Evolution

[Sophophile]

Never once in my years of study or discussions with my brother (or his fellow scientists) has anyone EVER suggested that explosions are not neccesarily a quick thing but could rather happen over millions of years. it is a pity nobody untill now wanted to explain this. So I wouldn't neccesarily agree that it is a sleight of hand trick as you suggest but rather if what you say is true then it is the inability of scientists and the like to explain this. Why is it that this is the first time I have heard this in over 20 years of discussion about evolution theory?

Hello TheDag.

I am simply amazed that you have discussed evolution theory for 20 years, and yet never understood that the Cambrian Explosion is claimed by evolutionists to have taken millions of years.

How many people have you discussed such with over 20 years? I am wondering what the odds are that not one of them understood this.

Just curious.

Thanks
S.

 

[Hespera]

Well, I lived for 20 some years before I discovered that anyone thought there had been a "water canopy" and that water shot out of the ground to make the great flood, so called. i have been learning a lot of very peculiar things here.

I am inpressed tho that anyone could study and discuss evolution for 20 years and have no idea of the duration of the 'cambrian explosion". I guess it would be like studying / discussing westernh istory but never hearing of Julius Caesar.

 

[Hespera]

Originally Posted by TheDag Never once in my years of study or discussions with my brother (or his fellow scientists) has anyone EVER suggested that explosions are not neccesarily a quick thing but could rather happen over millions of years. it is a pity nobody untill now wanted to explain this.<<<<<<<<<



Dag! it is not really an explosion! "Explosion' is a figure of speech!

And if nobody searched you out to explain this well.....sorry, but really if you are interested in things its your responsibility to educate yourself.

 

[Baggins]

Hello the Dag.

I studied the Cambrian Explosion for my BSc thesis 22 years ago, and it has always been considered to be a period lasting multiple millions of years - explosion ( as in the case of The Big Bang) is a bit of a misnomer here. Even in geological terms it is no longer believed to have been a particularly quick event.

http://www.pnas.org/content/97/9/4424.full

The first 9 papers at this conference in 2000 showed the state of play then, things have moved on since then but not dramatically so. The pre-amble suggests a period of around 45 million years for the explosion. I particularly recommend the Conway-Morris paper:

The Cambrian &#8220;explosion&#8221;: Slow-fuse or megatonnage?

http://www.pnas.org/content/97/9/4426.full

I don't really agree with a lot of Conway-Morris' meta-physics but his science is usually sound- he suggests 65 ma as the time period from simple metazoan body plans to the full Cambrian assemblage.

This works out at roughly 10% of the period of complex metazoan life, so it wasn't a brief explosion. It also has far more fossil evidence for it these days as people have started looking at Pre-Cambrian rocks in Siberia and China which weren't available to Western Scientists, these have thrown up a wealth of new fossil evidence in the last 20 years.

If you are interested in that then Andrew Knoll's - Life on a Young Planet - 2003 is the book for you.

if you have any specific questions about late pre-Cambrian and Cambrian evolution I would attempt to answer them, although I do not research in this area - I am an applied geophysicist - it is an area of interest of mine and I try and keep up.

 

[Bombila]

I think when it comes to intelligent and educated creationists who, like TheDag appear to have made vastly wrong assumptions about things that are known facts to most of us, we are looking at an understandable failure to engage the available material. People get factoids and associations stuck in their minds, especially those associations which support their particular world view. That's only human, and we all do it. The unfortunately named Cambrian Explosion is a prime example, and in all likelihood TheDag, like most people who haven't really read much real science on the subject, is at base still working with the kind of school textbook enthusiastic description of the Cambrian - two paragraphs and then move on to the more interesting stuff: vertebrates. Anything read later is read in the light of that early knowledge, which is both outdated and inadequate, and in the light of a worldview which does not want the evidence to point to their being wrong - again, only human.

There is also the difficulty of really understanding time when it is in big units like 53 million years, and I strongly suspect many people don't take in such numbers when they see them - the 'short form' descriptive name of an era is what is remembered, and here we have something called an 'explosion' which, as TheDag rightly notes, is taken by most people to mean something fast, if not instantaneous. And of course, pictorial graphs are usually very deceptive, often giving people the wrong impression about how much time really elapses during various eras of prehistory.

However, TheDag, I doubt you've really never been told or read the known facts of the duration of the Cambrian and the creatures we know to have lived then. I suspect you've not taken the information in when it has been presented. Perhaps a fresh start with a consciously open mind would be in order.

I have to say as well, TheDag, I find your picture of scientists ruthlessly fighting and lying over funding opportunities very offensive.

It is apparent to me that you don't know many scientists. I have a friend who is a marine biologist. When he was a child he used to spend his playtime on the nearby shore, examining the creatures in the tidepools, under the rocks, and in the buckets of water he would bring up from the water's edge. He was completely fascinated by the little lives playing out in the sea and on the shore. He became an enthusiastic student, and at fifty-eight has been working in the field for many years, still as fascinated by it all as he was as a child. he is happiest in the field, and always thrilled to find out some other biologist has discovered some new fact, even if it overturns something he himself has believed to be true for years. I've met quite a few of his colleagues, and they all seem to share that enthusiasm.

Please consider: scientists are ordinary people, and I'm sure you don't think of most of the ordinary people you know as being grasping evil liars so full of pride they can't ever admit to being wrong, especially if money is involved. Or if you do, then you need to sort out a better class of acquaintances.

 

[lucaspa]

But people Believe in lots of things, including elves, little people, ect, but believing doesn't make something true.

Believing equally doesn't make something false, either. What makes something false is disproving it. What you have listed are shared beliefs that elves, leprechauns, etc. do not exist.

The correct answer to the OP was showing how the Cambrian "explosion" is:
1. Not an "explosion like creationists like to think. It lasted at least 10 million years.
2. Not all phyla appeared in the Cambrian.
3. The Cambrian mostly represents the evolution of hard body parts, which fossilize much better. Recently soft-bodied ancestors to most of the phyla in the Cambrian have been discovered in pre-Cambrian strata. For instance: http://www.answersingenesis.org/Home/Area/faq/dont_use.asp
4. The Cambrian represents one of the first (if not the first) major radiations in the history of life. The previous fauna was Eidacaran and there was a mass-extinction between the Eidacaran fossils and the Cambrian. Because this happened so early in the history of multi-celled life, we have new "phyla" in the taxonomic scheme. When a radiation in mammals happened at the beginning of the Tertiary, resulting in as much diversity as at the Cambrian, we only have new orders and families, because Mammals are a Class.

Most of the "phyla" in the Cambrian consist of 2-10 species. It's a radiation with lots of new trials, most of whom went extinct. Because of the rules of the classification scheme, we must put these few species in their own phyla.

 

[lucaspa]

Never once in my years of study or discussions with my brother (or his fellow scientists) has anyone EVER suggested that explosions are not neccesarily a quick thing but could rather happen over millions of years.

YOu weren't dealing with paleontologists. Every discipline -- law, history, plumbing, etc. -- has it's own perspective and how it uses the language among members. For instance, physicists talk of the "Big Bang", but there was no noise involved.

Paleontologists deal in long spans of time. The average bedding plane represents 50,000 years. This is an "instant" to a paleontologist. To the rest of us it is a really long time.

Why is it that this is the first time I have heard this in over 20 years of discussion about evolution theory?

I don't know, because it has been out there in scientific responses to creationists for at least 20 years. If you go to the book Science and Creationism published in 1982, you will find this. TalkOrigins has had it up for at least the 10 years I've been involved in discussing evolution vs creationism. Maybe you have avoided the information?

Yes I understand how scientists work. You see they compete for funding so they don't actually care what the other person is doing or if it is right or wrong. They just want to discredit them so they can get that persons funding.

Absolutely NOT! Yes, we "compete" for funding, but this isn't done the way you think. We all submit grants for what we want to do. The grants are graded anonymously by other scientists and scored on their scientific merit. I've served on study sections. Each grant gets scored on its own merits and ignores what other people are doing.

This is different to what Richard Dawkins tries to suggest is the norm. He suggests that scientists are more than happy to be proven wrong.

Yes, we are. What you don't understand, Dag, is that when we are "right", we do that by proving all the alternatives to be wrong. Science works by falsification. We can't "prove" by the deductive logic used by science. Instead, we falsify hypotheses. There are usually a number of hypotheses that can explain a given bit of data. The "controls" for an experiment are there to disprove all the hypotheses but one. So, when scientists say "proved", that is shorthand for "I've disproved all the alternative explanations I can think of."

One example of a scientist willing to be shown to be wrong:
C Seife, Radical gravity theory hits large scale snag. Science 292: 1629, June1, 2001 MOND (modified Newtonian dynamics) alters some properties of gravity to eliminate the need for dark matter, but doesn't fit with General Relativity. Recent observations show it is at odds with observationsof galaxy clusters. "Missing" peak in CMB thought support for MOND, but peak found. The data "disagree very strongly with MOND's prediction," says Aguirre. "MOND is not a viable alternative to dark matter in clusters." "As its inventor, I would like it [MOND] to be a revolution, but I look at it coolly," says Milgrom. "I will be very sad, but not shocked if turns out to be dark matter."

In being a scientist, you do not get emotionally attached to "your" hypothesis.

 

[Hespera]

good post Lucaspa. I hope that Dag will indicate that he now sees he was mistaken about a few points.

If he understand the principle that a person who is "never" wrong is in fact almost never right, then it shouldnt be a problem.

 

[Naraoia]

Yes I understand how scientists work. You see they compete for funding so they don't actually care what the other person is doing or if it is right or wrong. They just want to discredit them so they can get that persons funding.

Yes I understand how scientists work.

I don't think you do.

I don't doubt there are scientists who would gladly strangle certain other scientists and their ideas, but I highly doubt that's the norm. As Bombila so excellently put it, "scientists are ordinary people".

(Thanks, Bombila. I came to science from the opposite extreme: mostly with wild-eyed awe. Then I found out that scientists are just humans, too, and it actually made me more comfortable in my choice.)

And, in any case, even if you disagree with someone else's scientific stance for petty reasons, you'd better have some good points, or nobody will take you seriously.

In being a scientist, you do not get emotionally attached to "your" hypothesis.

Or if you do, hopefully you have another, rational you watching

 

[lucaspa]

good post Lucaspa.

Thank you.

If he understand the principle that a person who is "never" wrong is in fact almost never right, then it shouldnt be a problem.

My grad mentor told me "If you aren't making at least 2 mistakes a day, you aren't working hard enough."

 

[lucaspa]

And, in any case, even if you disagree with someone else's scientific stance for petty reasons, you'd better have some good points, or nobody will take you seriously.

Ain't that the truth. In science, data rules.

Or if you do, hopefully you have another, rational you watching

if you don't, you rapidly stop being a good scientist.

 

[NailsII]

I guess the problem starts when all people know explosions as are quick occourences rather than something that can happen over a long period of time. Never once in my years of study or discussions with my brother (or his fellow scientists) has anyone EVER suggested that explosions are not neccesarily a quick thing but could rather happen over millions of years. it is a pity nobody untill now wanted to explain this. So I wouldn't neccesarily agree that it is a sleight of hand trick as you suggest but rather if what you say is true then it is the inability of scientists and the like to explain this. Why is it that this is the first time I have heard this in over 20 years of discussion about evolution theory?

I'll hazard a guess here, so please don't be offended if I'm wide of the mark.
The people you have heard discussing or people who have taught you have deliberatly muddied the waters to make it look like the Cambrian Explosion is some kind of fantasy and not based on real evidence.

Fred Hoyle did a similar thing by coining the phrase 'big bang' for a theory he didn't agree with. The phrase is not very helpful either and can easily give the wrong impression - but that was his whole idea.
The problem is that it backfired, he created a little 'soundbite' that has been used to describe the possible origin of our universe.

Perhaps it has been said in some conference and when the discussions have been recorded and edited into a form for publishing it gets left out. I've seen that happen with statements made by christian leaders where the public statement doesn't reflect what was actually said very well (sometimes not at all!) so I'm sure it could happen in science as well.

I have no doubt that editing creates confusion and this is a clear possibility. However, I'd wager that it is more likely you have been deliberately decievedby people who cannot invisage an earth older than 10,000 years.

Yes I understand how scientists work. You see they compete for funding so they don't actually care what the other person is doing or if it is right or wrong. They just want to discredit them so they can get that persons funding. This is different to what Richard Dawkins tries to suggest is the norm. He suggests that scientists are more than happy to be proven wrong. There may be some who are but mostly they will fight tooth and nail over it not calmly walk up to the other person and say thankyou.

Science is the quest for knowledge, and rarely (but unfortunately not always) for personal gain. Competition for funding is just a fact of life - you can compete with people for a job quite successfully without having to resort to character assasination or whatever.

I do however agree that there are some people who will not admit that they are wrong - but this is just a human trait, is it not?
It is unfortunate that you have painted such a bleak picture of some of the finest minds in the world and then tried to assert it as the norm.

It is indeed a noble person who can admit that his lifes work has been discredited or superceded by something better or more accurate - but that does not mean it is the exception and the majority fight about it

 

[lucaspa]

I do however agree that there are some people who will not admit that they are wrong - but this is just a human trait, is it not?
It is unfortunate that you have painted such a bleak picture of some of the finest minds in the world and then tried to assert it as the norm.

I think what happens is tha creationists won't admit they are wrong. Therefore they think everyone else is just like them.

What matters is not the person but the idea. We don't care about scientists but rather about the various theories. Are they correct or incorrect. If a scientist won't admit that a theory is incorrect, we don't care. There were phlogiston chemists who went to their graves never admitting that phlogiston was wrong. Einstein basically exiled himself from productive work in physics because he would not admit that determinism was wrong. It's tough on the individual, but we care about the idea.

 

[Naraoia]

if you don't, you rapidly stop being a good scientist.

I didn't understand "emotional attachment" to mean you can't let go. Just that you shed a tear or two when you do.

But, then, English isn't my first language, so I might not always get meanings 100% right.

 

[TheDag]

So apparently you have never met or even been in the same room with a scientist.

I have had meaningful discussions with over two hundred scientists at the very minimum in the last ten years. I would not be able to even give you a ball park figure how many over my lifetime. While I didn't say it clearly I often see many treat science as if it has a great reputation. It doesn't for several reasons. This does not mean that I think we should ignore science. However I do get the strong impression that if it was a religion then people would be alot more cynical or sceptical about it.

 

[TheDag]

Originally Posted by TheDag Never once in my years of study or discussions with my brother (or his fellow scientists) has anyone EVER suggested that explosions are not neccesarily a quick thing but could rather happen over millions of years. it is a pity nobody untill now wanted to explain this.<<<<<<<<<



Dag! it is not really an explosion! "Explosion' is a figure of speech!

And if nobody searched you out to explain this well.....sorry, but really if you are interested in things its your responsibility to educate yourself.

See that could be part of my problem. I don't really care about the origin of the universe or life. I just don't consider it important. (For that reason I'll probably get bored of this fairly soon and stop replying.) However people often bring up the topic and that is how I get into discussions. Some are ongoing as in they will come back a week or monthy later and talk some more while others are one off conversations.

So it seems to me that perhaps the word explosion and period are perhaps interchangeable when it comes to discussing the cambrian era. If that is correct then I guess I could say I have heard of it being over a period of time.

 

[TheDag]

YOu weren't dealing with paleontologists. Every discipline -- law, history, plumbing, etc. -- has it's own perspective and how it uses the language among members. For instance, physicists talk of the "Big Bang", but there was no noise involved.

Paleontologists deal in long spans of time. The average bedding plane represents 50,000 years. This is an "instant" to a paleontologist. To the rest of us it is a really long time.

This could very well be true that I was not dealing with paleontologists. I don't tend to ask that kind of detail. Same as if I find out that someone is an engineer. I don't pretend I'm interested enough to care what type. It may sound harsh but at least I'm being honest.

Absolutely NOT! Yes, we "compete" for funding, but this isn't done the way you think. We all submit grants for what we want to do. The grants are graded anonymously by other scientists and scored on their scientific merit. I've served on study sections. Each grant gets scored on its own merits and ignores what other people are doing.

However if a project loses its funding then that funding would be available to a different project. So while the decision may be independant of what others are doing there is still only a set amount available. It happens that people will miss out. They may no longer miss out if they can discredit another person and cause them to lose their funding.
i have worked in a place where every single day I have been in contact with scientists and researchers. This description of funding I have given is their words not mine.

One example of a scientist willing to be shown to be wrong:
C Seife, Radical gravity theory hits large scale snag. Science 292: 1629, June1, 2001 MOND (modified Newtonian dynamics) alters some properties of gravity to eliminate the need for dark matter, but doesn't fit with General Relativity. Recent observations show it is at odds with observations of galaxy clusters. "Missing" peak in CMB thought support for MOND, but peak found. The data "disagree very strongly with MOND's prediction," says Aguirre. "MOND is not a viable alternative to dark matter in clusters." "As its inventor, I would like it [MOND] to be a revolution, but I look at it coolly," says Milgrom. "I will be very sad, but not shocked if turns out to be dark matter."

Thanks for the example. however it is not the first I've heard of (or maybe I keep being given the same example) My claim was that it is not the norm.

 

[consol]

See that could be part of my problem. I don't really care about the origin of the universe or life. I just don't consider it important. (For that reason I'll probably get bored of this fairly soon and stop replying.)

So are you saying, you were told something when you were growing up and you believe it to be true,
and you will not listen to or talk about anything that could make you think that what you were told might not be true,
is that about right?

 

[lucaspa]

While I didn't say it clearly I often see many treat science as if it has a great reputation. It doesn't for several reasons.

Please list the reasons.

This does not mean that I think we should ignore science. However I do get the strong impression that if it was a religion then people would be alot more cynical or sceptical about it.

But science is not a religion. The so-called "scientific method" boils down to 2 essential rules:
"1. All our theory, ideas, preconceptions, instincts, and prejudices about how things logically ought to be, how they in all fairness ought to be, or how we would prefer them to be, must be tested against external reality --what they *really* are. How do we determine what they really are? Through direct experience of the universe itself. " Kitty Ferguson, The Fire in the Equations, pg. 38.
2. All those experiences must be the same for everyone under approximately the same circumstances. This is intersubjective or public experience. Private experience is not part of science. That doesn't mean it's wrong, just that it is not part of science.

Religion relies on private experience. What's more, the "authority" in science is not a book, not what someone says, but the physical universe itself.

This is why Christians uttered the first quote in my signature. Science reads God's second book: Creation (or the physical universe). When we are wrong, God will tell us. But God can't tell us when our interpretation of scripture is wrong. So that is why Christians realized that science -- God's second book -- was more reliable and should be used to decide when an interpretation of scripture was wrong.

 

[lucaspa]

See that could be part of my problem. I don't really care about the origin of the universe or life. I just don't consider it important.

But we aren't talking about either of those. Life existed long before the Cambrian.

Science can't tell you whether God created. If you believe in God for other reasons, science will tell you how God created. That is, science will provide the material mechanisms God used to create:
God created the universe by the Big Bang, galaxies, stars, and planets by gravity, life by chemistry, and the diversity of life by evolution.

So sit back, relax, pop some popcorn, open a Coke, and let science discover how God created.