A bunch of Australian magpies learned to open milk bottles and drink the milk. The bottle-openers stopped breeding with non-bottle-openers and within a relatively low number of generations they’d become a (functionally, if not genetically) new species, and within a few more their beaks had started to change visibly to make them more adept at opening said milk bottles.
I’ve heard plenty of anecdotal evidence of this, but the absence of hard cites makes me inclined to dismiss it as a myth.
Well, sure, the theory of evolution isn’t a good tool for examining abiogenesis. That’s like saying that the study of human growth isn’t a good tool to examine human reproduction.
Not merely difficult but impossible. That’s because evolutionary theory is simply not applicable to describing the origin of life. You might as well try to describe abiogenesis with music theory. It’s a non-sequitur.
Infinite regress? How so? Evolution takes us the first self-replicating life forms and no further.
If you’re talking about the origin of life, the word is abiogenesis. If you’re talking about the beginning of the universe then the phrase “beginning of the universe” will suffice. Physicists use it. Neither abiogenesis nor the beginning of the universe play any part in evolutionary theory, though.
“Creation” has not been shown to be “in frame.” There is no reason to believe that the origin of life was not a result of completely natural processes.
I don’t understand the question. The common ancestor was the common ancestor. You want me to name it? How about “Rover?”
If you’re asking what the first organisms were, then I guess that depends on how you define an “organism.” I guess I would say that our first common ancestor was a self-replicating RNA molecule but maybe you’d prefer not to count that as life. In that case the first true living organisms were probably bacteria.
Okay, I’ll have a look at the talk.origins site while I work on my Behe summary. Still can’t believe that I’m descended from a bacterium, but my wife would say it explains one or two things, no doubt.
I’m glad I asked for clarification. I don’t believe this to be true.
Firstly magpies do open milk bottles. Buggers. However it needs no trick beak to do so. They are 600ml reuseable glass bottles with alfoil lids. The magpies, or currawongs as they are correctly known, simply peck through the alfoil lid and drink.
Currawongs are not the same birds as European or Nth American magpies. Glass milk bottles aren’t used much any more, partly because of the currawongs.
FWIW I follow science and biology. If there were such a new species it’s likely I’d hear of it, and I haven’t.
Myth.
Well, there is a big difference between the first appearance of matter after the Big Bang (when the temperature of the universe got cold enough for energy to “freeze” into matter) and the origins of stars and planets. We are seeing stars and planets in the process of forming today, thanks to the Hubble, so there is no great mystery about it. How life started is interesting indeed, and from what I read it comes from self-replicating molecules getting more complex, and evolving in a sense. Evolution happens when there is imperfect replication and a sorting mechanism. For life it is reproduction with genetic diversity and mutation, and the sorting mechanism is natural selection. Now if self-replicating molecules (DNA being a complex example) could become more prevalent by replicating faster or incorporating more amino acids, we might eventually get something like life.
That species evolve is true, as it has been directly observed. The details of the evolution of a particular species in the past is going to be somewhat uncertain. The details of how evolution happens is the theory, parts of which might still be hypotheses. None of this is an argument against evolution. If your friend Joe from 100 miles away pulls up at your house, you know he drove there. Not knowing the details of every turn he took to get there does not make it likely that he teleported his car to your house, or that god picked him up and moved him.
I’m 52, have a Ph.D, am well known in my field, yet correct my own ignorance every day. Ignorance is just not knowing something, which is no sin. When you have enough evidence to conquer a reasonable doubt, and still deny it, it becomes something else.
The other evolution thread gave me an example of wicked. A common creationist quote is Darwin talking about the complexity of the eye. They cut off the quote there, making it sound as if Darwin himself thought the eye disproved evolution. The very next paragraph shows how Darwin successfully explains the eye with evolution, with many examples of intermediate forms. This isn’t ignorance, since they have read Darwin. The writing of creationists indicate they are not stupid. Wicked is the only alternative - wicked in the sense that we love God so much that we will lie for him. If God exists I suspect these people are going to get a big surprise when they die.
Now I’m starting to wonder about your reading comprehension. What Dawkins actually said was “It is absolutely safe to say that if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked, but I’d rather not consider that).”
How can you possibly interpret this sentence to mean that he is calling everyone who disagrees “wicked”? He specifically said that he doesn’t.
Indeed; the presence of the commas coupled with the logical term ‘OR’ indicates that these are independent possibilities; if he had said “that person is ignorant, stupid, insane and wicked…”, then bodswood would have a sound argument.
Something I hadn’t noticed before is the lack of a comma between “stupid” and “insane.” Could this have been the cause of some confusion? In British English (isn’t Dawkins British?), the norm is to not put a comma between the last two items in a list like this, whereas in the US we put one there. The British leave it out because it cleans the text of clutter (I think they also leave out the period in abbreviations like “Mr.”), but Americans leave it in because it sometimes makes the meaning ambiguous. A funny example of ambiguity would be “I’d like to thank my parents, Ayn Rand and God.”
Can you link us to a site in which any scientist has claimed that humans are descended from chimps? We’re not. Chimps and Humans derive from a common ancestor that is neither human nor chimp. Do you see the distinction?
As for fossils that show creatures that have a combination of human and ape features, have you never seen any Australopithicines (ie, fossils from the genus Australopithicus)? Here’s one that fits the bill very nicely.
Folks, I think the OP’s point about Dawkins is being misunderstood. Look at the entire statement:
(emphatics are mine)
The concluding paragraph is a subjunctive, not declarative- that is bodswood is saying that IF Dawkins called everyone who disagreed with him “wicked” that his “sanity would be in doubt.” He’s not saying he believes that to actually be the case.
The door is not opened.
First, it should be pointed out that “evolution” is a multi-faceted field of study. On the one hand, we have the fact of evolution: populations change over time. Certainly there is nothing startling or heretical about such a statement. On an associated hand, we have the mechanisms of evolution - how those populational changes occur. Natural selection, genetic drift, and so on - these are indivudal theories which strive to explain the hows and whys of changing populations.
On another hand, we have the phylogenetic consequences of evolution. As populations change, sub-populations may break off from a larger population and change independently of the parent population. This results in diverging lineages. If we operate under the (not unwarranted) assumption that all extant species are related to some degree, then it must be the case that they all descended from a single population in the very distant past. Thus, we have “common descent”, and an attempt to reconstruct the tree of life, starting from its humble beginings and arriving at the diversity we see around us today. Related to this is the study of adaptations, wherein we find that many species have arrived at solving the problems of life in different ways. How these adaptaions occur ties back into the first part about the mechanisms of evolution.
The “first part” of evolution - the fact and mechanisms - are relatively stable. Not surpsingly, these are not the areas singled out for attack by IDers / creationists. Rather, it is the phylogenetic oncponents which are attacked because we have substantially less data available for the resulting hypotheses, and a good deal more inference is required. The problem is that by attacking a single evolutionary pathway, it does absolutely nothing to disprove the fact and mechanisms. Scientists themselves are constantly scrutinizing those pathways, and relationships between organisms have been revised many, many times throughout history. Because those hypotheses are data-driven, and because data are all-too-often lacking, IDers see that as an “opnening” whereby they can attack the whole theory of evolution. Nonsense, of course. If you show that whales could not have eovlved from terrestrial vertebrates, you have only disproven the idea that whales evolved form terrestrial vertbrates. What you have not done is proven that evolution could not, or did not, happen. Scientists then go backto the drawing board and attempt to determine where whales really did come from.
The main point is that ID does not - ever - get to win by default. In order to be a valid theory on tis own, it must stand or fall on its own merits. It must explain the natural world at least as well as current evolutionary theories, and provide us insight that we currently lack. It must also be able to make its own predictions as to what we should expect to find, or not find, based on those insights. Evolutionary theories do not depend on the falsity of ID - they are fully testable on their own, and their strengths lie in that fact. But even if the whole of evolutionary theory were brought down tomorrow, there is still no default “winner” - again, whatever takes its place must do at least as well as explaining the natural world as has evolution. And ID currently lacks anything resembling such explanatory power.
bodswood, a suggestion: when you come back from talkorigins (one of the best sites on the net, IMO), if you wish to debate the veracity of natural selection and/or evolution, please reference specific arguments, with links, on that website in your posts. So far, you’ve consistently misrepresented what most scientists believe about evolution and natural selection; if you quote specific passages from talkorigins, it’ll make it much easier to engage with you.
Daniel
Gest:
Why presume that the speculatory Intelligent Designer was omniscient and omnipotent? It’s possible that Mr. ID did not know what was in store for his creations until they were tested out “in the field”, much like the designers of fighter aircraft who adjusted–or scrapped–their designs as combat experience came back to them. “Puntuated equillibrium” could indicate an active vs inactive design process–prototypes vs mass production. And perhaps different species had/have diffeent designers in competition with each other.
It’s also possible that Mr. ID could only manipulate DNA and had no way of magically altering conditions on Earth or stopping meteors. Perhaps the current oxygen levels in the atmosphere were deliberate, but required eons of CO2-breathing life forms to bring about.
This is where I’m at in my thinking, so it’s frustrating to see the phrase “intelligent design” and realize that it’s usually a smokescreen for Biblical creationism.
Common ancestor of what? Humans and chimps? Primates and dogs? Mammals and reptiles? The further apart two species are, the further back in time are there common ancestors. I assume you know that the common ancestors are very likely extinct, right?
I think the OP is trying to get at the “ultimate” common ancestor of all life. And the answer is that we really don’t know. Most likely this ancestor was a single celled organism, but I doubt there is much more we can say about it other than that.
But, as DtC has pointed out earlier, there is a lot of confusion in these types of discussions concerning evolution and abiogenesis, and we need to clearly define when we are talking about one as opposed to the other. If the OP is indicting evolution because it does not address the issue of abiogenesis and is looking for a non-living “ancestor” of all a life, then (s)he is barking up the wrong tree.
That would be the reasonable expectation, but the half-man half-chimp comment made me wonder.
Right, and since evolution deals with things that replicate, going from non-replicating things to replicating things does not fall under evolution. The problem is defining life clearly. If the precursor to life was a primitve replicating molecule, was this molecule alive? If not, when did it become alive? What is the boundary between a really complex molecule and really simple life? I certainly don’t know, and, just as in the definition of a species, maybe it doesn’t even make sense to ask the question. Drawing clear boundaries around stuff like life and species is something that humans do, but does not appear to be something that nature particularly cares about.
Darwin’s Finch said:
You can say that again… 
I’d wager that one of the circumstance for life to arise is that there is no other living things around… because pre-life in the process of arising could look suspiciously like food to living things.
I know you are being sarcastic, but free will, what of it? If you want to make big money you gotta be able to answer that one weaseley enough.