You said, olegt, that my questions prior to that first link were irrelevant to the BreakPoint article.

But follow the trail, please. You quoted this:

Though usually presented as a matter of pure scientific reasoning, much of the evolution/ID debate comes down to a kind of aesthetic judgment—what fits best in our picture of what we think reality ought to be like. A mechanistic picture of reality fits poorly with poetry like this—not just with the sense of it, but also with the fact that such creativity exists.

But later in context of the continuing discussion on that, you say that “these aren’t the questions you explored in your article:”

It still leaves the question on the table, Does a mechanistic picture of reality fit with the existence of such creativity? That’s not a question of art. It’s a question of science and philosophy. In expanded form it is this: could a mechanistic world really “create” creativity? How? What could “creativity” actually mean in a world where everything happens just by chance and necessity (deterministically and/or by chance)?

I don’t know how you could say that this expanded set of questions does not relate to the article, in view of what you quoted yourself earlier.

So I continue to wait for your responses.

I suggest that we should find some ancestors of trilobites and all the other Cambrian animals (hard-bodied and soft-bodied), but instead we find none.

No, we shouldn’t find some ancestors necessarily. What I said was that there is no reason to believe that all ancestors of all Cambrian organisms will appear in the fossil record just because some soft-body fossils do. I don’t mean “all” in the sense of the entire geneology, but “all” in the sense of at least one unambiguous ancestor for every Cambrian organism. First, there is no guarantee that any given fossil bed even had Cambrian ancestors living in it. Life ebbs and flows with the environment, small populations tend to experience faster evolution than larger. Second, even if there were Cambrian ancestors living at the time, preservation is difficult for reasons already given.

Your special pleading has worn me out.

I’ve engaged in no special pleading. I’ve simple stated the facts of nature and what would be expected in the fossil record if evolutionary theory were true.

Now you are going “STRAW” on me:

But there’s absolutely no reason to believe that just because some soft-body fossils form and are found that all soft-body ancestors of all Cambrian organisms will magically appear in the same location.

Who suggested that? I suggest that we should find some ancestors of trilobites and all the other Cambrian animals (hard-bodied and soft-bodied), but instead we find none.

Your special pleading has worn me out.

Since you have taken offense, this is probably a good place to stop the discussion.

I haven’t taken offense. I’m letting you know that I have no interest in a grudge match were we take turns pointing out the other’s personal flaws that prevent valid reasoning. I’m not desperate to protect Darwinian theory. It succeeds or fails on the strength or weakness of its evidence and arguments, nothing more. However, if I don’t see that evidence or arguments being correctly presented, I will speak up, as in this thread.

Let’s grant you (to temporarily buttress your position) the soft- or non-exoskeleton conjecture without the clear evidence demanded by scientific investigation. Especially given the prevalence of Tribolite fossils, should we not observe a progression of fossils to the Tribolites as the exoskeleton progresses in fossilization viability… or will the response be yet another unsupported pushing back the envelope?

You misunderstand, or perhaps you didn’t see my most recent comment on this. The distinction between a calicified exoskeleton and a non-calcified exoskeletion is the key. A non-calcified exoskeleton makes fossilization difficult; the organic material all decays. However, a calcified exoskeleton makes fossilization easy, inorganic material is left behind after organics decay. Therefore, if trilobites evolved an organic exoskeleton first followed by inorganic mineral uptake to fortify that organic armor (a logical progression), we would expect to see a spotty fossil record of trilobites up until the mineralization/calification of the exoskeleton is well advanced. This would look like sudden apperance in the fossil record, when the reality closely follows known evolutionary mechanisms.

This basically means that given the nature of geology — organic material usually decays — and the likely progression of organic exoskeleton to inorganic, the fossil record of trilobites should look similar to what we see, if evolutionary theory is correct.

Yes, it would be great to find more soft-body impressions or trace fossils to flesh out early arthopod evolution and remove the puzzle, but the fossil record has always been hit or miss. Older layers are harder to find, they’ve had more time to be jumbled or simply eroded away by natural forces. We are lucky to have what we have.

Certainly soft-body fossils exist in the Burgess Shale and elsewhere. But there’s absolutely no reason to believe that just because some soft-body fossils form and are found that all soft-body ancestors of all Cambrian organisms will magically appear in the same location. That’s not the way life works, that’s not the way evolutionary mechanisms work.

You are most definitely pleading for a special exemption to the case you’re trying to make—unsuccessfully, it must be added.

Please go back and read the context of my particular exchange with pds. I’m trying to provide information (when I can) about what scientists really think about certain Cambrian puzzles posed here. Wouldn’t you rather take on the true weaknesses of Darwinian theory and not strawmen born of fundamental misunderstandings?

It’s a simple, verifiable, even logical fact that soft-bodied animals are far less likely to be fossilized than those with a calcified skeleton/exoskeleton.

Right, but soft-bodied animals fossilized anyway. That is precisely what is so amazing about the Burgess Shale, the Cambrian fauna and the Ediacara fauna. We have lots and lots of fossils of soft-bodied animals. The fossil record shows that soft-bodied animals fossilized quite nicely well before the Cambrian and during.

Please leave out the personal attacks.

Please leave out the false accusations of personal attacks.

It strikes me that we do not agree because we have very different plausibility structures. It strikes me that you are desperate to protect Darwinian theory from the facts. That is not a personal attack.

Since you have taken offense, this is probably a good place to stop the discussion.

You are most definitely pleading for a special exemption to the case you’re trying to make—unsuccessfully, it must be added. And, there were no personal attacks on you: that your fallacious reasoning was exposed is not a “personal attack.”

Every time the point is made that hardly any Tribolite ancestors exist as fossilized remains (despite the huge numbers of Tribolite fossils), you push the envelope further back as an exemption to the rule—which is a textbook case of special pleading.

Worse, you provide a reference that only accomplishes one thing: it “conjectures” the development of soft-bodied ancestors… with sparse evidence at best (that’s the unscientific part of which your position is rightly accused). Isn’t the onus on you to prove the case?

Worse still, compounding special pleading false start is a blatant (perhaps intentional?) oversight. Let’s grant you (to temporarily buttress your position) the soft- or non-exoskeleton conjecture without the clear evidence demanded by scientific investigation. Especially given the prevalence of Tribolite fossils, should we not observe a progression of fossils to the Tribolites as the exoskeleton progresses in fossilization viability… or will the response be yet another unsupported pushing back the envelope? Isn’t that quite like the “God of the gaps” explanation usually leveled against others?

To repeat: pds makes a straightforward observation that requires an explanation–not only for the observed fact but for the severe weakness of neo-Darwinian mechanisms for the period in question. Instead of entertaining other potential mechanisms, you propose “soft bodies” without substantive support. (Thinking up a possible “out” for yourself doesn’t actualize reality to meet your preconceived desires.)

Okay, granting soft-bodied fossils may not be observable, this still doesn’t absolve you of the responsibility to prove your case. If you can’t prove it by means of fossilization efficacy (or lack thereof), then prove it by other means. If you can’t prove it by other means (your current situation), then either withdraw your conjecture or stand rightly accused of special pleading.

You know I am not a supporter of IDT, but I am sympathetic to its not-well-developed point that neo-Darwinism is very weak in these areas. Nonetheless, I am an avowed enemy of the implied mechanistic reductionism (a world view) you keep pushing at all costs—which is not only “not good science,” it’s not science in the first place.

That is precisely what is so amazing about the Burgess Shale, the Cambrian fauna and the Ediacara fauna. We have lots and lots of fossils of soft bodied animals. The fossil record shows that soft-bodied animals fossilized quite nicely well before the Cambrian and during.

It’s a simple, verifiable, even logical fact that soft-bodied animals are far less likely to be fossilized than those with a calcified skeleton/exoskeleton. See below for more details.

Trilobites with a calcified exoskeleton would have evolved from something without such a structure.

Suddenly? In a great leap from no exoskeleton to having one? I find that highly implausible.

You misunderstand. A non-calcified exoskeleton is just as likely to decay away as soft-body tissues, leaving nothing for fossilization. It’s made of organic materials, after all. However, once an organism starts depositing calcium-carbonate into its exoskeleton, fossilization becomes vastly easier. The calcium-carbonate and other minerals that reinforce the exoskeleton now remain behind after all organic compounds decay.

It’s possible that trilobite ancestors gradually accumulated calcium-carbonate in their exoskeletons, which resulted in a stronger shell, thus conferring reproductive advantage. Those without any minerals were unlikely to be well-preserved simply because organic materials decay. However, those with an advanced degree of inorganic deposit would leave those deposits behind after death. This would match what we see in the fossil record.

Woodchuck, your comments include a lot of special pleading. It strikes me that you are desperate to protect Darwinian theory from the facts. That is not good science.

Please leave out the personal attacks. I’ve done nothing in this thread but attempt to correct misunderstandings about the actual science of Darwinian theory.

You are right. Computers sprang into existence in a kind of explosion. It was almost as if they were designed.

The fossil record is very poor for soft-bodied creatures.

That is precisely what is so amazing about the Burgess Shale, the Cambrian fauna and the Ediacara fauna. We have lots and lots of fossils of soft bodied animals. The fossil record shows that soft-bodied animals fossilized quite nicely well before the Cambrian and during.

Trilobites with a calcified exoskeleton would have evolved from something without such a structure.

Suddenly? In a great leap from no exoskeleton to having one? I find that highly implausible.

Woodchuck, your comments include a lot of special pleading. It strikes me that you are desperate to protect Darwinian theory from the facts. That is not good science.

Probabilities work where they work. I don’t have any reason to think they work in terms of a supernatural creator’s free choices. Do you?

This would mean God’s past behavior is in no way predictable of his future behavior. But you have to use probabilities and inference to at least trust God, right? It is not equally likely as not that God will change his mind tomorrow and send sinners to heaven and saints to hell?

In addition to what woodchuck64 says, consider this: if you were to take a random sample of 1 of every 4 million computers manufactured over the last 40 years, what would you see? And why?

Evolution is similar to free market capitalism. When a new technology comes along, or when a new market becomes viable, you get many start-ups innovating new solutions in a short time, followed quickly by a shakeout, and the most successful solution squishes almost all of the others. That solution may become dominant for a long period of time before another wave of innovation changes the landscape. During the period of dominance, there may be many start-ups that try to challenge the king, but which fail to amount to significant numbers to show up in a small sample.

Count the computers around before the PC, and my guess is that you’d be lucky to reach 4 million machines in total. You might not get a single sample of a computer that isn’t an Intel personal computer running DOS, MacOS or Windows. Yet there were Apple II’s, Pets, Ohio Scientifics, Sinclairs, PDP-11’s, VAxes, CPM machines and dozens of other species that were the predecessors of the modern PC. These species were incremental variations on a past designs. And there have been attempts to dethrone the PC since it became dominant, but I dare say none has met with conditions permitting a significant population to come into existence.

And if you’re finding only rare samples (as in fossilization), you’ll find what appear to be leaps in development. It will look like the PC sprang into existence in the 1980’s out of light bulbs and transistor radios that came before it.

We shouldn’t expect biological evolution will be gradual any more than we expect market evolution to be gradual.

Trilobites appeared in the Cambrian, and they lasted 300 million years. We have found 17,000 species of them. They are so prevalent that amateur collectors can find 10 or more in a day. Why can’t we find a single trilobite ancestor? Where we would expect to find them, we find only soft bodied Ediacara fauna lasting for 100 million years, right up to the cusp of the Cambrian explosion. That very strongly suggests something other than Darwinian mechanisms were at play.

The obvious reason we don’t find ancestors of trilobites is calcification of the exoskeleton. The fossil record is very poor for soft-bodied creatures. The odds of a soft-body fossil trace occurring are vastly lower than that for a creature with a skeleton. This is just a fact of geology.

Trilobites with a calcified exoskeleton would have evolved from something without such a structure. Therefore, if trilobytes evolved via Darwinian mechanisms and the Cambrian marks the period where the calcified exoskeleton first evolved, we would expect to find scant fossil history prior to the Cambrian.

However, it is NOT the case that we have no candidates for trilobite ancestors. We have trace fossils, and arthropod-like ancestors in the Precambrian that may be the ancestors of trilobites. See here for an example of how the fossil evidence combined with Darwinian mechanisms leads to a potential (but so far unproven) theory of trilobite origin.

You said that we know the odds of abiogenesis are low. This just isn’t true. If we knew it, we wouldn’t be looking for life on other planets.

Moreover, how can we know abiogenesis is improbable when there are no detailed models of abiogenesis? Just because we’re ignorant of the mechanism doesn’t make it improbable.

You have to remember that you are trying to rule natural processes out of the picture based on chemistry. But in order to do that you need to know everything about those natural processes, and you don’t.

…I’m aghast at your apparent understanding of all that a God might consider doing with his creativity. Why, you must be smarter than God himself to know all that!

See, I really don’t understand this sort of accusation. I am not the one who is limiting the designer, you are.

Suppose we ask a designer to make a deck of cards, by writing numbers on 52 blank cards. The designer then gives me the deck of cards, and I shuffle them. What are the odds that the card on the top of the deck is a 3? Well, if the designer chose to number them sequentially starting at the number 1, then the odds are 1 in 52. If he chose to number them sequentially starting at 456,297, then the odds are zero. If I don’t know anything about the designer, if I don’t limit the designer, the odds that a 3 would come up are SMALLER, and not greater. More designer options means a smaller chance of seeing a specific design.

So, why is it that I am accused of limiting the designer when I am partitioning the probabilities across more designs (representing MORE and not less designer freedom)?

Again, the probabilities here represent my ignorance about what the designer did, and NOT my knowledge of what he did. If I had reason to say the designer would evolve life exclusively, then I could say it was more probable evolved life would appear if there was a designer. However, THAT would be speaking for the designer. And THAT is what YOU are doing, not me.

Probabilities work where they work. I don’t have any reason to think they work in terms of a supernatural creator’s free choices. Do you?

Your choices are free, right? Yet, I can predict you probably won’t pull a bank heist this afternoon. This is because you have a personality, and a personality represents a collection of probabilities. I have a probabilistic model of what you will do. Your contra-causal free will (which you believe in) means that you can act in the tail of the probability distribution, and do something improbable. So, yes, of course probability applies to free agents. The freedom is in the tails of the distribution. If you had no personality, the distribution would be completely flat, and you would be as likely to pull a bank job as go help out at the soup kitchen. You would be as likely to enjoy base jumping as chess. Nothing in this paragraph has anything to do with worldview. You believe it just as I do.

If I don’t pre-judge your personality, then I would assume that any act or any tendency of yours was equally likely. Your next move (or your last move) becomes less predictable, and so any specific move becomes less predictable, less likely.

The only way to prevent the likelihood of the designer using evolution exclusively from vanishing is to say that the designer has personality traits that make evolution likely. What is it about evolution that makes the designer go that way instead of another? Because whatever that personality trait is, if it can predict the kind of evolution we see, it must predict some other very detailed stuff. And if it doesn’t you’re drawing targets around where the arrows land.

That’s not getting my point. The Cambrian body plans are not dramatically different in the sense that known evolutionary mechanisms can not produce them.

You are combining fact with opinion. The body plans are dramatically different. Whether evolutionary mechanisms can produce them is not even the question. The question is whether that is a plausible explanation given all we know about the entire fossil record.

Wish I had time to discuss every last detail that makes it implausible.

Here is one. Trilobites appeared in the Cambrian, and they lasted 300 million years. We have found 17,000 species of them. They are so prevalent that amateur collectors can find 10 or more in a day. Why can’t we find a single trilobite ancestor? Where we would expect to find them, we find only soft bodied Ediacara fauna lasting for 100 million years, right up to the cusp of the Cambrian explosion. That very strongly suggests something other than Darwinian mechanisms were at play.

Please note that it is not a “gap” that makes it implausible. It is the abundance of trilobite fossils and Ediacara fossils, together with the trilobite stasis and Ediacara fauna stasis in the fossil record.

Funny how God neglected to give us chemistry, antibiotics, or anything plausibly from a superior being.

Giving life and giving mankind the ability to reason and discover truths about the universe doesn’t count as anything?? That really is funny.

olegt, you asked for further evidence and interpretations, but I think it’s still your turn to answer questions I’ve asked you that have remained unanswered so far.

There were a couple of reasons for that, Tom. One, they did not seem pertinent to your article, as I explained at # 16. Two, they boil down to personal incredulity: I can’t imagine how physics explains psychology. Guess what, no one says that it does or could. When you have a moment, read the essay by Phil Anderson More is Different. That should clear it up.

Besides not being directly related to neo-Darwinian evolution, this is also not true. The scientific consensus is that it is likely that simple life forms quickly on worlds.

Wow.

Really?

Can you point to any person in any scientific field as support for that?

Is a so-far negative search for evidence now being offered as evidence for what is being searched for?

I don’t have time tonight to write the rebuttal on this, but it’s not because it’s difficult, it’s because it’s a busy weekend.

You keep using probability arguments about God and calling me irrational for not accepting them in the form you write them. This is astonishing to me. You claim to have some idea of the probability space in which you are working.

Maybe we’ll have to come back to this later, but I’m aghast at your apparent understanding of all that a God might consider doing with his creativity. Why, you must be smarter than God himself to know all that!

When the probability distribution isn’t known, you must rationally assume it’s flat

No, you can also assume that probabilities are being being used in argument sometimes.

It’s a worldview thing of course. Probabilities work where they work. I don’t have any reason to think they work in terms of a supernatural creator’s free choices. Do you?

Tom: We have reliable estimates of other probabilities relating to the appearance of the first life, however, and they are vanishingly low.

doctor(logic): Besides not being directly related to neo-Darwinian evolution, this is also not true.

Based on what data?

The scientific consensus is that it is likely that simple life forms quickly on worlds. That’s why we’re sending life-seeking probes to Titan and Mars.

Scientific consensus about the origin of life means squat. Consensus amounts to a show of hands- a subjective opinion. There were other reasons for the missions to mars and Titan. We explore planets and moons deemed not hospitable to life.

But it didn’t have to be that way, Tom. I don’t understand how you can ignore this issue for so long. God didn’t have to use evolution for any of it, let alone every single life form in existence. He didn’t need millions of years for ANY step, nor did he have to stick to the same materials at EVERY step, nor did he need to eschew manufacturing at EVERY step.

Tom knows that God is not constrained. He also knows that God gave us brains with which to analyze evidence.