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Not unless we have to dig up fossils and generate assumptions about similarities to build a house or an airplane.
It's not necessarily slow. Blind, to my knowledge, yes.
On the other hand, evolutionary theory includes the idea of common descent. This is not a necessity for the basic process of evolution to work - it's part of the evolutionary explanation for biodiversity. So we have to distinguish the two concepts.
It's also important to note that evolutionary theory as originally formulated did not postulate universal common descent. I don't think that, at the time, there was enough evidence to do so. No comparative genetics, very little knowledge of biochemistry, no Precambrian fossil record, what have you. Likewise, if life has more than one ultimate ancestor, that does nothing to rule out the processes of evolution or the idea of common descent - it's simply irrelevant to the former (many if not most of which have been directly observed) and it merely restricts the latter.
I'd also like to know which predictions these are. Mind you, I want predictions that can be distinguished from evolutionary ones. I.e. don't come with things like the common design common designer argument - common ancestry also predicts commonalities of design.
As a person interested in the fossil record, I was very curious about this...
So. First, though probably least important: Retallack represents a fringe opinion. Very few palaeontologists argue that fossil-bearing Ediacaran deposits are terrestrial. The general consensus is that they are mostly marine; some of them represent shallow seafloors covered by microbial mats, some of them were buried by volcanic ash, while some of the later ones (in the Nama Group in particular) contain microbial reefs.
Second, lichens aren't necessarily "plant life". The photosynthetic part of the symbiosis is often not a plant but a cyanobacterium (and then, single-celled algae are only plants in the broaders sense). To top that, Genesis doesn't simply mention "plant life". I don't know about the original Hebrew, but English translations specifically list things like grass and fruit-bearing trees. Angiosperms do not appear in the fossil record until the Mesozoic.
Third, the Ediacaran period is not "the earliest earth" by any stretch. Ediacaran fossils start around 580 million years ago, in the latest Precambrian. They were preceded by four billion years of earth history, the majority of which didn't leave us any fossils more complex than bacteria. The earliest multicellular algae are things like Bangiomorpha, from under 1.5 billion years ago. And again, these were red algae living in water and not grass and fruit-bearing trees on dry land. AFAIK, the earliest evidence of land plants is some Ordovician spores that certainly didn't belong to fruit-bearing trees.
It's pretty simple. If you (not you specifically) insist that evolution only happens within a kind, I think you ought to know where kinds end. After all, presumably you have some sort of evidence for your claim, and that evidence should be the observation that evolution doesn't proceed beyond a certain level of divergence.
Theoretically, a kind always means the same thing. It's the unit of God's creation and the limit of evolution.
Species doesn't always mean the same thing, and we don't believe there is some sort of discrete unchangeable entity behind the definitions. It makes a lot of sense to talk about biological species when you're discussing how populations of sexually reproducing organisms diverge from each other. It makes very little sense to apply the same concept to asexuals and/or promiscuous gene swappers.
(FWIW, I'm quite happy to be explicit about which species definition I mean. Usually, it'll be the biological species, because that's the context where speciation is most often discussed by evolutionary biologists. Often, species definitions are actually irrelevant. When discussing how humans evolved from an ape-like ancestor, it doesn't really matter whether we interpret "humans" as a biological species or a morphospecies or an ecological species or a genotypic cluster; it's the traits, their genetic basis and the evolutionary forces acting on them that matter. Incidentally, I'm reasonably sure that we could find examples of new species observed to form under most currently used species definitions.)
What is this 'gap' between monkeys and humans?
OK so monkeys and humans are different.Depends on what are you looking at.
A simpler example: DNA differences.
A harder example: civilization.
OK so monkeys and humans are different.
Now, who exactly is trying to 'bridge the gap'?
My Daisy Chain Challenge
Can we take every single piece of physical biological evidence for evolution that is currently on display everywhere, and line them up side-by-side in a way that can account for every single year in history since abiogenesis?
Similar studies have happened now. People study DNA to explore the origin of human being. What do they know now? Can they bridge the gap between monkey and human? Or is the gap becoming more and more clear?
If they can not be successful in using the most recent samples, I do not hold much hope when people are going toward any fossil record.
There is extensive cross-transference of DNA between species.
Mainstream science finds this among scores of species.
Evolutionary biologists, the bottom of the barrel in hard science,
Heh, the Cambrian explosion is probably not the best falsification of pure gradualism - while we have evidence indicating it was fast compared to "regular" evolution, there's precious little evidence that it involved anything other than gradual changes. I don't think we have a good enough Cambrian fossil record to track individual changes during the origin of major groups. (Clarification: I understand "gradual" as the other end of the scale from "hopeful monsters", i.e. referring to the magnitude of individual changes.)I was not the one that said slow and blind the original thread starter did. However, ToE did predict that evolution must be a slow and gradual process. The prediction was falsified by the Cambrian Explosion.
Just making sure you're under no misconceptions about what evolution "predicts"I am not sure what you are getting at here.
Indeed. As the lichen controversy shows, Precambrian fossils are very hard to interpret even at the level of kingdoms, never mind finding specific links to the various creatures of the Cambrian*. In that, Darwin's hopes were certainly not borne out.The Precambrian fossil record is controversial and it definitely didn't show a clear progression to the Cambrian fossils.
I want something distinct from evolutionary predictions because making different predictions is the only way you can tell explanations apart. And, given that the evolutionary view doesn't assume a meddling extra entity (supernatural to boot!), Occam's Razor is on its side if the evidence is equally consistent with both accounts.Why do you want something that distinguishes it from evolutionary ones? ToE is a man made construct created to explain what is found in the past. Evidence is evidence and the evidence is not a property of ToE.
Of course. Although Retallack has been pushing it for a long time, and so far as I can tell, he's not made much impact. Either he's a brave maverick way ahead of his time, or he's simply passionately wrong.That is true, it is controversial. However, the hypothesis is substantiated with evidence that bears merit. This is something that needs to be examined further.
Cyanobacteria are not grass and fruit-bearing trees, even if they are "plants" by a folk botanical definition of the word. The Bible mentions very specific kinds of plants, which do not appear until the Mesozoic era.Oxygen may have filled Earth's atmosphere hundreds of millions of years earlier than previously thought, suggesting that sunlight-dependent life akin to modern plants evolved very early in Earth's history, a new study finds.[...] This jump in oxygen levels was almost certainly due to cyanobacteria microbes that, like plants, photosynthesize and exhale oxygen.
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We're not the ones treating it as one.The Bible is not a science book.
In that case, the claim that evolution only proceeds within kinds is meaningless.It should agree with evidence we see in the natural world but to put a value on kind is not something that is possible.
And I'm totally fine with that.I don't think that we can determine what limits there are. If we use it as the three domains of life it can encompass the entire spectrum of life. Which is not going against scripture either.
Unfortunately, biology doesn't like being put in boxes. A palette of definitions is the best we can do when simple boxes don't fit. As long as scientists who work in relevant fields know which species concept they're talking about, it's probably fine.It does, however, [suggest?] there is some lack of clarity to the concept.
Heh, the Cambrian explosion is probably not the best falsification of pure gradualism - while we have evidence indicating it was fast compared to "regular" evolution, there's precious little evidence that it involved anything other than gradual changes. I don't think we have a good enough Cambrian fossil record to track individual changes during the origin of major groups. (Clarification: I understand "gradual" as the other end of the scale from "hopeful monsters", i.e. referring to the magnitude of individual changes.)
Just making sure you're under no misconceptions about what evolution "predicts"
Once you go back as far as the Precambrian, where we think all the lines of descent of animals converge, it also becomes difficult to know what you expect to find. Living animals have an awful lot in common in genetic terms, but their bodies are so diverse that it's very hard to infer what the common ancestors of disparate groups like mammals and jellyfish looked like. As some very smart people once said, developmental genetics only tells us what might have been possible. That adds yet another layer of uncertainty to the interpretation of Precambrian fossils macro and micro.
*Kimberella aside. I love that beastie, being one of the few Ediacarans that comes with strong evidence of movement and feeding activity.
I want something distinct from evolutionary predictions because making different predictions is the only way you can tell explanations apart. And, given that the evolutionary view doesn't assume a meddling extra entity (supernatural to boot!), Occam's Razor is on its side if the evidence is equally consistent with both accounts.
Give you an example. Say I have a runny nose and a sore throat. The accepted explanation, of course, is an infection, probably by a rhinovirus. But the evidence is equally consistent with another theory. One could hypothesise that cold viruses are actually the parasitic young of cold demons. Mature cold demons must lay their eggs in the warm incubator of people's noses, and that these eggs then multiply there, spawning more demon eggs that can eventually grow into new cold demons. Colds can spread either by a demon directly infecting you, or by you spreading your freshly spawned demon eggs to a new victim.
Why would I choose the demon hypothesis when the conventional explanation makes the exact same predictions without positing some mysterious entity in addition to known phenomena?
Of course. Although Retallack has been pushing it for a long time, and so far as I can tell, he's not made much impact. Either he's a brave maverick way ahead of his time, or he's simply passionately wrong.
Cyanobacteria are not grass and fruit-bearing trees, even if they are "plants" by a folk botanical definition of the word. The Bible mentions very specific kinds of plants, which do not appear until the Mesozoic era.
We're not the ones treating it as one.
In that case, the claim that evolution only proceeds within kinds is meaningless.
And I'm totally fine with that.
Unfortunately, biology doesn't like being put in boxes. A palette of definitions is the best we can do when simple boxes don't fit. As long as scientists who work in relevant fields know which species concept they're talking about, it's probably fine.
Not unless we have to dig up fossils and generate assumptions about similarities to build a house or an airplane.
I dare you to substantiate your assertion that scientists 'generate assumptions' in the ToE.
I dare you to substantiate your assertion that scientists 'generate assumptions' in the ToE.
When do you pick up your Nobel prize for showing that evolution did not happen, in your own mind?
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