What you are doing is a great way of arguing that the evidence I cited does not disprove evolution. What it is not is a convincing way of arguing that evolution is susceptible to disproof.

I discuss the problem of contamination of macroscopic fossils, of plants that as far as I (and presumably you) know do not live in the area now, and you propose that those plants lived there previously and got buried and placed in the Cambrian sediment because the area is geologically active. You go on to say later that “since all confirmed fossils of Q. clamensis are found in North America, not Asia, as far as I’m aware.” Thus there is no evidence that there were these particular oaks in the Oligocene, or apparently at any other time, that lived in the area, but you still write it off to contamination.

You then minimize the problem thus: Bhardwal was unable to find microfossils similar to those apparently found by Sahni (who argued for a Cenozoic age IIRC), so the fossil (partial) oak leaf is “unconfirmed”, and then you ask,

Do you think one unconfirmed sample is enough evidence to have botany textbooks changed to declare this species having existed in Asia? Is that how you think science should work?

To put it another way, we found the paw of a rabbit in the Cambrian. We now need to find more rabbit parts, because one rabbit in the Cambrian isn’t really enough.

You minimize the Precambrian angiosperm example from Venezuela as “those very rare unresolved samples you are bringing up.” Precisely how many Precambrian rabbits do we need to find to disprove evolution?

You state that

A good theory should be difficult to prove wrong from a practical point of view. That’s because a good theory is built from a large base of well-supported data.

In physics this is not true. The reason a good theory is difficult to prove wrong in physics is that nature behaves in ways that the theory describes. If one could accelerate electrons reproducibly to the speed of light in a vacuum and beyond, relativity would collapse. Period. If someone were to show that a body were to accelerate towards another one at a rate disproportional to the inverse square of the distance between them, gravitation would collapse as a theory. In fact, it did so when the motion of Mercury did not fit the theory. Gravitation may be a useful approximation, but nobody believes it any more as a complete explanation. Perhaps evolution is a useful approximation, but does not explain everything. Can one not be a little more tentative about the complete adequacy of the theory?

Because that’s essentially what you’re demanding of science.”

What an inane comment. First of all if you check anyone around here I would be the last person to use the bible to support anything having to do with intelligent design and rarely comment on anything religious. So what has the comment about the bible and Christianity got to do with anything.

Second, what kind of convoluted reason led you to your comment. It doesn’t compute from what I said. I was showing how Haldane was avoiding the issue about how to falsify neo Darwinism with his comment and somehow this means I expect zero contradictions from the bible or else Christianity is disproved. Talk about silliness.

The pattern expected from evolution is pretty much the same pattern expected from spin-art- pretty much all over the place depending on the circumstances.

If defining characteristics can be lost then containment is also lost.

And seeing that evolution does not have a direction and defining characteristics can be lost, then you can see that the ToE dopes not expect a nested hierarchy.

Also as a matter of fact the ToE does not say that defining charcteristics have to be added.

This means that with evolution we may expect to see only one set.

And one set does not make a nested hierarchy.

Then there is the issue of transitional forms- where to put them?

For example say we have species X as having ten defining charcteristics.

And we have species why which has ten different defining characteristics.

X & Y also have ten defining characteristics in common.

Now on the road to each of these there had to have been organisms which do not fit into either X & Y, but had a mix of X and Y.

Ya see with evolution the best one can hope for is a lineage of branching lineages.

And a lineage is never to be confused with a nested hierarchy.

Nested and non-nested hierarchies: nested hierarchies involve levels which consist of, and contain, lower levels. Non-nested hierarchies are more general in that the requirement of containment of lower levels is relaxed. For example, an army consists of a collection of soldiers and is made up of them. Thus an army is a nested hierarchy. On the other hand, the general at the top of a military command does not consist of his soldiers and so the military command is a non-nested hierarchy with regard to the soldiers in the army. Pecking orders and a food chains are also non-nested hierarchies.

Isn’t the requirement of containment satisfied by the ToE?

Because that’s essentially what you’re demanding of science.

By defending the absurdity of the Haldane quote you are admitting the same thing that Haldane did and that is that his theory of evolution had no basis in reality.

Hyperbole isn’t the best way to discuss a scientific issue, in my opinion.

You are deflecting from the basic issue by saying we have to be careful about rock formation and fossils and we will be ok.

No, that is not a deflection at all. I was very clear in saying that a good theory will be difficult to falsify in practice, especially one with as many converging and supporting lines of evidence from so many disciplines. But for a theory to be falsifiable in principle, there has to be some way, some data that can conceivably disconfirm it. Haldane chose his example because it was extreme, and it’s extreme because it would unravel many lines of supporting evidence at once, as I outlined. In practice it would be very difficult, given the large amount of evidence, to disconfirm evolution in one stroke. But, as I said, that doesn’t change the fact that evolution is falsifiable in principle, which is the issue, I believe.

The quote assumes that any evidence of deep time automatically dismisses alternatives and you basically support this subterfuge.

Haldane simply took the inferences from the supporting lines of evidence for evolution and came up with an example which would disconfirm many of them in one stroke, and he did it with panache as well (have you ever seen that picture of him in that crazy suit?)

The alternative is not 6,000 year old creationism but the basic mechanism of evolution itself and thus the rabbit comment is an embarrassment to Haldane and an admission that he could not defend his theory.

I’m having a hard time seeing where Haldane’s example has anything to do with “6,000 year old creationism”.

If he had better defenses he would have used them

What he used was perfectly serviceable.

but instead went for the mocking of the opposition instead.

He’s not mocking the opposition. The failure of the opposition to adequately comprehend his example makes mockery unnecessary.

And you proceeded with the same irrelevant argument.

I suppose I’ll just have to look to the good Dr Samuel Johnson:

Sir, I have found you an argument; but I am not obliged to find you an understanding.

By defending the absurdity of the Haldane quote you are admitting the same thing that Haldane did and that is that his theory of evolution had no basis in reality. You are deflecting from the basic issue by saying we have to be careful about rock formation and fossils and we will be ok. When neither of these two issues is relevant in the current debate and should not have been relevant when Haldane made the comment. The quote assumes that any evidence of deep time automatically dismisses alternatives and you basically support this subterfuge.

The alternative is not 6,000 year old creationism but the basic mechanism of evolution itself and thus the rabbit comment is an embarrassment to Haldane and an admission that he could not defend his theory. If he had better defenses he would have used them but instead went for the mocking of the opposition instead. And you proceeded with the same irrelevant argument.

I’m still blown away by the ease with which a leaf from an oak strongly resembling Oligocene Quercus clarnensis can be dismissed as contamination. Are there claims that such oaks live in India or Pakistan at the present? If not, how can one contaminate rock with this kind of fossil?

Contamination does not always mean from extant material. Intrusions from younger layers can insert themselves into areas where older layers have been pushed up, especually in geologically active areas. The Salt Range lies in one of the most geologically complex areas of the world, right where the Indian plate crashes into the Eurasian plate. In addition, salt deposits can move like glaciers, due to what is called salt tectonics. Did Pitman’s source mention teh paper by Bhardwaj (1950) in Nature who examined sandstone (6292) given by Sahni, to look for evidence of land plants (carbonized wood, etc)? His results:

In all, more than fifty permanent preparations and a number of smear slides were examined; but no micro-fossils were recovered. The results are negative and do not show any evidence of a post-Cambrian age for these rocks.

Bhardwaj goes on to say:

Careful researches by Hsu on the purple sandstone, and by Sahni, Lakhnapal and Bhardwaj on beds of salt pseudomorphs have revealed a complete absence of any tertiary fossils in them.

So, what does Bhardwaj have to say about Ghosh’s findings?

[Ghosh's findings] make it difficult to reconcile our findings with their work. The only explanation of their find of tertiary plant remains in these rocks of a Cambrian sequence would seem to be contamination during investigation, or the use of cracked and fissured samples.

Bhardwal DC (1950). Examination of the Magnesian Sandstone beds of the Punjab Salt Range for plant microfossils. Nature 4203: 821
As for the genus Quercus, several species are known in Asia, but not Q. clamensis. One report suggesting a leaf “strongly resembling” Q. clamensis isn’t exactly confirmation, now is it? In paleobotany, misidentification of plant fossils is an occupational hazard, (see Noe’s “Paleozoic Angiosperm” as one excellent example), so I’ll wait for confirmation before jumping to conclusions, especially since all confirmed fossils of Q. clamensis are found in North America, not Asia, as far as I’m aware. Do you think one unconfirmed sample is enough evidence to have botany textbooks changed to declare this species having existed in Asia? Is that how you think science should work?

If a drill core finds such a leaf, would you at that point surrender to the “Cambrian rabbit”, or would you soldier on, knowing that there must be an answer consistent with evolutionary theory, even if you don’t know it and can’t hazard a guess as to what it might be? Your dismissal of the Precambrian stuff about which the “controversy, which as far as I know, hasn’t been completely resolved”, suggests that you have a pretty large shelf on which to put things that do not fit.

How is recognizing that a controversy hasn’t been resolved a dismissal? I have a pretty large shelf, yes. But it isn’t full of unresolved samples. Its crammed with examples contradicting those very rare unresolved samples you are bringing up.

This quip by Haldane is an admission that the theory is not falsifiable. While apparently dismissing objections to the theory on technical grounds that it is not falsifiable, the quip was supposed I guess to be an amusing put down of those who have objections. But in reality it is an admission that there is really no way to falsify the theory. If there were, then Haldane would have provided some real examples

Haldane’s quip was amusing, but in principle it was absolutely correct. Just because the theory would never expect to see such a thing has nothing to do with the theory being falsifiable. If the theory is wrong, then evidence supporting it (from such disciplines as basic geology and paleontology) could very well be wrong too. Finding a confirmed mammal fossil in what current paleontology tells us are PreCambrian rocks behooves us to make sure of the fossil itself and the evidence for the rocks being PreCambrian. We need to do this because so much of the evidence (fossil and geological) indicates otherwise. Should the evidence solidly indicate it, then a rethinking and possible abandonment of the theory and/or some of its supporting evidence might be necessary.