Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

Darwinian Debating Device #18: The “You’re Too Stupid to Understand Why I’m Smarter than You” Dismissal

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DDD # 18 is a particularly contemptible form of ad hominem, which Mark Frank and Elizabeth Liddle do us the service of demonstrating in the combox to this post. In the post Dr. Torley refers to Darwin’s Doubt by Dr. Stephen C. Meyer, which explains many of the shortcomings of various Darwinian narratives. Frank and Liddle tag team for a DDD #18:

Mark Frank:

[Meyer] explains perceived weaknesses in his understanding of evolutionary theory but gives no reason why design is a better alternative.

Liddle:

Exactly. His understanding of evolutionary theory is weak, and actual evolutionary theory is a better alternative.

Follow this link and take a look at what scientists who actually know what they are talking about have said about Darwin’s Doubt. A sample:

Darwin’s Doubt is by far the most up-to-date, accurate, and comprehensive review of the evidence from all relevant scientific fields that I have encountered in more than forty years of studying the Cambrian explosion. An engaging investigation of the origin of animal life and a compelling case for intelligent design.

Dr. Wolf-Ekkehard Lönnig, Senior Scientist Emeritus (Biologist) at the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research

Darwin’s Doubt is an intriguing exploration of one of the most remarkable periods in the evolutionary history of life—the rapid efflorescence of complex body plans written in the fossils of the Burgess Shale . . . No matter what convictions one holds about evolution, Darwinism, or intelligent design, Darwin’s Doubt is a book that should be read, engaged, and discussed.

Dr. Scott Turner, Professor of Biology, State University of New York

Does anyone believe that numerous highly-credentialed scientists, many of whom specialize in biology, would recommend Meyer’s book if his “understanding of evolutionary theory is weak”? Of course not. What does this mean? It means that Elizabeth Liddle’s statement is false. I will leave it to others to debate whether she is merely too muddle-headed to understand that she has made an egregiously false ad hominem attack as a substitute for argument, or she knows the truth and has deliberately misled. The point is that either way, Liddle has avoided having to actually defend against Meyer’s claims by simply dismissing him as too stupid to understand why Darwinists like her are smarter than he. And that is contemptible.

Comments
Mung: Your alleged proof of divergence reduces to a single fossil. Not very convincing. The discussion of the rabbit in the Cambrian was revealing. While most everyone on the thread knows that rabbits never existed in the Cambrian, they seem to have a mental block as to why — there are no plausible ancestors to a Cambrian rabbit. Similarly with Kimberella. Kimberella didn't just suddenly appear, but had ancestors. Metazoan evolution was well underway in the Precambrian.Zachriel
May 14, 2015
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Zachriel: Kimberella is eumetazoa, bilaterian, and probably a protostome. And that's my point Zachriel. Your alleged proof of divergence reduces to a single fossil. Not very convincing.Mung
May 14, 2015
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Querius: 1. There’s no single theory. It constant morphs to accommodate new discoveries (and then claims to have predicted them). A scientific theory is a number of interrelated claims. The fundamentals of the Theory of Evolution have been consistent since Darwin, but some tangential claims have been subject to change. Querius: 2. It’s a mosaic of facts and speculation. That life has descended from common ancestors over millions of years is not in serious scientific dispute. Querius: 3. Macro-evolution lacks any factual evidence or plausible re-enactment. The overall history of life shows how organisms have changed and adapted incrementally over time. Querius: Fossil evidence from the Cambrian explosion, which occurred in 5-10 million years, possibly even in 2-3 million years is exactly opposite of the concept of tiny incremental changes over millions of years. Kimberella shows that metazoan evolution was well underway in the Precambrian. Querius: 4. Apparently the iron in hemoglobin doesn’t work very well for human blood cells in human remains. You're conflating heme with erythrocytes. Querius: A new study of the Neandertal genome shows that humans and Neandertals interbred. It can be hard to keep up with latest in scientific research, but there's an interesting chapter on hybridization you might want to check out. See Darwin, Origin of Species, 1859.Zachriel
May 14, 2015
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ppolish: the fossils just aren’t there. http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/vendian/kimberella2.html Mung: No fossil of eumetazoa? No problem! No fossil of Bilateria? No problem! No fossil of protostome? No problem! Kimberella is eumetazoa, bilaterian, and probably a protostome.Zachriel
May 14, 2015
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The salient issues with the Theory of Evolution as as follows: 1. There's no single theory. It constant morphs to accommodate new discoveries (and then claims to have predicted them). 2. It's a mosaic of facts and speculation. The facts are the pretty bits picked out by the Darwinists. They then mortar them together into the mosaic with great gobs of speculation and fairy tales into whatever image that they want to portray. When challenged, they point to the pretty bits. 3. Macro-evolution lacks any factual evidence or plausible re-enactment. Fossil evidence from the Cambrian explosion, which occurred in 5-10 million years, possibly even in 2-3 million years is exactly opposite of the concept of tiny incremental changes over millions of years. Haldane, Ohno, Behe and others have pointed out the impossibility of evolution in such a tiny amount of time. 4. Darwinist reasoning is frequently circular and thrives on paradox. When pliable tissue and red blood cells are accidentally discovered in a Tyrannosaurus rex, it's asserted to be able to survive the presumed 68 million years due to the iron in hemoglobin, but when researchers discover red blood cells in Ötzi, it's hailed as follows: http://phys.org/news/2015-05-iceman-reveals-oldest-red-blood.html Apparently the iron in hemoglobin doesn't work very well for human blood cells in human remains. http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-21330194 "Though once thought to have been our ancestors, the Neanderthals are now considered an evolutionary dead end." https://www.sciencenews.org/article/neandertal-genome-yields-evidence-interbreeding-humans "A new study of the Neandertal genome shows that humans and Neandertals interbred. The discovery comes as a big surprise to researchers who have been searching for genetic evidence of human-Neandertal interbreeding for years and finding none. About 1 percent to 4 percent of DNA in modern people from Europe and Asia was inherited from Neandertals, researchers report in the May 7 Science. 'It’s a small, but very real proportion of our ancestry,' says study coauthor David Reich of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard in Cambridge, Mass." Very real indeed! And on and on it goes. -QQuerius
May 13, 2015
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Mung, what is the difference between a trilobyte and a Zach? A trilobite used its brain. Moran.ppolish
May 13, 2015
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This "amazing evolutionary transition" sure ain't NS & RM. It's guided and purposeful. It's heads popping out in a geological eyeblink. http://www.hngn.com/articles/90863/20150508/cambrian-explosion-era-brain-fossils-reveal-origins-modern-head.htmppolish
May 13, 2015
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ppolish, Zachriel doesn't need fossils. He has cladograms! No fossil of eumetazoa? No problem! No fossil of Urbilateria? No problem! No fossil of Bilateria? No problem! No fossil of protostome? No problem! No fossil of Arthropoda? No problem! Zachriel thinks the map is the territory.Mung
May 13, 2015
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Sorry Zach, the fossils just aren't there. And it's become even worse since Darwin's time - not better. Much worse. Additional Cambrian Critter discoveries since Darwin have been outstandingly numerous. Discoveries of pre Cambrian scant. Darwin would be even more doubtful today. Smart dude.ppolish
May 13, 2015
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I think you meant to say Zachriel is doobieous.Mung
May 13, 2015
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I also call you dubious Zach. I am correct on both counts.bornagain77
May 13, 2015
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bornagain77: I don’t know what the fossils are. But you will claim they are dubious, nonetheless.Zachriel
May 13, 2015
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Zach, I don't know what the fossils are. From the 'illustrations' on wiki, illustrations which are 'vague' to put it mildly, and which obviously came from someone's imagination, I call the interpretations of the fossils 'dubious'. That is reasonable. You believe otherwise. So what? It does not matter one way or the other as far as the science is concerned. It is obvious that you are purposely avoiding the scientific fact that neo-Darwinian mechanisms are shown, by laboratory work, to be grossly inadequate for what you claim for them in the Cambrian explosion as well as subsequently to the Cambrian. And I hold the term 'grossly inadequate' to be an understatement as to how far off the mark Darwinian explanations are! Perhaps 'Not Even Wrong!' more adequately describes the situation. Why do you not honestly address that titanic wide hole in your empirical argument and honestly admit that you have no viable mechanism so as to explain how the Cambrian explosion, as well as the subsequent diversification of life within the disparity of the Cambrian body plans, could have happened in the first place? Is honesty towards the empirical evidence a bridge too far for you?bornagain77
May 13, 2015
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bornagain77: pointing to fossils of dubious interpretation Are you saying Kimberella are not metazoan? Not bilaterian? Not triploblastic?Zachriel
May 13, 2015
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Zach, to be Captain Obvious for a moment, pointing to fossils of dubious interpretation does not go one inch towards establishing that neo-Darwinian mechanisms were responsible for the fossils nor does it establish that the fossils are in any way related to the Cambrian fossils. To quote Henry Gee:
“No fossil is buried with its birth certificate. That, and the scarcity of fossils, means that it is effectively impossible to link fossils into chains of cause and effect in any valid way... To take a line of fossils and claim that they represent a lineage is not a scientific hypothesis that can be tested, but an assertion that carries the same validity as a bedtime story—amusing, perhaps even instructive, but not scientific.” - Henry Gee, In Search of Deep Time: Beyond the Fossil Record to a New History of Life
To be 'scientific' you would actually have to prove that unguided material processes can generate non-trivial functional information to account for the Cambrian Explosion. Good luck with all that. You will need it:
The Vindication of Michael Behe – podcast/video – 2014 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=itkxFbyzyro
Moreover, the lack of transitional fossils is made all the more problematic for Darwinists because of the following fact:
Challenging Fossil of a Little Fish What they had actually proved was that Chinese phosphate is fully capable of preserving whatever animals may have lived there in Precambrian times. Because they found sponges and sponge embryos in abundance, researchers are no longer so confident that Precambrian animals were too soft or too small to be preserved. “I think this is a major mystery in paleontology,” said Chen. “Before the Cambrian, we should see a number of steps: differentiation of cells, differentiation of tissue, of dorsal and ventral, right and left. But we don’t have strong evidence for any of these.” Taiwanese biologist Li was also direct: “No evolution theory can explain these kinds of phenomena.” http://www.fredheeren.com/boston.htm Dr. Stephen Meyer: Darwin’s Dilemma – The Significance of Sponge Embryos – video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JPs8E7y0ySs Deepening Darwin’s Dilemma – Jonathan Wells – Sept. 2009 Excerpt: “The truth is that (finding) “exceptionally preserved microbes” from the late Precambrian actually deepen Darwin’s dilemma, because they suggest that if there had been ancestors to the Cambrian phyla they would have been preserved.” http://www.discovery.org/a/12471 Response to John Wise - October 2010 "So, where then are those ancestors? Fossil preservation conditions were adequate to preserve animals such as jellyfish, corals, and sponges, as well as the Ediacaran fauna. It does not appear that scarcity is a fault of the fossil record." Sean Carroll developmental biologist http://www.evolutionnews.org/2010/10/response_to_john_wise038811.html At North Dakota State University, Presenting the Positive Case for Design – Casey Luskin – February 14, 2012 Excerpt: Indeed, Simon Conway Morris notes in his book Crucible of Creation that in the Burgess Shale fossil collections which document the Cambrian explosion, “about 95 per cent are either soft-bodied or have thin skeletons.” [p. 140]. http://www.evolutionnews.org/2012/02/at_north_dakota056351.html New Precambrian Fossils Are Not Cambrian Ancestors - October 2, 2014 Excerpt: Similar embryos were found in the 1990s by J. Y. Chen and Paul Chien in the same Doushantuo formation, and reported in the peer-reviewed literature (Xiao et al. paper cited in their references). The story is recounted in both Stephen Meyer's book Darwin's Doubt and in the Illustra film Darwin's Dilemma. The presence of embryos in the Precambrian didn't solve the Cambrian explosion problem then, and it doesn't now. In fact, they make the problem worse, because they show that the Precambrian strata were perfectly capable of preserving transitional forms, had they existed. http://www.evolutionnews.org/2014/10/new_precambrian090171.html Origin of Biological Information and the Higher Taxonomic Categories By: Stephen C. Meyer; Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington "To say that the fauna of the Cambrian period appeared in a geologically sudden manner also implies the absence of clear transitional intermediate forms connecting Cambrian animals with simpler pre-Cambrian forms. And, indeed, in almost all cases, the Cambrian animals have no clear morphological antecedents in earlier Vendian or Precambrian fauna (Miklos 1993, Erwin et al. 1997:132, Steiner & Reitner 2001, Conway Morris 2003b:510, Valentine et al. 2003:519-520). Further, several recent discoveries and analyses suggest that these morphological gaps may not be merely an artifact of incomplete sampling of the fossil record (Foote 1997, Foote et al. 1999, Benton & Ayala 2003, Meyer et al. 2003), suggesting that the fossil record is at least approximately reliable (Conway Morris 2003b:505)." http://www.discovery.org/a/2177 Does Lots of Sediment in the Ocean Solve the "Mystery" of the Cambrian Explosion? - Casey Luskin April, 2012 Excerpt: I think the Cambrian fossil record is surprisingly complete. I think it may be more complete than we realize. The reason for that is, for instance, if you look at the stratigraphy of the world, if I go and collect Cambrian rocks in Wales and find certain fossils, if I then go to China, I don't find the same species but I find the same sorts of fossils. If I go into Carboniferous rocks, I go to Canada, they are the same as what I find in this country. So there is a clear set of faunas and floras that take us through geological time. The overall framework is falling into position. - Simon Conway Morris http://www.evolutionnews.org/2012/04/lots_of_sedimen059021.html
bornagain77
May 13, 2015
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bornagain77: you are assuming your conclusion. One would think that citing a paper title "New Data ..." would be a clue that there is evidence involved. Hundreds of new fossil specimens of Kimberella have been found. They exhibit fine details of morphological complexity including triploblasty. bornagain77: If you think a fossil of dubious interpretation proves that neo-Darwinian mechanisms can account for the Cambrian explosion you are delusional. What Kimberella shows is that metazoan diversification was already well underway in the Precambrian.Zachriel
May 13, 2015
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Zachriel, you are assuming your conclusion. Moreover, as was shown to you, your postulated mechanism, neo-Darwinism, is grossly inadequate for the work you ascribe to it. If you think a fossil of dubious interpretation proves that neo-Darwinian mechanisms can account for the Cambrian explosion you are delusional. You actually have to demonstrate that it is possible. In that regards, as was already pointed out, you fail big time!bornagain77
May 13, 2015
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Mung: Fail again. We did mistype that above. Kimberella was mollusk-like organism, of course. bornagain77: So that would still leave you with 24 or so other phyla unaccounted for. What it means is that bilaterians had already diverged from eumetazoa, that protostomes had probably already diverged from bilateria, and that possibly mollusks had diverged from protostomes. In other words, animal evolution was well underway during the Precambrian. bornagain77: a fossil of dubious interpretation It's hardly dubious. We now have a large number of fossil Kimberella at various stages of development, and they show that Kimberella was a bilaterian, probably a protostome, possibly a primitive mollusk.Zachriel
May 13, 2015
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Zachriel, as I stated on the other thread: as Luskin pointed out, if Kimberella helped any phylum at all it would be the mollusk phylum
“It’s an enigmatic creature which if anything was more like a mollusk.” http://www.evolutionnews.org/2013/10/current_biology078581.html
So that would still leave you with 24 or so other phyla unaccounted for. Are you so desperate for any support whatsoever for your atheistic worldview that you are willing to ignore the enormity of the problem that the Cambrian presents for neo-Darwinian processes? Which brings us back to the most important question of all. Where did all the information come from for all these different phyla? The math simply does not work out for neo-Darwinian processes for even ‘simple’ novel proteins, changing one protein into another protein, and for protein-protein binding sites, (Axe, Gauger, Behe), much less entirely new creatures, no matter how long you make the waiting time!
Darwin’s Doubt – Chapter 12 – Complex Adaptations and the Neo-Darwinian Math – Dr. Paul Giem – video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFY7oKc34qs&list=SPHDSWJBW3DNUaMy2xdaup5ROw3u0_mK8t&index=7 “Shared Evolutionary History or Shared Design?” – Ann Gauger – January 1, 2015 Excerpt: The waiting time required to achieve four mutations is 10^15 years. That’s longer than the age of the universe. The real waiting time is likely to be much greater, since the two most likely candidate enzymes failed to be coopted by double mutations. http://www.evolutionnews.org/2015/01/happy_new_year092291.html When Theory and Experiment Collide — April 16th, 2011 by Douglas Axe Excerpt: Based on our experimental observations and on calculations we made using a published population model [3], we estimated that Darwin’s mechanism would need a truly staggering amount of time—a trillion trillion years or more—to accomplish the seemingly subtle change in enzyme function that we studied. http://biologicinstitute.org/2011/04/16/when-theory-and-experiment-collide/ Waiting Longer for Two Mutations – Michael J. Behe Excerpt: Citing malaria literature sources (White 2004) I had noted that the de novo appearance of chloroquine resistance in Plasmodium falciparum was an event of probability of 1 in 10^20. I then wrote that ‘for humans to achieve a mutation like this by chance, we would have to wait 100 million times 10 million years’ (1 quadrillion years)(Behe 2007) (because that is the extrapolated time that it would take to produce 10^20 humans). Durrett and Schmidt (2008, p. 1507) retort that my number ‘is 5 million times larger than the calculation we have just given’ using their model (which nonetheless “using their model” gives a prohibitively long waiting time of 216 million years). Their criticism compares apples to oranges. My figure of 10^20 is an empirical statistic from the literature; it is not, as their calculation is, a theoretical estimate from a population genetics model. http://www.discovery.org/a/9461
Of note: although Dr. Behe had been mercilessly vilified by neo-Darwinists for daring to suggest that there could possibly be an ‘Edge’ to evolution (i.e. possibly be a limit to what Darwinian processes could be expected to accomplish), Dr. Behe’s was vindicated and his 10^20 number was recently verified in the lab.
The Vindication of Michael Behe – podcast/video – 2014 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=itkxFbyzyro
Moreover, body plans are not even reducible to mutations in DNA as is presupposed in neo-Darwinism:
Stephen Meyer – Functional Proteins and Information for Body Plans – video https://vimeo.com/91322260 Dr. Stephen Meyer comments at the end of the preceding video,,, ‘Now one more problem as far as the generation of information. It turns out that you don’t only need information to build genes and proteins, it turns out to build Body-Plans you need higher levels of information; Higher order assembly instructions. DNA codes for the building of proteins, but proteins must be arranged into distinctive circuitry to form distinctive cell types. Cell types have to be arranged into tissues. Tissues have to be arranged into organs. Organs and tissues must be specifically arranged to generate whole new Body-Plans, distinctive arrangements of those body parts. We now know that DNA alone is not responsible for those higher orders of organization. DNA codes for proteins, but by itself it does not insure that proteins, cell types, tissues, organs, will all be arranged in the body. And what that means is that the Body-Plan morphogenesis, as it is called, depends upon information that is not encoded on DNA. Which means you can mutate DNA indefinitely. 80 million years, 100 million years, til the cows come home. It doesn’t matter, because in the best case you are just going to find a new protein some place out there in that vast combinatorial sequence space. You are not, by mutating DNA alone, going to generate higher order structures that are necessary to building a body plan. So what we can conclude from that is that the neo-Darwinian mechanism is grossly inadequate to explain the origin of information necessary to build new genes and proteins, and it is also grossly inadequate to explain the origination of novel biological form.’ Stephen Meyer – (excerpt taken from Meyer/Sternberg vs. Shermer/Prothero debate – 2009) “This book has presented four separate scientific critiques demonstrating the inadequacy of the neo-Darwinian mechanism, the mechanism that Dawkins assumes can produce the appearance of design without intelligent guidance. It has shown that the neo-Darwinian mechanism fails to account for the origin of genetic information because: (1) it has no means of efficiently searching combinatorial sequence space for functional genes and proteins and, consequently, (2) it requires unrealistically long waiting times to generate even a single new gene or protein. It has also shown that the mechanism cannot produce new body plans because: (3) early acting mutations, the only kind capable of generating large-scale changes, are also invariably deleterious, and (4) genetic mutations cannot, in any case, generate the epigenetic information necessary to build a body plan.” Stephen Meyer – Darwin’s Doubt – (pp. 410-411) Darwin’s Doubt narrated by Paul Giem – The Origin of Body Plans – video http://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLHDSWJBW3DNUaMy2xdaup5ROw3u0_mK8t&v=rLl6wrqd1e0&feature=player_detailpage#t=290 Body Plans Are Not Mapped-Out by the DNA – Jonathan Wells – video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meR8Hk5q_EM
Zach, for you to point to a fossil of dubious interpretation and pretend that you have gone one inch towards ‘explaining away’ the insurmountable information problem for neo-Darwinism is, IMHO, as unscientific as a person can get. It is similar to pointing to a slingshot and declaring that you have now solved the problem of how to land men on the moon. That is how detached from reality your thinking is in this matter!"bornagain77
May 13, 2015
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111bornagain77
May 13, 2015
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bornagain77 (quoting): “Kimberella does not possess any unequivocal derived molluscan features, and its assignment to the Mollusca or even the Bilateria must be considered to be unproven.” You're dated. Hundreds of additional fossil Kimberella have been found in different stages of development. There's little doubt Kimberella was bilaterian, most probably a protostome, and quite possibly a primitive mollusk. Mung: Where do you come up with this stuff? From scientific evidence as published in journals. Fedonkin et al., New data on Kimberella, the Vendian mollusc-like organism (White Sea region, Russia): palaeoecological and evolutionary implications, Geological Society, London, Special Publications 2007.Zachriel
May 13, 2015
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Great video, bornagain77! I didn't know that the latest research has reduced the time of the appearance of life in the Cambrian to 5-10 million years, and possibly as short as 2-3 million years. The quote by Dr. Ohno of "junk DNA" fame was amazing:
". . . it still takes 10 million years to undergo 1% change in DNA base sequences . . . (The) emergence of nearly all the extant phyla of the Kingdom Animalia within the timespan of 6-10 million years can't possibly be explained by mutational divergence of individual gene functions." - Susumu Ohno, "The notion of the Cambrian pananimalia genome." PNAS USA 93 (1996): 8475-78
It was also impressive that including recent discoveries in south western China, the fossil record clearly indicates that up to 85% of the phyla originated during this short time rather than by slowly drifting apart for 100s of millions of years. -QQuerius
May 12, 2015
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Thanks Q, I got the info from someone else so I am just passing it along. Of related interest is this talk from a few years ago that Stephen Meyer and Marcus Ross gave on the Cambrian Explosion. The Cambrian Explosion - Stephen Meyer and Marcus Ross - video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLpSb-iDNywbornagain77
May 12, 2015
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bornagain77, Thanks for posting the links and the commentary. I especially appreciated the Chinese researchers who are rethinking the obsolescent 19th century Darwinist paradigm in light of emerging evidence to the contrary, namely that the cones of diversity in the fossil record are pointing the wrong direction, toward narrowing rather than radiating. Genetic data also seems to be indicating slow degeneration rather than evolution. Fascinating! -QQuerius
May 12, 2015
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“Kimberella does not possess any unequivocal derived molluscan features, and its assignment to the Mollusca or even the Bilateria must be considered to be unproven.” (Budd, Graham E., and Sören Jensen, “A Critical Reappraisal of the Fossil Record of the Bilaterian Phyla,” Biological Reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society, 75 (2000): 253-95.) https://uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/what-elizabeth-liddle-doesnt-understand-about-the-cambrian-explosion/#comment-564219 Ediacaran embryos in retrospect – David Tyler – January 28, 2013 Excerpt: “there is currently no convincing evidence for advanced animals with bilateral symmetry in the Doushantuo biota”. This particular quest for animals preceding the Cambrian Explosion has drawn a blank. Needless to say, Darwin’s dilemma remains in full force. http://www.arn.org/blogs/index.php/literature/2013/01/28/ediacaran_embryos_in_retrospectbornagain77
May 12, 2015
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Zachriel: Kimberella was a bilaterian, meaning bilaterians had already branched off of eumetazoa. It means no such thing. Where do you come up with this stuff? Zachriel: Kimberella was a protostome, meaning protostomes had already branched off from bilaterians. Again, it means no such thing. Don't make me go Joe on you. Zachriel: It was probably an arthropod, meaning arthropods may have already branched off of protostomes. Fail again. Zachriel: In any case, it answers the objection about the lack of animal fossils in the precambrian. And Meyer claims there is no evidence of animals prior to the Cambrian? Or is that just another red herring.Mung
May 12, 2015
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Mung: Hundreds of the same fossil are evidence of diversity? Kimberella was a bilaterian, meaning bilaterians had already branched off of eumetazoa. Kimberella was a protostome, meaning protostomes had already branched off from bilaterians. It was probably an arthropod, meaning arthropods may have already branched off of protostomes. It may have even been a primitive crustacean. It shows that metazoan evolution reaches back into the precambrian. In any case, it answers the objection about the lack of animal fossils in the precambrian.Zachriel
May 12, 2015
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Zachriel: There are now hundreds of Kimberella fossils showing that animal life was already diversifying before the Cambrian. Hundreds of the same fossil are evidence of diversity? How so?Mung
May 12, 2015
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Zachriel: Kimberella shows that bilaterians were diversifying well before the Cambrian. Does not.Mung
May 12, 2015
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11:53 AM
11
11
53
AM
PDT
I defaced it? That sounds bad.Mung
May 12, 2015
May
05
May
12
12
2015
07:14 AM
7
07
14
AM
PDT
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