The Scientific Method & Macroevolution?

[bhsmte]

You have lost.

Clearly!

I see a distinct pattern that has developed.

 

[crjmurray]

I may have jumped the gun in my response to whois and misunderstood her comment. I'll wait for a clarification.

 

[whois]

You have got to be joking. I took the time to email a person you have been claiming supports your point. He took the time to write that very long and detailed email explaining how the quote was an error. Quit trying to act as if the quote has any legitimacy. You have lost.

i've read the letters that were sent to "science" regarding this article.
none of them were from ayala, and none of them called into question ayalas quote.
the article still resides unamended on JSTOR servers.

 

[crjmurray]

You were respectfully requested to address your claim of "fraud" from yesterday and completely ignored the request.

Are you going to address it?

She won't address it. She'll wait for someone to email Rensberger to get an answer straight from the horses mouth.

 

[DerelictJunction]

The issue of science having errors isn't an issue then, we agree on it.

Now, what were the errors of science based on? Evidence? If so, the evidence was wrong, the evidence was nothing more than guesses and suppositions, not fact.

The errors of science were not based on evidence? Then they were again based on guesses and suppositions.

Either way, guesses and suppositions which were wrong produced the errors.

We've been through this blah-blah before.

When a person has an error in their interpretation of the Bible, does that make the Bible nothing more than guesses and suppositions?

Now about that example. Have you found it yet? What seems to be the delay here. I would have thought you have one ready for presentation.

Just so you don't forget what we're requesting....Please provide an example of scientific evidence that is a guess or supposition.

 

[crjmurray]

i've read the letters that were sent to "science" regarding this article.
none of them were from ayala, and none of them called into question ayalas quote.
the article still resides unamended on JSTOR servers.

Unammended or not, the quote is wrong. Your insistence that the quote is legitimate has been proven wrong. I really don't care what science magazine has to say on the subject since I've got personal correspondence showing that the quote is wrong.

 

[whois]

Unammended or not, the quote is wrong. Your insistence that the quote is legitimate has been proven wrong. I really don't care what science magazine has to say on the subject since I've got personal correspondence showing that the quote is wrong.

then explain why ayala did not contact science, but instead contacts an unrelated agenda site.
that makes no sense at all, none.

 

[justlookinla]

We've been through this blah-blah before.

When a person has an error in their interpretation of the Bible, does that make the Bible nothing more than guesses and suppositions?

Now about that example. Have you found it yet? What seems to be the delay here. I would have thought you have one ready for presentation.

We both agree that science isn't errorless. What's the issue?

Just so you don't forget what we're requesting....Please provide an example of scientific evidence that is a guess or supposition.

Just so you don't forget, the term 'scientific evidence' was introduced late into the discussion.

Were the errors of science produced by evidence? That's the question.

 

[crjmurray]

then explain why ayala did not contact science, but instead contacts an unrelated agenda site.
that makes no sense at all, none.

Are you going to admit that the quote is false?

 

[whois]

Are you going to admit that the quote is false?

i've seen nothing that leads me to believe it is.
none of the letters science received about this article mentions ayala.
ayala did not write to science.
science has issued no errata for this article.
so no, i have no reason to believe it's false.

 

[DerelictJunction]

We both agree that science isn't errorless. What's the issue?

The issue is that you want to conflate the fact that science isn't errorless to mean that science is all guesses and suppositions.

Also, you didn't answer my question about the Bible. To wit: When a person has an error in their interpretation of the Bible, does that make the Bible nothing more than guesses and suppositions?

Just so you don't forget, the term 'scientific evidence' was introduced late into the discussion.

by you when you claimed that the evidence was guesses and suppositions. It's not our fault you make silly claims.

Were the errors of science produced by evidence? That's the question.

No it's not. You have already claimed that the errors were produced by the "guesses and suppositions" that scientists call evidence. We're simply requesting one example of scientific evidence that is a guess or supposition.
That you cannot provide even one example, makes me think you don't know what you're talking about.

 

[sfs]

it would not be bizarre at all for ayala to ask the horses mouth "hey, why are you misquoting me?"

It might not be bizarre, but it also wouldn't be at all surprising if he didn't bother. The news report is trivia, and scientists are very familiar with having their statements misreported in the news.

and what is the scientific community expected to believe when it reads the article on JSTOR servers?

The scientific community is not a bunch of morons. They wouldn't be drawing conclusions from a news piece to start with, and they're going to be much, much more interested in what Ayala has to say in his lengthy article on the subject.

This entire tangent is a red herring. It doesn't matter whether Ayala said that at the conference or not. Maybe he said it, changed his mind later and lied about it. Maybe he was drunk when he said it. Maybe the reporter misunderstood him, or missed context that changed the meaning. Maybe the reporter is lying. It doesn't matter. The state of evolutionary biology doesn't change a whit if any of those possibilities is true.

Why are we even talking about this? The entire conference concerned a dispute about the modes and tempo of evolution. Nothing discussed there casts any doubt on the truth of common descent.

 

[Hammster]

MOD HAT ON



The OP has requested that the thread get back on topic.

I will insist that it does.

If you have other topics you'd like to discuss, you may start another thread.


MOD HAT OFF

 

[lewiscalledhimmaster]

I'm currently trying to understand this post by Sarah, so if it's possible to focus on it -- perhaps we might get this thread back on track.

Kindly,
Lewis.

Of course.

So, prokaryotic cells, such as bacteria, are actually far more successful, in terms of evolutionary fitness, thanks to their fast generation time (it can be within 4 hours in really good conditions) allowing them to quickly adapt to changes in the environment. No matter what the conditions, chances are at least 1 bacterium within a population will be capable of suviving, and that is all that is needed in order to reestablish a population which is capable of surviving in the new conditions. Even better, individual bacteria can be very mobile and have chemical triggers to avoid deadly conditions and move towards favorable ones, which is a lot easier to do singularly rather than communally.

Being multicellular has its advantages as well, but prokaryotic cells do not have an advantage over eukaryotic cells in becoming multicellular. For one thing, they lack mitochondria, an energy producing organelle which eukaryotic cells have that allows them to have higher and faster energy processing than prokaryotes. Additionally, eukaryotic cells are generally far larger than prokaryotic cells, and seeing as one of the big advantages to being multicellular is avoiding being consumed, it would take far more prokaryotic cells to make an organism the same size as one made of eukaryotic cells. They do, in a way, take advantage by living in the bodies of multicellular eukaryotic organisms, but they retain being unicellular.

But it really is that energy production that places eukaryotes as becoming multicellular over prokaryotes. The way multicellular organisms work is through the specialization of cells to perform various functions at the cost of not being able to perform all the functions needed for survival by themselves. This requires the energy processing cells to be able to produce enough not only for themselves, but for a great number of other cells as well. Prokaryotic cells just don't have the capacity to do that to the extent eukaryotic cells can in a natural environment, and being that they were already dominating the single celled life, natural selection pressures didn't push prokaryotes to become multicellular.

Is this what you were looking for?

 

[James Is Back]

Mod Hat On


This thread has undergone a thread cleanup due to some flaming and off topic posts. I will remind everyone of Hammster's Mod Hat to stay on topic and also don't flame each other. Address the post not the poster. Thank you.


Mod Hat Off
​

 

[PsychoSarah]

I'm currently trying to understand this post by Sarah, so if it's possible to focus on it -- perhaps we might get this thread back on track.

Kindly,
Lewis.

Short summary: you don't see multicellular prokaryotic organisms because they don't have mitochondria, which produce enough excess energy that cells can specialize far enough to become multicellular. Being multicellular requires that some cells produce enough energy to support many other cells which are occupied too much by another function to produce enough energy to sustain themselves.

 

[lewiscalledhimmaster]

Short summary: you don't see multicellular prokaryotic organisms because they don't have mitochondria, which produce enough excess energy that cells can specialize far enough to become multicellular. Being multicellular requires that some cells produce enough energy to support many other cells which are occupied too much by another function to produce enough energy to sustain themselves.

Thanks.

 

[lewiscalledhimmaster]

Okay.

Moving on.

After tossing the idea of scientific methodology around, I'm back at the primary focus of this thread: MACROEVOLUTION

To break this up into topics for discussion, would it look something like this?

A.
Understand The Mechanisms & How They Affect Populations of Organisms.
B.
Basic minimum mechanisms to consider:
1. Mutation
2. Selection <<<
3. Speciation
C.
Understand why these mechanisms would produce a nested hierarchy, and what a nested hierarchy is.

SELECTION

 

[sfs]

Short summary: you don't see multicellular prokaryotic organisms because they don't have mitochondria, which produce enough excess energy that cells can specialize far enough to become multicellular. Being multicellular requires that some cells produce enough energy to support many other cells which are occupied too much by another function to produce enough energy to sustain themselves.

I haven't thought about this subject before. Is the above speculation, or is it based on the literature? I'm skeptical about mitochondria letting some cells provide energy to other cells, since mitochondria produce energy in the form of ATP, which is primarily used (at least as an energy store) within cells, rather than being passed between them. Or such is my rudimentary understanding. Mitochondria due permit cells to fine-tune the energy output (more mitochondria = more available energy).

Eukaryotes have much more complex machinery than prokaryotes it other important ways, though. They have a variety of internal, membrane-bound organelles, i.e. mitochondria, but also the endoplasmic reticulum, Golgi dohickeys, the nucleus. That lets them carry out specialized chemistry and protein processing in dedicated chambers, while bacteria pretty much do everything in a soup. The nucleus sequesters the DNA, permits more complex genome organization (and thus larger genomes) and controls traffic to and from the genes. Basically, there's a whole bunch of stuff going on in eukaryotic cells that lets them have more complex behaviors.

Even so, some prokaryotes manage a form of multicellularity. Look at magnetotactic bacteria, for example.

 

[PsychoSarah]

I haven't thought about this subject before. Is the above speculation, or is it based on the literature? I'm skeptical about mitochondria letting some cells provide energy to other cells, since mitochondria produce energy in the form of ATP, which is primarily used (at least as an energy store) within cells, rather than being passed between them. Or such is my rudimentary understanding. Mitochondria due permit cells to fine-tune the energy output (more mitochondria = more available energy).

Eukaryotes have much more complex machinery than prokaryotes it other important ways, though. They have a variety of internal, membrane-bound organelles, i.e. mitochondria, but also the endoplasmic reticulum, Golgi dohickeys, the nucleus. That lets them carry out specialized chemistry and protein processing in dedicated chambers, while bacteria pretty much do everything in a soup. The nucleus sequesters the DNA, permits more complex genome organization (and thus larger genomes) and controls traffic to and from the genes. Basically, there's a whole bunch of stuff going on in eukaryotic cells that lets them have more complex behaviors.

Even so, some prokaryotes manage a form of multicellularity. Look at magnetotactic bacteria, for example.

I know, I didn't mean directly. I meant it allowed cells to specialize first, so as to make things such as a digestive system, which then do a lot of the work of providing and processing energy that frees up other cells to do other things. Sometimes, not having a well-developed Theory of Mind is a pain in the butt sorry about that.

I am also aware of the number of multicellular prokaryotes, but we both know that they are glorified petri dish colonies compared to multicellular eukaryotes. I never intended to give the impression that NO prokaryotes were multicellular, but they never come close to the specialization that we see in eukaryotes.