Feedback for March 2003

I've heard that it takes all kinds...

It gives me a special warm fuzziness to be a part of getting the reader in touch with his feelings.

Wesley

In the talkorigins archive, the Sept 2002 POTM addresses fish fossils and the Coelacanth; and the Transitional Fossils FAQ has a section on Transition from primitive bony fish to amphibians.

The page you list contains two serious and related errors. Specifically, it states that the Coelacanth did not evolve, and it assumes that evolution should have the same effect on different species.

Modern coelacanths are quite distinct from their ancient ancestors. They belong to a lineage which had once been thought to have gone extinct about 65 million years ago (around the time of the great dinosaur mass extinction), and in the popular press this is frequently and erroneously presented as meaning that they are the same as ancient forms.

The first amphibians date from over 300 million years ago. That is, we already knew that coelacanths represent a distinct branch of the great evolutionary tree, evolving alongside the amphibians.

The rhipidistians are indeed considered a likely ancestor to the amphibians. They most likely had lungs; as did the coelacanth ancestors 300 million years ago. The coelacanth lineage evolved to fit a deep water niche (and they no longer have lungs), whereas the lineage leading to amphibians evolved for a terrestrial niche. Modern coelacanths are quite similar to fossils from 75 million years ago (though not identical), but overall their lineage shows considerable evolutionary change.

• 29+ Evidences for Macroevolution.
• Evidence for Evolution
• Evidence for Jury-Rigged Design in Nature
• Plagiarized Errors and Molecular Genetics
• Transitional Vertebrate Fossils FAQ

• Observed Instances of Speciation
• Some More Observed Speciation Events

In The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex Darwin spent 3/4 of the book presenting many hypotheses on sexual selection. Just among birds he pointed out several cases where larger female size and brighter plumage may have been selected for (the males being dull-plumaged incubators).

In my reading of Darwin I did not get the impression that he claimed sexual selection was of universal application. Ever since Darwin the relative importance of this form of selection has been debated within science.

The news stories came out of the AAAS meeting. This is the original press release: Sex and gender scientists explore a revolution in evolution. Unfortunately, I cannot find online any posters or abstracts of all the papers.

One of the attendees commented: "This may be better viewed as a refinement of Darwinian theory, rather than a revolution."

On the other hand, one of the presenters has a book coming out soon, and a little controversy is not always a bad thing.

Spontaneous generation is not the same as the study of abiogenesis, which investigates how the chemical precursors to life organized themselves into replicating molecules, primitive organisms, and eventually cells. See our articles on abiogenesis.

It appears that this question was answered in the February 1998, June 1999, July 1999, September 1999, November 1999, January 2000, and January 2002 feedbacks. I would advise all our readers to first use the search facility, conveniently found at the top and bottom of this page, to see if a question has already been answered on this site.

I must admit I am quite confused by your statement that this site is judgmental and opinionated instead of being purely factual. For one, it seems to me that this site provides many facts, and more importantly, references to the primary literature where you can read about the facts for yourself. For another, I am not sure it is inappropriate to be judgmental and opinionated, when--and this is the catch--those judgments and opinions are based upon facts. That seems to me to be much of the point of science, to reach conclusions based upon the systematic examination of evidence. Science, in my opinion, really does have right answers and wrong answers, and no amount of sugar-coating or wishful thinking can turn one into the other.

Thank you for visiting this site, and I hope that you will return to explore further.

I am sorry you had a less than satisfactory experience. If anyone has complaints about articles in the archive, please indicate in feedback what file you mean. Critical feedback is appreciated, but without specifics we can't do much about it.

(2) The existance of God is not an issue. Some of your claims might be.

(3) You asked " if both the poles melted do you think there would be any land unsubmerged ??"

The poles will not melt. However, if all the ice on earth were to melt (near the poles, Greenland ice cap, other glaciers) the total rise in sea level would be approximately 130 meters (less than 450 feet). The vast majority of land would remain above sea level, even though inundation would be devastating to many islands and low-lying areas. This has happened in the past, and no doubt will happen again in the future.

"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."

I suspect that many people vote with their heart and, of course, they may also relate to the personal testimony of others. Knowing Wendy (Rubystars) from having spent many hours talking to her in a chatroom, I think her January post reflects the facts of her personal journey.

Having given numerous anti-evolutionists a link to her website, as an example of how a theistic evolutionist manages to handle faith AND science, I can tell you that it does help the cause. That is, if "the cause" is to help others to deal with the facts.

Copyright for articles remains with the individual authors, and they should really be contacted individually for permission to reproduce. There is no formal organization for the archive as a single group, and there is no scope, as I understand the matter, for a blanket permission to be granted.

However, I am not sure what you are proposing. The archive is already on the web, and many of the important files are already available in pdf, in particular most of the Must Read FAQs. The indexing and site map could stand some improvement to give easier access to the pdf files.

There is also a problem in that files in the archive do get modified from time to time, to correct errors, to keep up with progress in the field, or to link to other relevant information which has become available. The pdf files sometimes lag behind the html versions, and this problem would be exacerbated if the files are archived elsewhere.

Many FAQs already grant permission for non-comercial and education use; see the headers of the files to check. Actually placing the files on the web again in a new location, however, seems a bit beside the point and of little benefit.

Also, Earth in Upheaval is listed in the Book Recommendations.

Basically, almost nothing Velikovsky actually predicted for Venus has been confirmed. For an indirect consideration, see Is Venus Young. It was written mainly in respond to Ted Holden, whose enthusiastic and often hilarious defense of Velikovsky was the main spur to development of this part of the archive.

A Google search of the talk.origins group will turn up a lot of discussion of Velikovsky's alleged predictions back around 1994 or so. Some of my favourites include his predictions that Venus would be populated with vermin, that Venus would be rich in petroleum gases, that Venus will be noticeably cooling, and that Venus' brightness is due in part to incandescence.

Velikovsky was remarkably ignorant about Venus when he first published. Attempts to resuscitate his ideas in less ludicrous forms have remained ludicrous.

And Genesis is not really the issue here. Evolution is a scientific topic; the problem Genesis poses for science is non-existent. What relevance Genesis has is gained via those who think that it is a source of scientific knowledge, for whatever reason. Science and religion mostly have an agreement - science won't try to deliver morality or theology, and religion won't try to deliver science or facts about the natural world. In the end, opposition to evolution comes directly from those who will not respect that division of labor; and it doesn't much matter if it is on the basis of Genesis, the Q'uran or the Upanishads.

Harun Yahya (or his acolytes at that website) frequently rush onto one of their webpages diatribes against science. It appears that they do so based on popular media reports and without troubling themselves to read the underlying scientific publications.

In the case you have cited they provide a total of five references. The first two are to news sources (one at CNN is now unavailable, the other at New Scientist is). Had they bothered to follow up on the link provided by New Scientist thay might at least have seen and cited the abstract of the paper by Roy J. Britten in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences:

PNAS -- Abstracts: Britten 99 (21): 13633

"Five chimpanzee bacterial artificial chromosome (BAC) sequences (described in GenBank) have been compared with the best matching regions of the human genome sequence to assay the amount and kind of DNA divergence. The conclusion is the old saw that we share 98.5% of our DNA sequence with chimpanzee is probably in error. For this sample, a better estimate would be that 95% of the base pairs are exactly shared between chimpanzee and human DNA. In this sample of 779 kb, the divergence due to base substitution is 1.4%, and there is an additional 3.4% difference due to the presence of indels. The gaps in alignment are present in about equal amounts in the chimp and human sequences. They occur equally in repeated and nonrepeated sequences, as detected by Repeatmasker."

Britten analyzed less than one million base pairs of DNA sequence out of ~3.2 billion base pairs, or less than 1 in 3,200 of total DNA. It is an interesting study that confirms the ~1.4% difference between humans and chimps found in several other studies. However, Britten also discusses the differences in Indels (inserts and deletions) and "junk" DNA which is yet another kind of comparison. Doing so is controversial, as will be noted below.

To date, among mammals, only the Human and Mouse genomes have been decoded, and the actual work with both of these is far from complete. It will be at least several years before chimp and human genomes are "finished" so that a full comparison of all actual genes may be made. In numerous studies to-date, based on the analysis of varying amounts and types of DNA, including the study by Britten, roughly comparable results have been obtained. When full genomes of many species are available for detailed study, it will hardly matter what the percentage of differences are IF the geneological relationships are determined to be what we now think they are.

Carl Zimmer addresses this issue as well as the controversy over including Indel and junk DNA in such calculations. See his essay Searching for Your Inner Chimp which appeared in Natural History for December 2002 - January 2003.

Please also consider the fact that "news reports" often strive to make news, and not simply to report it. Compare the following two statements:

CNN: "Humans, chimps more different than thought" (According to Harun Yahya).

Britten: "We're not any more different than we were," says Britten. "But we see a bit more divergence than before because insertions and deletions are taken into account. It almost triples the difference."

Finally, the expression "more unique" requires no comment. But I couldn't resist.

Once you accept that the bible is not strict literal history (which you can see at once in the matter of Earth's great age) you may see that the biblical creation stories speak of life from non-life; of living creatures from the earth, and of mankind from dust. I am presuming that you are a Christian, even though this is not mentioned in your feedback. Sorry if I assume too much. Note that science does not know exactly how life originated; though there is some useful progress on plausible models.

As for humans and apes, our Fossil Hominids FAQ lists 19 hominid species, and gives a quick sample of the important fossils involved in their identification. What you choose to call human is a rather subjective choice, but there are at least two obviously ancient human species, which are not modern at all, and the others are at varying degrees of difference from modern humans and earlier non-human ancestors.

The archive also has a wonderful FAQ on contrasting views of six prominent creationists on six fossils from Homo erectus and Homo habilis. All agree that the fossils are either clearly ape, or clearly human. None agree on which is which; although as a general rule, you can make a good transitional series by sorting the fossils in order of the number of creationists who classify them as human.

Your request is very general; and I am trying to think what is most likely to be useful or of interest for your school classes. One great website with lots of images and good information is the Museum of Paleontology at the University of Berkeley. There are beautiful and well organized virtual exhibits of all kinds of ancient life forms.

There is also their Evolution Wing, which I commend to your attention.

And, just for interest, this talkorigins archive is listed as one of their favourite places to look for further information!

• The Kent Hovind FAQs
• Kent Hovind's $250,000 Offer

Since you were (correctly) sure that we had heard of Kent Hovind, before sending feedback like this, you might try using our search facility to see if we had already answered your question. That goes for everyone, by the way.

Besides, it probably is not the best way to win friends or influence people.

Take a look in a kaleidoscope sometime. All you need is a line of symmetry and a little random noise to generate quite elaborate patterns -- no Designer or even a designer needed.

Turing was once asked if he could generate the patterns on a zebra this way. "Yes," he reportedly replied, "but the whole horse is harder." Of interest is that the inventor of the idea of a computer never chose to characterize genes as computer programs. He also explained phyllotaxis (the spirals that develop on plants, particularly in some flowers) this way

Patterns are, as Paul noted, easy to generate; they are the outcome of a symmetry of some kind and the usual noise of the physical world. We find it easy to see patterns in things because we are pattern recognizers; we have entire parts of the brain devoted to facial recognition and so forth. What is surprising about patterns in the world is not that they are there, but that after you eliminate what we humans tend to over-recognize, that any remain at all. Turing's solution is one explanation for this and recent work in developmental biology backs him up entirely.

Nature has already accomplished this in Prehensile Tailed Monkeys of the Genus Ateles. These New World monkeys differ significantly from their closest primate relatives in musculature, having a roughened hairless pad at the tip of the tail, and in other characters.

I'm just guessing, but I'd bet a number of genes, perhaps many, differ both within the genus and between Ateles and their genetic neighbors. A Google search turned up these two .pdf files which provide information on Platyrrhine Systematics and an analysis of genetic distances (based on accumulated mutations) in a study of Alouatta mtDNA combined data, using Ateles and Brachyteles as outgroups.

We have been undertaking a campaign (slowly but surely) to make the archive pages as accessible as possible, through the use of standards such as stylesheets and XML. One of the primary contributors to this Archive, Tero Sand, was a quadraplegic who used a mouth control to access the Internet, so accessibility is and should continue to be a goal of this archive.

That said, I would like to point out that most modern Web browsers give users the ability to change the fonts and colors on the Web pages viewed. For instance, I am currently using Internet Explorer 5.5 on Windows 2000; under the "Tools" menu, one can select "Internet Options," which has buttons for "Fonts" and "Colors" that allow a user to change these options, and an "Accesibility" button that lets a user override the choices made by a Web site. If you have a different browser, try looking through that browser's "Options" or "Preferences" selections, or look the topic up in the browser's online help. Your mileage may vary.

We most certainly would not say that as a non believer in creation, there can't be any other answer than evolution. That gives entirely the incorrect impression, in two important ways. First, many evolutionsts do believe in creation; they just do not believe Genesis is a literal account of events in history. Second, evolution stands on its own, as the clear implication of all evidence; not as a kind of default alternative. There were several other competing models proposed by scientists back in the early days, and Darwin's model was the one which became accepted, because it was the one which was supported by the evidence.

The evidence for evolution is extensive and unambiguous; have a look in the archive. Some other feedback this month lists a few especially relevant files on evidence.

There have been drastic changes over six million years, if you accept the origins of humanity as a drastic change. Yes we are perfectly obviously still very similar in form to the great apes. Even the word "ape" means "imitate"; they were called apes because they were so much like humans.

In short, you are intimately related to all of life, and your rejection of your relatives is ill founded.

Professor Burnham suggests: "This statement underscores the fact that Darwinism is a vigorously maintained firewall against scientific objectivity," and "I have seen too many examples of "cover up the truth."

Did the professor read the paper published in Science on 5 July 2002 or the many "publication for laymen" cited at the bottom of this FAQ Fossil Hominids: Skull D2700.

Science follows the evidence wherever it leads, even when new facts require that old hypotheses be re-examined. Tongue-in-cheek humor over the possible implications of a new discovery is an indication of humility, not a coverup. The folks who found the fossil bought a lot of champaigne to celebrate their discovery. Then they analyzed and reported the facts so that other scientists could argue over their interpretations of those facts.

This is cause for yet more celebration. Care to join the party?

This is utter nonsense. Polyploidy is well known in plants and in tree frogs. Variations of it (giving a variety of new chromosome counts) is known in Appalachian salamanders and many other species/genera. A Google search on Jefferson Salamander will yield interesting information. This FAQ provides more information on polyploidy and other forms of Speciation.

I suspect that the author of that website well knows that very few of the readers inclined to believe him will do any research.

1) Frogs with legs sticking out of their heads (although, strictly speaking, I haven't seen that specific error) aren't the result of mutations. They are typically a consequence of developmental errors, often due to teratogens in their environment.

2) Ever watched a cat lick itself clean? How about visiting a farm and taking a look at the backside of a few cows and sheep?

However, the common phenomenon of cats with extra toes is due to mutation.

Archaeoraptor burst into the public eye with a front page coverage in the November 1999 issue of National Geographic, before normal scientific review had been conducted. It was publically queried as a fake within days, and officially recognized as a fake by all concerned within a few months. National Geographic, rightly, is horribly embarrassed by the fiasco.

The story of events leading up to publication is told in "Archaeoraptor Fossil Trail" by Lewis M. Simons, in the National Geographic October 2000 issue. Simons was given the task by the magazine editors of finding out just how and why National Geographic went so horribly wrong. His report makes amazing reading. Simons describes it thus:

It's a tale of misguided secrecy and misplaced confidence, of rampant egos clashing, self-aggrandizement, wishful thinking, naive assumptions, human error, stubbornness, manipulation, backbiting, lying, corruption, and, most of all, abysmal communication.

Basically, the fossil was not found by scientists, but was found as two fossils and combined into one by farmers and/or fossil dealers in China. It was sold at a bazaar-style gem and mineral show in the USA to the owner of a small dinosaur museum in Utah; who then contacted a paleontologist friend for help in writing a scientific paper, who in turn contacted National Geographic.

But when the paleontologist first saw the fossil in March, he immediately suspected it was not quite right. Somehow, however, his concerns failed to get through to the magazine. Papers on the find were sent to both Nature and Science, which are major peer reviewed journals; and they were rejected. Concerns being felt by those involved failed to be adequately shared. National Geographic, which had been acting on the assumption that the fossil would have been reported in the scientific literature before their own release, was left out on a limb; a limb which came crashing down almost as soon as the magazine hit the newstands.

It would be churlish to blame the Chinese finders and dealers for this hoax. They generally receive only a fraction of what fossils are really worth. The aim of the original constructor of the composite was quite likely not simply to deceive, but to present material with the best possible appearance for market.

Creationists, of course, have had a field day with this hoax. The Answers in Genesis article, for example, concludes with a broad hint that other fossils like Sinosauropteryx are hoaxes as well.

The two cases are not remotely comparable. There have been four fossils of Sinosauropteryx found. We know who found them, and where they were found. They are subject to intense scrutiny. There is no comparable fragmentation of the slab holding the best specimens.

The truth is that there have been a series of spectacular fossils found in China, which have clearly established a linkage between dinosaurs and birds. Even "Archaeoraptor" is legitimately a part of this. The two parts are an ancient bird, and a tiny non-avian dinosaur; the smallest non-avian dinosaur known and of major interest in its own right.

Almost all scientists now recognize birds as direct descendents of theropod dinosaurs. There is really only one notable hold out remaining -- Alan Feduccia, who opts for a less direct relationship by an older common ancestor amongst the thecodonts; but as the evidence mounts Feduccia's model is becoming more and more idiosycractic.

A final caution; note that Archaeoraptor is not the same as Archaeopteryx.

Nature Science Update carried this news story: Fossil Forgery's Front Half Revealed.

The reseach paper by Zhou, Z., Clarke, J. A. & Zhang, F., was published in Nature 420:285 (2002). Here is the abstract: Archaeoraptor's Better Half.

The Gold Web Site award is now noted on the TalkOrigins Archive Awards page.

Wesley

We give considerable thought to creationism, and try to provide useful articles which answer many of the questions raised; and we keep adding new ones. In this feedback column (which really ought to be for feedback on the website) we spend a fair bit of time answering questions from anyone with a question to ask. If you have a genuine question to which you would like an answer, first of all see if it is already addressed in the web site (use the search facility). If it is not addressed, feel free to ask.

Several FAQs here mention them and may collectively present a larger list:

Jury-Rigged Design

The Origin of Whales and the Power of Independent Evidice Vestigial hips.

29 Evidences for Macroevolution: Part 2 Morphological vestages.

Creationism and the Platypus Vestigial teeth.

Horse Evolution Vestigial toe or nubbin.

Plagiarized Errors and Molecular Genetics Vestigial genes.

Carl Zimmer's essay The Rise and Fall of the Nasal Empire was published in Natural History for June 2002. In it he tells about most of our olfactory genes being "broken" or vestigial.

I hope this helps.

"Only if the subsurface rocks were cold and hard could these weak mountains defy gravity and stay erect." All wrong. To begin with, the mountains are not "weak", nor is there any real reason to think they should be. The creationist simply assumes without merit that the surface rocks "quite understandably" should be "weak & tar like" at such temperatures. "Understandable" perhaps to someone who is unfamiliar with the thermal & mechanical properties of rock. But in reality, 900°F is quite a low temperature for rock, and one would not in fact expect them to behave in any other way than rock. The surface rocks of Venus would not become "weak & tar like", even if they were subjected to such temperatures for billions of years, which they certainly have not been. Furthermore, rock behaves quite differently under pressure than it does on the surface. The subsurface rocks will remain quite viscous, and easily have the strength to hold up the mountains of Venus, even at much higher temperatures than 900°F. There is simply nothing physically correct about the creationist's claim.

"Venus was never molten. had it been, it's hot atmosphere would have prevented it's subsurface rocks from cooling enough to support it's mountains." Not at all. In fact, heat escapes through the atmosphere of Venus, such that it's surface has cooled from a molten state, to it's current temperature, in about 500,000,000 years, which is the "evolutionary" age for the exposed surface of Venus. There is no way an atmosphere as cold as 900°F could keep the surface of Venus hot.

"if Venus were billions of years old, its atmospheric heat would have "soaked" deeply enough into the planet to weaken its subsurface rocks." Heat does not "soak". It moves, as our creationist has already told us, from hot to cold. And the speed with which it moves depends very much on the physical properties of the material it's trying to move through. Heat moves very slow through rock, and would not move far anyway, since the subsurface rocks are already much hotter than is the atmosphere (but as I said before, they don't get "soft" under pressure at such low temperatures). Since the surface is already at the same temperature as the atmosphere, and since heat can't "soak" into a hotter subsurface, the heat remains in the atmosphere, where it eventually radiates away.

In all three cases, the creationist argument is in direct contradiction to what we know about the physics of rocks, and the thermal properties of Venus. For a comprehensive study of Venus see the books Venus (1983) and Venus II (1997), both in the Space Science series from the University of Arizona press. Everything you could possibly want to know about Venus (alomst) is in at least one of these books.

The universe

"If the universe were infinitely old everything should have the same temperature." Well, evolution does not necessarily claim an infinitely old universe. But that should not prevent us from pointing out that the creationist is already treading on thin ice. This assertion might be true, and it might not. It isn't enough to say that the universe is infinitely old, but one must also say something about its internal physics. Consider for instance, a universe such as our own, evolved to the point of having black holes in thermal equilibrium with their own Hawking radiation. Everything is not at the same temperature, and it will remain so forever.

"Therefore, the universe had a beginning. (a beginning suggests a Creator)" Indeed, a beginning might suggest a creator (though it certainly does not require a creator). But there is no aspect of evolution, cosmological or biological, which in any way interfere's with the notion of a creator, so I fail to see the relevance of the point.

"Billions of years should be long enough for the temperatures to even out because of the natural property of heat flowing to colder spots to eventually even out temperature." Why? The creationist has decided that it "should" be so, but it is fair to ask why it should be so. In fact, it should not be so. billions of years is not even close to the time it takes for heat to move from hot to cold. Our current best estimate for the age of the universe is about 13,500,000,000 years. But a low mass, M-dwarf, main sequence star, will sit around happily fusing hydrogen into helium, for about 100,000,000,000,000 years. Notice that this number has 5 more zeros tacked onto it, beyond the current age of the universe. So we have to wait, until the universe is about 10,000 times older than it is now, before we even lose the current generation of red dwarf main sequence stars. And since there will be more of those stars born in the future, it will surely be much longer than that before we have to worry about the universe falling into "heat death" (the cosmologist's phrase for the condition brought up by the creationist.

"the planets would have over a billion years time (which is unimaginably long) had enough time to distribute all the heat energy equally." Not much of an imagination, I'm afraid. We already pointed out that the universe is about 1.3x10¹⁰ years old, and small red stars hang out for about 10¹⁴ years. But we can expect heat generating processes to go on for as long as, hold on to your hats, an astounding 10¹⁰⁷⁶ years! That's a number so large I can only write it in exponential notation; in a universe which could only hold about 10¹²³ protons, how would I write so many 0's? The creationist's intuition & imagination fall far short of the standard set by common reality.

See Time without end: Physics and biology in an open universe, Freeman J. Dyson, Reviews of Modern Physics 51(3): 447-460, July 1979; The Five Ages of the Universe: Inside the Physics of Eternity, Fred Adams and Greg Laughlin, Touchstone Press, 2000.

She not only mentioned avoiding debates in some cases, but also how and what to debate in order to be most effective. As a frequent debater herself, Ms. Scott is eminently qualified to advise others.

Look at what you will find in a search of Ms. Scott's website at the National Center for Science Education

The age of the Earth is 4.55 billion years old, and this is known with a precision of about half a percent. There has been no credible alternative age presented, and over the last three of four decades the only real change has been increasing precision. See our FAQ Changing Views of the History of the Earth.

I guess you may be referring to new measurements of the age of the Universe which came out just last month (in February 2003). NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) released results used to obtain a new estimate of 13.7 billion years +/- 0.2. The age of the Universe is a more difficult problem than the age of the Earth, and this result is not as secure as the many times confirmed measurements relating to the Earth. But it is a major advance, it is consistent with previous results, and the new precision is unprecedented.