Slaying Meyer's Hopeless Monster

Here's a simple review--Darwin's Doubt completely lacks any kind of match-up between specific, identifiable cause and specific, identifiable effect that points to design.

For that reason alone, it has done nothing to change ID from being mere speculation and apologetics.

Glen Davidson

Here, allow me to step in with some bits I put up on talk.origins recently.

First, a take on the whole book that I don't recall seeing in other reviews:

I've finished reading the book, and to my surprise it turns out not to be about the Cambrian explosion at all. Sure, the first few chapters are, but they and the explosion they discuss are irrelevant to the main point, which is that any significant amount of evolution is impossible. Meyer proves that no new protein can arise, and no developmental program can change, not even once in the entire history of life. So forget the Cambrian explosion, whose duration is by the way irrelevant. Humans and chimps can't be related; they're just too different for evolution to manage. Oddly enough, Meyer seems not to take his own message and doesn't draw the conclusions about the history of life that follow directly from his studies. Not even with a "much light will be thrown" sentence.

And, by the way, don't go countering with anything like "we have conclusive evidence that it happeed, so it must be possible". Meyer rejects all historical evidence as mere conjecture.

Second, a bit of summary on the fossil chapters:

Chapter 1: Darwin's Nemesis. Why Louis Agassiz was a great scientist and was perfectly right not to accept evolution. Agassiz was all for separate creation of each species, which Meyer conveniently elides into the inability of evolution to generate "wholly novel organisms", without ever confronting the difference. And of course he raises the title problem that the book is ostensibly about: the sudden appearance of disparate animal taxa in the Cambrian explosion.

2: The Burgess bestiary. All about the Burgess Shale and, eventually, the Chengjiang fauna, interpreted as weird wonders with no relatives. Hallucigenia, for example, is considered a bizarre, one-of-a-kind monster, which was certainly Conway Morris's original notion; but that changed, and now we know it's connected to a number of other Cambrian fossils and to modern onychophorans. Similarly, he can simultaneously claim there are no transitional forms while touting Anomalocaris as just an unusual arthropod.

Here we begin two major confusions that are repeated and amplified in succeeding chapters: first about when the Cambrian explosion happened, as any phylum with a first appearance in the Cambrian is counted in fig. 2.5 as part of the explosion, including phyla that appear in the 20+ million years of the Cambrian that he fails to mention before his explosion starts; second, confusing appearance in the fossil record with appearance on earth, as if the record were perfect.

And we also begin the habit of cognitive dissonance; Anomalocaris (above) is one such example. He also is capable of noticing (in fig. 2.5) that a dozen phyla have no or almost no fossil records while simultaneously proposing that the record is nearly perfect. I suppose you can reconcile that if you presume that some phyla have been created just recently, but Meyer seems not to notice, as will often be the case below, that his claims have implications.

A major claim in this chapter is the idea of "top-down" appearance: phyla appearing before families, families before species, etc. He dismisses the idea that this is an artifact of classification, but makes no real argument. But phyla were defined based on extant species as the broadest classifications, and so must arise earliest in the history of life, before lower-level groups that they contain. His counter is that these early taxa all have the distinctive features of their modern relatives. Oddly enough, he frequently cites one of my favorite papers, Budd & Jensen 2000, which shows that nearly all Cambrian taxa are at best stem-members of their respective groups. And he relegates potential transitional fossils (Anomalocaris, Opabinia, halkieriids, etc.) either to extant phyla or to new phyla, again unrelated to any others. Each transitional fossil, in other words, just creates another gap.

3: Soft bodies and hard facts. Here we dismiss the idea that the sudden appearance of soft-bodied taxa in the Cambrian explosion can be a preservational artifact. For example, we have preserved fossils of bacteria in stromatolites billions of years old. If tiny little bacteria can be preserved, reasons Meyer, then no large animals should remain unpreserved. Can anyone be this naive about taphonomy? I suppose so. But different taphonomic conditions preserve different things; what preserves bacteria doesn't necessarily preserve animals, and vice versa.

More cognitive dissonance: he takes pains to point out (in the previous chapter) that fossil deposits like the Burgess shale are extraordinarily rare, but here declares that if there were equivalent species before the Chengjiang, we would have found them. (I will note also that he doesn't say "before the Chengjiang"; he says "in the Precambrian", again ignoring a 20-million-year stretch of early Cambrian time).

Meyer also perpetuates the claim that many body plans are impossible without mineralized skeletons; he consistently confuses "hard" with "mineralized", despite the evidence of the commonly preserved, mineralized trilobites vs. rarely preserved, non-mineralized arthropods of the Burgess and Chengjiang. Clearly, a tough, organic exoskeleton or shell can make a body plan possible without readily preservable mineralization. So, what we have in the Cambrian explosion is the sudden appearance in the fossil record of a host of phyla, but what that means is that they all appear in a single deposit, the Chengjian fauna. There are no earlier deposits with a similar type of preservation. Meyer, looking through a narrow window into a meadow, sees a horse, and therefore concludes that there are no other horses in that meadow to left or right of his view.

4: The *not* missing fossils? This chapter is all about the Ediacaran fauna, with the purpose of dismissing Ediacaran life as transitional. And indeed much of it isn't. Much of what he says here is true. Spriggina probably isn't bilaterian at all, since it isn't bilaterally symmetrical. However, he also dismisses other potential intermediates on the basis that they lack derived characters when in fact we can't know whether they had them or not; preservation quality just isn't good enough to tell. At the end, he mentions Kimberella, a fossil he had earlier accepted as a mollusk, but here he does all he can to cast doubt on its nature. Note again: Meyer goes straight from the Chengjiang (about 520ma) to the Precambrian (ending about 543ma) and never talks about the 20+ million years in between. God of the gaps, indeed.

And a very quick summary of three more chapters:

5: The genes tell the story? In which any notion of molecular dating is quashed.

6: The animal tree of life. In which any notion of phylogenetic analysis is likewise quashed.

7: Punk eek! In which the punctuated equilibria theory is eliminated as an explanation for the Cambrian explosion, to the surprise of nobody, including Gould and Eldredge.

Budd, G. E., and S. Jensen. 2000. A critical reappraisal of the fossil record of the bilaterian phyla. Biological Reviews 75:253-295.

Who cares about Meyer?

The real news is that the fundy ID-creationist crowd can't blame Nick aymore for not having a PhD.
Congratulations and all the best for yor future work.
Martin aka sparc

Is Skepticblog down? I'm repeatedly told I don't have permission to access it when I try the link.

John Harshman said: Is Skepticblog down? I'm repeatedly told I don't have permission to access it when I try the link.

Huh. The main skepticblog URL returns the same error. Their problem, it appears.

At least everyone agrees its an important enough book to comment on!!
Its been the scientific talk of the summer.
The point is BANG suddenly fully complicated creatures arrived and are here at a point everyone, not me/YEC, agrees in time.
It overthrows the slow acquiring of complex traits as evolutionism must predict and find in the fossil record.!
I think he's doing a good job because in reality there was no evolution or low to high complexity growth. In fact there is no greater complexity in any thing in biology. Its all got gods spirit animating it and the mechanics is all crazy complicated. Spineless sponges are not primitive because of no bony spine. They do fine.
Anyways the whole thing is all based on biological data points entirely connected by geological assertions of deposition timelines.
There is no biological research going on here by anybody. Not scientific research.

No, Robert. Sorry. The level of response has nothing to do with science (as Darwin's Doubt has nothing to do with science). It's all about ID politics. Meyer prefers to keep you ignorant, and we try to educate you. Doesn't work on you, but there may be others more susceptible to reality.

Robert, first, Meyer says that organisms need millions of years... except during the Cambrian Explosion (for extra points, state what 'exploded')... which, while lasting for over 20 million years (up to 54 million years depending on who you ask) still wasn't enough time.

Meyer misunderstands the concept of phyla. He also mistakes the idea of fossilization and both what is expected and how it works. Which is pretty pitiful coming from a Earth Science major.

Finally, and the point of my review, is his research is willfully sloppy. For example, in chapter one, he states that science has no idea how turtles evolved. They just appeared in the fossil record fully formed. Of course, if you google "turtle evolution", you will find a number of papers. One of which came out more than 4 years go and describes a proto-turtle... i.e. an evolutionary ancestor to modern turtles. Meyer ignores this completely.

I don't really expect you to understand why this is important, but Meyer SHOULD and anyone who writes science also should. The fact that he doesn't understand the importance of research shows that he doesn't have a scientific case, but a sociopolitical ax to grind.

By fisking his entire stupid book and pointing out the excessive (and fundamental) errors, we can show this... probably to the satisfaction of a court (if it ever came to that).

Personally speaking, if I read a paper from one of my high school students that had made that same claim and I googled turtle evolution (as I did) and found that paper, I would give that student a poor grade. Meyer never learned that lesson and that's a damn shame.

ogremk5 said: For example, in chapter one, he states that science has no idea how turtles evolved. They just appeared in the fossil record fully formed. Of course, if you google "turtle evolution", you will find a number of papers. One of which came out more than 4 years go and describes a proto-turtle... i.e. an evolutionary ancestor to modern turtles. Meyer ignores this completely.

Sedgewick emphasized that these Cambrian animal fossils appeared to pop out of nowhere into the geological column. But he also stressed what he viewed as a broader reason to doubt Darwin's evolutionary model: the sudden appearance of the Cambrian animals was merely the most outstanding instance of a pattern of discontinuity that extends throughout the geologic column. Where in the Ordovician strata, for instance, are many of the families of the trilobites and brachiopods present in the Cambrian just below it?{15} These creatures along with numerous other types suddenly disappear [emphasis in original]. But just as suddenly one finds newcomers in the Ordivician strata like the euypterans (sea scorpions), starfish, and tetracorals (see fig 1.5).{16} In a later Paleozoic period called the Devonian, the first amphibians (e.g., Ichthyostega) arise. Much later, many staples of the Paleozoic era (which encompasses the Cambrian, Ordovician, and four subsequent periods) suddenly go extinct in a period called the Permian.[17] Then, in the Triassic period that follows, completely novel animals such as turtles and dinosaurs emerge.[18] Such discontinuity, Sedgwick argued, is not the exception, but the rule.

Robert Byers, What about finally giving us a full review of an evo-devo book like Sean B Carroll’s Endless Forms Most Beautiful (click here)? Remember, it's a popular level book for the public which is something you stress. You could use this book to show how evo-devo and other evidence depends on fossils as you routinely parrot.......unless evo-devo really doesn't depend on fossils.

Are you ever going to address this Christian link about Christian scientists that accept and routinely use radiometric dating? You repeatedly look away and run from this (Byers, click here to see).

When are you going to get around to fully discussing SINE insertions? You could use SINEs to tie in with your wild claim that "genetic researchers today are like alchemists of yesterday" and oh here's a link to the post about SINEs that you have ignored: http://pandasthumb.org/bw/index.html#comment-300136

Are you ever going to make a full critique of this particular link?

Gilbert and his colleagues have tried to solve the problem of the origin of form by invoking mutations in genes called Hox genes, which regulate the expression of other genes involved in animal development—an approach that I will examine in Chapter 16.41 Notwithstanding, many leading biologists and paleontologists—Gerry Webster and Brian Goodwin, Günter Theissen, Marc Kirschner, and John Gerhart, Jeffrey Schwartz, Douglas Erwin, Eric Davidson, Eugene Koonin, Simon Conway Morris, Robert Carroll, Gunter Wagner, Heinz-Albert Becker and Wolf-Eckhart Lönnig, Stuart Newman and Gerd Müller, Stuart Kauffman, Peter Stadler, Heinz Saedler, James Valentine, Giuseppe Sermonti, James Shapiro and Michael Lynch, to name several—have raised questions about the adequacy of the standard neo-Darwinian mechanism, and/or the problem of evolutionary novelty in particular.42 For this reason, the Cambrian explosion now looks less like the minor anomaly that Darwin perceived it to be, and more like a profound enigma, one that exemplifies a fundamental and as yet unsolved problem—the origination of animal form.

I don’t consider myself to be in the camp of those who question the legitimacy of “modern” evolutionary theory. On the other hand, I do question the motivations of those who argue that the modern edifice has been patently unsuccessful and needs to be dismantled so that a new evolutionary synthesis can be erected to save the day. Not much drives me crazier than folks who make such statements without providing any evidence of ever having attempted to read a single paper in evolutionary theory. I find this attitude about as defensible as ID. The ID crowd tends to misinterpret my embracing of what I call “nonadaptive” mechanisms of evolution (drift, mutation, and recombination) as implying a rejection of Darwinian processes.

Webster, How the Leopard Changed Its Spots, 33; Webster and Goodwin, Form and Transformation, x; Gunter Theißen, “The Proper Place of Hopeful Monsters in Evolutionary Biology,” 351; Marc Kirschner and John Gerhart, The Plausibility of Life, 13; Schwartz, Sudden Origins, 3, 299–300; Erwin, “Macroevolution Is More Than Repeated Rounds of Microevolution”; Davidson, “Evolutionary Bioscience as Regulatory Systems Biology,” 35; Koonin, “The Origin at 150,” 473–5; Conway Morris, “Walcott, the Burgess Shale, and Rumours of a Post-Darwinian World,” R928–R930; Carroll, “Towards a New Evolutionary Synthesis,” 27; Wagner, “What Is the Promise of Developmental Evolution?”; Wagner and Stadler, “Quasi-independence, Homology and the Unity-of Type”; Becker and Lönnig, “Transposons: Eukaryotic,” 529–39; Lönnig and Saedler, “Chromosomal Rearrangements and Transposable Elements,” 402; Müller and Newman, “Origination of Organismal Form,” 7; Kauffman, At Home in the Universe, 8; Valentine and Erwin, “Interpreting Great Developmental Experiments,” 96; Sermonti, Why Is a Fly Not a Horse?; Lynch, The Origins of Genome Architecture, 369; Shapiro, Evolution, 89, 128. The perspective of Eugene Koonin, a biologist at the National Center for Biotechnology Information at the National Institutes of Health, provides just one good example of this skepticism. He argues: “The edifice of the modern synthesis has crumbled, apparently, beyond repair . . . The summary of the state of affairs on the 150th anniversary of the Origin is somewhat shocking. In the postgenomic era, all major tenets of the modern synthesis have been, if not outright overturned, replaced by a new and incomparably more complex vision of the key aspects of evolution. So, not to mince words, the modern synthesis is gone. What comes next? The answer suggested by the Darwinian discourse of 2009 is a postmodern state, not so far a postmodern synthesis. Above all, such a state is characterized by the pluralism of processes and patterns in evolution that defies any straightforward generalization.” Koonin, “The Origin at 150,” 473–75. David J. Depew and Bruce H.Weber, writing in the journal Biological Theory, are even more frank: “Darwinism in its current scientific incarnation has pretty much reached the end of its rope” (89–102).

Equally outdated is the (neo)Darwinian notion of the adaptive nature of evolution: clearly, genomes show very little if any signs of optimal design, and random drift constrained by purifying in all likelihood contributes (much) more to genome evolution than Darwinian selection 16, 17. And, with pan-adaptationism, gone forever is the notion of evolutionary progress that undoubtedly is central to the traditional evolutionary thinking, even if this is not always made explicit.

ogremk5 said: Robert, first, Meyer says that organisms need millions of years... except during the Cambrian Explosion (for extra points, state what 'exploded')... which, while lasting for over 20 million years (up to 54 million years depending on who you ask) still wasn't enough time. Meyer misunderstands the concept of phyla. He also mistakes the idea of fossilization and both what is expected and how it works. Which is pretty pitiful coming from a Earth Science major. Finally, and the point of my review, is his research is willfully sloppy. For example, in chapter one, he states that science has no idea how turtles evolved. They just appeared in the fossil record fully formed. Of course, if you google "turtle evolution", you will find a number of papers. One of which came out more than 4 years go and describes a proto-turtle... i.e. an evolutionary ancestor to modern turtles. Meyer ignores this completely. I don't really expect you to understand why this is important, but Meyer SHOULD and anyone who writes science also should. The fact that he doesn't understand the importance of research shows that he doesn't have a scientific case, but a sociopolitical ax to grind. By fisking his entire stupid book and pointing out the excessive (and fundamental) errors, we can show this... probably to the satisfaction of a court (if it ever came to that). Personally speaking, if I read a paper from one of my high school students that had made that same claim and I googled turtle evolution (as I did) and found that paper, I would give that student a poor grade. Meyer never learned that lesson and that's a damn shame.

My own small contribution is here:

Meyer's Mistake

Webster, How the Leopard Changed Its Spots, 33

Thanks orgremk5, but was the misspelling of "eurypteran" in the original? ogremk5 said:

Sedgewick emphasized that these Cambrian animal fossils appeared to pop out of nowhere into the geological column. But he also stressed what he viewed as a broader reason to doubt Darwin's evolutionary model: the sudden appearance of the Cambrian animals was merely the most outstanding instance of a pattern of discontinuity that extends throughout the geologic column. Where in the Ordovician strata, for instance, are many of the families of the trilobites and brachiopods present in the Cambrian just below it?{15} These creatures along with numerous other types suddenly disappear [emphasis in original]. But just as suddenly one finds newcomers in the Ordivician strata like the euypterans (sea scorpions)

diogeneslamp0 said: Note this IDiot Meyer is conflating extinction with appearance, making it seem as if extinction in the fossil record implies that the only other explanation is "A Magic Man dunnit."

eric said:

diogeneslamp0 said: Note this IDiot Meyer is conflating extinction with appearance, making it seem as if extinction in the fossil record implies that the only other explanation is "A Magic Man dunnit."

He's not conflating them, but he is arguing that the reasons for extinction are mysterious (cough goddidit cough), and not explained by science (cough goddidit cough). Hey folks, it may be time to get excited! You two may have discovered a new creationist argument! I looked in talk origins archive for any mention of sudden disappearance as being evidence for creationism, but it doesn't look like there are any entries for that. Nothing in CB (bio) CC300 (paleontology), or CE (misc), at least.

Since Meyer loves Louis Agassiz so much, perhaps he's indulging in some catastrophism: successive catastrophes that destroy all life, with new biotas created after each catastrophe. Of course we will never know, because Meyer knows that presenting an actual hypothesis will leave him vulnerable to criticism, so he'll remain as vague as he can. He will content himself with discussing problems with evolution. This also helps to maintain the DI's big tent, in which theistic evolutionist Behe lives in perfect agreement with YEC Nelson.

Elizabeth Liddle said: My own small contribution is here: Meyer's Mistake

At least everyone agrees its an important enough book to comment on!! Its been the scientific talk of the summer.

It's certainly not the scientific talk of the summer. Actual scientists aren't touching it. And I'm proud to admit that I have exactly the same number of non-book publications that Meyer has... and mine wasn't retracted by the publisher.

It's worth pointing out again that Darwin's Doubt was published by Harper One, whose mission statement on its web site is this:

"For 30 years we have published the books that have changed people's lives, influenced culture, built bridges between faiths, and withstood the test of time. View this video for more about HarperOne and our authors and readers.
The most important books across the full spectrum of religion, spirituality, and personal growth, adding to the wealth of the world's wisdom by stirring the waters of reflection on the primary questions of life while respecting all traditions."

They are, in other words, a publisher of religious and self-help books. Not science. But wait -- ID is science. IDers say so all the time. How does that work?

harold said:

At least everyone agrees its an important enough book to comment on!! Its been the scientific talk of the summer.

It has not been the scientific talk of the summer. I think it's worth putting this in perspective. Most people in the basic and applied sciences, even in the United States, have literally never heard of any of this. Many have never heard of ID/creationism. Those who are vaguely aware of it just see it as I did before 1999; they know some people believe that Genesis is a documentary, but they also know that some people believe in alien anal probes. Of those who are aware of organized political ID/creationism, most are directly involved in evolutionary biology. Even so, most academic evolutionary biologists are not particularly aware of ID/creationism. Then there are people like me who are either in applied scientific fields, or who take an interest in science from an outside perspective, who become aware of political ID/creationism. I happened to be living near Kansas in 1999; that's how I heard the "local" news about the science denying school board that was very transiently in power there at that time. That's how I learned about any of this. Now, obviously, I think that scientists should be more aware of creationist scheming, but the truth is, most scientists are too busy to care. I happen to be a fast typist and like to punctuate periods of intense concentration with checking up on various issues. Most people in my field are not the least bit aware of ID/creationism. Most of them haven't heard the words. It wouldn't surprise if most evolutionary biologist, let alone pathologists, in Seattle, are completely unaware of the existence of the DI. ID/creationists rely on being sneaky, but although far less than 1% of scientists and pro-science people make a hobby of rebutting ID/creationists, that's all it takes. So yes, creationists can financially destroy a few conservative rural school districts and crank out vast amounts of repetitive verbosity, but no, nothing they do is the scientific talk of the summer, the day, or the microsecond.

ogremk5 said: Robert, first, Meyer says that organisms need millions of years... except during the Cambrian Explosion (for extra points, state what 'exploded')... which, while lasting for over 20 million years (up to 54 million years depending on who you ask) still wasn't enough time. Meyer misunderstands the concept of phyla. He also mistakes the idea of fossilization and both what is expected and how it works. Which is pretty pitiful coming from a Earth Science major. Finally, and the point of my review, is his research is willfully sloppy. For example, in chapter one, he states that science has no idea how turtles evolved. They just appeared in the fossil record fully formed. Of course, if you google "turtle evolution", you will find a number of papers. One of which came out more than 4 years go and describes a proto-turtle... i.e. an evolutionary ancestor to modern turtles. Meyer ignores this completely. I don't really expect you to understand why this is important, but Meyer SHOULD and anyone who writes science also should. The fact that he doesn't understand the importance of research shows that he doesn't have a scientific case, but a sociopolitical ax to grind. By fisking his entire stupid book and pointing out the excessive (and fundamental) errors, we can show this... probably to the satisfaction of a court (if it ever came to that). Personally speaking, if I read a paper from one of my high school students that had made that same claim and I googled turtle evolution (as I did) and found that paper, I would give that student a poor grade. Meyer never learned that lesson and that's a damn shame.

Talk about a hopeless monster.

Right Robert, we can't expect researchers to actually read papers about the research they are doing. If that research was so important, then they would write a book.

Tell me Robert, how would you get fossils in anything other than a deposition event?

Don't answer that. Your description would be too painful to bear.

I'm thinking that ought to be about enough of Mr. Byers.

Yeah, Robert has reached his limit in this thread.

Elizabeth Liddle said: My own small contribution is here: Meyer's Mistake

Well, of course languages display a top-down structure. That's a clear prediction of the confusion of the tongues at Babel.

1- Kevin McCarthy is NOT a scientist

2- No one knows how turtles evolved- no one knows what makes a turtle a turtle

3- Elizabeth Liddle's response is full of her misunderstandings- also what Meyer said is based on what evolutionists said

4- Yes evos have called it the Cambrian explosion and the sudden appearance of body plans

Heck you guys can't get prokaryotes to evolve into something other than prokaryotes. Your reliance on endosymbiosis just exposes your desperation.

Several possible patterns exist for the establishment of higher taxa, the two most obvious of which are the bottom-up and top-down approaches. In the first, evolutionary novelties emerge, bit by bit. The Cambrian explosion appears to conform to the second pattern, the top-down effect.

So when a phylum, or a class, or even a kingdom first diverges from a single population into two lineages, the “morphological distance” from the other lineage will be very short.

Time for a dump to the bathroom wall.

JoeG said: LoL! SPECIES diverge, Lizzie- you know populations. So when that first SPECIES/ population splits, you now would have two different species and one genera that contains those two species. One species/ population, even if its the only one, wouldn't warrant a classification any higher than species. And unless it was capable of classifying itself it wouldn't know nor care. Then Lizzie total blows it as she accuses Meyer of not understanding the difference between "Phyla" and "Phylum" and yet his usage in the book is correct.

Elizabeth: I'm pretty sure you realize that nothing Joe G said about your review is correct, but just in case you need reassurance from a professional: yes, nothing he said is correct.

The comparisons with languages could be extended further. Conditions for fossilization of languages (i.e., written records) have varied extensively over time. We have no fossil record for proto-Indo-European. By the time we see any IE languages -- Greek, Hittite, Latin, Gothic, etc. -- they are already well separated. So if they're related, why don't we see ancestral fossils? Similarity doesn't show relationship! Linguistic analyses assume that there's a relationship! Therefore, languages were created separately by God. QED.

John Harshman said: The comparisons with languages could be extended further. Conditions for fossilization of languages (i.e., written records) have varied extensively over time. We have no fossil record for proto-Indo-European. By the time we see any IE languages -- Greek, Hittite, Latin, Gothic, etc. -- they are already well separated. So if they're related, why don't we see ancestral fossils? Similarity doesn't show relationship! Linguistic analyses assume that there's a relationship! Therefore, languages were created separately by God. QED.

joe has worn out his welcome in this thread. The personal shot at Elizabeth earns him the BW for any further comments.

TomS said: (The thought just occurred to me - is there something in languages which corresponds to irreducible complexity?)

I'm reminded of what Travis McGee said when asked if he spoke Spanish: "pidgin Spanish--no verbs."

Elizabeth Liddle said: My own small contribution is here: Meyer's Mistake

Larry Moran has an interesting graphic showing the (lack of) scope of Meyer's book.

catshark?

Elizabeth Liddle said: My own small contribution is here: Meyer's Mistake

bigdakine said:

Elizabeth Liddle said: My own small contribution is here: Meyer's Mistake

Fixed, thanks! " And how could you possibly so fundamentally understand the entire point of Darwin’s tree and its relationship to the nested hierarchies observe by Linnaeus?" I think you meant *misunderstand*

I get very frustrated with discussions about the paleontological record from the Precambrian and what it implies. I feel that theres a lot of info that's just missing from every treatment I've read.
We've all heard of the Burgess shale, and perhaps the Chengjiang and small shellies, but my question is what other fine-silt shallow-sea sediments do we have from this period? If we have none than the lack transitionals and the apparent 'explosion' is a nonissue. If on the other hand we have many deposits at one million year intervals just prior to this period ( an exaggeration ) that are completely devoid of fossils, that would be harder to explain. So I'd like to see one of those geological timelines that typically lists the fossil locals but containing and exhaustive list of every geological site from that period. It seems to me if this was done it might deflate some of the ID arguments well enough that they'd move on to other topics.
I'd try to put this together if someone could point me in the right direction. Is there a database of geological sites by timeperiod?

RodW said: I get very frustrated with discussions about the paleontological record from the Precambrian and what it implies. I feel that theres a lot of info that's just missing from every treatment I've read. I'd try to put this together if someone could point me in the right direction. Is there a database of geological sites by timeperiod?

Thanks John!

That is exactly what I was looking for!

RW

A couple of comments. Meyer's titled his book "Darwin's Doubt." Darwin never questioned the Cambrian fossils as the Burgess Shale wasn't found until 1910. I know Meyer's is trying to make an association, but the very premise of his books is erroneous.

Second, I ran across a page in Wikipedia on the Cambrian explosion that is begging for evolutionists to correct:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discredited_hypotheses_for_the_Cambrian_explosion

Perhaps some of you might take a look at the page and make the necessary corrections.

There is a series of papers I am very fond of that seem to be on topic. The first does a linguistic analysis of the languages of Polynesia using techniques similar to phylogenetics. It shows that the languages form a nested hierarchy with a common ancestor that arose in the vicinity of Southeast Taiwan. The second paper does a true phylogenetic analysis of Helicobacter pylori isolated from mouths of the native speakers of these same languages. The same nested hierarchy emerges with the common ancestor from the same region. The third paper serves as a lovely control. They examine the phylogenetics of yams eaten across the Pacific. They don't find a nested hierarchy - instead, they find 3, indicating that yams were imported from at least three different places. No assumptions were made about whether a single nested hierarchy would emerge and in fact in one case it didn't. The other nice feature is, of course, that all of these changes (yes, people are still people, Helicobacter are still Helicobacter and yams are yams) can be dated by archaeology to the last few thousand years so no 6000 years old earth arguments need apply.....

Very nice! Not that I am qualified or prepared to delve into the stuff but I probably might dig out some by creating search strings from words in the text.

After reading the defenses of Meyer's book presented at "Meyer's Mistake" I have to say that I am stunned by the total lack of comprehension out there.

I have been following creationism for quite a while, but still I was taken aback by some of the defenses.

air said: There is a series of papers I am very fond of that seem to be on topic. The first does a linguistic analysis of the languages of Polynesia using techniques similar to phylogenetics. It shows that the languages form a nested hierarchy with a common ancestor that arose in the vicinity of Southeast Taiwan. The second paper does a true phylogenetic analysis of Helicobacter pylori isolated from mouths of the native speakers of these same languages. The same nested hierarchy emerges with the common ancestor from the same region. The third paper serves as a lovely control. They examine the phylogenetics of yams eaten across the Pacific. They don't find a nested hierarchy - instead, they find 3, indicating that yams were imported from at least three different places. No assumptions were made about whether a single nested hierarchy would emerge and in fact in one case it didn't. The other nice feature is, of course, that all of these changes (yes, people are still people, Helicobacter are still Helicobacter and yams are yams) can be dated by archaeology to the last few thousand years so no 6000 years old earth arguments need apply.....

Could you give the refs?

Seconded. Refs please.

2- No one knows how turtles evolved- no one knows what makes a turtle a turtle.

DavidK said: A couple of comments. Meyer's titled his book "Darwin's Doubt." Darwin never questioned the Cambrian fossils as the Burgess Shale wasn't found until 1910. I know Meyer's is trying to make an association, but the very premise of his books is erroneous.

As you wish -

Linguistic study

Gray et. al Science 323 479 (2009)

Link to popular article not behind paywall

Helicobacter pylori study

Moodley et al Science 323 529 (2009)

link to free PubMed copy of article

Yam study

Rouiller et al. PNAS February 5, 2013 vol. 110 no.6 2205-2210 doi:10.1073/pnas.1211049110

discussion of article

Speaking of wishes, wish I was better at links -

non-borked version of last link to discussion of sweet potato article-

discussion of article

Anyone have a copy of It's a Wonderful Life? I need to know what Gould says about Darwin on page 57.

Nevermind, I found it. SOrry.

I have to apologize to ogremk5. I inadvertently marked one of his/her comments as spam. It's been restored. Sorry. This phone has teeny tiny keys.

When such blandishments fail, I always say, try an honest intellectual argument: if these names were arbitrary divisions in a smooth continuum of events unfolding through time, I would have some sympathy for the opposition-for then we might take the history of modern multicellular life, about 600 million years, and divide this time into even and arbitrary units easily remembered as l - 1 2 or A-L, at 50 million years per unit. But the earth scorns our simplifications, and becomes much more interesting in its derision . The history of life is not a continuum of development, but a record punctuated by brief, sometimes geologically instantaneous, episodes of mass extinction and subsequent diversification . The geological time scale maps this history, for fossils provide our chief criterion in fixing the temporal order of rocks. The divisions of the time scale are set at these major punctuations because extinctions and rapid diversifications leave such clear signatures in the fossil record. Hence, the time scale is not a devil's ploy for torturing students, but a chronicle of key moments in life's history. By memorizing those infernal names, you learn the major episodes of earthly time. I make no apologies for the central importance of such knowledge.

I'm hoping to find time to go over each of Meyer's objections since they reveal a lot about IDiot misconceptions of evolution (and science) and a lot about how they employ strawmen, lies, quote-mining, and distortions in order to discredit an entire field (molecular evolution).

The Cambrian explosion is a tolerably ancient event, but the earth is 4.5 billion years old, so multicellular life of modern design occupies little more than 10 percent of earthly time. This chronology poses the two classic puzzles of the Cambrian explosion-enigmas that obsessed Darwin (1859, pp. 306-10) and remain central riddles of life's history: (1) Why did multicellular life appear so late? (2) And why do these anatomically complex creatures have no direct, simpler precursors in the fossil record of Precambrian times? These questions are difficult enough now, in the context of a rich record of Precambrian life, all discovered since the 1950s. But when Charles Doolittle Walcott found the Burgess Shale in 1909, they seemed well-nigh intractable. In Walcott's time, the slate of Precambrian life was absolutely blank. Not a single well-documented fossil had been found from any time before the Cambrian explosion, and the earliest evidence of multicellular animals coincided with the earliest evidence of any life at all! From time to time, claims had been advanced-more than once by Walcott himself for Precambrian animals, but none had withstood later scrutiny. These creatures of imagination had been founded upon hope, and were later exposed as ripple marks, inorganic precipitates, or genuine fossils of later epochs misdiagnosed as primordial. This apparent absence of life during most of the earth's history, and its subsequent appearance at full complexity, posed no problem for anti-evolutionists. Roderick Impey Murchison, the great geologist who first worked out the record of early life, simply viewed the Cambrian explosion as God's moment of creation, and read the complexity of the first animals as a sign that Cod had invested appropriate care in his initial models. Murchison, writing five years before Darwin's Origin of Species, explicitly identified the Cambrian explosion as a disproof of evolution ("transmutation" in his terms), while he extolled the compound eye of the first trilobites as a marvel of exquisite design:

The earliest signs of living things, announcing as they do a high complexity of organization, entirely exclude the hypothesis of a transmutation from lower to higher grades of being. The first fiat of Creation which went forth, doubtlessly ensured the perfect adaptation of animals to the surrounding media; and thus, whilst the geologist recognizes a beginning, he can see in the innumerable facets of the eye of the earliest crustacean, the same evidences of Omniscience as in the completion of the vertebrate form (1854, p.459).

Darwin, honest as always in exposing the difficulties of his theory, placed the Cambrian explosion at the pinnacle of his distress, and devoted an entire section to this subject in the Origin of Species. Darwin acknowledged the anti-evolutionary interpretation of many important geologists: "Several of the most eminent geologists, with Sir. R. Murchison at their head, are convinced that we see in the organic remains of the lowest Silurian* stratum the dawn of life on this planet" (1859, p.307). Darwin recognized that his theory required a rich Precambrian record of precursors for the first complex animals:

If my theory be true, it is indisputable that before the lowest Silurian stratum was deposited, long periods elapsed, as long as, or probably far longer than, the whole interval from the Silurian age to the present day; and that during these vast, yet quite unknown periods of time, the world swarmed with living creatures (1859, p.307).

Darwin invoked his standard argument to resolve this uncomfortable problem: the fossil record is so imperfect that we do not have evidence for most events of life's history. But even Darwin acknowledged that his favorite ploy was wearing a bit thin in this case. His argument could easily account for a missing stage in a single lineage, but could the agencies of imperfection really obliterate absolutely all evidence for positively every creature during most of life's history? Darwin admitted: "The case at present must remain inexplicable; and may be truly urged as a valid argument against the views here entertained" (1859, p.308). Darwin has been vindicated by a rich Precambrian record, all discovered in the past thirty years. Yet the peculiar character of this evidence has not matched Darwin's prediction of a continuous rise in complexity toward Cambrian life, and the problem of the Cambrian explosion has remained as stubborn as ever-if not more so, since our confusion now rests on knowledge, rather than ignorance, about the nature of Precambrian life. Our Precambrian record now stretches back to the earliest rocks that could contain life. The earth is 4.5 billion years old, but heat from impacting bodies (as the planets first coalesced), and from radioactive decay of short-lived isotopes, caused our planet to melt and differentiate early in its history. The oldest sedimentary rocks-the 3.75-billion-year-old Isua series of west Greenland-record the cooling and stabilization of the earth's crust. These strata are too metamorphosed (altered by heat and pressure) to preserve the morphological remains of living creatures, but Schidlowski(1988) has recently argued that this oldest potential source of evidence retains a chemical signature of organic activity. Of the two common iso­topes of carbon, 12C and 13C, photosynthesis differentially uses the lighter 12C and therefore raises the ratio of isotopes-12C/13C-above the values that would be measured if all the sedimentary carbon had an inorganic source. The Isua rocks show the enhanced values of 12C that arise as a product of organic activity. * Just as chemical evidence for life may appear in the first rocks capable of providing it, morphological remains are also as old as they could possibly be. Both stromatolites (mats of sediment trapped and bound by bacteria and blue-green algae) and actual cells have been found in the earth's oldest unmetamorphosed sediments, dating to 3.5-3.6 billion years in Africa and Australia (Knoll and Barghoom, 1977; Walter, 1983). Such a simple beginning would have pleased Darwin, but the later history of Precambrian life stands strongly against his assumption of a long and gradual rise in complexity toward the products of the Cambrian explosion. For 2.4 billion years after the Isua sediments, or nearly two-thirds of the entire history of life on earth, all organisms were single-celled creatures of the simplest, or prokaryotic, design. (Prokaryotic cells have no organelles- no nucleus, no paired chromosomes, no mitochondria, no chlo­roplasts. The much larger eukaryotic cells of other unicellular organisms, and of all multicellular creatures, are vastly more complex and may have evolved from colonies of prokaryotes; mitochondria and chloroplasts, at least, look remarkably like entire prokaryotic organisms and retain some DNA of their own, perhaps as a vestige of this former independence. Bacteria and blue-green algae, or cyanophytes, are prokaryotes. All other common unicellular organisms-including the Amoeba and Paramecium of high-school biology labs-are eukaryotes.) The advent of eukaryotic cells in the fossil record some 1.4 billion years ago marks a major increment in life's complexity, but multicellular animals did not follow triumphantly in their wake. The time between the appearance of the first eukaryotic cell and the first multicellular animal is longer than the entire period of multicellular success since the Cambrian explosion. The Precambrian record does contain one fauna of multicellular animals preceding the Cambrian explosion, the Ediacara fauna, named for a locality in Australia but now known from rocks throughout the world. But this fauna can offer no comfort to Darwin's expectation for two reasons. First, the Ediacara is barely Precambrian in age. These animals are found exclusively in rocks just predating the explosion, probably no more than 700 million years old and perhaps younger. Second, the Ediacara animals may represent a failed, independent experiment in multicellular life, not a set of simpler ancestors for later creatures with hard parts. (I shall discuss the nature and status of the Ediacara fauna in chapter V.) In one sense, the Ediacara fauna poses more problems than it solves for Darwin's resolution of the Cambrian explosion . The most promising version of the "imperfection theory" holds that the Cambrian explosion only marks the appearance of hard parts in the fossil record. Multicellular life may have undergone a long history of gradually ascending complexity leaving no record in the rocks because we have found no "Burgess Shale," or soft-bodied fauna, for the Precambrian. I would not challenge the contribution of this eminently sensible argument to the resolution of the Cambrian enigma, but it cannot provide a full explanation if Ediacara animals are not ancestors for the Cambrian explosion. For the Ediacara creatures are soft-bodied, and they are not confined to some odd enclave stuck away in a peculiar Australian environment; they represent a world-wide fauna. So if the true ancestors of Cambrian creatures lacked hard parts, why have we not found them in the abundant deposits that contain the soft-bodied Ediacara fauna? Puzzles mount upon puzzles the more we consider details of the astounding 100-million-year period between the Ediacara fauna and the consolidation of modern body plans in the Burgess Shale. The beginning of the Cambrian is not marked by the appearance of trilobites and the full range of modern anatomy identified as the Cambrian explosion . The first fauna of hard parts, called the Tommotian after a locality in Russia (but also world-wide in extent), contains some creatures with identifiably modern design, but most of its members are tiny blades, caps, and cups of uncertain affinity-the "small shelly fauna," we paleontologists call it, with honorable frankness and definite embarrassment . Perhaps efficient calcification had not yet evolved, and the Tommotian creatures are ancestors that had not yet developed full skeletons, but only laid down bits of mineralized matter in small and separate places all over their bodies. But perhaps the Tommotian fauna is yet another failed experiment, later supplanted by trilobites and their cohort in the final pulse of the Cambrian explosion. Thus, instead of Darwin's gradual rise to mounting complexity, the 100 million years from Ediacara to Burgess may have witnessed three radically different faunas-the large pancake-flat soft-bodied Ediacara creatures, the tiny cups and caps of the Tommotian, and finally the modern fauna, culminating in the maximal anatomical range of the Burgess. Nearly 2.5 billion years of prokaryotic cells and nothing else- two-thirds of life's history in stasis at the lowest level of recorded complexity. Another 700 million years of the larger and much more intricate eukaryotic cells, but no aggregation to multicellular animal life. Then, in the 100-million-year wink of a geological eye, three outstandingly different faunas -from Ediacara, to Tommotian, to Burgess. Since then, more than 500 million years of wonderful stories, triumphs and tragedies, but not a single new phylum, or basic anatomical design, added to the Burgess complement. Step way way back, blur the details, and you may want to read this sequence as a tale of predictable progress: prokaryotes first, then eukaryotes, then multicellular life. But scrutinize the particulars and the comforting story collapses. Why did life remain at stage 1 for two-thirds of its history if complexity offers such benefits? Why did the origin of multicellular life proceed as a short pulse through three radically different faunas, rather than as a slow and continuous rise of complexity? The history of life is endlessly fascinating, endlessly curious, but scarcely the stuff of our usual thoughts and hopes.

Rhazes said: Ogremk5, I have a huge library of books on evolutionary biology. I have most of the references that Meyer cites, though I'm still trying to get hold of the rest of them. So, if you need help, let me know how I can contact you. This is the full passage that Meyer partially quotes from Wonderful Life:

When such blandishments fail, I always say, try an honest intellectual argument: if these names were arbitrary divisions in a smooth continuum of events unfolding through time, I would have some sympathy for the opposition-for then we might take the history of modern multicellular life, about 600 million years, and divide this time into even and arbitrary units easily remembered as l - 1 2 or A-L, at 50 million years per unit. But the earth scorns our simplifications, and becomes much more interesting in its derision . The history of life is not a continuum of development, but a record punctuated by brief, sometimes geologically instantaneous, episodes of mass extinction and subsequent diversification . The geological time scale maps this history, for fossils provide our chief criterion in fixing the temporal order of rocks. The divisions of the time scale are set at these major punctuations because extinctions and rapid diversifications leave such clear signatures in the fossil record. Hence, the time scale is not a devil's ploy for torturing students, but a chronicle of key moments in life's history. By memorizing those infernal names, you learn the major episodes of earthly time. I make no apologies for the central importance of such knowledge.

Gould starts the chapter (A Background for the Burgess Shale) by recounting how difficult it is for students to remember the names of the different eras and epochs in the geological time scale. He then reviews some quite funny simplifications and techniques that people employed to memorize the names of the different strata. And that's when the passage that I quoted starts.

I think it's time we put all of our critiques and responses in one place. I created this humble blog, where I'm going to be posting all the critical reviews that I have come across. If you don't want your review to be posted on the blog, or you'd like to modify it, please let me know, and I'll comply. Anyhow, for the rest of you fellow spectators, enjoy:

Darwin's Doubt Critical Reviews

A note to John Harshman: I compiled your comments on Sandwalk and here into one blog post, and I'll be modifying it to add your critiques of the other chapters.

Richard B. Hoppe said: Larry Moran is embarking on a critique of Meyer's Hopeless Monster II. ...

Richard B. Hoppe said: I have to apologize to ogremk5. I inadvertently marked one of his/her comments as spam. It's been restored. Sorry. This phone has teeny tiny keys.

Elizabeth Liddle said: My own small contribution is here: Meyer's Mistake

https://me.yahoo.com/a/hHXYfJpysYHQ3610gllC7ldTYTqv#37db0 said:

Elizabeth Liddle said: My own small contribution is here: Meyer's Mistake

Simple yet excellent point. It nicely shows what happens when a person with no training in a subject writes a book on that subject.

Rhazes said: I think it's time we put all of our critiques and responses in one place. I created this humble blog, where I'm going to be posting all the critical reviews that I have come across. If you don't want your review to be posted on the blog, or you'd like to modify it, please let me know, and I'll comply. Anyhow, for the rest of you fellow spectators, enjoy: Darwin's Doubt Critical Reviews A note to John Harshman: I compiled your comments on Sandwalk and here into one blog post, and I'll be modifying it to add your critiques of the other chapters.

https://me.yahoo.com/a/hHXYfJpysYHQ3610gllC7ldTYTqv#37db0 said:

Rhazes said: I think it's time we put all of our critiques and responses in one place. I created this humble blog, where I'm going to be posting all the critical reviews that I have come across. If you don't want your review to be posted on the blog, or you'd like to modify it, please let me know, and I'll comply. Anyhow, for the rest of you fellow spectators, enjoy: Darwin's Doubt Critical Reviews A note to John Harshman: I compiled your comments on Sandwalk and here into one blog post, and I'll be modifying it to add your critiques of the other chapters.

Thanks for your effort to compile all reviews. But, I couldn't find Smilodon's Retreat's chapter-by-chapter review: http://www.skepticink.com/smilodonsretreat/2013/07/09/darwins-doubt-a-review/ Am I missing something?

https://me.yahoo.com/a/hHXYfJpysYHQ3610gllC7ldTYTqv#37db0 said:

Rhazes said: I think it's time we put all of our critiques and responses in one place. I created this humble blog, where I'm going to be posting all the critical reviews that I have come across. If you don't want your review to be posted on the blog, or you'd like to modify it, please let me know, and I'll comply. Anyhow, for the rest of you fellow spectators, enjoy: Darwin's Doubt Critical Reviews A note to John Harshman: I compiled your comments on Sandwalk and here into one blog post, and I'll be modifying it to add your critiques of the other chapters.

Thanks for your effort to compile all reviews. But, I couldn't find Smilodon's Retreat's chapter-by-chapter review: http://www.skepticink.com/smilodonsretreat/2013/07/09/darwins-doubt-a-review/ Am I missing something?

Rhazes said:

https://me.yahoo.com/a/hHXYfJpysYHQ3610gllC7ldTYTqv#37db0 said:

Rhazes said: I think it's time we put all of our critiques and responses in one place. I created this humble blog, where I'm going to be posting all the critical reviews that I have come across. If you don't want your review to be posted on the blog, or you'd like to modify it, please let me know, and I'll comply. Anyhow, for the rest of you fellow spectators, enjoy: Darwin's Doubt Critical Reviews A note to John Harshman: I compiled your comments on Sandwalk and here into one blog post, and I'll be modifying it to add your critiques of the other chapters.

Thanks for your effort to compile all reviews. But, I couldn't find Smilodon's Retreat's chapter-by-chapter review: http://www.skepticink.com/smilodonsretreat/2013/07/09/darwins-doubt-a-review/ Am I missing something?

I wasn't sure whether to copy and re-organize the whole review (or at least the parts that have been published as of yet) in one blog post or to just provide a link to their series. I'll probably do the latter right now. Also, in the upcoming days, weeks and months I'm going to be adding reference material on the Cambrian radiation and protein evolution, amongst other issues, as well as my own critiques of the book.

https://me.yahoo.com/a/hHXYfJpysYHQ3610gllC7ldTYTqv#37db0 said:

Elizabeth Liddle said: My own small contribution is here: Meyer's Mistake

Simple yet excellent point. It nicely shows what happens when a person with no training in a subject writes a book on that subject.

Rhazes said: A note to John Harshman: I compiled your comments on Sandwalk and here into one blog post, and I'll be modifying it to add your critiques of the other chapters.

John Harshman said:

Rhazes said: A note to John Harshman: I compiled your comments on Sandwalk and here into one blog post, and I'll be modifying it to add your critiques of the other chapters.

I'm posting my comments initially to talk.origins, and sometimes also to other places. And I've just put up critiques of chapters 8-10 there.

Rhazes said:

John Harshman said:

Rhazes said: A note to John Harshman: I compiled your comments on Sandwalk and here into one blog post, and I'll be modifying it to add your critiques of the other chapters.

I'm posting my comments initially to talk.origins, and sometimes also to other places. And I've just put up critiques of chapters 8-10 there.

I added your critiques of chapters 8-10 to the post. Please alert me here when you publish your critiques of the chapters.

What's going on at Skepticblog? The Meyer thread, which had accumulated a bunch of comments -- OK, mostly me arguing with Peter Nyikos -- has suddenly been pruned back to 4 comments, one of them Prothero's non-answer to a question I asked him, removing my response that re-asked the question. And now attempts at new comments disappear into cyberspace. No announcement that the thread is closed, or that anyone has been banned, or whatever. It feels like the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, looseleaf edition, or perhaps Uncommon Dissent. And I find that disturbing.

John Harshman said: What's going on at Skepticblog? The Meyer thread, which had accumulated a bunch of comments -- OK, mostly me arguing with Peter Nyikos -- has suddenly been pruned back to 4 comments, one of them Prothero's non-answer to a question I asked him, removing my response that re-asked the question. And now attempts at new comments disappear into cyberspace. No announcement that the thread is closed, or that anyone has been banned, or whatever. It feels like the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, looseleaf edition, or perhaps Uncommon Dissent. And I find that disturbing.

"In this study we've estimated that rates of both morphological and genetic evolution during the Cambrian explosion were five times faster than today – quite rapid, but perfectly consistent with Darwin's theory of evolution."

Ok, I got the paper. You can download it from here:
Rates of Phenotypic and Genomic Evolution during the Cambrian Explosion

Rhazes said: If anyone would like to criticize Prothero's review, they can freely comment on my blog.

What do you think of this new study that was published just today? Here's what one of the authors has to say:

"In this study we've estimated that rates of both morphological and genetic evolution during the Cambrian explosion were five times faster than today – quite rapid, but perfectly consistent with Darwin's theory of evolution."

The original study is behind pay-walls. I'll try to get a PDF version somehow.

By the way, I didn't encounter a paywall.

Try this.

Very interesting indeed. You really need to download the supplementary information if you want to understand what they did. The collection of anchor points for the time calibration is impressive, and so is the exploration of varying parameters. The morphological result is unsurprising; it's the molecular result that's interesting. Who would expect molecular evolution to track morphological evolution so closely? I would have expected most proteins not to notice that anything was going on, except for those few whose changes were actively involved in generating the morphological changes. And this alone makes me wonder if there's some artifact at work. But the supplemental info does much to test various artifactual possibilities, and none of them seem to change the result. So I guess at this point I need to believe the result. Odd.

I'd expect neutral protein changes to accumulate at a fairly regular rate. Could that be it?

No, because what you need to explain is a big slowdown in rate after 500ma compared to before 500ma. Not a constant rate.

John Harshman said: Very interesting indeed. You really need to download the supplementary information if you want to understand what they did. The collection of anchor points for the time calibration is impressive, and so is the exploration of varying parameters. The morphological result is unsurprising; it's the molecular result that's interesting. Who would expect molecular evolution to track morphological evolution so closely? I would have expected most proteins not to notice that anything was going on, except for those few whose changes were actively involved in generating the morphological changes. And this alone makes me wonder if there's some artifact at work. But the supplemental info does much to test various artifactual possibilities, and none of them seem to change the result. So I guess at this point I need to believe the result. Odd.

As for that paper on the rates of evolution in the Cambrian Explosion, I'm sure Casey Luskin is preparing a list of ad hominem attacks right now to be published at ENV as a complete refutation. Anyone want to bet as to which ad hominem Luskin will lead with?

Atheists! Materialists!

No doubt, they'll unleash the Klinghoffer to remind us Darwin = Hitler.

Talking about rates of evolution assumes evolution. Calibrating a tree with fossils assumes there is a tree and that fossils go on it somewhere. Besides, Meyer has shown that evolution is impossible.

Besides, Meyer has shown that evolution is impossible.

John Harshman said: Talking about rates of evolution assumes evolution. Calibrating a tree with fossils assumes there is a tree and that fossils go on it somewhere. Besides, Meyer has shown that evolution is impossible.

Henry J said:

Besides, Meyer has shown that evolution is impossible.

He did? I must have missed the memo!

I added a new blog post showing how simplistic and misleading Meyer's favorite combinatorics analogy is. I cannot blame him for falling for it, though, and I don't believe that result of the more sophisticated calculation will change the substance of his argument. The argument has other weaknesses that have been noted in previous posts, and will be addressed in future posts as well.

So I do find a potential problem with Lee et al. 2013. They're comparing rates over a short period in the Early Cambrian with rates averaged over most of the Phanerozoic. That is, the times in the basal branches of their tree are much, much shorter than the times of the terminal branches. If there were similar, rapid radiations in, say, the Jurassic, they wouldn't detect them using the tree they have, because those radiations would be averaged into much longer periods of normal evolution.

Charles R. Marshall just published a short review of Darwin's Doubt: When Prior Belief Trumps Scholarship. He isn't particularly happy about the quote mine that was discovered by John Farrell.

If you don't have access to the magazine, you can read the review on the DDCR blog:
Charles R. Marshall reviews Darwin's Doubt: When Prior Belief Trumps Scholarship

Rhazes,

For compiling all those reviews in one place, you win the internet.

A blog with white text on a dark brown background, Marshall lost me. A pity, I might want to read it...

harold said:

2- No one knows how turtles evolved- no one knows what makes a turtle a turtle.

JoeG's comments reflect an important condition of contemporary society. The comments that precede them, although strongly critical of Meyer's book, are written in a civil style. JoeG, meanwhile, is exploding with insulting rage. Forget about reasoned discussion. Here in this discussion thread it doesn't matter. We have the artificial ability to shunt him to the bathroom wall. But, unless one is retired and living in some kind of an idyllic college town or some such thing, we all have to live and work within a population that is 20-40%, possibly more, composed of JoeG types. I'm referring to the entire ideological and stylistic package, of course, not just the ID/creationism. One aspect of that ideology is extreme assumption of privilege. One of the privileges they assume is that is is perfectly appropriate for them to explode with rage or jeering insults if any aspect of their ideology - an ideology which includes disrespect for science and denial of scientific reality - is questioned. They also have a strong tendency to throw out cues and hints, at least to some other people, and if you don't respond to the cue with the right line, they begin preparing for battle. Trying to avoid the discussion is taken as not responding with the right line. If they make some comment about "Obamacare" or use some other buzzword, and you just try to keep your mouth shut, you can expect further trouble down the line. In the real world, sometimes they "lose". Sometimes they get themselves fired or sued. But even when they lose, they cost other people massive amounts of time and money. Far more damage was done to the Dover school district than to any individual who promoted the teaching of creationism there. And at other times they simply win http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christine_Comer. Actually they always win. Heads, they violate your rights or persecute you and get away with it. Tails, you stop them, but you're emotionally and financially bankrupted in the process. No-one ever thought of this before. It's brilliant. Simply combine a narcissistic assumption of total privilege with a tendency to explode into rage at the drop of a pin, and you can dominate an entire free society. It's very tiresome for the rest of us, though. I was hoping that the 21st century might see a tapering off of this, but it looks more as if it may be the dawn of a new age.

The simple fact remains that random mutation and natural selection can’t account for the origin of the kind of information contained in DNA.

Cal said: This sort of "slash and burn" tactic is a favorite not only here but in leftwing political circles. Attributing such commentary to Saul Alinsky has become rather popular in recent years

The attempt to claim Meyer says "no one has any idea how turtles evolved" is utterly disingenuous. No one would say that to Meyer directly as he would shred that premise and the "supporting logic" that followed. The fact that numerous papers have been written on the evolution of turtles in no way disproves Meyer's point.

The simple fact remains that random mutation and natural selection can't account for the origin of the kind of information contained in DNA.

While intelligent design only takes us to a new set of questions (who's the designer, where did he come from, why doesn't he show his face, etc.,) it is a much more intellectually satisfying explanation than neo-Darwinism.

I'm an agnostic. I have no theistic "dog" in this fight. I simply find neo-Darwinism and its follow-on theories to lack the explanatory power it/they claim to have.

There seems to be a Lewontin-like obsession with defining science in such a way as to exclude ANY non-naturalistic cause to the point of irrationality.

If turtles aren't designed, how did some of them get painted? ;)

Cal said: The simple fact remains that random mutation and natural selection can't account for the origin of the kind of information contained in DNA. While intelligent design only takes us to a new set of questions (who's the designer, where did he come from, why doesn't he show his face, etc.,) it is a much more intellectually satisfying explanation than neo-Darwinism.

Cal said: The attempt to claim Meyer says "no one has any idea how turtles evolved" is utterly disingenuous. No one would say that to Meyer directly as he would shred that premise and the "supporting logic" that followed.

Cal said: The simple fact remains

that random mutation and natural selection can't account for the origin of the kind of information contained in DNA.