An Australian response to Intelligent Design

[Moonbear]

Look, why don’t you just show me where I’ve not understood. It isn’t that difficult to study evolution, nothing has mystified me yet. You haven’t cited one solitary example where I’ve misunderstood or under-understood.

Russ may not have, but I know I've already pointed out several instances in this thread alone. You just keep ignoring this and repeating the same arguments with the same misunderstandings. The objections you're raising are not problems with evolution, they are misunderstandings of what evolutionary theory is about. Your statement claiming it's not that difficult to study evolution is very telling. Yes, it is difficult! There's a LOT of literature out there. It didn't become a theory based on a handful of studies, it became a theory because of an overwhelming amount of evidence. There's not just one but several scientific journals dedicated just to this subject alone. The version that gets taught in biology classes is very simplified, just like the version of physics that gets taught in general physics classes is very simplified. Your statement is like the folks running around here who think they know all there is to know about physics because they've studied some general physics textbooks and read some stuff on websites, and then try telling everyone it's wrong when the only thing wrong is that their knowledge of the current standing of the subject and the body of evidence supporting it is far from complete.

 

[Moonbear]

http://www.angelfire.com/tn/tifni/misc/cambrianexplosion.html

Until recently, scientists believed that phyla evolved over a ridiculously short period of 75 million years. In 1993, a group of researchers from M.I.T. and Harvard did some zircon dating in Siberia, then took the Cambrian period, chopped it in half, and stomped down the evolutionary boom to the first 5 to 10 million years. ‘We now know how fast fast is,’ grinned Samuel Bowring of M.I.T. in an interview with Time magazine. ‘And what I like to ask my biologist friends is, How fast can evolution get before they start feeling uncomfortable?

Here's a little fact-checking, since they couldn't even cite their secondary source correctly, let alone accurately portray the findings of the primary source.

The journal article for which that Time article was written, and that quote attributed, was published in 1995, not 1993. This is even apparent in the Time magazine article, published in December 1995:
http://www.mc.maricopa.edu/dept/d10/asb/anthro2003/origins/life_explosion.html

The original article in Science is:
Biostratigraphic and Geochronologic Constraints on Early Animal Evolution
John P. Grotzinger; Samuel A. Bowring; Beverly Z. Saylor; Alan J. Kaufman
Science, New Series, Vol. 270, No. 5236. (Oct. 27, 1995), pp. 598-604.
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0036-8075(19951027)3:270:5236<598:BAGCOE>2.0.CO;2-Z

When you read the original article, it becomes abundantly clear that what this study did was greatly refine what scientists knew to be more approximate dating of the Ediacaran period and the Pre-Cambrian/Cambrian boundary. The challenge of how fast would it have to be before they start feeling uncomfortable is clarified and put into much better context by reading the entirety of the article, in which it becomes clear that there were two (or more) competing theories explaining the apparent Cambrian "explosion" of life forms in the fossil record. One camp held that this was indeed a rapid explosion, and the apparent gap in the fossil record that existed prior to this study was explained as two separate major diversification events, the first being species that did not survive (hence the gap) and unrelated to those in the second explosion. The second camp held that the apparent "explosion" was really just the end of a more gradual evolutionary process. This new data supports the second view better than the first, and made it easier to reconcile a previously hard to explain gap in the fossil record by showing it wasn't a gap at all.

Directly from the Science article:

Once held as the position in the rock record where the major invertebrate groups first appeared, the Precambrian-Cambrian boundary now serves more as a convenient reference point within an evolutionary continuum. Skeletalized organisms, including Cambrian-aspect shelly fossils, first appear below the boundary (46, 64, 65) and then show strong diversification during the Early Cambrian (Fig. 4) (8, 66-68). Similarly, trace fossils also appear first in the Vendian, exhibit a progression to more complex geometries across the boundary, and then parallel the dramatic radiation displayed by body fossils (23, 24)...

Alternatively, by filling in most of the temporal gap between Ediacaran and Cambrian faunas, the Ediacaran fossils at the top of the Spitskopf Member in Namibia could be used to support evolutionary models that interpret the Ediacaran organisms as ancestors to certain Cambrian metazoans (9, 71-73), or as a sister group to the metazoans (74). Our data do not force abandonment of any of these hypotheses. Considered collectively, however, the most parsimonious interpretation of the available fossil and age data is that the early development of animals proceeded as a single, protracted evolutionary radiation, culminating in the Cambrian explosion (Fig. 4).

 

[Evo]

I think the thread has run it's course on the Australian decision.