WinePusher wrote:
Indeed, but the fact that competition exists support my assertion. Why do organisms need to "compete"? Because natural resources are scarce and those species that go extinct seem to be due to their inability to adapt to their enviroment.
Biotic interactions are not the same as abiotic interactions. There are several forms of competition which do not involve the environment at all like sexual selection.
The statement you made above is correct, but you are linking it to your previous statement:
Almost everything about the fossil record seems to dispute the validity of gradualism. So yes, a flood of a global scale coupled with the theory of catastrophism seems to be a more potent explanation for the fossil record:
Catastrophic events better explain extinctions and the disappearance of transitional species from the fossil record.What are the causes of extinctions if not enviromental factors?
is not correct.
Huge catastrophic events are drivers of speciation, but not competition. Which leads us to your next statements
I am not necessarily speaking in favor of a global flood. I am saying that catastrophic natural events that wipe out a certain species allow room for the inception of new species )as indicated by primary succession), thus catastrophism is able to account for dissimilar fossilized organisms found within different layers of strata.
In primary succession, disturbance creates room for poor competers. Shade intolerant, fast growing plants for examples. I dont see what this has to do with "dissimilar fossilized organism".
As I stated before, if there was a flood, there should be a haphazard mix of fossils, which seems to be what you are saying (its not very precise). Instead, we do find ordered fossils which are consistent worldwide.
Ok, I'll agree with you about the uniqueness of the Burgess Shale. However, keeping this example in mind, the inability of fossilization of soft body parts as an explanation for the gap between precambrian and cambrian fossils becomes somewhat arbitrary and dubious. I would not regard this as a sound explanation.
My point was there
is no gap. There are a significant amount of transitional fossils.
He presented an example of a fossil which was fossilized in a manner that contradicts superposition and faunal succession.
The foot example? The one which is thoroughly discredited?
And I am unsure of your claim that the fossil record is "orderly."
We go from simple to complex as we go from old rocks to young rocks.
We never find rabbits in cambrian rocks.
Fossils found in carboniferous rocks in Utah are the same or similar species in Moscow.
We dont find T-rex in the Jurassic in Montana, and in the pre-cambrian in Illinois.
Refer to the diagram otseng posted in Post 1092. Phyletic Gradualism predicts a gradual change in populations over time, yet in the Cambrian Explosion we see the exact opposite of this as evidenced in the fossil record.
What is phyletic gradualism? That not even a real scientific term. Did you ream my numerous posts demonstrating how he is not just wrong on his basic assumptions about scientific concepts, but his facts?
# The Cambrian explosion was the seemingly sudden appearance of a variety of complex animals about 540 million years ago (Mya), but it was not the origin of complex life. Evidence of multicellular life from about 590 and 560 Mya appears in the Doushantuo Formation in China (Chen et al. 2000, 2004), and diverse fossil forms occurred before 555 Mya (Martin et al. 2000). (The Cambrian began 543 Mya., and the Cambrian explosion is considered by many to start with the first trilobites, about 530 Mya.) Testate amoebae are known from about 750 Mya (Porter and Knoll 2000). There are tracelike fossils more than 1,200 Mya in the Stirling Range Formation of Australia (Rasmussen et al. 2002). Eukaryotes (which have relatively complex cells) may have arisen 2,700 Mya, according to fossil chemical evidence (Brocks et al. 1999). Stromatolites show evidence of microbial life 3,430 Mya (Allwood et al. 2006). Fossil microorganisms may have been found from 3,465 Mya (Schopf 1993). There is isotopic evidence of sulfur-reducing bacteria from 3,470 Mya (Shen et al. 2001) and possible evidence of microbial etching of volcanic glass from 3,480 Mya (Furnes et al. 2004).
# There are transitional fossils within the Cambrian explosion fossils. For example, there are lobopods (basically worms with legs) which are intermediate between arthropods and worms (Conway Morris 1998).
# Only some phyla appear in the Cambrian explosion. In particular, all plants postdate the Cambrian, and flowering plants, by far the dominant form of land life today, only appeared about 140 Mya (Brown 1999).
Even among animals, not all types appear in the Cambrian. Cnidarians, sponges, and probably other phyla appeared before the Cambrian. Molecular evidence shows that at least six animal phyla are Precambrian (Wang et al. 1999). Bryozoans appear first in the Ordovician. Many other soft-bodied phyla do not appear in the fossil record until much later. Although many new animal forms appeared during the Cambrian, not all did. According to one reference (Collins 1994), eleven of thirty-two metazoan phyla appear during the Cambrian, one appears Precambrian, eight after the Cambrian, and twelve have no fossil record.
And that just considers phyla. Almost none of the animal groups that people think of as groups, such as mammals, reptiles, birds, insects, and spiders, appeared in the Cambrian. The fish that appeared in the Cambrian was unlike any fish alive today.
http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CC/CC300.html
This idea that phyla magically appeared from nothing is simply untrue.
Also, to address his graphs:
1. The Cambrian explosion does not show all groups appearing together fully formed. some animal groups (and no plant, fungus, or microbe groups) appearing over many millions of years in forms very different, for the most part, from the forms that are seen today.
2. During the Cambrian, there was the first appearance of hard parts, such as shells and teeth, in animals. The lack of readily fossilizable parts before then ensures that the fossil record would be very incomplete in the Precambrian. The old age of the Precambrian era contributes to a scarcity of fossils.
3. The Precambrian fossils that have been found are consistent with a branching pattern and inconsistent with a sudden Cambrian origin. For example, bacteria appear well before multicellular organisms, and there are fossils giving evidence of transitionals leading to halkierids and arthropods.
4. Genetic evidence also shows a branching pattern in the Precambrian, indicating, for example, that plants diverged from a common ancestor before fungi diverged from animals.
http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CC/CC301.html
Also, the cambrian explosion was a 300 million year process. Not a short period of time for rapid evolution.
And the reason WHY we saw rapid evolution is because this is when oxygen levels are starting to pick up in the atmosphere. Oxygen gives organisms the energy to be able to grow bigger and move further and this then lead to carnivory, which further led to higher energy inputs.
I'm not sure if otseng's model makes an attempt to explain continental drift, so like I said I'll forego that point for now.
His models explains nothing really. Its a bit of an insult to my intelligence.
However, the idea that species live in habitats that are beneficial for their survival
supports what Creationism has to say.
Dude, come on. Read what you just said. Because species live in habitats that are beneficial for their survival? Whats the ONLY other option? Death? So really, what you are saying is "Because things are alive, it supports what creationism has to say" This statement makes no sense.
Also, how would you account for the initial origin of a group of species that have undergone disjunct distribution?
Species move. Who ever said otherwise? Why do you think plants produce floating seeds, seeds for animals to eat, seeds that fly? Why do you think animals move? I dont see the point you are trying to make.
First, I'm not definitely am not arguing in favor of a Global Flood. My first contention has to do with Dembski's postulation of Specified Complexity,
The soundness of Dembski's concept of specified complexity and the validity of arguments based on this concept are widely disputed. A frequent criticism (see Elsberry and Shallit) is that Dembski has used the terms "complexity", "information" and "improbability" interchangeably. These numbers measure properties of things of different types: Complexity measures how hard it is to describe an object (such as a bitstring), information measures how close to uniform a random probability distribution is and improbability measures how unlikely an event is given a probability distribution.
When Dembski's mathematical claims on specific complexity are interpreted to make them meaningful and conform to minimal standards of mathematical usage, they usually turn out to be false. Dembski often sidesteps these criticisms by responding that he is not "in the business of offering a strict mathematical proof for the inability of material mechanisms to generate specified complexity".[21] Yet on page 150 of No Free Lunch he claims he can prove his thesis mathematically: "In this section I will present an in-principle mathematical argument for why natural causes are incapable of generating complex specified information." Others have pointed out that a crucial calculation on page 297 of No Free Lunch is off by a factor of approximately 1065.[22]
Dembski's calculations show how a simple smooth function cannot gain information. He therefore concludes that there must be a designer to obtain CSI. However, natural selection has a branching mapping from one to many (replication) followed by pruning mapping of the many back down to a few (selection). When information is replicated, some copies can be differently modified while others remain the same, allowing information to increase. These increasing and reductional mappings were not modeled by Dembski. In other words, Dembski's calculations do not model birth and death. This basic flaw in his modeling renders all of Dembski's subsequent calculations and reasoning in No Free Lunch irrelevant because his basic model does not reflect reality. Since the basis of No Free Lunch relies on this flawed argument, the entire thesis of the book collapses.[23]
According to Martin Nowak, a Harvard professor of mathematics and evolutionary biology "We cannot calculate the probability that an eye came about. We don't have the information to make the calculation".[6]
Dembski's critics note that specified complexity, as originally defined by Leslie Orgel, is precisely what Darwinian evolution is supposed to create. Critics maintain that Dembski uses "complex" as most people would use "absurdly improbable". They also claim that his argument is a tautology: CSI cannot occur naturally because Dembski has defined it thus. They argue that to successfully demonstrate the existence of CSI, it would be necessary to show that some biological feature undoubtedly has an extremely low probability of occurring by any natural means whatsoever, something which Dembski and others have almost never attempted to do. Such calculations depend on the accurate assessment of numerous contributing probabilities, the determination of which is often necessarily subjective. Hence, CSI can at most provide a "very high probability", but not absolute certainty.
Another criticism refers to the problem of "arbitrary but specific outcomes". For example, if a coin is tossed randomly 1000 times, the probability of any particular outcome occurring is roughly one in 10300. For any particular specific outcome of the coin-tossing process, the a priori probability that this pattern occurred is thus one in 10300, which is astronomically smaller than Dembski's universal probability bound of one in 10150. Yet we know that the post hoc probability of its happening is exactly one, since we observed it happening. This is similar to the observation that it is unlikely that any given person will win a lottery, but, eventually, a lottery will have a winner; to argue that it is very unlikely that any one player would win is not the same as proving that there is the same chance that no one will win. Similarly, it has been argued that "a space of possibilities is merely being explored, and we, as pattern-seeking animals, are merely imposing patterns, and therefore targets, after the fact."[12]
Apart from such theoretical considerations, critics cite reports of evidence of the kind of evolutionary "spontanteous generation" that Dembski claims is too improbable to occur naturally. For example, in 1982, B.G. Hall published research demonstrating that after removing a gene that allows sugar digestion in certain bacteria, those bacteria, when grown in media rich in sugar, rapidly evolve new sugar-digesting enzymes to replace those removed.[24] Another widely cited example is the discovery of nylon eating bacteria that produce enzymes only useful for digesting synthetic materials that did not exist prior to the invention of nylon in 1935.
Other commentators have noted that evolution through selection is frequently used to design certain electronic, aeronautic and automotive systems which are considered problems too complex for human "intelligent designers".[25] This strongly contradicts the argument that an intelligent designer is required for the most complex systems. Such evolutionary techniques can lead to designs that are difficult to understand or evaluate since no human understands which trade-offs were made in the evolutionary process, something which mimics our poor understanding of biological systems.
Dembski's book No Free Lunch was criticised for not addressing the work of researchers who use computer simulations to investigate artificial life. According to Jeffrey Shallit:
The field of artificial life evidently poses a significant challenge to Dembski's claims about the failure of evolutionary algorithms to generate complexity. Indeed, artificial life researchers regularly find their simulations of evolution producing the sorts of novelties and increased complexity that Dembski claims are impossible.[22]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specified_ ... Criticisms
my second contention seems to parallel what Creationism predicts, that species began diverse and are becoming less and less diverse as time progresses.
Osteng doesnt know jack about ecology and he couldnt get this concept down. If you have 500 phyla, with 1 species in it, vs. 10 phyla with 100 species in it, the one with more species, is more diverse. Biodiversity is measured on the species level. Many of the phyla represented in the burgess shale only have a handfull of representatives.
The shale also has ZERO plants. An entire kingdom is missing. There are currently over 350,000 plant species. This doesnt includes the tens or hundreds of thousands which have gone extinct.
The vast majority of insects are not represented in the burgess shale. There are nearly 1 million identified insects.
To top all that, fungi which are not represented in the burgess shale are even larger. Every single plant and every single insect posses at least 1 unique species of fungi that associates with them. And this is only the symbiotic fungi, not even including the free living fungi.
Then we have all the birds (10,000 species), reptiles (and amphibian) (15,000) and mammals (5,5000 which are not represented in the burgess shale and are extant. This doesnt include the rest of the stuff living in the past 600 million years.
So, to make it
crystal clear, anyone who tells you biodiversity was higher in the cambrian, doesnt know what they are talking about.
