I can't think of any religious doctrine as mystical and simply odd as the idea that a parasitic clump of cells becomes human by virtue of passing through the birth canal.

Kind of a Dred Scot moment. Let the rationalizing begin.

OK, I thought of one.

Watch yourself Cohen. I'm sure there are some Papists around here.

See. See. I knew that The Passion of the Christ would lead to an uptick in antisemitism. I've been threatened. Quick, someone call the ADL.

By the way, are you saying Transubstantiation is not mystical or not odd?

David-

The story of Christ is mystical. The Roman Church simply takes His words regarding the bread and wine consumed at the Passover meal quite literally. The "sacrifice" of the Mass is the recreation of that meal in obedience to the command to "...do this in memory of me."

(I have a feeling you already knew this)

I have a feeling David's having fun at we Papists' expense.

On that note, though, I should add that Transubstantiation is distinctly Aristotelian, not distinctly Goebbelsian. Ergo, it does not deny what is obvious to plain sensual understanding; it says that there's more than we can immediately sense going on.

You guys obviously need the services of a good Protestant mediator. Just drop the nonsense about transubstantiation, chosen people, rules and all sorts of other stuff and then we'll all sit in a circle and talk about love.

David, it is more along the lines of the Schrodinger's Cat paradox, where a particle exists only when someone observes it. If a clump of cells grows in a womb, and noone wants it, is it human?

Robert:

Yes, that's precisely the point--that which we choose not to see as human need not be treated as human. It's simple dehumanization.

I would have thought that the Virgin Birth was a better comparison than Transsubstantiation, in this context.

I have not heard Orrin's position on unfertilized eggs, but if it takes fertilization to become human, then the status of Jesus is problematic, no?

I'll say.

Harry:

I'm not aware of anyone who believes fertilization of a human egg is required to create a human being.

How do they do it in New Hampshire?

Harry:

You believe in Darwinism, no? So there's some magical moment in time when a non-human egg was fertilized by a non-human sperm and the off-spring was human. Right?

Meanwhile, the religious believe God Created Man in the first place.

So no one believes that a human egg and a human sperm are required.

OJ:

Wrong.

True.

Wrong again.

No. If a non-human egg and non-human sperm were united, you would not get a human.

Sperms and eggs are human, they just are not autonomous individuals.

If you unite an egg of one species and a sperm of another (which can be done with some closely related species), you don't get one or the other but a combination of the two -- a chimaera.

A hinny, for example.

A cloned human, if possible, would, in the darwinian view, be a human.

But I don't understand the Virgin Birth as a cloning, because God was the father. That makes Jesus's humanity problematic.

If I recall, you don't believe he was divine, so for you the problem is other way round.

The Catholics taught me that we could accept evolution as presented by the darwinians, as long as in the special case of humans we allowed that at some point god infused an immortal soul.

Curiously, given the fact that these doctrines are carefully worded, we were taught that the soul came in at some indefinite point. Not at conception or any other specific time.

Apparently, the priests did not want to appear to be telling God how to make humans.

So humans preceded the evolution of humans?

Of course Christ was Divine--the story has no meaning otherwise.

What preceded English?

When was the first day English was spoken?

No matter the causative agent, English, or any language, is a clear example of modification through small variations.

Your question is unanswerable because it makes no sense, as is obvious from applying it to an analogous situation.

Not English. That's my point. Humans, according to your theory arose from non-humans, just as English arose from non-English.

If I've misunderstood and it's your position instead that humans suddenly sprang into existence then I agree. Welcome to Creationism.

You're flailing, Orrin. You have been for several weeks now.

Eventually, the press of evidence does drive the antidarwinists into absurdities.

I distinctly recall that you dismissed or denied that Jesus was divine.

Harry:

Did homo sapiens sapiens evolve from something else or not? I believe not, so I'm untroubled by the idea that the first man is not the product of the fertilization of a human egg. You supposedly believe we did evolve, so you must believe in some magical being who is a human but whose parents aren't, right?

Harry:

"Eventually, the press of evidence does drive the antidarwinists into absurdities."

And the absence of evidence on papal galley slaves is keeping the religionists up at night. C'mon, Harry, it has to be easy.

Would you and Jeff please stop digressing into the joys of religion-mocking and try to answer Orrin's quite sensible question. How, according to Darwin, was the first human conceived? How, according to Darwin, can a new species evolve if its parents are of a different species. And c'mon guys, no copping out with "mists of time" evasions or genotype bafflegab. It really is a very simple question, one that would instantly occur to eye-witnesses.

OJ and Peter:

Certainly "How, according to Darwin, was the first human conceived?" and "How, according to Darwin, can a new species evolve if its parents are of a different species?" are "sensible questions" if you know nothing about Darwinism. But OJ claims to have it sussed - he just thought (quote) "Darwin whiffed on speciation."

But unfortunately, yet again, his question shows that he doesn't have a clue what Darwinism actually says about speciation.

The whole point about Darwinian evolution is that it recognises that species aren't essential, Platonic 'types', of which each individual is a 'copy.' There wasn't a moment when the last non-human gave birth to the first human - and bang! - from now on, we're all homo sapiens… (Homo erectus is dead, long live homo sapiens!)

Instead, species are populations composed of genetically unique individuals. (Here's a nice thought: you're genetically different from all the 6 billion other humans, and all the billions who have gone before.)

Generally, speciation (the processes leading to new species) occurs when a 'parent species' (a population) splits into reproductively isolated populations (eg. geographically isolated due to migration).

Over time, each of these populations will accumulate changes from the processes of natural selection (eg. sexual selection, random mutation). Eventually, the members of the two populations may no longer be capable of interbreeding with each other. Now we can point at the populations and say we've got two different species.

Note that the 'new' species does not automatically replace the old species. They can co-exist. (If the new population does survive and become a new species, and the old one dies out, that's called 'anagenesis.')

This is anoter of Darwin's great observations: evolution by 'gradualism' - not sudden change from one thing to another ('saltation')

There's no particular line you can draw between one individual and its parents and say, 'this was the exact moment when a new species emerged'.

Just like there was no single person who was the 'first' to speak 'English', while his parents spoke 'not-English'.

Brit:

So your answer is, "yes": you do believe in a magic moment where two non-humans bred and produced a human.

Peter:

What Brit said. The British colonists that came to America became a geographically isolated linguistic population. From that time, American English diverged from British English. Had technology not ovecome the geographic isolation, that process would have continued until the languages were mutually unintelligible.

It is a process that occurs in contiguous populations over time, as well. Try reading the original Shakespeare. You can do it, but not easily.

Both those phenomena are the result of descent with small, continuous, random, unplanned, variation.

According to OJ, we should be able to point to the first speaker of English whose parents spoke non-English. Well?

Jeff:

I agree. Evolution is identical to the English language, a function of intelligent design.

OJ

Too childish.

'Flailing' is putting it politely.

Brit:

So, you have no answer. eh?

yes i do.

But, it's yes and you can'tr admit that or Harry, Jeff and Robert will take away your secret decoder ring?

No.

Cool! You get to keep the ring?

Brit & Jeff,

I'll play the Devil's advocate and ask the question that OJ can't seem to formulate. One requirement for speciation is that members within a species can reproduce with each other, but cannot reproduce with a member of a separate species. So if you follow the line of ancestry backwards, any Homo Sapiens should be genetically able to reproduce with any of his/her ancestors who were also Homo Sapiens, correct? That suggests that there was a discontinuity sometime in the past where one of our ancestors gave birth to a person that he/she could not genetically reproduce with, due to a mutation. But that offspring would need a mate with the exact same mutation in order to breed, correct?

Or could it be that it is not single mutations that cause the discontinuity in mate-ability, but a collection of mutations? If A, B, C, D and E are succeeding generations of a species, each separated by a single mutation in a key gene, then it could be that A can mate with B, B can mate with C, C can mate with D, D can mate with E, but due to accumulated mutations A can no longer mate with E.

What do you think?

Uh-oh, the quartet is down to just two believers--one a Stalinist and the other mad at his father.

Robert:

I think you've got it in your last paragraph. And E can no longer mate with any members of the founder population, who are still existing, but due to a lack of selection pressure in their environment are still As. Hence the new population are a different species.

The key to understanding darwinian speciation is 'population thinking.' You don't have a bunch of A's, then a sudden saltation and the next generation are all Bs. You have a population of genetically unique individuals. That's a species. Speciation is a result of gradual accumulative changes in these variable populations.

More mechanisms for speciation here.

Thanks! You can keep the decoder ring.

If there was no selection pressure why are there Bs, Cs, Ds & Es? Why didn't the As just keep breeding true? Or is each of us a separate species and then the term species just a social construct, like "race"? Why are there not As, Bs, Cs, Ds, & Es now? Why can a Swede breed with an Aborigine? How do we manage to stay all A?

Robert:

Cheers mate.

OJ:

Swedes and Aboriginies are still the same species. Evolution usually takes mind-boggling amounts of time. Maybe if we'd let the Aboriginies continue to live undisturbed for another x thousand generations, they'd become a separate species to Swedes.

The example I'm talking about is one in which the original 'founder population' (could be homo erectus, could be birds, could be any animal) splits into two. So imagine a bunch of them (still As at this stage) migrate to a new environment.

The emigrants face different selection pressures (mutation, sexual selection etc) to the stay-at-homes. After a long time, they're now Es.

The stay-at-homes may not have faced any particularly strong evolutionary pressures in this time. So they might still be As. Or, they might have had their own, different pressures, so they're now Xs, Ys or Zs. Or they might even have died out.

The stay-at-homes and the emigrants are now two different species. Note that the former did not transform into the latter in one particular generation.

"Evolution is identical to the English language, a function of intelligent design."

Wrong. Capital Wrong. Evolution is not a thing, it is a process. The English language is a thing. How the English language changed from, say, Shakespearean times to now is a process. And unless you can specify the planner and the plan, it was an unguided process with no end state in mind, that changed in precisely the way, and under precisely the circumstances, Darwinism would suggest.

So, to answer Robert's question. If you went far enough back, probably only a few hundred years before Shakespeare, you would be completely unable to understand the language. You could follow a continuous line of descent through until today, speaking a language completely unintelligible to the Olde English speaker. You and the speaker are members of two language species.

So where did the language not breed true?

Of course, one can extend this to all languages, while noting the linguistic tree is morphologically identical to the phylogenetic tree. One would note that there are many different dialects of English (like races of humans), but that an English speaker would be at sea in a stuffy French restaurant, with a similar situation between species.

OJ:

" ... and the other mad at his father."

Two things occur to me here. First, ad hominem attacks are a sure sign of a bankrupt argument.

As for the second, diplomacy fails me.

Piss off, jerk.

Except that in practice they're just Swedes and aborigines. The same species, however different looking. I can buy that. It's the farmers breeding experiments again.

My, but aren't we clever. We can debate evolution on two threads at the same time. Look Ma, no hands!

Hey Jeff, you are nuts, of course, but one or two questions. You guys keep talking about the huge swaths of time evolution needs which is why there is no apparent change in so many species. So how come such a pokey evolutionary species as man manages to effect such phenomenal linguistic changes so quickly? Why would language evolve so breathtakingly quickly? And why only in humans? And what evolutionary pressures operate on language?

Jeff:

Calling your father, or your Father, a jerk won't help you with your problem.

We are the planners. The plan is more effective commincation. So we design a language. It changes over time.

Evolution, as you say, is identical.

So, when "groovy" changed to "gnarly" changed to "da-bomb", our language became more efficient? What design considerations went into these changes? What panel of judges made the final decision?

Robert:

Don't tell me "groovy" is gone? That explains all the strange looks.

French does have a panel of judges on this kind of thing, so I guess it is only English that evolves.

Robert:

It's a democracy, we all decide what is in vogue and out of date words tend to fall by the wayside, though they delightfully prone to comebacks, just as new ones tend to be short-lived, no matter how successful for a brief period of time.

OJ

A lot of it comes down to how you define species...biologists don't class it on looks alone. Daschunds and Great Danes are both dogs.

As to the personal insults, let's all keep calm. Nobody is 'nuts'. I guess I must be the Stalinist? Don't get that. My friends are always calling me a right-wing yank-lover. I call THEM loony lefty euro-lovers...still, always nice to be appreciated. At least I'm not a Nazi this time?

Peter

Re language. Very interesting question - it develops incredibly fast, as do other social things, like architecture, science, and yes, car technology. Much faster than our biological change, which is minimal in the history of homo sapiens.

Anyone who had to read Beowolf or Chaucer at school will know how much langauages evolve. I often wondered how they had the nerve to teach us Chaucer in 'English' lessons.

Full discussion of language is in Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct.

Orrin, your argument amounts to Zeno's Paradox of Achilles and the hare.

And the answer is the same.

You may not, of course, know the answer. The only person I ever met who believed Achilles did not pass the hare was my college philosophy teacher, who was also a Baptist minister.

I do believe that everybody else here understands that Achilles does pass the hare and many of them can even explain why.

Also on language, I can think of two practical examples of the hopelessness of the 'design' theory of language.

1) Esperanto. Boy, that went well, didn't it.

2) The French panel that Peter mentions. They try to stop the kids using Franglais words like Le football, le weekend and le Big Mac. Utter failure.

Because languages develop through use, not through design or rules.

OJ:

That ad hominem insult was presumptuous, insulting, pointless, and completely wrong.

It doesn't exactly reflect great credit upon you.

OJ, these changes in language usage are certainly not designed to improve the efficiency of communication. To the extent that they are designed, it is to explicitly to impede communication. Slang pops up in sub-cultures, the members of the subculture don't want the larger society to understand what they are saying. Hip-Hoppers don't want white suburbanites to "be down with them". Dawg!

Robert:

Where are you going with that point after conceding intelligent design by making it?

Harry:

Zeno

Brit:

No, Harry's the Stalinist. You already conceded that non humans give birth to a human at some point.

Jeff:

It's not meant as an insult, but an observation. Sorry if you find it offensive.

I'm as much a stalinist as Orrin is a Christian.

Amen, Comrade.

Harry, Jeff, Brit, Robert, and anyone I left out:

Hi. I have no problem with evolution. I fully understand gene mutation. I was a biochem major in college. I'm completely copacetic with the concept that over time a group of organisms can, through selective death, reproduction, mutation, and gosh-golly-gee chance end up as a different set of organisms. I'm agnostic on whether The World As We Know It came to be through that route, as I didn't watch it firsthand; but, it fits within the universe of possible causes as far as I'm concerned.

I say all this so you completely understand where I'm coming from when I say you're each a little wrong.

Insofar as you argue that language and evolution are not both processes, but rather one is a thing and the latter a process, you're wrong. Language is by definition a descriptive process. This is why it changes over time -- there are new things to describe, new ways to describe them, and we mark these things linguistically.

Second, people both consciously and unconsciously change the manner in which they describe things. Trust me: Lawyers do this all the danged time. Eventually, these changes either catch on (which is to say, the language species, to contradict what I just got done saying, changes as a result of mutation) or die out because they insufficiently cope with reality.

Robert: When you ask for a caffeinated, cold, carbonated, caramel-colored beverage with a red can and a swirl on the side, do you say, I would like a caffeinated, cold, carbonated, caramel-colored beverage with a red can and a swirl on the side? Or do you say, "Gimme a Coke." Or, if you prefer, has anyone here ever Xeroxed a document? There's a reason trade names are such endangered animals: If the name becomes too convenient a way to describe a thing, it becomes common use, and therefore loses its legal protections. Put differently: Most slang arises to describe, not to obfuscate.

On the question of Zeno, in real life, Achilles tramples the hare. However, the Paradox is a thought experiment; any elementary calculus class will have you proving the paradox within the first or second semester. Thus, within the confines of the thought experiment, Zeno, and Harry's prof, were dead right.

Finally, not to get too philosophical, and not to contradict paragraph one, but my one big hangup with evolution has always been that it was a little too neat, especially in light of the facts. Thus, humans can make dogs into such a different animal from a wolf, within 50,000 years, that many (but not all) dogs cannot breed with wolves. Within less time than that, we made the turkey one of the stupidest animals of all time, making it only vaguely similar to its wild cousin. These don't trouble me; but I've always been a little uncomfortable with how slow successful evolution outside of human control is. If we can do it in 50,000, and therefore observe what's happening, why can't ol' Ma Nature? Heck, given the number of species, you'd think we'd see some speciation.

Before you get into bacteria developing antibiotic resistance, let me head you off at the pass: That's a single-gene mutation, and changes nothing about the cute little bugger than that his cell wall can continue to grow in the face of a specific chemical.

OJ:

Apology accepted. Although, I'm feeling badly about not following my normal practice, the far better option here, which is to rant furiously, then use the Delete key to transmit.

Chris:

Good post, though I must disagree with some of it. Language, at any given moment is a thing, an entity. That it is used to describe and communicate doesn't make Language a process any more than a hammer is a process because one uses it to drive a nail.

It is beyond doubt that any language changes over time. How would you explain the process of change?

OJ:

No, I didn't say that, so I guess I am a Stalinist.

Chris:

Good questions.

You raise the question about "how slow successful evolution outside of human control is" - which I think actually contains several questions and needs several answers or hypotheses.

1) Why has there been no observable speciation in the last 50,000 years? Well, we haven't been looking very long...maybe there has.

2) Why is evolution generally so slow? Here's one reason: in evolution there are conservative factors as well as change processes.

I take it you know about 'gene flow' (the exchange of genes between local populations of a species through interbreeding). This is a very powerful conservative factor in evolution. In any given population there seems to be a great variation of the propensity of different individuals towards degrees of 'dispersal' (that is, reproducing away from their birthplace).

But even a small amount of dispersal is very effective in preventing the progressive divergence of local populations - which is the cause of speciation.

Ironically, those animals which are prone to very long-distance dispersal (eg. will travel hundreds of miles away) can be the most significant in terms of speciation. Most will fail, but some may discover suitable environments well away from the current species, and breed in isolation - thus becoming founder populations.

3) How can you explain really long-term stasis. ie. why have we still got 'living fossils' that are hundreds of millions of years old? As far as I understand it (not a massive amount), this is believed to be due to the fact that some phenotypes are able to adapt to pretty much whatever their environment throws at them, with no need for changes in the genotype.

Just as a general comment, by the way, even if there has been no speciation in the last 50,000 years, that hardly throws evolution per se into doubt, as you seem to suggest. The weight of evidence is overwhelming - such that even OJ accepts evolution.

Chris:

Over what time span have flightless birds evolved on isolated islands?

I don't know that it is as recent as 50,000 years, but it might be. In any event, it happened since they got there.

Jeff:

Evolve into what? You just said they are still birds.

But a different species of bird.

Orrin, there has not been macroevolution at the level of the phylum/division for at least 100 million years. This is compatible, in fact, expectable within the theory of darwinism, for reasons that were well described earlier in the discussion about the notochord. (Although it was said "all animals," wheras it applies only to Phylum Chordata.)

If an event occurs only once every 100 my, it is not a valid objection that a man who lives at best about 70 years didn't encounter one.

I've played golf but I've never seen a hole in one. That doesn't prove nobody ever made one.

Language is a convention, and although it evolves, it is not a particularly good analogue for evolution, because it is intelligently driven (in part, we also know that pronunciation changes are uncontrollable; if you limited your comparison to just pronounciation and not whole languages, you'd have a closer model to naturalistic evolution of creatures).

There has been evolution in species of Hawaiian fruit flies just over the last 20 years. It had to do with behavior (which doesn't fossilize so cannot enter very much into discussions of long-term evolution).

However, simple mutations which (as Chris says) might even be single site changes, can create a new species very quickly, given the right conditions. And these are irreversible, so good species.

For Orrin's objections to be valid, he would have to show that macroevolution can never occur, which in turn means explaining, among other things, the teeth in the chickens.

Harry:

MacroEvolution does occur, just not by natural selection.

So why does the chicken genome include the instructions for teeth?

You are committed to intelligent design, but which I take it you mean directed as opposed to, naively, "most efficient" or "perfect."

Nevertheless, even by that narrow usage, a chicken with teeth is absurdist. Perhaps the universe is absurd. Many precious writers have said so. But I'd think a professed salvationist would want to avoid that line of thought.

Life used to be tougher and they needed teeth. Now they don't. They're still chickens though.

I posted this in a similar thread, to explain why no birds have teeth:

How long have birds not had teeth?

Well, about as long as birds have been flying. Why? Because the reason for teeth is to bite and/or chew, which entails substantial mechanical loads. To carry those loads, heavy teeth, jaws, muscles, and attachment points, and the vascular network to support them all are required.

That equals weight, all of it in front the center of gravity. In order for a bird to be stable, the centers of lift and gravity have to be fairly close together, with the CG in front of the CL. Putting a heavy head at the very front of the airframe tosses balance completely out the window. In other words, a bird can fly, or it can have teeth. But it can't do both.

Flight conveyed better survival prospects for proto-birds than teeth. Teeth lost.

That chickens, or birds, don't have teeth has nothing to do with how tough life is.

And if macro-evolution doesn't occur by natural selection, what is the process? And what is the barrier that natural selection is unable to hurdle to produce macro-evolution?

Harry:

You are right that language doesn't, in all respects, mirror evolution in natural history. But I use it for several reasons: One, to demonstrate that significant complexity is possible without teleological input. Two, there is no such thing as ultimate language fitness. Three, exposes the fallacy behind asserting there must have been, for instance, a first human.

A the majestic soaring flight of the chicken...