For those wondering what "macroevolution" actually is...

[tas8831]

First question is lacking in any specifics I asked for.

On the second-
Asking a vague many moving parts question
is not an answer at all.

Seems to be his M.O.

 

[Ophiolite]

As a typical Brit I only have one language to scramble, having failed in my attempts, over several years, to learn thirteen or fourteen different languages.

OK, I want a list...

I had written a lengthy post in response two weeks ago, then deleted it, since it was filled with "humorous" incidents involving me trying to speak while under the influence of excessive amounts of alcohol.

Here is my list:
French, Spanish, Latin, German, Dutch, Danish, Norwegian, Finnish, Russian, Japanese, Mandarin, Malay
That is thirteen. It is fourteen if you consider Indonesian distinct from Malay, but that's pushing it, unless we think American English is a different language from British English.

 

[Bradskii]

I had written a lengthy post in response two weeks ago, then deleted it, since it was filled with "humorous" incidents involving me trying to speak while under the influence of excessive amounts of alcohol.

Here is my list:
French, Spanish, Latin, German, Dutch, Danish, Norwegian, Finnish, Russian, Japanese, Mandarin, Malay
That is thirteen. It is fourteen if you consider Indonesian distinct from Malay, but that's pushing it, unless we think American English is a different language from British English.

Wow. I'm impressed. I did try Indonesian once but it was so unlike any other language the vocabulary was too difficult for me to remember. No tenses if I recall?

Humorous/embarrassing moment? I speak some Spanish and in Spain a couple of years ago I walked into a bar (sounds like the start of a joke anyway) and said to the young barmaid, in Spanish, that I'd really like a small beer. Which is una caña. I'd already had a few 'small beers' and I mixed up my vowels and caña came out as an extremely crude slang word for a certain body part. I was mortified when I realised what I'd said but she thought it was hilarious and started telling the rest of the patrons.

 

[Ophiolite]

Wow. I'm impressed. I did try Indonesian once but it was so unlike any other language the vocabulary was too difficult for me to remember. No tenses if I recall?

Don't be impressed. I essentially failed in every instance. My schoolboy French was used successfully only once, with a campsite manager in communist Poland, as it was our only common language. And even then it took me five minutes to figure out he had a bad limp because, when younger a tree had fallen on him.

Indonesian came closest to success. I could hold simple conversations and buy things, but only while in Indonesia. Within an hour or two of leaving the country the ability would go, but would come back within a day or two of re-entering the country. This really annoys my wife who is a Malay, with Indonesian relatives.
There are, I think, some aspects of tenses in the more sophisticated usage, but you certainly don't need them for casual conversation. It remains the only language I would attempt to speak without alcohol.

You mentioned your Spanish faux pas. A Dutch colleague was travelling in the Andes with his wife. On a crowded local bus a passenger offered his seat to his wife. Deciding to try his newly acquired Spanish he responded. "Gracias senor, usted es un caballar." Of course he had intended to say un caballero. As you will know this means instead of "Thank you sir, you are a gentleman" it came out as "Thank you sir, you are a horse."

 

[SelfSim]

Humorous/embarrassing moment? I speak some Spanish and in Spain a couple of years ago I walked into a bar (sounds like the start of a joke anyway) and said to the young barmaid, in Spanish, that I'd really like a small beer. Which is una caña. I'd already had a few 'small beers' and I mixed up my vowels and caña came out as an extremely crude slang word for a certain body part. I was mortified when I realised what I'd said but she thought it was hilarious and started telling the rest of the patrons.

I did the same in Austria with my poorly expressed German. The locals almost laughed me out of the bar.
I thought I was asking for a toasted ham and cheese sandwich?

 

[Subduction Zone]

Wow. I'm impressed. I did try Indonesian once but it was so unlike any other language the vocabulary was too difficult for me to remember. No tenses if I recall?

Humorous/embarrassing moment? I speak some Spanish and in Spain a couple of years ago I walked into a bar (sounds like the start of a joke anyway) and said to the young barmaid, in Spanish, that I'd really like a small beer. Which is una caña. I'd already had a few 'small beers' and I mixed up my vowels and caña came out as an extremely crude slang word for a certain body part. I was mortified when I realised what I'd said but she thought it was hilarious and started telling the rest of the patrons.

You naughty boy you

I had a Venezuelan roommate for a while in college.

 

[Bungle_Bear]

I had written a lengthy post in response two weeks ago, then deleted it, since it was filled with "humorous" incidents involving me trying to speak while under the influence of excessive amounts of alcohol.

Here is my list:
French, Spanish, Latin, German, Dutch, Danish, Norwegian, Finnish, Russian, Japanese, Mandarin, Malay
That is thirteen. It is fourteen if you consider Indonesian distinct from Malay, but that's pushing it, unless we think American English is a different language from British English.

You picked some tough languages there, and most of them aren't in the same family as English so the grammar would be tricky. I can speak many of those languages, some even fluently, plus a few more. And I just started learning Arabic which is different to any other language I speak. Got to have a hobby!

 

[SLP]

After almost 3 years, I re-read this OP and need to make a clarification:

Many creationists (and sadly, some biologists) seem to believe that 'macroevolution' is substantively different from 'microevolution.'

Short answer - it isn't, it is just many rounds of microevolution resulting in speciation.

I should have written:

Many creationists (and sadly, some biologists) seem to believe that 'macroevolution' is substantively different from 'microevolution.'

Short answer - it isn't, it is just the result of many rounds of microevolution resulting in speciation - the overall patterns produced by many rounds of 'microevolution.'​

I did essentially write that at the end of the OP, but just reading it this morning, it struck me that I should have written it 'up front.'
Carry on.

 

[SLP]

I think it's fair to say that not just creationists, but all skeptics of Darwinism, including secular, see limitations on evolutionary change occurring through processes of random/natural variation-

Ah, the Trumpian "I've heard.." routine.

 

[SLP]

Another of 'Guy Threepwood's' busts:

@Guy Threepwood "But if you have any substantive response to Raup's observation, I'd be interested in that"

Would you submit that?

How is the evidence in favor of your preferred explanation coming along? Looks to me, based on what you've written so far, that there is still no evidence at all for creationsm/IDism and creationists/IDists are left today doing what they've been left having to do for the last several decades - attack evolution and make stuff up.

Not as boring as the use of analogies as evidence; frequent unsupported assertion re: how 'the evidence' is not as supportive of evolution as it used to be, etc.; the use of quotes of dubious relevance; etc.

From RationalWiki:

Religious creationists are known for quote mining the work of Raup. Creationists usually quote mine Raup's paper titled Conflicts between Darwin and Paleontology (1979). The quote the creationists take out of context is:

“We now have a quarter of a million fossil species, but the situation hasn't changed much... We have even fewer examples of evolutionary transition than we had in Darwin's time."

What Raup really said in context was:

“”Well, we are now about 120 years after Darwin and the knowledge of the fossil record has been greatly expanded. We now have a quarter of a million fossil species but the situation hasn't changed much. The record of evolution is still surprisingly jerky and, ironically, we have even fewer examples of evolutionary transitions than we had in Darwin's time. By this I mean that some of the classic cases of darwinian change in the fossil record, such as the evolution of the horse in North America, have had to be discarded or modified as a result of more detailed information -- what appeared to be a nice simple progression when relatively few data were available now appear to be much more complex and much less gradualistic. So Darwin's problem has not been alleviated in the last 120 years and we still have a record which does show change but one that can hardly be looked upon as the most reasonable consequence of natural selection."
​

The paper is a discussion about Darwin's mechanism of natural selection and whether this mechanism is reflected in pattern of the fossil record, not whether there is a lack of evidence for common descent. From the beginning of the article:

“”Part of our conventional wisdom about evolution is that the fossil record of past life is an important cornerstone of evolutionary theory. In some ways, this is true -- but the situation is much more complicated. I will explore here a few of the complex interrelationships between fossils and darwinian theory. . . Darwin's theory of natural selection has always been closely linked to evidence from fossils, and probably most people assume that fossils provide a very important part of the general argument that is made in favor of darwinian interpretations of the history of life. Unfortunately, this is not strictly true. We must distinguish between the fact of evolution -- defined as change in organisms over time -- and the explanation of this change. Darwin's contribution, through his theory of natural selection, was to suggest how the evolutionary change took place. The evidence we find in the geologic record is not nearly as compatible with darwinian natural selection as we would like it to be."​

 

[SLP]

Yes Do while was snarky.

Do-While (D. Pogge) is kind of a jack@ss. He is a lower-level engineer (now long retired) who thinks that what he knows (engineering), bolstered by his belief in 100% bible accuracy, has universal applicability (to, say, biology) - when all you have is a hammer, etc. He once tried to dismiss phylogenetic analyses on the basis that he could arrange motor brackets, too, but that doesn't mean the brackets evolved...

But she has a point, cladisticly we may be fish, but as the cultural baggage cannot be ignored. She is correct in stating that using "fish" for this basal organism leads to little but problems.

This is where I have an issue with the use of this kind of cladistic 'thinking' (don't get me wrong, I am 100% a cladist!) - saying we are sarcopterygian fish seems fairly arbitrary. We could also say we are Euarchontaglires (if one accepts that group name) or going the other way, we are Deuterostomes!

 

[Tinker Grey]

Ah, the Trumpian "I've heard.." routine.

"People are saying ..."

 

[Ophiolite]

"People are saying ..."

"That's certainly what I was told . . . ."

 

[Phred]

"That's certainly what I was told . . . ."

By... people?

 

[Ophiolite]

By... people?

I'm not sure. It's just voices, whispers really. Very insistent. I've thought about it a lot. It might be indigestion.

 

[FredVB]

Many creationists (and sadly, some biologists) seem to believe that 'macroevolution' is substantively different from 'microevolution.'

Short answer - it isn't, it is just many rounds of microevolution resulting in speciation.

Creationist propaganda site "CreationWiki" states:

Macroevolution is a purely theoretical biological process thought to produce relatively large (macro) evolutionary change within biological organisms. The term is used in contrast to minor (microevolution) changes, and is most commonly defined as "evolution above the species level".​

Not surprising that such people would lie to their target flock. Surprising that so many take it at face value.

From a reliable source, we see that 'macroevolution' is:

"One of the most important tenets of the theory forged during the Evolutionary Synthesis of the 1930s and 1940s was that "macroevolutionary" differences among organisms - those that distinguish higher taxa - arise from the accumulation of the same kinds of genetic differences that are found within species."​

- "Evolutionary Biology, 3rd Ed." 1998, p. 477. D. Futuyma.

That is, macroevolution is produced via multiple rounds of speciation. Or put another way, macroevolution is a pattern created by multiple rounds of speciation.

Macroevolution is NOT 'an event' that needs to be 're-created.' It is an observed pattern.

There is a problem to evolutionary explanation for the fossils accumulated with there being such gaps that accumulated steps of microevolution or accumulated speciation to account for new species, genera, biological families, orders, and classes are not being shown. Hence there has been the hopeful monster theory, and the punctuated equilibrium theory. Otherwise, clear examples leading to new biological families and orders can be shown.

 

[Estrid]

There is a problem to evolutionary explanation for the fossils accumulated with there being such gaps that accumulated steps of microevolution or accumulated speciation to account for new species, genera, biological families, orders, and classes are not being shown. Hence there has been the hopeful monster theory, and the punctuated equilibrium theory. Otherwise, clear examples leading to new biological families and orders can be shown.

There is a problem for students of ancient Rome.
Some of the records are...gasp...missing!
That may invalidate the unproven theory that so- called
" Romans" built that stuff.

 

[Subduction Zone]

There is a problem to evolutionary explanation for the fossils accumulated with there being such gaps that accumulated steps of microevolution or accumulated speciation to account for new species, genera, biological families, orders, and classes are not being shown. Hence there has been the hopeful monster theory, and the punctuated equilibrium theory. Otherwise, clear examples leading to new biological families and orders can be shown.

The fossil record was predicted to be that way. It is not a continuous record. But in the places and times where it is unbroken we do observe slow speciation events.

 

[Shemjaza]

There is a problem to evolutionary explanation for the fossils accumulated with there being such gaps that accumulated steps of microevolution or accumulated speciation to account for new species, genera, biological families, orders, and classes are not being shown. Hence there has been the hopeful monster theory, and the punctuated equilibrium theory. Otherwise, clear examples leading to new biological families and orders can be shown.

The thing is that fossils don't stand alone as evidence, there is also the genetic evidence for the same pattern of transition and relatedness.

Do you have a specific example of unjustifiable acceptance of evolutionary theory... or just a general nonspecific unease about its validity?

 

[Guy Threepwood]

There is a problem for students of ancient Rome.
Some of the records are...gasp...missing!
That may invalidate the unproven theory that so- called
" Romans" built that stuff.

Well yes, you might invalidate the belief that Roman architecture was designed.. but only if you followed the same rationale as ToE.

i.e. since we can directly observe Roman architecture changing over time through destructive natural forces, we can extrapolate this over thousands of years, to conclude that Pompeii was probably originally constructed by volcanoes, earthquakes and erosion.