U of T’s Larry Moran sort of reviews Meyer’s Darwin’s Doubt

_{Denyse O'Leary

September 9, 2013

Cambrian explosion, News}

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After saying he has read but won’t review it, he keeps coming back to the subject. One might say he “attackviews” it instead. Or something.

One real achievement these games result in is to remind people, by a contrary example, that there were once scientists intrigued by the Cambrian and capable of doubt (as in Darwin’s Doubt), instead of anxious to just beat it into subservience to tenured theory. And it just won’t go.

Comments

Elizabeth Liddle:
Meyer has this wrong in a very important way. Palaeontologists call the number of higher-order taxa in an environment (i.e. at a particular time) “disparity”, and far from being different from “diversity”, it’s one of a number of measure of diversity.
And yet:
Taxonomic diversity and morphological disparity are different measures of biodiversity that together can describe large-scale evolutionary patterns.
Perhaps it's Elizabeth who is mistaken, not Meyer.Mung_{September 12, 2013
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Dr. Stephen Meyer: Darwin's Dilemma - The Significance of Sponge Embryos - video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JPs8E7y0ySs Dr. Stephen Meyer: Darwin's Dilemma - Where did the information come from? - video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CTKKrtSc8k Dr. Stephen Meyer - Why Intelligent Design Describes the Cambrian Explosion - video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfYaD0c-SAcbornagain77_{September 12, 2013
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Elizabeth:
Palaeontologists call the number of higher-order taxa in an environment (i.e. at a particular time) “disparity”, and far from being different from “diversity”, it’s one of a number of measure of diversity.
So your argument is that we use disparity to measure diversity and therefore disparity is no different from diversity? Right now I'd just love to have you post one of your wonderful analogies to help us understand.
Palaeontologists call the number of higher-order taxa in an environment (i.e. at a particular time) “disparity”, and far from being different from “diversity”, it’s one of a number of measure of diversity.
Would "phyla" be included in "higher-order taxa"? How about phyla present during the period of time known as the Cambrian? How diverse were the various species making up the separate phyla, as measured by disparity?Mung_{September 11, 2013
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Yes Mung, that is the same Lizzie Liddle- her reading comprehension is definitely affected by her personal biases. She is a sick old lady, that one...Joe_{September 11, 2013
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Joe:
Lizzie Liddle did sort of a review- she said she is reading the book but obviously she missed the parts in which evos, such as Darwin, Dawkins, Lewin, Erwin, Valentine and Sepkoski, say something, Meyer repeats it, and Meyer is wrong, not the evos.
Is this the same Lizzie who posted the following:
I’d have expected an urbane, Cambridge-educated guy like Meyer to know the singular of “phyla” but that’s minor compared to his crashing howler of an attempt to demonstrate what the term means.
And who, when faced with a direct quotation from the book indicating that Meyer does know the difference and that her accusation is demonstrably false, fails to correct her mistake, in a thread titled, ironically, Meyer's Mistake. The relevant quote from Darwin's Doubt:
The term phyla (singular phylum)… (p 31)
Of course, her fans over there could care less about the obvious gaffe.Mung_{September 10, 2013
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I'm not sure why the last link didn't work... here it is: http://sandwalk.blogspot.ca/2011/05/junk-jonathan-part-4-1.htmlDominick_{September 10, 2013
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Larry claims that he won’t review the book, because he is not an expert in the field. Instead, he is going to rely on other experts in the field.
Others have dealt with this and I'm not going to comment because it's outside of my area of expertise. 1
I guess some people never learn from their mistakes? In the past, Larry has relied on Jerry Coyne as a supposed world's leading expert in speciation thinking, that Coyne supports his view that speciation results largely due to random genetic drift. As it turns out, Coyne believes that most speciation occurs due to natural selection and not random genetic drift. So, here we go again. Two world's leading experts on evolution, rely on each other and lecture everyone around calling them Idiots, who can't agree on its main mechanism. Do we really need more proof on how bankrupt this whole theory of evolution is? (See also Larry's comment at the bottom of the page at @Moran Wednesday, May 25, 2011 2:25:00 PM) [Larry]: Coyne and some commenters have corrected me. Coyne actually does think that most speciation is due to natural selectionDominick_{September 10, 2013
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Lizzie:
And so his claim that we should expect diversity to follow disparity doesn’t even make sense.
LoL! He says that disparity follows diversity. IOW, just as I have been saying, you lack the reading comprehension skills that my 10 year old has. Meyer says that diversity leads (can lead) to disparityJoe_{September 10, 2013
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Lizzie sez:
Meyer has simply misunderstood the concept of taxonomic categories and their relationship with phylogenetics. No, the misunderstanding is all yours.
From the diagrams in his book, this is embarassingly obvious – repeatedly, he circles round the populations at the end of a lineage and calls labels the included populations with some taxononomic rank, completely excluding the very populations further back in the lineage that also carry the feature by which they are assigned to that taxon.
LoL! Please show us that those organisms have those features. IOW you just made it up. Also what Meyer said goes along with evos! Go figure
Joe_{September 10, 2013
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Lizzie, Evos said what Meyer did- are they also wrong? Or do you not know how to read? IOW your "summary" is total BS and anyone who can read knows that. Dawkins said:
What had been distinct species within one genus become, in the fullness of time, distinct genera within one family. Later, families will be found to have diverged to the point where taxonomists (specialists in classification) prefer to call them orders, then phyla.- pages 40-41 Darwin's Doubt
Darwin said pretty much the same thing. Lizzie sez:
Whatever anyone thinks of the Darwin’s proposed mechanism for adaptation of populations over time, the evidence for Universal Common Descent is pretty well beyond serious dispute.
The concept can't even be tested. It ain't science. BTW you don't know jack wrt classifuication. Meyer forgot more than you know.Joe_{September 10, 2013
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Well, no, they don't. It's hard to get a handle on the book, because it is so wrong in so many ways. Here is one of my summaries of what I think is his most basic mistake:
Here is another quotation from Meyer:
Darwin's theory implied that as new animal forms first began to emerge from a common ancestor, they would at first be quite similar to each other, and that large differences in the forms of life - what palaeontologists call disparity - would only emerge much later as the result of the accumulation of many incremental changes. In its technical sense, disparity refers to the major differences in form that separate the higher-level taxonomic categories such as phyla, classes, and orders. In contrast, the term diversity refers to minor differences among organisms classified as different genera or species. Put another way, disparity refers to life's basic themes; diversity refers to the variations on those themes. The more body plans in a fossil assembly, the greater the disparity.
Meyer has this wrong in a very important way. Palaeontologists call the number of higher-order taxa in an environment (i.e. at a particular time) "disparity", and far from being different from "diversity", it's one of a number of measure of diversity. An environment can be diverse even if it consists of just one taxon, with lots of sub taxa; it could also be diverse if it consists of many taxa, each represented by only one branch. And so his claim that we should expect diversity to follow disparity doesn't even make sense. We certainly would expect taxa to diversify, and we see that we do. But we wouldn't expect to see the total number of higher- level taxa increase - in fact, by definition, they can only reduce. If originally there were, say, six basic body plans (forms of symmetry, say), and only two left lineages further down, then clearly the number of taxa present when there were six of them is smaller than later on where there are only two. In the mean time, those two have diversified. But there's nothing problematic about that for Common Descent. Nothing in the hypothesis of Common Descent requires that all bifurcations leave lineages that don't go extinct, and they clearly don't.
Meyer has simply misunderstood the concept of taxonomic categories and their relationship with phylogenetics. From the diagrams in his book, this is embarassingly obvious - repeatedly, he circles round the populations at the end of a lineage and calls labels the included populations with some taxononomic rank, completely excluding the very populations further back in the lineage that also carry the feature by which they are assigned to that taxon. This completely undermines his point, because if we go back to the root of each branch, the "morphological distance" between those taxa is now small, exactly as would be expected under Common Descent. Whatever anyone thinks of the Darwin's proposed mechanism for adaptation of populations over time, the evidence for Universal Common Descent is pretty well beyond serious dispute. Presumably that's why a even a fair number of ID proponents accept it.Elizabeth B Liddle_{September 10, 2013
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When the evidence is against you, your options are quite limited. These reviews actually serve to strengthen Meyer's work because it shows they really have no adequate answer.tjguy_{September 9, 2013
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Lizzie Liddle did sort of a review- she said she is reading the book but obviously she missed the parts in which evos, such as Darwin, Dawkins, Lewin, Erwin, Valentine and Sepkoski, say something, Meyer repeats it, and Meyer is wrong, not the evos. Then there is the fact that Meyer did NOT name it the Cambrian Explosion nor did he first say there is a sudden appearence of body plans- yet the evos are giving him flack for using them. Strange.Joe_{September 9, 2013
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sigh, undisciplined imagination and ad hominem, the two great pillars of modern evolutionary thought.bornagain77_{September 9, 2013
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