"Am I missing something here, or is this scenario about a group of
intelligent
players with a specific teleology in mind, and a specific strategy to reach
it?"
The fact that the card players have a specific teleology in their minds has
no bearing on the problem. Let us place this game in Stalin's Russia. The
guard tells the players to save their clubs Their "teleolgoy" is to have
clubs.. But when the hand is dealt and the players mix their cards to form a
big hand, the guard takes out and shoots all players who have more than 6
clubs in their hand. Replacement players are brought in, the surviving hands
are split, and reproduced for the replacement players and the process is
repeated. Before you know it, there isn't a club in the room, in spite of
the intentions of the players.
You wrote:
"If the players are environmental factors, I still don't get it. How should
the
environment know that a few more clubs are "better"? Unless the player with
the most clubs "survives" the present hand, how is his position on the next
deal a "cumulation"? Isn't the LARGE assumption here that the player with a
few more clubs will get to hold them deal after deal?"
The next deal does not start with the same cards as the original deal.
Notice that they said that the hand was "reproduced". The second round was
not dealt to the players but consists of a reproduction of the cards you have
+ a shuffle. That makes the situation much different than what I think you
are describing.
You wrote:
"And THEN, where is the fossil evidence of all these "deals"? We should at
least be able to find thousands of "hands" that have progressively more
"clubs," shouldn't we?""
How do you know that we don't find thousands of animals which progressively
change? You have been told that by people for years, but there are thousands
of examples of gradual change in the fossil record. The problem is that most
of the authors in the area of creationism are not very familiar with the
literature. I do not claim expertise here, but I ran across the following
items. From Nature recently:
"The i'iwi (Vestiaria coccinea) is a Hawaiian honeyeater which, as records
from the last century show, used to feed largely by extracting nectar from
lobelioid flowers. The i'iwi's long, downcurved bill is well adapted for
extracting the nectar from the base of the deep corollas of these flowers,
which they pollinate in the process. But lobelioids are no longer abundant,
and in a paper in Conservation Biology Smith and colleagues describe evidence
that teh i'iwi's bill is evolving in response to the bird's enforced change
in feeding habits.
"Lobelioids used to be a prominent component of Hawaiian forests. In
the past 100 years, however, a quarter of the species have become extincet
and the remainder are rare as a result of habitat changes and grazing by
feral ungulates. I'iwi now feed largely upon the flowers of the ohia treee,
Mestrosideros polymorpha. According to nineteenth-century naturalists,
i'iwis were excluded from this tree by the aggressive behaviour of another
honeyeater, th 'o'o (Moho nobilis). But the 'o'o was extinct by 1900.
"Ohia flowers lack corollas and the other honeyeater species that feed
upon them have short bills. Smit et al. thus predicted that the i'iwi should
evolve a shorter bill and they compared measurements of museum specimens
collected before 1902 with measurements of live speciments. This analysis
showed that i'iwis have undergone stattistically significant declines in
upper mandible lenght by about 2-3 percent, whereas characters such as wing
or
tarsus length are the same. No such change in mandible length was recorded
in a related honeyeater species, the aparine Himatione sanguinea, that had
not altered its diet.
"The classic example of a microevolutionary change in bill morphology is
that in one of Darwin's finches, Geospiza fortis, on Daphne Major Island in
the Galapagos. There the population shows rapid declines in bill depth and
width after severe El Nino events, as a result of a short-term fall in the
abundance of large seeds and an increase in small ones. The especial
interest in the case of the i'iwi, however, is that the adaptations in bill
length are a response to extinctions and are likely to be
long-lived."~William J. Sutherland,
"I'iwis fit the Bill," Nature May 4, 1995, 375, p. 14.
I know that the answer will be something to the effect "This is only small,
micromutational change, big deal. This does not prove large change."
Consider this: Does our galaxy orbit the local galactic group? The necessary
changes in position on the sky of the other galaxies are far too small to
even be measured. The only motion we can detect is line of sight motion.
Extrapolation from the measured motion does not lead to an orbit, but to
collisions with other galaxies.
My point is this, if you believe that there is an orbit for our galaxy
in the local cluster, then you believe in alteration of events which are too
small to even measure. So why is there a sudden reluctance among many
christians to disbelieve that small changes in the genetic composition
eventually leads to major morphological change? There is also the fact that
digital systems which mutate and reproduce have very complex topological
phase spaces, just like the system I based my selection program on. Random
mutations, eventually lead to major, sudden morphological change. Like it or
not, that is the nature of digital, iterative systems and DNA is a digital
iterative system!
Przewalski's Horse displays gradual change.This horse is the animal
which is found painted on European cave walls. It was not found alive until
the late 1800's. The horse, equus equus, has 64 chromosomes, Przewalski's
Horse has 66 chromosomes. However, the horse and Przewalski's horse can mate
and produce fertile offspring. The reason is that one of the horse
chromosomes broke in to giving rise to Przewalski's horse. During mating,
the two broken halves in Przewalski's horse can align with the unbroken equus
chromosome. One might be tempted to say big deal except that all horse-like
animals appear to have arisen this way. The plains zebra has 44 chromosomes,
but some have 45. Assuming that two 45 chromosome zebras mated you could get
a 46 chromosome zebra. Burchell's zebra is such a beast. Donkeys have 62
chromosomes (one has been found with 63); Persian onagers have 55 or 56
chromosomes, kulans have 54 or 55 and kiangs have 55 or 56. This seems to be
an excellent example of gradual chromosomal and morphological change.
Other documented changes are a gradual change are documented by Nehm and
Geary, where they show a gradual transition of one fossil species of Prunam
coniforme to Prunam christineladdae. (see
Ross H. Nehm and Dana H. Geary, "A Gradual Morphologic Transition During a
Rapid Speciation Event in Marginellid Gastropods," Journal of Paleontology,
68(4), 1994, p. 787-795.)
T. Barnard, wrote of the Dentalina which evolved from the Nodosaria
(these are microscopic forms of life.
"This is perhaps the most difficult of all the groups of the Lagenidae to
study, because at certain horizons the differences between the genus
Nodosaria and Dentalina become so much reduced that the genera appear to
grade into each other, with accompanying difficulties in taxonomy." (T.
Barnard, Evolution in Selected Jurassic Lagenidae", in G. H. R. von
Koenigswald, ed., _Evolutionary Trends in Foraminifera_ Amsterdam: Elsevier,
1963 p. 89)
One of the most fascinating speciations (at least to me) is the
speciation which is has been taking place among the Cichlid fish.Steven M.
Stanley writes:
"Lake Victoria itself offers evidence of evolutionary
divergence on a much larger scale. This lake is at most 750,000
years old, which makes it quite young on a geological scale of
time, and yet it contains about 170 species of cichlid fishes,
all but three of which are unknown to any other locality."~Steven
M. Stanley, "Evolution of Life: Evidence for a New Pattern",
Great Ideas Today, 1983, (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica,
1983), p. 24.
Of the Lake Victoria Flock Axel Meyer writes:
""However, electophoretic data showed that the members of this
cichlid flock are extremely closely related (the mean genetic
distance being only 0.006 substitutions per locus), which
suggested that they might have recently arisen from a single
ancestral species."~Axel Meyer "Phylogenetic Relationships and
Evolutionary Processes in East African Cichlid Fishes," Trends in
Ecology and Evolution, 8:8(1993), p. 280
Stanley tells of a small lake at the edge of Lake Victoria
"At the margin of Lake Victoria, in Uganda, there sits a
small body of water called Lake Nabugabo that has an areal extent
of some fifteen miles. The smaller lake obviously formed from
the larger one when a sand spit grew across a channel that
formerly united the two bodies of water. Radiocarbon dating of
fossil plant material in the spit shows that Nabugabo was
separated from the parent lake approximately four thousand years
ago. Within Lake Nabugabo are, five species of cichlid fishes
unknown from Lake Victoria or any other locality in the world."
.~Steven M.Stanley, "Evolution of Life: Evidence for a New Pattern", Great
Ideas Today, 1983, (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1983), p.
22
For the creationist who thinks that carbon 14 dating dates things
too old, the problem is even greater. It means that the
speciation has occurred in even a shorter time.
One final gradual change.
Stanley writes:
" "Hawaii harbors several moths of the genus Hedylepta that
feed only on banana plants. Other species of the genus feed on
other Hawaiian plants, and similarities of form demonstrate that
one of these that feeds on palms is the ancestor of the banana-
feeding species. Each of the banana-feeding species is
restricted to high mountain forests on only one or two islands,
and the reason they must bear a descendant rather than ancestral
relationship to the palm-feeding species is that, while palm
trees are native Hawaiian plants, banana trees are not. In fact
Polynesians first introduced the banana plant to the Hawaiian
Islands only about a thousand years ago. This sets an upper
limit for the evolution of the new banana-feeding insect species.
For all we know, they evolved in a small fraction of this
interval."~Steven M. Stanley, "Evolution of Life: Evidence for a
New Pattern", Great Ideas Today, 1983, (Chicago: Encyclopaedia
Britannica, 1983), p. 21
These insects are not far morphologically from their ancestor. Gradual
change.
glenn