Don't tell me there's no proof for evolution

Typical!

Who's on first.

There's no such critter as gravity; the earth sucks.

The original Darwinian vision of gradualistic evolution is flatly refuted by the fossil record (Darwinian evolution demanded that the vast bulk of ALL fossils be intermediates) and by the findings of population genetics, particularly the Haldane dilemma and the impossible time requirements for spreading ANY genetic changes through any sizeable herd of animals.

Therefore Steve Gould, Niles Eldridge, ERnst Mayr and others devised what is called "Punctuated Equilibria, or "punk eek", which is the defacto replacement theory for Darwinism.

Consider what Gould and other punk-eekers are saying. Punc-eek amounts to a claim that all meaningful evolutionary change takes place in peripheral areas, amongst tiny groups of animals which develop some genetic advantage, and then move out and overwhelm, outcompete, and replace the larger herds. They are claiming that this eliminates the need to spread genetic change through any sizeable herd of animals and, at the same time, is why we never find intermediate fossils (since there are never enough of these CHANGELINGS to leave fossil evidence).

Obvious problems with punctuated equilibria include, minimally:

• The problem which Walter Remine notes in that you'd need a certain population level before you'd ever see a "beneficial mutation", assuming such a thing exists at all.
  
  
• It is a pure pseudoscience seeking to explain and actually be proved by a lack of evidence rather than by evidence (all the missing intermediate fossils). In other words, the clowns promoting this BS are claiming that the very lack of intermediate fossils supports the theory. Similarly, Cotton Mather claimed that the fact that nobody had ever seen or heard a witch was proof they were there (if you could SEE them, they wouldn't BE witches...) This kind of logic is less inhibiting than the logic they used to teach in American schools. For instance, I could as easily claim that the fact that I'd never been seen with Tina Turner was all the proof anybody should need that I was sleeping with her. In other words, it might not work terribly well for science, but it's great for fantasies...
  
  
  
  
• PE amounts to a claim that inbreeding is the most major source of genetic advancement in the world. Apparently Steve Gould never saw Deliverance...
  
  
• PE requires these tiny peripheral groups to conquer vastly larger groups of animals millions if not billions of times, which is like requiring Custer to win at the little Big Horn every day, for millions of years.
  
  
• PE requires an eternal victory of animals specifically adapted to localized and parochial conditions over animals which are globally adapted, which never happens in real life.
  
  
• For any number of reasons, you need a minimal population of any animal to be viable. This is before the tiny group even gets started in overwhelming the vast herds. A number of American species such as the heath hen became non-viable when their numbers were reduced to a few thousand; at that point, any stroke of bad luck at all, a hard winter, a skewed sex ratio in one generation, a disease of some sort, and it's all over. The heath hen was fine as long as it was spread out over the East coast of the U.S. The point at which it got penned into one of these "peripheral" areas which Gould and Eldredge see as the salvation for evolutionism, it was all over.
  

The sort of things noted in two of the items above are generally referred to as the "gambler's problem", in this case, the problem facing the tiny group of "peripheral" animals being similar to that facing a gambler trying to beat the house in blackjack or roulette; the house could lose many hands of cards or rolls of the dice without flinching, and the globally-adapted species spread out over a continent could withstand just about anything short of a continental-scale catastrophe without going extinct, while two or three bad rolls of the dice will bankrupt the gambler, and any combination of two or three strokes of bad luck will wipe out the "peripheral" species. Gould's basic method of handling this problem is to ignore it.

And there's one other thing which should be obvious to anybody attempting to read through Gould and Eldridge's BS:

They don't even bother to try to provide a mechanism or technical explaination of any sort for this "punk-eek"

They are claiming that at certain times, amongst tiny groups of animals living in peripheral areas, a "speciation event(TM)" happens, and THEN the rest of it takes place. In other words, they are saying:



Again, Gould and Eldridge require that the Abracadabra-Shazaam(TM) happen not just once, but countless billions of times, i.e. at least once for every kind of complex creature which has ever walked the Earth. They do not specify whether this amounts to the same Abracadabra-Shazaam each time, or a different kind of Abracadabra-Shazaam for each creature.

Now, you might ask yourself, why would a handful of such serious scholars go to the effort to devise so patently idiotic a theory, or why they might show so little care that so disreputable a thing might exist with their names associated with it?

The answer is as follows. In the 1970s, Darwinism lay like a dead hand over the entire field of palaeontology, and scholars were being forbidden to publish valid work which did not mesh with accepted evolutionary ideology. This included any sort of thing which dealt with the two basic features of the fossil record as it actually exists, i.e. sudden appearance, and stasis.

Therefore Gould and the others took a note from the history of radio (the story of Uncle Don not realizing that the mike was on and saying "Well, I guess that takes care of the little bastards for another day"), and deliberately devised an idiotic theory for people (evolutionites) they clearly viewed as idiots, simply to get them (the idiots) out of the way of the field of palaeontology.

In doing this, Gould, Eldridge, Mayr and the others were acting upon a variant of Adolf Hitler's big lie theory sometimes employed by salesmen, i.e. that if you tell a lie so preposterous that God himself could not feel sorry for anybody who bought off on it, then your conscience should be clean.

The gungasnake doth protest too much, methinks!

If the statement I made wasn't factual then Gould, Eldridge, et. al would not have gone to the trouble to devise something like punk-eek, would they?

You wish me to speculate on the underlying intentions of Gould & Eldridgel (let alone your underlying intentions of which I have made light of)?

I get some enjoyment out of reading, and occasionally participating, in threads about evolution. I've learnt a lot, not only about evolution, but debating and logic. However, I sometimes get the feeling here we go again. Check out the A2K thread called Evolution? How? at http://www.able2know.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=47010&highlight= There are nearly 12,000 replies on 1192 pages. What is being discussed here was discussed and debated umpteen times over, and then some more for people that don't get it, at that now closed thread or topic as A2K call it.

Just remember this gungasnake, evolution is falsifiable, something that creationism dare not allow itself to be. None of the arguments you have presented falsifies or invalidates evolution. So whilst you're attempting to discredit evolution, put your creationism on the same level playing field and allow it to be falsified. Read my words again, same level playing field.

If you haven't found the answer here, try Evolution? How?

And hello again Chumly from Vancouver.

All this is crap that gunga just keeps recycling

Punctuated Equilibrium is old and pretty much discounted anymore. Less than 1 in 4 or 5 paleontologists even look at it anymore. MAyr discounted it in his last book (2001) as just "saltation within a single species" Gould and Eldregde use a specific species of brachiopod to define their hypothesis. Subsequent micro sampling within their field site has revealed a series of unconformities where sedimentation was absent and fossils were not present. Correlation of those same brachs to field areas elsewhere, showed that they actually did show gradualism.

Gould never looked at extinction much but DAvid Raup did and gungas look at the Gamblers Ruin is an example that extinction is just as much a mechanism of evolution as is evolution itself.
Gamblers ruin is a random walk statistical analysis, with extinction being compared to casino. Now its known that a casino has an advantage but assuming that a casino exists with an even-odds policy, they still could make a profit as long as they limit the size of the bets that gamblers can make. There are two absorbing boundaries on a gamblers luck through a time versus total stakes graph. The lower absorbing boundary is Zero (the gambler is busted), The upper absorbing limit is the houses worth. A high roller could come into the casino, and ,if were there a no limit stakes policy, and if this bettor had stakes of about half the house, this bettor has a 50/50 chance of busting the house.

In evolution, the gamblers stake is the number of species in a genera. lets say 10. For each(say) million yer period, each species has a 50/50 chance of making it to the next million years.
So, the number of spewcies will vary up and down just like a random walk.

Extinction lowers diversity and speciation increases it, as long as the chance of speciation is the same as that of extinction.

Eventual extinction is inevitable The fossil record shows this. There is but one important absorbing boundary, which is zero, =extinction. There is no upper absorbing boundary but the lower boundary is gonna be hit eventually. If there were an upper absorbing boundary, then the wrold could be populated by just one genus. The "bank would be broken". So ultimate extinction is assured. However, since gunga brought this up, maybe he doesnt wish to carry out the discussion further because the fossil record and Gamblers Ruin really doesnt help his case, or the case of Creationist thinking.

Hi to you as well, I'm still trying to fully understand all the implications of falsifiability http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability

Somehow it does not quite sit easily with me, maybe because only some philosophers and scientists (not all) have asserted that no empirical hypothesis, proposition, or theory can be considered scientific if it does not admit the possibility of a contrary case. Well, for whatever reason, some concepts / arguments automatically sit well with me, while with others, I seem to have a resistance to for reasons that escape me, fuzzy brain syndrome maybe, or not enough fiber in my diet...

Bullshit! Evolution has BEEN falsified, numerous ways, numerous times over a century-long span and, as I note above, the defacto new version of it, punk eek, involves a claim that the theory is actually supported by a lack of evidence. In other words, the claim is that the lack of intermediate fossils is what you would expect given the theory.

How is that falsifiable?

What crap.... But this is the claim I always read from evo-losers:



Bullshit. The whole picture is that scientists had been looking for intermediate fossils for a century and a half after Darwin and they never found the first ****ing one. Here's a sampling of what real scientists (as opposed to blowhards) have to say on the subject:


It will be obvious enough to intelligent people that a picture like that does not get turned around in the last five years.

What is it about the phrase COMPLETE ABSENSE[/color] which evolutionites have such a hard time comprehending?

Hello gungasnake.

What a sweeping statement, that evolution has been falsified many times. Well, if it has, it should've been replaced by something that fits observable evidence. Sadly for you, it hasn't been falsified since 1840. Never. You don't provide any examples where it has been falsified. Is there a reason why you haven't? Just a couple of examples will do. Nor do you provide a credible alternative based upon observable evidence. Remember, we're on a level playing field here. Observable evidence. Punk eek doesn't invalidate evolution either. It's just one model of explaining how evolution might occur.

I've provided numerous such examples here, one being the case of the famous fruit fly experiments which amounted to a decades-long lab test of macroevolution. The theory failed the test.

One might argue the existence of gungasnake is an affront to the premise of natural selection and survival of the fittest, and thus within such narrow confines a certain degree of falsifiability may be suggested, notwithstanding unsuccessful mutations!

Does this mean I have mastered the concept of falsifiability I wonder?

If you notice all of gungasnalkes quotes come from the period of about 25 years ago. Since then many discoveries have been made that just add to the evidence.
Id love to have gunga in a class, hes so easily influenced by ancient history (In SCIENCES SUCH AS PALEO. YOUR FACTS ARE OLD IN A FEW MONTHS )..

I obviously get yo ass riled up good, gunga. HEEE HEEE , .

CHUMLY, yes , you are demonstrating predictability and falsifiability nicely. Its a concept that says

1. FALSIFIABILITY---"If this were true then ( umpty ump) should not happen. An example is "If evolution werent going on, then we should see that all organisms pretty much appear at once and stay the same through geologic history
2. PREDICTABILITY----- If this were true then we should be able to predict that (Umpty ump) happens over here. AN example is " if all the evolution of the birds occurs in the Jurassic times, whenever we visit Jurassic sediments we should be looking for different bird fossils and guess what. ITS WHAT HAPPENS


I wish gunga would at least send some quotes from the preesent century, after all this decade is over half done and lots of new **** has happened.

TRY TO KEEP UP GUNGA.

gungasnake

That doesn't invalidate evolution. Here's a response to the fruit fly experiments. You're tinkering around the edges. Here are some tests that would invalidate evolution as we know it, or take it back to the drawing board:
1. Evidence of Precambrian rabbits;
2. Evidence of a true chimera;
3. Evidence of not enough time;
4. No means of passing information from parent to offspring;
5. Evidence of whales and humans and kangaroos and horseshoe crabs coming into existence at the same time;
6. Absence of hominid fossils;
7. Lack of transitional fossils.
These tests were suggested by someone called commissar. They look valid to me. I'm sure there are many others. I love the Precambrian rabbits one!

I notice that you don't propose any other theory using observable evidence. Just because evolution could be proved wrong doesn't mean creationism is correct.

Chumly, I'll get back to you on your question that you posed earlier. I don't know the answer, I'll go and read the hyperlink.

Common sense seems to me to be just as good as the fossil record in suggesting that there are no intermediate stages between species unless "species" is defined to allow trivial variations and, dare I say, larger botanical collections.

The change from leg to wing or back would need to show how the leg half way to becoming a wing or a wing half way to becoming a leg could not be other than seriously disabling to the organism involved in such a process especially bearing in mind that such a process requires unimaginable periods of time.

And why would a species which produces a multitude of offspring of which only a few could survive by their rarity not have developed over millions of years a reproductive system in which that rarity was already existent. A frog produces a multitude of tadpoles which are food for other species.
What reason exists for this massive waste of energy by the frog when it is a tenet of evolution theory that the process does not waste energy?

gungasnake

I missed your long reply to farmerman above. I do tend to get put off by seeing long copied passages and I usually read them later. But anyway, the lack of transitional fossils is a myth, a lie, a fabrication. Yes, there are transitional fossils. Why this still gets peddled confounds me. As farmerman says, you need to get acquainted with evolution in the 21st century.

legs never became wings in invertebrates. In vertebrates, there are plenty of examples that only are seen in the fossil record. (pterosaurs, birds etc). Insects have plenty of examples in the fossil record of wing stubs from early ages growing from their thoracic segments as modified post cephalic structures that became stubby devices for , perhaps cooling the nest , to ultimately a flight memeber. Just because were not familiar with the fossil record, dont deny its value. Its a tool, just like a GCMS. Ecological predictions and environments of deposition are made from fossil equivalents. These are powerful tools in resources exploration. Paleontologists are not "stamp collectors" as was stated by Richard Feynman, they are tools for applied research and academic research. However, it takes a certain degree of familiarity of how to work them.