But in the current mess, how would we know? From Noah K.Whiteman at BigQuestionsOnline:
Counting the number of herbivorous insect species that scientists have identified reveals a remarkable possibility: insects that feed on living plants may be the most species-rich group of organisms ever to have evolved in the history of life on the planet. This includes extinct lineages such as the Palaeodictyoptera — among the first herbivorous insects to have evolved. Only unnamed microbes might be more diverse (although this hypothesis is controversial). Parents in some future colony on Mars could someday read to their children the bedtime story The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle and with that story illustrate the essential nature of the two most diverse life forms on our planet: herbivorous insects and flowering plants.
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Chemical coevolution between plants and herbivorous insects has produced not only a vast range of drugs that have been exploited by humans for millennia but also a profusion of species. This, then, may help us understand how plants and the insects that eat them — which constitute most species of life on earth — evolved. Modern genomics, coupled with classic evolutionary theory and natural history observations allow us to see how this process unfolds.More.
The article sounds like a Darwinian time warp. We don’t hear of the many problems about how a species is even determined, let alone about how hybridization and horizontal gene transfer fuzz the picture. Are there really one thousand “species” of cichlid in Lake Malawi?
Why are there so many species? Well, first thing, maybe there aren’t. One problem is that speciation has a meaning for Darwinians (or neo-Darwinians or whatever) that it lacks for others. It allegedly demonstrates that Darwinism (natural selection acting on random mutation) all by itself produces thousands of distinct new species. So the concept must be maintained even when, not only is the evidence contrary, but the idea, as they propound it, it has largely ceased to cohere or make any sense.
Until we know how much reversible plasticity there is in genomes, we can’t know how many species there are. But we can have biologists trading numbers around with no serious science basis.
By the way, The Very Hungry Caterpillar is a great board book for small kids (three years?). They tend to “get” that the caterpillar is eating its way through the book.
See also: Twice as many bird species in the world as formerly thought? Have the species’ ability to hybridize and produce fertile offspring been tested? One asks because, in general, the concept of speciation is currently a mess.
and
Nothing says “Darwin snob” like indifference to the mess that the entire concept of speciation is in
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So… FWIW, no one thinks that “Darwinism (natural selection acting on random mutation) all by itself produces thousands of distinct new species”. Joe Felesenstein and others showed that we recombination will undue selection too rapidly for this to work. The more interesting question is undertanding the conditions under which selection can contribute to speciation.
As to the “mess”? Species are a mess, so any scientific approach to understanding them is going to be messy. Unless you have a sure-fire way to delmit them? N
wd400 at 1: No “surefire way to delmit them” can be envisioned until the issues are seriously on the table. The Royal Society chickening out on a number of basic issues around how evolution happens means many absurd statements around speciation to come.
I’m sorry, but this is not an answer. Is there a surefire way we are missing? If not, which issues that we currently ignore are preventing us from finding it?
wd400 states:
To basically restate, and expand upon, exactly what I said to Bob O’H yesterday:
Stop trying to fit everything into a Darwinian narrative would be a huge step in the right direction.
Gradual evolution would expect a smooth blending of defining characteristics which would ruin any objective nested hierarchy, i.e. ruin any attempt to ‘classify individuals into species cleanly’.
In fact, besides the attempted classification of life forms into distinct types being directly contrary to the ‘smooth blending of defining characteristics’ that we would expect from the gradual ‘bottom up’ Darwinian scenario, the fossil record itself reveal a ‘top down’ pattern. A ‘top down’ pattern of sudden appearance of distinct ‘kinds’ and then rapid variation from that distinct kind, then followed by long term stasis, with never a complete departure from the basic form of that distinct kind.
, as Dr. Wells points out in the preceding video, Darwin predicted that minor differences (diversity) between species would gradually appear first and then the differences would grow larger (disparity) between species as time went on. i.e. universal common descent as depicted in Darwin’s tree of life. What Darwin predicted should be familiar to everyone and is easily represented in the following graph.,,,
But that ‘tree pattern’ that Darwin predicted is not what is found in the fossil record. The fossil record reveals that disparity (the greatest differences) precedes diversity (the smaller differences), which is the exact opposite pattern for what Darwin’s theory predicted.
As Valentine hinted at, there are ‘yawning chasms’ in the ‘morphological space’ between the phyla which suddenly appeared in the Cambrian Explosion,,,
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 also found throughout the fossil record subsequent to the Cambrian explosion as well.
Simply put, there is no ‘smooth blending of defining characteristics’ as would be predicted on Darwinian presuppositions but a sudden appearance of distinct kinds as would be predicted on the Biblical perspective.
Dr. Arthur Jones, who did his Ph.D. thesis in biology on cichlids, (fish), comments on the distinctiveness of ‘kind’
Moreover, cichlid speciation is attributed to the ‘inbuilt’ ‘phenotypic plasticity’ of the organism. The variation of cichlid’s is not the result of any new information being added to the organism via Darwinian processes:
Wolf-Ekkehard Lönnig, retired director of Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding, elucidates to correct, non-Darwinian, pattern of speciation in the following article
Moreover, if I were to use genetic evidence to try to demarcate organisms into distinct entities, I would use developmental Gene Regulatory Networks, and/or alternative splicing patterns, to accomplish my demarcation of organisms.
Whilst genes can be ‘surprisingly similar’ for widely different species,,,
Whilst genes can be ‘surprisingly similar’ for widely different species, developmental Gene Regulatory Networks, and/or alternative splicing patterns in particular, are found to be vastly different between even supposedly closely related species:
Just how vastly different the alternative splicing patterns are between different species is highlighted in the following article:
A little reminder as to the ‘strikingly different interaction profiles for proteins that act as if encoded by distinct genes’, Behe’s limit for generating just 2 new protein-protein binding sites by Darwinian processes is 1 in 10^40,
In further note to developmental gene regulatory networks, if a dGRN (developmental gene regulatory network) subcircuit is interrupted the consequences are ‘always catastrophically bad’,,,
Needless to say, since Darwinian evolution presupposes the unlimited plasticity of organisms, then the finding of inflexible, yet radically different, alternative splicing patterns, (i.e. developmental gene regulatory networks), and protein interaction networks between even supposedly closely related species is exactly the opposite finding for what would have been predicted by Darwinists.
If Darwinian evolution were a normal science that was subject to rigorous testing, instead of being a unfalsifiable pseudo-science that relies on an almost endless litany of ‘just so stories’ to cover up embarrassing and persistent empirical shortcomings, this finding, by itself, should have been more than enough to falsify neo-Darwinian claims.
Verse:
great stuff, born again……..it’s clear that evolutionists have flipped reality upside down and passed it off as “science.” Biological changes over time are just evidence that individual organisms have a suite of adaptive, nonrandom mechanisms that spring into action and allow them to survive/reproduce better when the need arises. The “bottom up” story whereby random/haphazard/fortuitous mutations plus selection adapt and then build populations over millions of years is nothing short of the biggest intellectual scam of all time. To think about how many millions of people have been lied to and duped over the decades by the leftist scientific community can only leave one dumbstruck.
And here’s something else: if you take mutations (alterations in the base code) out of the equation on the micro, (replaced by plasticity, epigenetics or whatever else) then suddenly the darwinists have no explanation for the buildup of the genome. The two must go hand in hand; genetics and morphology must both climb “Mount Improbable” together…. But if the vast majority of adaptive morphological changes in nature are decoupled from random mutations (plus selection), then suddenly today’s genomes have no explanation as to how they got built up.
These two top-down arguments (one regarding the fossil record, the other regarding the nature of adaptive changes) are devastating to the evolutionists’ science — and worldview as a whole.
tommy hall, here is another ‘top down’ feature of organisms you may appreciate.
The reason why ’4-Dimensional’ quarter power scaling laws are impossible for Darwinian evolution to explain is that Natural Selection operates at the 3-Dimensional level of the organism and the ’4-Dimensional’ quarter power scaling law are simply ‘invisible’ to natural selection. The reason why 4-Dimensional things are, for all practical purposes, completely invisible to 3-Dimensional things is best illustrated by ‘flatland’:
The second part of this following video, at the 10:08 minute mark, also covers quarter power scaling
Moreover, there is also another ‘top down’ argument that is devastating to the atheist’s worldview as a whole.
Both General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics are built upon what can be termed ‘top down’, i.e. higher dimensional’, mathematics:
Specifically, the state-space of quantum mechanics is an infinite-dimensional function space. Some physical theories are also by nature high-dimensional, such as the 4-dimensional general relativity.
Not so surprisingly, it was two Christians who originally laid down the basis for the ‘higher dimensional’ mathematics that eventually enabled Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity to be formulated
The ‘top down’, higher dimensional, nature of Quantum Mechanics is weird enough so that I don’t really have to point out its many bizarre features, yet the 4 Dimensional space-time of nature General Relativity has one particularly bizarre feature that many people do not fully realize yet.
From a 3-dimensional (3D) perspective, any particular 3D spot in the universe is to be considered just as ‘center of the universe’ as any other particular spot in the universe is to be considered ‘center of the universe’. This centrality found for any 3D place in the universe is because the universe is a 4D expanding hypersphere, analogous in 3D to the surface of an expanding balloon. All points on the surface are moving away from each other, and every point can be considered central to the expansion, if that’s where you live.
Thus, all in all, the Christian Theist, as far as the science itself is concerned, is sitting very pretty in his belief that God created the universe and all life on earth
Verse:
Baraminology by Todd Elder and other references and observations in RCCF – The Recent Complex Creation Framework help shed light on how many base ‘Min’ there are
Pearlman – can you give some link to this? I’m afraid I don’t understand what you mean by “base ‘Min’”.