Archaeopteryx, Evolution and Morphology

[Medic]

Relevant portion at 5:40.Sorry if your YouTube sucks as much as mine; you might very well have to wait those 5 minutes. It's a nice video though, even if the methods Liddle uses to make his point is rife with fallacies you could fly a jumbo jet through.

Anyway, he mentions one Professor Jeffrey Schwartz, who's "turning evolution on it's head." Of course, there is no counter-argument to this specific segment in this video. I can't remember who 1st pointed out on SDN that video is the best medium for persuasion exactly because of this; you can omit other points of view and competing evidence, but it's something that struck a cord with me.

His theory goes along the lines of morphology, that recessive genes building up over time create the potential for a new species to branch off. The spread of the potential for a new species to come out of these build up of recessive traits may take several generations but the appearance of it, takes just one generation.

Then there's evolution, as Dawkins once put it "Life results from the non-random survival of randomly varying replicators." In other words, the prorogation of some genes out of a great genetic diversity in species, as guided by natural selection, is where we see speciation come from. There is change with respect to improvement, not a wholly random process.

I haven't been able to find something of a source-document describing in detail, morphology, so my understanding of it may not be a strawman, but it seems to me that it fails completely to describe the sorts of mutually competitive adaptations we see in nature now. One example I can recall is non-monarch butterflies that just so happen to look just like monarch butterflies, so obviously they look every bit an unpleasant meal that the monarch is to predators. It seems to me that these specific adaptations can't be explained by morphology because without a gradual process of natural selection, you don't have a mechanism to explain why predators and prey [just one example] specifically adapt against each other.

In short, he can point out real or perceived shortcomings of evolution but what does it do BETTER. How is it really a better theory at predicting the variation we see in the world? Morphology and natural selection are mutually exclusive, but it seems of the two, only the latter adequately that sort of adaptation.


Feel free to comment on the video too I suppose, since I'm not entirely confident I didn't just run across a batshit theory that will be discarded in 1-2 posts.

[Medic]

Fuck I forgot to note this bit that really annoyed me and actually made me decide to post this in the 1st place.

The Darwinian theory is that selection causes the feature to appear but in fact a feature can only have selection act on it once it appears.

The choppy editing of any documentary does create an inherent potential for out-of-context quotes but isn't this a gross strawman of evolution? I mean, no, just no. The genes themselves are not an intelligent entity that realize what adaptation needs to occur in order to better compete in the future, but that's an unstated point in this sentence. Natural selection says that when a beneficial adaptation appears, an adaptation that is a function of genetic diversity, it will propagate because that organism will be more fit for survival.

Or is he contending that these mutations and variations don't have a sufficient explanatory mechanism in evolution to describe how they come about? We have observed micro-evolution at work so I can't believe that's the case.

I did notice this PDF though which had a rather interesting quote:

Although he had already commited himself in the Origin to answering this question by invoking a gradualistic model of change, Darwin was clearly aware of examples, not only from nature, but also from plant and animal domestication, that could have led him to formulate a different model of evolutionary tempo. For example, in volume 1 of Variation (pp, 92-94) he commented on how the niata breed of cattle had appeared suddenly, in the course of one generation, and then described in detail how they differed from the common cattle in numerous aspects of their anatomy.

In fact, on comparison with the skull of a common ox, scarcely a single bone presents the same exact shape, and the whole skull was a wonderfully different apearance. (p. 94)

Although they appreared suddenly, and their features were so different from those of common cattle, niata cattle could breed successfully with one another, as well as with common cattle, In the latter case, Darwin even discussed the specific characters that were often dominant in offsprink when a niata cow was mated with a common bull, and vice versa.

Darwin of course later discarded these examples, of which there were many, because most happened under domestication. Evolution may may have a high-gear, but that it isn't necessarily the case in nature -- especially if the appearance of such morphs in nature wouldn't be beneficial, as Darwin noted with the niata.

Still, in the instance that they are beneficial, that's neat to think about. Maybe the 2 theories aren't entirely mutually exclusive?

[Molyneux]

Just a note...but it's "struck a chord", not "struck a cord". It's a musical reference.

[Darth Wong]

The idea that features simply "appear" is a longstanding creationist caricature of evolution. There are no features which abruptly appear; they are always modified versions of existing features.

[Admiral Valdemar]

They never do grasp this gradual aspect of the whole concept. I guess that's why a lot of cretinists ask why monkeys in the zoo aren't morphing into new species right before their very eyes. Information doesn't just magically arise out of nothing, there needs to be a foundation for new features to appear from since, unlike Larmarck's model, a creature cannot think it wants wings and get them soon after when it started off crawling on it's belly.

[Surlethe]

They never do grasp this gradual aspect of the whole concept. I guess that's why a lot of cretinists ask why monkeys in the zoo aren't morphing into new species right before their very eyes.

Creationists lack either the ability or the will (it depends based on the case) to consider the problem of the development of species abstractly. There is no way a human mind can grasp the absolutely gargantuan timescale over which evolution occurs. It requires one to be able to abstractly handle the timescale in order to conclude that evolution can describe the immense variety of life on the Earth.

By contrast, note that the act of creating something is very intuitive and concrete, and the timescale of 6000-10000 is, while not directly intuitive, something which can be grasped much more easily than millions or billions.