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Originally Posted by Thane
I'm sorry you feel that way, I can't help you with that.
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Don't be. I take comfort in my kinship with other species. I'd think this was obvious, given my username.
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Yes, I'm "talking about raising and lowering here" because that is exactly what YOU are DOING. You continue with:
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This is only true if you approach it from the viewpoint that humans are inherently superior, rather than exceptionally adapted.
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Anyway, what do you believe? That we are fundamentally different from other animals, and seperate from the rest of the life on this planet? Do we have a soul that animals lack?
I may seem foolish to many. That doesn't concern me in the least. That I can read between the lines is hard for some to accept. I know precisely where you're going with this and I'm not going to let you drag me there.
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So.. just where do you think this is going? I'm not 'going' anywhere in particular with this, just enjoying a philsophical discussion on the status of humans and other animals. You're starting to sound paranoid.
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That we are fundamentally different from other animals...
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Well, what
do you think? You want to hear others ideas- how about some of your own?
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That's simply not true. Believe what you will.
That's news to ME. I guess you're on the "cutting edge" of everything yes ?
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Ah.. not everything, but I was an evolutionary biologist before vet school.
Nice.. the below (in red) is from the American Conservative Union Foundation:
American Conservative Union Foundation (not a scientific source, by the way). If you are going to quote, you really ought to cite. You give the impression that this is from 'The Scientist (which you do cite below).
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Fossil records show all of the major animal groups appeared fully formed about 540 million years ago. Virtually no transitional life forms have been discovered to suggest that they evolved from earlier forms. This sudden eruption of multiple, complex organisms is referred to as the Cambrian Explosion. [b]Even Darwin knew about the lack of evidence in the fossil record to support his theory a century and a half ago !
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B]
Darwin knew that there was enough evidence in the fossil record, and that more would be found. The Cambrian explosion marks the beginning of the evolution of hard bodied animals- before that there are few (not none) fossils because soft bodied animals don't fossilize well. In fact, the Burgess shale (
National Museum of Natural History - Paleobiology) is a rare find, in that soft parts of many organisms were preserved when an underwater mud slide carried animals into the oxygen-poor depths, were they were buried in an environment more favorable to fossilization than decomposition.
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To explain this discrepancy, Darwin opined that the reason no transitional life forms had been found was because such organisms would have been too small or too fragile to become fossilized. The problem with this is that microfossils of single-celled organisms, that predate the Cambrian explosion by billions of years, have been discovered which are much smaller and more delicate than any transitional forms would have been. Also, around 70 % of the Cambrian era fossils found to date come from delicate, soft-bodied animals.
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Soft bodied things do fossilize very occasionally, but we have plenty of transitional forms. Archaeopteryx, Ambulocetus, the 'whale with legs', Tiktallik, the tetrapod fish, and my personal favorite, the Eurypterida; 'sea scorpion' ancestors of spiders and scorpions, who made the transition to land well before vertebrates did.
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This led modern Darwinists to devise a more workable hypothesis called 'Punctuated Equilibrium,' which states that speciation occurs by sudden bursts of rapid change among small populations, with long periods of little change in between. Since the populations involved were small, and separated by great expanses of time, there would be little expectation of finding the transitional forms necessary to prove speciation.
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Wrong. Punctuated equilibrium was a hypothesis of Gould and Elredge, and was suggested by the apparent suddenness of the Cambrian diversification.
It explains one possible pattern of evolution, and of course all it really says is that evolutionary change occurs at different rates. Some species may be well adapted and remain fairly static for long periods of time (like sharks), while others move into new environments and radiate rapidly (like the lake Victoria cichlids)
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This is a purely speculative hypothesis, that conveniently predicts the absence of its own supporting evidence, and it's not insignificant to note that Darwin himself opposed the notion of biological changes occurring in such a sudden, explosive manner.
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"Sudden and explosive' is a misnomer. Remember we are still talking about tens to hundreds of thousands of generations, even with the most 'punctuated' of equilibria. What you are referring to is evolution by saltation, which was suggested by Richard Goldschmidt (I think in the 1940's), and is not well supported or generally accepted, though there have been some interesting investigations of large phenotypic shifts through mutations and duplications of homeobox genes, that code for body structure and are the genetic underpinning of segmentation.
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To paraphrase Theodosius Dobzhansky, nearly everything we study in biology makes sense only in the context of one central unifying concept: evolution. Yet evolution is still quite "controversial," as a recent article and letter in this publication demonstrated (R. Lewis, The Scientist, May 12, 1997, page 13; M.J. Behe, The Scientist, June 9, 1997, page 10). Many people are still convinced it never happened. How is it that so many scientists can claim something is so certain, and so many people can be so sure it's wrong? Why can't scientists "show" the public the "truth"?
We're often tempted to blame it on "them"- these "zealots" who reject evolution, who have been so blinded, their minds so closed to the truth, that nothing we can do will sway them. But, in truth, we can't lay the blame so easily. As scientists and teachers, we've dropped the ball. Many of us don't even try to teach evolution, or we just put it out there without trying to engage the students, for fear we'll open a Pandora's box that we won't be able to close or that we'll be out in territory we don't think we can adequately defend. In arguing with the students on this point, we might risk looking like we don't know it all. Indeed, many of us have holes in our understanding of evolution, and even doubts, because we too have been taught by people who were afraid of the topic.
I myself am guilty. I've often taught evolution of genes, avoiding the actual topic of evolution of species or humans, because teaching at a religiously linked Southern college, I knew I'd have a tough time with it. I'd like to share a few of the tools I use to attempt to clarify the controversy to my students.
One of the major problems with our understanding of evolution is how we define it. "Evolution" and "natural selection" are terms used to explain the origin of the universe and of life on Earth, as well as processes in business, behavior, product development, and more. There is no consensus of the term's meaning even among biologists and authors of biology texts (see Y. Linhart, Bioscience, 47[6]:385, 1997), which certainly adds to the confusion. In his letter to The Scientist, Michael Behe points out there are three aspects to the term "evolution." Unfortunately, the word is used in far more than three different ways. The solution suggested by Linhart and others is to use the term evolution as broadly as possible; I believe we must limit its use to one. "Evolution," in the context most biologists intend to use it, is correctly defined simply as "descent with modification." That's the way Darwin introduced it, and that's the way in which it is basically incontrovertible. Darwin argued that species were created from other species through a process of change over time, by natural selection. Period.
It's important to note that Darwin did not comment on the origin of life, and we need to stop linking the concept of the biochemical origin of life with the term "evolution."
The Scientist : The Problem With Evolution: Where Have We Gone Wrong?
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Uh.. yeah. Do you realise that this article does not support creationism? That evolution does not even adress the origin of life, only what happens once it is present.
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I'll say it again for you:
The THEORY of evolution (which is continually evolving ITSELF) does that. Not so well either. That is a rather big argument among academics actually. One I'll let THEM bandy about for eternity.
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Does what?
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The theory of Evolution has some major flaws which have not been, and in some cases, cannot be overcome scientifically.
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Name one flaw that can't be overcome scientifically. We can discuss it- it will be fun.
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Now, you can claim that "the debate is over and has been for a long time" all you WANT. That doesn't make it so. The "debate" isn't over and it never WILL be over.
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the debate is over whether evolution is a good enough theory to use as a framework for exploration is long over. The dabate on how it works, what happened in our history, and the importance of various processes, genes, and relationships is ongiong (duh, otherwise I couldn't have worked in the field) and I hope it will continue for a long time.