Evolution is a basic, biological process

Hi TL! Hope your holidays were safe and happy.I think you're misunderstanding Soplar's point on the ID issue. S/He is exploring the implications of the existence of a designer (or if you prefer, Designer). I think a re-statement of his point would be more along the lines of:1. Infectious diseases exist.1.5 This is a bad thing.2. If there's a Designer, by definition s/he/it must have also designed infectious diseases.Conclusion: The Designer isn't very nice.edited to add: BTW, Soplar gave you a nice out: all you had to do was agree that the nasty bits were designed by an "evil" entity, thus transferring the blame away from the Nice Designer.This message has been edited by Quetzal, 12-31-2004 09:46 AM

Heh. True. However, the Designer in the context that the IDists use for reference is not only anthropocentric, but merely a very thinly disguised God of the Christian Bible, n'est-ce pas? Personally, I think that the Designer, if s/he/it exists, probably designed everything to accommodate insects or bacteria...

Not necessarily. As with any other process in nature that can be observed, although we may not be able to discern "motive" in some entity so far removed from our normal existence, we should be able to see the "fingerprints" as it were of Its activity. This is where the entire ID premise falls flat - there have been NO (as in zero, zip, nada) unequivocal signs that any non-natural process has been at work over the history of life. Or, as far as that goes, any indication that natural processes could NOT have produced the diversity of life we see. That is Soplar's entire point, IMO. What conceivable purpose could the Guinea worm or trypanasomes serve? How about Ebola or the other hemorrhagic diseases? How about non-human diseases such as rinderpest or feline parvovirus? If we're reduced to "God/ID works in mysterious ways", we'll never be able to come to grips with these scourges. Are we (and our commensals) supposed to simply suffer? Is this some kind of test? Okay. However, even granting the absurd premise that all modern humans are somehow cursed because of something that occurred thousands of generations ago, why are the other animals on the planet forced to suffer? They certainly had nothing to do with the Adamic curse, n'est-ce pas?

Hi Soplar.It appears our friend TheLiteralist is uninterested in addressing anyone but you on this thread, so I'd like to take a stab at one of your premises: I'm not sure why you consider this such an important, or even controversial topic. Perhaps you could elaborate? After all, Darwin was neither the first to propose that organisms evolved, nor even (really) the first to propose natural selection as the mechanism. His contribution was tying in others' works (especially population work), coupled with exhaustive real-world examples, and his own thoughts into a coherent picture. There's been quite a bit of new data and new ideas brought out in the 150 years since the publication of Origin. The interesting thing IMO is that, in spite of all the changes and additions, the modern version of the ToE is still recognizable as deriving from Darwin's works. Now THAT'S a legacy.

Unfortunately (from the point of view of an inverterate arguer ) I find nothing in your post with which to disagree. I share your motivation to speak out against the encroachment of religion into science. I agree completely with your argument concerning the conflation of the colloquial "theory" and scientific "theory".So I guess: Welcome to EvC! You'll find that I often use understatement to make my point.

Of course you are free to address whomever you wish. I have little or no quibbles with anything Soplar has written thus far, so if you'd care to take a stab at my comments, it would be appreciated.

Hi Soplar. Basically yes, apart from a really minor quibble to point out that there are metazoans which reproduce through parthenogenesis, etc, that make them essentially clonal just like single-celled organisms. Beyond that, I'm not an evo-devo or molbio specialist, so I have no real comment on the rest. My background is ecology, and my actual work in the field has been mostly in tropical conservation, biodiversity, and protected area management - meaning I tend to look at (and pull my examples/arguments from) the "macro" level when dealing with evolutionary topics. Heck, I didn't even understand the bit about A&M physics. You're talking to a guy whose ideal of science is playing frisbee on a tropical beach while waiting for the Olive Ridley arrivada so we could continue our nesting behavior study... This message has been edited by Quetzal, 01-04-2005 09:54 AM

Hmm,I guess this one you'll need to clarify: I don't want to bash away here, because I suspect my disagreement is due to your shorthand version rather than a fundamental error. The way you have written this seems to indicate evolution implies a linear progression over time from simple to complex, with humans being the apex evolutionary endstate. Perhaps you might wish to either clarify for the readers or rewrite this a bit. I'm pretty sure I know what you meant, but there are a lot of folks on this board who might not - especially your target audience.

Oh, we're just amusing ourselves until an interesting, intelligent creationist comes along. Care to try out for the part? You want to see an EvE discussion, check out this thread: Overkill, Overill, or Overchill. There was a certain amount of fur flying in that thread.

The language of science is often confusing and/or unintelligible to non-scientists. This is not, as you implied, an attempt to obfuscate or blow smoke. The terminology used by scientists is a shorthand that is designed to facilitate communication between scientists in the same field. Since specialists share a common framework, it makes sense to assume the person to whom you're talking understands the basic concepts. However, this also means that it can be opaque to non-scientists. This is one of the biggest failings of modern science: it's so specialized and so esoteric that explaining what they're talking about to the average person is problematic. Teachers - even college professors - are not always better at it, either.However, discussion boards like this one are excellent places to ask questions and get clarification of what you don't understand. Most of us are willing to explain in detail and understandably the areas of science we're most familiar with or passionate about. For example, you say: Guess what? S/he was right. This is an example where the terminology of science has a completely different meaning from the definition used colloquially. A scientific theory is a collection of explanations that unifies a whopping number of observations. It has been tested six ways from Sunday, and has always passed. In addition, most often a scientific theory has spawned innumerable new lines of investigation, and often whole new sciences. It is about as unshakeable as it gets. However, it can be overturned as new evidence or new technologies are uncovered. Understand though that to overturn a scientific theory, the new idea MUST be able to not only answer all the questions and explan all the observations of the old theory, but also to answer questions that the old theory did not. This is why you most often hear that a theory has been modified, rather than discarded. What they mean by modified is that one or more of the underlying explanations has been changed or discarded - not that the theory as a whole is invalid or needs to be scrapped. See the difference? and And again, your buddy and your teacher were both correct. The "fact" of evolution is that species change over time. Moreover, new species arise, others go exinct (the complex, detailed evidence for this needs to be addressed in a separate thread). Some of the explanations for this fact, globally contained in the Theory of Evolution, may or may not be accurate - and have been subject to many modifications over the years. Thus we have a double confusion here: evolution is both a fact (the observations) and a theory (the explanations) which coupled with the common misunderstanding of the scientific use of the term "theory" leads to confusion. Hope this explanation helps. Probably for lack of time. This is a very complex subject, and one again that needs to be more fully addressed in another thread. It's not something that can be answered successfully in a one-line verbal response. You'll have to forgive your teacher for not elaborating. However, for the time being I'll give you the gist.In the first place species don't "mutate" (this term is another one that has a very specific meaning in science and is thus inapplicable in this context). Species can split, slowly change internally, or remain the same.In a split, there is some barrier (geographic, genetic, behavioral, etc) that arises between two different groups (called populations) of a species. Since the barriers (whatever they are) prevent mixing of the gene pool between the populations, and since each new population is subject to new environmental factors that don't effect the other, gradually the two populations diverge to the point where scientists state that the populations represent different species. This takes a looooooong time in most organisms. We have observed it in short-generation-time species of insects, bacteria, algae, etc. It's a bit harder to detect in "higher" organisms because of the time required. You have to have recourse to other sciences (like biogeography, ecology, geology, paleontology, etc) to see the lines of evidence that allow us to conclude speciation in higher organisms is the same as speciation in the lab. Again, the details should be covered in another thread.A slow divergeance, where a species changes into another species, is only detectable in the fossil record. It takes geological time scales for this type of phyletic evolution ("phyletic" means "within a lineage") to happen. This was what Darwin thought was what happened, btw. There are a couple of points worth mentioning:1. It's only observable in a few, mostly marine, species (like trilobites, foraminiferans, and ammonites) where an exceptionally good (read: unbroken) sequence of fossils exists.2. It's often pretty arbitrary where scientists draw the line between species in this type of evolution. At some point, a decision is made by concensus that more recent versions of Species A are now different enough from the original type to state they are Species B. Obviously we can't use the biological species concept (reproductive isolation) here - it's based entirely on morphology (what the critter looked like).3. One of Darwin's original ideas - that more recent species "replaced" older species through competition - has been shown to be wrong. The old idea of orthogenesis (speciation in a linear fashion from one to the next) is invalid. He wasn't wrong that this type of evolution occurred - just that the parent isn't always replaced by the offspring. Sometimes they co-exist for a long time.Sometimes, evolution is a conservative process. Some species or lineages remain relatively unchanged for a really long time. This is called stasis, and again is only observable in the fossil record. A new way of looking at stasis was proposed under the name punctuated equilibrium. The jury is still out on whether that new idea is completely valid and should be incorporated whole cloth into the ToE. However, it doesn't change the theory - it's neither a new idea nor a revolutionary one, in spite of the hype to the contrary. PE attempts to explain a pattern observed in the record, and is essentially a subset of the ToE, rather than a new theory.Hope this helps a bit.

Not bad... You posed some reasonable questions. I'll let the others have some fun with them. I'm interested to see if Tal responds to my most recent post on the thread.

Thank YOU. I look forward to your reply. (BTW: I think it was this thread, around page seven or so.) Keep your head down!

I have read them. I've been following this thread fairly closely. I agree with what Para wrote: Really, "scientific law" is an archaic term that is pretty much no longer in use. It was VERY common during the 19th Century. Just about everything that could have some math attached to it, or seemed to have a lot of evidence (or even good solid logic) behind it was termed a Law of Nature. The Victorian Era gave us a lot of "laws" -- some of which have turned out to be garbage with new information or new technologies, etc. (I'd have to dig a bit to find specifics - it's been awhile since I researched this particular topic - but I'm willing to if you want). Once the idea that a Law of Nature wasn't necessarily immutable came around, we started looking for new ways to describe ideas that had a lot of support. "Theory" became the word of the day. Unfortunately, the word "law" remained in the lexicon. It's one of those oddball facts that science tends to stick with the first name for something, whether species or ideas (it has to do, IMO, with the ethical "primacy of authorship" which scientists tend to very scrupulously adhere to). So even if we think, or have even shown, some early "law" is not immutable, the term tends to stick.Obviously, this leads to HUGE confusion. Heck, when I was in high school (back in the Late Paleolithic ), I was taught the erroneous "hierarchy of science" which seems to remain the way most people look at it: observation => hypothesis => theory => law. It was only way later when I started working that I was not-so-gently informed that this was BS. I think in most cases "theory" seems to be the most-used term these days for something that is so well supported by multiple lines of evidence, so many different observations, and ties in so many disparate fields and explanations, as to be for all intents and purposes factual.However, even here, scientists STILL throw the term around when it may not be justified. One example from my own field: back in the 1960's two brilliant scientists named Robert MacArthur and Edwin Wilson came up with a truly revolutionary idea in ecology. Up to that point, ecology had been mostly a descriptive science, with very little underpinning. These two guys developed the first general (and mathematical) explanation of how various factors regulated the ecology of populations. They tied in many lines of evidence, lots of observations, and gave us some really strong mathematical rules for why species are distributed in an ecosystem the way they are. They called this the Equilibrium Theory of Island Biogeography. It was a brilliant piece of work. Unfortunately, it appears their conclusions were wrong (or at least very incomplete). More detailed examinations - using the ETIB as a starting point - show that ecosystems are likely never in equilibrium. The pattern is more a dynamic disequilibrium. If we were to use a strict constructionist view of "hypothesis" and "theory", the ETIB would be the EHIB. However, we retain the "theory" part of it both for the reason I mentioned above, and for the arguably valid reason that it DID meet most of the criteria for a theory: it tied in numerous observations, it linked disparate data into a coherent explanation, it tied together multiple explanations into a theoretical framework, and it spawned many fruitful lines of investigation - and even new sciences (it forms the basis for the sciences of landscape ecology and much of conservation biology, not to mention being the springboard for much of our modern understanding of biogeography).No wonder people get confused about "theory" in science! Really, the best thing to do is simply ignore the semantics (i.e., theory vs law vs whatever), and look to the underlying evidence. Don't sweat what people inside or outside of science call something. Look to see how well supported it is. THEN decide whether it's worth accepting or rejecting. In many ways, this is an apples and oranges question. However, taking it in the spirit I think you intend, I'll try to give you my thoughts.Gravity is one of the dirty little secrets of science. Everybody on the planet can see the effects - you drop something, it falls. Physicists have come up with wonderfully complex mathematical equations to describe what happens and how bodies interact. But not one physicist on the planet can tell you why it happens. They simply don't know what gravity IS, and they have no mechanism for how it works. Try and pin 'em down sometime. They'll babble about particles and waves (sometimes one, sometimes another) and undefinable forces. They'll get shifty-eyed and mumble about quantum effects. They'll fill entire blackboards with abstruse equations that nobody but them can understand. But they can't give you a concrete mechanism to save their lives.Evolution, on the other hand, actually has an embarassment of mechanisms. Unlike gravity, however, many of these mechanisms can be isolated and their effects observed. If we want to test different ideas about how, say, metazoans evolved from single-celled organisms, we can set up lab experiments that show how colonial organisms can spontaneously arise under predation pressure. If we want to see what the effects of environmental change have on populations, we can sit on a beach for 35 years like the Grants did and see it in action day by day and year by year. We can knock out genes in mice or induce mutations in flies and see the results. IOW, our ideas about how evolution works are testable (not always, obviously, but most of the major mechanisms are and have been). Moreover, the same patterns we get from observations in the lab and in the field can be detected in the fossil record (or at least in enough cases) - so we can state fairly convincingly that what we see now happened in the past - even though we can't directly observe it. The patterns are the same.This is not to say that the mechanisms of evolution are "proven" in any juridical sense. In fact, the most fascinating arguments in biology are about the relative importance and/or existence of certain hypotheses on mechanisms. If you think biologists all agree with one another, I hope you'll have an opportunity some day to sit in on a major scientific conference where a controversial paper is being presented. The arguments and rhetoric in the EvC arena are like a ladies' tea party compared to some of the arguments in a few conferences I've attended. Of course, scientists are generally more "polite", and it seldom comes to violence. However, it's rare entertainment to watch some guy spend 15 minutes politely telling another scientist the semantic equivalent of "you're an idiot". So to wrap up your question: evolution is actually a much stronger theory than gravity. Of course, neither are "absolute" in any sense whatsoever.

Hey, that's no fair! Who are we supposed to argue with if you agree with us???

Hi Soplar,I agree with Nosy - I take issue with the weakness of this statement: I submit that ecology without evolution is simply descriptive natural history and does little if anything to advance our knowledge. Biogeography is completely unintelligible. Mutualism, commensalism, endosymbiosis, parasitism, pathology, biodiversity, etc etc all require evolution to make sense. Conservation would be ad hoc, "blind guess" science without evolution: bioinvasion, the effects of habitat degradation on ecological communities, and the long-term effects of pollution and resource over-exploitation are impossible to understand and/or mitigate without reference to evolution. The causes and consequences of extinction - local or mass - cannot be understood without evolution. Preparing for and controlling the effects of epizootic or zoonotic EIDs are impossible to even approach without evolution as a basic underpinning. The list is so comprehensive that if anything, Dobzhansky's phrase is an understatement.