Got a good laugh from this, Roger, you are correct in my opinion. Just wish there were more non-Bible Creationists here. But it is true that most can handle the abuse, but just don’t want too.
Exactly! The earlier form of whales weren’t evolving toward modern forms, they just happened to end up as modern forms. If we found a species today that was piece-be-piece the same as some whale fossil of 15M years ago, that species woudl not be a precursor of a whale. It would be its own species.
Those earlier forms only look like they were “evolving toward modern forms” in retrospect.
Like Excalibre I’m puzzled as to your actual position. You asked if anyone could point to a species that is evolving into a new species. I’m pretty sure that you know the question to be irrelevant. There are several possible responses.
One is that no one posting to the thread can think of an example that suits you. Surely you realize that this has no bearing on whether or not speciation is occuring.
Another is that someone does come up with an example that turns out to be wrong. Can it then be said - Aha, this proves that speciation doesn’t happen? Of course not.
Someone might, by accident hit on a correct one but we won’t know that for maybe a million years.
The question and all possible answers that can be thought of by posters to the thread are completely irrelevant to whether or not speciation happens through the operation of evolutionary change.
I also don’t see any examples of people thinking ‘… that they terrify’ anyone.
The only thing I see you doing so far is asking an irrelevant question and amusing lekatt. Both of those are exceedingly modest accomplishments.
Ahem. Allow me to clarify the point I was working towards, as Roger seems to have completely missed it.
It is possible that some sealions will ‘soon’ (the order of thousands of years, not millions) breed in the water, and not on land. This really requires no genetic change. Once they do, they will become two distinct populations, a sea-breeding and a land-breeding one. Those two populations will qualify, if I understand correctly, as seperate species, by a very common definition of the term. “Do they interbreed?” They won’t, because of geographic seperation.
Take elephant seals, which you can visit in Ano Nuevo State Park in California in late November and December. They breed on land, but during breeding season they do not eat. If, and a big if it is, they develop the ability to breed in water, not having to fast for a period of months would surely be advantageous. But no one knows if this feature will show up, or if they will go extinct.
Walking among them, as I did, will convince you quickly that they have pretty much evolved into a fully aquatic creature - except for their breeding problem.
Since I believe subpopulations use different beaches, speciation is possible.
BTW, I read somewhere, and I forget where, that they have discovered that speciation can happen in the midst of large populations, not by the isolation that has long been assumed. I bet Finch knows the reference.
Oooh! Burn! Oh no you didn’t!
roger thornhill only gets to have these discussions due to the eternal indulgence of some of the SDMB. While I admire their patience, I must ask what value they see in engaging him when he won’t actually put forth an argument? Do a search on his old name, or just check this thread out: Do you need more faith to believe in evolution than in intelligent design? (the author, bodswood, became our beloved roger thornhill.) Examine the history of his refusal to make claims (the pinnacle, in my opinion, being the point where he asks those who disagree with him to provide a reference to support his view, as he was unwilling even to look for sources of his own to cite.)
roger is a genuinely all right guy in most circumstances, but he has a tremendous unwillingness to engage honestly on this subject. He continues his previous modus operandi: demanding evidence (in whatever form he seeks at the moment) without providing any of his own, demanding proof without forming an argument of his own, and generally (as evidenced by the persistence of his own irrelevant questions) not putting forth an effort to even understand the arguments he’s soliciting. He seems to view himself as an audience in this debate, meaning that he wishes to be entertained or taught, passively, rather than being willing to play his part. He uses that position to poo-poo arguments without responding to their content. He is stubborn in his position but can’t justify it, and it’s really not useful to try to argue it with him.
And seeing many of the same faces here as in the thread I just linked, I see you guys must be enjoying your parts in this more than I would. Ignore what I just said if you wish.
I didn’t know that **Roger **is bodswood. I see your point now.
You’re talking about parapatric and sympatric speciation. In short, parapatric speciation is subhabitat geological isolationism, like dating in New York; if you’re from the Bronx you don’t date a Brooklynite; if you’re from Little Italy you don’t mix with Russians in Brighton Beach, et cetera. Sympatric speciation, on the other hand, allows you to date anyone in any of the burrows, or even New Jersey (if you’re really desperate), but only if they’re in the same social circle and income range as you; so an investment banker from The Upper East Side can swing with an international financier from Westchester, but a pediatrician from Long Island can’t covet a New Age bookstore owner from the Village. Since incomes and social circles become highly stratified in very competitive environments, it creates “artificial” barriers to breeding between different populations, which goes a long way to explaining the Republican party and the inscrutable popularity of Manolo Blahniks.[sup]*[/sup]
Sympatric speciation is especially contoversial, as some biologists claim that it just can’t happen due to the potential divergent populations breeding with each other, a la ring species that Mangetout (never fear, you’re being read!) has posted about. The idea is that the individual species (or subspecies, depending on your view of it) are only divided due to some transient geographical or ecological isolating factor and will eventually merge back into a common, homogenous gene pool. However, there are many instances where this has apparently happened; the Galapagos finches, for instance, have overlapping geographical ranges but are speciated by their ecological nitches (i.e. what they feed upon.) Here’s an article in Nature which postulates sumpatric speciation in the parasitic African indigobird species, which behave in similar fashion to European cuckoos.
Here’s another cite on sympatric speciation, and here and here offer some information on why identifying and definining speciation are not as distinct and absolute as creationists (and undergraduate biology students) would like to believe.
I can’t find an immeidate cite, but IIRC there are no major translocations or reversals in the genomes between the Asian and American black bear. Although the two species are distinct in many behavioral and phenotypical ways, it is quite likely that their divergence has occurred recently (in evolutionary terms) and that the two species may be still be able, genetically, to crossbreed successfully. As you rightly point out, the existing species of American black bear is being divided into subspecies and, due to habitat restriction and geographical isolation, is developing pools of differening genotypes that may, at some point, become sufficiently distinct to warrant being classified as unique species.
Stranger
*Now having decisively and irrevocably offended New Yorkers, GOP members, and Sex and the City fanatics, I will proceed to demonstrate that one cannot, in fact, dodge a speeding trainwreck and also that flowers look much more attractive from above rather than below.
Boroughs. :o Where in the heck did that come from? :smack:
Is there a name for homonymic “dyslexia”? I do this all the time. :rolleyes:
Stranger
what a silly thread.
First, I’d like to start by saying it’s rather ignorant to pigeonhole Creationists into one big jumble, especially if you’re going to spout off names like Darwin.
Edward Blyth, long time Christian, champion of natural selecton -PRE-DARWIN-. You could downright say that Darwin stole ideas from him (as he kept frequent correspondence with Darwin himself on their ideas). The more you read about Darwin, the more you find out that the story of evolution is NOT a Darwinian idea at all, but Darwin is just the first one to put them together in a book.
The Big Bang theory - again, a Christian idea. Georges LeMaitre, mathematicians later agreed, and added some formulas.
Genetics - we all know that was fathered by Mendel - a monk.
It appears to me that all the current theories used to disprove Creationism were created by Creationists themselves…
Once again: what a silly thread.
As soon as I figured out what you were referring to, I thought “burrows” was a pretty apt term.
What does this have to do with whether or not we are going to hear from Darwin’s Finch?
Why the tendency to analyze the players rather than the subject?
The discourse on evolution covers methods of creation, but not creation itself.
When do we get to creation? Was it some type of intelligence? Was it randomness? I had hoped someone would actually want to debate creation.
You appear to have had a bit of trouble reading the actual thread (or you have suffered a momentary lapse that, somehow, equates the word Creationist with the word Christian in your mind).
Aside from a very few passing remarks regarding Fundamentalist Christians who subscribe to Creationism, the posters to this thread have made no observations regarding Christianity. As you note, the issue is Creationism; it is not Christianity. So the fact that Dobzhansky and Mendel established the reality of Evolutionary Theory (a point well known to most of the posters in this thread) has no real bearing on the fact that some people refuse to accept the reality of evolution.
.
The attempt to prove that the first person to accomplish something was not “really” the first person to do that is really a plague on the study of history. (Sure, Langley flew the first powered airplane–even though he had to use a catapult and he couldn’t actually keep it up in the air past the point where gravity overtook the force of the catapult.)
The fact that Darwin was the first to put evolutionary ideas together in a book is exactly the reason he desrves to have his name attached to the Theory of Natural Selection. The fact that he continued to defend his theory after Wallace got cold feet and backed away from it means that he gets more credit than Wallace who published the same theory in the same year as Darwin. The fact that Darwin published the theory while Blyth was content to correspond with others, individually, means that Darwin deserves more credit for presenting the theory in a form that the entire world could debate. (Darwin also continued to expand upon his theory (and develop evidence to support it) throughout his life, meaning he invested far more of him1`self in the venture.)
The concept of evolution was widely explored (though not spoken of with absolute candor due to fear of social expulsion) even before Darwin’s time. What Darwin is more properly noted for is his proposed mechanism for evolution, to wit, natural selection, i.e. the selection of traits based upon their fitness in terms of their contribution to the procreation of their exhibitor.
While Darwin was not the only one who argued that evolution (or as he preferred to call it, “descent with modification”) was due to externally applied factors, he “stood almost alone in insisting that organic change led only to increasing adaptation between organisms and their own environment and not to an abstract ideal of progress defined by structural complexity or increasing heterogeneity–never say higher or lower.” (Gould, Ever Since Darwin, pg 37). Unlike Lamarck (and moreso the quasi-Lamarkian followers), he argued against creatures selecting preferred traits, and unlike other “evolutionists” of the time, he disagreed with the notion that evolution was working toward a preferred or more perfect result. Darwin lacked only a method of information encoding, on which natural selection recorded “its” preferences, to make his theory complete. Mendel, and later Crick and Watson (and the sadly unattributed Rosalind Franklin) offered up genetics and DNA respectively to complete the puzzle.
To be fair, although these theories may have been laid out by people who follow the Christian faith, it doesn’t make the ideas “Christian”, i.e. in conformance with or originating from the Bible, the teachings of Christ, et cetera. Galileo Galilei was a staunch Catholic and remained so, even as his discover of heliocentricity contadicted alledgedly inviolate Church doctrine.
The essential problem with Creationism (in any form) it its ultimate unfalsibility. One could claim, without fear of absolute disproof, that the whole mess of fossils, geological and cosmological evidence, evolution, et cetera, is just a big game ginned up by some mocking intelligence as a test of faith. There’s no way to disproof what can’t be seen or measured, but there’s no reason to expect that one must agree with your faith, either.
Stranger
That’s okay. When I lived in Queens I brought my girlfriend down to my basement all the time. 
(And I’m glad you didn’t say mating in the burrows.
Thanks for the links, btw.
That can be quite an important point, given that a very common creationist argument goes along the lines of “if you start out from atheistic naturalism, you’re bound to end up forcing an evolutionary interpretation upon the evidence, whereas, starting from creationist presuppositions, you inevitably find the evidence fits better.”
The suggestion that Darwin “stole” the idea of natural selection from Blyth has a rather specific history. It was originally put forward by Loren Eiseley in a paper in the Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society in 1959. He drew particular attention to an article that Blyth had published in 1835 - when Darwin was still on the Beagle - in which he’d discussed the effects of what we’d now call selection pressure on variation in species. Eiseley argued that it was in reading this that Darwin first encountered the notion of natural selection. Furthermore, he’d then systematically obscured this debt to Blyth in his later writings, most notably in the Historical Sketch of the Progress of Opinion with which he prefaced the later editions of the Origin. Eiseley repeated and elaborated upon the thesis in some of his immensely successful popular science books up until his death in 1977, so the suggestion was spread to a large readership.
It’s presumably from these books that some creationists picked it up and have been repeating it ever since - see here, here and here for examples.
In general, Eiseley’s writings were respected by historians of science, so it wasn’t as if anybody rejected his suggestion out of hand. But Darwinian scholarship (in the sense of studies of Darwin himself) has progressed significantly in the last half century and one of the casualties in this has been Eiseley’s thesis. A vastly greater amount of Darwin’s private papers have since become available than Eiseley could easily read in 1959 and nothing’s turned up to remotely confirm his hypothesis. Furthermore, numerous historians have now pored over Darwin’s early notebooks and letters to reconstruct how he was led to the idea of natural selection. Blyth’s early papers are not thought to have had any influence on this process. It’s now considered likely that Darwin did read the Blyth papers that Eiseley suggested he did, but only because having decided that species evolved he systematically began reading everything relevant he could find on the topic. The presumption is that this would have included Blyth, but the bountiful (negative) evidence is that these left absolutely no trace in his private notes. If he did read them, he seems not to have found anything of any use in them.
The reason for that is that the Edward Blyth of 1835 wasn’t offering anything particularly relevant to the puzzle that was bothering Darwin. Why not? Because in 1835 Blyth was arguing that species were fixed. To him, selection pressure was acting to eliminate variation to keep species as God had created them. Since Darwin was looking for a mechanism whereby species could transmute, Blyth’s speculations about why they didn’t wasn’t relevant. He ploughed on to other writers - and hence ultimately Malthus.
In that period - the late 1830s - Darwin and Blyth weren’t in contact. According to the definitive Darwin Correspondence Project, their first exchange of letters was in 1855. By then Darwin had been a transmutationist for nearly twenty years and a believer in natural selection for almost as long. He’d written about these ideas at length in notebooks and unpublished papers and even tested them on carefully selected friends. Throughout this time he’d been patiently testing his ideas and accumulating evidence, particularly by soliciting specific information from fellow naturalists via letters. The latter activity distinctly picks up in about 1855 and as part of this pattern he wrote to Blyth in Calcutta. That letter doesn’t survive, but Blyth’s reply, mainly about Indian wildlife, from April 1855 does. The subsequent Blyth-Darwin correspondence is substantial, though not unusually large by Darwin’s standards. It is true that the exchanges with Blyth are particularly important to him in the years immediately following 1855. For the Blyth of the late 1850s was no longer the Blyth of 1835. He was now willing to accept some degree of transmutation of species. In one sense, this was old hat to Darwin, whose own ideas had already long progressed beyond what Blyth was suggesting, in another, this was encouraging. As Darwin worried about whether he dare publish his full theory, Blyth was another example to him of how other naturalists might be willing to consider this sort of idea.
There’s then the big twist. In December 1855, Blyth writes to ask what Darwin thinks of a paper by Alfred Wallace. This isn’t the famous moment where Wallace’s independent discovery of the theory forces Darwin to publish (that doesn’t happen till 1858), but it is important. Wallace is evidently zeroing in towards the idea. Blyth likes the paper - though without claiming any sort of priority; another strike against the Eiseley hypothesis. Independently of Blyth, Lyell also draws Darwin’s attention to the paper. But there’s the crucial difference that Lyell, unlike Blyth, already knows the full extent of what Darwin privately believes. Just a few months later, presumably prompted by the paper and these letters, on May 14th 1856 Darwin finally begins to write the “big species book” explaining the theory he has been developing for two decades. Wallace’s 1858 letter will derail that project, but that manuscript is the origin of the Origin as a book.
Blyth is thus a significant figure in the last few steps of Darwin’s long journey from becoming a transmutationist, through conceiving natural selection as an explanation and then gathering (lots of) evidence in support, to going public. But the Eiseley hypothesis granting him a crucial role in the early stages has long been discredited.
But I’m a very modest chap. And I’m not sure that any question should be dismissed so quickly as irrelevant. If it leads even one person to challenge their preconceptions (and after all this is always a useful exercise in the quest for knowledge and understanding given that no scientific data is value-neutral). We all have our agendas towards which we are working, and it’s as well to be constantly reminded of this in case we think we have made history by becoming the first human being to perfect the hypothetico-deductive approach.