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Darwin's most vexing problem
- Thread starter Neuropteron
- Start date
TagliatelliMonster
Veteran Member
"suddenly" on geological timescales.
It's nevertheless a period of 40 to 80 million years.
It doesn't predict we're guaranteed to find fossils thereof.
It's amazing we have as many as we do.
Off course. The vast majority of species that ever lived, did not leave fossils behind.
And those that did - we still have to find them first.
Also, you forgot to actually answer the question. How does this contradict evolution theory?
TagliatelliMonster
Veteran Member
It's neither.
What it is, is nothing short of confirmation bias coming forth from an assumed conclusion.
While, off course, ignoring all evidence to the contrary.
Perhaps I need to clarify what I meant. How did the Cambrian explosion refute the theory. Simply stating what's found in that era then claiming that the precursors are missing, does not demonstrate how it's refuted.
Just saying, "the Cambrian era refutes it,” without describing how, is a weak argument...no substance.
I think that is Newton were alive today, he would understand that evolution is how life has developed and that life is a matter of chemistry. Newton was a man of his time. In many ways, he was the last medieval scholar. With a modern education, I have no doubt he would have given up his superstitions.
You identify physics with 'chance and undirected mechanisms'. I find this to be very common among theists and am curious why you do this. Physics is NOT a matter of chance. And it is only undirected in the sense that no personality directs it. But yet, the planets orbit in an orderly fashion because of its laws. Those cells, which are amazingly complex, ultimately follow the laws of physics and chemistry. Yet, they are orderly and structured. But no personality needs to direct this structure. It happens according to the natural laws spontaneously.
It was no 40 million years, not according to what’s currently understood. Between 15-20 m.y.
And we’re talking 1000’s of species, each appearing suddenly during that period.
TagliatelliMonster
Veteran Member
Depends how you look at it. But I'm fine with either.
20 million years is by no means "sudden" in the way you like to pretend that it is.
The evolution of Homo sapiens from the common ancestor with chimps didn't even take half that long.
No, we are talking a few dozen phyla.
Speciation isn't exactly rare. Nor does it take millions of years.
Speciation can occur rather quickly, actually.
Your biggest error however, is that you ignore plenty of things in order to make this PRATT of an argument...
1. you ignore that pre-cambrian life was primarily unicellular and extremely hard to fossilize - and fossilization is already hard enough (so nobody, except creationists, expects many pre-cambrian fossils)
2. you ignore all the genetic data, which shows that cambrian species didn't come about out of thin-air
3. you ignore that earth's environment in pre-cambrian periods was vastly different.
The cambrian "explosion" indeed marks an acceleration of evolution. It's called punctuated equilibrium. We see this all the time - in every lab experiment, in the wild and even in genetic algorithms.
In a nutshell: in times of environmental stability, evolution "slows down", as species occupy their niches and get optimized for that specific niche, making them approach, or attain, their so called "local optimum".
A local optimum, is when the system is so optimized that there are no easy evolutionary pathways anymore towards further improvements. Things are "as good as they will get", with only minor changes left (like the arms-race between the gazelle and the lion) - but which themselves will also hit physical limits eventually.
So, in such periods, natural selection will favor the status quo.
If the environment undergoes drastic changes however (as well the case at the start of the cambrian), then local optimums will shift. Certain niches will be destroyed, others will change and some new ones will appear. Natural selection no longer favors the status quo. In fact, the opposite. At that point, it rather is more like "evolve or die".
This accelerates the process again. This accelerated process continues until niches are once again filled with species. From that point on, the optimization starts once again to approach that local optimum. Natural selection now again favors the status quo.
It's not rocket science. It's very well understood and rather simple.
It's easily modeled in a genetic algorithm and it is easily tested in controlled conditions.
No, it isn’t. Laws, though, originate from a law maker... a mind. You attribute the order that these laws provide, to chance. If that were the case, if physics alone could create de novo, we would see a functioning structure to the matter that is formed from CERN experiments. But it never is.....the results are chaotic, and unstructured. Even with the “minds” controlling the experiments.
Of course, no dispute there. But how did the planets get established in their precise orbits? You think chance did it. Do we just give satellites enough propulsion to escape Earth’s gravity and leave it at that? Then expect the Laws of Physics to handle the rest? That would be unreasonable.
It takes mind.
Again, it’s not about directing it — maybe it is directed even now to some degree, otherwise we’d have observed imbalances in biological systems: each organism with their “selfish” genes, would not cooperate for the benefit of the whole. And yet, balance is everywhere, when man doesn’t interfere.
It’s more about the origin of these things.
TagliatelliMonster
Veteran Member
That is a brutally ignorant equivocation error.
Laws of physics are not "laws" like in legal settings, where "rules" are written down.
Laws of physics are merely descriptions of observations. Abstractions thereof, actually, of how things interact with one another.
If you insist on saying that there must be a "law maker", then that "maker", are humans. Like Newton, who formulated the laws of motion. However, all he did, was describe how objects interact.
The laws of physics are descriptive. Not prescriptive.
This makes no sense at all. I can only assume that it flows from your misunderstand of what "laws" in physics actually are.
Gravity.
No. Gravity.
Teleological fallacy.
You are assuming that the orbits of the planets were "meant" or "intended" to be as they are. This is incorrect. Instead, it's how they ended up.
It took quite some time before they stabilized in the orbits they are in.
This makes no sense and further exposes ignorance on how evolution works.
In social species, cooperating for the benefit of the whole, ultimately benefits the self.
Depends what you mean exactly by "balance".
We (as in: humans/science) understand those origins. It's evolution.
Ignorance is not a valid argument.
Tiberius
Well-Known Member
Oh, and of course the universe is obligated to provide them for you.
Human laws do. But human laws are prescriptive. Natural laws are descriptive.
No, I do not. I think it makes no sense to talk about the cause of fundamental laws. To do so would need to invoke even more fundamental laws.
In other words, I consider natural laws to be uncaused.
We *do* see functioning structure forming de novo in matter. The formation of atoms. The formation of molecules. Even CERN is finding structures involving the automatic bonding of the more unusual quarks.
So I am not at al sure why you make the claim there is no structure.
Once again, I do NOT think that chance did it. I think they formation of the planets happened according to natural laws. And, we know that planets form around other stars and a fair number of planetary systems show structures similar to what we see in ours.
Among other 'structural' aspects are the small ratios between the periods of nearby planets. This is due to the way individual planets affect each other as they pass. Over time, the orbits are actually driven, by the laws of gravity, towards such small ratios. This is something we expect to develop naturally and, in fact, we see it in other stellar systems.
And that is another misconception. Balance of the type we see does arise spontaneously (even in artificial systems). Those organisms that get too far out of balance tend to die off and only those that work together survive to the next generation. After a few generations you have a functioning ecosystem.
Individuals do not have to cooperate for the sake of the whole. But, because of the effects of natural selection, those that don't have a harder time surviving.
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You’re saying you can recover genes....from fossils? (That’s what you are implying.)
No I’m not. But if you know, explain how the environment became oxygen-rich (that’s where you’re going with this, right?) Such an occurrence would indicate plant life, prior to the explosion of animal life. Wouldn’t it?
You’re twisting the data...or at least trying to water down the impact to the conclusion. Phyla with 1000’s of different species, each of which “suddenly appeared” over that time-frame.
Gravity keeps them in precise orbits. It didn’t put them into precise orbits.
Which type? Examples, please.
That isn't the only way to compare and time genetic changes. The fossils we can get usable DNA out of tend to be very recent.
Well, the increase of oxygen levels occurred long before the Cambrian and was due to single celled organisms. And yes, there was a huge restructuring of living things because of that.
The Cambrian explosion is more due to the development of hard body parts (which is also why there was a sudden increase of fossilization). Pre-Cambrian fossils do exist, but the soft-bodied animals didn't fossilize nearly as well as those with shells and bones, and armor.
The phyla *later* developed thousands of species. At that point, they didn't have the full variability they evolved into later.
Yes, actually, it did. Gravity alone will form 'precise orbits'. And, the interaction of different planets will tend to push the orbits into resonance with the others. Just like, over time, some moons change their rotation rate to keep the same face towards the planet they are orbiting (tidal forces do this), a similar thing happens between different planets pushing them into patterns we can see.
Simulations going back decades show that even with very simple mutation and competition (leading to natural selection), systems will evolve things like cooperation, parasitism, mutualism, etc. This is hardly new and this happens with a wide range of initial conditions. No fine tuning required. Just limited resources and mutation.
I’m sorry, but almost everything you mention is supposition. That’s faith.
To assume that gravitational forces resulted in the Earth being “pieced together” from debris, which is the assumption taught about Earth’s origins, and then basically “heated itself up” to weld itself together, is so full of speculation as to defy logic. But materialistic thinking requires such illogical steps. A bunch of faith!
TagliatelliMonster
Veteran Member
Newsflash: DNA is past on to off spring. In other words, you carry with you, the DNA that you inherited from all your ancestors.
In evolutionary context, this means that you can derive a family tree from sequenced genomes
Not plants. Cyanobacteria.
No. The cambrian explosion is about the rise of the various phyla.
As I brought to your attention already, speciation isn't a rare event, nor does it take particularly long.
And 20 million years is by no means "sudden", except in context of geological time.
In evolutionary terms, it was a rapid radiation, yes.
But again, it took millions of years.
You like to pretend that it happened overnight. It did not.
You like to pretend that there were no precursors. This is false.
You like to pretend that we are unable to know anything about "before" that. This is false.
You like to pretend that we can't use DNA to find out. That is false.
Except that it did.
btw: why do you keep repeating that word "precise"? What do you mean by that?
TagliatelliMonster
Veteran Member
No.
No. Faith is what you need when you have no evidence and wish to believe anyway.
That is not the case here, as there is evidence. And lots of it.
Errr, no.... instead, it's rather inevitable.
It's what gravity does....
There's nothing "faith" about the deterministic force of gravity.
Tiberius
Well-Known Member
If you'll indulge me, I shall provide an example.
Let's say that we have several sentences, and we suspect that they all came from a common ancestor sentence. One sentence that existed in the past, and reproduced itself, leading to all the sentence descendants we have now.
Some of the ones today are:
- The slick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
- The quick clown fox jumps over the lazy hog.
- The thick brown box jumps over the lazy dog.
- The clock shown pox jumps oven the lazy fig.
We can compare how many characters (including spaces) in each are shared between them. We can see that 1 and 2 have many letters in common (there are only five spots where the characters are different between them, out of 44 individual characters). And we can see that between 2 and 3, there are also five differences.
But when we compare 1 and 4, there are a lot more differences, there are eight differences. Now, if we are trying to figure out what the original sentence was, we could get some interesting information from this. We see that both 1 and 3 have the word brown. Now, is it possible that the original sentence had a different word here, and random changes brought out the word brown in both of them? Possible, yes, but not as likely as saying that brown was the original word.
Likewise, in the second word, there is no word that is repeated, but in 4 there are three letters different, in 1, 2, and 3 there are only two letters different. It's unlikely that all three would have ended up with i as the middle letter by random chance, so we can be fairly certain that the original word ended in -ICK. Likewise, with the fourth word, we can conclude that fox is the original word, and we can continue through the rest of the sentence.
And in this way, we can determine that the original sentence was "The **ick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." It's not perfect, since there's no way from this information we can make a reasonable determination of what the second word is, apart from the fact that the middle letter is probably I and therefore it's not "clock". But it gets us pretty close.
And we can do the same sort of thing with genes, comparing different animals and seeing how similar their genetic codes are. So when we sequence an animal's genome, we can compare it to the genomes of other animals we sequenced and figure out how closely related they are.
No, it is not. We know when the increase of oxygen levels happened because the chemistry of the oceans shifted because of it. That shift precipitated the red band formations (iron precipitated out of the ocean).
We know that the Cambrian animals had hard shells because of the record, but we also know the animals in the Pre-Cambrian did not (the Ediacaran fauna don't have hard parts). Common sense also shows that having shells or other hard parts would increase the likelihood of fossilization.
Except that we see this very process going on around other stars. And, given the record from that time period (increased rates of meteor strikes, for example, the formation of the asteroids, etc) and the data from other star systems, this is also very far from being just speculation.
That isn't faith. It is using the evidence on hand to understand what happened using the laws of physics and chemistry we can test today.