Let's study ID: giraffe plumbing (Introduction)

by dhw, Tuesday, September 28, 2021, 11:15 (912 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Darwin thought itty-bitty steps evolved species.

dhw: Gaps demonstrate the absence of fossils, or a period when there were no new species (Gould’s punctuated equilibrium). How itty-bitty is itty-bitty? It might take many generations for large design changes to perfect themselves (I’m thinking of legs becoming flippers), but even the Cambrian offers millions of years and generations for such changes to take place.

DAVID: Strange illogical point in bold: the start of the Cambrian had all sorts of new forms without precursors. The start is the gap. The million of years afterward are window dressing.

Some say the Cambrian lasted for about 55 million years. Please tell us how many millions of those years do you regard as being the “start”? Here is an interesting account of the Cambrian, rather different from your sensationalized version.

CC300: Cambrian Explosion
www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CC/CC300.html

QUOTES: “Even among animals, not all types appear in the Cambrian. Cnidarians, sponges, and probably other phyla appeared before the Cambrian. Molecular evidence shows that at least six animal phyla are Precambrian (Wang et al. 1999). Bryozoans appear first in the Ordovician. Many other soft-bodied phyla do not appear in the fossil record until much later. Although many new animal forms appeared during the Cambrian, not all did. According to one reference (Collins 1994), eleven of thirty-two metazoan phyla appear during the Cambrian, one appears Precambrian, eight after the Cambrian, and twelve have no fossil record."

“Almost none of the animal groups that people think of as groups, such as mammals, reptiles, birds, insects, and spiders, appeared in the Cambrian.”
“The length of the Cambrian explosion is ambiguous and uncertain, but five to ten million years is a reasonable estimate; some say the explosion spans forty million years or more, starting about 553 million years ago. Even the shortest estimate of five million years is hardly sudden.”

“Cambrian life was still unlike almost everything alive today. Although several phyla appear to have diverged in the Early Cambrian or before, most of the phylum-level body plans appear in the fossil record much later (Budd and Jensen 2000). Using number of cell types as a measure of complexity, we see that complexity has been increasing more or less constantly since the beginning of the Cambrian (Valentine et al. 1994).”

Nothing is as clear-cut as you like to make it seem.

dhw: And please remember that each stage will still be a fully formed organism - pre-whales could still have swum with legs that had become less leggy. I don’t know what special knowledge you have that makes you so certain about the potential capabilities of cells.

DAVID: Cells only potential is to do their assigned jobs.

“Assigned” in what way? Cells potential is quite clearly to change the jobs they do! How else could evolution have taken place?

Immunity system complexity
DAVID: Immune cells are built/designed to automatically make new antibodies against newly-appearing invading organisms.

dhw: I know what immune cells do. I’m asking you how your God “instructs” them to do it. With a library of instructions to choose from, or does he keep popping in to tell them what to do as and when each new invader arrives on the scene? Please answer.

DAVID: Immunity appeared during evolution, or there would not have been any evolution. The immune cells have all the instructions they need to meet new invaders.

Of course it appeared during evolution, and of course it evolved during evolution. Now please tell us how your God “instructs” the cells: a library for them to choose from, or constant dabbling?


Complete thread:

 RSS Feed of thread

powered by my little forum