On Thu, 15 Jan 1998 21:06:51 -0600, Glenn Morton wrote:
>>GM>...Suppose all you had were the bones and
>>>the bones were really old. Suppose further you didn't know the
>>>history of the dog. In such a case, you would have difficulty saying
>>>that a chihuahua is related to a St. Bernard. The bone shapes are
>>>quite different the ratios of various skeletal measurments are quite
>>>different. One might note that they are related but the same
>>>species? Without prior knowledge, I doubt that any future person,
>>>creationist or evolutionists would place them in the same species.....
>SJ>...what is your point? Obviously if there are poorly
>>preserved fossils bones, it is harder to tell what species they came
>>from. But even if these bones were perfectly preserved, we still
>>couldn't see the point where the wolf-dog split happened. It could
>>have taken 100, 5000, or 50000 years, or it could have taken only
>>1 year - the fossil record cannot (unless we are incredibly lucky)
>>reveal the wolf-dog speciation event(s).
GM>Never mind Stephen. Talking with you is often an experience in
>redundancy and frustration.
Good old Glenn. If you run out of arguments, resort to your stock-in-
trade of ad hominems! But even your claim was true, that my arguments
are often redundant and you are frustrated by them, so what? It is
up to *you* my friend to refute my arguments and/or provide *your own*
better ones.
In the above debate, I have actually *agreed* with you, but simply
pointed out that the rapidity of speciation events has little or nothing
to do with the fossil history of the species formed after those events.
If speciation is 1% (or less) of a species tenure on Earth and its
subsequent fossil history is the remaining 99% (or more), as Gould
maintains:
'If species arise in hundreds or thousands of years and then persist,
largely unchanged, for several million, the period of their origin is a
tiny fraction of one percent of their total duration." (Gould S.J., "The
Panda's Thumb",, 1990 reprint, p177).
then it is obvious that even a near-perfect fossil record would not
preserve the former, but would preserve the latter. If this is still
not clear to you, forget it-I trust it is clear to others.
Bill
On Fri, 16 Jan 1998 09:30:41 -0500, Bill Hamilton wrote:
[...]
BH>This is not what I'm responding to, but first for accuracy's
>sake, I need to ask, "what wolf-dog speciation event?" I believe
>wolves and dogs are the same species
Wolves (canis lupus) and dogs (canis familiaris) are regarded as
different species:
"The system by which individual kinds of mammals are scientifically
named within the large categories can be seen by taking a familiar
example, the wolf. First of all, the wolf belongs to the class
mammalia. Then it falls in a group made up of the placental mammals,
and is further separated into the order Carnivora, or meat-eating
mammals. To distinguish it from such other meat eaters as cats,
weasels and the like, it is placed in the family Canidae, that of the dog
like carnivores. Together with various other closely related species, it
is included in the genus Canis, which separates it from such closely
allied groups as the foxes and the bush dogs. The specific name of the
wolf is Canis lupus, distinguishing it from all near relatives, such as
the coyote (Canis letrans) and the domestic dog (Canis familiaris)."
(Carrington R., "The Mammals", 1965, p14)
even thought they can apparently interbreed and have fertile offspring:
"...a species is often defined as a population of individuals that
interbreed, producing fertile offspring, and thus experiencing a flow
of genetic material between individuals of the species, and which are
non-fertile with respect to other species. This is not really true at all,
however. Our common household pet, the dog (Canis familiaris),
interbreeds with wolves (Canis lupus), coyotes (genus Canis), and
jackals (genus Canis), producing fertile offspring. Ordinarily,
however, they do not interbreed and there are minor morphological
differences, so they have been placed in separate species." (Gish D.T.,
"Creation Scientists Answer Their Critics", 1993, p34)
BH>I've read "Reinventing Darwin" and accept Eldredge's claims about the
>difficulty of detecting events that required less than 50K years or so. (I
>also accept that there are places on earth where the resolution is finer.
>But perhaps the fossils of interest are elsewhere :-).
That is in fact the central excuse of Darwinism-evolution always happens
somewhere else. Mayr's term "allopatric speciation" literally means speciation
in "another place"! But some of the more self-critical Darwinists like Eldredge
obviously find this hard to swallow:
"No wonder paleontologists shied away from evolution for so long. IT
SEEMS NEVER TO HAPPEN. Assiduous collecting up cliff faces yields
zigzags, minor oscillations, and the very occasional slight
accumulation of change-over millions of years, at a rate too slow to
really account for all the prodigious change that has occurred in
evolutionary history. When we do see the introduction of
evolutionary novelty, it usually shows up with a bang, and often with
no firm evidence that the organisms did not evolve elsewhere!
Evolution cannot forever be going on someplace else. Yet that's how
the fossil record has struck many a forlorn paleontologist looking to
learn something about evolution." (Eldredge N., "Reinventing
Darwin", 1996, p95. My emphasis.)
BH>But it seems to me that the important point is not the length of time
>required for speciation, but the difficulty of determining from morphology
>_whether_ two animals are related.
No one is denying that it is difficult to determine from morphology
whether two animals are related. The recent developmental evidence
of bird and dinosaur digits being fundamentally different shows how
two distantly related speciescan appear morphologically very
similar. But the original debate in this thread was the problem of
the fossil record, with a claimed time-frame resolution of between
5,000 and 50,000 years, being too coarse-grained to capture
speciation events, which may occur in a small number of (or even
one) generations.
In any event, the morphological difficulty would only apply if the
speciation is micro. But if God did create the first birds by a clutch of
reptile eggs hatching out one or more feathered reptiles (as
Goldshmidt proposed), then that would be easy to determine from
morphology, because feathers do fossilise and they are one of the
defining characteristic of all birds.
God bless,
Steve
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Stephen E (Steve) Jones ,--_|\ sejones@ibm.net
3 Hawker Avenue / Oz \ Steve.Jones@health.wa.gov.au
Warwick 6024 ->*_,--\_/ Phone +61 8 9448 7439
Perth, West Australia v "Test everything." (1Thess 5:21)
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