Re: The Reasonable Minority

Evopeach wrote, On 2007/12/30 08:34:
On Dec 29, 11:35 pm, John Harshman <jharshman.diespam...@xxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
Evopeach wrote:
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.
Which of my statements are you claiming to be incorrect?

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.
Chien is not a paleontologist and as far as I know does not claim to be.
He's no more on top of the "China record" than I am.

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

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)
There are some problems with that statement, wherever you got it, but
close enough. Chien's claim was that animals all appeared suddenly in
the Cambrian explosion. The claim here is that animals appeared in the
Precambrian. They say 750ma, which is actually over 200 million years
before the start of the Cambrian. I wouldn't put it that far back, but
how do you figure this quote to be against my statements?

So you like cutting dead people who can't defend their arguments. you
vs Gould...what a joke!!
Don't take my word for it. Look at any of the subsequent publications.
The most famous is Hallucigenia, which Gould (and Conway Morris before
him) had reconstructed upside down and backwards, making a truly bizarre
"weird wonder" out of what was actually an armored lobopod similar to
modern onychophorans.

This review is the best single summary of the explosion I know of: Budd,
G. E., and S. Jensen. 2000. A critical reappraisal of the fossil record
of the bilaterian phyla. Biol. Rev. 75:253-295.

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
Your snarkiness is not an attractive feature and only makes you look
immature. Word to the wise. But no, that paper doesn't address my
claims. Do you happen to know where it was published? Not in any real
journal, I expect, as peer review would have forced corrections to some
of the misstatements, at the very least.

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.
That's just not true. Brachiopods and mollusks could easily exist with
an organic skeleton similar to the chitin of arthropods. And in fact
there are soft-bodied mollusks, even primitively shell-less ones like
solenogastres. There are also echinoderm relatives, rather similar in
body plan, with organic skeletons: pterobranchs.

Arthropods bear jointed appendages and likewise require a hard,
organic or mineralized outer covering.
True. But note that organic coverings work, and are not easily
preserved. The Cambrian explosion is explainable as an increase in the
prevalence of mineralized skeletons; no new body plans are really necessary.

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
In fact there are fossil tracks in the Precambrian, and during the
Cambrian before the explosion, and they gradually increase in numbers
and complexity over many millions of years. I'm afraid that note 59 is
not a complete citation, referring only to "Chen et al., The Chengjiang
Biota".

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
Actually, the main reason for the difficulty is that they were preserved
in coarse sandstones, so that detail was lacking. Better preservation in
other locales, which the paper doesn't cite, shows that some of them
were indeed cnidarians. Others are still controversial.



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.
Hello?

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.
I'd like to see the actual justification for any of the claims that the
time allowed is too brief for evolutionary theory. Now in fact the stuff
they allude to as "deep divergence" is merely a set of molecular clock
estimates of divergence times, not any theoretical limit. And divergence
time estimates have been going down recently; the most recent dates for
divergences of bilaterian phyla are only modestly Precambrian.

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.
Not necessarily. See, for example, Butterfield, N. J. 1995. Secular
distribution of Burgess-Shale-type preservation. Lethaia 28:1-13.
Briefly, taphonomic conditions have not been constant over time. But
current evidence does suggest that the early molecular clock estimates
were faulty.

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.
This is a major error in taphonomic understanding, or perhaps it's a
conscious bait-and-switch. It's *mineralized* skeletons that are easily
preserved. Organic skeletons are not so preservable and tend to require
special conditions.

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
While I agree about the unreliability of many past molecular clock
estimates, and in fact with the conclusion, the conclusion here doesn't
follow from the premise.

Can you do more than quote? Can you argue from the evidence on your own?

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.
Let me know when you've read them, and we can discuss whether Scherer's
data support his conclusions.

You arguing against Valentine and his group is pretty funny.


Normally I would do some snippings, since this was already over 300 lines, bu to make my point...

You know what is truly funny? That you couldn't counter a single one of John's responses so you're forced to add hat meaningless one-liner. IOW, you haven't got ***. But then you proved that longs ago with Gish gallops and goalpost shifting, not to mention descending into insult when you couldn't counter points and then erroneously claiming you won the debate.

.