I do think it's good to remember that science can never be complete. There will always be room for mystery (or superstition, if you like). Still, biological evolution, which is what intelligent design is usually about, is an area where a lot of hard work has been done to discover the mechanisms that can be discovered, and it's nowhere near as mysterious as some people want everyone to think.

There has been a concerted campaign by certain factions, mainly in the US, to make it seem to the public at large that evolution is controversial. This is their goal. They have been working for years to establish the idea that evolution still under debate. The truth of the matter is that in scientific circles there is no controversy about evolution, especially the bits like common-descent, and yet every day I see news reports about some group or another "weighing in on the evolution controversy".

The controversy is not about science or evidence. It's about people not wanting to accept that maybe the universe is unfeeling and maybe it wasn't created to bring the glory that is humanity into being. They don't want nasty pieces of evidence calling their faith into doubt. I'm of the opinion that a faith that can't stand a little doubt is not much of a faith at all.

"...maybe the universe is unfeeling and maybe it wasn't created to bring the glory that is humanity into being."

Yeah, that and life being over when you die seems to trouble a lot of people so much that they invent fantasies to make themselves feel better and in order to control others.

I don't get it.

My beliefs, which don't include an intelligent being controlling the universe, or life beyond the human lifespan, don't trouble me much.

I can accept the bleak prospect that the universe is controlled by the immutable laws of physics, rather than the whim and will of a being.

And I can accept living only one short, painful, futile lifetime. It seems fair.

I can be content with the love of friends and family in lieu of the "hard love" of The Lord.

I can bear knowing that the experiences I have during this lifetime are all I'm going to get.

What's so hard about it?

The Onion's take on the issue

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I can bear knowing that the experiences I have during this lifetime are all I'm going to get. What's so hard about it?

Wow. I thought I was the only one.

Actually, I find that fact upsetting since, like Roy Batti says, "all these moments will be lost like tears in the rain".

Even through photos and writing, you can never really appreciate fully another person's experience in life.

Don't get me wrong. That doesn't mean I am not thankful to be alive - quite the opposite actually.

It's almost like a disbelief in a "god" fosters a stronger actual love for life than a dogmatic faith. Which is probably why the neo-cons are so busy trying to blow it all up....

quote:

Originally posted by colin:

quote:

NOT ONE SINGLE INTERMEDIATE between species has EVER been found.

Oh bother.

What this site says is: "few or none of the speciation events are preserved".

Few or none? Phew! We get a choice.

Re Argyria -- that picture looks remarkably like my blue guys, that's the colour they turned. But we did extensive tests on the silver, blood tests at hospitals etc, and this is definitely not to blame for their condition (this was suggested by several readers of our community newspaper). The diagnosis we got (from a doctor who stated he would "stake his practice" on the fact that this was caused by microwaves) was hypoxia caused by chaining of haemoglobin -- there's some term like "roulading" but I can't remember it right now. I've since discovered other accounts of this as an effect of microwave radiation and apparently there was a Discovery Channel TV story about people in Europe living near masts turning grey. Anyone see that?

This evolution debate is critically important, for a variety of reasons, but it always goes off the rails. I'll just contribute one thing here. The work of Dr Fritz-Albert Popp over 30 years (and the Russians in the 1930s who started this work) has shown conclusively that cells regulate their internal and intercellular functioning in REAL TIME through the emission of what Popp calls biophotons, ie EM radiation ie light, very often around the microwave spectrum. He researched this using photomultipliers. He has shown conclusively that the main emitter of photons in the cell is DNA. This is of the most critical importance. Geneticists discover repeated, seemingly completely redundant strings of DNA code. It doesn't seem to code for proteins, so they call it "junk DNA". Now I want you to think for one second -- if you see DNA as a LIGHT EMITTER, you'll see immediately that these repeated structures might be acting as a phased antenna array. (This is my own idea, btw, I've never seen anyone else say this). If you want to see what a macro-level phased array looks like, here's a webcam to Haarp:
http://www.haarp.alaska.edu/haarp/cam.fcgi
which is an internet-infamous US military installation trying to duplicate what the Russians have been doing since the mid-70s with the Woodpecker. Please note the repeated, redundant elements.

What Popp also says is that species are communicating continuously among themselves and between other species by electromagnetic means. The ecosystem is a communicative "web". You'll find people like Viktor Schauberger talk about the same thing -- Schauberger, by his observation of forests, talked about "horizontal ground rays" that living beings emit.

I saw James Watson's big book "DNA" in the shop the other day, so I looked in the index. Literally not one word about light, or photons, or biophotons, or bioluminescence. This huge body of empirical work (similar to Kaznacheyev's) is completely lost to orthodox science -- "for some reason". Yet Popp has shown that ONE SINGLE PHOTON can trigger a sequence of 10,000 chemical reactions in the cell.

What drives evolution is electromagnetics, and quantum jumps "energised" by changing EM fields in the cosmos. For eg every 10,000 years the solar system passes through an intense beam and there's a jump in evolution, along with mass extinction, as is happening now, and then there are other "inhomogeneities" in the cosmic EM field that produce catastrophic leaps in evolution. This is Kaznacheyev's speciality. This evolution is also mediated by inter- and intra-species EM communication (morphogenetic fields, as Sheldrake calls them).

It's explicable, it's predictable, but it requires people to look at electromagnetics. They don't. Why? Because it's been militarised.

I hate to use the word truth, but that's the truth.

(By the way, I thought I was wrong once, but it turned out I was mistaken..)

And a PS -- there's some interesting work by a renegade Australian prof called Ted Steele reviving Lamarckism -- he wrote a book called Lamarck's Signature, which I haven't read, but I've seen crits of. He has shown that children seem to be able to INHERIT immunities ACQUIRED by their mothers. I corresponded briefly with Ted Steele -- he seems to be a very interesting character, and worth watching. He was fired from the University of Wollongong (that's not a Monty Python joke) but apparently not so much for his heretical biology as for his habit of hitting "group send" on his e-mail with stuff critical of the university admin...

Anyway -- Lamarck is used as a figure of fun in biology, but he was actually a very deep thinker and should not be dismissed too lightly.

An amusing story. The version of evolution I was taught as a child was lamarckism, specifically so that I could be shown evolution was wrong. It's the perfect strawman, because it is so easily and obviously disprovable. Anyway.

Vec, what you're touching on really has little to do with origins of life. You're trying to get at the meaning of life, the source of order and whatnot. You, and most folks who look around and see order, and therefore divine a source for that order, are falling into a standard trap of apophenia. Pattern recognition.

Consider the Giant's Steps, in...is that in ireland or scotland? Hm. Anyway, it's this great big rock structure, that looks for all the world like smooth, hexagonal stairs leading down into the ocean. Medieval man had no choice but to believe they were crafted by some beastie. They were smooth, regular, and enormous. Nothing about them looks natural. Of course, now we recognize that they are natural, formed by certain molten rocks and exposure to salt water. Science has filled in that gap. No more giants.

In the same way, as we bump up against the unknown, science will slowly provide answers. Not knowing is the central mechanism of science. Finding something, not knowing what it is, and applying our mind to its revelation. That is science.

There are thousands of mobile phone masts all over the UK, many of them on top of office buildings. I've not heard a single report of people turning blue, or grey. There was a report recently of a woman complaining that they caused her migraines.

And as for speciation, we don't need to look at the fossil record, we can actually observe speciation occurring.

quote:

What this site says is: "few or none of the speciation events are preserved".

Few or none? Phew! We get a choice.

But perhaps you should have paid attention to the next bit, where they go on to explain in excrutiating detail exactly what is preserved, and why that does include a great many transitional fossils, including some very gradual sets.

I can't actually find that quote about "few or none" by the way, but I didn't look long, and I did stumble across this:

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As a starting point, check out Gingerich, 1980, who found 24 gradual speciations and 14 sudden appearances in early Eocene mammals; MacFadden, 1985, who found 5 cases of gradual anagenesis, 5 cases of probable cladogenesis, and 6 sudden appearances in fossil horses; and the numerous papers in Chaline, 1983. Most studies that I've read find between 1/4-2/3 of the speciations occurring fairly gradually.

Compare and contrast with this:

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NOT ONE SINGLE INTERMEDIATE between species has EVER been found.

I think if you're just going to ignore what the vast majority of scientists say, you should be up front about it, not try to make it sound like they say what you want them to say.

OK, there's some material here I've never seen before. But nearly all of this stuff is describing gradual changes within one species, which undoubtedly occurs, and then inferring similarities to other species and saying this is "speciation", when it isn't. For example, the "hominid" sequence described: the palaeoanthropologists, if pushed, have to admit that they cannot prove that one single bone they've ever found is a direct link to humans. (They really do admit this, see below.)

The critical thing is the SPECIATION event: at what precise point does a new species arrive. And what the fossil record shows overwhelmingly is DISCONTINUOUS jumps, species apparently appearing from nowhere, species going under equally abruptly (e.g. the "Cambrian explosion" of species).

Steve Jones, a major Darwinist, in his book "Almost like a whale" -- a chapter-by-chapter reworking of "Origin of Species" using all the modern information available, published 1999 -- says (p 359): "Why does not every collection of fossil remains afford plain evidence of the gradation and mutation of the forms of life? WE MEET WITH NO SUCH EVIDENCE [my emphasis], and this is the most obvious and forcible of the many objections which may be urged against my theory [he's pretending to be Charles Darwin]....I can answer these questions and grave objections only on the supposition that the geological record is far more imperfect than most geologists believe".

So the biologist tells the geologists: my theoretical biology tells me that your practical geology must be wrong.

For one thing: right from Darwin, they do not have a proper definition of species. Their definition (see that fruit fly story also, "speciation now occurring") is entirely negative -- if they can't interbreed, or won't interbreed, then they're different species. Prof Hugh Patterson, now in Australia, whom I had long talks with, has shaken up theoretical biology completely with a POSITIVE definition of species that goes -- it's the mating recognition pattern that actually defines the species, i.e. it's a behavioural thing. He initially called it an SSMRP, species-specific mating recognition pattern, but it seems he's now calling it a specific mate recognition system, SMRS. Once you have a proper definition of species, you can start trying to decide whether something is a different "type" or a "clade" (family cluster) or a whole new species.

Steve Jones also says (p347): "In spite of a century's claims of the discovery of 'missing links', it is quite possible that no bone yet found is on the direct genetic line to ourselves".

The word "quite" meaning "exactly, precisely".

The only thing the evolutionists can really say is: when a small group of a species gets isolated, it may gradually "drift" and lose touch with the main population, and eventually it becomes a new species. This is "allopatric" speciation ("in another country"). Yet Darwinism is all about competition IN THE SAME LOCALITY, with the "fittest" surviving. Yet in the "sympatric" ("in the same country") situation, what they see is discontinuous jumps. So they have to say the fossil record is incomplete.

To see a real scientist at work here, read Bruce Chatwin's book The Songlines, where he talks to Elizabeth Vrba, now of Yale, who really looked at the fossil record just as it is -- "Then suddenly all hell breaks loose among the antelopes", she says, for example. She was one of the early proponents of "punk-eek" or the "punctuated equilibrium" theory of evolution -- which is exactly what the fossil records show. You have to take the evidence you see, even -- in fact especially -- if you can't explain it.

Your name is uncannily appropriate, crazy carlos.

I hope some of you enjoy this.

Carlos, do you know where your great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great grandparents are buried?

quote:

Originally posted by crazy carlos:
For one thing: right from Darwin, they do not have a proper definition of species.

Who exactly is "they?" We're not out to get you, CC. The demarcation of species is one of the more interesting challenges to arise in the past hundred years and it's true there is still a lot of spirited discussion and cool research revolving around the problem of discontinuity in nature. I guess the scientist's response to gaps in knowledge that are difficult to test with falsifiable hypotheses is to propose rational, causal explanations that don't conflict with standing theory. Filling those gaps by claiming that it is self-evident that Santa Claus or some other mythical entity pulled species intact out of his sack seems truly crazy to me.

In fact, the problem of defining a species is interesting because they tend to blend into each other in some cases. Did you know there is a kind of seagull (I think) which is distributed around the arctic circle, where groups in neighbouring areas are capable of interbreeding , but groups from widely separated areas are not? This sort of makes it difficult to use interbreeding as the definition of a species. Some people even go so far as to say that "species" is an entirely artificial distinction.

Sorry if this was mentioned above, I'm rushing off to a meeting.

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"Then suddenly all hell breaks loose among the antelopes", she says, for example. She was one of the early proponents of "punk-eek" or the "punctuated equilibrium" theory of evolution -- which is exactly what the fossil records show. You have to take the evidence you see, even -- in fact especially -- if you can't explain it.
-- CC

One way of thinking of evolution is that it is an optimization strategy (this approach is currently being used to write software optimization algorithms: e.g. see Genetic Algorithms). Genes evolve so that that they converge on local maxima in the 'survival search space', but external events can perturb them out of that position, causing adaptation until another local maxima is found.

Typically these 'external events' are things that drastically reduce the population of the species (a new disease, a famine, a new predator, etc.) to the point that many do not survive, and those with traits that are beneficial to cope with the 'external event' are much more likely to survive than those that don't have these traits. i.e. natural selection.

The fact that the species is under extreme population pressure is a possible explanation as to why there may be gaps in the fossil records for this point in the evolution of that species - there just aren't that many of them around. The species needs to adapt, to get better at coping with the 'external event' in order to thrive. I think this models the 'punk-eek' data pretty well.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: DIT,

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nearly all of this stuff is describing gradual changes within one species, which undoubtedly occurs, and then inferring similarities to other species and saying this is "speciation", when it isn't.

It doesn't look that way to me. I like this page and especially this example. But I suppose you could shoehorn those patterns into some idea of gradual change within species but not between if you really wanted to, but I don't think the evidence points that way.

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For example, the "hominid" sequence described: the palaeoanthropologists, if pushed, have to admit that they cannot prove that one single bone they've ever found is a direct link to humans. (They really do admit this, see below.)

Hominids are always a favorite, because we like to talk about ourselves, but they have one of the worst fossil records. Why don't we talk about snails instead?

Really, you start off saying there are "no intermediates between species" in no uncertain terms, and now you're trying to call the definition of species into doubt and demand a "direct link" to humans. I think you've made up your mind and it's going to be very hard to change that. I find the evidence linked sufficiently convincing, but you do not, so there's not much more we can say.

One more point though: scientists, when pressed will "admit" you can't "prove" that any fossil is a "direct link" to humans. It's almost impossible to prove that a fossil is a direct link. The best you can get is that a species existed in the past that had features intermediate between two other species. It's difficult to prove, however, that a given specimen is a direct link instead of a species that branched off at some point during the transition. I do think, however, that these specimens are good evidence that the transitions in question occured.

Just a little poetry...

You know one of the more interesting aspects, for me, of that little hominid family tree (er, bush) above is that many scientists think the ancestors of Chimpanzees were more like humans than chimps are today, possibly even walking upright, if I recall correctly. The chimps evolved away from human form. So much for humanity as the pinnacle of evolution.

Heck, colin, chimps are pretty bipedal these days, too, although not habitually.

There were probably a few different apes in the Miocene that were bipedal, including this one.

Can't recall off the top of my head when chimps and humans diverged, but it was (relatively) recent.

OK. Thanks very much for The Truth from Robert Ingersoll, I really liked that...

Please, I'm very much shooting from the hip on all of this. I don't have access to any libraries or anything like that, quite seriously, and my internet time is very limited (I'm bankrupting myself this month, but keeping the mad anthroposophical internet cafe running...)

1. This whole "intelligent design" argument is one of the best examples yet of how this argument gets stuffed up from both sides. They (this time the "intelligent designers") can point to all kinds of structures that could not "possibly" have evolved by accident (eg the eye) and so they say -- "there's a designer". But they show no mechanism (that I've seen) as to how this "designer" works. This is non-science to me, but they're useful in that they're pointing out the kinds of things that real science must explain, ie make intelligible.

2. The "they" who don't have a proper definition of species -- I'm talking about orthodox biologists. If you take a look at Origin of Species (and I'm going mostly here on this "Almost Like A Whale" reworking) -- towards the end, it becomes quite clear to me that "they" really don't have any hard criteria for distinguishing between types, species, families, clades, name it...gangs... It's a mess. I got involved in theoretical biology 30 years ago doing a thesis on the modelling of the evolution of ecosystems (the kind of stuff that later got called chaos theory -- very bad name -- and complexity theory -- even worse). I found that theoretical biology was a complete mess, and that I was not alone in thinking this. Fortunately at that time I met a young American called David Sloan Wilson (who wrote "Unto Others", Harvard UP 1999) who is now the doyen of evolutionists looking at the evolution of co-operative behaviour and altruism. David is a screaming genius in my opinion, but a very careful researcher, and well worth following. He confirmed my perceptions that theoretical biology was a mess. Then I met Hugh Patterson, who is another screaming genius, but much harder to access (it's his students who have put out his ideas, and I was good friends with a couple of them). When I met Patterson, we talked entirely about the language of science -- it's like Bohr said, physics is what we can SAY about the world, not what the world "really" is. It's the same with theoretical biology. There's a drastic need for new concepts and a clearer language of the subject, that's what Patterson was saying, and that's my mission.

3. I don't want to get into a huge fight over whether there's ever been a transitional form been found. If you look at my posting, I was deliberately being provocative, but at the time I had found reference to one possible genuine inter-species transitional form. You've done me a huge favour by drawing my attention to this material, thank you. My main thing is -- if you look at the fossil record, what you overwhelmingly see is discreet jumps. I think it was Sewell Wright, the geneticist, who conceived of a "fitness landscape", where a species on one fitness "peak" can see another adaptive "peak" some distance off, but has to find some way of making the jump.

Orthodox Darwinism (the "they") insists that evolution must proceed (a) by tiny random steps (b) EACH ONE OF WHICH must be of IMMEDIATE ADAPTIVE ADVANTAGE. So a fish sprouting legs in the water, as per that website... where's the advantage in that? This is where the "intelligent designers" get busy, and there's no resolution. So...

4. Quantum physics shows (in the interference patterns) that the "hard outcome" physics, unchangeable "effects" physics (in relativity, the same effect can have different "causes", depending on your frame of reference, hence the term "relativity", but the outcome is absolute... there may be different reasons why the bullet hits the target, depending on your frame of reference, but all agree that the bullet hits the target...) -- anyway, the hard physical outcome is the result of ALL THE POSSIBILITIES combining to create the interference pattern. Richard Feynman's great trick (and these were the calculations that drove the atom bomb) was to look at the relative possibility of EVERY SINGLE POSSIBLE MOTION of an electron, no matter how crazy or unlikely, and combining all of these to find the final interference pattern, the "hard" observed physics.

Now -- think of DNA. There are a vast number of possible configurations, some more likely (given the starting point) and some less. EVERY SINGLE ONE of those configurations is contained in the final pattern we see. All the most unlikely "ghost forms" you can possibly imagine -- the quantum potential contains them all. This is the hard physics we see, and the hard physics in the books also. The purple dinosaur with pink polka-dots -- if it's possible for DNA to code for this, then that "ghost form" is always hovering, no matter that it's infinitesmally likely.

Bearden says that there is "automatic feedback" from the universe of all possible futures (these are the time-reversed waves -- the future hasn't happened yet, but the universe of all possible futures is contained in the quantum potential and can affect the present). I say that the creatures' STRIVINGS radiate particular energies into the biosphere, and can build up one potential "ghost form" energy. (I only saw recently that this was actually pure Lamarckism, I burst out laughing... how to stuff your reputation up in one easy step...) And then you can get a quantum jump, all at one go -- the creature that was trying to run, gets legs. I'm being helluva helluva crude here, you're welcome to take pot shots, please do, but in a nutshell that's my take on all this.

5. In all of this, the "optimisation" game is very much what the quantum potential is -- it's an automatic summing-up of all the possibilities and their probable outcomes. My point: this is BLIND PHYSICS. I still think it's a catastrophic mistake to import "purpose" into this, unless it's from the efforts of existing creatures.

6. Human evolution is something else -- there is here the possibility of directed evolution, conscious choices of mate (good luck, mate) and all kinds of stuff. Here I do go esoteric and draw on the work of people like Rudolf Steiner, but I try and link it with concepts such as Hugh Patterson and the definition of species. Basically -- if the species is defined by the positive "specific mate recognition system" then by being able to make conscious choices, we each become a "species"... and I saw once that this was exactly what Steiner said -- "Every man is a species." Sorry for the sexist terminology, that's the way he put it.

I'm going to have to take it easy here, but I'll do my best to follow.

PS. I have crazier theories, but I'll save them for later.
PPS. The very closest guy to what I'm saying is oddly enough Scott Adams, of Dilbert fame... look at his book The Dilbert Future, Thriving on Stupidity in the 21st Century, and the last chapter is very serious about evolution and quantum physics. I think he's another screaming genius.