Newly discovered fossil could prove a problem for creationists

Washington Post ^ | November 5, 2014 | Rachel Feltman

[Ha Ha Thats Very Logical]

So define *supernatural*.

It's not my term. Ask Lexinom. He or she seems to want science to address something that science cannot observe. I'm just wondering how that works in practice.

I'm sure lots of scientists are investigating thoughts and emotions. I would guess that they do so something like the way they investigate subatomic particles: do something and infer from the results. Maybe someday they'll be able to observe thoughts and emotions directly, I don't know. Would you rather they stop trying?

[Lexinom]

Those are all great questions. I suppose it would not change how they practice observational science (which of course precludes theories of our origins) one iota. In fact, we have no choice but to make certain transcendental assumptions (axioms) which form the scaffolding for all further inquiry. The laws of logic are a good example.

When we venture beyond observational science into the more speculative realm of origins, whereby to extrapolate backwards we must make assumptions about uniformity (constancy of speed of light, assumptions about decay rates, assumption about original parent-daughter ratios to name a few), we necessarily must cross that blurry boundary between science and philosophy.

My own opinion for whatever it's worth is that the proper disposition for the observer, a human being living within a miniscule sphere of space-time, is one of great humility. This we can derive from the vastness of the universe, and from our self-awareness - something which does not lend itself well to purely mechanistic origins. We would do well to remember that ancient adage that God resists the proud and gives grace to the humble, and are justified in using that measuring rod (humility) in evaluating others.

[Lexinom]

Maybe someday they'll be able to observe thoughts and emotions directly, I don't know. Would you rather they stop trying?

Who is arguing against advances in observational sciences?

[Lexinom]

Your own particular version of a supernatural component, I imagine. But whatever you mean by it: let's say scientists do presuppose that.

I'll be more explicit: To do science we need to make axiomatic assumptions not themselves subject to the scientific method. We must assume, for example, that 2+2=4. We must assume the law of noncontradiction. By making those assumptions we implicitly assume a Lawgiver over an ordered universe since it would make no sense that these truths would stand on their own, just sort of floating out there with no rhyme or reason in the epistemological ether....

[BrandtMichaels]

Re: indisputable evidence for the geological theories of gradualism, deep time and plate tectonics. <== so which is it indisputable or theory? The law of biogenesis is almost indisputable as are the thermodynamic laws - almost or as close as it gets which is why we call them laws and not theories.

When science becomes theories, assumptions and conjecture is when it attempts to explain history and define it’s duration. Go back to the fundamentals of the scientific method and see if you can determine exactly why science can’t accurately define any aspect of unobserved history.

[metmom]

Nice attempt at deflection.

So scientists think that thoughts and emotions are part of the real world, eh?

And now they're spending time trying to observe the unobservable. They can only determine it based on inferring from the results.

But that doesn't apply to all things that cannot be observed.

Mighty selective of them. Sounds like a somewhat biased viewpoint that they're working from. Not very objective of them. Kind of disqualifies them from being scientists from the get go, doesn't it?

Seems to me that at one time electricity was considered supernatural.

Science has come a long way. Downward. if they immediately disqualify something from being studied based on personal prejudices.

[metmom]

Who is arguing against advances in observational sciences?

Apparently the scientists with their preconceived notions of what qualifies to be observed and what doesn't.

They're working on the assumption that the supernatural can't be found out through the scientific method, and arbitrarily assign the label to something that they don't even know if it IS supernatural.

[JimSEA]

“A scientific theory is a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world that is acquired through the scientific method and repeatedly tested and confirmed through observation and experimentation.[1][2] As with most (if not all) forms of scientific knowledge, scientific theories are inductive in nature and aim for predictive power and explanatory force.[3][4]”

[BroJoeK]

The Ghost of FReepers Past: "I didn’t think evolutionists admitted there were any missing links.
I guess there aren’t until they find one?
Now we are back to no missing links?"

No, you have it backwards.
Every individual and every fossil is a "transitional form" between its ancestors and its descendants, if any.
So any fossils found anywhere on earth can be related back to their more ancient ancestors, and potentially to their more modern descendants.

However, you must remember that there are today approximately 50,000 named vertebrate animal species (mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians & fish), and it is estimated a typical species survives around a million years before it goes extinct, or becomes so changed it must be reclassified under a new species name.
So, if we just consider the past 100 million years, we are looking at something like five million vertebrate species that roamed the earth, flew its skies or swam its seas.

Of those five million distinct species, we have found fossils for fewer than one percent, meaning 99% of the "transitional forms", aka "missing links" are still missing!

Of course, every year scientists working in the field find and name fossils of species never seen before, so slowly, slowly the number of "missing links" diminishes.
But at the current rate, it will be a very long time indeed, if ever, before there are more "link" species found than still missing.

[BrandtMichaels]

A theory is already proven useless if it has too break several scientific laws in order to supported.

Also I mentioned the mathematicians b/c they have proven with math and our hard scientific knowledge of DNA and the assumed rate of ‘good’ mutations that not billions nor trillions of years would still not make evolution even close to possible nor probable. But obviously ymmv...

[BroJoeK]

DoughtyOne: "As if there weren’t any problems with proving evolution was the source of the human species."

FRiend, even the strictest of strict Creationists confess to a physical process you call "adaption", such as human breeding of new types of domesticated animals & plants.

So the key to your understanding is to realize that "adaption" is the only kind of change that ever happens in nature, and the only issue is whether we are talking about short-term or long-term adaptions.

Short term adaptions create new breeds, varieties, races and sub-species of animals & plants.
The fossil & DNA records show results, that if you continue the same processes for millions of years, you get new species, genera & families.
Continue that same process for hundreds of millions of years, and you will see new orders, classes & phylums of life -- or at least so the fossil & DNA evidence suggest. ord shows that

[JimSEA]

“A scientific law is a statement based on repeated experimental observations that describes some aspects of the universe. A scientific law always applies under the same conditions, and implies that there is a causal relationship involving its elements.”

On the other hand, a theory tells you “why” the observations underlying the law occur. A law fails and is falsified if one observation is contrary to what is expected. A theory can be revised to account for variations in observations. Both law an theory are falsifiable.

[DoughtyOne]

Sorry, I’m not buying in on that.

I believe you get changes within a animal line. I do not believe a squirrel becomes a horse. I don’t believe a maple tree becomes a sequoia.

There are so many missing links that I believe it’s laughable to consider what you’re trying to explain as fact.

[Ha Ha Thats Very Logical]

My own opinion for whatever it's worth is that the proper disposition for the observer, a human being living within a miniscule sphere of space-time, is one of great humility.

Fair enough. I think many scientists are very humble, awestruck by the vast magnificence of what they're studying. (Some are not, of course, and some of those tend to dominate the media. But that's true in any discipline, including religious ones.) But I'm still not sure how that attitude is supposed to affect their practice of science, particularly what you've called historical science.

Take the people described in the original article here. Leaving aside the unnecessary confrontational anti-creationist presentation, how were they supposed to conduct their research and discuss their results? They obviously accept the theories of evolution and an old earth. They looked at the evidence so far and said, "If the theories are right, there should be an animal with these characteristics in the timeline right about here." They looked for it and found it. They presented it as further evidence in support of their theories. What should they have done differently? How would their a priori presupposition of the supernatural change things?

You've criticized, among other things, the assumption of uniformity that underlies such things as radiometric dating. And yet different methods of dating have been shown to produce consistent results, and scientists working with the assumption of uniformity have been able to make predictions that bore fruit. Should they stop trying to build a narrative of origins based on that assumption because there's a chance it might be wrong? Or present all their results with an asterisk and a "*This might all be wrong, if the speed of light used to be different and radioactive materials used to decay faster" disclaimer?

[Ha Ha Thats Very Logical]

So scientists think that thoughts and emotions are part of the real world, eh?
And now they're spending time trying to observe the unobservable. They can only determine it based on inferring from the results.
But that doesn't apply to all things that cannot be observed.

I have no idea what you're getting at. If you have a point, feel free to make it. Are you complaining because scientists aren't investigating the supernatural, is that it? You know that they've investigated lots of "supernatural" things, from prayer to ESP, right?

The only tools for investigation of some phenomena--or the only ones we have now, anyway--involve putting something into the system and seeing what you get out. Facebook famously altered some users' news feeds to change the balance of positive and negative posts, and then analyzed those users' own posts to see if their moods were affected. Medical researchers have divided patients into groups that were prayed for and groups that weren't, to see if there was a difference in outcomes. What "supernatural stuff" would you like scientists to be investigating that you're convinced they aren't?

[Lexinom]

I think they are right: One cannot find the supernatural directly; rather, one can dust Creation for the fingerprints of the Creator and find evidence thereof...

You raise an interesting point, though. The GToE is not required for the scientific advances that we've enjoyed anymore than beer is required to be sold at highschool football games. The GToE has held back further enlightenment for over a century. Eventually it will be discarded, esp. as new evidence (such more living fossils, esp. something big like a nocturnal pterosaur alive and well in 2014) comes to light... Some of us are working on this diligently...

[BroJoeK]

DoughtyOne: "I do not believe a squirrel becomes a horse.
I don’t believe a maple tree becomes a sequoia."

First and foremost, you must address your own problem of truth-telling -- you don't seem to grasp the concept, and somehow think it's perfectly **OK** to lie about what science actually says.
You need to fix that problem.

Now that you are practicing honesty, let me advise you that no scientist has ever claimed "a squirrel becomes a horse", or that "a maple tree becomes a sequoia," -- those are ridiculous mischaracterization of evolution theory.
Indeed, if you will think back to who first told you such nonsense, that is the source of your current truth-telling problems.
Eventually you must confront it.

What evolution theory actually says is that every generation, without exception, experiences some small mutations causing changes from those generations which went before.
Frequently confirmed observations show us that most such mutations have no effect on us, and of those which do effect us, most are negative.
But just a few mutations actually help in survival and reproduction, and those get passed on to future generations.

Short-term, that's called "adaption", while longer term changes slowly accumulate, leading to "evolution".
So there's no difference between "adaption" and "evolution" except the length of time under discussion.

DNA and fossil records show that after about a million years, separated populations, which could previously readily interbreed (i.e., races, breeds & varieties) become unwilling, if not yet actually unable, to interbreed.
At that point, we refer to them as not just different sub-species, but separate species.
Yes, they may well still look like others closely related, but their willingness and ability to interbreed is key to our classifications of them as different breeds, species, genera, orders, etc.

For example: Zebras, while generally looking all the same, actually come in a dozen different breeds and sub-species in three different species and two sub-genera:

[DoughtyOne]

First of all Bro, I didn’t say there wasn’t mutation.

I merely said that you don’t get a horse from a squirrel or a maple tree from a sequoia.

And what I said was correct wasn’t it.

I don’t buy into evolution as the origin of the human species.

I don’t buy into the idea that every animal came from some space spill on isle 6 or a lightening bolt in a pond.

Science does not prove that was the case. That’s the end of the story for me. We all have our gods, some of us are just willing to admit to it.

[BrandtMichaels]

Err not exactly there bub...

Adaptation aka natural selection aka micro-evolution are changes in the natural selection process choosing traits between the 2 sets of DNA [mother vs father] while mutations are damages to the DNA code that may get corrected through the copying processes, may have no effects, often have damaging effects leading to disease and premature deaths, while a very few are actually described as beneficial even though it represents a loss in the genetic code it can in rare instances produce slight beneficial results but often at a cost somewhere else in the normal life cycle. Gradual decay of the DNA is one of the 101 signs of a young earth and universe and is thought to lead to species becoming extinct. Basically the observational evidence of DNA indicates devolution.

“The decay in the human genome due to multiple slightly deleterious mutations each generation is consistent with an origin several thousand years ago. Sanford, J., Genetic entropy and the mystery of the genome, Ivan Press, 2005; see review of the book and the interview with the author in Creation 30(4):45–47,September 2008. This has been confirmed by realistic modelling of population genetics, which shows that genomes are young, in the order of thousands of years. See Sanford, J., Baumgardner, J., Brewer, W., Gibson, P. and Remine, W., Mendel’s Accountant: A biologically realistic forward-time population genetics program, SCPE 8(2):147–165, 2007.”

[BrandtMichaels]

You may claim to be [or actually are] a law-breaker all you want, but for these scientific laws, well not exactly. You see they are declared by science as laws because there has never even been one experiment or instance of there being shown to be broken.

No, not once, not even bent, just ‘nonce’, zero, get it?!