Posted on 07/25/2009 10:11:21 AM PDT by GodGunsGuts
There is no credible evidence that I know of that the life forms of today evolved from simpler life forms. The actual evidence suggests the sudden appearance of a wide variety of life forms, fully formed and fully functional, and then stasis (regardless of whether the orginism in question has gone extinct).
“Whether you believe the conventional wisdom that our own species, Homo sapiens, descended in seamless continuity from the preexisting species, homo erectus, depends not on the evidence (because the fossil evidence is moot) but on the deferment of your lack of knowledge to the authority of the presenter or whether the presentation (italicized in original) of the evidence resonates with your prejudices.”
The author didn't question whether evolution took place but went to some lengths to say most of what is offered as evidence is assertion based on authority.
It is not just the creationists that are pointing out the error of trying to build a human or animal lineage with fossils but evolutionists too.
Anyone want to take a guess who the author was?
It was Henry Gee, Senior Editor of “Nature”, in the introduction to his book, “In Search of Deep Time/Beyond the Fossil Record to a New History of Life”.
>>and survives only because it has a built-in facilitated variation mechanism for continually adapting to internal and external challenges and changes. The essential components are: functional molecular architecture and machinery, modular switching cascades that control the machinery and a signal network that coordinates everything. All three are required for survival, so they must have been present from the beginning—a conclusion that demands intelligent design.<<
No point in going further. The author acknowledges TToE and in the next breath baldly asserts that the mechanism demand an ID. This is just a rehash of the “who started it” argument and I agree that God did so.
This doesn’t say what you think it does. It doesn’t even say what the author thinks it dies.
At the same time, your awareness that the author is arguing against "assertion based on authority," and specifically against building a "lineage with fossils," suggests pretty strongly that you extracted this quote from the original source yourself, and that you understood the larger context. So we probably can't attribute the misleading effect to your having cribbed the quote from a secondary source, nor consider the misleading effect as ignorantly unintentional.
So, for those who might be curious, if arguments from authority don't fly, are there other fossil based arguments about evolutionary relationships which the "real academic heavy weight in the evolution camp" Henry Gee, Senior Editor of “Nature”, thinks do fly? Why, yes, as it turns out, there are! If Gee thinks you can't build a solid, testable, scientific "lineage with fossils," are there other ways you can organize fossils into evolutionary relationships which Gee thinks are solidly scientific and testable? Why, yes, as it turns out, there are!
What's going on here is that Gee is a "cladist". (I'll let him explain for himself what that is below, in my own extraction from the same introduction, or read the whole introduction for yourself HERE. My extraction starts on page 6.)
Like most more enthusiastic cladists, Gee argues that direct ancestor-descedent relationships are not scientifically testable, but that relationships of "cousinship" are testable. IOW Gee would (although he doesn't happen to deal with the case of hominids in the intro beyond what count-your-change quotes) be suggesting that you can't say, or ought not say, or that it's scientifically weak and problematic to say, for instance, that Homo habilis was the direct ancestor of Homo erectus, which in turn was the direct ancestor of modern humans. OTOH, a cladist like Gee would say that you can testably and scientifically assert that, for instance, modern humans and Homo erectus together share a common ancestor exclusive of Homo habilis, this being a testable cladistic relationship.
To further clarify, here's that section I extracted from the same book intro count-your-change quotes:
Before we can understand the history of life, we need to find the order in which we are all cousins, the topology or branching order of the tree of life. This can be done without having to make any prior assumptions about cause and effect, or ancestry and descent. These branching diagrams, which look, misleadingly, like genealogies, are proper scientific hypotheses that can be tested by examining the strength or likelihood of alternative orders of branching -- different orders of cousinhood -- in the light of the anatomy of the organisms in whose relationships we are interested. As long ago as 1950, a German entomologist called Willi Hennig used these simple principles as a basis for a new way of looking at the living world. Hennig sought to understand creatures in terms of how they shared characteristics with one another, independently of time, rather than in terms of their histories of ancestry and descent. Hennig called his philosophy 'phylogenetic systematics', but it came to be known as 'cladistics' and its practitioners, inevitably, as 'cladists'. The branching diagrams cladists drew up to represent orders of cousinhood between organisms -- patterns of relationship -- became known as 'cladograms'.Cladistics looks only a the pattern of the history of life, free from assumptions about the process of the unfolding of history. It resolves the conundrum of trying to comprehend Deep Time in terms of an unfolding drama...
An important aspect of cladistics, as in all science, is testability. In cladistics, you are asked to find the most likely way in which a set of organisms is related to one another... [I]f you have more than two organisms, you will find that there is more than one way of drawing a cladogram that links them up... [I]f there is more than one way in which organisms can be cousins, you are forced to consider the alternatives, and you must find a way of evaluating them all.
How can these alternatives be evaluated? The central test is as old as science -- older: Occam's razor, or the Principle of Parsimony. ... The simplest, or most 'parsimonious', cladogram is the one that assumes the smallest amount of evolutionary change...
Conventional stories about evolution, about 'missing links', are not in themselves testable, because there is only one possible course of events -- the one implied by the story...
The introduction is ten pages and a copyrighted work so I choose to quote only a small portion.
“clever, misleading”? Nothing you have said demonstrates that. But none the less you are amusing in your effort to make it seem so. Enjoy!
You know very well that the vast majority of lurkers are not aware of the intramural debates surrounding cladistics.
We all know very well that you hoped these uniformed lurkers would assume from your carefully chosen quote that even this leading evolutionists was, in effect, admitting that fossils can tell us nothing scientifically credible about evolutionary relationships.
But, we now know that you were very well aware that Gee strongly endorses that fossils -- correctly, by his lights, analyzed -- can indeed tell us a great deal about evolutionary relationships, but that you managed to conceal this fact while still quoting "accurately".
As I say, well done. Definitely an above average performance. And you did it all yourself, rather than cribbing from another quote hunter. Take a bow!
That it is impossible to trace direct lineages of ancestry and descent from the fossil record should be self-evident. Ancestors must exist, of course -- but we can never attribute ancestry to any particular fossil we might find....this is a logical constraint that must apply even if evolution were true -- which is not in doubt, because if we didn't have ancestors, then we wouldn't be here. Neither does this mean that fossils exhibiting transitional structures do not exist, nor that it is impossible to reconstruct what happened in evolution. Unfortunately, many paleontologists believe that ancestor/descendent lineages can be traced from the fossil record, and my book is intended to debunk this view....the point of IN SEARCH OF DEEP TIME, ironically, is that old-style, traditional evolutionary biology -- the type that feels it must tell a story, and is therefore more appealing to news reporters and makers of documentaries -- is unscientific.You understand that he's not criticizing "most of what is offered as evidence." He's criticizing attempts to tell a particular story of "x evolved from y," not the overall assertion of a family relationship. He goes on:
I am a religious person and I believe in God. I find the militant atheism of some evolutionary biologists ill-reasoned and childish, and most importantly unscientific -- crucially, faith should not be subject to scientific justification. But the converse also holds true -- science should not need to be validated by the narrow dogma of faith....the use by creationists of selective, unauthorized quotations, possibly with intent to mislead the public undermines their position as self-appointed guardians of public values and morals.
What was misleading about it (I'm not sure how clever it was) was that you claimed it showed that "most of what is offered as evidence is assertion based on authority." It should be clear by now that that wasn't his point at all. His argument isn't with the evidence, but with the particular stories some people base on it.
Maybe the “uninformed lurkers” will sit at your feet and wait for what they can go read for themselves since I gave the source. But no, no, I don't think so, no.
I don't need to “assume” anything that's why I quote accurately even if it upsets you.
And I DO enjoy your comments so don't leave yet. Pleeeeze!
“If we can never know for certain that any fossil we unearth is our direct ancestor, it is similarly invalid to pluck a string of fossils from Deep Time, arrange these fossils in chronological order, and assert that this arrangement represents a sequence of evolutionary ancestry and descent.”
I was quite correct in saying that assertion based on authority was being offered as evidence since the fossils didn't and cannot support the stories, as Gee said. It was this "arrangement" he called "misleading tales" as the fossils don't support the tales in his view. If you don't like my pointing out his disagreement with what you or others might believe, I understand why, but those are his views as he stated them. and instead of arguing his views are in error you argue he didn't hold those views. Oh well.
You either misunderstand or wilfully misrepresent his views.
You said, “The author didn’t question whether evolution took place but went to some lengths to say most of what is offered as evidence is assertion based on authority.”
Your clear implication is that most of what is offered as evidence *for evolution as a whole* is just assertion based on authority.
That’s not what Gee meant—he meant there was no real evidence for specific “x evolved from y” stories. I am not disagreeing with that.
If you wish to walk back or rephrase your original sentence, I could understand why. But Gee clearly believes there’s plenty of real, scientific evidence for evolution, and for you to imply he doesn’t was an error.
Satisfies me.
I plainly said he didn't question whether evolution took place but it seems you want to make that mean something else.
Comments Gee: “Once we realize that Deep Time can never support narratives of evolution, we are forced to accept that virtually everything we thought we knew about evolution is wrong. It is wrong because we want to think of the history of life as a story; but that is precisely what we cannot do. This tension-between Deep Time and the everyday scale of time-is the theme of this book...”
And then he says that the picture of orderly progression from primitive forms to man with evolution driven by improvement in posture hand/eye coordination, brain size, use of fire, development of language, etc., are not testable, are not scientific and,
“They rely for their currency not on on scientific test, but on assertion and the authority of their presentation.”
Make what you will of it but I think the word “most” is justified.
You claim I misunderstand or willfully misrepresent based upon, not what I actually said but upon what YOU infer.
Good grief! And you expect me to go back and correct your mistaken inferences? That is your problem, not mine!
“Actually I have confidence in the ability of most of the viewers here to read and understand, though as you demonstrate that’s not so in every case.”
Then why did you facilitate a willful mis-characterization of his overall position? Is it because you have confidence that most readers here will understand, as you’ve admitted, and hence must deceive them by selective quote mining? Citing copyright restrictions is an insufficient defense.
I’ll respond to you only to say I have no time for your nonsense. I thought I made that clear.
I’m confused. What part of my post to you was nonsense? Was it not consistent in content to those of the other posters who responded to you?
See #55
I plainly said he didn't question whether evolution took place but it seems you want to make that mean something else.
Okay, when you wrote, "“The author didn’t question whether evolution took place but went to some lengths to say most of what is offered as evidence is assertion based on authority," you were referring to evidence for what? I believe most people would read that sentence as "evidence [for evolution]," since that's the only previous referent.
"The police officer didn't question whether the suspect committed the crime but went to some lengths to say that most of the evidence is hearsay."
"The historian didn't question whether Washington stood up in the boat but made a point of saying that most of the evidence was scanty."
I don't believe most people would read "evidence" in those sentences as referring to anything by the subject of the first clause. I will accept, however, that you meant what you have since claimed to mean and just worded it badly. It's really up to the writer to make sure his readers draw the correct inferences.
“I will accept, however, that you meant what you have since claimed to mean and just worded it badly.”
You’re very kind. However, as you know, providing intentionally misleading information is the hallmark of this group. It’s rather a pity, as it seems they come by this tactic honestly—the creation rationalization rags that they post from do exactly the same thing.
Quoting you to Ha Ha Thats Very Logical, who may have his own response, but I'll jump in also.
Obviously both Ha Ha and I felt that a minimally adequate representation of Gee's views were not available from what you quoted, so each of us added context. There would be no point in "arguing his views are in error" (or arguing the converse, or taking some intermediate position, or whatever) until those views were placed before us; so that was step one.
Now, that having been done, we can move on to step two.
I think Gee is wrong to suggest quite so broadly that positing hypotheses about ancestor-descent relationships is scientifically useless or hopeless. I think he's right to suggest that testing such hypotheses is generally very difficult. But I think the difficulty can vary quite a bit from cases to case.
IOW I don't think his views are fundamentally in error. I do think they are somewhat overstated. This has traditionally been common among cladists. Although Gee, from what I hear, is pretty well rounded, and not nearly so extreme as the "worst" of them, there has been a tendency for cladists to be a bit cultish, to treat their approach as "the one true method," and to commensurately denigrate other approaches.
Like I say, Gee doesn't appear to go that far, but rather to be merely, as I put it earlier, "enthusiastic" about the method, rather than being a full bore cladism cultist.
But, hey, even if he was, it wouldn't particularly bother me. It's a GOOD thing in science that different researchers are coming at the same data sets using different methods and approaches. It's a GOOD thing that they vigorously criticize the actual or potential weaknesses of competing approaches.
I suppose it might be preferable if each and every scientist were utterly dispassionate about the methods they chose to employ, and could each individually and exhaustively formulate and analyze all the arguments for and against each approach and all of its results. And the rare scientist may occasionally approach that ideal. (Darwin himself came pretty close, possessing a remarkable ability to self criticize. Absent some specific variations thereof, there was probably not a single major objection later brought against his theory which Darwin, working on it for more than twenty years in near complete isolation, had not already thought of, and comprehensively thought through.)
But, being humans, scientists seldom live up to that ideal. Some don't even seem to try. And even good self-criticizers don't always catch all their errors. (Again to Darwin. Despite his perspicacity in anticipating objections to evolution by natural selection, at other times he failed to perceive weaknesses in his theories and hypotheses, e.g. the parallel "roads" of Glen Roy, his theory of coral reef formation, and especially his theory of pangenesis.)
That's O.K. Even if individual scientists can't identify all the weaknesses and pitfalls of their own favored theories and methods, there are almost always plenty of other scientists eager to do so. Diversity, competition and criticism are our friends.
So, I think cladistics is a great method, but not the method. Probably more useful sometimes than others, but good to have in the mix. Even if some cladists are a bit too dogmatic about the superiority of their approach, it's good to have their advocacy and criticism, so long as balanced with responses and criticism from other scientists who favor other approaches.
That's my take as a non-scientists observer, anyway, for what it's worth.
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