Why do people deny evolution?

@farmerman,

farmerman wrote:

Its a point of discussion that Creationists can make some valid points re the shortcomings of evolutionary theory as we know it now.

The inconsistency is not 'shortcomings' - it is fatal system error, which is very much different in terms of range of impact and effect of feasibility. Anyway.

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@Herald,

Herald wrote:

farmerman wrote:
Its a point of discussion that Creationists can make some valid points re the shortcomings of evolutionary theory as we know it now.
The inconsistency is not 'shortcomings' - it is fatal system error, which is very much different in terms of range of impact and effect of feasibility. Anyway.

Unlike the fatal system error of having no evidence whatsoever? Laughing

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@FBM,

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Unlike the fatal system error of having no evidence whatsoever

Like evoltuion! ?? whooaaa what a fool he is making of herself here!

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@farmerman,

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darwin's is still the best synthesis

Without proof! RIDICULOUS!!!!!

it is only your RELIGION, mate! get over it!

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@layman,

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I really can't follow what your trying to say here, Farmer. What does this mean? "nat Selection is the "how" the organisms develop resistance." Sure doesn't sound right to me.

Let's just face it farmergirl doesn''t even understand nor comprehend it himself!

Figures.

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@Herald,

Quote:

The inconsistency is not 'shortcomings' - it is fatal system error,

I would be happy to hear what you consider these "fatal errors". Ive certainly given you enough time to look up the concept of convergent evolution. I think I brought it up back last August when I still followed what you were asserting.

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@layman,

common ancestry in the prokaryotes and eukaryotic microrogansms that reproduce by fission, is almost an impossibility since, for many of these organisms "capturing of genomes" ala Lynn Margulis is a common MO.

Ive been teaching Margulis "hypotheses" for about 25 years to my infrequent classes in applied micropaleo. Margulis was initially considered sort of a crank .

There i no "old school v new school" science is the best answers that can be evidenced. Much of the gene trannfer stuff ( extended to higher organisms) is still considered "pop science", theres no real evidence that Im aware of. Even Gould's last book was pretty much a mind experiment with no support.

Punctuated Equilibrium, a 1970's concept hs been pretty much evidenced away and even Gould and Eldredge's "sampling sites " have later been shown to be discontinuous layers with interior paraconformities ( a stratigraphic break or a "nonsequence"). The actual interiror layers could be found by correlation studies from sediment layers miles away.

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@farmerman,

PA "subsequent generations" --youve sorta answered your own point there. Adaptive radition of a resistance species needs no magic other than old fashioned parenthood and (unlike Darwin's "dilution" of favored traits), such traits (including resistance) are retained by "se;ection of progeny that have inherited the trait. This is the way that agriculture studies have explained how "Roundup resistance" is developed .

Its been important to ag products to develop seeds that can thrive in Roundup sprayed fields. Such resistance is transferrable via LGT to weeds and daughter seeds also can retian any but "stacked resistance"

Noone has yet used "Terminator genes" in the US so some LGT via pollenation can occur.

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and still.......NO EVIDENCE!!

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@farmerman,

Quote:

There i no "old school v new school" science is the best answers that can be evidenced

Well, Farmer, that's a nice ideal, and one we would all "like" to believe, I'm sure, but in practice?..... Here's another brief excerpt from the same interview of Noble that I cited before:

Quote:

Suzan Mazur: Lynn Margulis told me...that "people are always more loyal to their tribal group than to any abstract notion of truth. Scientists especially tend to be loyal to the tribe instead of the truth."

Would you comment?

Denis Noble: I would certainly go along with the view that gradual mutation followed by selection has not, as a matter of fact, been demonstrated to be necessarily a cause of speciation. Many of those who defend the modern synthesis would say, "Well, it has been."....

...Regarding wish fulfillment, what I find is that the modern synthesists tend to quote such ring warbler examples as though it is obvious that they must have occurred by gradual mutation followed by selection...You have to prove it. So I go along with the view that there has been no really clear proof that speciation occurred via gradual mutation followed by selection....

Suzan Mazur: As Richard Lewontin has pointed out, [natural selection] was intended as a metaphor not to be taken literally by generations of scientists. The range of views about what natural selection is is staggering -- a brand, a political term, a political and scientific term, failure to reach biotic potential, physicists are seeing it as part of a larger process now, etc. etc....It seems natural selection is used as a catch-all for a failure to identify what the mechanisms are.

Denis Noble: I think that's right. In principle, Darwin didn't refer to any mechanisms. It was simply what we now regard as a fairly obvious statement, which is if there is variation and no definition -- not in Darwin's books, anyway -- as to what the cause of that variation might be, if there is variation, then there can be selection....

A lot of scientists came up to me afterwards and said, "Thank goodness somebody from either Oxford or Harvard said what you said." And the comment was, "We can't get our papers published." They said they simply have been told that their theory is wrong.

This little exchange doesn't really even touch upon the issue of "entrenched ideas" in science, and that's a topic that could be elaborated on by volumes of arguments and counter-arguments.

Personally, I don't think scientists, as a rule, are nearly as "objective" as they think they are, or as they claim to be. Their purported"openness to evidence" is certainly not displayed when others scientists with different views (such as McClintock, Magulis, Woese, Gould, et al) are subjected to vicious personal attacks for even presenting their theories.

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@farmerman,

Quote:

Adaptive radition of a resistance species needs no magic other than old fashioned parenthood and (unlike Darwin's "dilution" of favored traits), such traits (including resistance) are retained by "se;ection of progeny that have inherited the trait.

A couple of comments on this, Farmer:

1. As I recall, I have seen claims (from people of high reputation such as biology professors at MIT and the U. of Chicago) that, when subject to toxins, and many are being killed, the survivors start rapidly exchanging DNA. The idea seems to be, to use an extreme hypothetical example, that if, out of millions, only one had a pre-existing immunity, it would quickly be spread to a much larger percentage of the population before they ALL died. Without that, there would be no subsequent "inheiritance." Again, this is an extreme example which I use just to clearly illustrate the questions that have arisen.

2. What I think I have routinely seen (and this goes to your "refutation" of Gould's PE also) is the logic that if it can be shown that an alternative is "possible" and if that alternative is consistent with current theory, then scientists will quickly conclude that the "possibility" is "the case." The standards for "proof" in support of the prevailing theory are extremely low. That is a point Noble is making too, as I read him.

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@layman,

Margulis was one of those who had been looked at as a "crackpot" in her early "cpturing genomes" career. Shes pretty much mainline since the late 90's.
Most of the stuff youve been quoting re" LGT (I never denied it , but for higher organisms, there has NEVER been any good evidence) On some of your quotes , Im familiar with the Lewontin one and it ws taken as a "quote mine" and used within a Creationist context. Science is alwys required to hold on to pet theories lightly. I think many of these were quote mined to make it look like the speakers were denying the concept pf natural selection. Margulis herself, if you can remove her unreal adherence to "gaia", actually makes sense for most of how organisms have acquired new genes via "symbiotic means".
Convergence (like the eye in unrelated organisms HAD to have developed that way)
Actually, it appears to me that she is the one whose a bit dogmatic and(just maybe) needed some excessive assertion to sell a book.
In almost all cases Margulis has re nounced the "neo-Darwinin" in fvor of the original means that Darwin himself meant.
Thomas Bethell was, I think, the forst to say (back in 1977) that most scientists had "Abandoned naturl selection decades ago". If Darwins rationale was merely the "Survival" of species, then how could Evolution be a creative force. As Gould said, "Darwin was correct in that , by first focusing on artificial selection, survival and spread varietals at the breeders choice is a result of varietal fitness and not merely a definition of it. Darwinian naturl selection is the morphological adaptation to environments, not mere survival because "unfit" species s many times also survived . In other words, Darwin wsnt only talking about survival but was including adaptation to environments. AND, even though Victorians felt that this was an example of "ever onwards and upwards" in the development f life, subsequent evidence showed that this was not necessarily the case.

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@farmerman,

As an addn point, IT WAS GOULD who stated the genes were merely "The bookkeepers of evolution" The wether got cold before the wooly mammoth got its hair and teeny ears and grew a few feet .

Noble has always "Attempted debunking of Neodarwinism" .
Like Irreducible complexity, Im waiting for the evidence. A lot of what many of these people like Noble and Rn hve said is, kinda untestable and unfalsifiable as it stands.

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@farmerman,

Farmer, do you have any comments to make, observations to share, or the like, with respect to this statement of Noble's?:

Quote:

I think that as a gene-centric view of evolution, the modern synthesis has got causality in biology wrong. Genes, after all, if they're defined as DNA sequences, are purely passive. DNA on its own does absolutely nothing until activated by the rest of the system through transcription factors, markers of one kind or another, interactions with the proteins. So on its own, DNA is not a cause in an active sense. I think it is better described as a passive data base which is used by the organism to enable it to make the proteins that it requires.

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@layman,

PE, has had, Gould and Eldredges field sites , from which PE had developed, been shown to be paraconformable strata. So their very use as examples may be invalid.

as to your first point re"exchange of DNA" that should be easily seen in the field. As Ive seen data on Immunity to Roundup, plants "may" have exchnged DNA, but from experiments done by DOW and Dupont ag, the "spread" of weed immunity did nt explode. In fact it creeped via windward migration.(Ill see if I cant find an old paper re :weed resistance to Glyphosates). As I recall, the study groups layed out prospective and retrospective study plats and watched the spread of weeds after being shot with glyphosate in a series of crop years.

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@layman,

Quote:

I think that as a gene-centric view of evolution, the modern synthesis has got causality in biology wrong. Genes, after all, if they're defined as DNA sequences, are purely passive

Well, Ive gotta say, he seems to make the same sort of remark that Gould did, (except I think Gould was better known for wit)

"Genes are merely the bookkeeping of evolution"-S.J. Gould

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@farmerman,

farmerman wrote:

I would be happy to hear what you consider these "fatal errors".

     1. Fatal system error No.1: The Evolution of the Stars is most probably not causing the apperance of Life in the Universe, otherwise you will have to show the 60 ÷ 70 civillisations that must be existing in theory only in our Galaxy. What about the Universe? Where are they ... and where are we?
     2. The Evolution should clarify to itself at first, and then to the world, whether it is operating on stochastics or on determinisim. If it operates on stochastics, how does it generate PNA, and after that (all of a suddent and out of nowhere and by reason unknown) changes to DNA ... and why don't we have any standard function of porbabilsitic distribution of that?
     3. If it is determinism - who/what is the rulemaker and why Life cannot be created in the lab from scratch (inorganic matter and stochastic processes within some space, entirely insulated from the biosphere)?
     4. IF the Evolution is really in action, and is making various species by 'positive mutations', why are there species at all - why don't we look like the viruses ... without any distinct species - every new year with a brand new biocode? Why is that not happening?
     I can tell you how far have we gone with FBM in terms of the Big Bang 'theory', but unfortunately this thread here is exclusively about evolution.
     BTW this thread here is trying to suggestologise the attitude to the issue, by attaching as 'keyword' mental health to the theme dening evolution with the sole intention to provide infinite competitive advantage to the people that are 'confirming' the Evolution, and to place in utmost uncomfortanle position the opponents. This actually is a glaring example of how some people, who prenet to be the greatest scientists for any age, are missing elementary things, like scientfic integrity, for example.

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@farmerman,

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Well, Ive gotta say, he seems to make the same sort of remark that Gould did

Well, I don't recall the exact context of Gould's statement (I do vaguely recall reading it), but, to the extent that he was using it as support for PE (which may be little or no extent, for all I know), then the "point" he was trying to make is much different than what I perceive Noble's point to be.

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@layman,

Im not bailing on you

Im going trout fishing down on the Octoraro Creek (its opening day) All the "tourists" went home and Ill be ready for the evenings activity.
Ill catch up in the AM.

PS, I downloaded some of the blues cuts onto a CD (I guess I am "old school"

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@farmerman,

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Im waiting for the evidence.

Fair enough. That's what Noble says about orthodox theory too, so you don't differ in that respect:

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You have to prove it. So I go along with the view that there has been no really clear proof that speciation occurred via gradual mutation followed by selection

.

Of course just what evidence is acceptable, and just what "evidence" the data provides, can be a very subjective decision--whatever "side" you're on.

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PS, I downloaded some of the blues cuts onto a CD (I guess I am "old school"

Good work, ya damn reactionary, ya!

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Why do people deny evolution?

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