You’re missing the argument here. The argument is that the theory of vertical evolution is not a theory that has been proved to high confidence level (or indeed anything close to it) and yet it is commonly taught in school as a confirmed theory. Worse, alternative theories are not often taught and indeed are often suppressed. VE is often taught as “truth”, as the one acceptable theory. This, I’m saying, is unscientific and wrong, and probably damaging as well. Further, I’m saying that NRO theories are legitimate avenues of study that address significant shortcomings in the theory of VE and that they should be introduced in schools as legitimate theories for study, and that it would be good scientific practice to do so.
The reference was not to the teaching of spirituality at all, only the general comment that both ideal science and spirituality should welcome free thinking and a pursuit of the truth. Both sides in the political war claim to be fighting for these but in reality neither is. That was my point but I’ll try to refrain from even using the word spirituality as it has no bearing on my argument but in the greater context of this discussion can be misleading. The Japanese do some things very well and other things not so well. Traditionally they have been great at refining technology and finding ways to mass produce it cheaply, but they have often not been the inventors of the technology itself. They were able to do very well at what they did well but their system does not necessarily produce the most well rounded students and that may become more of a problem for them in this century, if they don’t adapt. Bingo! It’s a difficult problem because the amount students need to know these days, and that all of us need to know these days for that matter, is growing at a rapid rate, so how do you prioritise? If the inherent political nature of science is something of importance, and it is, what are you going to give up in order to insert teaching it into the lesson plan? (Are you a teacher by chance?) Still, in a world of rapid change that is rapidly becoming a global community one’s ability to think critically and to deal with diversity and chance and to figure out what knowledge they need to acquire to solve a given problem may be more important than the ingestion and regurgitation of X number of facts. How do you effectively teach this though? I think there are ways but it’s not an easy problem. Agreed, and this is an area where the US is more challenged that other countries. When you’re not the world superpower it’s easier to see yourself as vulnerable and in many areas and easier to be humbled. When you carry the big stick, however, it’s easier to be lulled into a sense of complacency and perhaps even self-righteousness and to lose touch with the changing world around you. Could the Iraq war and/or the rise of the new economic powers in the east be the US’s wake up call? The VE issue seems to be the big one right now because of its perceived social ramifications. You can find economic theories (most notably many of the ones promoted by the neocons) and social theories that have become overrun with politics and no longer have any foundation in fact or sound reasoning. You could probably find some potential problem areas in the hard sciences, like genetic engineering, VE with respect to different abilities in different races, and other politically hot topics. These are the areas where the politics can overwhelm the science. These examples raise lots of interesting questions. Horizontal evolution would seem to have taken Chihuahuas and Great Danes to the extremee limits of the genetic potential of dog DNA, and yet they are both still dogs. You are right that selective breeding, which would not happen in nature, has been used with dogs for thousands of years, and yet dogs are still dogs. We’ve got big ones and little ones and aggressive ones etc. but in spite of thousands of years of breeding programs (which would very greatly accelerate the process of evolution) for the most part a dog is still a dog. Interesting, don’t you think? And then, of course, there is the mule. There are lots of interesting cases to study, but does any of this prove VE? No, and indeed you have to do a tremendous amount of pure speculating to come up with any kind of consistent explanation for most of these phenomena. The excuse is always “it takes place over such a long time period that it’s hard to know what happened” and that’s fine, but no one can by any use of good science claim that these speculations constitute poof, or even high probability, and that’s where the problem lies, the unscientific overstating of the evidence and further the use of these overstatements to suppress other lines of questioning. I meant that the mutation would have to become dominant within a gene pool and form a new species, and it would have to become established and claim a niche in the ecosystem in order to survive and mutate farther in the future. True enough. There is a grey area in between. Obviously if the wings were a big enough impedance the insect would become food for something else. Without the mutation producing any advantage, however, VE would suggest that it would not become dominant in the species because there is no added fitness that would cause members that had it to be positively naturally selected. True. This is likely an example of horizontal evolution (I think I’ve mistakenly used the term genetic drift for HE in some past posts) but yes I agree. IQ is a controversial measure to begin with and has been show to have a heavy cultural bias so I’ll leave that one aside but I assume there will be other good examples as well. The butterfly article is interesting because it shows in another way the dangers of over stating the proof for VE. Take this opening quote: Why one species branches into two is a question that has haunted evolutionary biologists since Darwin. Given our planet's rich biodiversity, "speciation" clearly happens regularly, but scientists cannot quite pinpoint the driving forces behind it. The bad science in that is enough to make your skin crawl. First of all we don’t know that one species branches into two at all. Speciation may happen a different way, or not at all. There is no proof and there isn’t even a clear or unified theory behind what’s being presented as a confirmed fact here. It’s part of the theory of VE, but stating a theory as a fact launches this article, and many other like it, into the worst kind of circular reasoning that absolutely butchers good scientific principles. “Given our planet's rich biodiversity, "speciation" clearly happens regularly…” And on it goes. There is nothing clear about it. Again, there is no high level of certainty that speciation happens at all. There are no clear links and no clear theory for how it could happen, just a lot of maybe’s and perhaps’ but no solid proof or clear theory supporting them. What this article could legitimately be talking about is whether this finding supports the theory that speciation occurs by showing part of the theoretical process, but when it starts out by presenting a highly speculative theory as a fact then it exits the realm of anything resembling good science. VE is no more speculative than competing theories, of course, but that doesn’t make it true, as anyone genuinely concerned with good science will recognise immediately. In fact history would tell us that a theory as ill supported as VE would certainly undergo major revisions at the very least, even if it was eventually legitimately considered substantially true at some point, and yet it is rarely if ever presented in a manner that represents its true state of certainty. That’s something that all scientists should object to vociferously, and yet a great many don’t. As far as what the example itself suggests, it’s not clear to me whether this supports or contradicts VE. This is another example of a tendency to mate with only ideal members of a species. This would discourage evolution because members that don’t look just right would tend not to be selected as partners. So what’s the logic here? If you follow through the assumptions that appear to have been made I think there may be some significant logical problems here as well. I’ll have to get back to the rest later.
Though it might be a tangential question, let me try re-wording. Are you open to the idea that modern humans and modern apes share a common ancestor, or is this something that you unequivocally reject?
I believe that technically you can cross a Great Dane and Chihuahua with artifical insemination but need to make sure that the female is the Great Dane and a small one at that. A more interesting starting point would be mules and hinnys. I am fairly sure that most people would consider donkeys and horses to be distinct species, yet they can produce offspring, albeit sterile ones. You can then go a step further and take the offspring of Servals and common housecats which are called Savannah Cats. Again, two naturally distinct species that produce offspring but with a difference; [rquoter] As Savannahs are produced by crossbreeding servals and domestic cats, each generation of Savannahs is marked with a filial number. For example, the cats produced directly from a Serval/domestic cat cross are the F1 generation, and they are typically 50% serval (although if you use a F1 Savannah as the domestic cat, the percentage of serval blood can jump to 75%). The F2 generation, which has a serval grandparent and is the offspring of the F1 generation, is 25% serval. The F3 generation has a serval great grandparent, and is 12.5% serval. Male Savannah cats are typically sterile until the F5 generation or so, although the females are fertile from the F1 generation and on. [/rquoter] These seem to me to be pretty good examples of divergent evolution in (now interupted) progress. Possibly Homo sapiens and Homo erectus might have been able to produce viable offspring, and "Naming species" seems to me to be a bit of a 19th Century red herring based on morphological and behavorial differences. In a sense it might be more reasonable to think of overlaping lines of genetic continuity with significant gaps. But my point really is that in general I have a hard time seeing how you draw the line between "ring species" and "vertical evolution". Is hexadactyly (having six fingers per hand) an example of increased complexity? Many evolutional turns are believed to have resulted in reduced complexity when conditions called for it. I genuinely don't see anything but a semantic difference when you try to draw a line between "macroevolution" and "microevolution", any more than I see a difference between expressing a distance in kilometers or meters. It seems like you are saying, "Well, we know that if you run 100 meters you will burn x calories, but if you run a kilometer, any sort of estimates for calorie expenditure is unfounded and unreasonable." The other day I heard this story on NPR. It was an interview with a zoologist/photographer who notes that 90% of known species are smaller than a human finger and the majority of these are all confined to an extremely small space, like the top of a mountain. All that is supposedly required for evolution to diverge is separation of two groups in different environments and different conditions which favor survival. "Punctuated Equilibrium" is just a particularly quick way of placing species in new different environments. BTW, in the past you've mentioned the acceleration of complexity. Having thought about this and contemplated the nature of population growth, etc. It seems to me that the process and it's growth fairly neatly fits into the standard exponential curve. Mutations are normally reported as one change per x number of genes. In a single celled organism with a smaller genome, would naturally have little opportunity for change. As mutations cause the genome to grow, the chance for mutations which cause change would increase. Kind of off topic, but this might have been true 30 years ago, but simply isn't the case at this point. I can definatively say that tons and tons of pure science discoveries in physics, astrophysics is Japanese these days. I don't know as much about other scientific fields, but am willing to bet it crosses over there as well. This is a steriotype that simply isn't true. I do find it mildly ironic that you mention adaptation and obscelescence while doubting evolution.
Grizzled, Some replys are abridged.... We agree on the Japanese system. They're very good at accelerating what you refer to as "old science". The catch is that Americans are falling behind on both forms of science (evolutionary and revolutionary). I disagree. America isn't falling behind. It's productivity has plateaued, so competition has become a matter of attrition (which we can't win). Other countries will deal with similar problems we're having now, though they won't neccesarily have political causes like ID to cloud up the issue. I believe we're reaching a point where the increasing complexity of knowledge will revert us back to a class based period seen in the Middle Ages, where the aristocracy were very learned and performed a bulk of the most revolutionary research. In the 70s, one can find a stable career with just a high school diploma and even better with a college degree. Now, it's bumped up a notch where a degree is neccessary and some graduate degree is even better. Yet the public school system has stayed relatively unchanged compared to career demands in experience... With increasing specialization of technical skills, a biologist can find a career without much training in chemistry or heavy math. Right now that biologist can plunge into any broad category. In the future, specific skills are necessary (enough to demand more than summer school or correspondence training) and the individual has to weigh his time and opportunity to decide which training to recieve. So this "prioritization" you speak of... it is happening. In a very loose analogy of baseball, the days of churining out 5 tool players are over. There'll be schools (or drugs perhaps?) primarily for power hitters, fielders and runners. So when I talk of a plateau, it's the point in our progress where the bar has been set much much higher than the problems our school systems are meeting. Computers will help mask the burden, but in the end you still get a class barrier of the rich and multifaceted smart. The backyard scientist is becoming even more of a dying breed. I'm not a teacher. In the era of genetic manipulation and cloning, the explosive growth of neuroscience has gone largely ignored. You have rats controlling veehicles to make simple rudimentary directions....Increasing research on cognitive science and marketing.... mapping out the neural pathways of hypnosis... It's going to be a very powerful and ethically loaded field (if it isn't already). What makes you think they haven't evolved? Humans are still humans through evolving the traits I mentioned before. Domesticated animals have closely shadowed our evolution since beginning of human civilization. While it's still the same species, who cares if Sparky has sickle cell?!? He's a member of the family and I want the best care for him that money can provide!!! Yup, like Otto wrote, mules can't breed. They are sterile because they don't have a matching set of chromosome pairs. That's one part of the evolutionary mechanism to prevent cross breeding of mammals (though plants can have inconsistent numbers of chromosome pairs) Yup, there are lots of interesting cases and there is a lot of diversity. Diversity usually lacks consistency. A copout perhaps, but current categorization schemes aren't entirely fleshed out. There are times when scientists miscategorize, but they learn more and fit them in another box, such as through genetic matching. Magnifying errors is just as hazardous as dogmatizing them. For your benefit, "speciation" is the current paradigm. The reason why the ID that's focused upon the God angle is so hard to accept is that scientists have been burned on that paradigm many many times before. (Again, look up geodiversity and classification) So yes, what I've responded could broadly imply VE or ID, but I never said likewise. I'm only offering cases for VE. Yet, none of what I've mentioned has disproved VE either... Polydactyly or hexadactyly is a dominant trait that affects less than 5% of the worlds population. Same as some cases of dwarfism. If it's a strong subject, I'll look more into it in the future. Another misconception in evolution is the term "dominance". When Mendel did his pea experiment, he was really lucky he chose that type. The experiment didn't work on certain plant species. Assuming you still remember some HS bio, a punnet square of two parents with the traits of Ww and Ww didn't always come out in a 3:1 ratio. Instead of 3 white and 1 black, sometimes you had 1 white, 2 grey, 1 black; other times you had 4 greys; 1 white, 2 spotted, 1 black; 3 white, no black; 1 white, 2 grey, no black; or all black. You might even come out with different shades of grey*... Scientists then didn't know how to make of it. Until they saw and categorized more to figure out specific patterns, much like a doctor making a diagnosis from symptoms. "Dominant traits" could also be lurking in the shadows. They only kick in when the opportunity arises. Huntington's disease is a dominant trait. Symptoms for Huntington's usually occur mid to late adulthood. What was the average age for humans in the 1700's? Finally here's my idea of mutations. Like I said before, DNA copying isn't always 100 or even 95% accurate (it's still far better than anything we've made). Suppose someone defaced a Xerox machine with a magic marker. Copies now have a defacement on the top right corner of every page. That "mutation" is fine for most people. Most people only read the body. Suppose the dates of some copies were located where that defacement is. Still no problem...unless you get an audit. Or maybe the wife is auditing you in some trust issue. Problem evaded... Getting hungry again...reply later. Happy Thanksgiving. *(If you came out of that sea of numbers with something that big book of inheritance might just be fun for you....)
Intelligence implies an informed knowledgeable actor. Design implies that that actor has purposefully and deliberately undertaken that action. Therefore Intelligent Design implies that there is an informed knowledgeable actor who has purposefully deliberately created the diversity of species as we know it. So to say that Intelligent Design isn't about a specific designer or method that goes against the idea that speciation might be Intelligent or Designed To borrow the ID analogy if I find a watch in the jungle I will try to ascertain its purpose, method of construction and nature of who designed it. I won't just say will this must be non-random and leave it at that. I will agree that ID has been hijacked by Creationist and that it actually does do a disservice to the debate because as you note there are several different intelligent designers proposed besides just the Biblical account. I agree that Non-Random Origins might be a better term as it gets away from the political connotations of the Intelligent Design term and also might better encompass the possibility that speciation might not be that intelligent. Using the term non-random that would still apply that there is somesort of deliberateness to speciation which inevitably leads to the question of what then is responsible for speciation. I will also add that non-random origin though could also encompass Evolutionary theory as natural selection isn't purely random since successful adaptions and mutations survive while those that don't die out.
