Feedback for July 2004

Of course, such exceptionless laws are fictions. There never was an infinite, flat, frictionless plane on which any object would tend to travel in a straight line until acted on by another force. But laws do tend, in physics, to be more general than in biology. Why is that?

It is because biology covers only a single planet in a vast universe, and each event in biology, such as the evolution of a spine, or adaptation to industrial pollution, is a historically singular event. Generalisations about history are only rules of thumb, and they summarise what is known about past events rather than setting the preconditions for all evolutionary events.

It is true, though, that if the criteria for a natural selection process are fulfilled, the end result has to be natural selection, unless other evolutionary "forces" intervene. But since we cannot predict exactly which mutations will arise, or which alleles will be sampled in a peripheral and isolated population, or what the Sun will do or the tectonic plates will do, in evolutionary theory, we can't make the sorts of predictions we can make in, say, astronomy.

Punctuated Equilibrium (PE) Theory is a generalisation about evolutionary patterns. It says that most change occurs off the fossil record, as it were, because the standard model of evolution of new species has it that speciation occurs in small semi-isolated or completely isolated populations, which are rarely if ever going to be fossilised in the process of speciating, and that species, once adapted to local conditions, will track those conditions rather than adapt much further.

This leads to the "stasis/rapid evolution" pattern in the phylogenetic record. It is not, as such, a "law" about evolution, but a recognition that evolution happens at variable rates, and not over an entire species' range, but locally. So it is a generalisation about (sexual) species evolving over large numbers of species and large periods of time. Unlike a law, a single instance to the contrary is not a falsification of it. Hence, PE is a model of patterns in the evolutionary record, and can be expected to apply only to most speciation events, and not all.

This is true of pretty well all evolutionary rules and models. For that reason, it is not thought that evolution has laws. Ecological theory has laws, though, and they feed into evolutionary theory. So, too, do the laws of physics and chemistry.

That is to say, this is my opinion on the matter.

First remember that the Rev. Willaims http://www.ldolphin.org/wmwilliams.html was writing about science nearly eighty years ago without much training. Modern science is so far beyond that of his time that even with adequate training, it is unlikely that his "evidences" could hold water. Sadly, many of today's creationists have done no better. I have seen perhaps half of Williams' false arguments repeated in creationist feebsites and on internet discussion pages in just the last few months.

There are so many errors of fact and inference that it is hard to know where to start. Most of the historical errors in dating the Earth (and the solar system) are adressed by G. Brent Dalrymple in his 1991 book "The Age of the Earth" (Stanford University Press). Dalrymple covers the false age estimates you repeated from Williams in a manner available to non-scientists.

Actual data on the age of the solar system puts it at about 4.55 billion years old. An advanced text from 1995 is "Radiogenic Isotope Geology" by Alan P. Dickin (Cambridge University Press).

Williams, William A. (1925) The Evolution of Man Scientifically Disproved: in 50 arguments, Self-published, Camden, NJ.

It was republished in 1928 and went through several reprintings after that (I own a paperback copy which was printed sometime after 1956, based on an added appendix which refers to an article on Piltdown Man from that date).

Knowledge advances while creationism keeps recycling the same junk over and over.

[From Ch. 4 of Planet Earth and the New Geosciences]

From this we can see that Rev. Williams is wrong about:

1. Thickness: The bottom of the (solid) mantle is at nearly 3,000km, but he argues the lowest solids are 45km [28 miles] down.
2. Temperature: The solid lines indicate the bottom of the mantle is about 4,000°C, but his extrapolation of 33°C/km [100°F/mile] yields nearly 100,000°C.
3. Melting point: The dashed line indicates the lower mantle is solid at up to 5,000°C, but he argues that everything melts at 1,500°C [2,700°F] or less.

But, even so, the interior of the Earth is pretty hot. One might argue that (c) and (d) would be true to some extent even though (a) and (b) are not. For the latter half of this chain of reasoning, Rev. Williams relied on the work of Lord Kelvin. In 1862, Lord Kelvin calculated that a molten Earth would take at most a few tens of millions of years to cool down to its present temperature profile. However, Lord Kelvin's calculation requires that there be no heating after the Earth formed. If the heat inside the Earth is not residual heat of formation, the result of the calculation is meaningless.

By about 1905, radioactivity had been discovered, the heat released by radioactivity had been observed, and widespread existence of radioactive isotopes within the Earth had been established. At that point, Lord Kelvin's calculation was known to be invalid -- two decades before Rev. Williams used it anyway in 1925. That doesn't say much for the quality of Rev. Williams' research. Anyone using the same argument today has even less excuse than Rev. Williams did; it is hard to see it as anything other than a deliberate attempt to deceive.

See also:

• The Earth's Crust [Thickness of the crust, but a different meaning of the term than Rev. Williams uses]
• Energetics of the Earth [Heat sources and output of the mantle]
• Univ. New Mexico, Env. Sci. 101, Lecture 10 [.PDF, see p. 3; Flaw in Lord Kelvin's calculation]

As for Gary's response, I should point out that a lot of the HTML work for feedback is handled by the feedback scripts created long before I ever lent a hand to this site.

As to how this behavior might have evolved, we simply don't know, but an educated guess might be possible if we consider Darwin's frog (Rhinoderma darwinii), found in Argentina and Chile. This species picks up the developing eggs and carries them in its mouth (the male's) until they hatch.

Anuran (frog) parental care occurs mostly in territorial species, and it makes sense to protect your eggs against predators and competitors. A species that independently from the Rhinodermatidae carried eggs in its mouth might very well find it advantageous to carry them further down in the gastric tract, leading eventually to carrying them in the stomach, rather than in the vocal chambers as Darwin's frog does.

This would set up a process whereby selection would make it easier to carry eggs this way by shutting down acid production, and for eggs to be more resistant to gastric juices. But all this is just a guess - so far as I can tell there is no evidence how it evolved. And since they are now extinct, we can't really observe the biochemical pathways they used, to hazard better guesses.

Natural gas (chiefly methane) has a completely different origin. As you note, it forms from the decay of organic material. Decay does not always produce significant amounts of natural gas, but under the right conditions, it does. Swamp gas is natural gas being formed today in swamps. Methane is formed in many modern landfills; some gather it and use it for their energy.

To form useful pockets of natural gas and oil, you need to bury the organic debris to keep the gas and oil in place, and you need to keep the stuff from getting eaten before then. The second condition in particular is not met in the case you describe. In most areas, earthworms, beetles, termites, fungi, etc. will scavange and destroy a dead plant or animal before it gets buried deep enough to matter. It is interesting to note that the amount of coal deposits decreases greatly after termites evolved.

Once oil and natural gas form, they don't necessarily stay in place. They also move through porous rocks, such as sandstones, and gather in reservoirs formed by non-porous layers, such as clays.

Everything that is alive, has ancestors.

This is a simple question? It seems to me to have occupied millions of people over the millennia. The simple response is that TalkOrigins is described in the introductory comments on the home page,

"The Talk.Origins Archive is a collection of articles and essays, most of which have appeared in talk.origins at one time or another. The primary reason for this archive's existence is to provide scientific responses to the many frequently asked questions (FAQs) that appear in the talk.origins newsgroup and the frequently rebutted assertions of those advocating intelligent design or other creationist pseudosciences."

So, there is no point to poll the volunteers to the TO archive as to their personal faiths. I know some who are Christian, some who are atheists and some who are members of other faiths. Let me direct you to a FAQ here which should clarify why this is an irrelevant question The God and Evolution FAQ

Re: New species

Evolution of new species is commonly observed. There are examples given in "Evolution has never been observed.", 29+ Evidences for Macroevolution The Scientific Case for Common Descent, Observed Instances of Speciation, and Some More Observed Speciation Events. I have read three articles in the science literature on new species in just the last few months (one amusingly claimed to be the "first" observation of an incipient species).

"I am eagerly waiting for your truly "scientific" response. Please do not refer me to some lengthy essays I've read quite a few of them. They are all futile."

As Paul observed, it is futile to try to educate the "willfully ignorant." But this is a good opportunity to point out some great articles to anyone willing to learn.

I'm sorry if you find it hard to "win arguments" because the subject matter is difficult, but whether you can understand it or not, it remains what it is. Perhaps you should either decide to investigate the reasons why you think science and theology have to be in conflict, or acquiesce in what your own coreligionists accept - that two truths cannot be in conflict.

The meaning of the word "theory" derives from the Greek, of course, where it means "perspective". A theory in science is a perspective on a number of problems, which resolves them and explains why they are as they are. Most modern scientific theories involve mathematical models, and the explanation occurs when the observed results fall out logically from the models used. If, in short, the implications and the observations match, then the theory explains the observations.

Evolution the process is observed, both in the fossil record and the modern day. This is what has to be explained. Darwin's theory, and the elaborations and revisions made since him, explains how the things we observe to evolve do so. Sometimes this involves prediction, sometimes it involves "retrodiction".

But you are exactly right when you say that a theory is not a guess. It is well-supported as a hypothesis well before anyone calls it a theory.

Paul was asking if anyone wanted to guest-blog in his absence - since it is his blog, he is free to restrict access to anyone he likes, including Jews (not that he would). But being a largely rational person, Paul chose to base his discrimination not on culture or ethnicity nor even religious faith, but upon individual conceptual commitments. He wants those who think sympathetically to him on his own blog. I don't think that is offensive; and those who take a right-wing neo-conservative, or fundamentalist religious, view directly opposite to Paul's are entitled to make exactly the same stipulations on their blogs.

Panda's Thumb is not a formal part of this archive, but it has a lot of the same crew contributing. Think of it as the "personal" pages of those who take a more formal and cautious approach when working here. He speaks, in short, for himself. And those who choose to agree with his position...

In the meantime, doesn't he explain developmental biology well for the masses?