Slimebeast said:
About paleonthology. The humanoid tree of evolution is very shaky. The lack of missing links, the reinterpretation of fossils (like the one recently, a sensational bipedal guy is now considered four-pedal) is disturbing. Dont worry, you dont offend me. As Ive said before, your instinct about me, it has some truth. I have a sceptical default stance yes, due to my religious world view. But I can play around with different scenarios, independent scenarios in my head at the same time. Like say.. the topic of evolution of morals as an example. I can see the logic up to a point (the evolution model, how morals evolved). But if I can sneak a big question mark or some doubt in there, why whouldn I? As long as I can truthfully say to my self that it's relevant and not just a "god of the gaps" cop-out. You would too if it was a topic you were very sceptical of. Look, even Dawkins admits that the evolution of morals and altruism is very puzzling. So why do we never see those sort sof confessions by the evo-defenders in forum discussions like these? So it goes both ways, the bias and the rigid positions. Especially in the bacteria example (lack of diversity and complexity). I actually find it laughable how the evo-guys refuse to acknowledge that problem no matter how I try to present it right under their noses. It's dishonest and weak, and proves that they're just as religious as I am. These debates are comedic from my point of view too. |
The evolutionists backed away from the bacteria argument you posed? I think lestatdark would beg to differ on that point. Personally I didn't notice it first time round, I just had to search for it; anyway...
"We've gone through some things before, things I have problems with. Like the lack of evolution in bacteria."
Well that wasn't exactly long, easy to skip over. The first thing that pops into my mind is the commonly cited (and I'm sure you've heard of it before) long term evolution experiment on E-coli (it even has its own Wikipedia page it's that commonly cited).
It is an experiment which began in 1988 to monitor the evolution of 12 populations of E-coli. The results proved that all populations evolved, an distinctly from each other. One population even made the (rather major) transition from acidophobe to acidophile in 40,000 generations (about 20 years as I recall?). That's like us evolving to having cyanide as our staple food. The experiment has showed that many mutations occurred, and whilst most were unsuccessful and died out relatively quickly, a few dozen were extremely beneficial and gradually became a prominent mutation throughout the population.
I think this shows that evolution in bacteria is pretty quick. 40,000 generations isn't that many when you take into account the massive evolution that occurred in the e-coli.
In a way this is kind of similar to another commonly cited case that you must come across constantly, and that is MRSA. For a bacteria to become resistant to penicillin is a big evolution. And it has been fairly rapid too because it only took around 50 years of penicillin use to develop a resistance that has allowed it to thrive. I was reading only the other week in New Scientist about how medical researchers are finding it increasingly more and more difficult to develop new ways to combat bacteria, who rapidly evolve to become resistant to treatments.
These are just two examples out of literally thousands.
To be honest, I would say that even if you claim that bacteria evolution is slow, I think I have clearly shown that it does happen and I am certain that it is not as slow as you make it out to be.
I actually met a researcher at my University a few weeks ago who is looking at the evolution in CO2 consuming bacteria. I wish I had his number right now, I bet he would be full of answers lol.
...
Anyway, as for the human evolution tree. It is fairly complete, complete enough to know how we evolved. I mean as we dig further down and "go further back in time" fossils become increasingly rare, so this is why gaps exist in the early tree of humanoid evolution, hence the "missing links". But we have found many of the so called missing links and I think you are posing this argument because you know it can never be fully satisfied.
I think that if you were shown 100 skeletons in evolutionary order you would say "I don't believe you because you don't have 200?", then when you come back a few years later and they have 200 you would say "I don't believe you because you don't have 500", and I've seen this as a typical creationist response to evolution time and time again.
The truth is though that we have found fossils of of early hominids that are clearly different to humans, if I may I would like to dust off an old chestnut...
These skulls are clearly not homosapien skulls (except the last one), they are clearly hominid though. So what does this mean? They're not our type of human, but they are human, and there's plenty of them and the further you go back the more "primitive" they become (not the right word, but you know what I mean).
There's not much room for interpretation of something so broad, it's clear as day, humans evolved.
Your arguments do not centre on the broad picture, they want to focus on the more detailed picture, which is where evolutionist and creationists agree that there is room for further development and evidence. The difference is evolutionists use it to further refine their theory, where as creationists are convinced this is evidence that falsifies the theory, which it isn't.
And whichever way you reinterpret the data, there are just many fossils that whichever way you reinterpret them, they would not be homosapien, which is what you argument relies on (that they are homosapien and can be interpreted as such).
Which brings me nicely onto my next point. Reinterpretation is why palaeontologists deserve to be acknowledged. If you never reinterpret anything, then you will never get the correct answer.
To use you example, when they thought it was bipedal did they leave it at that? No. They knew it required further study and concluded that it was possibly a quadraped. Is this bad? Again no. They have redefined the answer so it becomes more correct. They had a wrong answer before, and now they have a more right answer.
And the key thing to realise with reinterpretation is that it would rarely be a step in the wrong direction. Again I point you towards the essay I referred to earlier by Isaac Asimov, where he talks about studying the shape of the Earth, and the constant reinterpretation of it's shape.
You say reinterpretation as though it's bad, when it's actually good.
