Re: The Fossil Fallacy


<jgrisham@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1124291038.382205.190950@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>
> Xerxes wrote:
>> http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa006&article
>> ID=0003EFE0-D68A-1212-8F3983414B7F0000&colID=13
>> http://tinyurl.com/aw3vu
>>
>> The Fossil Fallacy
>> Creationists' demand for fossils that represent "missing links" reveals
>> a deep misunderstanding of science
>> By Michael Shermer
>>
>> Nineteenth-century English social scientist Herbert Spencer made this
>> prescient observation: "Those who cavalierly reject the Theory of
>> Evolution, as not adequately supported by facts, seem quite to forget
>> that their own theory is supported by no facts at all." Well over a
>> century later nothing has changed. When I debate creationists, they
>> present not one fact in favor of creation and instead demand "just one
>> transitional fossil" that proves evolution. When I do offer evidence
>> (for example, Ambulocetus natans, a transitional fossil between ancient
>> land mammals and modern whales), they respond that there are now two
>> gaps in the fossil record.
>>
>> This is a clever debate retort, but it reveals a profound error that I
>> call the Fossil Fallacy: the belief that a "single fossil"--one bit of
>> data--constitutes proof of a multifarious process or historical
>> sequence. In fact, proof is derived through a convergence of evidence
>> from numerous lines of inquiry--multiple, independent inductions, all of
>> which point to an unmistakable conclusion.
>
> I'm sorry!
> What kind of "skeptic" talks that way? "unmistakable conclusion"? Until
> recently, gradual evolution was an unmistakable conclusion, now it's
> evolution in spurts. For most of the last century we were unmistakably
> Homo Sapiens... Oops! Now, we're more acurately Homo Sapien Sapiens,
> because we evolved about 60,000 years ago and it took a century to
> notice. Shermer's definition of a skeptic is a follower of whatever
> scientific concensus happens to be popular at the moment.
>
What Shermer calls an "unmistakable conclusion" is common descent with
modification, not some particular "tempo or mode" of common descent. Note,
in passing, that from Darwin's day on there have been debates between
phyletic gradualists and various sorts of nongradualists, including
saltationists. "Evolution in spurts" (which involves accumulation of small
changes in quick succession, not sudden appearances of complex new
adaptions), as such, does not even differ from Darwin's own suggestion that
the amount of time a lineage spends not changing is greater than the amount
of time it spends changing.

If you want to argue about taxonomical revisions, you could do much better
than simply noting that we are now not merely within a particular species,
but within a subspecies of that species (of course, if you designate more
than one subspecies of some species, every organism in that species suddenly
has to become part of one of those subspecies). Dogs, in Darwin's day, were
_Canis familiaris_; now they're _Canis lupis familiaris_. Arguments over
how to name things are not the same as arguments over their evolutionary
relationships to one another, much less arguments over whether they *have*
evolutionary relationships to one another.
>
>> We know evolution happened not because of transitional fossils such as
>> A. natans but because of the convergence of evidence from such diverse
>> fields as geology, paleontology, biogeography, comparative anatomy and
>> physiology, molecular biology, genetics, and many more. No single
>> discovery from any of these fields denotes proof of evolution, but
>> together they reveal that life evolved in a certain sequence by a
>> particular process.
>
> Again, I'm sorry!
> If I'm playing the skeptic, I could make the same argument that God
> exists, not because of the Holy Bible (a single bit of evidence) but
> because of the convergence of all the world's religions (Judaism,
> Christianity, Protestantism, Islam, Hindu, Zen, etc.). Together they
> reveal that mankind of every location and background has had
> interaction with deity. Yeah! It had nothing to do with a shared
> rationalization that became the popular perception... humans don't do
> that, do they?
>
"Consilience of induction" is most compelling when different lines of
evidence support the same conclusion (otherwise, you don't really have
"consilience," but simply different lines of evidence leading to
incompatible conclusions). Buddhism and Christianity, for example, not only
have different concepts of how to attain salvation, but different concepts
of what we need to be saved from. Different faiths have very different
concepts of how many deities have interacted with humans, or the nature of
those deities, or what (if anything -- Buddhism in some forms, including
Zen, doesn't even have deities) they want from us. They don't converge on
very much, even on the question of whether a supernatural realm exists.
>
>> One of the finest compilations of evolutionary data and theory since
>> Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species is Richard Dawkins's magnum
>> opus, The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution
>> (Houghton Mifflin, 2004)--688 pages of convergent science recounted with
>> literary elegance. Dawkins traces numerous transitional fossils (what he
>> calls "concestors," the last common ancestor shared by a set of species)
>> from Homo sapiens back four billion years to the origin of heredity and
>> the emergence of evolution. No single concestor proves that evolution
>> happened, but together they reveal a majestic story of process over time.
>>
>> We know evolution happened because of a convergence of evidence.
>>
>> Consider the tale of the dog. With so many breeds of dogs popular for so
>> many thousands of years, one would think there would be an abundance of
>> transitional fossils providing paleontologists with copious data from
>> which to reconstruct their evolutionary ancestry. In fact, according to
>> Jennifer A. Leonard, an evolutionary biologist then at the Smithsonian
>> Institution's National Museum of Natural History, "the fossil record
>> from wolves to dogs is pretty sparse." Then how do we know whence dogs
>> evolved? In the November 22, 2002, Science, Leonard and her colleagues
>> report that mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) data from early dog remains
>> "strongly support the hypothesis that ancient American and Eurasian
>> domestic dogs share a common origin from Old World gray wolves."
>>
>> In the same issue, molecular biologist Peter Savolainen of the Royal
>> Institute of Technology in Stockholm and his colleagues note that even
>> though the fossil record is problematic, their study of mtDNA sequence
>> variation among 654 domestic dogs from around the world "points to an
>> origin of the domestic dog in East Asia" about 15,000 years before the
>> present from a single gene pool of wolves.
>>
>> Finally, anthropologist Brian Hare of Harvard University and his
>> colleagues describe in this same issue the results of a study showing
>> that domestic dogs are more skillful than wolves at using human signals
>> to indicate the location of hidden food. Yet "dogs and wolves do not
>> perform differently in a nonsocial memory task, ruling out the
>> possibility that dogs outperform wolves in all human-guided tasks," they
>> write. Therefore, "dogs' social-communicative skills with humans were
>> acquired during the process of domestication."
>>
>> No single fossil proves that dogs came from wolves, but archaeological,
>> morphological, genetic and behavioral "fossils" converge to reveal the
>> concestor of all dogs to be the East Asian wolf. The tale of human
>> evolution is divulged in a similar manner (although here we do have an
>> abundance of fossils), as it is for all concestors in the history of
>> life. We know evolution happened because innumerable bits of data from
>> myriad fields of science conjoin to paint a rich portrait of life's
>> pilgrimage.
>
> Again, I'm sorry!
> We're all agreed that dogs are dogs! A Toy Poodle or a Great Dane can
> interbreed with the East Asian Wolf, regardless of their physical
> differences and brain size. These are animals of the same species. But
> if I didn't know better and I were of a mind to suggest that Toy
> Poodles evolved from Great Danes, I could string together fossils from
> collies and bassett hounds and produce the exact same type for Dane to
> Poodle as the theory from ape to man. It doesn't occur to the
> scientific mind that people and apes may well have been as various as
> breeds of dogs and plucking one from here and one from there to
> construct a process, as they imagine it, might not be altogether
> accurate. But, I'm playing the skeptic... too bad no one else is!
>
Toy poodles evolved (under human guidance) from grey wolves, and I don't
think you could actually find a series of transitional fossils to
demonstrate this. It has, of course, occurred to paleontologists that we
don't know and cannot know exactly which extinct hominids, if any, were our
ancestors, although it is possible to conclusively show that some were side
branches without living descendants. The "scientific mind" is perfectly
clear that the hominids were once more various than they are today, and that
phylogenic trees (especially when extinct species are thrown in) are an
approximation. This is not the same as saying that there is insufficient
reason to conclude, e.g. that humans and chimps share a common ancestor more
recent than our last common ancestor with orangutans, or that humans share a
common ancestor with "Lucy" more recent than our last common ancestor with
chimps.
>
>> Michael Shermer is publisher of Skeptic (www.skeptic.com) and author of
>> The Science of Good and Evil.
>
> Yeah! He needs his Skeptics license revoked!
>
>
> JTG 8/17/05
>
-- Steven J.


.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: The Fossil Fallacy
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  • Re: The Fossil Fallacy
    ... >>transitional fossil" that proves evolution. ... proof is derived through a convergence of evidence ... With so many breeds of dogs popular for so ...
    (talk.origins)
  • Re: The Fossil Fallacy
    ... > transitional fossil" that proves evolution. ... > This is a clever debate retort, but it reveals a profound error that I ... With so many breeds of dogs popular for so ...
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