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If your stupid evolution exists (no offense but it’s quite dumb) then why don’t monkeys give birth to humans?
This one is the first “with attitude” question and I am pleased as pumpkins to respond.
Evolution is indeed very “dumb”— just like geology or astrophysics. Did you ever try and ask a nebula a question, or a mountain range? Dumb as dirt.
But as for the natural processes generating those things, and how we featherless bipeds with big brains and occasionally even bigger mouths are concerned, that’s a different matter. First off, no species is ever going to give birth to something so radically different as the questioner is posing. That is not part of evolutionary doctrine, so flailing “evolution” for something that doesn’t happen that evolutionary theory doesn’t think should be happening, is not evolutionary theory’s problem. Never mind monkeys and people, peonies aren’t going to sprout oak trees either, or beetles into butterflies. All natural evolution involves exceedingly similar offshoots; it is only after lots and lots and lots of that do you notice that the descendant of a lineage has changed a lot from its ancestor (this is most easily seen in the origin of mammals, our own vertebrate class). That is why no proper understanding of what evolution does or does not say, or whether it jibes with the evidence, can get along without a good understanding of the fossil record (the track of what actually did live in the past).
The common ancestors of modern monkeys and today’s humans lived over 50 million years ago, and resembled a bush baby or shrew (we have actual fossils of some of these wee critters, by the way, so this is not a hypothetical matter). The lines leading off into their descendants have big stories to tell, with groups spreading over continents and diverging ever so gently until you get what we have now. The ape lineage has only developed much more recently, in Africa, and the common ancestors of us, the chimps and gorillas, were living around 10 million years ago. They were still small, about the size of a typical monkey, arboreal a lot of the time. The important point about what evolutionary theory actually says (and not what some people’s misunderstandings think it says) is that if you track any individual lineage there will be no point where radically different things are appearing (poof!) without antecedents. Creationists often think that is what is happening in the fossil record, but none of them are working career paleontologists and the rest do not show particularly good familiarity with the details (the late Duane Gish comes to mind on the creationist side, and Casey Luskin is a comparable example over in the modern Intelligent Design movement).
Now the question of how did we get to be so different than monkeys or peonies is a matter of genetics and developmental biology, a very big subject that can hardly be covered in just a quickie question response. But the short version is that the major genes governing body plans and appendages have been duplicated and mutated to play out at different times and positions in the developing body. In our own case, very few actual genes knocking around in our bodies are unique to humans, we just deploy our inherited (but modified) genetic tool kit in different ways than our cousins. For example, the FoxP2 gene that mammals use for a lot of basic biology has been co-opted for use in our brains and language processing (which similarly hitchhiked on the systems our primate cousins use for gesturing) so that mutations in those genes can at times produce strange lapses in grammar and speech.
Every gene and bone and muscle in our bodies has a story to tell about the long path our species has taken in the development of life, and modern evolutionary theory has (and continues to) peel back the layers to reveal more and more of that story. Its an extraordinary history we have, and not “dumb” at all.
Jim,
Too bad someone would ask that dumb a question, obviously not much thought going on there. I would like to hear your thoughts on the evolutionary explanation of the Cambrian fossil explosion, which according to what I’ve heard is exactly opposite of what evolutionary theory has predicted. Thanks.
I would encourage you to read “Signature in the Cell” or “Darwin’s Doubt” by Stephen Meyer. Macro-evolution does not work.
I would recommend Randy also read some of the many criticisms of Meyer’s books, and investigate some of the primary technical sources Meyer is either unaware of or elects not to address in his works, before deciding that “Macro-evolution does not work.”
I noticed, for instance, that in “Signature in the Cell” Meyer doesn’t even bother to discuss the relevant subject of endosymbiosis (whereby complex cellular organelles like our own mitochondria and the chloroplasts in plants have developed by bacterial cell fusions a couple of billion years ago), or the splendid work of Neil Shubin and others on the evolutionary origin of complex organisms by the deploying of modifications in genetic blueprint genes.
Meyer’s understanding of even the history of the field is pretty limited. For example, in his chapter on Punctuated Equilibrium (P-E) in “Darwin’s Doubt” he claimed that Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge invented the concept of allopatric speciation (speciation spurred by geographic isolation) simply to explain the bumpy nature of the fossil record, and that P-E had fallen into disfavor in science. Neither statement is true. Ernst Myer developed the allopatric model in the 1930s based on real world observations, and Gould & Eldredge later realized that model automatically implied the pattern they were seeing in the fragmentary fossil record. And I see the P-E concept constantly used in the current technical literature, from paleontology all the way down to the selection of gene function.
Meyer has been playing this game for some time, since he was making shoddy claims about Archaeopteryx in a 1998 lecture of his at Whitworth (dangling the idea that the fossils might have been faked) which he backed off from the moment I challenged him on the claim. Now the only way anyone would know how little Meyer knows is not to restrict your reading to just Meyer, but tiptoeing out into the bigger science world to find out what they’ve been doing.
Which brings us to the Cambrian Explosion. I have been following this subject for some time, tracking especially the evasions and misrepresentations of antievolutionists in this area, and Meyer’s latest book is no exception. Evolutionists had been working out the branching of organisms for some time, and certainly by the early 1980s it was expected that sponges and annelid worms were among the earliest animals to emerge, and this happened long before the Cambrian.
Now that the developmental genes like the homeobox cluster were discovered (another subject Meyer gives short shrift to), scientists have been applying that understanding to the issue as well. Paleontologists were expecting the earliest chordates, for example, to be even more primitive developmentally than the simple jawless squirmers that were known from the later Cambrian, predicting that they would resemble lamprey larvae—which is exactly what turned out to be the case in the newer early Cambrian fossil finds of the late 1990s on. I called this point to the attention of Casey Luskin of the Discovery Institute last year at one of his talks, and he had never known enough about the history of Cambrian paleontology to have ever known of this.
Now it would be swell if we could find fossil examples of what was going on even earlier to track the earliest evolution of the chordates tracking into the Precambrian, but here we hit a very big snag: such creatures would have been very tiny (small enough to crawl on your fingernail with room to spare) and lacking fossilizable hard parts would be virtually invisible unless you had a super-good deposit (the Cambrian Explosion has three of those, fortunately, but there are none of that level of preservation that date earlier).
One of the biggest evasions of the antievolutionary spin on the Cambrian Explosion is this fossil preservation issue. It is a plain fact of paleontology that of the 35 or so known phyla, half have no fossil record at all, let alone tracking all the way back to the Cambrian, and this is precisely because they are small and lack hard parts to get preserved. So if you hear anybody say, gee, all the animal phyla appeared in the Cambrian, you should reply, gosh, I didn’t know you were an evolutionist? Because only an evolutionist can say that with a straight face.
Indeed, several of the phyla identified in the early Cambrian are explicitly evolutionary ancestors, not representatives of the forms as known today (the chelicerates come to mind, which include the spiders, scorpions and horseshoe crabs). Not to my surprise, Meyer didn’t discuss them in “Darwin’s Doubt” either. He didn’t even bother with making a list of the known phyla and their fossil record (that wouldn’t have helped his case, of course).
It is a legitimate scientific issue whether the proliferation of Cambrian arthropods (buggy things that you’d reach for the bug spray if you saw one on your floor) was a genuine burst of novel forms or just an artifact of the preservation problem. I personally suspect it is not an artifact, but reflects instead a changing environment where critters with “birameous appendages” had a huge advantage that their ancestral forms hadn’t enjoyed. But none of that bears on whether there are genealogical relationships among living things or how strong the case for natural evolution is once you start diving into the details.
If Meyer had been trained as a paleontologist (his career bumped into geology in the oil industry but his degree is in philosophy) and he had been showing a technical expertise that earned the respect of people who actually do work in the field, such as Simon Conway Morris or Stefan Bengtson, that would be one thing. But he has not, and before anyone decides that Meyer’s wordy but technically thin books carry weight beyond being a paperweight, they should take the trouble to investigate more on the subject.
Jim,
One thing that was addressed that you seem to keep evading is the under layers of the Cambrian period. Apparently there are fossilized sponge embryos that are very soft bodied that are well preserved that disprove the idea of Darwin’s tree of life idea of simple to complex. Are you familiar with trained paleontologist Y.J. Chen and his opinion that his digs in the Cambrian layer in china turn the evolutionary tree of life on its head?
What this discussion proves to me as it “evolves” (microevolutionistically btw), is that nothing is proven, including evolution. Everyone has the right to their opinion, just don’t force it down everyone’s throat, as liberals and atheists are so fond of saying about religion. Listen to yourself in this regard.
As a saying goes, everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not necessarily their own facts. Since I explicitly mentioned Precambrian sponges and annelid worms, and how these were expected to be early branching forms and so would have to have existed back in the Precambrian, I fail to see how I am evading the issue or how the physical paleontology is a problem for natural evolution.
I am indeed aware of Jun-Yuan Chen’s work, and I may ask whether you have read papers he has written (I have read over a dozen of his technical research, in Science, Nature and PNAS among others), or are you relying on someone’s quotation from him as your sole source of information? The sponge fossils involved are wonderful in that the early cell division embryos are preserved through the process of phosphatization. There are embryos there also that may very well be from Precambrian arthropods, thus pulling the rug from another claim of creationists that there are no ancestors available, but the problem is that phosphatization can only preserve samples up to about half a millimeter, meaning whatever they were growing up into could not be preserved in principle.
To repeat: nothing in Chen’s work “turn the evolutionary tree of life on his head” and I would love to see any paper of his in which Chen contended any such thing. Ball in your court Dennis.
Evolutionist should hardly be scolding about using one’s own facts. They have had a history of lyling and falsification to uphold their theories for decades, some of which still reside in mandatory text book material in the government schools. I’m not saying yours is, but the principle certainly applies to some of your atheist predecessors.
i heard the statement from Chen’s own mouth in a video clip I watched so it wasn’t hearsay.
I happen to be thrilled by learning more of the amazing processes involved in cell division, particle physics and just about everything else in this universe. But I thrill because I also believe it has come from an amazing and personal God, Who is over and above all of it. I ponder sometimes about how an atheist can marvel at something that is supposedly here by chance from a body that came from dirt and is going to dirt never to exist or have consciousness again. If it was true, which I don’t believe at all, I would echo the apostle Paul, who said that if our faith in Christ is for this life alone, we would be, of all men, most miserable. But I am not, and I have a joy that is not something I could work up on my own, but is evidence to me along with all that I continue to learn out of the scriptures, that God is indeed real, and personal.
Reading your depth of knowledge of evolutionist literature, I’m confindent that I will never win the debate with you, but that’s ok. We both have a faith position that will lead us somewhere so I’m willing to wait and see. I have also read enough to know that time has always proven scripture to win out over every skepticism that has ever been raised against it and am assured that it will be so in the future. To say that I don’t have all the answers now does not bother me, but I have one answer and that is the knowledge of my salvation through Jesus Christ, and that is enough. Bless you Jim.
If trying to get a discussion of factual information to stay on the topic of factual information qualifies as “scolding,” than I do have to plead guilty. I invite Dennis to give us a text of what he heard Chen say, and explain what the context was for that statement. My understanding of Chen’s work causes me to suspect that he was being asked about the discovery of phosphatized sponge embryos, and how amazing is was to find that early cell embryos could be preserved that way.
That would not support the idea that sponges existed in the Precambrian was a shock (it wasn’t), or that this would somehow refute the idea that in most cases small soft bodied critters simply do not fossilize easily. As I noted already, phosphatization can only preserve things up to half a millimeter, meaning the sort of detailed fossils of Precambrian ancestors for the Cambrian phyla would still be invisible, and consequently would want to know the context of what he was saying. I suspect that the ID-friendly video was not providing that context, which puts it in the tradition of creationist quote mining.
As for your claim that evolutionists “have had a history of lyling and falsification to uphold their theories for decades” that’s a fine accusation, now document it. It sounds an awful lot like the claims of Jonathan Wells in “Icons of Evolution.” Unfortunately he had been playing fast and loose with his claims, which once more becomes clearer when the primary sources are comparade to his claims. So if your idea of what “lying” went on is based on a secondary treatment rather than primary sources, then we’re back at the same problem: knowing the bigger context to tell whether a statement is a fair representation of the facts or not.
Which is why I do take objection to the notion that both our positions are ones of “faith.” I do not have “faith” that Jonathan Wells misrepresents source material, I can observe him doing so, by looking up his primary sources and comparing the claims he makes. It is no more a matter of “faith” than finding that the address on a business card turned out to be a vacant lot. This is way beyond the “I watched a video” level of analysis, where one does have to have “faith” that the statements being quoted have not been taken out of context and thus misrepresented his views.
Anyway, I await hearing what Chen specifically said, and your recollection of what the context was in the video, so that we may wade into the swamp of direct investigation together.