I hope to continue my discussion with Paul (and anyone else) here .

(Another blatant plug! Will it never end?!?!)

I did see your later post distancing yourself from the video. Trouble is that I think first time-viewers might pop in, see the video and your introduction, and only get the headline, not your correction.

I’m glad you removed it. Thanks for that.

Anybody who would like to view the video in question may do so here.

Side note–this has been a week of intense controversy for me, on the blog and also in other situations. When I say “this has become more trouble than it’s worth,” there are other factors entering into it than what you see here (it does not have anything to do with my job or family, if anyone is wondering).

It’s all good stuff, the kind of thing that makes for important progress where it’s happening, but it tends to wear on a person. So I’ve decided to let go of this one at least, just to balance out my life a bit better for now.

I hope to move this discussion to my blog (blatant plug alarm!) with future posts.

I said what I need to say about the video there, and I don’t want to take time to respond to complaints or charges made since then. This has become more trouble than it’s worth. I’m just going to delete it.

The video is chock full of tired misinterpretations and strawmen about Evolution and science. It goes for that folksy, plain-talkin’ approach that implies that all science is just a matter of good old-fashioned common sense, not all this high-falutin, head in the clouds talk off those egghead scientists who lose sense of how things really are. It’s a plea to the ignorant, a sop to the crowds, a populist run-around in the debate that ID is supposed to be having within the scientific community.

Either you should disown this video or stop acting shocked when people use it as evidence of your ignorance of science and evolution; the two ideas are incompatible.

It’s interesting to me how people make the assumption that anyone who supports ID probably hasn’t read enough about evolution….

I have to throw in all my usual disclaimers as I say that, because there are readers now who probably haven’t seen them before. I think ID is a very intriguing and expanding research question, developing into a research program. I don’t know if it will succeed in showing empirically, to the satisfaction of large numbers of scientists, that a designer has been involved in natural history. I am an ID proponent in the sense that I strongly support its efforts; I am an ID agnostic in the sense that I don’t know how those efforts will come out.

As a writer on origins I limit myself (as far as possible) to the issue’s religious and philosophical connections, and not the nuts and bolts of the science, because I am myself not a scientist. (I also jump in once in a while when ID gets seriously misrepresented in the media.)

Having said that, Miguel, I will refrain from listing for you the books and articles I have read on the science of origins, from the evolutionary perspective. It’s been more than a few. Skepticism toward evolution does not automatically equate with ignorance about evolution.

You should probably post this on site of the person who made the video.

If I may say, I am really enjoying this thread. I admit I am making observations “from the sidelines” and drawing conclusions from them. I am not “in the huddle”, and therefore not privy to the “current thinking”, of which I would be very interested in learning more about.

That said, my point was meant to criticise both the article and certain (not all) historical sciences. I can (sort of) let the lack of details in the article slide given time and space contraints. At the same time, Dr. Pigliucci appears to use the limited baseball analogy as a general description of how the historical sciences work, and thus, opened the door to critique of the historical sciences. To be more specific, I was criticising evolutionary biology, paleontology and anthropology. That said, there may be some sound conclusions within each of these disciplines, however, IMO, they are very limited. (Again, this is a sideline observation. Extra details are always welcome)

I “chose” Dawkins’ consensus view because that is what the general public is being spoon-fed. Dawkins himself is “hostile to a rival doctrine”, which include saltation theories. This appears to be a running theme in evolutionary biology.

As for the fossil evidence, Dr. Philip Johnson brings up some interesting points in “Darwin on Trial”.
a. The fossils seem to be arranged based on the pre-supposition that macroevolution took place to prove macroevolution took place. The circular reasoning is obvious.
b. It appears paleontologists (in general) have discouraged publication of fossil evidence contrary to Darwinian Evolution (DE)/NDES. Thus, it would appear that paleontologists have cherry-picked certain circumstantial evidence while dismissing other evidence. On what basis did they do so? (rhetorical question - see first part of b)
c. Dr. Gould admitted that the sudden appearance and stasis that dominates the fossil record was paleontology’s “dirty little secret”.
Combined, points a-c lend serious doubt to the claims of paleontologists regarding the fossil record.

Yet another example of presuppositions of paleontologists is the dinosaur-to-bird macroevolutionary theory. I consider the major blow to this theory the challenge by Dr. Michael Denton in “Evolution: A Theory in Crisis”: how do you go from the bellows-type lung of a lizzard/dinosaur to the circulatory-type lung of the bird in a step-by-step process where the intermediates are breathing long enough to reproduce?

I realise I am again leaning towards the gradual/NS theory of macroevolution instead of saltation. Let this be a segue to the saltation concerns I have. To start off, it seems to me that saltation is dismissed because it could open the door to creationism or ID. You suggest that this is not a correct view by implying saltation is part of the “current thinking” of evolutionary biologists. Is this an accurate statement?

More to come…

This is where the historical or post-dictive sciences falls short: the details are glossed over.

I think you mean the details of the article’s explanation of the historical sciences, your sentence talks about the details of the historical sciences themselves. Are you really saying that the historical sciences are generally faulty? Of course, as with any human enterprise, there will be faults, but it sounds like you’re trying to dismiss them in general, which ignores, I think, and awful lot of pretty sound conclusions from many historical sciences.

Also, you are the one choosing to address Dawkins’ consensus. If you intend your critique merely as a critique of one school (Dawkins’) in current evolutionary thought, that’s fine; but if you’re intending to critique evolution as a whole, then you’re missing Gould’s PE idea, which is part of current thinking.

Your dismissal of the fossil record brings us back to the historical sciences issue.

1. I found the concept of the “continuum” vague, confusing and not very enlightening.

2. The short circuit analogy, as presented in the first few lines of the paragraph, I found superficial (and a cheap set-up for the swipe at ID at the end of the article) because anyone familiar with predictive science knows that all detailed experiments are based on a specific set of assumptions, something that was hammered into my head in 7th grade science class. To paraphrase, “Given A,B,C,…, X will occur”. The real fun part is when Y occurs instead of X.

3a. The baseball analogy then tries to explain the post-dicitive sciences by generally saying that we have circumstantial evidence, and post-dicitive scientists are playing detective. Based on what I know of law - mostly through watching episodes of Law & Order - circumstantial evidence on its own is generally weak, even though one can convict based on it. IMO, the confidence in the verdict is inversely proportional to the amount of variables involved in the situation. IOW, the fewer variables, the greater the confidence in the verdict. So Dr. Pigliucci is correct only in regards to the specific analogy: yes, “surprisingly few clues” are required “to infer an amazing amount of detail”, but only because the number of variables (house locked, glass shards on the floor inside, baseball on floor) are constrained. Plus, it only explains IN PART how the window got broken (was it vandalism or an accident?). Further investigation is clearly required.

3b. The baseball analogy ties in nicely to the video above that started this whole thread. Richard Dawkins was quoted as saying we have a lot of circumstantial evidence. However, he uses the “massive amount” of evidence to come to the conclusion that macroevolution (with natural selection dominating) occured while at the same time neglecting the number of variables involved. The variables include the various mechanisms of random mutation and natural selection (Side note: I thought Allen McNeil had a list out there, but I couldn’t find it on his blog. I’ve seen the list of mechanisms, I just can’t recall which site I saw it on). Other variables include, but are not limited to, the various ways macroevolution may have occured - punctuated equilibrium (Gould), single tree of life (Darwin), multiple trees of life (Doolittle), more recently, the bush of life (Koonin), frontloading (Mike Gene), etc. The variables increase substantially when you include the possibility of archetypes (or design).

To sum up, IMO, the overarching theme of the article by Dr. Pigliucci was a “glossed-over” generalisation of predictive and post-dictive sciences. However, as any engineer knows, the devil is in the details. This is where the historical or post-dictive sciences falls short: the details are glossed over. I also found that the purpose of the article was more served to propping up evolutionary biologists’ and paleontologists’ ego (I noticed that Dr. Pigliucci is an evolutionary biologist at SUNY - Stony Brook).

To comment on Paul’s other points in his post:

It is not my limitation (gradual over saltation), but rather the limitation imposed upon scientists by the “consensus” led by Dawkins et al. (Don’t get me started on consensus science)

Also, my implied point about macroevolution in the lab was that I would put greater emphasis on observed macroevolution in nature/real world than in the lab. To my knowledge, this has been done mostly by either analysing the fossil record and/or molecular phylogenies, both of which provide little evidence at best, flimsy at worst, to support macroevolution.

The limitation to saltation doesn’t seem necessary. Punctuated equilibrium was proposed as an expansion of, not a mutually exclusive rival to, gradualism. No need to limit macroevolution to gradualism.

I note the limitation to macroevolution in the lab. This seems unnecessary, too. There is such a thing as the historical sciences. See http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2843/is_4_29/ai_n15338075

I don’t know what the mechanisms were that produced speciation.

A qualifier before I state my case: scientific discoveries have a habit of not doing what we expect. To go off topic for a second, take the Voyager missions. Before Voyager 1 was launched, scientists generally expected nothing to learn from the satelites of the gas/ice giants. IMO, sulfur volcanoes on Io, possible liquid water ocean beneath Europa’s surface, and nitrogen “geysers” on Triton (to state just a few) were quite the shock. The Voyagers taught us to expect the unexpected.

Back to topic: If I understand NDES properly, saltation (i.e. rapid mutation) is generally frowned upon; thus macroevolution must take place gradually.

Given the above qualifier, understanding of NDES, and the animal speciation examples stated in the talkorigins link as a starting point, I would expect multiple speciations in a clear and gradual progression until a new genus/family/order/class/phylum is produced as observable evidence of NDES macroevolution. Anything other than a gradual progression is saltation, and thus not NDES macroevolution.

Now, another qualifier: I think we have to be careful when applying discoveries in the lab to what occurs in the real world. Even though the real world is modeled in the lab, the lab is still, for all intents and purposes, an artificial environment. However, say that a gradual progression of speciation that lead to a higher classification was observed in the lab. I would want to know what was the environmental variables and constraints and how does that relate to the real world.

I’ll give an example of this (sorry, no citation, but I will try my best to track it down). Sheep breeding (artificial/human selection) produced a variety of sheep breeds. However, I believe once these variations were introduced into the real world environment (i.e. outside the farm), the variations shrunk considerably. Should this be true, it would appear that while the genome possesses the potential for multiple breeds of a species/genus, natural selection “controls” the amount of variation (RM is dependent upon NS).

To sum up, macroevolution could be observed in the lab by multiple speciations that gradually progess towards a higher classification. Even if this did occur in the lab, NS would appear to select out a certain percentage (possibly 50+%) of the variations.

If I could ask a question, what were the mechanisms that produced these speciations, or did they even look there?

So, moving on, here’s a question for you: what would it look like if we did find an example of macroevolution being observed? I think that you think that such an observation has not occurred, but I want to be clear about exacctly what you’re talking about. Can you explain what that would look like a little more?

I’m looking forward to your next set of evidence.

More later.

I would say an equally valid interpretation of the fossil record would be that of archetypes (as was the view before Darwin). In other words, the fossil record is not the slam dunk you think it is.