After watching the film, reader Stephen Batzer kindly writes to reflect:
I’ve read some terrific books on fossils, new and old. Same problems, new and old books.
Peter Ungar’s book from 2010 Mammal Teeth: Origin, Evolution and Diversity is interesting:
The Origin(s) of Teeth – Most researchers believe that teeth first evolved from pharyngeal or skin structures resembling the placoid scales of sharks or rays…Evidence for the first teeth is equivocal, though they surely evolved as early experiments with vertebrate biomineralization … Regardless of when or where teeth first appeared … (p. 223)
So, as attorneys might ask me in a deposition, “The bottom line is, you just don’t know, do you?”
Ungar doesn’t know the mechanism of teeth origin or change. This is just about teeth and the guy (whom I’ve met, great guy) has spent his entire career on “food reduction.” No real knowledge of teeth origin, just description of progression in the fossil record.
Barbarah Stahl’s book, Vertebrate History: Problems in Evolution, is delightful. Phillip Johnson relied on it heavily, as you know.
If phyletic gradualism were “a thing” then we wouldn’t have “punctuated equilibrium” — the “get rich quick” scheme of evolution. That is why those buzz words were thought up, like, 50 years ago.
Of course there are always new fossil discoveries, but they tend to produce more questions than not. Think “Burgess Shale.”
One thing I always come back to is the “March of Progress” of horses. If we can’t get that one lineage figured out, the topic is hopeless. We have lots of horse fossils across multiple continents. What do we have? A dodge.
An arrangement of fossil horses is put in size order, and the reader is invited to “connect the dots.” However, as far as I know, no reputable anybody claims that the small horse to the left is the ancestral species to the marginally larger horse to the right. Remember, there is no genetic tree of life. If there isn’t, then there is no common ancestor. Full stop.
Schindewolf’s Basic Questions in Paleontology” is wonderful.
St. Mivart’s On the Genesis of Species is worth reading. It is, however, very much a product of its time.
Carroll’s book, Vertebrate Paleontology and Evolution, is an absolute delight.
So, we’ve had, plus or minus, two centuries of fossil studies. Right now we’re getting revolutionary findings that fundamentally change our understanding of the whole enterprise I call nonsense. An appeal to secret knowledge: “Yes, I can see how you could reach those conclusions by reading these antiquated and obsolete manuscripts, but if you were familiar with the current literature, etc.?
Pffft. Species don’t change substantially, and we know why, genetically. If they departed indefinitely from type, we could breed a dog into a cat. As Phil J queried, if we can’t do this using skill and persistence, what makes us think that blind natural processes can do it?
I’ll tell you what makes some people think this, their philosophical allegiance to naturalism. It’s nature or nature.
You may also wish to read: Science Uprising # 9: Unvarnished fossil record is bad news for Darwin. Fossils, we are told, demonstrate the Truth of Darwinism as the history of life. But that’s only if you don’t look too closely. Science Uprising #9 looks too closely.
As to teeth,
“At present, the problem of biological form remains unsolved” for Darwinists
There are several lines of empirical evidences that establish that biological form is forever beyond the scope of the reductive materialistic explanations of Darwinists. One of the empirical evidences that establish that biological form is forever beyond the scope of the reductive materialistic explanations of Darwinists is the following, “developing tooth buds were moved so that the incisors and the molars were switched. The tooth buds became the tooth appropriate to the switched location, not the original one, in direct contrast to what we would expect from a genecentric view.”
Of related note, since teeth are, by far, the most complete fossil evidence that we can have for testing the Darwinian claims for human origins,,,,
Since teeth are, by far, the most complete fossil evidence that we can have for testing the Darwinian claims for human origins, I consider the following study to be a fairly compelling piece of empirical evidence that undermines the entire Darwinian ‘narrative’ for human evolution.
Supplemental notes:
For folks interested in the actual state of research on the evolution of teeth without the predictively snarky ID editorializing, this podcast is outstanding: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0003zbg
Be forewarned, though, they talk about evolution….
ChuckyD, you do realize that your referenced site has Peter Ungar prominently cited do you not?
So ChuckyD, your site does absolutely nothing to refute what News quoted Ungar himself as saying.
News quoted Ungar precisely as saying, quote-unquote, “Evidence for the first teeth is equivocal,,,”.
And in case you are having trouble understanding exactly what the word ‘equivocal’ actually means,
Of course, I’m aware of the site’s content and reading list–I’m the one that referenced it. I’m also aware that Ungar is one of the most respected paleoanthropologists and evolutionary biologists in the business. Let me see if I have a grasp on the word “equivocal”: According to Bornagain, since chuckdarwin is a materialist, Darwinist, evolutionist, and, possibly atheist, evidence of his existence is equivocal. Or would it be certain–I get so confused…..
^^^^^^ Huh? what in the world does that have to do with overturning what Ungar himself stated about the origin of teeth??? “Evidence for the first teeth is equivocal,,,”.
Saying he is “one of the most respected paleoanthropologists and evolutionary biologists in the business” only accentuates his claim that “Evidence for the first teeth is equivocal,,,”. and does not detract away from it.
Moreover, it is not me who is claiming that your sense of self is a neuronal illusion, but it is the worldview of Darwinian materialism itself, (which you defend tooth and nail), that is claiming that. So don’t pretend as if I am the one making such an absurd claim. That patently absurd claim that you don’t actually exist as a real person is arising from Darwinian materialism itself!
To which the answer is, “No, we don’t know for certain and neither does anyone else but the hypothesis we have is the best fit to what little evidence there is. If you have anything better then bring it on.” That usually results in *crickets*.
Evolution can run both slow and fast, depending on circumstances. Darwin mentioned that about 100 years earlier.
A narrative which fits the fragmentary evidence we have is an hypothesis. Dodge is what intelligent design creationists do when challenged to come up with anything better.
Dogs and cats are thought to have split from a weasel-like common ancestor around 40 million years ago. You aren’t going to replicate that in a lab, not in just a couple of centuries. But if you can book lab-time for 40 million years, who knows what you might come up with.
“Skill and persistence” for how long? Decades? Centuries? Millennia? Can Phil J tell us if it has ever been given a fair trial?
What else is there that isn’t natural?
Bornagain77/3
That’s right. “Equivocal” meaning “uncertain” or “questionable in nature”. It doesn’t mean “wrong”, it means we don’t know for certain yet, like whole lot in science. If you want unfounded certainty then your religion is there to supply it for you.
;
Seversky.
When it is “brought on” you run from it at every turn. You refuse to engage. You have no response to the science behind the design inference. You have no response to the history of science behind the design inference.. You have no response to the reasoning that supports the design inference. You have a defensive blank stare as to how dynamics resulted in the quiescent descriptions that are fundamental to biology and open-ended potential. You have absolutely nothing. You have nothing at all. You have no-thing.
Total dishonesty on your part … demonstrated on there pages over and over and over again..
Sev @ 6… Your are just story telling… you are substantiating anything you said. Just another “just so” story. None of what you are saying is proven and maybe not even provable. it’s mythological.
Seversky at 7 states,
Yet Seversky is telling only part of the story. Although a thousand experiments establishing the validity of a theory is not enough to tell us with 100% absolute certainty that a scientific theory is unquestionably true or not, we can, none-the-less, know for 100% absolute certainty when a scientific theory is false. As Einstein explained,
And as Richard Feynman stated,
And please note that both Einstein’s General Relativity, and Feynman’s Quantum Electrodynamics (QED) are both confirmed to be true to almost absurd levels of precision, (confirmed to be true to 14 or so decimal places,,, confirmed to be true as far as current technology and measurement accuracy will allow!).
And as David Berlinski pointed out, Darwinian simply has nothing to offer in comparison with the experimental accuracy achieved in General Relativity and QED.
Shoot, as Robert Marks and company have demonstrated, Darwinian evolution doesn’t even have a realistic mathematical model to experimentally test against in the first place.
But regardless of the fact that Darwinism doesn’t even qualify as a hard and testable science in the first place, we still, via the principle of falsification, be absolutely 100% certain that Darwinian evolution is false.
In fact, the ‘potential’ ability of a theory to be falsified by experimentation is exactly why Popper’s falsification criteria is considered, by many, as the gold standard in science for judging whether a theory is even qualifies as a scientific theory or not.
And Darwinian evolution has been, as far as empirical science itself is concerned, falsified six ways from Sunday., (and thus we can, as Einstein himself explained, be absolutely 100% certain that Darwinian evolution is a false scientific theory)
Verse:
Of supplemental note: As to Intelligent Design (ID) and falsification, there is currently a 10 million dollar prize being offered for the first person who can falsify a primary claim of ID that only Intelligent minds can create the coded information that is necessary to explain life, and that it is, therefore, impossible for unguided material processes to ever create the coded information that is necessary to explain life.
To repeat David Berlinski, “What can Darwinian theory offer in comparison?”
Bornagain77 @10,
The answer to David Berlinksi’s question is “Plenty!”
Darwinists can
• Deny the functionality of “junk” DNA
• Mock proponents of Intelligent Design
• Promote the falsified concept of “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” (as in Hegel’s embryos)
• Ignore the spectacular falsification of more than one hundred so-called “vestigial organs”
• Suppress carbon dating of soft tissue found in dinosaur fossils
• Rationalize the discovery of numerous “living fossils”
• Deny hiring and tenure of professors that don’t adhere strictly to Darwinian orthodoxy
• Avoid investigation into trans-strata and out of place fossils
• Withhold non-Darwinian research grants
• Reject publication of non-Darwinian scientific papers
• Accept low-quality papers that promote Darwinian orthodoxy for publication
• Disinvite heretical researchers from attending or presenting at scientific conferences
I probably missed some, but this is a start.
-Q
My all time Berlinski favorite, just hilarious.
On the Derivation of Ulysses from Don Quixote
I imagine this story being told to me by Jorge Luis Borges one evening in a Buenos Aires cafe.
His voice dry and infinitely ironic, the aging, nearly blind literary master observes that “the Ulysses,” mistakenly attributed to the Irishman James Joyce, is in fact derived from “the Quixote.”
I raise my eyebrows.
Borges pauses to sip discreetly at the bitter coffee our waiter has placed in front of him, guiding his hands to the saucer.
“The details of the remarkable series of events in question may be found at the University of Leiden,” he says. “They were conveyed to me by the Freemason Alejandro Ferri in Montevideo.”
Borges wipes his thin lips with a linen handkerchief that he has withdrawn from his breast pocket.
“As you know,” he continues, “the original handwritten text of the Quixote was given to an order of French Cistercians in the autumn of 1576.”
I hold up my hand to signify to our waiter that no further service is needed.
“Curiously enough, for none of the brothers could read Spanish, the Order was charged by the Papal Nuncio, Hoyo dos Monterrey (a man of great refinement and implacable will), with the responsibility for copying the Quixote, the printing press having then gained no currency in the wilderness of what is now known as the department of Auvergne. Unable to speak or read Spanish, a language they not unreasonably detested, the brothers copied the Quixote over and over again, re-creating the text but, of course, compromising it as well, and so inadvertently discovering the true nature of authorship. Thus they created Fernando Lor’s Los Hombres d’Estado in 1585 by means of a singular series of copying errors, and then in 1654 Juan Luis Samorza’s remarkable epistolary novel Por Favor by the same means, and then in 1685, the errors having accumulated sufficiently to change Spanish into French, Moliere’s Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, their copying continuous and indefatigable, the work handed down from generation to generation as a sacred but secret trust, so that in time the brothers of the monastery, known only to members of the Bourbon house and, rumor has it, the Englishman and psychic Conan Doyle, copied into creation Stendhal’s The Red and the Black and Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, and then as a result of a particularly significant series of errors, in which French changed into Russian, Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Anna Karenina. Late in the last decade of the 19th century there suddenly emerged, in English, Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, and then the brothers, their numbers reduced by an infectious disease of mysterious origin, finally copied the Ulysses into creation in 1902, the manuscript lying neglected for almost thirteen years and then mysteriously making its way to Paris in 1915, just months before the British attack on the Somme, a circumstance whose significance remains to be determined.”
I sit there, amazed at what Borges has recounted. “Is it your understanding, then,” I ask, “that every novel in the West was created in this way?”
“Of course,” replies Borges imperturbably. Then he adds: “Although every novel is derived directly from another novel, there is really only one novel, the Quixote.”
Vivid
‘evolution’ of teeth
the same with bones / skeleton …
They just don’t know … not a single evidence of how skeleton/ bones evolved …
Querius as to your list at 11 answering “What can Darwinian theory offer in comparison?”, if I might add one more thing to your list,
*Unimaginable Horror and Misery
This OP is about the DNA model which nearly everyone at ID and evolutionary biology is fixated on. Why not follow the science and spend time looking for what had to be necessary for a macro evolution event to happen.
Even the dog/cat scenario would require more than just creating/removing alleles. In other words the difference between two species is much more than a DNA exchange or a DNA addition.
What is it?
It is human arrogance to use human lifespan as the sole means of determining how long it takes for a species to evolve, if evolution occurs, which has never been witnessed by anyone.
There were no rats in the Americas until Europeans brought them on ships. They have since flooded both continents. Due to their shot life spans, millions of years have passed for them without a single genetic change to show any rat, no matter how distantly removed from Europe, to be anything other than a rat.
@vividbleau
Thanks for that, I heard of it, but without knowing it was Berlinski, I couldn’t find the quote.
Thanks again.
Querius/11
The answer is a theory, which even some ID proponents have conceded they do not have.
Most of it is genetic debris and not even ENCODE has been able to prove otherwise. They just used a somewhat elastic definition of “function”
Pot, kettle, black.
It was Haeckel and his theory was rejected a long time ago.
Really? Such as?
Really? You know about it. I’ve read about it. How is it being suppressed?
How is that wrong? I thought you were all in favor of rationality.
If by “Darwinian orthodoxy” you mean panadaptationism, there are plenty of biologists who are pluralists.
How would we know of “trans-strata and out of place fossils” if they weren’t being investigated?
You have evidence of research grants being withheld specifically because the applicants held “non-Darwinian” views?
You have evidence of scientific papers that were rejected only because the authors endorsed “non-Darwinian” views?
Examples?
Here, at least, we agree. Holding unorthodox or even “heretical’ views should not be a reason to disinvite researchers to scientific conferences.
As for the rest, it’s standard conspiracy-theorizing. Explain everything you don’t like as the result of some secret but enormously powerful cabal of Darwinists or Marxists or socialists or Jews or Islamists or Satanists or cannibalistic pedophiles or reptilians or alien shape-shifters or any other group you can stereotype as the “bad guys”.
Personally, if I were inclined to conspiracy theorizing – which I’m not – I would be pointing towards Christian Dominionists or Reconstructionists who would love to establish the Christian equivalent of an Islamic theocracy here in the United States. It’s just as likely as some of the QAnonsense that passes for rational thought I some quarters.
Seversky claims that Darwinism is a scientific theory and that Intelligent Design is not.
Yet, Seversky, the fact of the matter is that you wouldn’t know a scientific theory if it bit you on the rear end!
Imre Lakatos, who was considered one of the top three philosophers of science in the 20th century,
,,, Imre Lakatos, who was considered one of the top three philosophers of science in the 20th century, stated that “nobody to date has yet found a demarcation criterion according to which Darwin can be described as scientific,”
And as Wikipedia itself, (certainly no friend of Intelligent Design), noted, “20 years after Lakatos’s 1973 challenge to the scientificity of Darwin,,, Helena Cronin, attempted to establish that Darwinian theory was empirically scientific… She wrote that “our usual idea of corroboration as requiring the successful prediction of novel facts…Darwinian theory was not strong on temporally novel predictions.” …
In short, Lakatos, when he stated that, “nobody to date has yet found a demarcation criterion according to which Darwin can be described as scientific” was basically claiming that Darwinian evolution did not have a ‘hard core’
And the reason that Darwinian evolution does not have a scientific ‘hard core’ is simply because Darwinian evolution has no mathematical model to test against. As Dr. Robert Marks states “Hard sciences are built on foundations of mathematics or definitive simulations. ,,, there exists no model successfully describing undirected Darwinian evolution. According to our current understanding, there never will be.,,,”
And the primary reason why nobody has ever been able to build a realistic mathematical model of Darwinian evolution for us to test against is simply because there is no ‘law of evolution’ within the known physical universe for mathematicians and physicists to ever build a realistic mathematical model upon:
As Ernst Mayr himself conceded, “In biology, as several other people have shown, and I totally agree with them, there are no natural laws in biology corresponding to the natural laws of the physical sciences.”
In the following article, Roger Highfield makes much the same observation that Ernst Mayr did and states, ,,, “Whatever the case, those universal truths—’laws’—that physicists and chemists all rely upon appear relatively absent from biology.”
Professor Murray Eden of MIT, in a paper entitled “Inadequacies of Neo-Darwinian Evolution as a Scientific Theory” stated that “the randomness postulate is highly implausible and that an adequate scientific theory of evolution must await the discovery and elucidation of new natural laws—physical, physico-chemical, and biological.”
Despite Darwinists constantly speaking as if their theory is on par with, say, general relativity, there simply is no physical and/or natural ‘law of evolution’ within the known universe that we can possibly measure in laboratory, (and thus provide a foundation for Darwinists to ever build a realistic mathematical model upon),,,
As Brian Miller recently noted, “To fully comprehend the critique, one simply needs to imagine attempting to craft an evolutionary barometer that measures the selection pressure driving one organism to transform into something different (e.g., fish into an amphibian). The fact that no such instrument could be constructed highlights the fictitious nature of such mystical forces”
Moreover, the second law of thermodynamics, entropy, a law with great mathematical explanatory power in science directly, or almost directly, contradicts the primary Darwinian claim that greater and greater levels of functional complexity can easily be had and/or ‘naturally selected’ for over long periods of time. Indeed, entropy’s main claim is that, over long periods of time, everything in the universe will eventually decay into simpler and simpler states until what is termed thermodynamic equilibrium is finally reached.
This is not a minor problem for Darwinists. As Eddington himself explained, “if your theory is found to be against the Second Law of Thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it to collapse in deepest humiliation.”
And whereas Darwinian evolution has no known law of nature to appeal to so as to build a realistic mathematical model and establish itself as a proper, testable, ‘hard’ science, Intelligent Design does not suffer from such an embarrassing disconnect from physical reality. In other words, Intelligent Design can appeal directly to ‘the laws of conservation of information’ (Dembski, Marks, etc..) in order to establish itself as a proper, testable, and rigorous ‘hard’ science.
In fact, as pointed out previously at post 10 in this thread, there is a 10 million dollar prize being offered for the first person who can falsify the theory of Intelligent Design,
To repeat David Berlinski, “What can Darwinian theory (possibly) offer in comparison?”
So thus in conclusion, and directly contrary to Seversky’s claim that Darwinism is a scientific theory, the fact of the matter is that Darwinian evolution does not even qualify as a ‘hard science’ in the first place in that “nobody to date has yet found a demarcation criterion according to which Darwin can be described as scientific”. And the primary reason why nobody has, or ever will, find a “demarcation criterion according to which Darwin can be described as scientific” is simply because there is no natural and/or physical law in the known physical universe for Darwinists to ever build a realistic mathematical model upon.
In short, Darwin’s theory, for all intents and purposes, is built entirely upon the imaginations of men, and is not, unlike every other ‘hard’ scientific theory, built upon a rigorous mathematical framework that is based on some known physical law of the universe.
Verse:
seversky is either a liar or just willfully ignorant. Perhaps both. There isn’t any scientific theory of evolution.
seversky:
No one has been able to demonstrate that. No one.
Clueless. There isn’t any naturalistic mechanism capable of producing eukaryotes given starting populations of prokaryotes. That also means there isn’t any naturalistic mechanism capable of producing metazoans. You have nothing but your lies and ignorance.
Good luck with that.
Earth to chuckdarwin- there isn’t any naturalistic mechanism capable of producing eukaryotes or metazoans. Your alleged “research” is pure lies.
ET: There isn’t any naturalistic mechanism capable of producing eukaryotes given starting populations of prokaryotes.
So, you find the possible explanations insufficient. What, in particular, do you think is wrong with those possibilities?
ET is so ragged at me he is now ascribing other people’s posts/ideas to me…. 😉
What, in particular, do you think is right with those possibilities?