ID vs. Evolution... support and discuss

I disagree with the contention that there is no “proof” in science. Understanding exactly what that statement actually means requires reams of rather esoteric study into the philosophy of science which, if done, alters the meaning of all sorts of words and contexts.

And in the end, what you end up with is just confusing and out of sync with conventional language. All it does it confuse people and convince creationists that THEY have proof of things in the everyday world and science doesn’t (in the colloquial sense) for anything in the past. If we are perfectly happy to colloquial call evidence for the guilt of OJ “proof” of his guilt, then there’s no reason why we shouldn’t call the universally confirmed phylogenetic tree proof of common descent.

By the way: doesn’t anyone else want to see the unexpergated version of EEman’s comments? :slight_smile:

Or a designer…

That is the crux of the arguement… the POINT of contention between ID and Evoltution is the very begining… the untested, un testable part…

Evolution does not cover it any better than ID does… we have see Multi-celluar organisms break down into simplier single cell ones… but we haven’t seen the converse…

Perhaps a giant intersteller ballon landed on the earth and let off a group of preformed life… again untested… untestable…

So tell us…what, exactly is the problem with Protoarchaeopteryx and Caudipteryx? My suspicion is that you pulled your “problem” from a creationist site such as this one; it’s at least very curious that that you used the exact same two species that they use there.

See, you are still laboring under the false idea that evolution produces lineages in the form of “chains” or ladders. It doesn’t - it produces bushes. P. robusta and C. zoui are both post-Archaeopteryx, yet in many ways more “primitive”. So? What this means is not that the timeline of dinosaur-to-bird is wrong. It means that Protoarchaeopteryx and Caudipteryx were not on the direct line to birds. Indeed, neither are considered to belong to the direct avian linage that includes Archaeopteryx. They are nevertheless significant, as, being members of a separate branch, they still have feathers, which means feathers evolved much earlier than previously expected. Archaeopteryx similarly had fully developed flight feathers. All of which points to a pre-avian evolution of feathers, meaning they evolved within truly dinosaurian lineages. They thus provide added support for a dinosaurian origin for birds.

So that’s the (watered down) scientific version of what those two species represent. What, pray tell, is yours?

First of all, this is false. Most of the ID movement focuses on calling evolution, from common descent to natutral selection, into question, not abiogenesis. They do focus on abiogenesis (and often try to introduce the same confusion between the two) but it’s just flat out wrong to say that they are not after evolution. Heck, a good portion still deny that humans are apes.

Second of all, evolution does not claim to explain “the very beginning” in the first place. You were thinking of chemistry/abiogenesis.

Actually, you are wrong here as well. We’ve seen single celled bacteria evolve multicellularity. But this really isn’t relevant to abiogenesis and the start of life either. Single-celled organisms evolve no different than multicellular ones.

I’m a terrible one for spelling… however i believe you mean unexpurgated?

No worries, I’m not holding back… though if you had a specific question, feel free to ask

First, evolutionary theory has nothing to say about the origin of life and there is nothing about the theory that can’t be tested (unlike EVERYTHING about ID).

Second, evolutionary theory is not an ideology. It’s not an opinion. It is, in fact, a factually confirmed explanation for the origin of biological species.

What exactly is your problem with saying that ID is a pseudoscience? What is unfair or un-factual about that statement? Is it your contention that ID is NOT pseudoscience?

Perhaps your problem is more basic. You need to go back and understand what science is and what it isn’t. The evolution/ID debate is not one between two equally valid scientific schools of thought. One is scientific and one is not. But you need to understand that yourself. Ask yourself… how would you test the hypothesis that a designer is responsible for some or all of the variation we see?

Keep in mind that all life is entertwined. Think of a complex bush extending back in time billions and billiions of years (as Carl Sagan would say :slight_smile: ). Now, imagine that we only see the very tip of that bush, which is our present time. Sure things look hazy because we don’t see 99.999…% of all life that has ever existed. However, when you look at the fossil record and the genetic evidence, a pretty clear picture of that bush emerges. But you have to spend time looking. ID says “no point in looking, it was magic”.

Actually I didn’t… they just happen to be the only two dino’s I know of with feathers… which as you describe later, were from an era AFTER Archaeopteryx

The ‘issue’ they present… is the links… or even the bush… as you would rather think of it (which might fit better anyway)… why is it logical to assume that birds evolved from Archaeopteryx the ‘link’ organism… verses from one of the other possible lineages? It makes calling something a ‘transition’ an issue… finding dino’s with feathers can do one of two things… it can say ‘see birds MUST have come from dinos’… or it can say ‘see Archaeopteryx isn’t a transition’…

Fact is we don’t know… we can speculate… but we don’t know…

Perhaps there have always been birds… however they were such a small population that we haven’t found their fossils… or perhaps they evolved from another species… but we can no longer be ‘sure’ that Archaeopteryx is THAT species

Evolutionary theory only explains what happened AFTER life began on earth. It does not attempt to explain how life originated. If it were proven that Zeus created the earth out of his earwax and then cast a bolt of lightening into the ocean to create life, evolutionary theory would be completely unaffected. Not a single thing would change.

Yes we have. We see it every day. How many cells do you think that YOU started off with?

Exactly. That’s why it’s not a scientific theory and not worth ten seconds of discussion…just like ID.

It’s also irrelevant to evolutonary theory.

Actually, this is not true. Unlike Evoutionary Theory, ID is a philosophy and different adherents of ID propose separate (and sometimes conflicting) objections to Natural Selection.

Behe actually accepts Evolutionary Theory for day-to-day processes, but insists on injecting a Designer at a few specific points where Behe’s imagination is not up to conceiving an evolutionary pathway.

Dembski is closer to your statement, conflating abiogenesis and evolution and denying the possibility of interspecial development.

Johnson opposes Evolution simply because he views it as “atheistic” and, therefore, “bad,” and never clutters his arguments with actual science.

Other ID proponents have other and different views.

I quite agree that every species (that isn’t going extinct) is transitional. However, we hear all the time that “how can a bird exist with half a wing” and associated junk. The elephant seal seems like a particularly good example of a species that might be half way between land and sea.

I don’t know how the transition to sea mating works - but we know it can happen, since the whales and dolphins made it. Like I said, it is quite possible elephant seals will never do it, and will go extinct. I doubt they’ll last forever at their current state, since they have very limited breeding grounds, and these might disappear at any time.

Mostly it is a good example, I think, because elephant seals are quite expected in evolution, but only an idiot intelligent designer would design a species that way.

It’s like this, EEMan

Insisting on inserting the concept of a designer into the discussion makes you a de facto proponent of intelligent design, despite your protests.

And the rest of your arguments in this thread are nearly verbatim repeats of ideas espoused by people who DO identify themselves as proponents of ID.

So the suspicion on our part, under the concept of “if it quacks like a duck, etc.”, is that you are in fact a believer in the idea that speciation on this planet was deliberately guided by some intelligent force into its present state.

This is very clear to every single person opposing your opinion in this thread. I realize you may have your own personal reasons for not self-identifying as an ID proponent, but your own words are betraying you. Your posts here could be taken a lot more seriously if you could bring yourself to remove this filter.

Yes, but it would be mistake to think that some whale ancestor looked like an elephant seal. We know that whales and seals evolved from completely different land animals (whales are related to hippos, seals to the carnivors). Seals are no more likely to become fully aqualtic than whales are likely to become semi-aquatic. You might as well say that Whales which beach themselves show that the species might be in transition to become land animals again.

Yes. I’ve often said that if there was a designer, he wouldn’t be very “intelligent”. “Trickster Designer” or “Stupid Designer” would make more sense.

It is no longer thought that Archaeopteryx is the ancestor of birds.

Cite

It’s not surprising that people jumped to that conclusion when the first fossil was discovered, though.

Why is it impossible? To me, it seems at the very least perfectly plausible, and in light of the evidence, pretty a pretty darn compelling and unavoidable conclusion.

Hunh? Genetics is PART of evolutionary theory.

But they are one in the same in terms of genetics! Look, many ID/creationists treat speciation as if the underlying mechanism was mysterious. But while we don’t necessarily know the exact ins and outs of every speciation that ever happened, the general underlying cause is not mysterious at all. In fact, it’s as I said, happening by EXACTLY the same underlying process as are changes within a species: the accumulation of mutations and new combinations, and other forms of variations in the prevailing genotype.

The reasons that two species cannot interbreed are ultimately genetic (either because the genes don’t work when combined and fail to produce a viable embryo or because they create creatures that have physical barriers to reproduction). And the genetic changes that cause two populations to stop being able to interbreed are no fundamentally different than the genetic changes that cause two populations to acquire different hair colors or skin colors. There are other macro concepts like genetic drift and punk eek and so forth that explain the particulars of how these changes become fixed in a population and when these sorts of speciating events are supposed to happen, but the basic underlying mechanism, difference in genes, is the same thing that you concede to when you concede to natural selection working to change species.

Finch already explained how fossils are like finding random members of your extended family tree. Because we only randomly get examples of the tree, we rarely get individuals on the exact same direct line over and over. We get a scattered sample from the entire tree. However, that’s more than good enough to get a sense of what the overall pattern is and what sorts of transitions occur.

What’s even more important to see is how life develops: not by leaping from one family to another, but by branching out at the bottom. We don’t see new phyla evolving from species, because phyla are higher level classifications used to describe very distant starting points. Evolution is, in that way, actually quite conservative.

And evolution inherently makes taxonomy problematic. Consider an ostrich. The scientific name is Struthio camelus, with Struthio being the genus name and camelus being the species name. Say there are several species of ostrich, and two evolve enough apart that they can no longer interbeed and look somewhat different. What do we do with “Struthio camelus”? Obviously, the two groups are different species now (before they were just subspecies), and yet they are both STILL just as much “camelus” as they wree before, just as they are still both Struthio, still both birds, still both amniotes, still both eukaryotes, etc. That is, “camelus” is still a useful descriptive term that describes a real grouping within Struthio. So do we create a new category between genus and species for camelus? Or do we add a new category below species that will now mean what species used to?

Taxonomists have answers to this sort of dilemna, but it’s important to see that the dilemna exists, and that it exists because of the very particular way in which evolution works: building on past history and in a sense bound by it. However much human beings have changed from lancets (fishlike creatures that are almost perfect “basal” chordates), both are still chordates. Human beings are, in fact, still part of every single taxonomic group that their direct ancestors were once part of. That’s how evolution proceedes: modifying what came before, branching out at the tips of the branches of the tree of life instead of off of the trunk.

sigh. Yes it would be a mistake, and it would be a mistake to say sea lions look like elephant seals. We know that the land to sea transition is possible (and obviously the sea to land one too) - so describing the difficulties of the transition are quite beside the point.

I don’t want to give the impression that I think elephant seals are “failures”. Not that I know what that means in the context of evolution, of course. I’m also not saying they are destined for the sea - perhaps they’ll acquire the mechanism to eat on land, and be better suited for their current life.

And I don’t even want to start to understand how you could equate a whale beaching itself with the breeding cycle of elephant seals.

I was just poking fun with your habit of using “…” everywhere, which normally signifies that text has been removed or is missing.

Well, for the purpose of elightenment, then, there are also Sinosauropteryx, Shuvuuia, Beipiasaurus, Sinornithosaurus, Microraptor, Dilong, Therizinosaurus, Yixianosaurus, Pedopenna, Jinfengopteryx and Epidendrosaurus.

It is logical because there is more to being a bird than having feathers. Indeed, as the specimens mentioned above show, feathers cannot even be considered to be a uniquely avian character (Dilong, for example, is a tyrannosaurid, which is only very distantly raletd to birds). Archaeopteryx remains one of the most bird-like dinosaurs that is still undeniably a dinosaur. The main “point” of many of those specimens is not in showing which one led to birds, but to show that feathers arose within dinosauria, thus birds evolved from dinosaurs. There are non-creationists who argue against a dinosaurian origin for birds (preferring an alternate origin within Reptilia), but even their position is becoming more tenuous as more fossils are found.

The current thinking for the origin of birds runs through Theropoda, Tetanurae, Avetheropoda, Coleurosauria (here is where the tyrannosaurids branch off, by the way), Maniraptora (now we’re into dromaeosaurs, such as Velociraptor and Deinonychus), to Aves proper. Within Maniraptora, we also get all sorts of craziness, such as the Therizinosaurs, which have many bird-like traits, and many non-bird-like traits. Archaeopteryx falls within Aves proper, but it is also a dead-end in itself.

Once we get into Aves proper, we still aren’t necessarily to birds as we know them. We have the Archaeornithes (which includes Archaeopteryx) as a side branch, and the Metornithes which continues the trend to modern birds. From there, we pass through Ornithothoraces and Ornithurae before hitting Neornithes, wherein we begin to see birds in their modern form.

As you can see, it’s a lot more complex than simply “Archaeopteryx was the first bird”. There’s a whole lot happening between Aves and Neornithes, and even more happening between Coelurosauria and Aves. Only one lineage led to modern birds, but there were also an awful lot of other bird-like critters running and/or flying around. As noted previously, we are unlikely to ever find all of these branches, partially because of the nature of fossilization, partially because of the nature of speciation. Many of the touted “missing links” are for specific features, not an entire lineage. Protoarchaeopteryx and Caudipteryx are important not because they are missing links to the direct line of avian evolution, but because they possess feathers, they do serve to link Aves quite securely within Dinosauria.

OK. What I originally objected to was you singling out of elephant seals as a “transitional” speices. If we can agree that they are no more deserving of that term than any other species on earth, then we’re in full agreement. Can we agree to that?

Riiiiight… so? What dinos with feathers demonstrate is that at some point there was a creature from whom these dinos AND birds were both descended. That’s especially certain given that up until those fossils were found, birds were the only living things known to have feathers.

It’s not necessarily logical. In fact, we generally don’t think that Archaeopteryx is an example of a direct ancestor to modern birds. But again, remember that we are looking at a set of branching lineages and trying to learn things about when and where different species branched off. Whether or not archaeopteryx is the ancestor of modern birds, it is clearly a more recent cousin of birds than a fossil crocodile from the same time period as archaeopteryx. That’s because any traits that it shares with modern birds (and there are several: more than just feathers)

No. First of all, it demonstrates that birds came from dinos regardless of whether it is directly ancestral to birds or not. Second of all, it clearly is a transition regardless of whether it is directly ancestral to modern birds. That is because it has features previously known as being found both only in modern birds OR in dinos. This demonstrates the link between the two. If you can’t see why that is, then you need to think more about the implications of a branching organization.

As I said, we don’t think that Archaeopteryx is a direct ancestor of birds: it’s a great great great cousin of sorts.

Your theory of “there have always been birds” is an interesting tangent though. Lets say that it is true: lets say that every modern creature alive today was actually around 3.5 billion years ago in small numbers and we just haven’t found any of their fossils yet. There are any number of gaping huge problems with this idea, but I’ll leave explaining those as an exercise for others or yourself before going into it myself. It’s worth thinking about it though!