Feedback for October 2002

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!

• 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

Wesley

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

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

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