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universal values?

dilute micro said:
Yes and you've mentioned the horse. I'm sure Gould and Eldredge and other paleontologists were aware of them. Still they agreed that there are very few transitionals.

Anyhow, some phylum level transitionals would be nice.
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How many do you need? What would satisfy you?

3? 8? 5 billion?
 
Do I need to quote Gould again?

Since we proposed punctuated equilibria to explain trends, it is infuriating to be quoted again and again by creationists—whether through design or stupidity, I do not know—as admitting that the fossil record includes no transitional forms. Transitional forms are generally lacking at the species level, but they are abundant between larger groups.
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http://www.stephenjaygould.org/library/gould_fact-and-theory.html

Round and round like a stuck record.
 
dilute micro said:
Oh so Darwin's theory didn't make predictions (and no theory makes predictions you say) but other theories, "auxilliary theories", do make predictions, you say.
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OK let's try this again.

Punctuated equilibria is an application of neo-Darwinian theory. It applies neo-darwinian ideas of speciation developed by Mayr and others to the fossil record. Neo-Darwinian theories involve not just Darwin's theory but also Mendelian genetics. I perhaps shouldn't describe Mendelian genetics as "auxiliary". However neo-Darwinianism doesn't predict anything until it is applied and in applying a theory we have to make auxiliary assumptions.

What assumptions are we making about climate change in a specific example? Are we assuming that organisms can track their environment as it changes? What assumptions are we making about the applicability of genetic drift in a specific case? What assumptions about gene flow are we making in a specific case?

This is not trickery. It's not a cunning ruse to make creationists look foolish. It's ordinary science. A theory is just a piece of paper with writing on it. It doesn't say anything until you apply it to the real world. If you are asking what the theory predicts then you have to ask yourself at the same time how you are applying the theory.
 
Now if you look at that article on phylum level evolution that I cited you will note that it ends by trying to answer the question, "why did so many phyla suddenly appear in Cambrian Seas?" Here the author cites various conjectures and theories which are not Darwinian, but act as auxiliaries to the Darwinian research program. The detox theories, the biomechanical locomotion theories, predation theories, biogeographic theories. Non of them contradict anything in Darwin's theory, but nobody is pretending that Drawin's theory alone will determine the fossil record. Also note that these theories do not contradict each other.

---

By the way dm, just to be clear, this has nothing to do with punctuated equilibria. I'm well aware that everytime you get refuted on one topic you simply switch to another. This little tactic of your's is becoming quite tiresome. I think you've been well refuted on all of your little points now and you're just running round in circles.
 
For those interested here's Imre Lakatos on the demarcation of science and the use of auxiliary hypotheses to shield research programs from refutation:

Audio
Transcript

There's some interesting points there regarding the present discussion. What picture of science do creationists have? Unsurprisingly it's a theological picture where there is just a stream of God given truths and no scientist is ever wrong about anything. When a scientist gets something wrong - the whole subject collapses.
 
Here's a Discovery Institute blog. It's worth a glance at, just to observe the sheer sense of schadenfreude. It consists of little more than sarcastic comments about scientists updating their theories. It reports on science, but makes no contribution to scientific debate. These are really bitter people. They've immersed themselves in something they hate. Venomous stuff.

However, at least they have realised that all this controversy about punctuated equilibria and what-Gould-once-said is now 25 years out of date.

Edit: One little thing - it's possible to tell when both phildwyer and dilute micro started absorbing "intelligent design" literature. Dilute micro concentrates almost exclusive on Gould, punctuated equilibria and the Cambrian explosion. However he doesn't use any of the later quote mines. He doesn't talk about ultra-Darwinism or Darwinian fundamentalism, he doesn't spit venom at Dawkins and Dennett or Pinker, Cosmides and Touby in short he isn't using Johnson's 1998 article The Gorbachev of Darwinism. So dm came to this after the publication of Wonderful Life (1989) and before 1998. Phildwyer is a post 1998 ID advocate - he sees Gould as someone converting to ID at the end of his life rather than someone who knew the "truth" all along but suppressed it.

But all this has a limited shelf life. It's just rhetoric. Neither pd nor dm have updated their rhetoric - neither go on about information or irreducible design. That is they have remained detached from the movement.
 
IMR said:
You wanted examples. Here's another:

List of human evolution fossils



You mean fossil evidence marking the emergence of new phyla, or ones for transitions within phyla?
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Apparently it makes you feel better to point to a few examples of 'transitionals' but the point is in the whole scheme of things there is way way fewer than darwin's theory predicted given the huge number of species over the millions and millions of years. That's why the whole theory of pe was conjured up. To explain why we can't find transitional fossils. This is because it is supposed to have happened so "rapid".
 
OK here it is:
By the theory of natural selection all living species have been connected with the parent-species of each genus, by differences not greater than we see between the varieties of the same species at the present day; and these parent-species, now generally extinct, have in their turn been similarly connected with more ancient species; and so on backwards, always converging to the common ancestor of each great class. So that the number of intermediate and transitional links, between all living and extinct species, must have been inconceivably great. But assuredly, if this theory be true, such have lived upon this earth.
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It's clear that Darwin is not talking about fossils of transitional forms. He wasn't expecting to find each and every last transitional form in the fossil record.

This is really pathetic stuff.
 
Knotted said:
Do I need to quote Gould again?


http://www.stephenjaygould.org/library/gould_fact-and-theory.html

Round and round like a stuck record.
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Yes, Gould was as honest as you are. In one post you say theories don't predict anything and in the next you'll say you don't say that. And it's not like the thread doesn't record what you actually say. You'll say anything you need to at the time.

Gould would say one thing and of course we know Gould said the opposite. Questions is - when is he telling the truth.

You have difficulty not only with honesty but with understanding what you're reading which is the norm with evolutionary biology. What do you think, "all at once and 'fully formed'." means? Seriously.



Seems like we're forgetting that Gould and others have made note of the lack of transitional fossils. But leave it to simpleminded urbs to do some google-paleontology to fix that problem.

The history of most fossil species include two features particularly inconsistent with gradualism:

1) Stasis - most species exhibit no directional change during their tenure on earth. They appear in the fossil record looking much the same as when they disappear; morphological change is usually limited and directionless;

2) Sudden appearance - in any local area, a species does not arise gradually by the steady transformation of its ancestors; it appears all at once and 'fully formed'.

* Gould, S.J. (1977)
"Evolution's Erratic Pace"
Natural History, vol. 86, May
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Every paleontologist knows that most species don't change. That's bothersome ... brings terrible distress. ... They may get a little bigger or bumpier. But they remain the same species and that's not due to imperfection and gaps but stasis. And yet this remarkable stasis has generally been ignored as no data. If they don't change, it's not evolution so you don't talk about it.

* Gould, Stephen Jay (1980)
Lecture at Hobart & William Smith College, February 14, 1980
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tasis, or nonchange, of most fossil species during their lengthy geological lifespans was tacitly acknowledged by all paleontologists, but almost never studied explicitly because prevailing theory treated stasis as uninteresting nonevidence for nonevolution. [T]he overwhelming prevalence of stasis became an embarrassing feature of the fossil record, best left ignored as a manifestation of nothing (that is, nonevolution).

* Gould, S.J. (1993)
"Cordelia's Dilemma"
Natural History, February, p. 15
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[W]ell represented species are usually stable throughout their temporal range, or alter so little and in such superficial ways (usually in size alone), that an extrapolation of observed change into longer periods of geological time could not possibly yield the extensive modifications that mark general pathways of evolution in larger groups. Most of the time, when the evidence is best, nothing much happens to most species.

* Gould, S.J., 1988
"Ten Thousand Acts of Kindness"
Natural History, Vol. 97, No. 12, December, p.14
http://www.veritas-ucsb.org/library/...es/Stasis.html
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Here's Eldredge:

"Each new generation, it seems, produces a few young paleontologists eager to document examples of evolutionary change in their fossils. The changes they have always looked for have, of course, been of the gradual, progressive sort. More often than not their efforts have gone unrewarded - their fossils, rather than exhibiting the expected pattern, just seem to persist virtually unchanged. - This extraordinary conservatism looked, to the paleontologist keen on finding evolutionary change, as if no evolution had occurred. Thus studies documenting conservative persistence rather than gradual evolutionary change were considered failures, and, more than not, were not even published. Most paleontologists were aware of the stability, the lack of change we call stasis. - But insofar as evolution itself is concerned, paleontologists usually saw stasis as "no results" rather than as a contradiction of the prediction of gradual, progressive evolutionary change. Gaps in the record continue (to this day) to be invoked as the prime reason why so few cases of gradual change are found." - Evolutionary Tempos and Modes: A Paleontological Perspective
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And just so we don't forget....

It's not just Gould and Eldredge. Here's a quote by David Raup, U of Chicago, Field Museum:

"Darwin predicted that the fossil record should show a reasonably smooth continuum of ancestor-descended pairs with a satisfactory number of intermediates between major groups. Darwin even went so far as to say that if this were not found in the fossil record, his general theory of evolution would be in serious jeopardy. Such smooth transitions were not found in Darwin's time, and he explained this in part on the basis of an incomplete geologic record and in part on the lack of study of that record. We are now more than a hundred years after Darwin and the situation is little changed. Since Darwin a tremendous expansion of paleontological knowledge has taken place, and we know much more about the fossil record than was known in his time, but the basic situation is not much different. We actually may have fewer examples of smooth transitions than we had in Darwin's time, because some of the old examples have turned out to be invalid when studied in more detail. To be sure, some new intermediate or transitional forms have been found, particularly among vertebrates. But if Darwin were writing today, he would still have to cite a disturbing lack of missing links or transitional forms between the major groups of organisms."
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Raup again:
"A large number of well-trained scientists outside of evolutionary biology and paleontology have unfortunately gotten the idea that the fossil record is far more Darwinian that it is. This probably comes from the oversimplification inevitable in secondary sources: low-level textbooks, semi-popular articles, and so on. Also, there is probably some wishful thinking involved. In the years after Darwin, his advocates hoped to find predictable progressions. In general, these have not been found - yet the optimism has died hard, and some pure fantasy has crept into the textbooks. .... One of the ironies of the evolution -creation debate is that the creationists have accepted the mistaken notion that the fossil record shows a detailed and orderly progression and they have gone to great lengths to accommodate this "fact" in their Flood geology." [Science, vol.213, p.289.]
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Check out the last quote here by Raup - It explains much of the confusion here on Urban.
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Knotted said:
OK here it is:


It's clear that Darwin is not talking about fossils of transitional forms. He wasn't expecting to find each and every last transitional form in the fossil record.

This is really pathetic stuff.
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No, your understanding of evolution is pathetic. Of course we should be finding more transitional fossils if all those transitional links existed back then.
 
dilute micro said:
Gould would say one thing and of course we know Gould said the opposite. Questions is - when is he telling the truth.
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He say one thing and then another. Not in two different articles. Not in even in two different sentences!!! How duplicitous is that? Shall I quote again:

Transitional forms are generally lacking at the species level, but they are abundant between larger groups.
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Both lack of and abundance at the same time!!! Can you get your head round it? Come on at least try. What happened to all your amazing critical thinking skills?
 
dilute micro said:
No, your understanding of evolution is pathetic. Of course we should be finding more transitional fossils if all those transitional links existed back then.
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Backtrack if you like.

Shall we try the question again. How many fossils of transistional forms would satisfy you?
 
Knotted said:
He say one thing and then another. Not in two different articles. Not in even in two different sentences!!! How duplicitous is that? Shall I quote again:



Both lack of and abundance at the same time!!! Can you get your head round it? Come on at least try. What happened to all your amazing critical thinking skills?
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You simply don't understand the terminology. :D The few transitional fossils that do exist are representative of lower level taxonomic change. And as Gould said, even then it's not much of a change - size... etc. They are "fully formed" meaning they have similar body parts and are classified, grouped, accordingly. And even these are relatively few considering the many species that have existed. What is missing are examples of transitionals higher on the scale of taxa. Things moving from one group to the other.
 
dilute micro said:
You simply don't understand the terminology. :D The few transitional fossils that do exist are representative of lower level taxonomic change. And as Gould said, even then it's not much of a change - size... etc. They are "fully formed" meaning they have similar body parts and are classified, grouped, accordingly. And even these are relatively few considering the many species that have existed. What is missing are examples of transitionals higher on the scale of taxa. Things moving from one group to the other.
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You idiot. Gould says the opposite. It's the lower level of taxonomic change where there is a lack of transitional fossils. It's not too surprising either. The morphological differences between one species and another are pretty slight.
 
dilute micro said:
Knotted, I don't know about you man. You're not mentally sound.

How do you just lie and go on?

I mean no wonder you have no problems picking and choosing your own reality and playing semantics with jargon you don't even care to learn.


http://www.urban75.net/vbulletin/threads/329109-universal-values?p=10938045&viewfull=1#post10938045

http://www.urban75.net/vbulletin/threads/329109-universal-values?p=10938173&viewfull=1#post10938173
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Read it carefully. (I didn't put the bold in - that was from your original post)
 
Knotted said:
You idiot. Gould says the opposite. It's the lower level of taxonomic change where there is a lack of transitional fossils. It's not too surprising either. The morphological differences between one species and another are pretty slight.
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:facepalm: Go back and read the red text.
 
Knotted said:
How many is that?



Where did "they" say there aren't "enough" and what wasn't it "enough" for?



Which opinion is that exactly?
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Depends on how many species lived and evolved. Check the quotes I gave. They're paleontologists and know better than you or I what is sufficient. You do understand the theory of punctuated equilibrium was made to solve the problem of lack of transitionals? So the number wasn't enough to be explained by Darwin's gradualism. It had to have some other theory. Had darwin's theory accommodated the lack of transitionals there wouldn't have been any need for pe. So with pe the lack of transitional fossils can be explained because transition happened rapidly and out of site of the fossil record.
 
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