Of course it’s compatible. Everything is compatible when all you are working with is a vague idea.
What you need is to define a real model from which predictive outcomes can be determined. This involves hypothesizing a mechanism, parameters, constraints, etc.
Does anything like this exist anywhere regarding a controlled/programmed process controlling the changes in populations of biological organisms over time?
Quote mines aside, we do have existence of transitional forms both in extant species and in the fossil record.
But since we aren’t working with any constraints re: a controlled/programmed process, I’m sure we can claim said process is also fully compatible with the existence of transitional forms.
Glad you asked, but this is a question you should have asked yourself a long time ago. The answer is complicated. First, what do you mean by discontinuity? At what level? How would you recognize it?
As Gould said, there is discontinuity, i.e. a general lack of transitional forms, between species in a genus. But transitional forms between higher groups, families, orders, classes, phyla, are much more common. A common creationist tactic, when shown a transitional species, is to require more transitions between the transitions. Thus every transitional fossil fills a gap but creates two more gaps. So the question remains, at what level do you think this discontinuity is observed? Where do you expect to see it?
Further, what do we expect from the fossil record? It’s notoriously incomplete both in time and space. If there were smooth transitions between species, would we even expect to see them recorded, or is the discontinuity between species just expected because the fossil record is a series of snapshots rather than a movie? Darwin, Gould, and I took the latter view. In order to take issue with Darwin, Gould was required to invent a strawman version of evolution in which change is both gradual and constant in rate. But even Darwin proposed that change was episodic, and the times of transition between species were much shorter than the durations of the largely static species.
So my claim, in short: discontinuity in the fossil record is mostly at a very low level, within genera or families, with the larger transitions well documented by intermediates. And observed discontinuity is itself an artifact of the incompleteness of the record.
So what’s your claim? Can you make it clearly? Can you respond to any of what I and others have been saying?
Not sure that this is true. But let’s assume it is. Then, if I understand you correctly, it means that in their attempt to colonize the land, the immediate tetrapod ancestors had to develop the very tetrapod limb layout that actually emerged in the history of life. If this is true, then the TSS accusation falls.
Not so, but it becomes a bit different. If there is only one anatomy suitable to colonize the land, the alternative is that the land doesn’t get colonized and we aren’t here. Thus we observe the fossil record only if those optimal limbs happen to evolve, and we mistake a posterior probability for a prior probability, which is the root of the Texas Sharpshooter.
Of course there isn’t only one such anatomy, since animals have become terrestrial several times, even though only one such instance involves vertebrates.
It seems to me that in order to rebut my claim, you are appealing to the anthropic principle (also known as the observation selection effect) in the same way that some people appeal to it in order to object to the fine tuning argument for God’s existence. Do I understand you correctly here?
Yes, I’ve read your very informative/interesting post. Thank you for that and sorry for not having readily answer to it. I was quite busy these late days. Now, as to whether I can respond to it, well, not really, for my knowledge of paleontology is weak (this is an understatement !) However, I note that Prof. Gerd Müller acknowledged (at the conference New Trends in Evolutionary Biology at the Royal Society in London in November 2016) that the fossil record seems to support the existence of true non gradual forms of transitions in the history of life and that this represents a problem for Neo-Darwinism. I can see that you don’t hold that view. Who is right? I don’t know.
I’m going to guess that you have not read the article (talk? overheard conversation?) by Gerd Müller that you cite (allude to? name-drop?). It’s nearly certain that you have no real idea what he actually said (wrote?) or what evidence, if any, he used to support whatever it was. But we can agree that you are not competent to discuss this question and should never have brought it up.
For anyone interested, here is the published version of Müller’s conference talk. I can find nothing about the fossil record; “fossil” is not mentioned, and “palaeontology” appears once, in passing. I sense an egregious quote mine.
@Giltil, what was your source for this quote-mine?
The way I read it, Gilbert’s point is that Müller “seems” to be acknowledging the myriad problems facing Neo-Darwinism, including problems arising within paleontology. In any case, there was no quote mine of Müller (at least not in the post you answered), let alone an egregious one, because there were no quotes of Müller mined.
I read as far as the second paragraph of Müller’s conference talk paper, which was enough to suggest to me that the standard evolutionary synthesis has become such a wide-ranging and abstruse theory, extending into so many new fields and invoking so many mechanisms in so many different contexts, that its very theoretical foundations need to be reconsidered. (I would add that if simplicity is the mark of a good theory, the standard evolutionary synthesis is not a very good theory on that score.) In fact, I will go so far as to say that Müller thinks an extended evolutionary synthesis is necessary.
Finally, it seems to me that Gilbert went out of his way to not only acknowledge his own epistemic limitations but to show his respect for you. Given your response, I think he was being far too kind. For my part, I don’t think it requires any particular degree of competence for someone to introduce a topic for discussion, express an opinion, or openly disagree with even highly respected experts when they don’t seem to make much sense.
That is all. I now welcome you to chastise me for having ever presumed to question you or any representatives of the scientific community about, well, anything. Just remember to do it peacefully in keeping with the mission of the forum.
I agree that “quote-mine” is the wrong term to use here, because there is no quote. Not sure of the proper term for an attribution to a person of something that person didn’t say. And as far as can be told from the paper I linked, Müller didn’t say anything like what @Giltil claims. Again, there is nothing whatsoever about the fossil record in that paper. It’s something else entirely that Müller thinks is a problem for the modern synthesis. I think you need to read farther than the second paragraph to figure out whether @Giltil was mis-attributing a claim.
Agree to disagree. It’s not good form to make pronouncements on a subject about which you know nothing. Introducing a topic is quite a different thing.
I believe the term for that sentence is “passive-aggressive”.
Right, but beware of dichotomous thinking. To be fair here the area of explanation is well beyond something like lumps of matter in a vacuum, or the formation of a spiral in a fluid, but concerns the transgenerational descent and modifications of the innumerable attributes of living organisms. Which I’m sure we all know, are probably the most complex things in existence.
Sure, compared to a theory like general relativity, the theory of evolution is much more complex. But organisms are also much more complex than, say, an orb of gas.
The theory of evolution doesn’t just seek to explain how under the mutual attraction of gravity, large bodies of gas or rocks tend to form spheres. The theory of evolution seeks to explain how basically every morphological and molecular phenotype of all living organisms came to be.
Considering the breadth of phenomena the theory actually explains both the ultimate origin and subsequent change of—with relatively few and simple mechanisms like genetic mutations, genetic drift, and natural selection—it’s an incredibly good theory.
Nice. You ignore all the substance to concenrate on a peripheral error. Yes, Bechly isn’t exactly a creationist, he’s a divine-saltationist, which is a little bit different. But exactly how different isn’t clear at all, because he’s never said what happens in a saltation event or which sorts of changes require them. Do you have any idea? And he’s also creationist-adjacent, because “Evolution News” is a mostly creationist site.
But I’m willing to discuss the topic. What is Bechly’s hypothesis, exactly? What data does it explain? In particular, does saltation create new species within a genus, new classes or phyla, or something in between? What’s your take, too? I’ve invited you several times to explain your hypothesis of the history of life, and you have ignored every invitation. Will you ignore this one too?
Nature extends into many fields, and is subject to many mechanisms in many contexts. The object of theory is to model and generalize reality. We do not get to tell nature how simple or complex it ought to be. Our task to to figure that out.