Gordon Kane, the physicist at U. of Michigan, has a useful acronym for discussing speculations: RIP.

Research in Progress.

That's different from settled research.

You would do well to make the distinction.

Evolution works in both ways, the gradual and the dramatic.

The reason that the story is "just-so" is because we already know brain growth accelerated.
We're just trying to explain why.

It doesn't mean that such growth HAD TO occur, only that it did.

It's only humankind's narcissism that leads us to assume that we're the end product of evolution; In fact, we most definitely are not.

Amazing how such a small change can have such dramatic consequences.

I can't help but be amused at your inability/unwillingness to consider the "engineering" constraints involved in building any organism, human or otherwise. There is nothing teleological about his use of the word "freeing." If true, the removal of a constraint allowed the development of something entirely different.

Nothing teleological about that.

This bowl of porridge is just right!

Harry:

And just what would turn this from research in progress into settled research? How do you envisage evolutionary biology ever proving this or any of the other wonderful suppositions we read of almost daily?

Peter:

It's actually a simple and rather elegant experiment--take the other primates, alter their jaw gene and watch their brains explode in size. Though, sadly, that would tend to prove design theory.

Orrin:

Cool. Can I come? After reading Mayr, I was sure all we had to do was surround a test subject with vicious beasts and watch his brain grow in order to outwit them.

Heh heh, still playing with that loose tooth I see, boys.

Statler and Waldorf thought they were legitimate critics too, but really they were just hecklers.

The implication of this hypothesis is that the
brain itself had some genetic potential to get
larger but was simply constrained by head structure. Yet scientists who long ago looked for correlations between skull shape/size and intellegence were discredited by the marxist
approach to Antropology that won out earlier in
the 20'th century.

It seems inevitable that the large-scale study
of physical anthropology that was jettisoned earlier in the century in favor of a cultural
approach to anthropology will go mainstream again (Though I suppose it has already happened).
I think when these ideas are again implied to living populations and sub-populations some egalitarians will begin to get very uncomfortable.

I surpassed my usual quota for typo's. Please
forgive.

Brit:

I'm thinking of bashing out all my teeth and watching my brain grow.

Does seem a bit of a leap... so, we lost the heavy jaws a few million years back, and it's doubtful our large brains are fully compatible with it. The rest is guesswork.

And I'd like to go on the record as doubting that engineering small-jawed, intellegent gorillas is a good idea.

Did anybody see the bit about splicing human neural transmittor genes into mice and making them smarter (!)?

Mike:

Recall the Flood? The Creator regretted engineering us too.

Well, as Alfonso said, "Had I been present at the creation, I would have given some useful hints for the better ordering of the universe."

Well, it's a commonplace among athropologists and obstetricians that our heads aren't any bigger at birth than they are because that's as much as a woman's birth canal can manage.

Nobody gets bent out of shape about that.

So why does Orrin get bent out of shape about the other side of the story?

The brains got bigger. Was there a constraint, earlier, that would have prevented their getting bigger?

Maybe.

There are necessary conditions and sufficient conditions. You might try to sort out which is which before you start jeering.

Harry:

Is this some form of parody? Obviously if evolution were real the birth canal would get bigger to "free" the brain to grow larger.

Not if it is not teleological, which, despite your desperate need, it isn't.

In fact, the extreme difficulty and danger for human women in childbirth (compared to most, perhaps all, other mammals) is one of those circumstances that disproves ID and intent.

Darwinism rewards systems that work, even if just barely. It does not always produce systems that work very well.

As the mathematician Michael Guillen wrote, any communications theorist could come up with a more efficent code for proteins than the DNA version, which is full of duplications and overlaps.

If it can't evolve then you're saying it is teleological--this far and no further.

OJ:

There you go again, betraying your inability/unwillingness to understand physical constraints.

Besides maternal and fetal mortality, there is another reason women's birth canals didn't get any bigger: torque. Bigger birth canals mean wider hips, mean greater distance between the hip and the spine, meaning greater torque around the spine during walking--both lateral and vertical. If human female hips got much wider, walking would become very energy inefficient.

Back in the olden days, people did a lot of that.

Sorry, but this far and no further has nothing to do with teleology, and everything to do with simple physics.

Jeff:

Yes, the jaw can magically evolve so the brain gets bigger but the birth canal can't. Everything is just so.

Biological matter is sufficiently malleable for humans to rise from one-celled organisms but the birth canal is totally static...

So is efficiency unimportant (Harry's DNA) or vitally important (Jeff's hips)?

brian:

That's the beauty of the theory--what happened was important; what didn't wasn't. That's one of the ways the theory is undisprovable.

OJ:

You can't be that simple. Something changes, something else entirely responds, until a third thing altogether imposes its limitations.

The birth canal did get bigger, until a combination of constraints put an end to it.

Brian:

Efficiency isn't vitally important--nothing is 100% efficient. But sufficient inefficiency becomes so. I should have added that in order to control torque around the z-axis (forward motion vector--the torque that would cause you to fall sideways if you lifted one foot and did nothing to balance your weight over the other foot), women's legs are angled inwards, putting significant side loads on the knees.

My guess is that the birth canal became progressively wider until inefficiency of locomotion became significant, and infant brains became bigger until the inefficency of infant and maternal mortality became insignificant.

The sort of messy compromise you would expect with mindless evolution.

However, the maternal slaughter (20% fatality rate pre-modern medicine) unique to human childbirth clashes jarringly with the "Intelligent" in ID.

So Natural Selection was capable of Creating the birth canal out of nothing in the first place but not of enlarging it? Unless, of course, it were to widen over the next couple generations, in which case you'd argue that this trait was selected for in order that larger brains could fit through. The thinbg and its opposite are both explained in the perfectly circular theory.

OJ

Evolutionists start with examining how things are. They then seek explanations of how things got like they are. Especially since things aren't as efficient as they could be. Finding explanations and causes of how things are is not circular. Things could have been other ways if environments were different or if chance had dictated it.

But they weren't and they didn't. Doesn't mean there's anything special or inevitable about how the world is currently arranged. It's just the world we happened to have got.

Do you accuse a historian who explains the causes of the 2nd World War of being circular because the war happened?

Not that it makes any difference how often we explain our position, of course.

Argument with you is pointless, because you don't use the tools of argument.

You're not a coherent critic of Darwinism, you're just a heckler. You're Statler and Waldorf.

However many times your objections are refuted with explanation or evidence, you just repeat the same ones.

But if it floats your boat, I suppose...

Brit:

Suppose a historian proposed that Hitler had started WWII because his Father was secretly Jewish and he hated his father for Oedipal reasons. However, we then found a journal in which Hitler consistently expressed love for his father and a belief that he was a Christan. Likewise, we uuncovered evidence that Hitler was syphiltic and that his brain was eaten away over the course of the late-30s/early 40s. Our understanding of WWII and the Holocaust would change, no? (Though Freudians would simply argue that he sublimated his Father-hatred and Darwinists would argue that his genes forced him to exterminate those unlike him.)

There's no circularity except for the most doctrinaire.

"Darwinists would argue that his genes forced him to exterminate those unlike him".

See, that's what I mean by heckling, OJ.

To the more sensible point in there, yes. And our understanding of the mechanisms of evolution changes, improves and deepens all the time too.

OJ:

If the human birth canal was much wider, women couldn't run.

Mike:

Aemeoba can't run. But you believe evolution enabled them to become running men. However you don't believe evolution could give women a bigger birth canal and the ability to run? Do you really not see the Just-So story quality of this?

OJ

You just don't get it, do you?

Of course women would be better off if they had bigger birth canals AND could run faster. And were taller and stronger and never got cancer and lived to 500 years old and were immune to all known diseases.

Natural selection does not produce perfection. It produces fitness.

Organisms are fit when they can reproduce in their particular environment.

Then why don't things stop when they're fit? The argument instead has to be that it favors the fitter. Thus those with the jaw mutation survived because their offspring could have bigger brains. So why don't the offspring of women with the bigger birth canal mutation likewise suirvive at higher rates?

You simply answer that the mutation is impossible because it didn't happen. Whatever is is and had to be, whatever isn't couldn't be.

OJ, one word for you to consider: cost. Added features have costs. Wider birth canals cost upright walking and running abiliy, upright walking and running capablilty cost birth canal width. It is a tradeoff. You might as well ask why Detroit hasn't produced an SUV that gets 35 miles per gallon. When two things are desired, such as fuel efficiency and the ability to drive up a mountanside and survive a head on collision with a GEO Metro, you will get a compromise that does neither to it's maximum capacity.

The female body is the optimum trade-off of the two capabilites of upright walking/running and birthing for the environment in which it evolved.

You still don't get it.

The mutation may well have happened; it may have happened many times. But if it did, it didn't take.

Women's hips are not one fixed width--there is variation. The variation could not move in the wider direction because relative immobility--a requirement having nothing to do with big brains--became sufficiently prounounced that those women with the wider hips driven by wider birth canals, did not survive.

Brain size, prolonged childhood, maternal mortality, and the ability to walk--never mind run--all exist in tension. You can't change one variable without drastic effects on the others.

You should study the mechanics of anatomy sometime.

Why wouldn't it take if brain size is such an advantage that it selected for the flappy jaw people? Oh yeah, because it didn't. What is is, what isn't isn't--no reason necessary.

Robert:

Why?

Orrin is really a lot smarter than he allows himself to let on when he attacks Darwin.

The problem is circular, all right. If he examines the theory fairly, he's going to have to concede it. But he can't, because he's committed -- incorrrectly in my view -- that that means giving up a creator god. (It would mean giving up an interfering creator god, but considering what he did -- if he did -- that's a small loss).

So he cannot consider the theory fairly.

The birth canal example was sort of a setup. There's another way to get intelligent babies besides widening the birth canal.

You could have brain development continue at a high rate after birth.

That would be, presumably, a pretty nifty solution. Less maternal death in childbirth, even smarter creatures.

A busybody god would surely have thought of it.

But natural selection does not think or anticipate. It works with what's there. If it isn't there, it cannot be selected.

Why vertebrates complete their brain development mostly before birth (or hatching) is kind of odd, but there it is.

OJ

The mutuation is perfectly possible. It's probably happened loads of times.

But it doesn't convey a sufficient advantage to the woman, to outweigh the benefits of being able to walk efficiently.

So women with abnormally large birth canals, (and their female children with large birth canals) have not become more prevalent in the population than those women who can walk in a straight line.

Instead, chances are that the characteristic that becomes most prevalent is the largest possible birth canal that still allows the woman to walk.

Which doesn't mean that the whole system couldn't have been designed better by an intelligent desginer. One hopes that an intelligent designer wouldn't have made women suffer so much during childbirth, nor would he kill them off so frequently without modern medicine. That would be pretty mean of him.

Harry:

So the jaw argument is totally bogus too, right? There's no imperative for larger brains so the jaw would have no effect.

Harry

Good angle on the argument.

And of course a busybody intelligent designer could have done a hell of a lot more than that, besides.

The fact that we risk choking to death every time we eat something is a bit of a pest. Appendicitis too.

If there was a designer, he wasn't very good at it.

Brit:

"Abnormally" How deterministic.

OJ:

Ummm, last time I checked "normal" or its converse, "abnormal" were terms of comparison regarding membership, or exclusion from, that which is most frequently found. Which means it has not the tiniest thing to do with determinism.

But maybe its just me.

But even more, uh, surprising, is "So the jaw argument is totally bogus too, right? There's no imperative for larger brains so the jaw would have no effect." Once again you display your lack of appreciation for constraints and tradeoffs.

At one time I flew an airplane that had a maximum roll rate of 720 degrees/second--it carried two people. At another time, I flew an airplane that rolled at a maximum of 30 degs per second--it carried 150 people. Why the difference? Why not have it all? What does roll rate have to do with carrying people?

Until you can answer that question, or ones like it, than you are unqualified to discuss why a constraint in one dimension can limit another dimension altogether.

Brit:

As usual, you seem to get straight to the point with the fewest possible words.

Jeff:

So, it's just a design problem? I can buy that.

Not bogus, but highly speculative. RIP.

If you're going to critique darwinism, first you must state what it says. Then you can try to impeach that.

Darwinism is non-teleological. Therefore, the oppoortunity to grow a bigger brain need not be realized.

It is exactly the same argument I made here many months ago regarding deposing vile regimes. There is a difference between a moral opportunity and a moral obligation.

If, a constraint on bigger brains is removed, by chance, then maybe a bigger brain will evolve.

You are attacking Lamarckism and doing a very good job of it.

Trouble is, nobody has believed in Lamarckism for generations.

Try attacking Darwinism for a change.

Harry:

To the contrary it is entirely teleological, seeking to explain how we arrived at a given pointm, that point being the telos.

Harry:

So are you saying the notion that evolution selects for fitness is obsolete? That mutations and adaptations are all just happenstance? It seems so because humans are supposed to have evolved from quadriped primates that presumably had wide birth canals, no? Man comes along and loses the ability to run fast, to hide in trees, to smell, to survive unclothed and with unheard of rates of neo-natal death, all for the nebulous honour of standing up. One would think he is probably headed for extinction but a freak mutation in the jaw that has no apparent cause allows the brain to triple in size and he gradually takes over the world.

Is that the story?

Also, what importance what was it whether women walked efficiently or not? They couldn't outrun anything even at their fleetest. Seems a tad implausible that nature would lead them from primate birth practices to the point of excruciating childbirth and high rates of both maternal and neonatal death as a "torque" trade-off for a brisker walk to the waterhole.

Oh grow up, Peter.

Mutations are happenstance. Adaptations are selected by competition.

There's not really any point in discussing, in adult fashion, a topic if you are unwilling to start out at least with a fair statement of the topic.

You don't like my general conclusions about Christianity, but I don't make up the specific objections. I choose them from, among other places, Holy Scripture.

You and Orrin might consider doing the same with Darwinism.

The ability of a hominid female to walk long distances easily would be important if food resources were sparse or becoming so. Paleoclimatology suggests that was the case.

You also misrepresent the abilities of humans -- it is often stated with an air of profundity that we are, physically, rather poorly equipped.

But this is not so. We can outrun a horse. We have excellent vision. Our digestive system, though not as good as it easily might be, is more adaptable than most other mammals have. And so on.

Among the tenets of Darwinism is that natural selection operates on individuals to change species.

That complicates things considerably, because whole suites of characters survive, not separate ones.

So that, in principle, a somewhat deleterious mutation can be carried along piggyback by a very advantageous one; or by recessive genes.

The presentation of the little jaw idea was extremely simplified, so much so, apparently, that it confused some people.

Harry:

You've already ruled out competition though. Well, actually you rule it in for the jaw and out for the birth canal. Of course, all you want is that things have to have happened exactly as they did, so competition functions for what is but not for what isn't. And around and around and around....

"So, it's just a design problem? I can buy that."

No, it is exactly the opposite of a design problem. Unless, of course, you can design a fully aerobatic airliner. Until then, you are faced with an intractable tradeoff problem.

Peter:

It isn't a matter of efficient walking. Women's gait is inefficient, and the inefficiency grows quickly, because the displacement of the hip affects rotation about two axes. Hips much wider than they are would be incompatible with bipedalism.

Carrying water and wood even short distances puts demands on mobility--the tradeoff isn't free. As my airplane example should have demonstrated, every change has an opportunity cost.

Asserting that competition for the jaw and birth canal are ruled it is just ridiculous--they are all examples of interlocking tradeoffs, and all have to exist within a context of mutual constraints.

Harry:

Holy Scripture? In capitals no less. Maybe I'm being unfair but I don't recall too many of those objections. They must have been drowned out by your many assertions that it was all an enslaving fraud perpetrated by a bunch of liars.

Jeff:

Fine, the human body is a complex thing full of trade-offs, but how did it get that way? Primates could both travel faster and birth more easily. Sounds like lose-lose to me. You are in the world of ex post facto conjectures, some quite implausible, yet you seem certain about it all. A million "could haves" don't constitute scientific proof or anything close.

Peter:

Something changed--genetic mutations happened. That change opens a new opportunity until reaching a constraint. According to the conjecture, narrowing the jaw removed a structural constraint on skull size, which led to increasing skull size, leading to selecting from variation in the population for wider hips due to maternal/infant mortality until impeded mobility becomes significant.

Having a bigger brain conveyed sufficient fitness to overcome the other costs until they got big enough.

These aren't could haves, they are must have beens. We could have bigger brains, but at the expense of prolonging already nearly interminable childhood, or we could have bigger brains within the existing dependency period, but at the expense of unsustainable (pre-modern era) energy requirements, or we could have bigger brains if killing half the women, rather than merely a fifth, was sustainable, or we could have bigger brains if women never needed to walk.

It got that way because all the attempted variations outside that existing today failed to accomodate the trade offs adequately.

One would think that anything more intelligent than evolution would find a way to be fruitful and multiply without ceaselessly killing so many women, though.

Peter:

At which point,. these same selection pressures, which had chosen for mobility and brain siuze in the first placxe froze in place and could not find any mutation, among the billions and billions which would allow both larger brains and mobility and so evolution of humans froze in place.

Jeff:

Do I ever feel lost in the enchanted kingdom. Why did all these amazing things have to happen? Why didn't we just go extinct?

Jeff:

So you're saying there will never be big planes with high roll rates? I suppose that's possible, but I'd note you're scientific predecessors used to say it was physically impossible to fly in the first place.

Orrin:

It is also interesting that just as mankind evolves into a biped with restricted, inefficient mobility for women, he decides to start trekking all over the world.

Peter/OJ

You both claim to have read Ernst Mayr, but the nature of the questions that you continue to ask doesn't really tally with that claim, to my mind.

That is to say, you're not asking informed questions; you're asking the exact kind of questions that people who've never actually read any Darwinist literature ask.

I'm not sure which book(s) of his you've read, but I recommend "What Evolution Is".

It's an excellent, concise, straight-down-the-line summary/explanation of the masses of evolutionary biology study worldwide. Particularly the chapters on natural selection, the definition of 'species' and speciation itself.

If you read that, and make a genuine attempt to understand it (as opposed to picking a few paragraphs near the beginning, then misinterpreting them and scoffing at them), you might start to ask better questions. Or at least questions about Darwinism, which don't require us to repeatedly explain the basics of gradualism and the non-teleological approach.

As Mayr says repeatedly, Darwinism attempts to explain how what is came to be that way. Starting from "is" is by definition teleological--it begins with the "end".

Brit:

No offence, old buddy, but I'm getting a little fatigued by all these accusations about not understanding this or that. Are you so beholden to your belief that you simply can't accept that people can genuinely believe your theory is seriously flawed. Besides, you yourself have often stated defenders of evolution must use teleological language as a metaphor because of liguistic constraints, so why hold your opponents to a higher standard?

Yes, yes, no purpose (except when there is one), no beginnings or endings (except when Mayr says evolution is complete) and many, many tiny changes over gazillions of years. Got it.

The problem is simply that, at least for man, the theory is incomplete, nonsensical, counterintuitive and implausible. Never mind teleological, you guys are positively theological. You have to explain man's evolution in terms of some kind of progress to a higher order in order to avoid foolishness in light of history, but you have him making all kinds of changes that make him less, not more, fit for his environment and surmising about climate changes and great voyages that have a distinctive mythological feel to them.

There is no way natural selection alone could explain a conscious, alienated, moral being like man. The history of man as recounted by Mayr and others simply does not make logical sense. I don't know what happened, Brit, but that wasn't it. May I respectively invite you to reread Mayr on the evolution of man and confirm that you are satisfied he is talking provable science.

Ok OJ, you have to grasp this, or you'll never get anywhere on your famous crusade against Darwinism.

That claim would only be teleological if we insisted that:

1) we've now reached the end of evolution;
and/or
2) we haven't reached the end, but we can predict where it will go;
and/or
3) it HAD to turn out this way - this is the best of all possible worlds/the only way things could have evolved;
and/or
4) all evolution was purposefully aiming for the current state, with this 'end in mind'.

We claim none of these things, so the approach is non-teleological.

The world happens to be this way. We study contemporary biology and its history.

Go and think about it, then maybe you'll come back with some better questions.

Peter

Then I suggest you leave that pesky loose tooth alone. If you think Darwinism is a crackpot religion, my advice is to just ignore it. I bet you don't expend so much time and energy trying to whack scientology or jedi-ism.

Just stop playing with it.

But if you want to attack it, get some ammunition.

Brit:

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,644002,00.html

Brit:

You've got the shoe on the wrong foot. There are no scientologist trolls or jedists sitting around trying to impose theirt religious views at the Brothers Judd--only fanatical Darwinist proselytizers some of whom likewise have nothing better to do than bad mouth Christianity.

Want to hear nothing but the dulcet tones of your fellow believers? Why don't you, Harry, and Jeff start a blog?

Heh heh, 'it's my ball and you're not going to play with it' you mean?

If you published attacks on Jedi-ism, eventually you might expect some commentor to come along and defend it.

But of course Jedi-ism is nuts, so you don't bother attacking it.

Darwinism gets a robust defence from your sustained, pretty much daily attacks. And though I can't speak for Harry, Jeff seems pretty polite about Christianity.

Brit:

I don't know anyone who believes in Jedism or Scientology or I'd attack them too. Jedism seems to appeal only to the British (http://www.brothersjudd.com/blog/archives/003998.html) for some reason (probably having to do with Alec Guiness), whicle Scientology is just an attempt to cure Hollywood types of their homosexuality.

That Jedi thing in the census was a 'hilarious' student jape...when they were taking a break from stealing traffic cones and putting them on statues, I suppose.

I'm with you on scientology. This is one minority we can't tolerate, since it's harmful to the general public.

It's certainly not a religion and should not be protected by the First Amendment.

"So you're saying there will never be big planes with high roll rates? I suppose that's possible, but I'd note you're scientific predecessors used to say it was physically impossible to fly in the first place."

That is precisely what I am saying. It has to do with cantilever beams, polar moments of inertia, mass distribution, roll coupling, ad infinitum. An airliner is the best combination of constraints it can possibly be, but there it no way to pick one and run with it, while ignoring all others.

Just like with humans. Within the environment of evolutionary relevance (everywhere probably up through, and including, the iron age), large brains existed in the context of unavoidable constraints.

And if you don't think 20% maternal mortality isn't a constraint, or doesn't have evolutionary feedback, then it is impossible to imagine what would.

Peter, there is nothing logical about darwinism.

There's nothing logical about a dolphin or a daisy.

There is something lawful -- in the sense that the word law is used by scientists -- in that of the multiple billions of things that might have evolved, only those allowed by the natural behavior of the elements are permitted.

To go back a few days to the post about life based on ammonia rather than water, there may not be any reason that a living system could not be created by another (intelligent) living system based on ammonia, but it's a pretty good bet that a planet that had ammonia the way ours has water would not allow life to originate. (I'll save the argument, which is straightforward and anybody who has studied chemistry can figure it out for himself.)

But no amount of natural selection is ever going to lead to a creature that requires, say, argon to form a molecule with carbon. Cannot happen.

Orrin is fond of saying that darwinists think Mankind is the highest end and destination of evolution, but what darwinists actually say is that there is no special preference for Mankind.

By the numbers, there are more parasites than hosts, and to all appearances, if evolution had a purpose it would appear to have been tapeworms.

Even intelligence is not necessarily supreme in humans. I suspect it is, but people like John Lilly thought that porpoise brains were just as capable.

What is is and had to be, what isn't isn't and couldn't, Amen.

Harry:

I appreciate that. Despite Brit's huffiness (you evolutionists are soooo thin-skinned!), I don't think Darwinism is a crackpot religion. I think it is trying to explain much more than it can logically or scientifically and in the face of anomolies that it explains rotely (and with an artificial language--always a suspicious sign)with little or at least selective evidence arrived at ex post facto on the basis of what "had to be" to make the theory work.

OK, man is both A) king of the hill; and B) the least adapted of all the species to his natural environment. If you lived in Africa a million years ago would your chances be better as a man or a chimp? Man can't generally survive two weeks without tools or technique, yet darwinism has him evolving from a species that could very nicely. In other words, man appears to have evolved away from adaptability, not towards it. If you guys didn't have that big brain as a sui generis catch all explanation, it would be very logical except the logic would all be counterintuitive and point to something else at play.

All the putative changes that are relied upon--light hairless skin, blue eyes, superior digestion, etc. are intra-species changes that don't seem to have involved natural selection. But the descent from the primates would have had to be a true descent, because it left man far less able to survive in a natural state. He gives up speed and mobility and efficient birthing in order to stand up and look out over the grass? Do you really think it is a sign of ignorance to hold one's wallet on that one? I'm sorry, but when it comes to man, whether his appearance was logical or rational or not (and I agree it wasn't), the point is it doesn't appear to have been natural either in the sense of responding to natural forces.

That's how you get extinctions, Peter.

If you will study your history of Darwinism you will recall that Darwin was a follower of Paley and not, at first, a disbeliever in ID.

He could not fit extinction into ID, and in fact, like Orrin, the orthodox refused to admit extinction because they realized it wrecked Creation.

But the evidence for extinction was implacable.

It was Aquinas's fault. He deliberately linked the natural world to the supernatural. If he hadn't done that, Darwinism wouldn't be such a threat to religion.

What's so tough about extinction? We hunted bald eagles so close to extinction that nitwit scientists thought it must be DDT.

OJ:

What is so tough about extinction? It describes virtually every species that ever existed.

Peter:

Man wasn't created out of whole cloth. Rather, man descended from animals that could survive without tools. The archeology is pretty clear: pre-humans were able to make primitive tools.

Your assertion that man has evolved away from adaptability seems suspect. Given tools and fire, man has become the most adaptable animal of all. Of course, it took a bigger brain to make that happen, which means another constraint had to go away...

The time involved, about 1.4MY, and the number of gene diffferences between us and chimps, about 300, is completely consistent with the theory that humans are an accident, rather than the point of the universe. Ego damaging that may be, but there it is.

Every step along the way left pre-humans and humans at least well enough adapted to survive, although the evidence suggests it was a near thing. The last I read (six or so years ago), mitochondrial DNA suggests the founder population was about 10,000.

That is about as close to extinct as darnnit is to swearing.

Realistically, how many species could you fit on the ark? Of course they're mostly extinct.

Jeff:

"Given tools and fire, man has become the most adaptable animal of all."

And abstract thought, sliced bread and Nintendo. Given all those, we're in great shape. They have a lot to do with natural history, don't they?

Peter:

Man is part of natural history, so they are, too.

OJ:

"Realistically, how many species could you fit on the ark? Of course they're mostly extinct."

I'm scratching my head trying to figure out which part of that sentence is realistic.

The creationists and natural theologians denied, strenuously, extinctions.

Made it a cornerstone of creationism.

So when it turned out extinctions are not only real but usual, creationism collapsed on their terms.

If you're going to be a creationist, you will have to do two things, neither of which you show any sign of being willing to do:

1. Repudiate almost 2,000 years of Christian teaching.

2. Develop another version of creationism that takes account of extinctions.

Harry:

Good news! I believe creationism must mend its ways and account for extinction.

Do I win?

If I am digesting yours and Jeff's posts above, do I understand the party line is now that man was a regressive mutation that evolved in opposition to adaptability and was nearly driven extinct, except that he discovered tools just in the nick of time and then went on ( after some global wanderings) to invent agriculture, war and civilization?

Harry:

They were wrong then. You're wrong now. We're even.

Peter:

Regressive? Opposition to adaptabilty? Tools contemporaneous with the population bottleneck?

Where did you come up with that stuff?

The first two are wrong, the third never stated. The population bottleneck is, however, demonstrably true.

What you need to digest is that, even if an Intelligent Designer exists, the interlocking constraints are unavoidable--or your ID has a repulsive affinity for killing mothers. What's more, there is nothing about the constraints, or the magnitude of the various changes that took place over the last 1.4MY, that is beyond the realm of natural processes.

No ID is required. Why invoke one?

Peter:

Anything that didn't happen is beyond the realm--anything that did was not.

Didn't and couldn't are two different things.

You've taken the first step, what the engineer J.E. Gordon (in "The New Science of Strong Materials") called climbing out of "the pit of anti-knowledge."

We are born knowing nothing. Most of us then go on to learn things that are not so.

But merely climbing out of the pit, and reattaining the intellectual level of an infant, is not the whole deal. You then have to develop a ramified, coherent theory of knowledge.

Have at it. Be warned, though. It ain't easy.