• Welcome to Religious Forums, a friendly forum to discuss all religions in a friendly surrounding.

    Your voice is missing! You will need to register to get access to the following site features:
    • Reply to discussions and create your own threads.
    • Our modern chat room. No add-ons or extensions required, just login and start chatting!
    • Access to private conversations with other members.

    We hope to see you as a part of our community soon!

Verifiable evidence for creationism?

Is there any verifiable evidence for creationism?

  • Yes

    Votes: 20 19.0%
  • No

    Votes: 85 81.0%

  • Total voters
    105

SkepticThinker

Veteran Member
What does that have to do with anything? Are you aware of why this analogy doesn't work?


They do if they are assertions of probability. Probability is a mathematical expression of likelihood, so to assert "x is more probable than y" does require a mathematical explanation.


Word of advice: accusing others of trying to look smart when the best argument you can offer is the watch in a box analogy doesn't reflect well on you. I suggest you look into statistical mechanics to understand exactly how and why any supposed "probability calculation" for the formation of life or evolution is essentially bogus. You can calculate anything to be unimaginably improbable if the only factor your calculation takes account of is "random chance" without any other potential variables that can (and do) influence the occurrence of such events. It's like calculating the probability of a rubber ball bouncing on the surface of the earth without factoring in the force of gravity - it's meaningless.
What are you doing here, countering arguments? Pfft, don't be such a troll. ;)
 

leibowde84

Veteran Member
Looks more like you are trolling and if you would like to prove what I said is wrong the empire state building is in Manhattan, New York City, on Fifth Avenue between West 33rd and 34th Streets.
Can you provide an explanation of where you are getting the odds of evolution being accurate? What are the actual odds? Are you including the immense time involved ... billions of years.
 

viole

Ontological Naturalist
Premium Member
Nothing I said required math to deduce as it should be obvious through your natural intellect that a box of watch parts forming a functioning watch is as improbable as you surviving a jump off the empire state building.
.

Not so fast. The chances of suviving a jump from ESB can be analized mathematically, if one really wish. You can calculate the speed of impact, the energy released, the resilence property of bones and internal tissue when such an energy is absobed, etc. etc. or you can make a statistical analysis of how many people survived a jump from the ESB, based on many attempts.

The procedure is to identify the set of possible end states and the exact operation performed in order to get one of the outcomes. In case of the ESB building scenarios, the set of possible outcomes is {dead, alive} and the operation is "jump".

So, now I wish to see a mathematical analysis of your probability statement. Please, specify the exact set of end states and the operation involved to reach one of them. Especially without the latter, all your probabilistic statements are vacuous.

Ciao

- viole
 

james bond

Well-Known Member
That is how science is supposed to work, be self correcting as the knowledge base increases. It is interesting to note, for example, that Darwin has had remarkable staying power and has required very little correction over the last 150 years.

Yes, science is more wrong than they are right until they get it right. That is what I have been saying all along. The Bible has to get it right the first time as it cannot change. And in the end, science ends up backing the Bible.

Darwin's Origin of the Species (1859) has been refuted. Apparently, Alfred Russell Wallace, Darwin's partner, had the same idea and Darwin had to fight being a plagiarist.

There was a bit of a problem with all of this natural selection stuff, though: Darwin didn’t know how it, uh, worked. Offspring had a mix of their parents’ features, sure. But how? What was going on at the moment of conception? It was a huge hole in Darwin’s theory of evolution. So in 1868, almost a decade after he published On the Origin of Species, Darwin tried to plug that hole with the theory of “pangenesis,” a wildly wrong idea that goes a little something like this:

Every cell in our bodies sheds tiny particles called gemmules, “which are dispersed throughout the whole system,” Darwin wrote, and “these, when supplied with proper nutriment, multiply by self-division, and are ultimately developed into units like those from which they were originally derived.” Gemmules are, in essence, seeds of cells. “They are collected from all parts of the system to constitute the sexual elements, and their development in the next generation forms a new being.”

Because both parents contribute these cell seeds, offspring end up blending the features of mom and dad. But what about a child exhibiting more features of one parent than the other? This comes about when “the gemmules in the fertilized germ are superabundant in number,” where the gemmules “derived from one parent may have some advantage in number, affinity, or vigor over those derived from the other parent.” In other words, they kinda just put more effort into it.

Gemmules must develop in the proper order to build a healthy organism. When something glitches along the way, though, you get birth defects. “According to the doctrine of pangenesis,” Darwin wrote, “the gemmules of the transposed organs become developed in the wrong place, from uniting with wrong cells or aggregates of cells during their nascent state.”

But most important of all, Darwin’s theory of pangenesis could finally explain variations among organisms—the raw fuel of evolution. This has two causes. First, “fluctuating variability” comes from “the deficiency, superabundance, and transposition of gemmules, and the redevelopment of those which have long been dormant.” In other words, they’re expressed in a grandchild after skipping a generation, though the gemmules themselves haven’t “undergone any modification.”

http://www.wired.com/2014/12/fantastically-wrong-thing-evolution-darwin-really-screwed/

Then, there is his Tree of Life. It's more an Orchard of Life like creation science proposed.

http://www.examiner.com/article/cha...ientists-debunk-darwin-s-tree-of-life-diagram

According to Darwin, closely related species compete more than distant ones, because they occupy similar ecological niches. Yet, this intuitive Darwin concept was wrong about "survival isn't always about competition."

NSF Study on Green Algae Finds Darwin Was Wrong About Competition
http://www.evolutionnews.org/2014/05/nsf_study_on_al085331.html

What about Darwin's Descent with Modification?

http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/article/evo_15

It states all life on earth has come about through descent with modification from a single common ancestor (a hypothetical, primitive, single-celled organism). This has not been falsified, so how can evolution be considered science? All evo has been able to show is microevolution.

 

james bond

Well-Known Member
I said amino acids. The building blocks of proteins.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murchison_meteorite
And how: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murchison_meteorite
(Oops. Copy paste wrong. I'll fix it when I get to work)

fixed link: http://www.nasa.gov/topics/solarsystem/features/life-components.html
"Creating some of life's building blocks in space may be a bit like making a sandwich – you can make them cold or hot, according to new NASA research. This evidence that there is more than one way to make crucial components of life increases the likelihood that life emerged elsewhere in the Universe, according to the research team, and gives support to the theory that a "kit" of ready-made parts created in space and delivered to Earth by impacts from meteorites and comets assisted the origin of life. "



There's a lot of evidence supporting that birds came from dinosaurs. The two most interesting ones are archaeopteryx and the gene for teeth.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archaeopteryx
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/ist/?...ng-dinosaur-traits-living-chickens-180957271/

All that aside, I still want to know how fixed limits work. Where is it? Stored in the DNA? Where in the DNA? And how?

On a side note, our chicken was domesticated from another bird about 2,000 years ago. A wild jungle fowl from Southeast Asia. So if you want to be funny, you can say "what came first? the chicken or the egg? ... The wild jungle fowl did."


And no one has seen these limitations in the DNA.

The DNA code the body and everything in the physical being from inception, through gestation, and further growth after. Some environmental influences exist as well, but the only thing that codify the fundamental morphological properties are in the DNA.

So a tiger is a tiger because of the code in the DNA. Do you agree?

There is no limitation to which gene goes where or what changes can be made to a gene? Do you agree?

So if you theoretically took a tiger DNA and moved all the codons around and modified them into looking exactly like some individual horse, would you get a horse or a tiger?



You're repeating opinions and claims, not facts. I'm still waiting for a scientific research paper showing that a DNA can't be changed from A to B because of some other factor.

You're a computer guy, if I understand it right. Now, are there limitations in a simple, regular, CMOS RAM to allowing you to put 0x4A or 0x5F or 0x07 in any single address? No. There isn't. You can put any number in any cell. The DNA is like that. Theoretically, there's no fixed limitations to how the DNA could potentially change, so a fish can evolve into a land crawler. But of course it doesn't happen in one step. Only a few bits can change at a time, so a change like that happens over many generations.

Talking about land crawling fish:

DNA would not change to something better or beneficial by mutation to the extent evolutionists think. New gene alleles are accumulating in populations today, but there are two possible sources for these changes -- mutations, and intentional changes introduced by genetic recombination or design. Mutation can change the genome over time, most biological evolution is actually due to genetic recombination followed by natural selection. There are many examples put forward by evolution biologists that attempt to show how new genes have been introduced into the genome of an organism. However, in most documented cases it merely illustrates the built-in plasticity or variation within the original created kind. Merely shuffling of already existing genes becomes woefully inadequate if the observational science is followed.

Land crawling fish doesn't sound too "evolutionary" to me. We know that man didn't evolve from it. It could kill the natural habitat for others though.

http://www.theguardian.com/lifeands...fish-a-major-disaster-if-it-reaches-australia

And more evidence that birds did not evolve from dinosaurs. How can it when it was their meal?

https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn21182-first-evidence-that-dinosaurs-ate-birds/
 

viole

Ontological Naturalist
Premium Member
Most likely, there was no 530 million years ago. Almost all species do not live that long. Probably all, but I can't falsify it. Can you?

That is no a sequitur. A species can arise 530 millions ago, and get extinct 429 millions ago. Ergo, the species lived 1 million years. Or less, if you set the time of extinction farther in the past.
That hardly entails that there cannot be no 530 millions years ago.

What has species life expectancy anything to do with how far the past can "go"?

Ciao

- viole
 

james bond

Well-Known Member
That is no a sequitur. A species can arise 530 millions ago, and get extinct 429 millions ago. Ergo, the species lived 1 million years. Or less, if you set the time of extinction farther in the past.
That hardly entails that there cannot be no 530 millions years ago.

What has species life expectancy anything to do with how far the past can "go"?

Ciao

- viole

Do you mean the species lived for 101 million years? What current species has lived that long? Today, a species goes extinct in hundreds of years. According to evolution, the species should be living longer before extinction. Yes? Yet, no one has been able to prove when a species started existing. I live in Cali, and we know the California Grizzly went extinct around 1924. It was first seen by European immigrants around when they first settled around the late 1800s in abundant population around 10,000.

There is no 530 million years ago because if there was, then we would be more advanced. For example, there would be no shortage of computer memory. Let's say there was no human life until 300 million years ago. Even then, we should be more advanced. The Jetsons would pale in comparison. Look how far we've changed in 100 years from 1916. People being 6,000 years old would make more sense than 300 million years.
 

Sapiens

Polymathematician
Yes, science is more wrong than they are right until they get it right. That is what I have been saying all along. The Bible has to get it right the first time as it cannot change. And in the end, science ends up backing the Bible.
No, science examines and rejects what is clearly wrong, thus gets it closer to right and then continuously corrects, the bible gets wrong in the first place, swallows it whole, and never fixes it's mistake.
Darwin's Origin of the Species (1859) has been refuted.
Really? That will come as news to all of science. Please enlighten us.
Apparently, Alfred Russell Wallace, Darwin's partner, had the same idea and Darwin had to fight being a plagiarist.
Wrong and wrong-headed. Darwin could have easily demonstrated precedence, that is why today we refer to is as Darwinism and not Wallaceism. However, but Darwin humbly offered co-authorship which Wallace gladly accepted.
There was a bit of a problem with all of this natural selection stuff, though: Darwin didn’t know how it, uh, worked.
That's right. There was a copy of Mendel's paper in Darwin's study, but unfortunately Darwin did not speak German. But not knowing "how" it worked did not prevent his clearly elucidated "what" it was.
Offspring had a mix of their parents’ features, sure. But how? What was going on at the moment of conception? It was a huge hole in Darwin’s theory of evolution. So in 1868, almost a decade after he published On the Origin of Species, Darwin tried to plug that hole with the theory of “pangenesis,” a wildly wrong idea that goes a little something like this:
No, Origin of Species stands on its own and was amazingly correct in almost all aspects. Ten years later Darwin was working in the "how" and started off where knowledge was at the time, Conway Zirkle wrote: "The hypothesis of pangenesis is as old as the belief in the inheritance of acquired characters. It was endorsed by Hippocrates, Democritus, Galen (?), Clement of Alexandria, Lactantius, St. Isidore of Seville, Bartholomeus Anglicus, St. Albert the Great, St. Thomas of Aquinas, Peter of Crescentius (?), Paracelsus, Jerome Cardan, Levinus Lemnius, Venette, John Ray, Buffon, Bonnet, Maupertius, von Haller and Herbert Spencer."

So it was not something Darwin invented to "plug a hole." It was a logical progression of knowledge give where knowledge stood at the time. Too bad he didn't learn German instead. In any case, it was not until about 1900, when new researchers worked with Mendel’s discoveries, that natural selection and heredity were synthesized into the dominant paradigm of modern biology. There are those who would give Darwin credit that I do not feel he deserves, as in (wiki): "... by some accounts in modern interpretation, gemmules may be considered a prescient mix of DNA, RNA, proteins, prions, and other mobile elements that are heritable in a non-Mendelian manner at the molecular level."

Your attempt at falsifying Darwinism and at vilifying Darwin founders on the rocks of reality and instead provides an excellent example of science succeeds.
Then, there is his Tree of Life. It's more an Orchard of Life like creation science proposed.

http://www.examiner.com/article/cha...ientists-debunk-darwin-s-tree-of-life-diagram
Trace your citation back ... you find a the root a piece in the Guardian and then New Scientist, which was roundly and justly criticized for sensationalism in pursuit of profit. Here's an example., Larry Moran, Professor of Biochemistry at the University of Toronto:

The cover is this week's issue of New Scientist is sure to get your attention.

tmp.jpg


I happen to believe that the science of evolutionary biology has moved on since 1859, and I happen to be a proponent of evolutionary processes that Darwin new nothing about. Nevertheless, proclaiming that "Darwin was wrong" is a different story. That's an egregious example of journalistic hype and it's unacceptable in a magazine like New Scientist.

The main article is Why Darwin was wrong about the tree of life. The author is science journalist Graham Lawton.
 
Last edited:

Sapiens

Polymathematician
The essence of the story is that the early history of evolution is probably characterized by a net of life and not a traditional tree. The "net" metaphor is due to many examples of lateral gene transfer.

Ever since Darwin the tree has been the unifying principle for understanding the history of life on Earth. At its base is LUCA, the Last Universal Common Ancestor of all living things, and out of LUCA grows a trunk, which splits again and again to create a vast, bifurcating tree. Each branch represents a single species; branching points are where one species becomes two. Most branches eventually come to a dead end as species go extinct, but some reach right to the top - these are living species. The tree is thus a record of how every species that ever lived is related to all others right back to the origin of life.

For much of the past 150 years, biology has largely concerned itself with filling in the details of the tree. "For a long time the holy grail was to build a tree of life," says Eric Bapteste, an evolutionary biologist at the Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris, France. A few years ago it looked as though the grail was within reach. But today the project lies in tatters, torn to pieces by an onslaught of negative evidence. Many biologists now argue that the tree concept is obsolete and needs to be discarded. "We have no evidence at all that the tree of life is a reality," says Bapteste. That bombshell has even persuaded some that our fundamental view of biology needs to change.
As it happens, I was at a function last night with Jan Sapp of York University (Toronto, Canada). Loyal Sandwalk readers might recall a series of articles on theThree Domain Hypothesis. The articles were based on a book edited by Jan Sapp. Sapp is a supporter, as am I, of the scheme advocated by Ford Doolittle (see below).


This net, or web, of life is characteristic of the earliest stages of evolution when all organisms were single cells and the distinction between eukaryotes and prokaryotes was barely discernible. Once the main groups rose out of the web, they evolved pretty much as you light expect by binary speciation events. This gives rise to a traditional tree-like pattern.

As Jan and I discussed, for the last three billion years of evolution the tree of life is a very good metaphor for evolution. Darwin was mostly right about that. On the other hand, the New Scientist article discusses some problems with the tree of life that extend beyond the early history. It makes several valid points that should make everyone skeptical of claims about evolution that are too simple. The tree isn't perfect.

The bottom line is that it's unfair to say that Darwin was wrong. It's as unfair as saying the Newton was wrong because of Einstein. We need to recognize that modern evolutionary biology is an improvement over the view of the Victorian founder of the field, but a cover saying that Darwin was wrong conveys the wrong message. It suggests that up until recently scientists believed that Darwin was right about everything.

A better headline might be: "More evidence that Charles Darwin didn't know everything there is to be known about evolution when he published his book in 1859."

UPDATE: In a surprising development, the IDiots at Uncommon Descent have picked up on these recent (sic) developments in evolutionary theory. Paul Nelson, a Young Earth Creationist philosopher, writes: “The tree of life is being politely buried”.
According to Darwin, closely related species compete more than distant ones, because they occupy similar ecological niches. Yet, this intuitive Darwin concept was wrong about "survival isn't always about competition."

NSF Study on Green Algae Finds Darwin Was Wrong About Competition
http://www.evolutionnews.org/2014/05/nsf_study_on_al085331.html
You'd best be careful with your "according to Darwins" 'cause you've got it wrong from the get go, niche similarity is not the issue, niche overlap and competitive exclusion is. I guess that's what comes from getting your information from a website put up by ID advocates rather than from original sources.

Here's the summary from the paper:



In summary, we have shown that coexistence among pairs of freshwater green algae is more strongly influenced by species’ niche differences than by their relative fitness differences. Our data do not support Darwin’s competition-relatedness hypothesis, as phylogeneticdistance had no impact on species coexistence or the mechanisms of coexistence. These findings reflect the maturation of a very old question in ecology (Mayfield & Levine 2010). For many years, the question of how species coexist had been answered with incomplete (in hindsight) theories and empirical observations that focused only on niche differentiation. Today, Chesson’s theory of coexistence has spawned the generation of operational measures of the mechanisms of coexistence, including both niche and relative fitness differences among species, that can completely explain the outcome of competition (e.g. Fig. 2). This maturation is key for ecologists to be able to address many ecological dilemmas presently facing humanity, including the causes and consequences of biodiversity loss, and the impacts of species invasions, range shifts resulting from climate change, and land-use changes and homogenisation. All of these questions are fundamentally tied to the question of how species coexist and how adaptable their mechanisms of coexistence are. The further investigation of the influence of evolution on both niche and neutral mechanisms of coexistence will help us to make more effective management and conservation decisions aimed at protecting biodiversity into the future.


Darwin's argument, in a nutshell, was that more offspring than can survive are produced and then nature winnows those that are less well equipped to produce the next generation. In order to avoid semantic BS I have avoided using the word "compete." Elucidating mechanisms of coexistence, even of cooperation does no violence to basic Darwinian perspectives, it just advances knowledge concerning what it means to be "fit" in a world where "survival of the fittest" is of paramount importance.

What about Darwin's Descent with Modification?

http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/article/evo_15

It states all life on earth has come about through descent with modification from a single common ancestor (a hypothetical, primitive, single-celled organism). This has not been falsified, so how can evolution be considered science? All evo has been able to show is microevolution.
All evidence supports the idea that all life came about through descent with modification from a single common ancestor. That is correct. This hypothesis has not been falsified, that is correct. There is no difference between micro and macro evolution, just that micro is easier to demonstrate and see because of the similar time frame for each. I would point out to you that lots of long time frame things require inference.
 

Guy Threepwood

Mighty Pirate


I think we agree on something here, Darwin wasn't wrong, he prophetically, correctly identified many potential flaws in the theory, long before they were borne out scientifically. As a good scientist does.

Rather the Darwinists were wrong, they were the ones who in contrast, dogmatically insisted the flaws didn't exist
 

james bond

Well-Known Member
No, science examines and rejects what is clearly wrong, thus gets it closer to right and then continuously corrects, the bible gets wrong in the first place, swallows it whole, and never fixes it's mistake.
Really? That will come as news to all of science. Please enlighten us.
Wrong and wrong-headed. Darwin could have easily demonstrated precedence, that is why today we refer to is as Darwinism and not Wallaceism. However, but Darwin humbly offered co-authorship which Wallace gladly accepted.
That's right. There was a copy of Mendel's paper in Darwin's study, but unfortunately Darwin did not speak German. But not knowing "how" it worked did not prevent his clearly elucidated "what" it was.
No, Origin of Species stands on its own and was amazingly correct in almost all aspects. Ten years later Darwin was working in the "how" and started off where knowledge was at the time, Conway Zirkle wrote: "The hypothesis of pangenesis is as old as the belief in the inheritance of acquired characters. It was endorsed by Hippocrates, Democritus, Galen (?), Clement of Alexandria, Lactantius, St. Isidore of Seville, Bartholomeus Anglicus, St. Albert the Great, St. Thomas of Aquinas, Peter of Crescentius (?), Paracelsus, Jerome Cardan, Levinus Lemnius, Venette, John Ray, Buffon, Bonnet, Maupertius, von Haller and Herbert Spencer."

So it was not something Darwin invented to "plug a hole." It was a logical progression of knowledge give where knowledge stood at the time. Too bad he didn't learn German instead. In any case, it was not until about 1900, when new researchers worked with Mendel’s discoveries, that natural selection and heredity were synthesized into the dominant paradigm of modern biology. There are those who would give Darwin credit that I do not feel he deserves, as in (wiki): "... by some accounts in modern interpretation, gemmules may be considered a prescient mix of DNA, RNA, proteins, prions, and other mobile elements that are heritable in a non-Mendelian manner at the molecular level."

Your attempt at falsifying Darwinism and at vilifying Darwin founders on the rocks of reality and instead provides an excellent example of science succeeds.

Trace your citation back ... you find a the root a piece in the Guardian and then New Scientist, which was roundly and justly criticized for sensationalism in pursuit of profit. Here's an example., Larry Moran, Professor of Biochemistry at the University of Toronto:

The cover is this week's issue of New Scientist is sure to get your attention.

tmp.jpg


I happen to believe that the science of evolutionary biology has moved on since 1859, and I happen to be a proponent of evolutionary processes that Darwin new nothing about. Nevertheless, proclaiming that "Darwin was wrong" is a different story. That's an egregious example of journalistic hype and it's unacceptable in a magazine like New Scientist.

The main article is Why Darwin was wrong about the tree of life. The author is science journalist Graham Lawton.

The Bible is right in the first place because it had to. Why would Christians and other believers follow it if it was not true? Basically, the differences in pov is based on worldview, and only one side can be right. I like science, but science in regards to the Theory of Evolution is wrong.

As for the New Scientist cover, my link describes it as,

"Modern scientists and geneticists are now saying that representing evolutionary history as a tree is misleading. A more realistic way to represent the origins and inter-relatedness of species would be an “impenetrable thicket.”

Darwin himself also wrote about evolution and ecosystems as a “tangled bank.”

"We have no evidence at all that the tree of life is a reality," Eric Bapteste, an evolutionary biologist at the Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris, told New Scientist magazine.

Genetic tests on bacteria, plants and animals increasingly reveal that different species crossbreed and form hybrids more than originally thought, meaning that instead of genes simply being passed down individual branches of the tree of life, they are also transferred between species on different evolutionary paths. The result is a messier and more tangled “web of life.”

The findings mean that to link species by Darwin's evolutionary branches is an oversimplification.

"The tree of life is being politely buried," said Michael Rose, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Irvine. "What's less accepted is that our whole fundamental view of biology needs to change."

It is interesting to note, too, that Darwin, evolution’s best-known advocate, when advancing his theory of evolution, had his own doubts about mankind’s origin and indicated an awareness of his theory’s limitations.

In his conclusion to The Origin of Species, he wrote of the grandeur of the “view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one,” thus making it evident that the subject of origins was open to further examination.

And Darwin conceded in Chapter 9 of his book that “the distinctness of specific [living] forms and their not being blended together by innumerable transitional links, is a very obvious difficulty.”

The author Graham Lawton is not even mentioned. I'll try to reply to your previous post next.
 

james bond

Well-Known Member
The essence of the story is that the early history of evolution is probably characterized by a net of life and not a traditional tree. The "net" metaphor is due to many examples of lateral gene transfer.

Ever since Darwin the tree has been the unifying principle for understanding the history of life on Earth. At its base is LUCA, the Last Universal Common Ancestor of all living things, and out of LUCA grows a trunk, which splits again and again to create a vast, bifurcating tree. Each branch represents a single species; branching points are where one species becomes two. Most branches eventually come to a dead end as species go extinct, but some reach right to the top - these are living species. The tree is thus a record of how every species that ever lived is related to all others right back to the origin of life.

For much of the past 150 years, biology has largely concerned itself with filling in the details of the tree. "For a long time the holy grail was to build a tree of life," says Eric Bapteste, an evolutionary biologist at the Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris, France. A few years ago it looked as though the grail was within reach. But today the project lies in tatters, torn to pieces by an onslaught of negative evidence. Many biologists now argue that the tree concept is obsolete and needs to be discarded. "We have no evidence at all that the tree of life is a reality," says Bapteste. That bombshell has even persuaded some that our fundamental view of biology needs to change.
As it happens, I was at a function last night with Jan Sapp of York University (Toronto, Canada). Loyal Sandwalk readers might recall a series of articles on theThree Domain Hypothesis. The articles were based on a book edited by Jan Sapp. Sapp is a supporter, as am I, of the scheme advocated by Ford Doolittle (see below).


This net, or web, of life is characteristic of the earliest stages of evolution when all organisms were single cells and the distinction between eukaryotes and prokaryotes was barely discernible. Once the main groups rose out of the web, they evolved pretty much as you light expect by binary speciation events. This gives rise to a traditional tree-like pattern.

As Jan and I discussed, for the last three billion years of evolution the tree of life is a very good metaphor for evolution. Darwin was mostly right about that. On the other hand, the New Scientist article discusses some problems with the tree of life that extend beyond the early history. It makes several valid points that should make everyone skeptical of claims about evolution that are too simple. The tree isn't perfect.

The bottom line is that it's unfair to say that Darwin was wrong. It's as unfair as saying the Newton was wrong because of Einstein. We need to recognize that modern evolutionary biology is an improvement over the view of the Victorian founder of the field, but a cover saying that Darwin was wrong conveys the wrong message. It suggests that up until recently scientists believed that Darwin was right about everything.

A better headline might be: "More evidence that Charles Darwin didn't know everything there is to be known about evolution when he published his book in 1859."

UPDATE: In a surprising development, the IDiots at Uncommon Descent have picked up on these recent (sic) developments in evolutionary theory. Paul Nelson, a Young Earth Creationist philosopher, writes: “The tree of life is being politely buried”.

You'd best be careful with your "according to Darwins" 'cause you've got it wrong from the get go, niche similarity is not the issue, niche overlap and competitive exclusion is. I guess that's what comes from getting your information from a website put up by ID advocates rather than from original sources.

Here's the summary from the paper:



In summary, we have shown that coexistence among pairs of freshwater green algae is more strongly influenced by species’ niche differences than by their relative fitness differences. Our data do not support Darwin’s competition-relatedness hypothesis, as phylogeneticdistance had no impact on species coexistence or the mechanisms of coexistence. These findings reflect the maturation of a very old question in ecology (Mayfield & Levine 2010). For many years, the question of how species coexist had been answered with incomplete (in hindsight) theories and empirical observations that focused only on niche differentiation. Today, Chesson’s theory of coexistence has spawned the generation of operational measures of the mechanisms of coexistence, including both niche and relative fitness differences among species, that can completely explain the outcome of competition (e.g. Fig. 2). This maturation is key for ecologists to be able to address many ecological dilemmas presently facing humanity, including the causes and consequences of biodiversity loss, and the impacts of species invasions, range shifts resulting from climate change, and land-use changes and homogenisation. All of these questions are fundamentally tied to the question of how species coexist and how adaptable their mechanisms of coexistence are. The further investigation of the influence of evolution on both niche and neutral mechanisms of coexistence will help us to make more effective management and conservation decisions aimed at protecting biodiversity into the future.


Darwin's argument, in a nutshell, was that more offspring than can survive are produced and then nature winnows those that are less well equipped to produce the next generation. In order to avoid semantic BS I have avoided using the word "compete." Elucidating mechanisms of coexistence, even of cooperation does no violence to basic Darwinian perspectives, it just advances knowledge concerning what it means to be "fit" in a world where "survival of the fittest" is of paramount importance.


All evidence supports the idea that all life came about through descent with modification from a single common ancestor. That is correct. This hypothesis has not been falsified, that is correct. There is no difference between micro and macro evolution, just that micro is easier to demonstrate and see because of the similar time frame for each. I would point out to you that lots of long time frame things require inference.

Last point first. I can see we are not going to agree. There is a difference in micro and macroevolution. There is no macroevolution. Microevolution is simply a change in gene frequency within a population. Macroevolution is above the species level. Macroevolution is evolution on a grand scale — what we see when we look at the over-arching history of life: stability, change, lineages arising, and extinction. Creation scientists do not think it exists.

So the Tree of Life has changed now into a thicket. Thus, Darwin was wrong about ToL. That part is now pseudoscience. CS stated from the beginning it is more an orchard. When will evolutionists state that the thicket is more an orchard?

I think you are agreeing that Darwin's competition-related hypothesis is dismissed even though you do not like the link.

We can discuss descent with modification from a single common ancestor next.
 

Sapiens

Polymathematician
Last point first. I can see we are not going to agree. There is a difference in micro and macroevolution. There is no macroevolution. Microevolution is simply a change in gene frequency within a population. Macroevolution is above the species level. Macroevolution is evolution on a grand scale — what we see when we look at the over-arching history of life: stability, change, lineages arising, and extinction. Creation scientists do not think it exists.

So the Tree of Life has changed now into a thicket. Thus, Darwin was wrong about ToL. That part is now pseudoscience. CS stated from the beginning it is more an orchard. When will evolutionists state that the thicket is more an orchard?

I think you are agreeing that Darwin's competition-related hypothesis is dismissed even though you do not like the link.

We can discuss descent with modification from a single common ancestor next.
You make no case. You say the mainstream view is wrong. You describe the mainstream view is wrong. You quote mine. You misunderstand what Darwin and all subsequent biology says. Here's is a rather simplistic overview that may help you: http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/article/evoscales_01
 
Top