I know plesiosaurs did not evolve from sharks, but they do show that a big long-necked aquatic predator is viable (or at least, was at one time). Now I’m wondering why there aren’t long-necked sharks. 
No, the OP wants non-creationist arguments.
Such as genetic drift, or punctuated equilibrium and how those can falsify Darwin’s theory of evolution through minor variation and natural selection. Can mutations regress, or can they only “travel one way” (IIRC, this is one area where Gould and Dawkin disagreed.)
I don’t know enough about these ideas to present them, my contribution to this thread was only to ensure that we were referring to Darwin’s theory, not evolution itself.
Obviously, there are evolutionary mechanisms at work which aren’t natural selection. Genetic drift is a good example. However, that does not make them non-Darwinian.
To develop a true non-Darwinian theory of evolution, one need do more than simply demonstrate isolated instances of change not occurring via natural selection. Darwin himself allowed for instances of “inheritance of acquired characters” in his theory - he never advanced natural selection as the sole mechanism of evolution, but rather as the primary one. Similarly, Lamarck acknowledged that instances of adaptation do occur, but they were, in his theory, relegated to “some circumstances” - side-effects which detoured lineages off the Great Chain of Being, with the main force of change driven by inheritance of acquired characters. The trick is not to find exceptions to the rule, but to establish a new rule. This is how Darwin overturned Lamarck, and this is what would need to be done to overturn Darwin.
“The first, nearly unreadable portion of “On the Origin of Species” goes into excrutiating detail about time spent breeding pigeons.”
I actually found that one of the entertaining parts… around chapter 7 it starts getting unreadable. But on topic… I’ve heard the main 5 “arguments” (and by arguments, I mean accustaions that barely hold water) against evolution are as follows,
- Evolution has never been observed. [sigh] (the wide variety seen at last weekend’s Wesminster Kennel Club Dog Show was the result of clever sock puppets and mass hypnosis. - scotandrsn)
- Evolution violates the 2nd law of thermodynamics. (I coulda sworn random genetic mutations are in fact as example of entropy at work)
- There are no transitional fossils. I don’t think I even need to put anything for that.
- The theory of evolution says that life originated, and evolution proceeds, by random chance. The problem with that is?
-
Evolution is only a theory; it hasn’t been proved. Don’t even get me started.
[site: Five Major Evolutionist Misconceptions
about Evolution (http://www.trueorigin.org/isakrbtl.asp)]
haha, and no, I am not looking for a fight. I’m pro-evolution.
Who Stole My Name? ,
Those are all the “creation science” points, but I suppose they could be secular. I was trying to think up an alterante scenario last night to account for the diversity of life on earth(without invoving, you know, goddidit),I can’t. I think all the scientifically inspired theories were laid to rest a hundred years ago. I am letting some meat go rancid in the garage, though. If I get flies I’ll get back to you.
Actually, the concept of geological “Deep Time” beyond Ussher’s date was already knocking around since the late 1700s and Buffon and Hutton’s geological studies. Contemporaries of Darwin were already talking about multimillion-year ages. What was badly lacking were both a way to put actual dates to Deep Time AND a mechanism that would explain how come that could be.
For the same reason why dogs didn’t evolve thumbs; the right combination of mutations and selective forces didn’t produce long necks in sharks.
However, given the historic increase in Discover Channel photographers, a long (and thin) necked shark could get through the bars of a shark cage for a tasty and nutritious meal. That’d be a nice selective force.
What response do you have to this guy?
Lloyd Pye
When come back, bring Pye.
In other words, ID is, if anything, even worse than YEC, because it’s trying to jump naturalistic evolution’s claim. It’s naturalistic evolution in all its parts, except for the repeated refrain that it was all designed by some greater intelligence of the universe (but not God! Oh, lord no! Can’t say God did it! Then we wouldn’t be able to sell it in the schools!).
I suppose it depends on what you consider legitimate, but what about the idea that aliens came to earth and planted the first life forms? (Of course, much like Creationist theory, this posits that something [in this case aliens rather God] existed prior to life on earth, rendering the whole debate somewhat pointless.)
No, because those planted life forms would still evolve.
Pye seems to be a clear-cut example that “a little learning is a dangerous thing.” He knows most of the jargon and understands a bit of the science, but he gets so many details wrong, that it is clear that he really has never studied the issue.
Piffle. Many of the leading scientists were devoutly religious and many of the strongest supporters of science were religious leaders. While there have been conflicts between some religious leaders and some scientists, Darwin’s Origin of Species did not evoke great or universal religious condemnation (Descent of Man did garner a bit more resistance, but sharp condemnation only gathered strength years later as the movement that evolved into Fundamentalism began to emerge.)
All fossils are transitional and we have ample evidence in the fossil record of transitions. Pye is just blowing smoke.
This is either abysmal ignorance or a deliberate lie. Searches for “missing links” died out 80 or more years ago and only people outside science even pay attention to the bogus concept any more.
Pye is clearly ignorant of (or willing to lie about) the meaning of neo-Darwinism which is simply Darwinian theory of Natural Selection enhanced with the information regarding genetics that was unavailable to Darwin. There are no “Darwinists” wandering about decrying genetic inheritance; Pye is simply misusing words.
More dishonesty. Wegener did not “figure out plate tectonics” and he was not “buried under spiteful criticism” (although he was subjected to ridicule). He had proposed an interesting idea, that the continents drifted around on the surface of the Earth without suggesting a mechanism to make it work and his idea was, for that reason, dismissed. When explorations of the earth’s structure advanced in the 1950s, Wegener’s “continental drift” was re-examined in light of new information and the theory of plate tectonics was developed.
The rest of Pye’s “examples” of bad scientific conclusions and the “suppression” of new ideas are equally false.
And, of course, Pye’s premise does nothing to establish an alternative to Evolution. Claiming (or broadly hinting) that life on Earth is simply a series of lab experiments by someone not of Earth does not preclude evolution (the mechanism of which is the basis for breeding, after all) and simply pushes the question back to how these extraterrestials developed on their home world…
Duh! They were tampered with by a previous intelligence, from yet another world. Oh - where did They come from, then? Ya ain’t pullin’ me into this - it’s turtles all the way down! 
Dani
As I understand it, that’s kind of a bad example, since Richard Wein says it is susceptible to Dembski’s silly protestations that it “smuggles in” a design element. At least, Dawkins’ one primary example of such an algorithm is.
Of course one would design the fitness function to reach a particular goal, though without any particular knowledge of the solution. And the fitness function itself (and the phase space too, I suppose) would alter over time as the solutions began to manifest. I don’t know if anyone has developed a program to mimic that yet.
As for evolution…well, I don’t mind the mathematics, but I’m not going to go learn 4 years worth of bio-science just to comprehend it. I’ll settle for taking the word of the best scientists in the nation that it’s the best naturalistic explantion (and thus the best explanation period.) As I still stumble over words like “phylogenetic”, I think I better just relax and let the science-y folk do the work.
Meh. The aliens installed all the life forms that currently exist. The fossils are just there to test our belief in our alien forefathers. 
I’m afraid “we” face no such problem: those first herdsmen didn’t have a “final model” in mind when they began breeding livestock. One need only look at one has in any given generation, pick out those with desirable traits and allow them to breed. Do that over a long period of time, and the end result will be markedly different from what you started with, but the end result in no way had to have been a goal from the first generation.
It’s obvious that this guy knows even less about comparative morphology than he does about evolution in general. Cheetahs, in no way, are a “weird genetic hybrid between cats and dogs”. Everything about them says “cat”. Pointing to a few superficial similarities is beyond moronic, especially if one is unaware of functional morphology to boot. The “dog-like” features he points out are easily explainable as adaptations for speed.
Please pardon my ignorance, as I am, after all, merely a layperson and not an evolution scientist, but I have a question:
It was stated earlier in the thread that Darwin observed different varieties of finch on different islands, and noticed that these finches all seemed to have adapted their beaks, etc. to become the ideal tools to use on the food sources at hand. Without sounding too simplistic, is it possible that Darwin got his observation backwards? I mean, isn’t it at least remotely possible that finch “a” on island “a” had merely learned how to best use the tools it already had at its disposal? It would seem to me that, with enough time and enough “pressure for survival” that the finch would have been forced to become extremely proficient with the tools at its disposal. This would, in my estimation, appear that the finch had become uniquely suited to its environment, which would be true, to a certain extent, but not for the mutational reasons implied by Darwin. It also seems to me that a finch becoming proficient would take considerably less evolutionary time than would random mutations…
…or am I missing something?
Michael Behe’s “irreducible complexity” has been thoroughly refuted. For example, eyes are found to have evolved a number of times independently. As it was pointed out, a light sensitive spot is an advantage over total blindness.
A Biochemist’s Response to “The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution” is an excellent debunking of Behe’s book itself.
The most obvious counter is that the “tools” are not static. Those tools (in this case, the finches’ beaks) have been documented to change over time, and selective events have likewise been observed in which those physical variations make or break an individual in terms of survival or mating success. There is also variation in what those toosl can be used on, depending on the degree of selective forces at work. In good times, there can be a great deal of overlap in the diets of, for example, the small, medium, and large ground finches, making those specializations less important. In lean times, the beak size of one of those finches plays a major role in the bird’s fate. Those that survive live to pass on their traits to further generations, and the ebb and flow of those changes in a population has likewise been documented.
The “random mutations”, in this case, can be as simple as size variation, just as there is a great deal of variation in height among humans. However, selective pressures in the Galapagos are such that even a very small variation can determine the fate of a finch during hard times.
A further critique of your argument would be the fact that many of the finch populations are not cleanly delineated, as one might expect if they were already all specialized when they got to the islands. Again using the ground finches as an example, in good times there can be a great deal of overlap between small, medium, and large finch matings. In hard times, the separation becomes much greater, and the populations breed much truer. This is consistent with a theory of relatively recent speciation, in which the individual populations are mostly, but not completely, reproductively isolated. Were hard times to continue for an extended period of perhaps mere decades, each species could well become truly separated from its neighbors. As it is, occassional hybrids still occur, and then mostly when selective forces are lessened.
In essence, natural selection has three major criteria which must be met: variation, heritability, and competition. A trait must vary, that variation must be heritable, and that variation must influence an individual’s ability to compete with conspecifics for resources. If those three are met, then selection follows syllogistically: those which possess favorable traits which give them an edge in competing for resources will be more likely to obtain those resources, thus being more likely to pass those traits on to the next generation, and so on. Consequently, a population tends toward adaption, or specialization, over time as each generation becomes “better” at obtaining those resources. Each criterion is met in the cases of the Galapagos finches’ beaks; ergo, natural selection is at work, and is repsonsible for the observed specializations.