More fuel to the Psychoreligionology fire

[maurile]

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So in any or all of these citations was an event such as a monkey becoming a man observed?

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"Such as"? Speciation has been observed, yes.

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But has say, a monkey giving birth to a [censored]-sapien been shown somewhere?

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If a monkey ever gave birth to a human, that would falsify current evolutionary theory. That's what makes evolution science: it is falsifiable.

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I'm not a creationist, but I do wonder how an evolutionist explains hoping over the specied divide.

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Speciation has been directly observed. There's no hoping; it's reality.

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I'm defining "species" here as meaning two of them can mate and have children.

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Yes, that's the standard definition.

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But consider hypothetically... we have a population of a so many monkeys that can breed.... one of them has mutation.... the first [censored]-sapien.... was it a male or female? Or more importantly, was a member of the other sex of that species also spawned somewhere? And how were they lucky enough to find each other and have spawn the third [censored]-sapien etc?

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This paragraph shows a total lack of understanding of evolutionary theory. There's nothing wrong with being completely ignorant about a subject; I'm completely ignorant about a lot of subjects, myself. If you're interested in learning a bit about biology, I can recommend some highly readable and interesting books to you. But I'm not going to write a whole book in this thread.

[IronUnkind]

"But when it comes to observable phenomena in the physical domain, science is the best tool we have. The best tool we have says that evolution is a fact. I'll take their word for it."

Though I tend to agree with you, the level of discourse obscures the complexity of the issue. In much the same way as the "hippies" served to undermine the anti-war movement by conflating social issues with the ancillary values of a counterculture, "creationists" have derailed their own cause by polarizing the debate.

Creationists have actually raised some provocative questions which present a real challenge to SOME aspects of evolutionary theory, but because they tend to see Evolution as some kind of monolithic satanic conspiracy, they never allow productive intercourse to develop (fundamentalists tend to distrust intercourse as a general rule).

Like the hippies, creationists present themselves so cartoonishly, and draw such wild, sweeping conclusions that most people, like you, dismiss their claims out of hand. In truth, though, they raise some interesting points, and it is possible for a responsible critic to separate wheat from chaff. But labeling them "religious nuts" is so much more expedient.

Part of me suspects that you know very little of evolutionary theory and that you've decided to take the scientific community at their word because, after all, they're "really smart." I concede that I may be dead wrong on this point, but if this is the case, is "trusting science" much different than believing everything your pastor says simply because he's "God's anointed servant?"

[maurile]

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Creationists have actually raised some provocative questions which present a real challenge to SOME aspects of evolutionary theory

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No they haven't.

Creationists have not gotten a single article raising any doubts whatseover about evolution published in any peer-reviewed journal.

Sorry if you don't like that.

[IronUnkind]

"I wonder what the 3600 A.D. version will look like? "

Laser guns, flying cars, metallic-silver onesies...you know, the future.

[NaobisDad]

I'm interested in this. And you seem to be well read into the subject.

Can you clarify a couple of things for me?

An argument you hear a lot is that of complex systems that could not have evolved because they only operate with all parts in tact.

Another is that instead of gradual change a boom of species is observed. That is, a great deal of new species have been found in a time period too short for evolution to explain.

What is known about these arguments and how false or correct are they?


Edit: Before this converstation continues with the wrong impression. In my earlier post I posted the arguments I encountered in discussion as being my own. I figured it a good way to find some one fully literate on the subject, that can provide me with the status quo on these points. Seems I have.
I'm a psycholoist, and eager to learn more on the topic

[MaxPower]

Many years ago I read a number of books by Stephen Jay Gould. He discusses all of these issues, but I can't remember exactly what he said.

I recommend his books. They are very readable and entertaining for non-experts.

[maurile]

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An argument you hear a lot is that of complex systems that could not have evolved because they only operate with all parts in tact.

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Yes, the "irreducible complexity" argument. It's been around in different incarnations ("What good is half an eye?") since Darwin's time. The modern version is presented in Michael Behe's book, Darwin's Black Box. (See Kenneth Miller's review here.)

There are two types of systems that Behe claims may be irreducibly complex:

1. A system involving two parts, A and B, in which Part A is useless without Part B, and Part B is useless without Part A.

2. A system involving multiple parts where all parts are required to do the overall job, so an incomplete system would provide no advantage.

Both types of systems, however, have evolved many times. The first type generally involves a type of scaffolding. Think of a Roman Arch as a metaphor: the right side of an arch won't stay up without the left side in place, and the left side of an arch won't stay up without the right side in place. So how can an arch ever be built in a step-by-step fashion? The answer is that the left side of the arch wasn't always supported by the right side: it was originally supported by scaffolding that has since become obsolete (now that the right side of the arch is there) and has been taken down.

For a biological example, consider the blood-clotting cascade. Behe claimed it to be an irreducibly complex system, but he was wrong.

The second type of system -- with many indispensible interrelated parts -- generally arises where the individual subcomponents had previously been built and used for other purposes, but have been coopted for a new function.

An example is the origination of the bacterial flagellum. Says Behe: "The flagellum is quite literally an outboard motor that some bacteria use to swim. It is a rotary device that, like a motorboat, turns a propeller to push against liquid, moving the bacterium forward in the process. It consists of a number of parts, including a long tail that acts as a propeller, the hook region, which attaches the propeller to the drive shaft, the motor, which uses a flow of acid from the outside of the bacterium to the inside to power the turning, a stator, which keeps the structure stationary in the plane of the membrane while the propeller turns, and bushing material to allow the drive shaft to poke up through the bacterial membrane. In the absence of the hook, or the motor, or the propeller, or the drive shaft, or most of the forty different types of proteins that genetic studies have shown to be necessary for the activity or construction of the flagellum, one does not get a flagellum that spins half as fast as it used to, or a quarter as fast. Either the flagellum does not work, or it does not even get constructed in the cell. Like a mousetrap, the flagellum is irreducibly complex. And again like the mousetrap, its evolutionary development by 'numerous, successive, slight modifications' is quite difficult to envision. In fact, if one examines the scientific literature, one quickly sees that no one has ever proposed a serious, detailed model for how the flagellum might have arisen in a Darwinian manner, let alone conducted experiments to test such a model. Thus in a flagellum we seem to have a serious candidate to meet Darwin's criterion. We have a system that seems very unlikely to have been produced by 'numerous, successive, slight modifications'."

Here is a serious, detailed model for how the flagellum might have arisen in a Darwinian manner.

For a full catalogue of arguments on the "irreducible complexity" topic, go here.

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Another is that instead of gradual change a boom of species is observed. That is, a great deal of new species have been found in a time period too short for evolution to explain.

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I'm not sure what you're referring to here. Stephen Jay Gould is known for coining the term "punctuated equilibria" in reference to the idea that evolution tends to occur in a herky-jerky manner instead of a very smooth, gradual manner: that it is a staircase instead of a ramp. (Many biologists believe that Gould is given undue credit for this notion, as it was already generally accepted before Gould gave it a catchy name.)

But the "rapid" bursts of evolutionary activity were rapid only in relative terms -- they still spanned over millions of years. Is the Cambrian explosion what you're referring to? It fits perfectly well within the timeframes posited by current evolutionary theory.

[maurile]

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Many years ago I read a number of books by Stephen Jay Gould. He discusses all of these issues, but I can't remember exactly what he said.

I recommend his books. They are very readable and entertaining for non-experts.

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I agree that Gould's books are very readable. I've enjoyed many of them. Just be careful not to take everything he says at face value.

"Because of the excellence of his essays, he has come to be seen by non-biologists as the preeminent evolutionary theorist. In contrast, the evolutionary biologists with whom I have discussed his work tend to see him as a man whose ideas are so confused as to be hardly worth bothering with, but as one who should not be publicly criticized because he is at least on our side against the creationists." -- John Maynard Smith

"But I eventually came to realize that working biologists regard Gould much the same way that economists regard Robert Reich: talented writer, too bad he never gets anything right." -- Paul Krugman

"Indeed, although Gould characterizes his critics as "anonymous" and "a tiny coterie," nearly every major evolutionary biologist of our era has weighed in in a vain attempt to correct the tangle of confusions that the higher profile Gould has inundated the intellectual world with." -- John Tooby and Leda Cosmides

[Jedi Flopper]

I have a question for anyone well versed in evolutionary theory. How did organisms move from asexual reproduction to sexual reproduction?

[CrisBrown]

Hi Jedi,

Chocolate and flowers. [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

Cris