytochrome C
   Excerpt: If the existence of cytochrome C in “higher forms” of animals is the result of evolution from a common ancestor, then one would expect to see a logical progression. That is, the cytochrome C of an invertebrate (like a worm) would be slightly different from a bacteria. A “primitive” vertebrate (like a fish) would have those same differences, plus a few more. As you progress along the presumed evolutionary path to amphibians, reptiles, mammals, primates, ending with humans, you should see the changes in cytochrome C accumulate.
   On the other hand, if cytochrome C is a commonly used component employed by a designer, you will not see that logical progression. You will just see minor differences which optimize cytochrome C for that kind of creature.,,,
   There is a way to distinguish evolution from design at the molecular level. Molecular biologist Michael Denton examined the molecular evidence in detail. He said,,,
   “,,,Where the fossils had failed and morphological considerations were at best only ambiguous, perhaps this new field of comparative biochemistry might at last provide objective evidence of sequence and of the connecting links which had been so long sought by evolutionary biologists.
   However, as more protein sequences began to accumulate during the 1960s, it became increasingly apparent that the molecules were not going to provide any evidence of sequential arrangements in nature, but were rather going to reaffirm the traditional view that the system of nature conforms fundamentally to a highly ordered hierarchic scheme from which all direct evidence for evolution is emphatically absent.”,,
   Dr. Denton then produced several tables and diagrams that show this. He showed, for example, that the cytochrome C in bacteria is 64% different from horses and pigeons, 65% different from tuna and silkmoths, 66% different from wheat, and 69% different from yeast. 2 He left it to the reader to realize that, according to evolutionary theory, one would expect the cytochrome C of a bacterium to be closer to the cytochrome C of a tuna (fish) than a horse (mammal). Furthermore, the horse should have the same mutations as the tuna, plus a few more. This is not what the molecular data shows.,,,
   Dr. Denton’s Figure 12.1, “The Cytochromes Percent Sequence Difference Matrix” 3, is an abridged version of the 1972 Dayhoff Atlas of Protein Structure and Function Matrix of nearly 1089 entries showing the percent difference between 33 species. Denton’s abridged matrix shows that molecular biologists can easily recognize which cytochrome C sample came from a fish and which came from a mammal.
   “However, the most striking feature of the matrix is that every identifiable subclass is isolated and distinct. Every sequence can be unambiguously assigned to a particular subclass. No sequence or group of sequences can be designated as intermediate with respect to other groups. All the sequences of each subclass are equally isolated from the members of another group. Transitional or intermediate classes are completely absent from the matrix. 4”
   If evolution were true, and creatures gradually evolved from one to another, there should be intermediate forms. Intermediate forms should be found in living creatures, in the fossil record, and in proteins. It should, in at least some cases, be hard to classify things because the boundaries are blurred. (But the boundaries are distinct as would be expected under the Design presupposition)
   http://scienceagainstevolution.info/v7i10f.htm
   of supplemental interest
   Transitional Metals And Cytochrome C oxidase – Michael Denton – Nature’s Destiny (Page 204)
   https://books.google.com/books?id=CdYpDRY0Z6oC&pg=PA204#v=onepage&q&f=false

   Something else that is found to cluster by species are alternative splicing patterns.

   Evolution by Splicing – Comparing gene transcripts from different species reveals surprising splicing diversity. – Ruth Williams – December 20, 2012
   Excerpt: A major question in vertebrate evolutionary biology is “how do physical and behavioral differences arise if we have a very similar set of genes to that of the mouse, chicken, or frog?”,,,
   A commonly discussed mechanism was variable levels of gene expression, but both Blencowe and Chris Burge,,, found that gene expression is relatively conserved among species.
   On the other hand, the papers show that most alternative splicing events differ widely between even closely related species. “The alternative splicing patterns are very different even between humans and chimpanzees,” said Blencowe.,,,
   http://www.the-scientist.com/?.....plicing%2F

   Moreover, Alternative splicing can produce variant proteins and expression patterns as different as the products of different genes.

   Frequent Alternative Splicing of Human Genes – 1999
   Excerpt: Alternative splicing can produce variant proteins and expression patterns as different as the products of different genes.
   http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pm.....PMC310997/

   Widespread Expansion of Protein Interaction Capabilities by Alternative Splicing – 2016
   In Brief
   Alternatively spliced isoforms of proteins exhibit strikingly different interaction profiles and thus, in the context of global interactome networks, appear to behave as if encoded by distinct genes rather than as minor variants of each other.,,,
   Page 806 excerpt: As many as 100,000 distinct isoform transcripts could be produced from the 20,000 human protein-coding genes (Pan et al., 2008), collectively leading to perhaps over a million distinct polypeptides obtained by post-translational modification of products of all possible transcript isoforms (Smith and Kelleher, 2013).
   http://iakouchevalab.ucsd.edu/.....M_2016.pdf

   Alternative Splicing patterns (and overlapping genetic codes in general) cannot be explained by the Darwinian mechanism of Random Mutation and Natural Selection:

   Time to Redefine the Concept of a Gene? – Sept. 10, 2012
   Excerpt: As detailed in my second post on alternative splicing, there is one human gene that codes for 576 different proteins, and there is one fruit fly gene that codes for 38,016 different proteins!
   While the fact that a single gene can code for so many proteins is truly astounding, we didn’t really know how prevalent alternative splicing is. Are there only a few genes that participate in it, or do most genes engage in it? The ENCODE data presented in reference 2 indicates that at least 75% of all genes participate in alternative splicing. They also indicate that the number of different proteins each gene makes varies significantly, with most genes producing somewhere between 2 and 25.
   http://networkedblogs.com/BYdo8

   Multiple Overlapping Genetic Codes Profoundly Reduce the Probability of Beneficial Mutation George Montañez 1, Robert J. Marks II 2, Jorge Fernandez 3 and John C. Sanford 4 – May 2013
   Excerpt: According to Kapronov et al., “it is not unusual that a single base-pair can be part of an intricate network of multiple isoforms of overlapping sense and antisense transcripts, the majority of which are unannotated” [41].
   Conclusions: Our analysis confirms mathematically what would seem intuitively obvious – multiple overlapping codes within the genome must radically change our expectations regarding the rate of beneficial mutations. As the number of overlapping codes increases, the rate of potential beneficial mutation decreases exponentially, quickly approaching zero. Therefore the new evidence for ubiquitous overlapping codes in higher genomes strongly indicates that beneficial mutations should be extremely rare. This evidence combined with increasing evidence that biological systems are highly optimized, and evidence that only relatively high-impact beneficial mutations can be effectively amplified by natural selection, lead us to conclude that mutations which are both selectable and unambiguously beneficial must be vanishingly rare. This conclusion raises serious questions. How might such vanishingly rare beneficial mutations ever be sufficient for genome building? How might genetic degeneration ever be averted, given the continuous accumulation of low impact deleterious mutations?
   http://www.worldscientific.com.....08728_0006
2. 2
   Amblyrhynchus says:

   May 29, 2018 at 3:27 pm

   It’s hard to think of a result more in keeping with “textbook Darwinism” than the idea that species form distinct clusters without intermediates… it’s from Chapter 4 of The Origin..

   Consequently, in the course of many thousand generations, the most distinct varieties … would have the best chance of succeeding and of increasing in numbers, and thus of supplanting the less distinct varieties; and varieties, when rendered very distinct from each other, take the rank of species.

   Modern evolutionary biology doesn’t need selection to render divergent species distinct, but the idea is still very mainstream.
3. 3
   bornagain77 says:

   May 29, 2018 at 4:04 pm

   as to: “It’s hard to think of a result more in keeping with “textbook Darwinism” than the idea that species form distinct clusters without intermediates.”

   Really?

   So Darwin did not predict intermediates?

   “it cannot on my theory be supposed, that these old species were the progenitors of all the species of the orders to which they belong, for they do not present characters in any degree intermediate between them.”
   – Darwin
   http://darwin-online.org.uk/Va.....-1861.html

   Besides this study in genetics, missing intermediates is practically a defining characteristic of the entire fossil record:

   “Darwin had a lot of trouble with the fossil record because if you look at the record of phyla in the rocks as fossils why when they first appear we already see them all. The phyla are fully formed. It’s as if the phyla were created first and they were modified into classes and we see that the number of classes peak later than the number of phyla and the number of orders peak later than that. So it’s kind of a top down succession, you start with this basic body plans, the phyla, and you diversify them into classes, the major sub-divisions of the phyla, and these into orders and so on. So the fossil record is kind of backwards from what you would expect from in that sense from what you would expect from Darwin’s ideas.”
   James W. Valentine – as quoted from “On the Origin of Phyla: Interviews with James W. Valentine” – (as stated at 1:16:36 mark of video)
   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtdFJXfvlm8&feature=player_detailpage#t=4595

   “Over the past 150 years or so, paleontologists have found many representatives of the phyla that were well-known in Darwin’s time (by analogy, the equivalent of the three primary colors) and a few completely new forms altogether (by analogy, some other distinct colors such as green and orange, perhaps). And, of course, within these phyla, there is a great deal of variety. Nevertheless, the analogy holds at least insofar as the differences in form between any member of one phylum and any member of another phylum are vast, and paleontologists have utterly failed to find forms that would fill these yawning chasms in what biotechnologists call “morphological space.” In other words, they have failed to find the paleolontogical equivalent of the numerous finely graded intermediate colors (Oedleton blue, dusty rose, gun barrel gray, magenta, etc.) that interior designers covet. Instead, extensive sampling of the fossil record has confirmed a strikingly discontinuous pattern in which representatives of the major phyla stand in stark isolation from members of other phyla, without intermediate forms filling the intervening morphological space.”
   Stephen Meyer – Darwin’s Doubt (p. 70)

   Moreover, this top down pattern in the fossil record, which is the complete opposite pattern as Darwin predicted for the fossil record, is not only found in the Cambrian Explosion, but this ‘top down’, disparity preceding diversity, pattern is found throughout the fossil record subsequent to the Cambrian explosion as well.

   Scientific study turns understanding about evolution on its head – July 30, 2013
   Excerpt: evolutionary biologists,,, looked at nearly one hundred fossil groups to test the notion that it takes groups of animals many millions of years to reach their maximum diversity of form.
   Contrary to popular belief, not all animal groups continued to evolve fundamentally new morphologies through time. The majority actually achieved their greatest diversity of form (disparity) relatively early in their histories.
   ,,,Dr Matthew Wills said: “This pattern, known as ‘early high disparity’, turns the traditional V-shaped cone model of evolution on its head. What is equally surprising in our findings is that groups of animals are likely to show early-high disparity regardless of when they originated over the last half a billion years. This isn’t a phenomenon particularly associated with the first radiation of animals (in the Cambrian Explosion), or periods in the immediate wake of mass extinctions.”,,,
   Author Martin Hughes, continued: “Our work implies that there must be constraints on the range of forms within animal groups, and that these limits are often hit relatively early on.
   Co-author Dr Sylvain Gerber, added: “A key question now is what prevents groups from generating fundamentally new forms later on in their evolution.,,,
   http://phys.org/news/2013-07-s.....ution.html

   In Allaying Darwin’s Doubt, Two Cambrian Experts Still Come Up Short – October 16, 2015
   Excerpt: “A recent analysis of disparity in 98 metazoan clades through the Phanerozoic found a preponderance of clades with maximal disparity early in their history. Thus, whether or not taxonomic diversification slows down most studies of disparity reveal a pattern in which the early evolution of a clade defines the morphological boundaries of a group which are then filled in by subsequent diversification. This pattern is inconsistent with that expected of a classic adaptive radiation in which diversity and disparity should be coupled, at least during the early phase of the radiation.”
   – Doug Erwin
   What this admits is that disparity is a worse problem than evolutionists had realized: it’s ubiquitous (throughout the history of life on earth), not just in the Cambrian (Explosion).
   http://www.evolutionnews.org/2.....00111.html

   disparity
   [dih-spar-i-tee] noun, plural disparities.
   1. lack of similarity or equality; inequality; difference:

   “In virtually all cases a new taxon appears for the first time in the fossil record with most definitive features already present, and practically no known stem-group forms.”
   TS Kemp – Fossils and Evolution,– Curator of Zoological Collections, Oxford University, Oxford Uni Press, p246, 1999

   “What is missing are the many intermediate forms hypothesized by Darwin, and the continual divergence of major lineages into the morphospace between distinct adaptive types.”
   Robert L Carroll (born 1938) – vertebrate paleontologist who specialises in Paleozoic and Mesozoic amphibians
4. 4
   kairosfocus says:

   May 29, 2018 at 10:36 pm

   Folks, islands of configuration based functionally specific organisation at molecular level, and that in s-t-r-i-n-g structures. This underscores the challenge to bridge said islands and undermines continent of function or stepping stones claims. Remember, a sol system wide chance and necessity based blind needle in haystack search cannot plausibly create even 500 bits worth of fresh functionally specific complex organisation and associated information (FSCO/I). Contrary to the suggestion at 2, this utterly undermines gradualistic narratives that try to account for the tree of life on blind darwinist mechanisms. A short step in Hamming distance space is much more plausible pwe blind search than a large jump, where configuration based function is to be preserved. The presence of large leaps as this result implies points strongly to intelligently directed configuration, design. KF
5. 5
   kairosfocus says:

   May 29, 2018 at 10:44 pm

   PS: Recall, we don’t just have mitochondrial evidence but evidence of islands in AA sequence space, including that there are a lot of protein clusters that have few members and mark significant jumps between seemingly close neighbour species.
6. 6
   PaV says:

   May 30, 2018 at 11:08 am

   Ambly:

   Modern evolutionary biology doesn’t need selection to render divergent species distinct, but the idea is still very mainstream.

   What modern evolutionary biology needs, though, are intermediate forms in the fossil record. And they are not to be found.

   Origin of Species, Chapter 6:

   By my theory these allied species are descended from a common parent; and during the process of modification, each has become adapted to the conditions of life of its own region, and has supplanted and exterminated its original parent-form and all the transitional varieties between its past and present states. Hence we ought not to expect at the present time to meet with numerous transitional varieties in each region, though they must have existed there, and may be embedded there in a fossil condition.

   . . .Thus extinction and natural selection go hand in hand.

   . . . Lastly, looking not to any one time, but at all time, if my theory be true, numberless intermediate varieties, linking closely together all the species of the same group, must assuredly have existed; but the very process of natural selection constantly tends, as has been so often remarked, to exterminate the parent forms and the intermediate links. Consequently evidence of their former existence could be found only among fossil remains, which are preserved, as we shall attempt to show in a future chapter, in an extremely imperfect and intermittent record.

   Show me the intermediates, and I will change my mind about Darwinistic evolution.
7. 7
   Amblyrhynchus says:

   May 30, 2018 at 2:05 pm

   There are loads of transitionals. Archeopteryx, Tiktaalik, all those whales…
8. 8
   bornagain77 says:

   May 30, 2018 at 3:09 pm

   as to: “There are loads of transitionals. Archeopteryx, Tiktaalik, all those whales…”

   Like all the other supposed evidence for evolution, the only place these fossils are transitional is in your imagination.

   “The first and most complete fossil of archaeopteryx, found in 1855, was misidentified as a flying pterodacylus for 115 years. The newest finding, though, demonstrates that our understanding of even well-studied fossils like archaeopteryx — scrutinized, measured, modeled for 150 years — can still be upended.”
   Bye Bye Birdie: Famed Fossil Loses Avian Perch – Oct. 2009

   Huffington Post Author Invents Claims about Explore Evolution and Pop-Paleontology – Casey Luskin – September 4, 2012
   Excerpt: What Asher fails to tell his readers is that, despite his claims that fossils are found “in a sequence that broadly corresponds with the Tree of Life,” Archaeopteryx is found some 20+ million years earlier in the fossil record than its supposed dinosaurian ancestors.
   http://www.evolutionnews.org/2.....63871.html

   Scientists caught faking Dinosaur – bird fossil Archeopteryx (Stors Olson)
   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Iz7GResDtQ

   “The whole notion of feathered dinosaurs is a myth that has been created by ideologues bent on perpetuating the birds-are-dinosaurs theory in the face of all contrary evidence”
   Storrs Olson – curator of birds at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History

   More Fossil-Molecule Contradictions: Now Even the Errors Have Errors – Cornelius Hunter – June 2014
   Excerpt: a new massive (phylogenetic) study shows that not only is the problem (for Darwinist) worse than previously thought, but the errors increase with those species that are supposed to have evolved more recently.,,,
   “Our results suggest that, for Aves (Birds), discord between molecular divergence estimates and the fossil record is pervasive across clades and of consistently higher magnitude for younger clades.”
   http://darwins-god.blogspot.co.....s-now.html

   Podcast – Casey Luskin discusses the origin of birds on The Universe Next Door with Tom Woodward. A recent series of papers published in the journal Science presents evidence of the abrupt appearance of major bird groups. Listen in as Luskin explains how these findings support the theory of intelligent design. – 12/30/14
   http://www.discovery.org/multi.....for-birds/

   Bird Evolution vs. The Actual Evidence – video (11:42 minute mark)
   https://youtu.be/OZhtj06kmXY?t=704

   Faced with Uncooperative Data, Evolutionary Icthyologists Reverse the Predictions of Common Descent – Casey Luskin – December 30, 2014
   Excerpt: Neil Shubin and his team are at it again, suggesting that Tiktaalik was a fish with a “wrist.”,,,
   ,,,it was never established that fish with wrists or fish with digits existed in the first place. In fact, the Science Daily article acknowledges that living fish have no analogues to the bones of tetrapod limbs:
   “Initial attempts to confirm the link based on shape comparisons of fin and limb bones were unsuccessful.”,,,
   Ironically, the description of bones in living fish is also a very good description of the fin of Tiktaalik. See my post from 2008, “An ‘Ulnare’ and an ‘Intermedium’ a Wrist Do Not Make: A Response to Carl Zimmer.”
   Tiktaalik had no wrist, and in fact, there are no known living or fossil fish that have anything like a wrist or digits.,,,
   http://www.evolutionnews.org/2.....92401.html

   Whale Evolution vs. The Actual Evidence – video – fraudulent fossils revealed (11:40 minute mark)
   https://youtu.be/VSmO4nQ717U?t=699

   Whale Evolution vs. Population Genetics – Richard Sternberg and Paul Nelson
   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0csd3M4bc0Q
9. 9
   PaV says:

   May 30, 2018 at 4:25 pm

   Ambly:

   There are loads of transitionals. Archeopteryx, Tiktaalik, all those whales…

   I’m afraid if you believe this, you’ll believe anything.

   Darwin, of course, because of his gradualism, thought that the fossil record, in length and complexity, ‘before’ the Cambrian would be much like what we see ‘since’ the Cambrian.

   Darwin was wrong about that, too.

   If Darwin had been right about that, I would also have changed my perspective.
10. 10
    Amblyrhynchus says:

    May 30, 2018 at 4:39 pm

    If Darwin had been right about that, I would also have changed my perspective.

    I mean… I’ve only been here a little while and I can say with some confidence that you wouldn’t have.
11. 11
    bornagain77 says:

    May 30, 2018 at 5:11 pm

    The overall fossil record, despite the concerted effort of Darwinists to squeeze imaginary, even fraudulent, transitional fossils into it wherever they can, simply does not match up with Darwinian presuppositions:

    “The lack of ancestral or intermediate forms between fossil species is not a bizarre peculiarity of early metazoan history. Gaps are general and prevalent throughout the fossil record.”
    R.A. Raff and T.C. Kaufman, Embryos, Genes, and Evolution: The Developmental-Genetic Basis of Evolutionary Change (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1991), 34.

    “Species [in the strata of the Bighorn Basin of Wyoming] that were once thought to have turned into others have been found to overlap in time with these alleged descendants. In fact, the fossil record does not convincingly document a single transition from one species to another.”
    Steven M. Stanley, The New Evolutionary Timetable: Fossils, Genes, and the Origin of Species (New York: Basic Books, 1981), 95.

    “The fossil record itself provided no documentation of continuity – of gradual transition from one animal or plant to another of quite different form.”
    Steven M. Stanley, The New Evolutionary Timetable: Fossils, Genes, and the Origin of Species (New York: Basic Books, 1981), 40.

    “No one has found any such in-between creatures. This was long chalked up to ‘gaps’ in the fossil records, gaps that proponents of gradualism confidently expected to fill in someday when rock strata of the proper antiquity were eventually located. But all the fossil evidence to date has failed to turn up any such missing links . . . There is a growing conviction among many scientists that these transitional forms never existed.”
    Niles Eldredge, quoted in George Alexander, “Alternate Theory of Evolution Considered,” Los Angeles Times, November 19, 1978.

    “With the benefit of hindsight, it is amazing that paleontologists could have accepted gradual evolution as a universal pattern on the basis of a handful of supposedly well-documented lineages (e.g. Gryphaea, Micraster, Zaphrentis) none of which actually withstands close scrutiny.”
    Christopher R.C. Paul, “Patterns of Evolution and Extinction in Invertebrates,” K.C. Allen and D.E.G. Briggs, eds., Evolution and the Fossil Record (Washington, D.C., Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989), 105.

    “It must be significant that nearly all the evolutionary stories I learned as a student from Trueman’s Ostrea/Gryphaea to Carruthers’ Zaphrentis delanouei, have now been ‘debunked’. Similarly, my own experience of more than twenty years looking for evolutionary lineages among the Mesozoic Brachiopoda has proved them equally elusive.’
    Dr. Derek V. Ager (Department of Geology & Oceonography, University College, Swansea, UK), ‘The nature of the fossil record’. Proceedings of the Geologists’ Association, vol.87(2), 1976,p.132.

    “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.

    Problem 5: Abrupt Appearance of Species in the Fossil Record Does Not Support Darwinian Evolution – Casey Luskin January 29, 2015
    Excerpt: Rather than showing gradual Darwinian evolution, the history of life shows a pattern of explosions where new fossil forms come into existence without clear evolutionary precursors. Evolutionary anthropologist Jeffrey Schwartz summarizes the problem:
    “We are still in the dark about the origin of most major groups of organisms. They appear in the fossil record as Athena did from the head of Zeus — full-blown and raring to go, in contradiction to Darwin’s depiction of evolution as resulting from the gradual accumulation of countless infinitesimally minute variations. . .”98
    http://www.evolutionnews.org/2.....91141.html

    “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.”
    Paleontologist, Derek V. Ager, “The Nature of the Fossil Record,” 87 Proceedings of the British Geological Association 87 (1976): 133. (Department of Geology & Oceanography, University College, Swansea, UK)

    “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 – one of the most influential American Paleontologist of the 20th century

    “A major problem in proving the theory has been the fossil record; the imprints of vanished species preserved in the Earth’s geological formations. This record has never revealed traces of Darwin’s hypothetical intermediate variants – instead species appear and disappear abruptly, and this anomaly has fueled the creationist argument that each species was created by God.”
    Paleontologist, Mark Czarnecki

    “There is no need to apologize any longer for the poverty of the fossil record. In some ways, it has become almost unmanageably rich and discovery is outpacing integration. The fossil record nevertheless continues to be composed mainly of gaps.”
    T. Neville George – Professor of paleontology – Glasgow University,

    “Evolution requires intermediate forms between species and paleontology does not provide them.”
    David Kitts – Paleontologist – D.B. Kitts, Paleontology and Evolutionary Theory (1974), p. 467.

    “The long-term stasis, following a geologically abrupt origin, of most fossil morphospecies, has always been recognized by professional paleontologists” –
    Stephen Jay Gould – Harvard

    Given the fact of evolution, one would expect the fossils to document gradual steady change from ancestral forms to the descendants. But this is not what the paleontologist finds. Instead, he or she finds gaps in just about every phyletic series. New types often appear quite suddenly, and their intermediate ancestors are absent in the earlier geologic strata. The discovery of unbroken series of species changing gradually into descending species is very rare. Indeed the fossil record is one of discontinuities, seemingly documenting jumps (saltations) from one type of organism to a different type. This raises a puzzling question: Why does the fossil record fail to reflect the gradual change one would expect from evolution?
    Ernst Mayr, What Evolution Is (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 14 – Professor Emeritus, Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University

    “Now, after over 120 years of the most extensive and painstaking geological exploration of every continent and ocean bottom, the picture is infinitely more vivid and complete than it was in 1859. Formations have been discovered containing hundreds of billions of fossils and our museums now are filled with over 100 million fossils of 250,000 different species. The availability of this profusion of hard scientific data should permit objective investigators to determine if Darwin was on the right track. What is the picture which the fossils have given us? … The gaps between major groups of organisms have been growing even wider and more undeniable. They can no longer be ignored or rationalized away with appeals to imperfection of the fossil record.”
    Luther D. Sunderland, Darwin’s Enigma 1988, Fossils and Other Problems, 4th edition, Master Books, p. 9

    “The evidence we find in the geological record is not nearly as compatible with Darwinian natural selection as we would like it to be …. We now have a quarter of a million fossil species but the situation hasn’t changed much. The record of evolution is surprisingly jerky and, ironically, we have even fewer examples of evolutionary transition than in Darwin’s time … so Darwin’s problem has not been alleviated”.
    David Raup, Curator of Geology at Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History

    “In virtually all cases a new taxon appears for the first time in the fossil record with most definitive features already present, and practically no known stem-group forms.”
    Tom S. Kemp, Fossils and Evolution (New York; Oxford University Press, 1999), 246. – Curator of Zoological Collections

    “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 record certainly did not reveal gradual transformations of structure in the course of time. On the contrary, it showed that species generally remained constant throughout their history and were replaced quite suddenly by significantly different forms. New types or classes seemed to appear fully formed, with no sign of an evolutionary trend by which they could have emerged from an earlier type.”
    Peter Bowler, Evolution: The History of an Idea (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984), 187.

    “No wonder paleontologists shied away from evolution for so long. It seems never to happen. Assiduous collecting up cliff faces yields zigzags, minor oscillations, and the very occasional slight accumulation of change over millions of years, at a rate too slow to really account for all the prodigious change that has occurred in evolutionary history. When we do see the introduction of evolutionary novelty, it usually shows up with a bang, and often with no firm evidence that the organisms did not evolve elsewhere! Evolution cannot forever be going on someplace else. Yet that’s how the fossil record has struck many a forlorn paleontologist looking to learn something about evolution.”
    – Niles Eldredge , “Reinventing Darwin: The Great Evolutionary Debate,” 1996, p.95

    “Enthusiastic paleontologists in several countries have claimed pieces of this missing record, but the claims have all been disputed and in any case do not provide real connections. That brings me to the second most surprising feature of the fossil record…the abruptness of some of the major changes in the history of life.”
    Ager, D. – Author of “The Nature of the Stratigraphical Record”-1981

    “Gradualism is a concept I believe in, not just because of Darwin’s authority, but because my understanding of genetics seems to demand it. Yet Gould and the American Museum people [i.e., Eldredge] are hard to contradict when they say there are no transitional fossils. As a paleontologist myself, I am much occupied with the philosophical problems of identifying ancestral forms in the fossil record. You say that I should at least ‘show a photo of the fossil from which each type of organism was derived.’ I will lay it on the line – there is not one such fossil for which one could make a watertight argument.”
    Colin Patterson to Luther Sunderland, April 10, 1979, quoted in Luther .D. Sunderland, Darwin’s Enigma: Fossils and Other Problems, 4th ed. (El Cajon, CA: Master Book Publishers, 1988), 89.
12. 12
    bornagain77 says:

    May 30, 2018 at 5:19 pm

    Moreover, as far as empirical evidence itself is concerned, the reductive materialistic framework that undergirds Darwinian evolution is now, empirically, found to be grossly inadequate for explaining how any particular organism might achieve its basic form. Moreover, to state what should be glaringly obvious, since neo-Darwinian explanations are grossly inadequate in their attempts at explaining how any particular organism might achieve its basic form, then the imaginary neo-Darwinian speculations (just so stories) for how one type of organism might transform into another type of organism are based on pure fantasy and have no discernible experimental basis in reality.

    Darwinism vs Biological Form – video
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JyNzNPgjM4w

    i.e. Darwinism, since it is basically impervious to any empirical falsification no matter how devastating that falsification is, is not a science

    Sociobiology: The Art of Story Telling – Stephen Jay Gould – 1978 – New Scientist
    Excerpt: Rudyard Kipling asked how the leopard got its spots, the rhino its wrinkled skin. He called his answers “Just So stories”. When evolutionists study individual adaptations, when they try to explain form and behaviour by reconstructing history and assessing current utility, they also tell just so stories – and the agent is natural selection.
    Virtuosity in invention replaces testability as the criterion for acceptance.
    https://books.google.com/books?id=tRj7EyRFVqYC&pg=PA530

    Darwinian Evolution Fails the Five Standard Tests of a Scientific Hypothesis – video
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L7f_fyoPybw

    Darwinian Evolution: A Pseudoscience based on Unrestrained Imagination and Bad Liberal Theology – video
    https://youtu.be/KeDi6gUMQJQ

    Darwin’s Theory vs Falsification – video
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rzw0JkuKuQ
13. 13
    nkendall says:

    May 30, 2018 at 5:49 pm

    BA77, to your point…and more recently…

    Evolutionary biologist Eugene Koonin:

    “Major transitions in biological evolution show the same pattern of sudden emergence of diverse forms at a new level of complexity. …. The cases in point include the origin of complex RNA molecules and protein folds; major groups of viruses; archaea and bacteria, and the principal lineages within each of these prokaryotic domains; eukaryotic supergroups; and animal phyla. In each of these pivotal nexuses in life’s history, the principal “types” seem to appear rapidly and fully equipped with the signature features of the respective new level of biological organization. No intermediate “grades” or intermediate forms between different types are detectable.”

    That’s just about everything.

    Gradualism is nowhere to be found.
14. 14
    Allan Keith says:

    May 30, 2018 at 6:00 pm

    Why is it that atheists and evolutionists don’t link to YouTube videos, fringe conspiracy web sites, popular press books and Christian web sites to highlight our points? Are we missing a large source of science discourse?
15. 15
    bornagain77 says:

    May 30, 2018 at 6:58 pm

    AK, Like this heavily referenced to the primary literature “fringe” Creationist site?

    The Human Brain Is ‘Beyond Belief’ by Jeffrey P. Tomkins, Ph.D. * – 2017
    Excerpt: The human brain,, is an engineering marvel that evokes comments from researchers like “beyond anything they’d imagined, almost to the point of being beyond belief”1 and “a world we had never imagined.”2,,,
    Perfect Optimization
    The scientists found that at multiple hierarchical levels in the whole brain, nerve cell clusters (ganglion), and even at the individual cell level, the positioning of neural units achieved a goal that human engineers strive for but find difficult to achieve—the perfect minimizing of connection costs among all the system’s components.,,,
    Vast Computational Power
    Researchers discovered that a single synapse is like a computer’s microprocessor containing both memory-storage and information-processing features.,,, Just one synapse alone can contain about 1,000 molecular-scale microprocessor units acting in a quantum computing environment. An average healthy human brain contains some 200 billion nerve cells connected to one another through hundreds of trillions of synapses. To put this in perspective, one of the researchers revealed that the study’s results showed a single human brain has more information processing units than all the computers, routers, and Internet connections on Earth.1,,,
    Phenomenal Processing Speed
    the processing speed of the brain had been greatly underrated. In a new research study, scientists found the brain is 10 times more active than previously believed.6,7,,,
    The large number of dendritic spikes also means the brain has more than 100 times the computational capabilities than was previously believed.,,,
    Petabyte-Level Memory Capacity
    Our new measurements of the brain’s memory capacity increase conservative estimates by a factor of 10 to at least a petabyte, in the same ballpark as the World Wide Web.9,,,
    Optimal Energy Efficiency
    Stanford scientist who is helping develop computer brains for robots calculated that a computer processor functioning with the computational capacity of the human brain would require at least 10 megawatts to operate properly. This is comparable to the output of a small hydroelectric power plant. As amazing as it may seem, the human brain requires only about 10 watts to function.11 ,,,
    Multidimensional Processing
    It is as if the brain reacts to a stimulus by building then razing a tower of multi-dimensional blocks, starting with rods (1D), then planks (2D), then cubes (3D), and then more complex geometries with 4D, 5D, etc. The progression of activity through the brain resembles a multi-dimensional sandcastle that materializes out of the sand and then disintegrates.13
    He also said:
    We found a world that we had never imagined. There are tens of millions of these objects even in a small speck of the brain, up through seven dimensions. In some networks, we even found structures with up to eleven dimensions.13,,,
    Biophoton Brain Communication
    Neurons contain many light-sensitive molecules such as porphyrin rings, flavinic, pyridinic rings, lipid chromophores, and aromatic amino acids. Even the mitochondria machines that produce energy inside cells contain several different light-responsive molecules called chromophores. This research suggests that light channeled by filamentous cellular structures called microtubules plays an important role in helping to coordinate activities in different regions of the brain.,,,

    Moore, E. A. Human brain has more switches than all computers on Earth. CNET. Posted on cnet.com November 17, 2010, accessed July 7, 2017.
    Osborne, H. Brain Architecture: Scientists Discover 11 Dimensional Structures That Could Help Us Understand How the Brain Works. Newsweek. Posted on newseek.com June 12, 2017.
    Cherniak, C. 1994. Component Placement Optimization in the Brain. The Journal of Neuroscience. 14 (4): 2418-2427.
    The “save wire” principle involves the minimization of connections between a system’s interconnected parts in order to reduce costs.
    Micheva, K. D. et al. 2010. Single-Synapse Analysis of a Diverse Synapse Population: Proteomic Imaging Methods and Markers. Neuron. 68 (4): 639-653.
    Moore, J. J. et al. 2017. Dynamics of cortical dendritic membrane potential and spikes in freely behaving rats. Science. 355 (6331): eaaj1497.
    Gordon, D. Brain is 10 times more active than previously measured, UCLA researchers find. UCLA news release. Posted on newsroom.ucla.edu March 9, 2017.
    Bartol, T. M. et al. 2015. Nanoconnectomic upper bound on the variability of synaptic plasticity. eLife. 4: e10778.
    Memory Capacity of Brain Is 10 Times More Than Previously Thought. Salk News. Posted on salk.edu January 20, 2016.
    Herculano-Houzel, S. 2011. Scaling of Brain Metabolism with a Fixed Energy Budget per Neuron: Implications for Neuronal Activity, Plasticity and Evolution. PLOS One. 6 (3): e17514.
    Hsu, J. How Much Power Does The Human Brain Require To Operate? Popular Science. Posted on popsci.com November 6, 2009.
    Reimann, M. W. et al. 2017. Cliques of Neurons Bound into Cavities Provide a Missing Link between Structure and Function. Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience. 11 (48).
    Osborne, Brain Architecture: Scientists Discover 11 Dimensional Structures.
    Rahnama, M. et al. 2010. Emission of Mitochondrial Biophotons and their Effect on Electrical Activity of Membrane via Microtubules. Journal of Integrative Neuroscience. 10 (1): 65-88.
    The Puzzling Role of Biophotons in the Brain. MIT Technology Review. Posted on technologyreview.com December 17, 2010.
    https://www.icr.org/article/10186

    Might I suggest that anyone who believes that the ‘beyond belief’ human brain can be an accident is not playing with a full deck? Or is that just too much sanity for you to handle at one time AK?
16. 16
    Bob O'H says:

    May 31, 2018 at 1:51 am

    Allan Keith @ 14 – we do use YouTube videos too.
17. 17
    ET says:

    May 31, 2018 at 6:57 am

    Allan Keith:

    Why is it that atheists and evolutionists don’t link to YouTube videos, fringe conspiracy web sites, popular press books and Christian web sites to highlight our points?

    Because lying, bluffing and misrepresenting are much easier.

    Are we missing a large source of science discourse?

    You don’t care about science.
18. 18
    ET says:

    May 31, 2018 at 6:59 am

    There are loads of transitionals. Archeopteryx, Tiktaalik, all those whales…

    Those are alleged transitionals. And for whales there are thousands that are missing.

    No one knows if any amount of genetic change can take a population of swimming fish and produce Tiktaalik. And no one knows if any amount of genetic change can take Tiktaalik and produce tetrapods.
19. 19
    Mung says:

    May 31, 2018 at 7:15 am

    Allan Keith:

    Why is it that atheists and evolutionists don’t link to YouTube videos, fringe conspiracy web sites, popular press books and Christian web sites to highlight our points? Are we missing a large source of science discourse?

    I’m still waiting for you to tell us what law of physics would be violated by an object in orbit having its orbit reversed.

    Feel free to google any source you like.
20. 20
    Allan Keith says:

    May 31, 2018 at 9:20 am

    Mung,

    I’m still waiting for you to tell us what law of physics would be violated by an object in orbit having its orbit reversed.

    We weren’t talking about any old object. We were talking about the moon. And for the moon to reverse its orbit would require massive amounts of energy or a violation of these two laws:

    The law of gravitational attraction.
    The law of inertia/motion.

    To suddenly reverse orbit would tear the moon apart. To slowly change the orbit would result in it crashing into the earth. The only alternative would be for some beings to expend massive amounts of energy to slowly reverse the orbit while keeping the law of gravity from pulling the moon to earth. Remember what the original discussion was about. I said that I would have no problem inferring god should I wake up tomorrow and the moon had reversed its orbit. My inference could still be wrong, as the inference to design in biology is, but I would require other evidence (e.g., massive energy signature or the presence of aliens) to discard the inference to god.
21. 21
    aarceng says:

    May 31, 2018 at 9:20 am

    It is almost as if today’s “species” are descended from a smaller number of discrete “kinds”.
22. 22
    ET says:

    May 31, 2018 at 10:17 am

    Allan Keith:

    My inference could still be wrong, as the inference to design in biology is,…

    The inference to design in biology is strongly supported by the evidence and the methodology to differentiate between what nature, operating freely, produce vs. what it takes intelligent agencies to produce. In other words the inference to design in biology is strongly supported by our knowledge of cause and effect relationships.

    And to date there aren’t any other testable alternatives to the design inference in biology.
23. 23
    cmow says:

    May 31, 2018 at 10:31 am

    It is almost as if there were a (relatively recent) global catastrophe, like a flood, that acted as a genetic bottleneck.
24. 24
    PaV says:

    May 31, 2018 at 11:15 am

    AmblyRhyncus (or is it Blunt-Nose, as in a reference to Darwin?):

    I said this: Darwin, of course, because of his gradualism, thought that the fossil record, in length and complexity, ‘before’ the Cambrian would be much like what we see ‘since’ the Cambrian.

    To which you responded:

    I mean… I’ve only been here a little while and I can say with some confidence that you wouldn’t have.

    You seem to know a lot—even what’s going on in my mind.

    FYI, I have a degree in Zoology/Biology. I accepted Darwin’s theory for a long time. Then two things happened: I read parts of Origin of Species, specifically the chapter on “Difficulties on the Theory” and realized that all that Darwin expected would one day be found in the fossil record had, in fact never been found. Then I read Michael Denton’s book, “Evolution: A Theory in Crisis.” That, as you know, is a devastating critique of the theory.

    So, you are wrong. I would change my mind.

    And, let me go further: if we had found the “Silurian” (Darwin’s term for the period before the Cambrian) to be similar in many respects to what is documented “post-Cambrian”, I don’t think UncommonDescent would even exist today. The ID argument would be almost moot in the face of this evidence.

    But, of course, that’s not what we see. That’s not what has been found.

    So, I suspect it’s only because you don’t have good answers to what I’m pointing out as defects in Darwin’s theory—per Darwin!
25. 25
    Mung says:

    May 31, 2018 at 12:24 pm

    Allan Keith:

    We weren’t talking about any old object. We were talking about the moon.

    If it only applies to the moon then it’s not a law of physics. Laws of physics are general. So you made up a bogus test.
26. 26
    Allan Keith says:

    May 31, 2018 at 12:55 pm

    Mung,

    If it only applies to the moon then it’s not a law of physics. Laws of physics are general. So you made up a bogus test.

    Nonsense. I was asked what it would take for me to infer god from something I observed. I said that the moon suddenly reversing its orbit would probably do it. Something, surely, that is not beyond god’s capabilities.