Nope. For example, a fire investigator, looking at a possible arson case, can determine where the fire started, if an accelerant (such as gasoline) was used, and so on. No faith required. Just evidence.
More bait-and-switch. I guess people were not buying your conflation of macroevolution and the Battle of Gettysburg.
As you just learned, it's directly observed. Even many creationists now admit the fact of speciation. Would you like me to show you?
So what? Speciation, which has been observed, is not macroevolution, which can never be observed because it is genetically impossible.
Barbarian observes:
I'm just disassembling your claim that Gould considered inference to be "faith." As you see, he did not. Inference is a way you can learn about the truth, even if you can't have logical certainty. And yet, you can't distinguish inference (which is the way science works) from faith.
There's no point in denying the fact that inference is not faith. You argue just to be arguing.
I hope you are eventually able to convince yourself. Your rationalizations are taking up a lot of bandwidth.
Nope. Even many creationists now admit that what were assumed to be "flood deposits" are nothing of the kind. In the Grand Canyon, for example, we have desert sand deposits, complete with plants and animal burrows in the middle of "flood deposits." There's no way to reconcile that with your story.
References? Evolutionists have a history of taking things out of context, and simply imagining things that do not exist, nor have ever existed. So, from this point forward, if you are going to make claims like that, please have the common courtesy to provide references.
Sounds like a testable claim. Show us one of those boundaries and explain why you think there can be no further variation in that organism.
The answer is as simple as the complexities of the Genome. And now that the Evolutionism Icon ("Myth") of Junk DNA has been thrown into the trash where it rightly belongs, and the astonishing complexities of such structures as the eye have been revealed (much to the chagrin of Richard Dawkins'), we realize that it would be virtually impossible for mutations, which typically result in the loss of information, to transform an animal of any kind into an animal of another kind.
The "boundary" is the information that is already present within a kind. Kinds can "use" that information to "modify itself", in a manner of speaking; or an intellectual designer, such as a dog breeder, can use that information to modify the appearance of a kind. But, as an old wise saying goes, a dog is always a dog.
Inferences are steps in reasoning, moving from premises to logical consequences. Charles Sanders Peirce divided inference into three kinds: deduction, induction, and abduction. Deduction is inference deriving logical conclusions from premises known or assumed to be true, with the laws of valid inference being studied in logic. Induction is inference from particular premises to a universal conclusion. Abduction is inference to the best explanation.
Statistical inference uses mathematics to draw conclusions in the presence of uncertainty. This generalizes deterministic reasoning, with the absence of uncertainty as a special case. Statistical inference uses quantitative or qualitative (categorical) data which may be subject to random variations.
Inference - Wikipedia
Gibberish. Gould's use of the word inference demands faith since there is no evidence of macroevolution, nor will there ever be.
I don't think you're doing yourself any good with that kind of thing.
Then quit repeating yourself? Quit begging? You will never convince any rational person that Gould did not write what he actually wrote.
Barbarian observes:
For example, we know that the whale Ambulocetus was a freshwater animal, because of the analysis of oxygen ratios in the fossil. The data was obtained by examining the material, after which a confidence level was obtained by statistical inference.
You were fooled again...
Ambulocetus's fossils were recovered from sediments that probably comprised an ancient estuary — and from the isotopes of oxygen in its bones. Animals are what they eat and drink, and saltwater and freshwater have different ratios of oxygen isotopes. This means that we can learn about what sort of water an animal drank by studying the isotopes that were incorporated into its bones and teeth as it grew. The isotopes show that Ambulocetus likely drank both saltwater and freshwater, which fits perfectly with the idea that these animals lived in estuaries or bays between freshwater and the open ocean.
The evolution of whales
Barrick, R.E., A.G. Fischer, Y. Kolodny, B. Luz, and D. Bohaska. 1992. Cetacean bone oxygen isotopes as proxies for Miocene ocean compostion and glaciation. Palaios 7(5):521-531.
That was based on old imaginations, "mined" from a highly fragmented skeleton. At the time it was imagined the Ambulocetus had a whale-like sigmoid process; a thin, whale-like cheek bone; and a blow-hole; all of which proved to be false or "questionable". It also had eyes high up on top of its skull, and was very large for an early whale, according to Phil Gingerich.
Dr. Carl Werner, who interviewed Gingrich and Thewissen, and examined the actual fossils, said,
“All eight characters he reported as whale features are disturbingly non-whale features.”
Dr. Don Batten summed it all up by saying,
"paleontology is open to fanciful story-telliing".
Amen to that!
They lied to you about that, too:
Macroevolution generally refers to evolution above the species level. So instead of focusing on an individual beetle species, a macroevolutionary lens might require that we zoom out on the tree of life, to assess the diversity of the entire beetle clade and its position on the tree.
What is macroevolution?
How did I lie? I said speciation is not macroevolution, and you claim that is a lie? My definition is right out of Evolution 101 from the University of California Berkeley:
"Speciation is a lineage-splitting event that produces two or more separate species. Imagine that you are looking at a tip of the tree of life that constitutes a species of fruit fly. Move down the phylogeny to where your fruit fly twig is connected to the rest of the tree. That branching point, and every other branching point on the tree, is a speciation event.
Defining speciation
The "branching point" is where the fly changes into another species of fly -- BUT IT IS STILL A FLY! Now to macroevolution:
"Macroevolution generally refers to evolution above the species level. So instead of focusing on an individual beetle species, a macroevolutionary lens might require that we zoom out on the tree of life, to assess the diversity of the entire beetle clade and its position on the tree. Macroevolution encompasses the grandest trends and transformations in evolution, such as the origin of mammals and the radiation of flowering plants. Macroevolutionary patterns are generally what we see when we look at the large-scale history of life.
It is not necessarily easy to "see" macroevolutionary history; there are no firsthand accounts to be read. Instead, we reconstruct the history of life using all available evidence: geology, fossils, and living organisms.
Once we've figured out what evolutionary events have taken place, we try to figure out how they happened. Just as in microevolution, basic evolutionary mechanisms like mutation, migration, genetic drift, and natural selectionare at work and can help explain many large-scale patterns in the history of life.
The basic evolutionary mechanisms — mutation, migration, genetic drift, and natural selection — can produce major evolutionary change if given enough time.
A process like mutation might seem too small-scale to influence a pattern as amazing as the beetle radiation, or as large as the difference between dogs and pine trees, but it's not. Life on Earth has been accumulating mutations and passing them through the filter of natural selection for 3.8 billion years — more than enough time for evolutionary processes to produce its grand history."
https://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/article/0_0_0/evo_48
Perhaps you should retake the course in Evolution 101, and pay attention this time.
Microevolution is evolution within a species. Macroevolution is the evolution of new taxa. As you see, the ICR's acceptance of new species, genera, and families is an admission of macroevolution. To keep their followers ignorant, they redefined the term to mean "evolution so far that no one could ever live to see it happen."
Yeah, right.
(claim that David Duke accepts evolution) I bet he accepts electricity and chemistry, too, the scoundrel.
Ya reckon?
By the way, have you read this by Henry Morris, ICR director and one of the founders of YE creationism?
His version of YE creationism requires him to believe that blacks are intellectually and spiritually inferior to other people.
Yet the prophecy again has its obverse side. Somehow they have only gone so far and no farther. The Japhethites and Semites have, sooner or later, taken over their territories, and their inventions, and then developed them and utilized them for their own enlargement. Often the Hamites, especially the Negroes, have become actual personal servants or even slaves to the others. Possessed of a genetic character concerned mainly with mundane matters, they have eventually been displaced by the intellectual and philosophical acumen of the Japhethites and the religious zeal of the Semites.
Henry Morris, The Beginning Of the World, Second Edition (1991), pp. 147-148:
Cool, huh?
Perhaps he should have been a evolutionist:
"Biological arguments based on innate inferiority spread rapidly after evolutionary theory permitted a literal equation of modern"lower" races with ancestral stages of higher forms." [Stephen Jay Gould, "Ontogeny and Phylogeny." 1992]
Or, maybe not. In that same book did Morris not also write?
“A race, in evolutionary terminology, is a sub-species evolving into a new species but, in reality, there is no such thing. That is, as far as mankind is concerned, there is only one race — the human race.”
That is consistent with the biblie creation story, as well as this declaration from the book of the Acts:
"God that made the world and all things therein, seeing that he is Lord of heaven and earth, dwelleth not in temples made with hands; Neither is worshipped with men's hands, as though he needed any thing, seeing he giveth to all life, and breath, and all things; And hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation;" -- Acts 17:24-26 KJV
Cool, huh?
YE creationists added all sorts of things to scripture, like a young earth, a worldwide flood, life ex nihilo, and so on.
I had no idea you were so clueless about the Bible. Theistic evolutionists MUST explain away the plain words of the scripture in order to deny a 6-day creation, created (not evolved) kinds, the unique creation of man and woman in the image of God, and a global flood.
From what I have read thus far, it is doubtful you know enough about the Bible to make even a reasonable argument in defense of the bizarre way you have to twist God's Word to make it fit your YE anti-God worldview.
You made the accusation. Now we shall see if you can back them up. I won't hold my breath.
Dan
