The Truth of Evolution (Evolution)

by David Turell , Friday, September 19, 2008, 09:50 (5707 days ago) @ George Jelliss

David Turell: 'Natural selection' is actually circular reasoning: who survives, the fittest. How do we know they are the 'fittest'? They survived. 
 
> This is a very old and cheap canard! A dead duck. In a sense it is true. There is no harm in a tautology. It is a truism. But it is not circular reasoning. - George, I must apologize. I have had no formal training in logic as used in philosophy. My training in logical thinking came in medical school and thereafter, using Occam's razor. To me logic is working from point A to point B and finally to point C and treating the patient. The tautology above to me is circular. You start at A and end up at A, no advancement in understanding the underlying issue. To me that is circular, but as I consult the dictionary, it is obvious you are correct. It is a tautology.
 
> David Turell: As an example of large jumps in evolution, the scientists have no explanation for the 'Cambrian Explosion' in animal development.
> 
> Here is an explanation that seems more than adequate to me, 
> quoted from wikipedia:
> 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambrian_explosion#Uniqueness_of_the_explosion
&am... 
>. [i]The rate of diversification seen in the Cambrian phase of the explosion is unparalleled among marine animals: it affected all metazoan clades of which Cambrian fossils [/i]have been found. > 
> Whatever triggered the early Cambrian diversification opened up an exceptionally wide range of previously-unavailable ecological niches. styles and forms.
> 
> There is a similar one-time explosion in the evolution of land plants: after a cryptic history beginning about 450 million years ago, land plants underwent a uniquely rapid adaptive radiation during the Devonian period, about 400 million years ago.[/i] - I have bolded the critical portions of the material you presented from Wikipedia. What I read above is not an explanation, it is a description of the Cambrian event and later the 'plant bloom' in Darwin-speak, the vocabulary used by Darwin researchers. It does not explain in any way how evolution went from Ediacaran forms, multicellar sheets of relatively undifferentiated cells, to extremely complicated organisms with multiple organ systems in such a short geologic period of 10 million years at most, with some simple bilateral forms as an intermediate step. And from no sex to sex. The best way to appreciate the magnitude of the jump is to read Gould's "Wonderful Life". - As an aside, Gould used the book to push his point about contingency in evolution. If Pikaia ( the tiny fish with a notoccord) had not appeared humans would not be here. Conway Morris has turned that conjecture on its head by going to China, finding other Burgess Shale equivalent areas and finding other fish similar to Pikaia, showing that evolution will create mutiple attempts at the same solution, a process he calls convergence. Gould always had an agenda, but he and Niles Eldredge at least clearly recognized the enormous gaps in the 'tree of life' fossil record, and invented the term 'puctuated equilibrium' to "explain it". By that I mean, giving something a name seems to explain it. The same thing happens in medicine. But nothing is explained. - Just as nothing is explained by the material from Wikipedia. Of course the 'niches' were empty. The animals didn't exist to fill them. Actually over 50 phylla appeared and 37 have survived. Wikipedia talks all around the key issue. If it is a chance purposeless and directionless process, it didn't follow the Darwin rules by proceeding so quickly. My guess is that the answer wil be found in the current work on regulatory RNA processes and epigenetics, which drive evolution to respond to environmental challenges, not depending on mutations, most of which are deletereous anyway. And my question still exists, where did the information come from to manage all this, that must exist in the DNA/RNA codes? Inorganic chemicals creating the information for life? Hardly. - I hope you will respond to the problems in 'homologous' and 'analagous' analyses of body forms, and to the lack of a biochemical evolutionary tree, although I think convergence is the answer to the biochemical. - And finally, the tight controls over research grants in science results in supression of renagade ideas. Peer review doesn't permit renagades. I did hear once by email from a young scientist working to get a Ph. D. in Darwin studies, who was a secret doubter, and asked me to guide him to some critical material. He indicated how secretive he had to be.