I thoroughly enjoyed the most recent Uncommon Knowledge podcast wherein Peter Robinson, the best interviewer in the world for my money, chatted with Stephen Meyer about evolution.
As a Catholic, I don't have a coelacanth in the fight. It's all one to me whether it was natural or whether God intervened. For that reason, I can be skeptical about both sides. A previous UK podcast turned me onto the mathematical problems with evolution and since then, I've fallen more on the Divine Nudge side of the debate.
In short, for higher order animals that don't reproduce often and have small litters, like whales, you just don't get enough throws of the dice to achieve bodily transformations. That is, with complex creatures, most mutations cause deadly deformities in bone structure and organ performance. To get one that creates a new structure without killing the animal, you'd need more and more chances for mutation. Instead, in animals like whales and elephants, you get fewer and fewer because their reproductive cycles are very long and their litters are very small.
In the Cambrian Explosion, the biosphere went nuts. Lots and lots of new and very novel species came into being in an evolutionary blink of an eye. In fact, dig this.
The replacement of the late Precambrian Ediacaran biota by morphologically disparate animals at the beginning of the Phanerozoic was a key event in the history of life on Earth, the mechanisms and the time‐scales of which are not entirely understood...The extremely short duration of the faunal transition from Ediacaran to Cambrian biota within less than 410 ka supports models of ecological cascades that followed the evolutionary breakthrough of increased mobility at the beginning of the Phanerozoic.
In plain English, a whole bunch of new living things popped into existence over a period of 410,000 years. 410,000 years might as well be next week from a mutation probability point of view. I can kind of suspend my disbelief at that, given the reproductive rates of plants and simpler animals, but combined with the issues raised above about bigger, complex animals, I find the gradual evolutionary change theory hard to swallow.
So what happened?
KT's Theory Of Evolution: God got bored. He made the Universe and all of its Laws of This and Equations of That, but it was taking soooooo long to get to the good parts. The Big Dude decided to hit the FF button on the remote and zip through the fern-into-redwood scene. It was way too boring anyway. He probably figured that by the time humans were clever enough to look into the evolutionary record, they'd have figured out that He made the whole thing so why not leave really big clues about His existence?
Or maybe He just did it to see what kind of intellectual Gordian knots Richard Dawkins would create trying to explain it all.
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| Searching on "multiverse," I got this image from Adobe Stock. It's called Multiple Glowing Bubble Universes. That's, like, totally scientific and stuff, man. No faith needed. Plus, it's super cool after about 5 rips on the bong. |
Well, a couple of things:
ReplyDelete1. Even in terms of large, slow-reproducing animals like whales and humans, if we take a 20-year generation time, 410,000 years is still 20,500 generations. And when we look at selective breeding of, say, dogs, where most of the breeding has happened in maybe the last 500 years (maybe 200 dog generations, assuming a dog generation is 2.5 years), we can see pretty massive morphological changes in less than 1% of that number of generations. Changes get slower at really large sizes and long generation times, but I see no reason to think that the amount of time available isn't enough for them to still happen.
2. Looking at the paper you link to, if I am reading right, they aren't talking about the time scale for evolution of the Cambrian fauna. They are talking about the time that it took for the Cambrian fauna (which had largely evolved elsewhere) to displace the Ediacarian fauna that had originally been living in the area they are studying. Figure 7 in particular shows that they aren't claiming that the Cambrian organisms evolved from the Ediacarian organisms, but that they were two separate, competing groups. And the Cambrian fauna ultimately won out. The 410 ka that they quote is the amount of time that this replacement took to happen specifically there, in Namibia and South Africa.
I think this paper isn't so much about evolution, as it is about ecosystem succession due to invasive organisms. It is a very interesting paper, nevertheless.
Second one first. Fair enough.
ReplyDeleteFirst one - that's fine if someone is organizing the selective breeding to get a certain shape, but that's not how random females choose mates, is it? They selectively breed for song or wattle or odd things like that. Unless the song or wattle goes with changes in organs and bones, I'm not sure how you get there. With fiddler crabs, isn't it the size of the claw?
In any case, you get back to simple, random mutations rather than deliberately picking the shortest-haired runts of every litter for 30 generations and ending up with chihuahuas. I can't see where the random stuff goes.
"As a Catholic, I don't have a coelacanth in the fight. It's all one to me whether it was natural or whether God intervened. For that reason, I can be skeptical about both sides. A previous UK podcast turned me onto the mathematical problems with evolution and since then, I've fallen more on the Divine Nudge side of the debate."
ReplyDeleteI could show you -- using nothing but logic applied to currently known scientific facts -- that the evolutionists' favorite "proof" of Darwinistic/atheistic evolution, far from proving "evolution", proves "ID".
Oddly enough, in my experience going back over two decades pondering the specific question to which I allude, neither the Creationists, nor the IDists, not the Darwinists are interested in thinking the issue through.