Limbs aren’t organs.
They all have the same body plan as we do.
I would say that not even the absence of some limbs constitutes a new body plan in the case of whales, as we have a very good idea that the loss was caused by tiny genetic changes, supported by three types of evidence in extant whales.
I haven’t heard that. Where did you hear that?
They are if most are subsequently lost.
Stop basing your position on words and start examining data for yourself. You’re repeatedly claiming to have a better understanding than people who actually produce and publish data.
Except when some ID numbskull does it.
Honestly, I am having a hard time believing you are really as stupid as you appear.
Who are “they”? The things Wikipedia said? Are you saying that the Wikipedia (or the usual) definition is wrong while Bechly’s is right? On what basis? And again, what “new organs” did Basilosaurus have?
You might try to make progress by supporting some claim you make.
Yes, that would be your job, which you have tried twice but failed each time.
For sure. The standard answer would be “as different as those of vertebrates and arthropods”. They should at least have a separate evolutionary origin. Your answer seems to be that they should have some slight modification from the limbs of their ancestors, just how slight being in question.
Wrong moral. The point is that reasonable suggestions are not evidence. That it’s reasonable doesn’t tell us that it’s true.
So you agree that a reasonable suggestion for which there is no evidence can’t be advanced as evidence itself. Yes, Basilosaurus had a blowhole, but that’s just nostrils moved from the front to the top of the skull. [Whoops, I misremembered: it didn’t have a blowhole, though the nostrils were farther back on the rostrum than in its more primitive relatives. Try again.] And flippers are just forelegs modified to be better for swimming at the expense of being good for walking. How are those a new body plan, when the vastly different and differently functioning beaks of palila and akiapola’au are not?
Show me where he said that. You are perhaps confusing descent with modification and natural selection, two separate theories explained in a single book.
Previously you claimed they weren’t. Can you remember?
That’s too incoherent a statement to comment on.
Of course you do, but if a reader doesn’t think you did after reading what you wrote, isn’t that a problem?
But you used your conjecture in an invalid way, as evidence. If that wasn’t your intent, there was no reason in context to bring it up.
What if I say we have several trees that resemble each other closely enough that they must all be estimates of a real tree?
But does that affect our ability to resolve other bits, say relationships within animals? And that’s all we’re talking about here.
That’s not a claim I made.
People are saying that: flat-earthers. And they have all sorts of evidence they think favors their claims. Why, even the bible says so. Nor would differences in geography cast any doubt on the shape of the earth, which makes the analogy more apt that you suppose.
In a creationist publication, perhaps? This is not a topic you know much about, clearly.
No idea what you’re trying to say there.
You understand that these orphan genes your Nature article is talking about arise from non-coding sequences already present in the genome, right? This is not appearance ex nihilo, as you seem to imagine.
Well, since most of them are subsequently lost, they are rare in existing populations. And no, the Nature article says no such thing. You are misreading again. “No homology to genes” doesn’t mean “no homology”; the homology is to non-genic sequences. In other words, these orphan genes result from mutations to junk DNA. Anyway, what relevance does any of this have to common descent?
Well, it’s your conclusion that they are all intermediates. I reply by pointing to Haldane’s remark that God apparently has “an inordinate fondness for beetles”! I don’t think we therefore have to arrange them all in a tree.
I consider them all explosions, because forms appear (geologically) suddenly, and there are many more. And one quote is this, “…as this process of extermination has acted on an enormous scale, so must the number of intermediate varieties, which have formerly existed, be truly enormous. Why then is not every geological formation and every stratum full of such intermediate links? Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely-graduated organic chain; and this, perhaps, is the most obvious and serious objection which can be urged against the theory.” (p. 287) Darwin admits that “though we do find many links — we do not find interminable varieties, connecting together all extinct and existing forms by the finest graduated steps.” (pp. 335-336) Origin of Species.
Well, when God said “let the waters teem” or “let the earth bring forth”, that could indeed indicate natural processes. I base my conclusion of there being events of special creation more on the scientific evidence.
It seems Wikipedia classifies Naraoia as Trilobites, not as ancestors of them.
And Wikipedia does not show Sidneyia as ancestors of Trilobites in the tree they give.
The Wikipedia article on Anomalocaris states that they ate Trilobites, but that’s it, do you have a reference about them being ancestors? And similarly with Microdictyon, I can’t find a claim that they are ancestors of Trilobites. With Kimberella, I can only find a statement that they are ancestors of Trilobites to be “hotly disputed” (AI statement). And I can’t find any claim Namacalathus is an ancestor.
I did find this article from NIH, entitled “Reassessing a cryptic history of early trilobite evolution”, which states that “This sudden appearance has proven controversial ever since Darwin puzzled over the lack of pre-trilobitic fossils in the Origin of Species, and it has generally been assumed that trilobites must have an unobserved cryptic evolutionary history reaching back into the Precambrian. Here we review the assumptions behind this model, and suggest that a cryptic history creates significant difficulties, including the invocation of rampant convergent evolution of biomineralized structures and the abandonment of the synapomorphies uniting the clade. We show that a vicariance explanation for early Cambrian trilobite palaeobiogeographic patterns is inconsistent with factors controlling extant marine invertebrate distributions, including the increasingly-recognized importance of long-distance dispersal. We suggest that survivorship bias may explain the initial rapid diversification of trilobites, and conclude that the group’s appearance at c. 521 Ma closely reflects their evolutionary origins.”
This kind of upends the claim that trilobites have a known ancestry.
Well, Merriam-Webster defines “saltation” as “the origin of a new species or a higher taxon in essentially a single evolutionary step that in some especially former theories is held to be due to a major mutation”, which I think has also been discredited. So I don’t think that is a good option. And I think there is good scientific evidence that argues against common descent, which is what we have been discussing.
But what are the misunderstandings? Where are the contradictions with science, in what I mentioned? And Ross presents arguments, many (though not all) of which I agree with. I mention his book, for people who want to investigate what has been said in response to your points.
Actually, ravens can solve puzzles requiring reasoning. I agree that sentences don’t reason, please address what I am saying.
Yes, I agree, that’s the basis for the validity of reason.
I again point to the fact that we always reject reasoning, we reject statements which we see are due to unreasoning, or irrational causes. How is this untrue? I make analogies to make the point clearer, how are they not apt? An apt analogy is one where a principle is a valid example of the principle, where it shows the principle in action.
Because it’s based in, because it comes from a self-existent reason.
I posted Haldane’s quote, it’s from “When I am Dead”, p. 209. Have for Darwin’s letter, I only have the fact that John Lennox first encountered this in one of Darwin’s letter, I haven’t been able to find it with a quick search. But I certainly don’t say “if Darwin said it, it must be true”! But this has been expressed by various authors, another one being H.G. Wells, in the article “Doubts of the Instrument”, referred to by Chesterton in his book “Orthodoxy”.
But what has been conflated, how are these unrelated?
Okay, so let’s see if we can agree on the following.
In Axe’s analogy, he takes four fragments of his sentence, then mutates each individually and puts it back into the full sentence context, and sees that the sentence remains somewhat readable as long as he does it one at a time. But when he puts all four mutated fragments together, it’s gibberish.
So Axe says because the result is gibberish, it shows we can’t extrapolate the per-fragment pass rate to the entire sentence. The result is invalid.
Do you agree with this characterization?
I’m falling behind in responding to all these responses, in the various threads I’ve been active in, this is taking all my spare time! More than all of it. So I may have to withdraw from one or more threads here. Have a good New Year in 2026!
If you ever actually attempted to understand a single thing, you would find it much easier to keep up. Give it a try!
Thanks, you too.
You are going to have to explain what you mean by that. Try to make sense.
Please justify those claims by appeal to some kind of evidence, or at least cite some source.
And what does he say right after that? Note that this is not a problem of explosions, particularly, but a problem of transitions between species.
Great, so the bible doesn’t say it. What’s your scientific evidence?
Yes, classification is arbitrary, whether you call Naraoia a trilobite or a trilobitomorph (a larger group). Wikipedia does both in various places. What counts is that it shows a number of features more primitive than those in what we commonly think of as trilobites, notably a completely unmineralized exoskeleton.
I believe you have been told repeatedly that we can’t recognize ancestors in the fossil record or distinguish them from cousins. But it’s a transitional form, i.e. possessing primitive or intermediate characteristics. Your appeal to ancestry is oddly naive at this late stage in our conversation, almost as if you have learned nothing.
That’s AI for you. Nobody, ever, has claimed that it’s ancestral to trilobites. Do you have any idea what Lophotrochozoa is?
Again, you confuse several things: transitional fossils with ancestors, the beginning of the clade Trilobita with the beginning of the more inclusive groups from which it descends. The fossils I mentioned are all representatives of successively more inclusive groups. Note also that this publication adopts a definition of Trilobita that would exclude Naraoia. Trilobites don’t have a known ancestry in the sense that we can point to ancestors. No, we can only point to intermediates and relatives, as with any determination of phylogenetic relationships.
Yes, but it’s Bechly’s view, and it shows that abrupt appearance is at least logically compatible with common descent. And it’s not discredited any more — or less — than separate creation.
So far you haven’t mentioned any of this supposed evidence.
Go back to the post where I explained them.
Sure. You agree with any argument whose conclusion you want to believe. That doesn’t help. Anyway, this whole bible thing is a digression, since you end up disclaiming any relevance to evolution.
OK. But we don’t require a reasoning source for ravens. And you silly analogy demands that humans be the reasoning source for sentences, which are themselves implicitly claimed to be reasoning products. If they aren’t, your analogy doesn’t work.
You have tied yourself in knots and multiple contradictions. Maybe you should go back over this conversation to find out what you’re actually responding to. I’ll wait here. But you have previously agreed that a reasoning cause doesn’t have to produce a reasoning product, so that justification is invalid.
You want to rewrite that so it makes any sense? I certainly don’t always reject reasoning, though I reject unintelligible or invalid reasoning, and quite frequently of late for some reason.
Explained several times. Natural selection and natural causes are not anything like an insane human, and crazy statements are nothing like either a rational or irrational actor. Nothing in that analogy makes sense; its only connection to any point is a couple of words used in different ways in different places.
No idea what you mean by “self-existent reason” or why it should make us believe in the validity of our reason.
So all you know there is that some nut claimed that Darwin said something. But you agree we can’t trust the claims of nuts. I also assume you haven’t read the actual source of the Haldane quote and have no idea of its context. Still, shouldn’t you be surprised when he appears to deny that his brain is made of atoms? Pretty sure you have no real idea what Wells said or meant either.