Re: The Reasonable Minority

On Dec 29, 7:58 pm, John Harshman <jharshman.diespam...@xxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
Evopeach wrote:

[snips]

Let me take a couple that I'm familiar with.





Paul K. Chien is Professor of Biology. He received his B.S. in both
Biology and Chemistry from Chung Chi College, N.T., Hong Kong, and his
Ph.D. from the University of California, Irvine. Prof. Chien is
interested in the physiology and ecology of inter-tidal organisms. His
research has involved the transport of amino acids and metal ions
across cell membranes and the detoxification mechanisms of metal ions.

RI: As you became more interested in this and discovered more about
it, did you find it really was an "explosion of life"?

Chien: Yes. A simple way of putting it is that currently we have about
38 phyla of different groups of animals, but the total number of phyla
discovered during that period of time (including those in China,
Canada, and elsewhere) adds up to over 50 phyla. That means [there
are] more phyla in the very, very beginning, where we found the first
fossils [of animal life], than exist now.

Stephen J. Gould, [a Harvard University evolutionary biologist], has
referred to this as the reverse cone of diversity. The theory of
evolution implies that things get more and more complex and get more
and more diverse from one single origin. But the whole thing turns out
to be reversedwe have more diverse groups in the very beginning, and
in fact more and more of them die off over time, and we have less and
less now.

This is not true on several fronts. For one thing, Gould was guilty of
"reverse shoehorning". Most of his "weird wonders" have since been shown
to belong either to modern phyla or to their stem groups.

BS... you are spinning fairy tales.


Chien is way behind the times. but way ahead of you. He's sure on
top of the China record and its older than the Burgess Shale.



Second, quantitative studies have shown that the
disparity (amount of variation) in arthropods was no greater in the
Cambrian than it is now.

meaningless

And third, the first animal fossils are Precambrian, and there is an
extended buildup of diversity in the 50
million years or so leading to the Cambrian explosion itself.

http://fossils.valdosta.edu/era_precambrian.html

BS again Multi-cellular animals (invertebrates) did not evolve
until very late in Precambrian time, around 700 million years ago, or
2,800 million years after life first began on Earth. Late bloomers.
The fossil collection in our museum begins about 750 million years
ago, near the end of Precambrian time. The only multi-cellular life
forms at the end of the Precambrian were in the oceans and included
some groups that have survived until the present: jellyfishes and
segmented worms (annelids)


So you like cutting dead people who can't defend their arguments. you
vs Gould...what a joke!!

RI: What information is the public hearing or not hearing about the
Cambrian explosion?

Chien: The general impression people get is that we began with micro-
organisms, then came lowly animals that don't amount to much, and then
came the birds, mammals and man. Scientists were looking at a very
small branch of the whole animal kingdom, and they saw more complexity
and advanced features in that group. But it turns out that this
concept does not apply to the entire spectrum of animals or to the
appearance or creation of different groups. Take all the different
body plans of roundworms, flatworms, coral, jellyfish and whateverall
those appeared at the very first instant.

This is just not true, at least based on fossil data. Roundworms, for
example, are unknown in the fossil record before the Jurassic. About
half of living animal phyla have no fossil record at all.

Most textbooks will show a live tree of evolution with the groups
evolving through a long period of time. If you take that tree and chop
off 99 percent of it, [what is left] is closer to reality; it's the
true beginning of every group of animals, all represented at the very
beginning.

Chien is seriously misinformed. To sum up: the first animal fossils are
Precambrian, the Doushantuo and Ediacaran faunas, all of which are
simple in appearance and some of which may be early members of modern
groups. Both trace fossils and body fossils (the "small shelly fauna"
gradually increase in number and complexity during the last bit of the
Precambrian and the first 15-20 million years of the Cambrian, before
the Cambrian explosion happens near the end of the Early Cambrian. Many
animal phyla are first known in the fossil record around that time,
though more than half are not. In addition, most of these records are of
stem groups, more primitive than any living members. There are also a
number of fossils that may bridge two or more phyla.


This paper addresses you claims and effectively dismisses them similar
to a teacher discliplining an erreant schoolboy.

http://www.discovery.org/articlefiles/pdfs/cambrian.pdf

Instead, soft and hard parts had to arise together.56 As
Valentine notes for the brachiopod, "the brachiopod Bauplan cannot
function without a
durable skeleton."57 To admit that hard-bodied Cambrian animals had
not yet evolved
their hard-bodied parts in the Precambrian effectively concedes that
credible precursor
animals themselves had not yet evolved.58 As Chen and Zhou explain:
"animals such as brachiopods and most echinoderms and mollusks cannot
exist without a mineralized skeleton. Arthropods bear jointed
appendages
and likewise require a hard, organic or mineralized outer covering.
Therefore the existence of these organisms in the distant past should
be
recorded either by fossil tracks and trails or remains of skeletons.
The
observation that such fossils are absent in Precambrian strata proves
that
these phyla arose in the Cambrian."59

As Erwin, Valentine and Jablonski have noted:
Although the soft-bodied fossils that appear about 565 million years
ago
are animal-like, their classifications are hotly debated. In just the
past few
years these [Ediacaran] fossils have been viewed as protozoans; as
lichens;
as close relatives of the cnidarians; as a sister group to cnidarians
plus all
other animals; as representatives of more advanced, extinct phyla; and
as
representatives of a new kingdom entirely separate from the animals.
Still
other specialists have parceled the fauna out among living phyla, with
some assigned to the Cnidaria and others to the flatworms, annelids,
arthropods and echinoderms. This confusing state of affairs arose
because
these body fossils do not tend to share definitive anatomical details
with
modern groups, and thus the assignments must be based on vague
similarities of overall shape and form, a method that has frequently
proved
misleading in other cases.75

You may also ask yourself how Chien's claims, even if true, would help
the anti-evolution idea. Even if all the phyla were magically poofed
into existence in the Cambrian, we would be left with evolution to
explain the diversification of those phyla, since almost none of the
modern classes are known from then. In particular, the chordates we know
and love were represented by a few wormy-looking things. Nothing you
would call a fish, much less a reptile or mammal.

Finally, even if one regards the appearance of the Ediacaran animals
as a kind of
"fuse" on the Cambrian explosion,79 the total time encompassed by the
Vendian and
Cambrian radiations still remains exceedingly brief relative to neo-
Darwinian expectations
and requirements. Only forty million years elapsed between the
beginning of the Vendian
radiation (565 Mya) and the end of the Cambrian explosion (525 Mya).
This represents
about 7% of the time that modern neo-Darwinists expect for the
development of complex
animals from their alleged common ancestor (see discussion of deep
divergence below),
and, by nearly all accounts, far less time than the selection/mutation
mechanism would
require to build such animals (see Section V.A below). Until recently
radiometric studies
had estimated the duration of the Cambrian radiation itself at 40
million years, a period of
time so brief, geologically speaking, that paleontologists had dubbed
it an "explosion."
The relative suddenness of this event, even on the earlier measure of
its duration, had
already raised serious questions about the adequacy of the neo-
Darwinian mechanism.
Treating the Vendian and the Cambrian radiations as one continuous
evolutionary event,
(itself a dubious assumption), only returns the problem to its earlier
(pre-Zircon redating)
status--hardly a positive state of affairs for advocates of neo-
Darwinism.

Nevertheless, the
"deep divergence" hypothesis suffers from several severe difficulties.
First, the
postulation of an extensive 700 million year period of undetectable
evolution (from a
paleontological point of view) remains highly problematic. As noted
above, the
preservation of numerous soft-bodied Cambrian animals, as well as
Precambrian embryos
and microorganisms (the latter dating from 3.5 billion years),
undermines the plausibility
of those versions of the artifact theory that invoke an extensive
period of soft-bodied
evolution as the reason for an absence of Precambrian transitional
intermediates.
Moreover, the existence of exclusively soft-bodied ancestors for hard
bodied Cambrian
forms remains anatomically implausible as noted earlier. A brachiopod
cannot survive
without its shell. Nor can an arthropod (e.g., a crab or an insect)
exist without its
exoskeleton. Any plausible ancestor to such organisms should have had
hard body parts
to fossilize, yet none have been found in the Precambrian.

In any case, without evidence
from the fossil record (older than 550 Mya) with which to calibrate
the molecular clock,
its reliability in dating the origin of the Cambrian animal phyla (at
between 1 and 1.2 bya)
remains highly questionable.90 Thus, Valentine, Jablonski and Erwin
argue that:
the accuracy of the molecular clock is still problematical, at least
for phylum
divergences, for the estimates vary by some 800 million years
depending upon
the techniques and or the molecules used . . .it is not clear that
molecular clock
dates can ever be applied reliably to such geologically remote events
as
Neoproterozoic branchings within the Metazoa.91
Thus, as paleontologist Simon Conway Morris concludes, "a deep history
extending to an
origination in excess of 1,000 Myr is very unlikely."92

Siegfried Scherer is the Director of the Institute of Microbiology. He
is a noted critic of Darwinism and has done research on genetic "basic
types" from a design perspective.

[edit]Career
Scherer studied biology and received his Ph.D 1983 from the University
of Konstanz. In his doctoral thesis he studied photosynthesis and
respiration of cyanobacteria. He begun to work as researcher in the
University Konstanz in 1983. He received BYK company's research award
in 1984. Between 1987-1988 DAAD reseach scolarship at the Virginia
Tech Department of Biochemistry. 1991 habilitation at University of
Konstanz in plant physiology and microbial ecology. Professor of
microbial ecology at the Technical University of Munich and director
of the FML Weihenstephan Institute of Microbiology since 1991

Scherer is the only creationist I know of who has managed to get real
creationist papers published in real scientific journals. I would be
glad to discuss his work on ducks (the part I'm familiar with), which
does not hold up to serious examination. I'm thinking of these, which
constitute his only published research that I know of on "basic types":

Scherer, S., and T. Hilsberg. 1982. Hybridisierung und
Verwandtschaftsgrade innerhalb der Anatidae -- eine systematische und
evolutionstheoretische Betrachtung. Journal für Ornithologie 123:357-380.

Scherer, S., and C. Sontag. 1986. Zur molekularen Taxonomie und
Evolution der Anatidae. Z. zool. Syst. Evolut.-forsch. 24:1-19.- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -


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Relevant Pages

  • Re: The Reasonable Minority
    ... 38 phyla of different groups of animals, but the total number of phyla ... fossils, than exist now. ... Cambrian than it is now. ... BS again Multi-cellular animals did not evolve ...
    (talk.origins)
  • Re: The Reasonable Minority
    ... 38 phyla of different groups of animals, but the total number of phyla ... fossils, than exist now. ... Cambrian than it is now. ...
    (talk.origins)
  • Re: The Reasonable Minority
    ... 38 phyla of different groups of animals, but the total number of phyla ... Cambrian than it is now. ... BS again Multi-cellular animals did not evolve ... The fossil collection in our museum begins about 750 million years ...
    (talk.origins)
  • Re: The Reasonable Minority
    ... 38 phyla of different groups of animals, but the total number of phyla ... Cambrian than it is now. ... Both trace fossils and body fossils (the "small shelly fauna" ...
    (talk.origins)
  • Re: The Reasonable Minority
    ... 38 phyla of different groups of animals, but the total number of phyla ... Cambrian than it is now. ... Both trace fossils and body fossils (the "small shelly fauna" ...
    (talk.origins)