Thanks Flabbergasted,
On the NDT and link to the discussion you had with nonhocapito (I fully agree with and admire his eloquence in saying exactly that); you find in me a partner if you want to fight specifically the idea that “
random mutations” are the
driving force of evolution, as I think
environmental factors, so well explained by nonho,
do contribute much more to the selection of genes to pass on., see for more below.
As promised links to the info in the last post, I cannot edit it anymore:
Evolution behaves incremental; in steps. And if Gaia has 1 thing (and we humans do not), it is time. To imagine the millions of years I grant is for the average person very difficult. But millions of years and billions of generations for the simpler species in a timeframe of ~4.4 Ga (even!) to ~3.5/3.7 Ga (first life) should be enough to do the job.
Wankerpedia
Possibly the progenitor of cellular life
The similarities between DNA sequences of thermoacidophiles, and other Archaea, and complex eukaryotes provides support to Archaea being the progenitor Domain for the first cellular life on Earth. They were able to thrive on the early, warmer Earth with an atmosphere that lacked oxygen.
Archaea
Scientific evidence suggests that life began on Earth at least 3.5 billion years ago. The earliest evidences for life on Earth are graphite found to be biogenic in 3.7 billion-year-old metasedimentary rocks discovered in Western Greenland and microbial mat fossils found in 3.48 billion-year-old sandstone discovered in Western Australia.
Oldest terrestrial material
The oldest material of terrestrial origin that has been dated is a zircon mineral of
4.404 ± 0.008 Ga enclosed in a metamorphosed sandstone conglomerate in the Jack Hills of the Narryer Gneiss Terrane of Western Australia. The 4.404 ± 0.008 Ga zircon is a slight outlier, with the oldest consistently-dated zircon falling closer to 4.35 Ga.
I agree with people who criticise
a view within the "evolutionist" thinkers who say it can only be natural selection. I see environmental factors and triggers as the main driver for evolution. Like adapting ourselves to emergency situations and evolve new ideas under healthy pressure in the present.
but the simplest of living cells is so complex that the probabilities of its coming into existence by chance cannot be expressed in meaningful figures.
The simplest of living cells is a cell which developed ~3.5 Ga (that is 3,500,000,000 years!) after the analysed first living cell. How can you compare the two?
And not by chance. That is a misunderstanding of the process. By environmental factors, triggers. In this "soup" of the Precambrian period any trigger may have spawned the process of abiogenesis. Lightning? Meteorites containing alien life? Magnetism? Chemical processes in the strange volcanic worlds of the time? A combination of all these and unknown factors? We will never know and can only speculate.
Let me react to your post. Not point by point, but in general. One interesting analogue I'd like to react to:
Flabbergasted wrote:You are right that these and other terms need to be defined. The list I posted was meant as a handy summary so I did not discuss definitions. “Greater” refers to biological systems of greater anatomical and/or physiological complexity, as a consequence of qualitative differences in the genome. In the same sense that a sonnet by Shakespeare is qualitatively “greater” than a phone number scribbled on a slip of paper.
What is "greater" in this sense? Let's say you are starving to death and you have the choice between a rabbit (a highly developed mammal) or some bacteria which you need to get your digestive system back on track. You instinctively might choose the rabbit and may die because you cannot digest it. Or you may choose the "lesser" (by far) bacteria which has a
specialised (evolved) characteristic...
To stay within your analogue: if I'm in a fire or any other emergency situation, I'd rather have the phone number of someone for help scribbled on that damaged poor piece of paper than that "greater" sonnet of Shakespeare...
And exactly that I think drives evolution; triggers, stress factors, specialisation and during after mass extinctions. We see that change happens from that in our everyday lives from drastic measures and/or environmental factors. Why would that be different on a molecular/gene level, I don't see that, but am not a molecular biologist.
Your position is in general: “Darwinism/evolutionism is not the answer to the observations, yet an Intelligent Designer is”.
With the acceptance of an Intelligent Designer the discussion becomes very difficult. Your position is of an irrational nature. You can postulate an Intelligent Designer, you can describe him/her/it to me and others, and that’s it. There are no rational points possible, as your Designer cannot be proven or disproven. It’s your personal philosophical view of “where do we come from” but not empirically or otherwise reproducible.
And what you do, is making your own position difficult to hold, because of the point in Earth’s history where you place your Designer.
In principle, there’s no scientific argument possible against the existence of an Intelligent Designer at the
beginning (“Big Bang”, the start of what we call universe, the big question of life) nor putting it
instead of abiogenesis. We couldn’t ever disprove that something has spawned life in the Precambrian and it was not nature of the time, but this Designer. The clues to the question are so old and worn down by time, that any analysis is already a challenge, so no way that can be disproven. It cannot be proven either, however.
If you position your Intelligent Designer at the point where “he/she/it” takes over from evolution, then this designer is constantly working to redesign? Then fossil species are not related through evolution, yet are all designed? Every time again, after mass extinctions?
In the Cretaceous this Designer designed dinosaurs (oh no, not) and in the Eocene
terror birds (did they exist, you think?)?
If you hold that position, I wonder how you see the everyday examples of “evolution”?
I gave the thought experiment example of the Egyptian.
Take another example: everybody’s houses.
If you take a look around in your house today, do you reckon it is
designed to be this way, or is it rather the product of a dynamic growth and development based on internal and external (environmental) factors? That vase that Aunt Annie gave as a birthday present, is that designed to be there? Is every position of the furniture and cutlery designed to be like this? Even in the most autistic case where the owner would be superfocused on keeping everything the same, even there the house would (slowly) develop, change,
evolve.
If you think about it, the list of examples is endless. Even in human cases. Take cities for example. Although the content of a city (buildings, infrastructure, parks, etc.) is planned, designed, the city itself, as it is today is not designed as such. It evolved. Ok, Madhatten Ground Zero is maybe not the best of examples….
But look at Rome. Did the Romans plan to have only those buildings of them left over in 2015? The Renaissance Roman people? The architects from the late 19th century maybe?
It looks designed today, yet there’s no designer but time…
Another argument for the in my opinion human perception error that proponents of “Intelligent” Design fail to see is that this “Intelligence” of Design, the fit for purposeness, is only because we recognize the functionalities.
If you’d present a helicopter to a medieval peasant (not some Leonardo da Vinci-type scientist, but the average Joe of the time) he’d look at you and ask about the "stupid" design, as he cannot reconcile what to do with it. He doesn’t know it. It is not in his system. It didn't evolve yet, so you will. To modern humans a helicopter looks intelligently designed, as we know the purpose of the design.
You say that “the incompleteness of the fossil record is an excuse”. That would be the same as you would take photos of your house development as in the example but not of every step in the process. Then, when you present the clues (for this example photos, for the Earth’s history fossils), one immediately discards your photos because not
all of the evolutionary steps in the photos of your home are shown.
Or for a bankrobbery that the prosecutor presents photos of the robber entering the bank at the moment of bank robbery, exits the bank and races off after the robbery and the judge discards the evidence because the presence of the man in the bank is unproven by photos.
Laws of court rooms do not apply to Earth sciences, and rightly so.
Geology, archeology, paleontology, are detective sciences. CSI, but then for real. And with a lot longer, more uncertain and
speculative past.
The photos of your house have been altered, your house itself has burnt down, experienced floods and earthquakes and all, through millions of years and still you ask us to present
every photo of every evolutionary step, otherwise you call it an “excuse”? Isn’t that demand in itself an excuse?
It’s not an excuse, it’s a fact of life we have to live with as crime scene investigating detectives have to live with their scattered and biased
clues. Or the prosecutor with his crucial linking lack of photos, yet rational reasoning can help him.
Imagine a vast mass extinction happens now and all things but some would get destroyed and an archeologist later will find one of the first computers from 1972 and then a modern 2015 microprocessor.
Would he/she say that it was
designed this way or postulate that the 2015 under the influence of time and environmental factors (R&D, chip techology, access to ores, freedom of market, etc.)
evolved from the old cranky living room sized box with 256 kb memory...?
The discussion in the topic now becomes also very broad, which of the following points is the real item?
1 – dinosaurs are fake/a hoax
2 – all fossils are fake(??)
3 – evolution is a hoax/wrong theory
4 – all the Earth sciences are corrupt, the age of the Earth is incorrect, etc.
The title in strict sense refers only to
point 1; the question is asked if dinosaurs are a hoax. To argument this position, examples of fossil fakery have been shown and presented by the various members. Other posts focus more on the suspicious links with(in) the nutwork (Disney, Hollywood, Spielberg, NASA, etc.).
Great work to expose fossil fakery and keep going on!, but that does not make
all fossils fake. Just like exposing a media hoax, does not make
all media reports faked (the local news; fires, accidents, etc. usually is not fake). Or taking NASA pictures of galaxies which are PhotoHubbleShopped as proof that stars and galaxies would be fake (do not exist, just like dinosaurs (?)).
Question Selene: My main question remains, if only the first point is the point of discussion: if only dinosaurs are fake, and all other fossils are real; which animals occupied the ecological niches of the dinosaurs in the lush Jurassic and Cretaceous (who ate all that food?) and where are their fossils then??
2 – all fossils are faked. This position is a bit silly, knowing that
everywhere in the world one can find fossils for themselves, even dinosaurs. Amateurs and professionals go fossil hunting in the remotest of places or close to civilisation.
Examples:
Fossil sites in Britain,
Germany,
worldwide.
To propose
all fossils are faked, it would mean
man would have total control over all parts of the Earth, especially the remote
Patagonian and
Mongolian deserts, and fabricate complete geological layers over thousands of square kms?
Looking at the ridiculous rock props they use in some movies, I am not convinced any human would be capable of falsifying all fossil sites (known and unknown!) and fooling all geologists in the world…
Dinosaurs are just a part of paleontology, a very serious science, but there are so many other fossils, of animals that obviously do not exist today. All
ammonites,
trilobites,
microfossils, terror birds,
fossil megasnakes, fossil other
megafauna,
everything from small to big is fake?
One can see fossils as well in “ordinary” sedimentary rocks, when looking through a microscope. Like these examples from personal archive of benthonic, planktonic and mixed foraminifera in rocks, present day at some 300 meters altitude in Southern Spain and Italy….
Foraminifera (/fəˌræməˈnɪfərə/, Latin meaning hole bearers, informally called "forams") are members of a phylum or class of amoeboid protists characterized by streaming granular ectoplasm that among other things is used for catching food, and commonly by an external shell or "test" made of various materials and constructed in diverse forms. All but perhaps a very few are aquatic and most are marine, the majority of which live on or within the seafloor sediment (i.e., are benthic) while a smaller variety are floaters in the water column at various depths (i.e., are planktonic). A few are known from freshwater or brackish conditions and some soil species have been identified through molecular analysis of small subunit ribosomal DNA.
Foraminifera typically produce a test, or shell, which can have either one or multiple chambers, some becoming quite elaborate in structure. These shells are commonly made of calcium carbonate (CaCO3) or agglutinated sediment particles. Over 10,000 species are recognized, both living (8,708) and fossil (1,837). They are usually less than 1 mm in size, but some are much larger, the largest species reaching up to 20 cm.
Left: Benthonic, snail-shaped foram in Miocene sandy limestone, Southern Spain
Right: Benthonic forams (nummulites) in Eocene limestone, Central Apennines, Italy
Benthonic (B) and planktonic (bulbous space ship looking fossils where the red arrows point at) deposited in a narrow deep pre-Mediterranean basin, compare present day Red Sea on a smaller scale - field of view 6 mm
Question Selene: If fossils are fake, (evolution not real, etc.), and these are not benthonic (1, 2) and (mixed)planktonic (3) life forms of some 5 million (1, 3) or 40 million (2) years old, but for every fossil this same question can be asked; what is it then?
3 – Evolution is a hoax/a wrong theory.
To hold such a position requires some back-up, just like
Simon is working on for his Tycho-superseding-Longomontanus-Capella-Simon Shack-Solar System. If you can propose a similar rational* theory
which confirms present and past observations and can be predictive for future ones, then you have something to talk about.
*if you propose an Intelligent Designer you are in the realm of irrationality. There’s nothing wrong with that, it is just non-compatible with a scientific theory, because you do not speak the same language. Religious, mystical, transcendent, metaphysical and other irrational ways of looking at the world around us may or may not point to truth, they just fall outside of natural science as it is. You can hold science responsible for it, but I think to have these different areas of research is not wrong at all. It is not one is better or worse than the other, it’s just different ways of looking at the physical world.
Selene: So, the only answer to the question “Is Evolution Theory a wrong theory/hoax/fake/politics, not science/whatever” would be a schematic point-by-point scientific approach, where you defend an alternative rational mechanism for the diversity and similarity of species around us, see for an example the topic about the SSSS.
Quick overview of different explanations for the diversity and similarity of species found on Earth, strongholds for "more environmentally driven" ar faster evolution to explain relative "sudden" changes in the fossil record. Religious views can be summarised by an Intelligent Designer, some entity that has super power. I do not know of any other rational theories regarding this subject?
I always wonder how someone who does not think evolution is the answer to the biodiversity on Earth sees an ape. A (baby) chimp, gorilla and orang utan do not look human to you? You do not spot the similarities in reactions, behaviour, facial expressions, playfulness with human children??
“Designed” on two drawing tables next to each other, but by slightly different authors?
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-WrBnmaNP-UA/U ... ies_03.jpg
...and of course you all spotted the ridiculous photo manipulation here (not my photo!)...
4 – All natural sciences, biology, paleontology, geology, paleo-antropology are all fake/in on the scam/a global fraud/proposing some kind of religion/are “Darwinists” or “evolutionists”/can be grouped into 1 common denominator.
Again, this stand point would be as ridiculous as to think all photographers in the world (amateur or professional) are fakers like the media do, just because it’s photos and there are so many faked photos as shown here on Cluesforum.
Within the Earth sciences very unfortunately there is a strong tsunami wave of
politicised “science”. The Antropogenic Global Warmongering (
thanks ICFreely, I so much enjoyed reading your post)-hoax is spoiling serious climate science and is poking into the related sciences of geophysics, hydrology and geology. That does not make these sciences as a whole a fraud. It is just this circle of AGW-proponents who get the publications.
The system of peer review as an infallible wall against bullshit is of course a laughter in general and the claim on that aspect for an individual publication (like Monstrosanto and Notorious Big Pharma propagandisers do) ridiculous.
But paleontology is not BigPharma research. The hundreds of millions of years old lush forests of the Carboniferous are
not infected by Roundup (if they find proof of that, let me know please); it is not a spoiled science.
A clown like Jack Horner is just as representative for many tens of thousands of serious paleontological researchers as Justin Bieber or Miley Cirus are for all the motivated singers in the world…
The data is tangible, so different from AGW (paleoclimatology and climatological predictions are compared to many other sciences pretty much a mystery), Apollo etc. (we depend on NASA c.s.), the media hoaxes (no access to all the data), the question of our solar system (NASA has poisoned the wells of information for a great deal), gravity (mysterious force), etc. Everyone can look for fossils. There are no restrictions to that.
The practicality of the hoax also remains a mystery. For the media and space hoaxes the mechanisms of fakery, technical challenges, logistics, vicsims, crisis actors, mass manipulations, frauds, deceptions, image manipulation, shills, trolls, thrills and shoals; links to dubious entities, etc. etc. etc. all have been exposed. This topic cannot stand that same test on all the factors to the theme.
How do you fake all these fossil sites? How big and expensive does the operation need to be to accomplish this? What’s the gain? A prank? Setting up a whole industry on pure 100% fakery? And no smart-ass whistleblows that something is fishy about the Eocene Messel Fische? No buyer of a dinosaur bone of 50 grand would check what he/she bought? Just got fooled by some plaster faked specimen, but what's 50 grand nowadays...
And if all fossil findings are faked -the absolutism I very much argue against as it spoils good and decent research-, do you think a serious geologist or paleontologist who sees a formation or fossil is completely fooled by the fakery? For all his or her research? You just replace 1 heavy fossilised bone (2.6+) or other fragment by
plaster of 2.32 kg/m3 and no paleontologist would ever notice?
To me, that’s the beauty of geology; it’s not (in the physical sense) affected by these media hoaxer crazies… It’s tangible, touchable, you can see the clues right in front of your eyes. Not depending on NASA claims…
Selene
The materials of wealth are in the [E]arth, in the seas, and in their natural and unaided productions
Daniel Webster (1838)