Feedback for October 2002

Jeffrey Shallit

The answer is co-evolution.

Insects have been around for at least 300 million years, while flowering plants have only been around since the early Cretaceous, about 140 million years ago. So it is clear that many insects could get by without needing flowering plants. On the other hand, bees may have evolved about 10 million years after the first simple flowers, so flowers did not need bees at first. We don't know for sure; the first Cretaceous bee fossil was found only in 1988. The bennettitaleans (a class of plants that may have been the origin of modern flowering plants), for example, may have been pollinated by beetles.

Once there were both bees and flowers, both evolved in response to the other. Bees found flowers a food source, while flowers hit on the strategy of using bees to pollinate themselves. Eventually these strategies replaced previous strategies, resulting in a system that appears "in harmony".

In contrast to the bogus claims of creationists such as Michael Behe, such complex interacting systems can easily evolve, and in fact we see precisely this sort of co-evolution in computer simulations. Furthermore, it is discussed in any good textbook on evolutionary biology. You might suggest to your friend that he/she could benefit from a college biology course!

Kenneth Fair

Not specifically, although snake and lizard evolution is mentioned in a few of places in the Archive. See:

• 29 Evidences for Macroevolution: Anatomical vestiges (also hindlimbs in snake and whale embryos)
• Archaeopteryx: Answering the Challenge of the Fossil Record
• Jim Meritt's General Anti-Creationism FAQs: Chaos and Complexity
• Evidence for Jury-Rigged Design in Nature

Here a couple of off-site references:

• DNA and Darwin: Evolution repeats itself in Caribbean lizards
• Lizard experiment suggests rapid evolution
• Nature: A twist in the tail of snake evolution
• Venomous Snake Evolution

Try searching with an Internet search engine to find more responses.

An apple falling is only an observation of micro-gravitation. It is macro-gravitation that cannot be, due to scale, directly experienced. It is "merely" a clear and logical inference from a wide range of data (some of which is "micro-gravitation," some of which is indirect). We call it a "fact" that Pluto orbits the Sun as a result of the Sun's gravitational attraction. Even though Pluto's existence has been known for only a tiny fraction of one orbit (so we haven't watched a full orbit), and nobody has ever been to Pluto to observe it directly.

Also, there are accurate means to measure large spans of time, and we already have some detailed "explanations" of these on this site. See for example my Isochron Dating FAQ.

Mark Isaak

For the millionth time, No, life did not arise by accident. Evolution is not pure chance. To erect a strawman of evolution that omits natural selection is a form of bearing false witness.

The items that you mention all look man-made. I come to that conclusion because I have read descriptions of the manufacturing processes of soda cans, sunglasses, and plastic bottles; I myself have seen glass bottles and paper being made; and, of course, I have made writing myself. None of this applies to any life form.

As you yourself note, life does not look like designed things, because life can repair itself and reproduce. Furthermore, life is much more complex than design, and life forms show a pattern of relative similarity that is nothing like we expect or observe from design. The logical conclusion is that life is not designed. Besides, if God cares for life, He would be stupid not to make life that evolves.

I'll leave your last question unanswered. But I will comment that God as you represent Him is a god that I find repulsive.

Mark Isaak

Thank you for one of the most intelligent responses we have had to our page about the flat earth.

John Wilkins

There are two competing philosophies of classification in biology. The older one tends to retain the Linnaean system of ranking things in families, orders, and variants of these, while the newer one - the cladist philosophy - organises them according to evolutionary order and includes all descendents of a single taxon (a group in the classification; it might be a species or it might be a larger group) in a group. Since there are many splitting events on the evolutionary tree, there are no set ranks in cladistic classification.

With this bit of background, the answer to your question is - it depends. If you are taking the older Linnaean approach, then humans and apes are in different taxa, and Hominoidea is the group above them both that includes them both - Classification of Humankind is a site that gives this information. But if you take the cladistic view, then humans are apes, because if you remove humans out of that branch of the tree (that "clade"), what remains is an incomplete branch - see this site for a figure showing this.

I hope this helps. Humans are, according to cladistic principles, in the same group as chimpanzees (hence Jared Diamond's book The third chimpanzee), and gorillas, and organutans and so on. We are not in the same clades as monkeys, lemurs and so on, although all of those, and the apes and us are in the clade known as Primates.

But on traditional classification principles (which are broadly a matter of subjective judgment and traditional names) we are not apes. I prefer the cladistic approach.

Troy Britain

While not disagreeing with the fact that most anthropologists today would classify "apes" and humans together in the same Family or Superfamily, I took issue with John's characterization of the relationship between cladistic methodology and the Linnaean hierarchy. I told him this through a personal e-mail and he invited me to make some comments on this here.

First I am personally unaware of a "Linnaean philosophy" other than the opinion held by many (if not most) biologists that the Linnaean hierarchy is a useful tool for organizing the plant and animal world.

Secondly I am unaware of any sort of "Linnaean rule" or standard "Linnaean methodology" that requires that "apes" and humans be placed in separate Families etc. Earlier anthropologists had, for a number of reasons, traditionally done this, but this had nothing to do with the Linnaean hierarchy.

Finally I am unaware of any innate conflict between the use of cladistic methods and the Linnaean hierarchy. In fact my understanding is that one uses cladistics to decide where to place an organism into the Linnaean hierarchy.

There is a group of cladists who argue that the Linnaean hierarchy is outdated and should be replaced with a new system based directly on cladistics known as the "PhyloCode" (many of them make similar sorts of comments to those John made here), however their claims both about the supposed problems with the Linnaean hierarchy and that they have a superior replacement, are still a matter of serious debate amongst systematists. See the following links for information on this debate:

The PhyloCode home page.

Stems, nodes, crown clades, and rank-free lists: is Linnaeus dead? by Michael J. Benton

The Phylocode is poorly reasoned and fatally flawed, and the current codes of nomenclature are not. by K. C. Nixon

The "Phylocode" - A Commentary by Scott A. Redhead

Further comments on the "PhyloCode" by Larissa Vasilyeva

"Phylocode debate -- Mike Lee (for); Gary Nelson (against)"

From Cladograms to Classifications: The Road to DePhylocode by Norman I. Platnick

Much more both pro and con can be found on the Web, simply put PhyloCode into Google or your favorite Internet search-engine.

Mark Isaak

Thank you for the link. In fairness to Noah, however, I don't think 420,000 annual layers were counted. From what I remember of my research on that FAQ, when you get too deep, the annual layers thin out too much to distinguish directly. Other methods are then used, such as radiometric dating of lead isotopes. However, you are correct that annual layers now go back more than 40,000 years. A web page on the GISP2 Ice Core (Greenland Ice Sheet Project 2) says, "Recently annual layer counts based on visual stratigraphy and solid laser light scattering have been extended back to ~110 kyr B.P." (That's ~110,000 years back.)

John Wilkins

Species are formed as populations, and so there is never a single organism without a mate - it is the population which is transitional between one species and another.

Kenneth Fair

No, it wouldn't. From the Welcome page:

"Why doesn't the archive contain any articles that support creationism?"

The Talk.Origins Archive exists to provide mainstream scientific responses to the frequently asked questions and frequently rebutted assertions that appear in talk.origins. The archive's policy is that readers should be given easy access to alternative views, but those who espouse alternative views should speak for themselves. Hence, the archive supplies links to relevant creationist web sites within many of its articles. It also maintains a frequently updated and extensive list of creationist and catastrophist web sites so that readers may familiarize themselves with anti-evolutionary perspectives on scientific issues.

This site presents the mainstream scientific position on evolution. Science doesn't work by majority vote or by polling the public. The scientific case for creationism was made, and rejected, over a century ago.

Because we do not want to be accused of misrepresenting creationist views--and there are multiple, conflicting views--the archive provides, where appropriate, links to creationist sites so that readers can decide for themselves. The archive also provides a long list of links to other sites that readers can peruse at their leisure. To my knowledge, no creationist site does the same.

John Wilkins

Jim Foley has it covered but I cannot find anything more recent than he lists, even on PubMed.

Mark Isaak

There is no science of Creation.

However, I agree with your principle--that a couple dozen of the various versions of Creationism from different cultures and religions should be taught in social studies classes. (It wouldn't be fair to teach only one creationism when there are hundreds of creation versions out there.) Then let the students decide for themselves what they want to beleive. I can't imagine any Creationist going along with that plan, though.

Mark Isaak

Unfortunately, it's not that simple. The two greatest causes of extinction are habitat degradation and introduced pests. In both cases, we cannot expect biodiversity to return to its previous levels -- even with long-term evolution -- until the original problem is reversed, and maybe not even then.

Habitat degradation is a problem because the degraded habitat (usually) simply doesn't support as many species as the original. To take an extreme but still common example, a pasture doesn't support nearly as many species as a tropical rain forest. The biodiversity lost when the rain forest is cleared for pasture cannot re-evolve until the pasture becomes rain forest again.

With introduced species, biodiversity caused by regional isolation is wiped out. In the long term, the introduced species may speciate, but the new species will always be more closely related to each other than to the species that were lost. The number of species may end up the same in the long run, but the diversity among those species will be less than now.

And, of course (as I suspect you already know), any appreciable evolution of new species will take thousands of years. Many generations of our children will suffer the lack of the extinct species in the meantime. And when a species goes extinct, that species is gone forever.

Furthermore, habitat degradation and introduced pests are serious problems in themselves, costing many billions of dollars per year directly. You can help with both the economic problems and the extinction problems by encouraging better agricultural inspection and land use policies that consider long-term effects.

Ed Brayton

I have observed "Dr" Kent Hovind for many years. I say without a moment's hesitation that no one with any knowledge of the science involved in the relevant fields will find him anything but a fraud. He is an embarrassment even to his fellow creationists, mostly due to his continued use of arguments that more reputable and better educated creationists debunked long ago. A good example of this is a recent article posted by the creationist organization Answers in Genesis. AIG put out a list of arguments that have been discredited and retracted by creationists around the world, and urged that creationists not use these arguments because it only undermines the credibility of creationism. Needless to say, many of those discredited arguments are in Kent Hovind's seminar, and they remain there despite the admonishment of his fellow creationists for continuing to use them. For example, he continues to argue that the lack of dust on the moon proves that the earth is only a few thousand years old, despite the fact that creationists like Andrew Snelling debunked the argument a decade ago. He continues to use the Paluxy "mantracks" as a proof that man and dinosaurs lived simultaneously, again despite the fact that his fellow creationists themselves abandoned this claim many years ago because the evidence is strongly against it. He continues to use material from Ron Wyatt, who was as pure a conman as I have ever encountered, and whose work has been condemned by creationist organizations around the world. Why does he continue to use discredited arguments? Well, to be blunt, I think he does it for two reasons. First, because he knows that his audience is not knowledgable enough to realize that he's wrong. Second, because I just don't think Kent Hovind cares much about the truth. As long as a claim supports his position, no matter how absurd or unsupportable that claim is, he will continue to use it. And even the criticism of his fellow creationists will not convince him otherwise.

The link to AIG's article criticizing Hovind's lack of honesty is found at Maintaining Creationist Integrity: A response to Kent Hovind

John Wilkins

No it is not. The last remaining scientific creationist, during Darwin's day, Louis Agassiz was definitely a racist, but Darwin, and his family, had opposed slavery well before Darwin developed the theory of evolution, adopting the slogan "Am I [the slave} not a Man and a Brother?" and this did not change after he developed the theories for which he is famous.

One thing that has led many to suppose Darwin was a racist is that he was definitely a Eurocentrist. He, like many of his contemporaries, took it as an article of faith that the British, and more specifically the English, civilisation was the very pinnacle of civilisation, and that the indigenous peoples of the colonised world were "savages".

In modern terms, this is "culturist", not racist. However, since the very notion of "race" in the human species is culturally defined, to that extent, and that extent only, one might call Darwin racist. In so doing, one would have to call everyone who thinks their society is better than others to be racist.

John Wilkins

Ah, yes. This is more than just a problem of definition. And it does also cause problems for biologists, conservationists, and many others. What, if anything, is a species? It's known as "the species problem", although there are quite a number of species problems.

There is a long answer. You can find it discussed in the listed books and references, but if you want a shorter answer, here it is:

Because species evolve many different ways of being isolated from each other, and because species are sometimes only partially isolated from each other, there is no simple definition that covers all cases of being species without at the same time also covering things that are not species. Likewise, if we give some criterion like reproductive separation, which is what most of the biology textbooks give, then there are plenty of cases where species are not perfectly isolated or where they can, but do not usually, interbreed. Even then, some organisms - as you note, plants, but also corals, bacteria, and some animals, especially birds and lizards - don't meet the criteria and will happily interbreed across species boundaries.

So, we have either got the problem of many different definitions of species (called, for obvious reasons, "pluralism") or we say that only one kind of definition is truly species (like the one in the textbooks) and that all other organisms are not actually organised into species (a view called "monism"). I personally find it odd to say that only a small part of the living world forms species, and so I push for a pluralism; on the grounds that evolution generates diversity and one form of diversity is ways of being species.

Anyway, here are the links and the books. The best introduction for the general reader is the one by Schilthuizen - it gives the history and biology in simple terms. Mayden's article is the most comprehensive list of all species concepts in the literature to date:

Links

• Observed Instances of Speciation FAQ
• Tulane course notes
• Biosis links
• American Museum of Natural History notes
• Ruedas' notes
• UC Davis Notes

References

Ereshefsky, Marc, ed. 1992. The units of evolution: Essays on the nature of species. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Hey, Jody. 2001. Genes, concepts and species: the evolutionary and cognitive causes of the species problem. New York: Oxford University Press.

Howard, Daniel J., and Stewart H. Berlocher. 1998. Endless forms: species and speciation. New York: Oxford University Press.

Mallet, James. 2001. Species, concepts of. In Encyclopedia of biodiversity, edited by S. A. Levin. New York: Academic Press.

Mayden, R. L. 1997. A hierarchy of species concepts: the denoument in the saga of the species problem. In Species: The units of diversity, edited by M. F. Claridge, H. A. Dawah and M. R. Wilson. London: Chapman and Hall.

Schilthuizen, Menno. 2001. Frogs, flies, and dandelions: the making of species. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Wilson, Robert A. 1999. Species: new interdisciplinary essays. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Wesley R. Elsberry

The anonymous critic is right that over the long haul, the average number of trials required to get the HHHH sequence is 16. Musgrave is right that the likelihood is greater that one will obtain an HHHH sequence in less than 16 trials. This is because coin flipping yields a skewed distribution. Let me illustrate...

In this case, the expected number of trials before observing a sequence of four heads in coin flipping works out to around 11.

More precisely, we can give the formula for the odds that we will not obtain a sequence of four heads over a sequence of trials as follows:

Single trials:

P(HHHH) = 1/ 2^4 = 1/16 = 0.0625

P(~HHHH) = 1 - (1/2^4) = 0.9375

The odds that one will perform sixteen trials and not observe at least one instance of HHHH are

P(~HHHH)^16 = 0.9375^16 = 0.3561

In other words, the proportion of attempts requiring more than sixteen trials is slightly over one-third.

But P(~HHHH)^11 = 0.9375^11 = 0.4917, which means that we expect that half the time we will have observed at least one instance of HHHH by the time we have made 11 trials. (Musgrave's expected value of 8 trials obtains if one construes this as search without repetition of probes; I don't think that coin flipping qualifies for the non-repetition of probes.)

Musgrave's argument that the number of trials is likely to be less than the simple inverse of the computed probability stands firm, as the anonymous critic admits. A correct view of the relevant probabilities confirms it.

Musgrave's further argument is not critically dependent upon the advantage obtained by consideration of the distribution alone, which as the anonymous critic notes does not give even an order of magnitude improvement in expectations. Musgrave develops an argument concerning large numbers of simultaneous, rather than sequential, trials, and it is this argument which shows that even the "orgulously, gobsmackingly unlikely" numbers become tractable given reasonable real-world initial conditions. Musgrave is simply being thorough in demonstrating the general poverty of antievolutionist use of probability arguments.

An example of exactly the sort of mistake Musgrave is correcting with regard to the distribution of length of trials can be found in antievolutionist William Dembski's book "No Free Lunch" as note 32 on page 232. Surely correcting this sort of error is a reasonable undertaking, even if the overall effect is relatively minor compared to other factors.

Wesley

Wesley R. Elsberry

A previous month's feedback contains a response by Mark Isaak with the links you are looking for.

Wesley

Wesley R. Elsberry

The reader is likely referring to Robert Gentry's arguments concerning polonium haloes. Fortunately, the archive has FAQs on polonium haloes which critique Gentry's arguments.

Wesley

Wesley R. Elsberry

I have written an essay on the topic of increasing information in genetics. Another resource which is here on the archive is Edward Max's FAQ on the Evolution of Improved Fitness.

The bottom line is that those who claim that "information" cannot be increased in genetics typically either will not specify a quantitative meaning for "information", or confuse and conflate "meaning" with "information".

Even antievolutionist William Dembski has indicated that natural selection is capable of fixing modest amounts of new information in the genome (see his 1997 essay on "Intelligent design as a theory of information").

Wesley

Wesley R. Elsberry

The Evolution Hoax Revealed!! Breaking News! article is a "Post of the Month".

As is noted about Posts of the Month,

Each month the Talk.Origins Archive selects an article posted to the Usenet newsgroup talk.origins that comes closest to capturing what the newsgroup is all about. Whether that article is written by an evolutionist or a creationist, the Talk.Origins Archive Post of the Month should give you a taste of what it's like to participate in talk.origins. You can nominate a talk.origins post by replying to it with the phrase "POTM nomination" somewhere in the subject line.

PotMs are not meant to characterize an official stance of the Talk.Origins Archive. The t.o. archive volunteers hold a diverse range of opinions and religious beliefs.

As satire goes, the article in question is pretty mild. I suggest renting a sense of humor.

Wesley