Religion is science?

[Willum]

As we find out more, we refine our theories, I think this is agreeable.

So let's roll back the clock.
Isn't it reasonable the first scientific theories were that a father-like figure created lightning and made the crops grow?
That guided our fortunes,just like when we were children?

Then as we learn more, we need to explain less with mommy and daddy gods? and more and more with fundamental particles and evolution?

Aren't gods just a psychologically driven scientific model to describe non-psychological phenomenon?

[DrNoGods]

[Replying to post 49 by Guy Threepwood]

Where new species appear abruptly in the record, remain in virtual stasis, sometimes for hundreds of millions of years, and/or vanish. leaving behind straight lines rather than branches, with the points of branching/diversion remaining extremely elusive.

Sure ... we don't have the complete picture yet because fossilization is rare (how many preCambrian organisms had hard body parts and/or lived in environments where fossilization was common?). The "tree of life" has changed pretty drastically since I was in undergraduate school in the late 1970s. Archaea were first classified as a separate group of prokaryotes in 1977 by Carl Woese and George E. Fox based on the sequences of ribosomal RNA (rRNA) genes. Before that everyone assumed they were some category of bacteria. It is a continuous process of refinement as new data becomes available, just like every other scientific pursuit, and one consistent aspect of evolutionary development is that it is very "bushy." This is especially obvious with human evolution, which was thought back in my college days to be a much more linear process that it is now known to be. But that doesn't invalidate the general ToE in any way ... it just shows that it is a very intricate process and new details are incorporated as the years go by.

The changes we do see are generally devolution and extinction events

Where are you getting that from? Evolution is change, and it happens in both directions (from less complex to more complex, and vice-versa). How is a multistep sequence containing billions of steps from single-celled organisms to the variety of life forms we see today "generally devolution and extinction." It is true that some 99% of all species that have evolved are not extinct, but the total population of living things on planet earth now is as large as it has ever been, and hugely diverse, exactly as ToE predicts.

Neanderthals are a good example- what did they evolve into? what did they come from? we used to have an assumed common ancestor, which was debunked and pushed back into the mists of time, and we see this pattern emerging over and over again.

They didn't evolve into anything ... they are just another example of a dead end like countless others (eg. the 99% of species that are not extinct). They came from earlier hominids through the "bushy" evolutionary process mentioned earlier. And when did the idea of a common human ancestor get discarded? Or are you referring to a common ancestor for all living things (the so-called LUCA ... Last Universal Common Ancestor)? Wikipedia describe LUCA like this:

The last universal common ancestor (LUCA), also called the last universal ancestor (LUA), cenancestor, or (incorrectly[R 1]) progenote, is the most recent population of organisms from which all organisms now living on Earth have a common descent.[1] LUCA is the most recent common ancestor of all current life on Earth. LUCA is not thought to be the first living organism on Earth, but only one of many early organisms, all but one of which died out.


Note that this refers to a population of organisms.

As for humans, the current best data indicates that humans share a common ancestor with chimpanzees and bonobos that lived some 6-10 million years ago. As far as I know this is still the accepted position. I don't know of any "debunking" of the concept that there are common ancestors, or some sort of LUCA. Have you read Dawking's book "The Ancestors Tale"?

And for that matter, what were they other than human? we apparently interbred- which would normally classify them in the same species as us, unless someone wanted to make exceptions to look like something more 'Darwiny' was going on there!

I assume you are using a particular definition of what a species is (ie. to be within the same species it must be possible to interbreed). First, separation of living things into differing groups (taxonomy) is for the convenience of humans in organizing things. Humans have decided to classify Neandertals as a different species, but they could physically breed with Homo sapiens as we know from genetic studies which prove this. Here is a random description of interbreeding among earlier Hominids:

http://rafonda.com/interbreeding_between_species.html

Darwin's book was not called 'origin of subspecies' or 'how species go extinct' the real question remains unanswered, what is the origin of the species?

And it was written in 1859! We don't know how the first living organism came into existence on earth, but that is completely irrelevant to ToE which only requires that this did happen via some means. It doesn't matter HOW it happened. So yes ... the mechanism for the origin of life on earth remains unanswered. But this has nothing whatsoever to do with ToE or any of its details.

What would you say is the best example of evolution ever actually occurring, that was actually scientifically observed?

That is a question for a real evolutionary biologist. But I'd choose human evolution for which we do have enough dated fossil remains and genetic data to support a good deal of the details. I like the diagram here (first below the video):

https://www.britannica.com/science/human-evolution

which includes the recently discovered Homo naledi. This illustrates the "bushy" nature and is very, very different from the version I saw in college.

Here is more thorough description with connections made between the various early Homo species based on current data:

http://www.lwrw.org/Part2.htm

along with a lot of commentary. And of course there are many whole books on this subject. It is hard for me to understand how anyone could look at this giant set of data and conclude that humans were created as fully-formed creatures, essentially identical to what we are today.

[DrNoGods]

[Replying to post 50 by DrNoGods]

It is true that some 99% of all species that have evolved are not extinct...

That should be NOW extinct ... caught it too late to edit.

[Guy Threepwood]

[Replying to post 50 by DrNoGods]

Sure ... we don't have the complete picture yet because fossilization is rare (how many preCambrian organisms had hard body parts and/or lived in environments where fossilization was common?).

Big Foot sightings are rare also- because they too are very good at hiding !

That's fine, and may be absolutely true, but you mentioned 'The vast amount of cumulative physical evidence'... not excuses, valid as may be , for why the evidence has not been found. Call me a stickler for scientific evidence.. intermediates remain something that is more demanded by the theory than the evidence..

The "tree of life" has changed pretty drastically since I was in undergraduate school in the late 1970s. Archaea were first classified as a separate group of prokaryotes in 1977 by Carl Woese and George E. Fox based on the sequences of ribosomal RNA (rRNA) genes. Before that everyone assumed they were some category of bacteria. It is a continuous process of refinement as new data becomes available, just like every other scientific pursuit, and one consistent aspect of evolutionary development is that it is very "bushy." This is especially obvious with human evolution, which was thought back in my college days to be a much more linear process that it is now known to be. But that doesn't invalidate the general ToE in any way ... it just shows that it is a very intricate process and new details are incorporated as the years go by.

It has changed drastically in a very distinct direction- from the assumptions that naturally flowed from ToE; That changes would be incremental, to the point that ToE itself has split into branches including 'punctuated equilibrium' which concedes what skeptics had been saying for a long time, that the gaps, jumps, stasis are real, not artifacts of an incomplete record.

As Raup said- 'ironically, we have even fewer examples of evolutionary transitions than we had in Darwin's tim' & 'The evidence we find in the geologic record is not nearly as compatible with darwinian natural selection as we would like it to be'

i.e. you could describe QM as simply adding more 'details' to classical physics also, but those details at some point became a fundamentally different mechanism and explanation for reality than once assumed.

Where are you getting that from? Evolution is change, and it happens in both directions (from less complex to more complex, and vice-versa). How is a multistep sequence containing billions of steps from single-celled organisms to the variety of life forms we see today "generally devolution and extinction." It is true that some 99% of all species that have evolved are not extinct, but the total population of living things on planet earth now is as large as it has ever been, and hugely diverse, exactly as ToE predicts.

the theory says it happens in both directions, but what does the observational evidence say? We see fish losing sight, birds losing flight, species becoming extinct, that's not difficult to explain, and I think we agree on the processes. How species came to be in the first place, is simply far more speculative

They didn't evolve into anything ... they are just another example of a dead end like countless others (eg. the 99% of species that are not extinct). They came from earlier hominids through the "bushy" evolutionary process mentioned earlier. And when did the idea of a common human ancestor get discarded? Or are you referring to a common ancestor for all living things (the so-called LUCA ... Last Universal Common Ancestor)? Wikipedia describe LUCA like this:

The last universal common ancestor (LUCA), also called the last universal ancestor (LUA), cenancestor, or (incorrectly[R 1]) progenote, is the most recent population of organisms from which all organisms now living on Earth have a common descent.[1] LUCA is the most recent common ancestor of all current life on Earth. LUCA is not thought to be the first living organism on Earth, but only one of many early organisms, all but one of which died out.

right, another example of extinction, entropy, chaos- and reduction in diversity- not an increase.

when did the idea of a common human ancestor get discarded?

the idea has always been there, what I'm referring to is actual evidence for it. It's a pattern we see across the board, as Raup alluded to; where examples previously claimed as definitive pieces in the puzzle- the Darwinian tree- as a transitional or node, are found not to be- and what was once 'evidence' becomes simply 'an idea' once again..

(wikipedia)
Homo heidelbergensis, dated 600,000 to 300,000 years ago, has long been thought to be a likely candidate for the last common ancestor of the Neanderthal and modern human lineages. However, genetic evidence from the Sima de los Huesos fossils published in 2016 seems to suggest that H. heidelbergensis in its entirety should be included in the Neanderthal lineage, as "pre-Neanderthal" or "early Neanderthal", while the divergence time between the Neanderthal and modern lineages has been pushed back[......]

And it was written in 1859! We don't know how the first living organism came into existence on earth, but that is completely irrelevant to ToE which only requires that this did happen via some means. It doesn't matter HOW it happened. So yes ... the mechanism for the origin of life on earth remains unanswered. But this has nothing whatsoever to do with ToE or any of its details.

Because in the classical model of 1859- the cell was an indistinct blob of protoplasm, a mixture of readily available chemicals that might just happen to fall together- So the origin of the first cell was not considered a particularly difficult problem to solve

Nobody could have dreamt of the digital hardware and software operating within- As Dawkins said, Darwin considered that any form of evolution that needed help over the difficult parts by God, was no sort of evolution at all, it made a mockery of the central point of it.

But all that aside, my point was that Darwin certainly did propose a mechanism for the origin of species after being granted LUCA, right? And that was supposed to be by slow incremental adaptation and natural selection. Not sudden appearances followed by stasis.

And the lack of change is as big a problem for the theory as the sudden changes- if a photocopied office memo remains identical after a million reproductions, you know it's coming from a master copy, not successive generations of randomly corrupted ones..

It is hard for me to understand how anyone could look at this giant set of data and conclude that humans were created as fully-formed creatures, essentially identical to what we are today.

well evidence is a notoriously subjective thing!

If we dig up the past and see shared traits, but also some gaps, jumps, stasis, sudden appearances and disappearances, dead ends and even a few regressions.. but an overall progression over time towards increased sophistication.. what does that pattern in itself suggest to you?

[DrNoGods]

[Replying to post 52 by Guy Threepwood]

that the gaps, jumps, stasis are real, not artifacts of an incomplete record.

Yes ... and ToE continues to evolve (pun intended) to accommodate new information as it comes along. Science, in general has always worked that way.

i.e. you could describe QM as simply adding more 'details' to classical physics also, but those details at some point became a fundamentally different mechanism and explanation for reality than once assumed.

Again, normal scientific progression. The different QM mechanisms were required to describe things at the very small physical scales when the effects could be seen and studied. QM was necessary to explain these things. It was "once assumed" that classical physics could explain most things because it did indeed work for the larger scales that were accessible, and still does. QM is consistent with classical physics at larger scales and does not contradict it. When it was possible to see things at much smaller scales and observe unusual behavior, or to explain why spectral lines occur in specific patterns rather than being continuous, new physics was needed. Perfectly normal.

How species came to be in the first place, is simply far more speculative

How so? ToE predicts that new species can arise, for example, via geological separations of groups and subsequent different evolutionary paths. There is nothing speculative about new species formation within ToE, which is consistent with observation.

right, another example of extinction, entropy, chaos- and reduction in diversity- not an increase.

That's fine. Nothing in ToE or thermodynamics requires that entropy go in only one direction for any specific process in an open system like the earth (being debated in another thread). Entropy can increase in one part of the system and decrease in another. And there are plenty of examples of life becoming more complex over time. It goes both ways, exactly as expected and observed.

Homo heidelbergensis, dated 600,000 to 300,000 years ago, has long been thought to be a likely candidate for the last common ancestor of the Neanderthal and modern human lineages. However, genetic evidence from the Sima de los Huesos fossils published in 2016 seems to suggest that H. heidelbergensis in its entirety should be included in the Neanderthal lineage, as "pre-Neanderthal" or "early Neanderthal", while the divergence time between the Neanderthal and modern lineages has been pushed back[......]

And? Homo sapiens were thought to have only appeared about 200,000 years ago (Omo remains) as these were the oldest fossils found with the correct features. Then a recent find in Morocco pushed that back to about 300,000 years. This stuff isn't static and never changing, and when new evidence comes into play it has to fit into the overall picture or the picture has to change accordingly. ToE has yet to be falsified at a level that it can be discarded, not even close, but you seem to want some completely static situation with virtually 100% of every detail defined, or it is all wrong. That's not how it works.

If we dig up the past and see shared traits, but also some gaps, jumps, stasis, sudden appearances and disappearances, dead ends and even a few regressions.. but an overall progression over time towards increased sophistication.. what does that pattern in itself suggest to you?

It says that evolution is a very "bushy" process with many fits and starts, and branches into different directions, and we have a very incomplete fossil record because fossilization is a relatively rare event. ToE is not a static subject that must coincide exactly with Darwin's original writings and ideas or the whole thing is wrong. Finding examples of inconsistencies, and new fossils that require adjustments to prior organization, etc. is part and parcel of the process of fine tuning and ultimately arriving at better and better descriptions. At present, ToE is the best and most consistent explanation of how life diversified on this planet, including how modern humans arose.

[Guy Threepwood]

[Replying to post 53 by DrNoGods]

Again, normal scientific progression. The different QM mechanisms were required to describe things at the very small physical scales when the effects could be seen and studied. QM was necessary to explain these things. It was "once assumed" that classical physics could explain most things because it did indeed work for the larger scales that were accessible, and still does. QM is consistent with classical physics at larger scales and does not contradict it. When it was possible to see things at much smaller scales and observe unusual behavior, or to explain why spectral lines occur in specific patterns rather than being continuous, new physics was needed. Perfectly normal.

It is normal scientific progression- towards a new and better theory I would say!

We learned that scales matter, things DO work very differently at different scales yes?, and it's not just a quirk of nature, but a necessity in hierarchical information systems, as physic, chemistry, life are.

Apples still fall from trees of course
just as we can directly observe that genetic apples fall not far from their trees also

The error in classical physics, was extrapolating the superficial observation, into a comprehensive explanation. As intuitively tempting as it is bound to be,

And ToE, born from this model, still maintains that the process that created a human being from a single cell... is essentially the same one which creates a woollier breed of sheep over a few cold winters, just extrapolated out...

i.e. Trying to explain evolution by adaptation, is like trying to explain gravity with classical physics, doomed to failure, because both of these observations are design features of a system, not design mechanisms for that system- that is an insurmountable paradox.

How so? ToE predicts that new species can arise, for example, via geological separations of groups and subsequent different evolutionary paths. There is nothing speculative about new species formation within ToE, which is consistent with observation.

. And there are plenty of examples of life becoming more complex over time. It goes both ways, exactly as expected and observed.

like what?

once again, we can directly observe species going extinct through chaotic events, a loss of diversity, we understand and are not debating this process, but where can we observe a species becoming more complex by random corruption of the instructions? that remains philosophical speculation- and only an increasingly more problematic one in the information age

And? Homo sapiens were thought to have only appeared about 200,000 years ago (Omo remains) as these were the oldest fossils found with the correct features. Then a recent find in Morocco pushed that back to about 300,000 years. This stuff isn't static and never changing, and when new evidence comes into play it has to fit into the overall picture or the picture has to change accordingly. ToE has yet to be falsified at a level that it can be discarded, not even close, but you seem to want some completely static situation with virtually 100% of every detail defined, or it is all wrong. That's not how it works.

As above its not just that the picture is 'changing' it is moving decisively away from fundamental Darwinian predictions, not towards them.

IF the explosions had been smoothed out, with vast numbers of clear transitions discovered as predicted, that would have been a nice validation of ToE- that's not what panned out

Many examples of common ancestors and transitional species once assumed in the past, did not simply 'change' to other examples- they vanished into the unknown entirely, the jigsaw pieces had to be tossed back into the box- that's not 'refining the picture' that's more like realizing were are trying to work from the wrong one!

Even such cornerstones of Darwinian evolution like dogs from grey wolves, birds from Dinos are looking more questionable the more we learn. Because they were based on superficial morphological similarities. DNA has revealed in many cases that form certainly follows function, but not necessarily ancestry

It says that evolution is a very "bushy" process with many fits and starts, and branches into different directions, and we have a very incomplete fossil record because fossilization is a relatively rare event. ToE is not a static subject that must coincide exactly with Darwin's original writings and ideas or the whole thing is wrong. Finding examples of inconsistencies, and new fossils that require adjustments to prior organization, etc. is part and parcel of the process of fine tuning and ultimately arriving at better and better descriptions. At present, ToE is the best and most consistent explanation of how life diversified on this planet, including how modern humans arose.

Sorry to set a trap- I was faithfully describing what you might find by excavating an old auto salvage yard.. But the point to be made, is that nothing in that pattern objectively suggests evolution through natural selection of random variation. aka ToE. In fact intelligent design is the only unambiguously proven mechanism by which such a pattern IS created- That's not to to say random chance cannot possibly create every necessary design change, but it's certainly not the 'default' explanation.

[DrNoGods]

[Replying to post 54 by Guy Threepwood]

And the ToE train keeps rolling along:

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-45588213

[Guy Threepwood]

[Replying to post 54 by Guy Threepwood]

And the ToE train keeps rolling along:

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-45588213

rolling a long way from Darwinism!

so soft bodied fossils CAN be found, (and have been for a long time) just not the ones Darwinians had hoped to find.

From your link:

"The Ediacaran biota appeared around 600 million years ago, and flourished for tens of millions of years before the event called the Cambrian explosion.

This massive diversification of life occurred around 541 million years ago; it's when most of the major animal groups appear in the fossil record.

The Ediacaran species largely disappear when the Cambrian explosion happens."

so again one species in stasis for millions of years suddenly vanishes, and is abruptly replaced by completely distinct ones , where is the gradual adaptation from one to the other?

[DrNoGods]

[Replying to post 56 by Guy Threepwood]

so again one species in stasis for millions of years suddenly vanishes, and is abruptly replaced by completely distinct ones , where is the gradual adaptation from one to the other?

There doesn't always have to be a gradual adaptation from one to the other. There are all kinds of scenarios where such a perfect sequence can be interrupted. If some new creature enters the habitat of another creature, and happens to eat that creature for lunch and dinner, and there are a sufficient number of the new creature, the one that is lunch can disappear abruptly and never evolve into anything else. This kind of thing happens all the time in nature.

Maybe a similar event happened to Ediacaran by one of the Cambrian species and it vanished for that reason. Or, it could have been out-competed for food and died out that way, or some disease wiped it out suddenly, etc. The dinosaurs vanished in a very short period of about 30,000 years after the Chicxulub impact and Deccan Trap eruptions. Evolution doesn't happen in a pristine, perfect environment with no external influences, and these external influences can cause major deviations from the slow, gradual change that you are expecting.

[Guy Threepwood]

[Replying to post 56 by Guy Threepwood]

so again one species in stasis for millions of years suddenly vanishes, and is abruptly replaced by completely distinct ones , where is the gradual adaptation from one to the other?

There doesn't always have to be a gradual adaptation from one to the other. There are all kinds of scenarios where such a perfect sequence can be interrupted. If some new creature enters the habitat of another creature, and happens to eat that creature for lunch and dinner, and there are a sufficient number of the new creature, the one that is lunch can disappear abruptly and never evolve into anything else. This kind of thing happens all the time in nature.

Maybe a similar event happened to Ediacaran by one of the Cambrian species and it vanished for that reason. Or, it could have been out-competed for food and died out that way, or some disease wiped it out suddenly, etc. The dinosaurs vanished in a very short period of about 30,000 years after the Chicxulub impact and Deccan Trap eruptions. Evolution doesn't happen in a pristine, perfect environment with no external influences, and these external influences can cause major deviations from the slow, gradual change that you are expecting.

Right, so we all know how you can turn Dinos into a muddy puddle, drop a huge rock on them- we all know how random chaotic errors can break stuff..I think we are both old enough to have experienced this first hand?

So the question remains; how do you achieve the opposite?, isn't that a tad more intriguing? Where is the evidence which supports a muddy puddle, or even a single cell incrementally becoming a dinosaur through random chaotic errors?

This 19th C claim was perfectly intuitive in the classical/ reductionist/ Victorian age, but defies everything 21st C information-age science can observe in the fossil record, direct experimentation, or computer simulation

[DrNoGods]

[Replying to post 58 by Guy Threepwood]

Right, so we all know how you can turn Dinos into a muddy puddle, drop a huge rock on them.

I assume you are making a joke there as the dinosaurs did not disappear because a rock was dropped onto them. It was the after effects of reduced sunlight from the atmospheric aerosols blasted up from the impact, subsequent cooling and loss of vegetation for the herbivores to eat, loss of herbivores for the carnivores to eat, etc. that ultimately combined over hundreds of generations to eventually wiped them out. Emissions from the Deccan Traps may have contributed as well.

So the question remains; how do you achieve the opposite?, isn't that a tad more intriguing? Where is the evidence which supports a muddle puddle, or even a single cell incrementally becoming a dinosaur through random chaotic errors?

Random mutations ... combined with natural selection. You can't leave out the natural selection part and just claim that the whole process is "random chaotic errors" (although that sounds more ridiculous and dramatic). The evidence for this process is the entire body of observation that supports ToE and has confirmed it beyond a reasonable doubt, and is contained in literally hundreds of thousands of peer-reviewed journal articles and the huge number of books and (now) web articles that summarize all of this observational data. It is one of the most studied and documented process in all of science.

The process from single-celled organism to dinosaur took over 3 billion years, which is enough time for small, incremental changes to ultimately lead to simple, multicellular organisms like sponges, then to hundreds of thousands of progressively more complicated and structured organisms that led to the appearance of fishes, amphibians and reptiles like dinosaurs and many other tetrapods. There are many summaries of current knowledge of this process, such as these very common ones (and their references) just to list a few:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_ ... ry_of_life

https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn ... n-of-life/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution ... ry_of_life

Are you claiming that none of this information qualifies as evidence? A full-up eye structure can realistically evolve from a simple eye patch in just a few hundred thousand years:

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/5c34/6 ... a1311f.pdf

3+ billion years is an incredibly long time, and mutations combined with natural selection can produce an incredible variety of life forms as the fossil record shows.

People have tried to discredit ToE since it was first proposed, particularly religious people who see it as a threat to the infallibility of their holy books which claim that humans are special creatures created in the image of their god figure, and not "just another animal." But the cumulative evidence for ToE (and human evolution from great apes) is just too overwhelming. It would be interesting to see stats on the percentage of anti-evolutionists who don't believe ToE mainly because it shows that modern humans evolved from apes, and the percentage who don't believe ToE because they don't think there is evidence for it (independent of the human issue specifically).