Interviewed by Breitbart’s Joel Pollak, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt says the American people deserve ‘a true legitimate, peer reviewed, objective, transparent discussion about CO2.’ Pruitt calls for the establishment of a ‘Red Team/Blue Team’ of scientist to examine ‘what do we know, what don’t we know, and what risk does it pose to health, the United States, and the world’.
EPA ADMINISTRATOR PRUITT: “What the American people deserve, I think, is a true legitimate, peer reviewed, objective, transparent discussion about CO2. And, you know there was a great article that was in the Wall Street Journal, about a month or so ago, Joel, called ‘Red Team/Blue Team’ by Steve Koonin, a scientist I believe at NYU. And, he talked about the importance of having a red team of scientist and a blue team of scientists and those scientists get in a room and ask what do we know, what don’t we know, and what risk does it pose to health, the United States, and the world with respect to this issue of CO2. The American people need to have that type of honest open discussion, and it’s something we hope to provide as part of our leadership.”
EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt
Breitbart News Daily
June 5, 2017
h/t to Harry Readme
Hope it happens. Could be a turning point.
A tipping point even.
Dr Curry suggested this at the last senate hearing. Looks like someone was listening.
Politicized EPA buried Allan Carlin‘s detailed “Comments on Draft Technical Support Document for Endangerment Analysis for Greenhouse Gas Emissions under the Clean Air Act, prepared for the US Environmental Protection Agency as my contribution to the then draft Technical Support Document, final version dated March 16, 2009.”
It is now time for a Red Team to resurrect and test all of Carlin’s arguments.
+1
Tried this very thing not too long ago….
For some God unforseen reason…our team sits there with their tails between their legs
A second grade boy did this experiment
Saul’s experiment tested the effects of carbon dioxide in heating a small biosphere. His control jar contained only dirt and air, his first test jar had dirt and a plant, symbolizing the rainforest and the second test jar contained dirt and carbon dioxide gas. He used a lamp as the heat source. The jar with the carbon dioxide had a warmer temperature than the other two.
This is called the greenhouse effect. It been science for more than a 100 years. Yes, the planet is a bit more complicated yet nobody has been able to disprove the FACT that putting more CO2 and other greenhouses gases into the atmosphere the planet will heat up. That’s why glaziers are disappearing around the planet.
Please sling all the abuse that you want, I laugh when I read it. But replies with science to disprove the greenhouse effect that NASA accepts would be welcomed. If you can then you should contact NASA and tell them they are wrong …. that’s a big call!
And how sensitive was this boys instrumentation ? What was his actual CO2 concentration, compared to the 400 and some PPM in the atmosphere. That less than 0.05% – this is one smart 7 year old who can prepare a concentration as low as that. Give him some leeway, lets make it 10,000 PPM, 1%. How’s he made his sample up ?
Why do people need fewer windows ?
Is the planet in a glass jar?
Apparently you’re unaware that glass jars act like greenhouses, so if the jars were glass, the “experiment” is worse than worthless.
In fact, no one has been able to show that adding a fourth molecule of CO2 per 10,000 dry air molecules has any effect at all in the real climate system, rather than in a controlled lab situation.
The first two molecules of CO2 do have an effect, if only because they make photosynthesis in the air possible. The third also helps and the fourth helps green the planet. But due to the logarithmic effect of CO2, it’s not at all clear that the fourth molecule actually causes any measurable warming.
In a self-regulating world, the net feedback effects are liable to be negative. Over most of the planet, the GHE is swamped by water vapor, leaving little scope for CO2, most of whose absorption bands overlap with H2O’s. In the hot, wet tropics, more CO2 might well have a cooling effect.
The science is far from settled. In any case, so far more CO2, ie plant food, has been a good thing. Doubling present level to 800 ppm would be better and 1200 ppm best of all.
Except the greenhouse effect isn’t the issue, the issue is whether a bit more–as a percentage of the atmosphere–of a relatively minor greenhouse gas–CO2s way less effective as a greenhouse gas than water vapor, for example–is causing or likely to cause effects worth spending trillions to try to avoid.
The jar with the carbon dioxide had…..thousands of times more CO2
….would have been easier and a lot more efficient to just add fog
A second grader, really!? Did he wear a bow tie? Bill Nye the “Science” guy wears a bow tie.
About a second grade try, Steve. The earth radiates every night virtually all the energy it absorbs from the sun during the day. A greenhouse doesn’t do that. Neither did the 2nd graders experiment. Not even climate scientists consider the experiment any more than a crude demonstration that heat from a lamp will warm a small closed container. BTW, all the jars contained CO2. The one that warmed had have had lots more than the other two, maybe . 100,000ppm
R. W. Wood ran an experiment in 1909 and concluded that it is convection that makes a greenhouse work and Arrhenius’ RGHE did not do much. Angstrom thought RGHE not worth his time to refute. Spurning Arrhenius, De Marci went off a different direction.
NASA is a big organization and those of us who have experienced large organizations know the unwritten rule: do what the boss wants done and say what the boss wants said.
NASA/NOAA are no longer credible.
Where is the greenhouse effect in the temperature data for the 20th century?
The first half of the century had a little warming.
The second half of the century had almost identical warming.
But you smarmy leftists tell us lots of CO2 was released in the second half of the century
.. yet the horrible, life-threatening effect of adding CO2 is completely invisible in the data
… even after “adjustments”, infilling and who knows what other distortions.
The climate change in the first half of the century is claimed to be “natural” but nearly identical climate change in the second half of the century is only caused by CO2?
So, I guess you believe that after 4.5 billion years of natural climate change, in 1975 natural climate change suddenly “died” and CO2 took over as the “climate controller”, like the transfer of power in a mob family?
Only a stupid person would believe that, Steve, and I suspect you would qualify!
If CO2 increases at 2 ppm per year, and the unproven in real life greenhouse theory is correct, and assuming no negative feedbacks from our planet trying to self-regulate the temperature, then the average temperature will be up about 1 degree C. in 200 years — mainly nighttime warming in cold areas of the planet … assuming fossil fuels are still in use for the next 200 years, which seems very unlikely.
I guess that means we should panic, Steve?
Alaska might be a degree or two C. warmer at night 200 years from now?
“That’s why glaziers are disappearing around the planet.”
Hmmm … The glass business up the street is doing good business. I seriously doubt your claim about glaziers is true.
The planet is in a glass jar, of course. That’s a settled fact. It also sits atop giant turtles, as the sun revolves around it.
Forget that a glass jar has no convection. Who needs convection, when you’re trying to prove a religious claim?
HA HA HA!
Common glass is completely opaque to IR.
All IR will be absorbed by the glass in both cases, and none would reach the atmosphere inside.
Claiming to see the effect of IR with CO2 using glass means:
A) you are stupid.
or
B) you think we are stupid.
Glass is essentially transparent to UV and visible (short wave lengths) light but opaque to infrared (long wave lengths emitted at normal temperatures). The CO2 added to a closed glass test jar, therefore, does not change the fact that the warming of the inside of the jars from the short wave length source increases the temperature until the heat loss by conduction through the glass and radiant and convective cooling from the outside of the jar to its surroundings balances the heat gain. What is in the jar is mostly immaterial other than its thermal mass which simply affects the time required to reach equilibrium and perhaps some small insulating effects. A plant in the jar would have a small cooling effect due to incoming energy used in photosynthesis, but not likely to be detectable without a much more elaborate experiment.
What you posted here is so intellectually and scientifically bankrupt it makes me want to cry.
Steve
They are glaciers not glaziers -the latter fix broken glass sheets
Glaciers have been melting for quite some time well before mankind started putting CO 2 into the atmosphere
Did the boy’s jar contain an ocean equivalent or a near vacuum (space) found in the actual world?
Some people are easily duped with pretty experiments and sciency sounding things. Others actually study the literature and learn what is really going on.
CO2 affecting the climate is not the same thing as NASA’s claim that CO2 is the planet’s thermostat. Maybe we can find a child who can do a pretty, flashy demonstration of this and change your emotional response to the issue.
And just what constitutes that as an experiment?
• What are the components you call dirt?
• How was the CO2 sample prepared?
• How would the child know the CO2 content after day 1?
• What were the exact distributions and facings for the jars? Was this experiment replicated trying all jars in all positions?
• Did any sunlight cross the experiment?
• How was the temperature measured? If by Thermometer, you should read up on measuring temperature of gasses as the experiment failed immediately.
• Where in the glass was the temperature measurement device?
• What colors is the temperature measurement device?
• What is the surface area of the temperature device?
• how often was the temperature measured? Every hour every day? or after an hour ride in a car?
• Did the experimenter calculate the temperature device area and heat absorption capability for that area?
Then could you please explain why the Goreman, Bill Nye not the science guy both conducted similar experiments and they had to doctor results to obtain the result they desired?
NASA and NOAA have been under the influence of determined and rather unscrupulous activists for quite some time. Otherwise, you could pull up a live OCO-2 world graph explicitly defining where CO2 is emitted from and absorbed from. Instead you will find that NOAA prefers their global CO2 model that shows zero relationship to actual CO2.
Now, be specific; exactly where and when was this “experiment” allegedly conducted? Right now, it sure sounds like a lame bogus rumor dreamed up by lazy activists.
And just what constitutes that as an experiment?
• What are the components you call dirt?
• How was the CO2 sample prepared?
• How would the child know the CO2 content after day 1?
• What were the exact distributions and facings for the jars? Was this experiment replicated trying all jars in all positions?
• Did any sunlight cross the experiment?
• How was the temperature measured? If by Thermometer, you should read up on measuring temperature of gasses as the experiment failed immediately.
• Where in the glass was the temperature measurement device?
• What colors is the temperature measurement device?
• What is the surface area of the temperature device?
• When and how often were temperature readings taken? Every hour, every day? Or after an hour long car ride?
• Did the experimenter calculate the temperature device area and heat absorption capability for that area?
Then could you please explain why the Goreman, Bill Nye not the science guy both conducted similar experiments and they had to doctor the results to obtain the result they desired.
NASA and NOAA have been under the influence of determined and rather unscrupulous activists for quite some time. Otherwise, you could pull up a live OCO-2 world graph explicitly defining where CO2 is emitted from and absorbed from. Instead you will find that NOAA prefers their global CO2 model that shows zero relationship to actual CO2.
Now, be specific; exactly where and when was this “experiment” allegedly conducted? Right now, it sure sounds like a lame bogus rumor dreamed up by lazy activists.
My bad!
Please delete the duplicate.
The question of the effects of CO2 under radiative forcing is in the realm of physics. Look over this paper by some German physicists and see what you think. There are some interesting points made in this paper.
A few words from the summary from these physicists.
There are no common physical laws between the warming phenomenon in glass houses
and the fictitious atmospheric greenhouse effect, which explains the relevant physical
phenomena. The terms “greenhouse effect” and “greenhouse gases” are deliberate misnomers.
Re-emission is not reflection and can in no way heat up the ground-level air against the
actual heat flow without mechanical work.
Infrared absorption does not imply “backwarming”. Rather it may lead to a drop of
the temperature of the illuminated surface.
There’s more, and it’s worth reading the entire paper. Sorry I’m not offering any abuse for you to laugh at with this reply. Abuse and insults are no way to have a conversation. Now, if you have actual physics to back up any claim you might have, bring it in to the conversation. If you’re going to make a claim, also give a scientific citation to back up your claim. Anecdotal evidence, at least in this conversation, is not evidence at all. Or, you could just continue trolling for the fun of trolling. It’s up to you.
Falsification Of The Atmospheric CO2 Greenhouse Effects Within The Frame Of Physics
https://arxiv.org/pdf/0707.1161v4.pdf
Good thing he didn’t put any water in there, water absorbs 100 times the infrared CO2 does across a wider energy band!
Here’s a thing while you’re chuckling to yourself.. ask yourself if you’ve ever been in a greenhouse. They work by stopping convection – that is, preventing the air from moving and transporting the heat (hot air rises – and causes wind, remember that from early school?) All gasses are refrigerants and work by doing this precise thing. Want to know something else? All gasses absorb energy and it doesn’t matter whether it’s ‘heat’ IR or UV – any material than absorbs energy has a raised energy state – which is the same thing as it getting hotter. Oxygen absorbs UV and thus gets warmer, were you aware of that? Now tell me, if near 30% of the atmosphere’s gas oxygen can warm with more UV , do you honestly think 0.04% of the atmosphere that is CO2 would have a measurable effect? Water gas can be hundreds or thousands of times the concentration of CO2 – if the AGW theory is right, humidity should also drive temperature!
As to glacier retreating yes, many of the glaciers we study are retreating but you know why? Because we were studying what was under those retreating glaciers long before the climate scare – as we leave the current ice age, we’re finding interesting things beneath that ice – and of the tens of thousands of glaciers the few we study are the few that are retreating. many are also growing..
Ask yourself why we pump CO2 into greenhouses while you’re at it. Plants depend on CO2, WE depend on CO2 to stay alive – it’s the catalyst for energy conversion and current levels are way too low for ideal plant growth. Look up C3 photosynthesis, read about the fertilization effects that have increased our food production by 17% or more, read about how more CO2 means plants need less water and are vastly more drought tolerant.
If you were a scientist, you’d question, challenge and test any new theory (and AGW is the interloper here) and you’d find as many of us here have that assuming other scientists have the same degree of rigor or the same critical thinking skills as your own can be a mistake, which will lead you as it has us to discover the world would benefit from MORE CO2 not less.
If however you read the 70’s book ‘how to save the world’ as I did and agreed with the proposed ‘air tax’ that picked CO2 as an arbitrary unit of exchange for redistributing wealth from the first world to the third (i did at the time, but I was young) then we can’t help sorry.
If you think the best course of action is to stifle examination of a theory then you’re advocating faith over science and again, we can’t advise you on that – maybe a priest can?
Yep that’s definite proof. Some 2nd grader known only as Saul did an experiment with jars of unknown size filled with an unknown amount of CO2 and heated by a lamp of unknown wattage and an unknown setup and it produced a temperature increase of an unknown amount. No doubt about it that clinches the case for catastrophic anthropogenic global warming . Come on!
BTW Glass is opaque to infrared so none of it will escape the jar regardless of whether there is CO2 in it or not. That experiment cannot work. I think that was shown at WUWT in the past.
By the time the second grade boy was entering middle school he realized that the silly “experiment” his second grade teacher had made him do was part of a “progressive” indoctrination plan ordered by the NEA.
Where did Little Stevie go? Off to play with his toy science experiment kit?
I’m pretty sure the little snot has been here before … several times … with the same kiddie story and the same insults. The insults probably make him feel like he’s playing with the big kids.
Say … you don’t suppose that is Steve Mosher, Jr, do you?
Steve says, “Yes, the planet is a bit more complicated yet…”
YA THINK?
Well Steve, it seems like you schoolboy was probably misled by Bill Nye’s science lie video which also stupidly used glass jars and had to post-production editing of the video image to falsify the result to what he wanted.
It seems you were misled too.
This is what happens when TV clowns are mistaken for scientist because they put on a white coat and pretend to be “eccentric” by wearing a silly tie ( ie top notch, mad professor type ) .
Nye has arguably got lots of children interested in science. Sadly he is now using that position to mislead them the media treat him as if he actually knows something about science, instead of presenting him as a TV clown character of scientist , which is what he really is.
From Watts policies for this blog:
“For the same reasons as the absurd topics listed above, references to the “Slaying the Sky Dragon” Book and subsequent group “Principia Scientific” which have the misguided idea that the greenhouse effect doesn’t exist, and have elevated that idea into active zealotry, WUWT is a “Slayer Free Zone”. There are other blogs which will discuss this topic, take that commentary there.”
I really wish that he would add a paragraph banning people insisting that everybody on this blog who points out the lack of certainty and doubt the correctness of the political correct belief are claiming that the greenhouse effect doesn’t exist.
As I have posted before, all you guys below should publish your evidence, get it peer reviewed and win a nobel prize for physics. It comes with a million dollars prize! By the way, Stephen Hawking accepts the science behind man made global warming. Does that mean all of you know more than Stephen Hawking, gee!
>>
Does that mean all of you know more than Stephen Hawking, gee!
<<
So your argument is that genius scientists can’t be wrong. Einstein said, “God doesn’t play dice.” That was his argument against Quantum Mechanics. Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen published a paper in 1935 (called EPR from the letters of the authors’ last names) that discounted the Copenhagen interpretation and of quantum entanglement. The idea was referred to as the EPR paradox (named after the paper they published). They were wrong. How can that be if Einstein was a genius?
Jim
“This is called the greenhouse effect. It been science for more than a 100 years. Yes, the planet is a bit more complicated yet nobody has been able to”…show that when we began shooting rockets off into space any of them ever hit a glass bell jar.
I kinda get that steve but have you considered hitting other materials like steel, aluminium or plastic with our rockets? If you discovered it was dirt they hit then that really would be ground breaking science. Keep up the good work and I’m sure you’ll get to the bottom of it all in the end.
“Does that mean all of you know more than Stephen Hawking, gee!”
No, it means that I agree with another eminent theoretical physicist called Freeman Dyson, Nobel Prize Winner Ivar Giaever and a highly qualified climate scientist named Richard Lindzen.
Two can play the ad verecundiam game.
How about this science steve.
Did the 2nd grader replicate ALL the climate feedbacks in his 3 jars? Heck, did he even just include the KNOWN feedbacks (as including the unknowns would be kind of hard)? How about just clouds, did he include cloud feedback in his jars?
Sorry, but unless his jars were the size of the largest building on the planet and included an actually working biota, then his “experiment” was completely useless and had no relation to what the effects of CO2 in the Earth’s atmosphere are.
And the fact that climate alarmists are using this “experiment” as something needed to be rebutted is so laughable that it is crosses the line into being sad. If anyone truly thinks this ‘experiment’ deserves any mention, Much less a rebuttal, then they need serious mental help.
But but it’s not peer reviewed
That’s a blatant lie that you have been told, and I assume you honestly believe it because you’re repeating, which only could lead rational people to conclude you’re very naive, gullible and lacking critical thinking skills. Trust me, firstly the jars don’t and can not contain enough CO2 to produce a measurable effect and secondly the glass the jars are made out of almost completely block the infrared light whose effect was trying to be measured. Repeating such drivel only weakens your position Please refer toAl Gore and Bill Nye FAIL at doing a simple CO2 experiment for a more in deoth explaination.
The number of people who deny that CO2 can warm the planet is small.
The question has always been by how much.
The fact that you have to lie about what others are saying is just further proof that either you have no idea what you are talking about, or have no ability to be truthful.
Neither position says anything good about you.
“Please sling all the abuse that you want, I laugh when I read it.”
Request granted. You are Trolling.
Steve, shocking a man with your perspicacity can miss this, but where is Saul published? Where’s the peer reviewed article, in a fourth glass jar? Where oh where is Saul’s Nobel Prize? (Prof. Mann knows). So Saul’s experiment fails your standards of science, yet it convinces you, and should convince us all.
Gotta say, you’re the lamest troll we’ve seen in a while.
Sounds a lot like this experiment:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/climate-fail-files/gore-and-bill-nye-fail-at-doing-a-simple-co2-experiment/
What does a jar of CO2 have to do with Earth’s atmosphere? And what is CO2 doing to the poor glaziers on a *planetary scale*? Who would have thunk that the destruction of mankind by CO2 would start with glaziers!!!!! darn you eeeevil Exxon! You are driving glaziers extinct!!!!!
Steve (not the auroral purple streak I hope), Glaziers ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glazier ) are doing quite well in my nich-o-the-woods. As for your correlation of CO2 to warming of the planet, nature has “blown it out of the water” (if you’ll excuse the pun). Stick around, read and learn, but try to avoid the embarrassment of commenting with the same old spurious coincidences.
Please challenge your indoctrination by reading one of these free books by Bob Tisdale:
https://bobtisdale.wordpress.com/2016/05/23/three-free-ebooks-on-global-warming-and-climate-change/#more-10885
steve
Planet Earth 🌏 is the experiment and CO2 does not warm the earth’s climate. CO2 simply follows temperature changes as a proxy thereof, due to temperature dependence of seawater solubility of gasses. The poor and variable correlation of CO2 and temperatures over the Phanerozoic disprove CAGW. The best that your side can do is stop people looking at the earth’s climate records both recent and in deep time, stop them being curious about truth and nature for their own sake, just keep on honing the intolerant narrative repressive of free thinking and rely on people’s cynical self interest to guarantee that enough will fall onto line to keep the “den1ers” of the party line at the margins.
Replace CO2 with argon gas (a non greenhouse gas ) and the experiment would show even more warmth than the CO2, so what is this experiment really demonstrating?
Look at the record. Jim Hansen predicted that the Major Degan expressway would be underwater by now. Not even close.
If the heat source is an incandescent lamp, most if its radiation is infrared that cannot penetrate the glass jars, but is absorbed by the glass jars heating the glass. Inside the test chamber the hot glass then heats whatever gases are inside which in turn transports the heat to the portions of glass that are not directly heated by the lamp, transfers energy and the glass then convects and radiates outward. What is being tested is the glass and convection. Some of the light passes through the glass and heats the dirt at which point the dirt heats the air and the air convects and finds cooler glass to transfer that heat to. So there is some relevance to the difference between CO2’s ability to convect heat as air, but at 400 PPM there’s not enough CO2 for it to alter convection more than a trace. These test chambers are much too small to reveal infrared emission and absorption phenomena.
Nice link. Should be required reading.
What was the peak of spectral emission of the lamp?
Climate models are engineering models, not scientific models. Pruit needs to get two or three validation and verification teams of hard-minded engineers to look at those models.
When it comes to climate models, physical scientists have shown themselves incapable of distinguishing accuracy from precision. Blue team, red team, if they’re scientists both teams will be negligent. Their negligence has been going on for 30 years. It won’t suddenly improve.
Engineers pay strict attention, because accuracy means things don’t fail. Let engineering teams get hold of the models for a little V&V, and the models are toast.
Right on the money. If you do not understand the difference between engineering and scientific models then you do not understand the debate about climate models. Also, climate modelers should stop claiming that they have created scientific models, aka physical theories.
Theo,
Good distinction.
The Copernican v. the Ptolemaic systems were dueling models, subject to falsification.
GCMs are not models in the same sense. They are GIGO computer games. To the extent that they do make predictions, they’ve been thoroughly falsified (in both senses), but their perpetrators wiggle off the science hook by calling their outputs “projections”.
The atmosphere is a basic HVAC problem, daily realm of ME’s.
While they’re at it, those engineers might look ant the GHCN with an eye to accuracy of measurement, precision of measurement, frequency of re-calibration, instrument drift and, since the “adjusted” data are actually estimates, the error of the estimate.
When he asks the CO2-causes-warming group to show their evidence, I would love to be a fly in the wall.
Truthfully that is not the issue. The issue is CAGW. Sans the C, and the evidence is the benefits are real, the catastrophe is non existant, there is no basis for action.
Then discussion of GHGs becomes academic.
Hig: I have no doubt that the earth i warming. We are , after all, in an interglacial period during which the globe warms…and continues to warm…until it doesn’t. Then back into an ice age.
It needs to be a team that includes top notch statistics analysts not from the climate scam union
The concern over CO2 rests sole on the projections from computer models that claim dangerously high levels of warming are going to occur within a specific time frame. All that is required is to demonstrate that the models are not fit for purpose; they are wrong with regards to amount of warming, with the timing of their projections or they do not accurately represent the atmosphere or drivers of our climate.
Should be easy to accomplish any of these or all three of them.
Stake, meet heart.
Of course the “Red Team” will have John McCain and Lindsey Graham in the shadows ready to surrender at a moments notice. There are plenty of science equivalents to RINOS whom I dub SINOS (Skeptics in Name Only).
Being a skeptic today is like being a Cleveland Brown football fan the past decade. I want the team to win but objectively my side are born losers who punt on third down every chance they get. By worrying about just showing up they never plan on winning the game.
The Dr. Lindzen swat team, Seal Skeptics #7 should have landed the day after the election and the whole kahuna of the UN Climate Framework exit should have been on the table. The climate trolls control NASA and NOAA to this day, crony green stocks are booming in many cases, no subside cuts are on the table. They are dug in ready to outlast DJT and the odds are in their favor.
Paris was a symptom, the entire UN Framework and academic/MSM/Greenshirt political base and globalist cabal is the disease. It’s going untreated to this point. I don’t blame Pruitt intensely, I think DJT tied him up and made some very weak calls. This was a galvanizing issue that he went soft on I would say for not trying to disrupt the money bubble and the 2 million jobs largely linked to climate hype. Elon Musk gets a free pass and will collect billions more in the Federal subsidies as the bubble only gets bigger at the moment. 250k car backlog x $7500 per car and forget about what California tax payers are on the hook for.
The campaign slogan for 2020 should be “For the good of the climate investment bubble” or more simply “I like my Tulips”. What could be next? Imagine TARP for the green industry, all the signs are there. Maybe DJT is playing his famous 4-d political chess again and knows he can’t pop the bubble at the moment. Maybe it is a longer game.
Let’s hope it’s a longer game and not a surrender.
Who picks the teams?
And who are the peers?
Who fires the team picks and bans them from publishing in the future and mocks them.
Rguy: Good shot! Obviously. the team that’s saving the planet is justified when attacking, degrading and destroying the team that seeks the truth. Can’t let ’em publish that! /s
Me, me, me.
Well, yeah.
How to keep the politics out of it?
Find scientist that voted for Obama and Hillary that have publicly opposed “the consensus” vs those who voted for Trump that have publicly endorsed “the consensus”?
In a perfect world both teams would be made up of actual scientist who disagree about what the raw, un-adjusted, data may show.
In other words, both sides made up of those whose personal pride will permit them to admit “I was wrong” or, worse yet, “I just don’t know”.
In fewer words, “honest and ethical in their evaluations”.
Even fewer words, “I’m still open to learn.”
You don’t. You run it like a civil tort case. Give them equal access to resources and let them slug it out. Maybe an extended version of the standard formal debate format: First Affirmative, First Negative Cross Question, First Negative, etc.
D. J.,
In the absence of a way to guarantee personal integrity, I guess that’s the best we’ve got.
(But on the plus side, we do know of a few Menn out there that have no personal integrity in this field.)
“I just don’t know” appears to be forbidden to say in a science context, at least in climate science. I have always admired doctors who will say “We just don’t know” for their honesty. I’ll like to see more such openness.
@Sheri
They still don’t like to admit it. The diagnosis comes back “[Your mysterious symptoms here] due to unknown etiology.”
I want Al “the blimp Gore on one of the teams along with the Pope.
I do ! Mann, Hansen, Gore Kerry (who served in Vietnam)and 100 hundred others named by the aforementioned will be the RED team. The blue team will be SEAL team six. Rules …..none.
Plenty here would pick Dr. Curry who spent most of career promoting group think consensus and then went on an agonizing 11 year Road to Skeptical Damascus to get to the most nuanced and wimpy form of skepticism imaginable. Such is the state of “skeptics in name only”. I don’t want Lomborg appeasing the core fraud either. If they pop up you know it was all a phony climate war exercise.
Our best known and qualified players are old, it isn’t a good situation at all. Heaven help us if we let the GOP pick the red team. Skeptics refuse to accept the basic political agenda since 1988 (at a minimum) and that’s why we are perennial climate war losers. It’s a delusional premise to begin with that actual “science” brought us to the UN Framework brink. The entire field should bear the mark of pseudoscience shame as there isn’t going to a logical science concession from the blue team. I would hope Pruitt knows this going in.
Let the pie throwing begin but only fools think a science process would be accepted by the blue team. Dr. Lindzen is the best the skeptics have. He’s a little too dignified frankly for the task and what the blue team will look like.
It’s never going to happen where the “blue team” will ever acknowledge the “red team” to exchange science as equals. They are committed to authoritarianism, settled science, it’s really that simple. If Pruitt can embarrass them through their own arrogance that will score a few points.
The better tactic is to study the IPCC process and denounce it as anti-science and political fraud, which is exactly what it declined to very rapidly from the very first meeting. There’s plenty of testimony to that fact.
The gloves should have come off much sooner then this as far as the science cartel is concerned.
Heads are exploding every where! However, lots of smiles also 🙂
We have had this “true legitimate, peer reviewed, objective, transparent discussion” on CO2. Science tells us man’s contribution is negligible.
That’s it. Learn it. Know it. Live it.
Of course, what is really meant is “a chance to put forth utterly laughable junk science as “peer reviewed”™. Too bad the “peer review” process has been compromised and corrupted as fully and completely as has science. Some of us know better.
“Science tells us man’s contribution is negligible.” Do you have a source for that?
Mann?
To be more specific, can you provide a source for the statement that ““Science tells us man’s contribution is negligible.”?
seaice1 Man only occupies 3% of the earth, that where he mostly measure temperature, he extrapolates what he measures where he lives to the rest of the earth, he certainly locally warms the earth both through his structures and agricultural, when we have over a hundred years of unadjust satellite data in the raw form the basicly the sensor reading for that day and to where the satellite was in orbit at that time we “might” have a clue wat direction of which way the climate is moving, the past proxy reconstructs tell us overall down with short periods of up, long after you are I are dead I betting that trend will prove out to be true, not the computer models the so called “climate scientist” tell us to believe and keep asking us to fund more expense computer in which I know will not improve their models. after all GIGO does not change with faster computers.
No source then.
what team will Mann be on?
Mann will be unable to attend, he will be too busy in court.
Mann will be on the red team!
and the blue team
The team that will continue to reimburse him for his ‘work’?
question is, would discussion of this nature get as much air play as Comey will this week?
Scott, you nailed it!!! Watch the junk on tv get into Comey & for the minor news Trump killed the World, these story’s are so distorted! It’s not the World, it’s about the Power of the De-Growthers and the far left!!!
De-growther? I’ve been calling them exterminationists .. it has been popular under many left wing authoritarians, and quite necessary according to them. They’re saving the world after all.
“question is, would discussion of this nature get as much air play as Comey will this week?”
I think the MSM will give this contest a lot of airtime, because they would want to show Trump was wrong and CAGW is real.
The MSM will be very interested in this endeavor until the alarmists start losing the argument. Then they may cut back on coverage. 🙂
But it won’t be truthful coverage. It’ll be spun to discredit science, and validate the political agenda
Hmmm, wasn’t exactly that discussed here at WUWT a few days ago ??
Please can they also asses the effectiveness, risks, and benefits of any proposed “fixes” (professional’s call them mitigations) should there be CO2 risks that need to be dealt with.
@rms, I would think that the greatest CO2 risk is not having enough of it to support life.
The “fixes” are not a part of climate science.
Climate science is all one big “fix-up”, Mosh… and you are part of that.
While that may be technically true, in practice nothing could be further from the truth. To a man and woman, the supporters of the CAGW view are intimately involved in policy making.
Nobody would really care about climate science but for the “fixes”.
“The “fixes” are not a part of climate science.”
Bwahahahahahahah.
Are you drunk?
Bingo Mosh, for once. The “fixes” like the Parris avreement, have exactly ZERO to do with any science.
Steve M.- “The ‘fixes’ are not part of climate science.” How about the marches?
Let us only hope that EPA avoids the sloppy and unprecise citation practice adopted by IPCC and rather document the results in a way that makes them independently verifiable.
It simply isn´t good enough to follow the practice of IPCC and just point to an entire paper without identifying the relevant statements, figure, or table within that paper.
The one I love is where people cite one of the entire IPCC reports. No volume, no page, no paragraph.
w.
Biologists, some of great “stature” and some who seem otherwise good scientists, do this all the time, ignoring the importance of understanding the whole temperature spectrum. Q10 is very important to physiology, but the apparent fear of demonic chemicals and phenomena has apparently resulted in their bias and advocacy. Of course, ego and money may be there also. They need retraining, if possible, in the basics of science and its particulars including fields like toxicology. The wonder is that much good biological science proceeds, but the emphasis on heat has changed the previous more balanced older view. .
H. D. Hoese
Thanks for bring up Q10. I should have thought of it, but didn’t. For those not in the know, Q10 is a chemistry/chem eng. term for the fact that roughly, a 10K change in temperature changes a reaction rate by a factor of 2-3 for many biological reactions. It applies to all chemical reactions through the Arrhenius equation, which he used to introduce activation energy- the concept that chemical reactions that you’d expect to occur, such as fire, require some excess energy to actually get started. It might be a match or some other source of heat. Catalysts(almost all enzymes) work by reducing the activation energy so the molecules have enough energy to react more readily without requiring high temperatures.
Interestingly, “normal” temperatures on earth have oscillated over a range of temperatures daily far exceeding 10K. Life has adapted.
RACookPE1978 June 6, 2017 at 4:57 pm
The actual sequence of creation in Genesis 1 could scarcely differ more from observed and inferred reality:
1) Waters. These aren’t created but already existing, and of course bear no relationship to a remarkably hot, dense point or singularity. Nor does the spirit of God moving over the waters equate to inflation starting at the Big Bang, which expansion causes the universe to cool as it grows. We also aren’t treated to the creation of atoms of hydrogen, most helium and a little lithium in the first three minutes of inflation, because biblical authors knew of no such things.
2) Light. This you apparently find similar to the phase in the early universe, when at about 380,000 years old, it cooled enough for a flash of light, but then went dark again until stars were able to form, after some 400 million years. By contrast, in Genesis 1, light not only originates at this point, but so does night, and they alternate. Clearly the author didn’t know that day and night occur because of earth’s rotation. Day and Night end the First Day.
3) Firmament of heaven. This solid dome separates the waters below from the waters above. Even John Calvin knew that there couldn’t be waters above the vault of heaven. There is water ice in outer space, but that’s not what the Bible envisions. Rather, there are storehouses of rain, snow, etc, which God Himself lets fall from these bins, while walking on the vault. Day and Night end Second Day.
4) Dry land. God gathers the waters under the firmament together so that dry land might appear. Of course that’s not remotely how it actually happened on earth. First the crust cooled, then water accumulated upon the dry surface.
5) Land plants. Please explain how it’s possible for plants or any other photosynthetic organism to exist without the sun. Thanks. Day and Night end the Third Day.
6) Sun, Moon and Stars. The sun and moon are merely signs (since Night and Day already exist), but the stars are to give light. They are set in the firmament. Elsewhere in the Bible we learn that they are anthropomorphic, ie the Heavenly Host, and sing. They’re also in danger of falling to earth. No mention of the formation of elements above lithium in these stars. Day and Night end the Fourth Day.
7) Water Creatures and Flying Creatures. Well, animals did evolve in the ocean, but all flying creatures, ie insects, pterosaurs, birds and bats, evolved on land, as you acknowledge. How they fly in the firmament of heaven is a little vague, too. Day and Night end the Fifth Day.
6) Land animals and Man. Note that unlike the myth in Genesis 2, Man and Woman are made at the same time in this chapter. The flying creatures of course should have come after the creation of land animals. Day and Night end the Sixth Day.
How exactly is it possible for earth, let alone land plants, to exist before the sun? Earth coalesced out of the protoplanetary disk surrounding the sun, as we can see happening around other stars today. What are these primordial waters doing in outer space, which God separates to allow dry land to emerge? Clearly biblical cosmology is the same as that of other prescientific Near Eastern creation and flood myths, including those on which the Genesis stories were modeled.
From the surface of the earth, the sky does look like a dome, with stars hanging from it. So it was natural for myth makers to assume that God could sit on the edge of the earth, as He does in Job, and look down at people, who appear to Him as bugs. And that He should walk on the dome, operating the levers of the storehouses of precipitation. Plainly no inkling of the hydrological cycle there.
You may not like it, but that’s what the chapter actually says. As noted, the sequence in Genesis 2 contradicts this sequence, but is even more wrong, if that’s possible.
The IPCC is a SUMMARY of the science, not a recapitulation.
I’ve never had any problem finding the support in the papers.
But then I actually read the chapters that lie within my experience.
And I actually read the papers in the bibliography.
IF you want your windows washed and diaper changed, then try a different field.
Or sign up as a reviewer and make suggestions to IMPROVE the document
That summary includes opposing views, of course, since science looks at all viewpoints and objectively presents all such viewpoints.
@ mosher. Not all scientists are geniuses like you. Here is link to a paper on how the sloppy citation practices you defend created an overly negative perception of the state of the oceans.
Mksh, so you read Greenpeace and other non peer reviewed rags while ignoring the NIPCC.
Steven, that kind of attitude doesn’t strengthen your position, let’s turn it around a bit.
IF you want us to pay for having your windows washed and diaper changed, then try convincing us there’s a need. We can always take our Billions of dollars and go home; then you can compete for burger flipping jobs with the English majors.
@ Steven Mosher:
But the ‘Summary’ (political) is produced first and the report then has to be amended to agree with it.
That ain’t science it’s marxist politics – but maybe that’s how you prefer it.
The IPCC Summary is written by politicians (final draft) and falsely claimed to be a summary of back up books released many months later in the hope that no one will compare them with the summary.
The IPCC is supported by climate change activists, environmental activists and scientists almost entirely believing in the CO2 is Evil Cult
Scientists who do not believe CO2 is Evil will not be asked to participate or will leave when they realize the conclusion was determined when the IPCC was formed in 1988 –Manmade CO2 controls the climate and will cause runaway global warming that will end life on our planet.
The IPCC was charged with collecting evidence to support that assumption, and ONLY that assumption — ignoring all contradictory data.
And that’s what they do.
Mr. Masher, you are apparently too dense to understand that the IPCC is nothing more than
a large data mining exercise with politicians putting the final spin on the summary.
Since no one knows what causes climate change, the arbitrary selection of manmade CO2 is wild guessing and claims that the future average temperature can be predicted are nonsense … as is obvious after 30 years of wrong wild guesses from the global climate models.
Masher, you brag that you read chapters of the IPCC Summary, as if you don’t know the conclusion was decided when the IPCC was formed in 1988, and will never change … no matter how many years of wonderful climate we enjoy … the end of life on Earth is always claimed to be coming … but never comes.
Only fools would keep believing this every year since 1988 with no doubt or skepticism.
Yes, you are right, I’m calling you one of the fools.
Climate change blog for non-scientists
(Don’t bother visiting Masher, the logic is over your head)
http://www.elOnionBloggle.Blopgspot.com
Richard Greene:
A good post, but you say….no one knows the cause of climate change.
Google “Climate Change Deciphered” for the answer
Don,
Funny!
Could be wrong, but my guess is that the screenwriters didn’t know nor care how closely related the giant and red panda are. Which isn’t really very much at all, since “panda” would have to include raccoons for the term to mean anything phylogenetically or cladistically.
They’re both on the same (non-felid) branch of the Carnivora, but so too then are dogs, weasels and seals.
Let’s be patriotic…. I want to be on the ‘White Team’, to review results, moderate debates, and drive appropriate changes in our regulatory agencies.
Debates?
Leftists don’t need no stinkin’ debates.
I though the leftists / government bureaucrat scientists were all going to stand on the stage and hurl insults at the other team … just like the current “climate debate”
Heh heh, red vs blue…we’ve already got it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9N8IpxO6rKs
Sorry, just to clarify…that youtube video has, literally, nothing to do with climate science. Well, actually, it has nothing to do with any science…but it IS funny.
The coming runaway global warming catastrophe has nothing to do with science, so a youtube video that has nothing to do with science would be appropriate, like white wine and fish.
The CIA did this to assess the Soviet threat in the 1970s, with A and B Teams.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Team_B
And of course we know who was on The A Team
They did a [pruned] job. We vastly over rated the soviets
Democrats still do!
Wrong again! At least you’re consistent. And persistent in commenting on topics about which you’re totally ignorant, to include physics, all other sciences, statistics and military power.
The B Team was right. The CIA grossly underestimated the USSR.
After its fall, we discovered that the B Team was spot on. Instead of the maximum of 20,000 nuclear warheads estimated by the CIA (A Team), there were more than 42,000. As the B Team correctly pointed out, every submarine carried nuclear torpedoes. That was discovered before the fall, during the Whiskey on the Rocks incident in Sweden. Every artillery battalion of 152mm and larger caliber was nuclear-armed. Their ICBM silos and SLBM launch tubes were (and are) reloadable.
A similar Red State / Blue State re-evaluation occurred in oncology in the 1970s. Circa 1940, estrogen was FDA-approved for the hot flashes of menopause. Wyeth promoted this, as Prempro, and was selling this drug to at least one of every three women, ages 45-65, by 1974 (Hemminki 1988). Big money.
In the 1970s, a couple of oncologists noticed that many of their endometrial cancer patients seemed to be estrogen-users. They did a case-control study, and found estrogen use in about 50% of a series of entrometrial cancer cases, and only 15% in matched controls.
Ziel HK, Finkle WD. Increased risk of endometrial carcinoma among users of conjugated estrogens. N Engl J Med. 1975 Dec 4;293(23):1167-70.
Sales dropped almost in half by 1976. The drug company, Wyeth, was worried. Wyeth questioned the “science” of the 1975 study – including suspecting the pathology lab work of being poor, biasing the determination of cases. The authors said, “OK, you send over your docs, and we will all blindly read the path lab samples.”
The corresponding 1977 publication confirmed the 1975 finding:
Gordon J, Reagan JW, Finkle WD, Ziel HK. Estrogen and endometrial carcinoma. An independent pathology review supporting original risk estimate. N Engl J Med. 1977 Sep 15;297(11):570-1.
Gordon and Reagan were Wyeth’s “hired guns,” with the other two authors just innocently carrying out their science in the interest of mankind – and womankind.
This moment of true science spurred a new line of research – that resulted in the finding that adding progesterone to the estrogen dropped the endometrial cancer risk.
In principle it’s not a bad idea, but like all things in Washington it will turn political and the media will mis-report it. I’d rather Pruitt step up and start to call out the people that we already know have mis-represented the issues and take NOAA to task for their role in creating fake data. Pruitt needs to become an activist for science, unlike the former head who was an activist for anything the green blob said
I suggest that he also establish an appropriate standard to ensure that the results are independent verifiable and reliable. This would be my suggestion for a set of principles that should be observed: The principles of science (v7.5)
Thanks, SorF. The nature of science has been defined in law:
Works for me … I’d definitely like to see those applied to the usual range of alarmist claims.
w.
Those principles are a bit too vague for my taste. A flaw may pass those 5 principles.
The principles of McLean v. Arkansas seem to be more about the demarcation of science from religion. The principles I suggest are intended to identify necessary characteristics of verifiable and reliable results.
SoF, warmunism is a religion. WE principles work for me.
OK, but the WE principles would still not be sufficient characteristics for reliable and independently verifiable knowledge.
Willis,
1) be guided by natural law;
2) be explanatory by reference to natural law;
3) be testable against the empirical world;
4) have conclusions that are tentative, i.e. are not necessarily the final word; and
5) be falsifiable.
“Works for me …”
Regarding Evolutionist vs Creationism? Sir, it eliminates one potential by definition . . How could you not notice that? I swear, sometimes it seems atheists are the most gullible people in this planet ; )
But, I don’t think either belongs in a science class, and I believe allowing Evolution (the kind no one ever observed ; ) in, was what opened the “Pandora’s box” of pretend science now threatening our very civilization.
John,
Why do you keep repeating the lie that evolution has never been observed?
It is observed daily.
None are so blind as those who refuse to see.
Results also need to be repeatable.
@Gabro: Thanks for the feedback. I think it is covered by §6: “A scientific concept is well-defined and has a well-defined capability of prediction within a well-defined context.”
I imagine that a concept that is well-defined in that manner should be repeatable. §10 and §11 should also help to ensure repeatability. However, it could be that it should be explicitly stated. I´ll make a note of it and consider it for the next revision. 🙂
SoF,
You’re welcome. I used to teach the history and philosophy of science along with science classes.
As nearly as I can tell, 17th century chemist Robert Boyle was the first to stress the importance of reproducibility and replicability in the scientific method.
Here’s a recent PNAS opinion piece on reproducible results. WUWT has also had some discussion on the topic.
Opinion: Reproducible research can still be wrong: Adopting a prevention approach
http://www.pnas.org/content/112/6/1645.full
Gabro,
I meant what I said, the kind no one ever observed. There are several meanings, and I don’t want to go through the ritual obfuscatory BS about that.
I’m talking about the kind Darwin himself said was not evident in the fossil record, and still does not appear (as far as I am aware).
Readers, please note the similarity in how Gabro responds to “me”, and how the climate alarmists respond to their skeptics (insulting, condescending, claiming it’s plain to see, etc.) I suggest they took that approach because they knew it could work to silence opposition, because they had seen it work . .
John,
Darwin never said that evolution wasn’t evident in the fossil record. He used the fossil record as evidence of the fact of descent with modification. He himself didn’t use the term evolution. He adduced various lines of evidence to show the fact that new species and higher biological classifications arise from previous ones.
What was an insight in 1858 is now a trivial observation. There are many evolutionary processes, but all can be directly observed or unavoidably interred without reference to any supernatural agency. Evolution is a scientific fact, ie an observation.
I shouldn’t have said daily, since evolution is observed continuously. The only difference between so-called microevolution and macroevolution is time. The processes which cause them are the same. There is no magical genetic barrier stopping micro from becoming macroevolution.
Cartilage is partially mineralized collagen, which connective protein was invented by sponges, the group from which other animals have evolved. When, in the Late Devonian, the fin rods of lobefin fish further calcified and fused into fingers, en route to the evolution of tetrapods, was that step micro or macroevolution? The same development pattern as seen in fossils is observable in the embryological development of fingers today.
Were you willing to look, you’d see the fact of evolution in your own body and everywhere around you. But you’ve blinded yourself to reality.
JohnKnight June 6, 2017 at 3:28 pm
Readers can plainly see that you, like CACA advocates, are immune to reality, adherents of a religion to be accepted on blind faith rather than scientific fact.
“Climate Change”. “Evolution”.
Both are terms thrown around that need to be defined before one can agree or disagree depending on what “the thrower” was implying.
JohnKnight, sorry to hack in as this is not my thing. Please buy and read scholarly ‘In the Blink of an Eye’ by Parker (2003) Or read my synopsis with many other peer reviewed papers added in the characterization chapter of The Arts of Truth. You have it wrong. Very wrong.
“JohnKnight June 6, 2017 at 3:28 pm
Readers, please note the similarity in how Gabro responds to “me”, and how the climate alarmists respond to their skeptics (insulting, condescending, claiming it’s plain to see, etc.) I suggest they took that approach because they knew it could work to silence opposition, because they had seen it work . .”
john, what superstition is in opposition to is reality.
you have no reason. that’s how you earn the condescension and it would be an act of moral embezzlement to deny to you what you have earned by your efforts.
howbowdah.
PS ~ Oh, and the similar vague lingo games (evolution/climate change), that take so long to get through in terms of what’s really being disputed/doubted (if the certitude side doesn’t want it to happen). The terms have very broad potential meaning ranges, but you will note if you look (I believe) that one side generally speaks as though it’s a very narrow range, and any definition sense being met means all have been, essentially (and then the skeptic is berated as uninformed for not going along with the vague lingo game).
Gunga Din June 6, 2017 at 3:34 pm
“Evolution” does have precise definitions in biology. For the purpose of my comments to John, the term means “change in the heritable traits of biological populations over successive generations”. This applies whether we’re talking about the evolution of antibiotic resistance in microbial pathogens or the evolution of new species, genera, families, orders, classes, phyla, kingdoms or domains of related organisms.
“Climate change” OTOH is intentionally vague shorthand for the hypothesis of dangerous man-made climate change or global warming or weather weirding or something bad and all our fault.
JohnKnight June 6, 2017 at 3:42 pm
As I’ve just commented, “evolution” isn’t a vague term. It has precise definitions.
You only imagine it’s vague because of your willfully complete, total and utter ignorance of the subject. Worse than that, all that you imagine you know is dead wrong.
ristvan,
Make your case, or I suggest you don’t really have a good one, yourself . . and it seems so freaking obvious to me that lots of peer reviewed p[parers can mean corruption and confirmation bias etc., that I’m kinda stunned you would act as though it’s impossible . . now, anyway.
gnomish June 6, 2017 at 3:39 pm
Remarkable that people who’ve never studied science feel qualified to comment upon it.
Please note readers, how Gabro goes right ahead and plays the vague lingo game;
“As I’ve just commented, “evolution” isn’t a vague term. It has precise definitions.”
Like I can see the ‘s’ at the end there ; )
JohnKnight June 6, 2017 at 3:56 pm
IOW, you can’t be bothered to educate yourself, for fear of what you might learn.
Ignorance may be bliss, but it’s still ignorance. Commenting falsely out of ignorance only earns you well-deserved derision and condescension. You must have missed the part about pride going before a fall.
(And then we see the Evo version of “you’ enot a climate sceintist” game ; )
lolz –
john’s winning rhetoric: ‘i’m so victim!’
next up: ‘truth is hate-speech’
John,
Nope. You don’t have to be a scientist to make worthwhile comments on “climate science”, but you do have to have studied the relevant science and math in order to understand the arguments. A complete neophyte could possibly ask good questions, but, as you yourself have shown, a lack of physics education just causes you to embarrass yourself. That goes double for biology.
(Weak, snowflake ; )
Note the lack of even an attempt to make a case, folks. It’s hand waiving and accusations of ignorance, all the way down ; )
Seriously, I’m only suggesting that something possible, was spun into “settled science”, and that many are too well indoctrinated to even question their absolute certainty, and now that pattern has been replicated with the CAGW clan. I’m a skeptic, and these lightweights (including ristvan in this case) are displaying a total lack of that commodity . . while pretending they are being ever so scientifically. No your not, I say, you’re just brainwashed (as I was most of my life).
You’ll pay lip service to the need for skepticism in science, I’ll grant you that . .
John,
I don’t know who you imagine to be a “snowflake”, but the term surely doesn’t apply to anyone who has pointed out your profound ignorance here.
But I’m prepared to be astounded by your understanding of nature. Please tell us, in your own words, how you imagine new species, genera, etc. arise. If they don’t evolve, how then have they been “created”.
Does God just poof! new ones into existence to replace those going extinct, or did He make them all at once?
In Genesis 1, you might recall, the earth brought forth plants on the third day of creation, then the waters brought forth sea creatures and winged creatures on the fifth day, followed by the earth again bringing forth land creatures on the sixth day. Of course, in Genesis 2, it’s a different kettle of fish entirely. So what is a Bible-believing anti-scientist to suppose?
No. You have some of the words, but not the complete sequence.
First, everything was created. From nothing.
THEN, there a great wave (wind, blast, or Big Bang – as some call it.)
THEN, light was formed as everything cooled from the initial blast.
THEN, solids formed from the light as everything continued to cool. (These early solids formed the first shadows.)
THEN, the clouds, dust, plasmas and gasses above (that formed the stars and other planets) separated from the clouds, dust, plasmas and gasses that condensed together and formed the earth.
THEN, one land was formed and one ocean was formed. (Or one ocean was formed because one land was gathered together.
THEN, plants grew in that ocean, and the skies cleared (as oxygen was released after the plants grew), and so the stars and moon were first visible through the atmosphere in today’s positions.
THEN, dinosaurs grew (well, today’s birds evolved on land – but they were from dinosaurs. Or dinosaurs ARE today’s birds. There is much disagreement today.)
THEN, mammals evolved.
THEN, Man evolved. Or was formed – depending on how you look at it.
Now. Am I quoting Genesis?
Or Darwin, paleontology, geology, evolution, astronomy, chemistry, physics, and today’s Big Bang Theory?
Hmmm…
““Evolution” does have precise definitions in biology. For the purpose of my comments to John, the term means “change in the heritable traits of biological populations over successive generations”.”
Sounds like “seed after its kind”.
People have been breeding dogs for a long time. Lots of different breeds of dogs out there. Yet no no one has ever observed a dog having a kitten.
As I said,
JohnKnight June 6, 2017 at 4:26 pm
What hand-waving?
Commenters here have wasted hours trying to educate you in great detail, free of charge, but you can’t handle the truth, since you have not the least interest in it.
Gunga Din June 6, 2017 at 4:30 pm
How do you get a dog having a kitten out of the definition of evolution I gave you?
What has been observed, in fossils, in genetics, anatomy, biochemistry, embryology, indeed ever possible relevant line of evidence, is that dogs evolved from Pleistocene wolves, which evolved from solitary Pliocene canids similar to coyotes, which evolved from Miocene canids, which evolved from Oligocene bear-dogs, which evolved from carnivores ancestral to both cats and dogs in the Eocene Epoch.
The genome of dog wouldn’t suddenly evolve in a single generation into that of a cat. Are you serious or just kidding? Is it really possible to graduate from high school and understand biology so ridiculously poorly?
A “bear-dog”, actually more closely related to canids than to ursids:
Amphicyon ingens lived during the mid-Miocene.
“What has been observed, in fossils, in genetics, anatomy, biochemistry, embryology, indeed ever possible relevant line of evidence, is that dogs evolved from Pleistocene wolves, which evolved from solitary Pliocene canids similar to coyotes, which evolved from Miocene canids, which evolved from Oligocene bear-dogs, which evolved from carnivores ancestral to both cats and dogs in the Eocene Epoch.”
Hand waiving, to me, sir. Just you spouting what you believe, with no evidence we can actually see and consider. It looks just like Michel Mann playing “pile it on” with all the vast array of verifying “science” he like to evoke (which we get to watch sliced and diced around here ; ) but I’m (we’re) supposed to just soak it up if it’s claimed in regard to Evolution . . HYPOCRISY ALERT . . ; )
John,
No hand waving. It’s summarizing the evidence, which you’ve been shown over and over again, to no avail. You’re impervious to reality. You just ignore all the effort that scientists here have provided you free of charge.
Can you move your ears the way that dogs, cats, horses, llamas and so many other mammals, including prosimian primates can? Then why do you imagine that you have the muscles to move your immobile ears and the neuropathways in your brain for the muscles to respond to stimuli which animals with mobile ears can locate? Only an idiotic designer would give us apes and monkeys muscles to move immobile ears. Wiggling doesn’t count. Only forward, sideways and backwards work.
You won’t even reply to direct questions. You’re a waste of time. Why cast more pearls before swine?
Gabro, evolution, however you define it, has a problem similar to modelling climate. We can only observe one “instance” of evolution- there is no way to show that any example, whether it is moths over a hundred years, or humans over millions of years, or amphibians to reptlles, can only occur on one pathway. It’s less a hypothetical science than an explanatory one that gives some basis for evaluating change in the fossil record and even in fruit flies over a few years. We are a looong way from being able to determine which genetic changes in which order and among which genes will give a particular result that survives the evolutionary challenge in response to an experiment.
The easiest thing is the eye evolution. Already covered.
philohippous June 6, 2017 at 5:20 pm
Nope. We do what you describe all the time. Every day in every way.
Just to take a couple of salient examples from human evolution, we know the genetic changes responsible for our upright walking and for our big brains.
We learn more all the time. Evolution is a scientific fact, ie an observation, with more examples compounding all the time. There is also a body of theory explaining these observations, just as the ever-changing theory of universal gravitation tries to explain gravity. Evolution however is much better understood.
You seem to imagine that evolution always occurs gradually. More often than not, however, speciation occurs in a single generation, via such rapid processes as single mutations, hybridization and polyploidy. Not just speciation, but microevolution also happens in every generation. You yourself were probably born with four mutations, and acquire more during your life.
Evolution is a consequence of reproduction. It’s a fact, observable all around us, all the time.
Gabro says;
“A “bear-dog”, actually more closely related to canids than to ursids:
Not thought by some to be such and such, but a totally skepticism free declaration of ostensible absolute truth. Why? And, where has the alternative gone? (creation) . . What is it about that skeleton that tells us, in a scientific sense, that it was certainly not the handiwork of a hyper intelligent being? I don;pt see it . . there is no logical argument even presented here, but Gabro doesn’t even realize that’s what he’s supposed to be demonstrating can’t be the story of how that thing came to exist, I don’t believe. (He forgot ; )
And this is where the “settled science” trick began, I propose. This explains what went wrong, such that science, the institutions/community, is not rushing to defend skepticism now . . better than anything else I can detect, anyway. In this realm of a propaganda generated pretend war between religion and science, and most of science went for the Priestly robes, so to speak. Saving us from . . not having them rule over us, they foolishly believed, it seems to me . .
Ristvan,
“The easiest thing is the eye evolution. Already covered.”
No one saw that happen, sir. They only imagined it . . right?
You see, folks, a different form of science (that I sometimes call Siants, because it sounds like science ; ) has become perfectly acceptable to most scientists and other people who really should know better, I feel; When direct observation is not possible, the visions of leading experts can act as a proxy for it.
Nope, that’s not science, that’s belief in the (vicarious) visions of seers . . (it’s false religion, in Book-speak)
John,
You fail fundamentally even to grasp what science is.
Science was Copernicus’ insight that the earth goes around the sun and isn’t immobile, as in the Bible. He couldn’t directly observe that fact, as we can now, but his hypothesis was correct. He was wrong about circular orbits, but he was closer to physical reality than was Ptolemy and especially the Bible.
Science was also Darwin’s insight that species originated via natural selection and other evolutionary processes. He didn’t know about heredity, just as Copernicus didn’t know that orbits are elliptical, but he was right about natural selection.
Science infers unseen phenomena from observations, then tests those inferences. Predictions made on the basis of evolution prove valid. Those on the basis of creationism, never. Thus evolution is science and creationism religion.
Fossils are observations of past life forms. In the case of the bear-dog, it’s easy to see both its canine and ursine features. The inference is that it represents a stage in the evolution of canids, after their separation from the line leading to bears. All available evidence shows this relationship and none show it false.
That’s how science works. We know that species evolved in the past and can see them doing so today. Willful ignorance is all that is keeping you from learning how the world really works.
Why not be brave, free your mind from myths and put yourself through a course of education? Here’s a good book, easily accessible by lay readers, on the fossil record. It mentions some of the other evidences supporting the fact of evolution, but focuses on fossils.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0231139624?tag=fivboo-20
No one with an open mind can avoid accepting the reality of evolution after reading it. The truth is overwhelming. Then maybe you’ll go on and read books on the dozens of other lines of evidence, ie all the evidence in the world. In that case, you’ll realize just how ignorant you were, and how presumptuous and sinfully proud you were to spout such drivel here.
JohnKnight June 6, 2017 at 6:38 pm
The evolution of eyes isn’t imagined. It’s reconstructed from observations, the same way that a crime scene is reconstructed from available evidence. Hypotheses are made and tested. That’s science.
Much of the genetic machinery used in eye development is shared by all eyed animals, yet complex eyes have evolved dozens of times.
This survey of vertebrate eye evolution is ten years old. A lot more is known now, but what is presented here is still valid:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3143066/
“Fossils are observations of past life forms. In the case of the bear-dog, it’s easy to see both its canine and ursine features.”
So what? I have no idea what causes you to think that a living thing Creator would only utilize basic “features” once only . . Do you impose such an arbitrary limit on yourself, in the things you create? You can shadow box with a dorky phantom god that is limited by urges or habits you yourself are not bound by, but it’s just boring to watch, frankly.
A wide array of “breeds” of dogs can come into existence without ANY new functional DNA coming into existence (last I heard) but it doesn’t seem to dawn on you that this swings the door of possibility that what that record is showing us is actually a wide variety of “breeds” that “evolved” from a relatively few initial critters, pre-supplied with the coding to generate that wide variety, as dogs and other critters have done.
I can understand doubting that’s what happened, but I can’t understand ruling it out, if we have observed that pattern in reality-land. You do, though, it seems . . So, I don’t consider you a scientific/self-critical thinker . . As I said, atheists can be the most gullible people I’ve ever encountered (# not all atheists ; )
In Siants, all it takes to make some idea into a Siantific fact, is for some self worshiping well paid practitioners to imagine it, and then generally agreeing it seems plausible . . Hence the imaginary “observations” of eyes evolving into existence being shoved in my face as some sort of proof they did, by devout believers in this Siants struff, and, hence the CAGW being shoved in all our faces by some others . . the one paved the way for the other, I believe.
@JohnKnight, take away all knowledge and writings of evolution, and the next generation of archaeologists and biologists will re-discover exactly the same facts and draw the same conclusions. Take away all knowledge and writings of the Bible, and it will never reappear.
>>
JohnKnight
June 6, 2017 at 4:14 pm
(Weak, snowflake ; )
<<
Ahhh Geee, and I thought “snowflake” was your special term for me.
But here you’re using it on others. Tsk, tsk, tsk.
Jim
>>
Gabro
June 6, 2017 at 7:30 pm
Much of the genetic machinery used in eye development is shared by all eyed animals, yet complex eyes have evolved dozens of times.
<<
What annoys me is that God gave us humans the same basic backwards, upside-down, inside-out eye design that he gave all the other vertebrates. As I age, I need stronger and stronger glasses, because the muscles adjusting our eye lenses aren’t strong enough to compensate for the stiffness as the lenses age.
Now God designed the cephalopod eyes correctly (in my opinion). The cephalopod eyes with lenses work like real cameras–the lenses move in and out to focus. I’ve never seen an old octopus wearing glasses (or a young one either). I wonder if octopuses suffer from cataracts.
Jim
Studying botany as a student near 3 decades back I never questioned evolution, nor had I for many years after for it was taught as a fact. Hearing the word ‘evolved’ almost everywhere, it was with some shock I realized the term was being used in regard the expression of alleles more oft than not and rarely in regard evolution.
“Ah this group of humans has ‘evolved’ to eat such and such a diet” – Rubbish! They’re the same species as every other human, they’re not exhibiting any such thing as evolution.. Should we ever see one species turn into another species then by all means, we’ll have seen evolution for the first time but so far no matter how hard we look or how many thousands of generations of microbes we culture, we’ve not seen a single example of a species becoming another species (accepting the criteria that differing species cannot generally interbreed).
This got me pondering things – we were taught speciation is divergent – but would convergent speciation look any different?
A galah parrot (Eolophus roseicapilla)mates with a weero cockatiel (Nymphicus hollandicus) and produces viable offspring. Assume this new creature being larger than a weero competes more successfully for food than the weeros and the weeros die out
– we would observe this as the ‘species evolving’. Even though thta’s not what happened at all. by the way, this has happened and currently such creatures are often labeled hybrids. If we’d stumbled across this hybrid creature in the wild after it became endemic, we’d have named is as just another species..
We’ve seen the specific example above occur, it’s been observed many times across the world but convergent evolution is generally not offered up as an alternative to the never-seen-but-intuited divergent evolution.
Whenever creationism is raised here it is interesting to see the same tactics used to reject evolution as are used to reject AGW.
We get obfuscation by semantics (discussion of what evolution means is like discussion of what acidification means)
“and it seems so freaking obvious to me that lots of peer reviewed p[parers can mean corruption and confirmation bias etc.” Or the fact that nearly all scientific papers support one position is not evidence for that position.
“Evolution has never been observed” So similar to “AGW has never been demonstrated”. Requiring an impossible standard.
“If they don’t evolve, how then have they been “created”. Does God just poof! new ones into existence to replace those going extinct, or did He make them all at once?”
The exact parallel of the “its natural” argument for climate change. How does nature do it? Does it just poof! climate change into happening without forcings?
I sympathise with Gabro, but think they are on a hopeless mission.
Johnnight
“No one saw that happen, sir. They only imagined it . . right?”
Not that I really care one way or another because in the end you believe what you want and as long as you don’t force your views on anyone else (i.e. CAGW) own it, but I have to ask where you there when god created the Heavens, or anything else? There is no science in what you believe it is only belief and that’s OK because in the end we can prove a lot with science when its done correctly but I don’t think we will ever prove or disprove the existence of a god, you have yours and let everyone else have there’s, just don’t tell me have to live based on your personal beliefs.
Karl June 7, 2017 at 1:21 am
You misuse the term “convergent evolution”, which has nothing at all to do with hybridization.
Hybridization is one way in which new species and genera can arise in a single generation. Another is via gene multiplication, often duplication of the whole genome, ie polyploidy. This is especially common in plants, but also happens less often in animals, to include human ancestry. Thirty to eighty percent of plant species have arisen in a single generation thanks to polyploidy.
Contrary to your false assertion, divergent evolution has been observed repeatedly and is an inescapable inference in untold other instances. Among the observed instances of speciation via gradual divergent evolution by natural selection is the famous case of Galapagos finches. Both in the wild and in the lab, nylon-eating microbes evolve in a single generation from sugar-eating bacteria, due to a simple point mutation.
It’s remarkable how many people consider themselves qualified to comment upon a subject they have never studied.
Jim Masterson June 6, 2017 at 11:56 pm
In general, I’d agree that the cephalopod “design” is superior to the vertebrate eye, but both have advantages and disadvantages.
Sadly, octopi don’t live long enough to suffer presbyopia. If they did, they would probably rule the planet rather than vertebrates. They are scarily intelligent, given their numerous brains and ability to grow new ones.
JohnKnight,
As an outsider to this discussion and as a Christian, you are being less than honest in your argument.
Your defense of evolution on religious grounds and by way of false claims is much more like that of the climate true believer than a skeptic.
Evolution is part of God’s plan. Period.
And we are not facing a climate crisis of any sort, much less one caused by human generated CO2.
Period.
hunter June 7, 2017 at 1:23 pm
Most Christian denominations recognize the reality of evolution. The only large American one that I know of which doesn’t is the Southern Baptist Convention, with 15 million members. I belong to what used to be called the American Baptist Convention. Some small sects like Jehovah’s Witnesses also don’t accept science, plus somewhat larger ones like the Seventh Day Adventists, with some 16 million members worldwide. Modern creationism is largely the work of SDA Church activists.
It is easier to interpret the Bible as supporting evolution than it is to read modern astronomy, physics, chemistry, meteorology or geology into its text. But trying to do so is IMO a fundamentally misguided exercise. Science and religion don’t mix well. Each has its appropriate sphere.
If one insists on trying to find science in the Bible, however, Genesis 1 doesn’t say that God Himself made species. Rather, the waters and the earth brought them forth. But in Genesis 2, God does Personally plant a garden, cause seeds to grow, make a man, then animals, then a woman. Elsewhere in the Bible, He Himself lays the foundations of the earth and causes precipitation to fall from the storehouses of the snow, rain, hail, what have you.
So IMO, it’s better just to accept that biblical creation myths aren’t literally true. That’s what Augustine argued for, against those Early Church Fathers who insisted upon the biblically correct flat earth, and later even Calvin, the theologian with whom most ardent YE creationists associate themselves. The message of scripture isn’t about the natural world. Trying to make it so is the sin of idolatry, ie bibliolatry, the blasphemous worship of a book rather than God.
Modern science began as a revolt against authority, whether of the Church’s interpretation of the Bible or of the ancient natural philosophers, like Aristotle. One dead giveaway that CACA isn’t science is its fallacious appeal to authority. Same as John’s reliance on the Bible rather than observation of nature.
That’s why I asked John how he imagined that species have arisen, if not by evolution. Creationism is nothing but stupid, ignorant arguments against the fact of evolution, rather than a positive, rational explanation for observed reality. No surprise, he’s not bothered to reply.
Bob,
““No one saw that happen, sir. They only imagined it . . right?”
Not that I really care one way or another because in the end you believe what you want and as long as you don’t force your views on anyone else (i.e. CAGW) own it, but I have to ask where you there when god created the Heavens, or anything else?”
No, and that’s why I said Creationism doesn’t belong in science class . . by which I meant taught as “settled science” to kids, basically, the way Evolutionism is. I think it’s fine that these potentials be discussed and elaborated on, in terms of observable evidence and such, particularly in more advanced settings (like WUWT ; ) but simply eliminating one potential by decree from “the bench” so to speak, is crazy-town stuff to me. And now I think that is perhaps becoming more tangible to some, with the CAGW being force fed to the kids as “settled science” too . . and the SJW “social science” stuff as well . .
“There is no science in what you believe it is only belief and that’s OK because in the end we can prove a lot with science when its done correctly but I don’t think we will ever prove or disprove the existence of a god, you have yours and let everyone else have there’s, just don’t tell me have to live based on your personal beliefs.”
Fine, but unfortunately “your” belief clan is extracting money (effectively at gunpoint) from non-believers, to pay for having their kids indoctrinated with your beliefs . . not the other way round. And frankly it’s kinda creepy to me that some dude on the internet is trying to flip the script, so to speak . . Prolly brainwashed by some giant headed Dawkin’s/Nye types, I figure, as I was . .
John Knight
It is not true that there are no present day examples of evolution in action. Evolution on the present tense is best shown by the phenomenon of “ring species”. Here a species is distributed in a ring, like a salamander Ensatina around the ring of hills around Central Valley in California and Oregon, or like the Herring gull – Black backed seagull whose distribution forms a ring around the world at high northern latitudes, from the North sea to the Baltin, Russia, Alaska-Canada, the Atlantic and back to the North sea.
In ring species there is gradual change in the species along the ring but for most of the ring the neighboring forms are close enough to breed. But the ends of the ring species meet abruptly like the date line in the Pacific, and across this junction there is no interbreeding. The species is different yet the same. Different in one direction, same in the other. “La plus ca change, le plus c’est la meme chose”.
I don’t agree that science and religious faith are incompatible btw. This article shows how the 19th century poet Walt Whitman celebrates both together:
https://ptolemy2.wordpress.com/2017/06/05/when-science-had-no-shame-the-poem-passage-to-india-by-walt-whitman/
JohnKnight June 7, 2017 at 2:39 pm
What you don’t get, because you’ve never studied science, is that it’s not based upon belief. It’s science, not religion. Creationism is a belief system totally contrary to all observation of nature. Evolution is a scientific fact and a body of theory seeking to explain that fact, subject to the scientific method. Comparing the fact of evolution with belief in creationism is invalid, to say the least.
Science is rarely settled. But comparing evolution with CAGW is also invalid, to say the least. Evolution is a fact. CAGW is aun unsettled scientific hypothesis repeatedly falsified, but unlike creationism, it at least is subject to the scientific method, by which it has been shown false. Thus its proponents need to resort to the same kinds of antiscientific appeals to authority to sustain it employed by adherents of creatonism.
Formerly unsettled science does sometimes become settled, at which time other issues arise. Heliocentrism was once an hypothesis. Now it’s known to be a fact that earth goes around the sun. Similarly, gravity and evolution are also now known to be facts, with theories explaining them. Evolution however is better understood than gravitation.
Public schools have a duty to teach science, which is why biology classes teach the fact of evolution. Creationism isn’t science, so can’t be taught in biology classes. Because you’ve never studied biology, the distinction eludes you.
ptolemy2 June 7, 2017 at 2:45 pm
Linguistic evolution works the same way. The Eskimo languages, for instance, form such a ring. Inuit from Greenland can understand the dialect of Inuit from eastern Canada, who can understand the speech of Eskimos from western Canada, who can sort of understand the Inuktitut of northern Alaska, but the Inuktitut dialect or language is unintelligible to Greenlanders.
Yupik spoken in western and southern Alaska and Siberia however is not intelligible even to the Inuktitut. It’s a separate language from any form of Inuit-Inuktitut, and has its own dialects. So it’s analogous to a different species in the same genus as the ring “species” from northern Alaska to Greenland.
Ptolomy,
“It is not true that there are no present day examples of evolution in action.”
I agree . . but I doubt we mean the term in exactly the same sense . . The critical question centers on the “coding” to me, the information which ostensibly allows change to occur. Is brand spanking new functional genetic coding coming into existence? Or, are we seeing coding that already existed being “selected” from an available pool, so to speak . . such as we can observe with various organism lines we humans have sort “evolved” ourselves?
“What you don’t get, because you’ve never studied science, is that it’s not based upon belief.”
Yes it is, you blithering imagination worshiper ; ) But again, you play the vague lingo games . . The whole point of all the careful testing is so people can believe the results of test are valid. There would be no point in conducting science if it didn’t result in something people can believe . . You have been indoctrinated to BELIEVE it’s all about asserting/enforcing some worldview or something, I guess . .
JohnKnight June 7, 2017 at 3:40 pm
Only in your ignorant imagination is it a vague word game. As you’be been showed time and time again, evolution is precisely defined, both as a fact and as a theory explaining that fact. It is far better defined and understood than gravitation, for example.
You are blinded by false religion. You don’t even dare to read a book on evolution, one such as that I recommended for you, which is tailored for creationists who have swallowed the lies they’ve been told, hook, line and sinker.
Evolution is science because it makes testable predictions, capable of being confirmed or shown false. Creationism isn’t science because it can’t make such predictions, and when it tries, they are invariably shown false, if testable at all. Evolution is taught in public schools because it’s science. Creationism isn’t because it isn’t. Not even close. It’s a pack of lies perpetrated by shameless, professional liars.
JohnKnight June 7, 2017 at 3:22 pm
Had you been paying attention to the scientifically educated here, you would know that new genetic information evolves all the time. It can be made in the lab, to include reproducing the changes observed in the wild.
How many times do you need to be told this and how many examples do you need to be shown before you shake off the blinders which professional liars have stuck over your eyes?
Mutations make new information all the time. It’s easy, inevitable and unavoidable. Often the new information was previously lethal, but in changed circumstances the same mutation can be beneficial. This is the case with nylon-eating bacteria. The simple mutation which permits nylon metabolism must have happened innumerable times before nylon entered the environment, thanks to humans. But once it did, a formerly lethal mutation became beneficial.
Whole genome duplication is a great source of new genetic information. since now evolution has twice as much material with which to work and all of the added base pairs are available for mutation, since the organism still has all the vital genes it needs. (A gene codes for proteins, but genomes contain a lot of non-coding, epigenetic material which is also useful. Maize and teosinte are identical in terms of their genes, but human artificial selection, ie domestication, has turned teosinte into a new plant epigenetically.)
Humans and sponges share about 70% of our genes. The other 30% are all new, having evolved in the past 600 million years or so of genetic innovation in animals.
Horizontal gene transfer also is a source of new information in the species to which the genetic info is transferred.
Here’s a diagram of animal evolution. Each node represents a branching due to a genetic innovation. We can look at sequenced genomes and see which new genes and other genomic changes are associated with each divergence.
At the root of the animal phylogenetic shrub is one of the key genetic innovations made by the earliest animals, ie motile, heterotrophic, multicellular eukaryotes, sponges. That’s the protein for connective and structural tissue, collagen. Working out its subsequent evolutionary history is an exciting and rewarding field of research, promising great human and other animal health benefits.
Similar diagrams can be drawn for the other multicellular eukarotic groups, ie plants and fungi, and for microbes, both prokaryote and eukaryote. Shared derived traits all owe to shared genetic coding and noncoding changes.
Only ignorance, willful or from lack of educational opportunity, keeps any sane person from recognizing the reality of evolution.
RACook,
Good engineers are easily recognized by their ability to see the big picture… 🙂
Gabro,
Without taking the time to look it up, can you give an approximate guess as to how far back in time it was that the first guy felt the need alter “fact” by adding the qualifier “scientific”? In other words, when did the term “scientific fact” become a reasonable and accepted term?
Don,
The use of “science” in something close to its modern meaning predates the scientific revolution of the 16th century. The earliest record of “scientific revolution” which I’ve found is from 1803, and “scientific method” dates from before 1854.
The first use of “scientific fact” to mean a valid observation of nature, I don’t know, but certainly from well before Huxley, who employed it in its modern sense.
If you don’t like the term of art “scientific fact”, then please feel free to use its equivalent, ie scientific observation.
hunter,
“As an outsider to this discussion and as a Christian, you are being less than honest in your argument.”
How dare you? Do you fancy yourself a heart-knower?
“Your defense of evolution on religious grounds and by way of false claims is much more like that of the climate true believer than a skeptic.”
Bullshit, I defended nothing here on religious grounds.
JohnKnight June 7, 2017 at 10:25 pm
As always, you are ludicrously wrong.
All your idiotic objections to the fact of evolution are religious.
You have no valid scientific objections to the fact of evolution because there are none.
Gabro,
“Here’s a diagram of animal evolution”
Imagined/believed animal evolution, sir.
“We can look at sequenced genomes and see which new genes and other genomic changes are associated with each divergence.”
Or not . . People can “associate” anything they like. It’s called imagination . .
John,
The imagined is all yours.
I yet again show your the fact of evolution. You lie that genetic codes can’t be altered. I show you the indisputable facts that they have been, over and over and over again. And that we can not only observe that fact now, but make it in the lab.
Your lies put you in league with the devil. Maybe it will take burning in eternal hellfire for you to realize at last how stupid and ignorant you have been to fall for the lies with which professional liars against God have tempted you.
John Knight,
Your blasphemies against God ensure that you will indeed roast in the hottest circle of Hell forever. Your soul is in mortal peril for repeating the damnable lies against God spread by creationist devil worshipers.
I pray that you will see the light before you die, to spare your soul eternal damnation.
You’re like a little kid to me, Gabro. You recite pat little evo pablum, with narry a trace of actual evidence or logic to back any of it up. If someone came on here and said; *The CAGW is science because it can make predictions* . . nobody is impressed.
You need to say exactly what prediction(s), and explain why that particular prediction is exclusively attributable to the process in question (Not like when you said that skeleton showed features similar to other creatures, demonstrating some special connection, since that could easily occur if they were both created, as I pointed out,), and show/explain the evidence for your claim, etc, etc. Just spouting bundles of claims is silly, to me anyway . .
“All your idiotic objections to the fact of evolution are religious.”
If that were true, you’d surely be able to present an example, or ten ; ) But you don’t, because it didn’t happen I say. The subject (I originally responded to Willis about) involves a set of potentials; Evolution and Creation, and I have made no arguments based on any religious anything, just those options.
Now, in your mind there is apparently the notion that the Creation potential is itself inherently “religion”, but that to me is residue of the brainwashing I’ve been warning about. It could have been hyper-advanced “little green men” who seeded the planet with life forms (which also renders the similarities in various critters “features” unremarkable sans decadency), or a God-like to us, superior form of entity that never made any “contact” with us at all, and so no “Religion” exists that has any relevance to It.
I’ve been speaking only to the Creation potential itself, not relating it to any particular scripture/text or doctrines or whatever. That potential was ruled out by a judge, when to do so is patently unsceintific, I contend. It’s the sort of evidence of very heavy handed stacking of the deck, so to speak, that is demonstrated in something like the *CO2 is pollution” ruling, and one of the reasons I came to suspect it was a springboard to much corruption of science, including the CAGW “powerplay” (as i see it).
While I wish eternal torment in the lowest circle of Hell upon no one, few are they who merit it more than inveterate Satanic devil worshiper John, whose every comment is blasphemous calumny against the Lord of Creation.
I fear the worst for his self-condemned soul.
(Oops, should say; sans descendantcy . . (which I’m not entirely sure is even a word ; )
JohnKnight June 7, 2017 at 11:39 pm
That all you do is spread lies against God is made plain for all to see because you refuse to even try to answer the question I ask.
But it’s not for me to judge. God has already weighed you in the balance and found you wanting. Even before your miserable, lost soul was formed, the Calvinist God knew your fate, which is eternal damnation as a damnable liar against the Creator.
I hope you like it hot.
“You lie that genetic codes can’t be altered.”
In your imagination apparently . .
“That all you do is spread lies against God is made plain for all to see because you refuse to even try to answer the question I ask.”
Question? You asked a question? I must’ve missed it . . Could you ask again, that’s a lot of text to go through, ya know?
RACookPE1978 June 6, 2017 at 4:57 pm
Your story disagrees in every particular with the actual words of Genesis 1, which mean what they say. And Genesis 1 disagrees with Genesis 2.
Neither creation myth even remotely resembles what actually happened in the history of the universe. Indeed, compared to the discoveries of science, both myths, and everything else in the Bible having to do with nature, is preposterously, ludicrously wrong.
The more scientific sequence which you imagine you find in the Bible bears no relationship whatsoever to what it actually says. You’re free to read into the text whatever you want to imagine, but the words really mean what they say, not what you want them to mean.
You: “First, everything was created. From nothing.”
Nope. Not even close. Genesis 1 starts out with the breath of God moving over the waters. Where did these waters come from? The Bible doesn’t say. Note that Genesis 1:1 explicitly states that God created the heaven and the earth. It doesn’t mention His creating the pre-existent waters. This is understandable by comparing Genesis 1 with the Sumerian original of the myth.
“1 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
“2 And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.”
You: “THEN, there a great wave (wind, blast, or Big Bang – as some call it.)”
Nope. The wind you imagine is properly translated as the spirit or breath of God. You don’t get to imagine words which aren’t there. But even if it were twisted into a wind, it in no way resembles the expansion from a hot, dense singularity associated with the Big Bang.
You: “THEN, light was formed as everything cooled from the initial blast.”
Nope. There is no such blast from which to cool in the actual words of Genesis.
“3 And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
“4 And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.
“5 And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.”
Note that the author of Genesis 1 doesn’t understand that night and day aren’t possible without the sun, let alone that the turning of the earth is what causes them.
You: “THEN, solids formed from the light as everything continued to cool. (These early solids formed the first shadows.)”
Nope. Not even close. What really happens in the actual universe is that the elements heavier than lithium are made inside stars. But in Genesis there are no stars yet.
“6 And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.
“7 And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so.
“8 And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.
“9 And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so.
“10 And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good.
Among the solids you imagine is the solid dome of heaven, the firmament, which is from the Latin translation of the Greek translation of the Hebrew word which means something pounded out. It’s an onomatopoetic word, “raqiyeh”, similar to the English word “racket”. So unless in your alternative universe earth is covered by a solid vault of heave, Genesis bears no relationship whatsoever with observation.
Note also that dry land appears from the waters. God doesn’t create it. The division of the waters comes from the Sumerian original.
You: “THEN, the clouds, dust, plasmas and gasses above (that formed the stars and other planets) separated from the clouds, dust, plasmas and gasses that condensed together and formed the earth.”
How exactly do you square there being solids before the “plasmas and gasses” solidify to form them. As noted, the elements which form solids are made in stars. Now hydrogen can form ice at near absolute zero, but the early universe was very hot. It has been cooling for 13.7 billion years, while expanding.
You: “THEN, one land was formed and one ocean was formed. (Or one ocean was formed because one land was gathered together.”
Again, not at all how it actually happened on earth. During the Hadean, the molten surface cooled to form a crust. Then water was able to concentrate on the surface, being deposited by comets and possibly generated internally. As with all else, the Bible has it perfectly bass-ackward.
You: “THEN, plants grew in that ocean, and the skies cleared (as oxygen was released after the plants grew), and so the stars and moon were first visible through the atmosphere in today’s positions.”
This is hilarious! Nice try, though.
Explain please how plants are possible without the sun? The alleged plants appeared on Day Three, but the sun and moon not until Day Four. We now know of course that the sun formed before the earth and the moon after that.
On the actual earth, plants didn’t evolve until long after animals. The oxygen producing organisms were cyanobacteria, which lived in the sea, not as “grass” on the land. Life was tough on the land before there was free oxygen in the air to form ozone and protect the surface from ionizing UV radiation. There were stromatolites in shallow pools, however.
“11 And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so.
“12 And the earth brought forth grass, and herb yielding seed after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after his kind: and God saw that it was good.
“13 And the evening and the morning were the third day.
“14 And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years:
“15 And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth: and it was so.
“16 And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also.
“17 And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth,
“18 And to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness: and God saw that it was good.
“19 And the evening and the morning were the fourth day.”
You: THEN, dinosaurs grew (well, today’s birds evolved on land – but they were from dinosaurs. Or dinosaurs ARE today’s birds. There is much disagreement today.)
The Bible plainly says that flying creatures were brought forth from the waters. No way around that. All known flying creatures evolved on land, to include insects, pterosaurs, birds and bats. Flying fish don’t actually fly, but fish which leap out of the water and glide have evolved a number of times.
Dinosaurs, the ancestors of birds, also evolved on land. Their distant ancestors, and ours, of course did evolve in the water, but, as noted, flying creatures were not brought forth directly from the waters.
“20 And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven.
“21 And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that it was good.
“22 And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let fowl multiply in the earth.
“23 And the evening and the morning were the fifth day.
You: “THEN, mammals evolved.”
Genesis says not just mammals (“beasts”), but living creatures, to include insects, which evolved before birds and were the first flying creatures. So yet again, the Bible is as wrong as wrong can be.
“24 And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so.
“25 And God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind: and God saw that it was good.”
You: “THEN, Man evolved. Or was formed – depending on how you look at it.”
Both Genesis 1 and 2 agree that God made Man, but differ drastically in how He went about it. Among the many irreconcilable contradictions between the two myths in Genesis 1 and 2, the creation of humanity is one of the more stark discrepancies. In Chapter 2, He personally forms the first man from dirt, then He makes animals, then he makes the first woman, from the man’s rib.
“26 And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.
“27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.
“28 And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.
“29 And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat.
“30 And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for meat: and it was so.
“31 And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day.”
You: “Now. Am I quoting Genesis?”
No, you’re not at all. You’re quoting nothing. You’re just putting an imaginary gloss, totally unjustifiably, on the plain words of the text.
You: “Or Darwin, paleontology, geology, evolution, astronomy, chemistry, physics, and today’s Big Bang Theory?”
You’re trying to fit one of the two ancient myths in Genesis 1 and 2 into modern science as you imagine it, but, as I’ve pointed out, your effort has failed. There is no way to make the text of the myths jibe with observed reality.
Protestant, Orthodox and Catholic theologians have recognized over the centuries that such efforts are futile, and result both in bad science and false religion. They are doomed to failure because there is no way to tease reality out of the words of the ancient mythmakers.
“Whenever Evolution is raised here it is interesting to see the same tactics used to reject Creation as are used to reject (c)AGW….”
“The science was settled.” “The Consensus said a hundred years ago….”
As I said way up there, the terms need to be defined.
To observe a fossil of, say a “bear-dog”, is not the same as observing a bear-dog having a pup instead of a cub (or vice versa).
Man breeding dogs to produce a breed with the traits Man desired? Sure.
Nature and environmental pressures producing a different breed of dog that can survive in the wild? Sure. Call it Evolution if you want to.
Man or Nature producing a cat from a dog or a dog from a bear or a “blank from a blank”?
Never been observed.
The “molecules to Man” definition says something like that last MUST have happened nth number of times.
We have theories (hypothesis?) that support theories that support theories (etc) that say it MUST have happened because of…. and theories say it COULDN’T have happened because of…..
Maybe a topic that’s a candidate for a Red and Blue team?
John,
I recite nothing. I try to teach you reality, as observed. You, like a child believing in Santa Claus, aren’t interested in reality, just the falsehoods you’ve been taught by professional liars.
Do you now accept the reality that it’s easy for parts of the genetic code to change, causing innovations in biochemistry and molecular biology?
To return to the ancestry of dogs and cats, their protein-coding genes are well over 90% similar. At around four nonlethal mutations per generation, and an average of perhaps one generation a year for 50 million years of separate evolution, there has been far more opportunity than needed for their different adaptations to have evolved from the ancestral Eocene carnivore.
Among the many questions others and I have asked, which you’ve dodged, is how do you imagine new species arise, if not by evolution? Did all of them come into being at once, poofed into existence by God, or have they been continuously created over the four billion years of life on earth? Or do you still imagine that earth is only thousands of years old, too?
Gunga Din June 8, 2017 at 2:54 pm
I don’t know why this is hard for you to understand. Artificial selection involved in domesticating animals and plants is the same process as natural selection. There is no genetic barrier that keeps changes from accumulating until a new species has evolved, no longer able to produce fertile offspring with its ancestral and related species. Besides which, there are evolutionary processes much more rapid than gradual natural selection or stochastic processes like genetic drift.
It should be obvious that a dog in a single generation isn’t going to undergo a one fell swoop the millions of precise mutations, and only those, separating its genome from that of a cat. Dogs and cats have gone their separate ways phylogenetically for some 50 million years, accumulating genetic differences all along in both lineages. Do you really not see what a stupid suggestion that is?
What has been observed repeatedly is the evolution of new species from old ones. No one would expect a mammal to give birth to another living species from which it is distantly related. Decent with modification usually means small changes, although, as noted, whole genomes can be duplicated and often are, giving rise to a new species in a single generation.
There is no need for a Red and Blue Team because the fact of evolution is indeed settled science, just as is the fact that the earth goes around the sun. Details in the theories explaining planetary orbits and evolution aren’t settled, but what were once insights by Copernicus and Darwin are now known to be facts, ie observations of reality. Science is never settled, but some facts have become so since modern science began in 1543.
Gabro June 8, 2017 at 2:52 pm
No matter how ingeniously biblical apologists try to spin the Genesis stories and other myths elsewhere in the OT and NT, it’s impossible by any interpretation honestly to reconcile them with reality and each other.
Mammals evolved before birds, no matter how loosely you define either group. In fact mammals and dinosaurs evolved at about the same time, if you go by the mammalian jaw joint, which is the key skeletal trait. Late Triassic mammals or protomammals, like the iconic Morganucodon, had both the reptilian and mammalian joints, with the former already adapted to hearing, its rear jaw bones well on their way to becoming the middle ear characteristic of mammals.
Birds OTOH evolved from maniraptoran dinosaurs in the Late Jurassic or Early Cretaceous, again depending upon what groups you count as “birds”. But by the Jurassic, there were already indubitable mammals, by whatever definition. Indeed, the monotreme, marsupial and placental lineages had already diverged.
There was a “Jurassic Explosion” in mammal evolution. Our ancestors’ hyperevolution went into warp drive during the middle of the period.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/07/150716123846.htm
Then of course there was also the post-K/T event explosion in mammalian evolution, a better known adaptive radiation into niches left empty by the mass extinction that wiped out non-avian dinosaurs and so many other living things.
http://www.upi.com/Science_News/2016/07/05/Study-Mammals-diversified-in-wake-of-dinosaur-extinction-not-before/7271467739985/?st_rec=2081468435216
But in between these two explosions in mammalian evolution, birds evolved, however defined. By the end of the Cretaceous, the ancestors of modern birds already existed, obviously, since they survived the mass extinction event.
Speaking of evolutionary explosions after MEEs, the second biggest of the Phanerozoic Eon, after the famous Cambrian, was the Triassic Explosion, which followed the worst MEE of the eon, the end Permian “Great Dying”. It led not only to mammals, lizards, turtles, ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs and dinosaurs, but to the latter’s archosaurian kin, ie crododilians and pterosaurs.
The MEE which preceded the Cambrian Explosion was of the strange Ediacaran biots, last of the Precambrian Supereon. Most of its animals went extinct when the basis of their food chain, cyanobacterial slime mats on the seafloor, was consumed. That produced a catastrophe almost as horrific as the Great Oxidation Event.
Since evolution of the Order Carnivora arose here in the absurd context of a bitch having kittens instead of puppies, here’s a summary of the mutational history of cats, hyenas, etc on the one hand and bears, dogs, weasel kin, seals, etc on the other:
I would have a hard time using “observation” & “fact” interchangeably, without being sure that the observer is cognizant of the distinction for fear of creating confusion.
And wrt to Huxley, an apt quote
” The antagonism between science and religion … appears to me to be purely factitious — fabricated, on the one hand, by short-sighted religious people who confound a certain branch of science, theology, with religion; and, on the other, by equally short-sighted scientific people who forget that science takes for its province only that which is susceptible of clear intellectual comprehension; and that, outside the boundaries of that province, they must be content with imagination, with hope, and with ignorance.
Don,
Precisely why it’s not superfluous to say “scientific fact” to mean a proper scientific observation. Evolution has been repeatedly observed under the strictest possible, controlled, rigorous scientific conditions. Hence, it is a scientific fact.
T. H. Huxley lived in Victorian Britain, so couldn’t come out as a fire-breathing. militant atheist, even if he were one (which I suspect). Among his many great accomplishments, which include being arguably the first to recognize that birds are reptiles, indeed dinosaurs, was providing the modern definition of “agnostic”:
“Agnosticism, in fact, is not a creed, but a method, the essence of which lies in the rigorous application of a single principle… the fundamental axiom of modern science… In matters of the intellect, follow your reason as far as it will take you, without regard to any other consideration… In matters of the intellect, do not pretend that conclusions are certain which are not demonstrated or demonstrable.”
The principle that science is naturalistic, rejecting all supernatural “explanations” for observed phenomena, had not been so overtly stated previously. At least not that I’ve found. But I’d welcome earlier instances.
Chimp,
So, from the chart, a “Trash Panda” is fairly closely related to a Red Panda…. Makes the joke in the movie that much better.
Don,
Please see my misplaced reply here:
Chimp June 8, 2017 at 6:36 pm
Sorry!
One of Huxely’s lesser known scientific observations:
“It may be quite true that some negroes are better than some white men; but no rational man, cognisant of the facts, believes that the average negro is the equal, still less the superior, of the average white man. And, if this be true, it is simply incredible that, when all his disabilities are removed, and our prognathous relative has a fair field and no favour, as well as no oppressor, he will be able to compete successfully with his bigger-brained and smaller-jawed rival, in a contest which is to be carried on by thoughts and not by bites. The highest places in the hierarchy of civilisation will assuredly not be within the reach of our dusky cousins, though it is by no means necessary that they should be restricted to the lowest.”
Of course he was using to argue for emancipation, but still, as far as scientific observations (or facts) go, this one has fallen by the wayside.
DonM,
By the standards of their time, Huxley was a liberal and Darwin a superliberal. Recall that at that time Europeans were hunting Australian Aborigines as wild game weed species to be eradicated and Hottentots were being exhibited as missing links between African apes and humans.
Africans hadn’t been given the opportunity to show of what they were capable, so it’s not surprising that even liberal men of good will presumed that their capacities, on average, were significantly less than Europeans.
Huxley was far in advance of many eugenics advocates of the early 20th century. Not to excuse his faults and those of others of his generation, but please put their opinions in chronological context.
It is beyond a shame that Darwin has been tarred with the brush of social darwinist theorists, when in fact few if any Europeans of his generation were so convinced of and committed to the belief that “lesser breeds without the law” were fully human.
PS: Lincoln’s views were similar to Huxley’s. He believed that Negroes couldn’t reach the same heights of intellectual prowess as Whites, but felt that they should not be kept from advancing as far as their talents could take them. At first he wanted to deport them “back” to Africa, but was forced by war to accept them as fellow citizens.
Willis Eschenbach Do you really thins Mosher would agree to that since Steve is not stupid and knows so called “Human induced Climate change” is not falsifiable. If Steve does no understand this he not as smart as he gives himself credit for.
Gabro says “Precisely why it’s not superfluous to say “scientific fact” to mean a proper scientific observation. Evolution has been repeatedly observed under the strictest possible, controlled, rigorous scientific conditions. Hence, it is a scientific fact.” Gabro you are incorrect, the ability of DNA to adapt has been observers many time. The real question is how DNA evolved, I have never found a scientific observation to explain that on, you are looking at the finish product “DNA” I want to know how on this earth DNA evolved, at this point and time it simply showed up and no one knows how or why. The don’t even have a good guess, answer that one and you will get a Nobel prize. Yet I have no problem with the earth being billion of years old in about twice the time the earth as existed it will be vaporized by the sun. I am not willing to rule out any answer how DNA show up, and I understand that having a “creator” has it own set of problems. like where did the creator come from, that a big one, of course the creationism tell us not to question that. So basicly the evolution question is what came first the chicken of the egg another question we cannot answer.
Gabro,
You help to make one of my points.
Cultural/personal norms bias observations and thought. And obviously a lack of information can result in conclusions that are wrong. Changing cultural/personal norms and additional information can result in different observational conclusions.
“Scientific facts” can change. Facts don’t change. Saying: “By the standards of their times … their observational conclusions were solid” would be an honest statement. Sometimes people are right and some they are wrong (although some can’t bear to admit it).
Some would say that, by the standards of OUR times, we need to get on board with the rest of the world and work on “Climate Change” (of course, they don’t take the time to define terminology precisely … maybe purposely? … because the main point is to argue rather than understand).
Mark Luhman June 8, 2017 at 11:14 pm
You clearly haven’t look very hard to discover how DNA evolved. It evolved from RNA, which is still used as the genetic information molecule in some viruses and is essential in the replication and protein synthesis processes.
The only difference between DNA and RNA is that the sugar portion of the former lacks one oxygen molecule. This enables it to form a double helix and makes it a more stable genetic information storage molecule. Pairs of RNA molecules forms straight strands.
The steps in the replacement by DNA of RNA as the information molecule, and the evolution of the DNA-RNA-protein synthesis process have been elucidated and various hypotheses tested.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK6360/
We do know approximately when and how DNA appeared. We have more than good guesses. Most of the process is known in detail. Your comments to the contrary indicate that you haven’t bothered to study this topic before presuming to comment upon it.
Perhaps what you have trouble with is not the origin of DNA but of RNA. This is an active area of research. The short answer is that it self-assembles from its constituent compounds, which abound in the universe, spontaneously under a variety of conditions, but only in oligomers of a few monomers, not the long strands (polymers) required for genetic storage. It also has the remarkable ability to act as an enzyme, ie an organic compound catalyst.
The remaining issue in origin of life research is getting RNA to stay together in long enough strands for information storage and enzymatic activity, without the protein enzymes which catalyze the synthesis reaction today. A lot of exiting answers are being discovered in labs around the world.
DonM June 9, 2017 at 9:23 am
I don’t see that saying “scientific fact” rather than “fact” has much bearing on Huxley’s social opinions. As I said, he had never rigorously scientifically investigated the issue of “Negro” mental or physical abilities. Hence his opinion wasn’t a scientific fact at all, just an opinion based upon casual observation of a society in which sub-Saharan Africans weren’t permitted to show their full capabilities.
Mark,
Yet again a long, detailed response by me has gone missing.
The short version is that we do indeed roughly know when and how DNA evolved from RNA:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK6360/
Short chains of RNA self-assemble from abundant chemical constituents spontaneously under a variety of conditions, and it is capable of acting both as a storehouse of genetic information and as an enzyme, ie a catalyst.
Don,
Huxley’s “racial” opinions weren’t scientific facts. They were just opinions, since he had never studied the issue African capabilities scientifically.
PS:
The Harvard team working on origin of life research is headed by a Nobel Prize winner, Jack Szostak. If his lab is the first to create a replicating protocell, he will indeed likely win a second Nobel. His group has already experimentally solved the problem of the origin of the cell membrane. They’re now working on getting RNA to replicate itself without any catalyst other than itself, with a non-protein catalyst or with a simple peptide catalyst, ie an amino acid chain shorter than a protein, which is a polymer called a polypeptide.
The Szostak lab has a good working hypothesis for the origin of life and are testing its components. Theirs involves the surface of the earth rather than the deep sea vents favored by some other origin of life research teams.
The origin of life is a different process from the origin of species. Biological evolution is about the development of living things after life got started via chemical evolution. Once the first protocell existed, biological evolutionary processes came into play, such as natural selection, leading to prokaryotes with modern-style membranes, using DNA in their genomes and messenger, transfer and ribosomal RNA to build proteins. Ribosomal RNA is itself basically transfer RNA.
RNA molecules also functions as enzymes, called ribozymes, capable of catalyzing specific biochemical reactions, similar to the action of protein enzymes. An important advance in OoL research was the discovery that the ribosome, site of protein synthesis in cells, is in fact a ribozyme.
Harvard creationists, in the literal sense. And they are almost there….
Don,
Jack’s lab is getting close, but they have competitors, whose contributions they welcome and celebrate. The Sutherland lab in Britain has made great contributions, but not quite in the same field in which Jack is working.
Szostak has some older and more recent presentations on Youtube, and has written good summaries of the outstanding remaining issues. Basically, it comes down to keeping RNA; phosphate group backbone together in long polymers. Another engineering problem is separating strands after copying, but Jack has hit on a wonderful possible solution to that issue, by substituting another nucleobase for one of the four in standard RNA (the base is still used in a restricted application in modern RNA). Previously, it was thought that water temperature changes could do the job in the absence of an enzyme, which is still also possible. A hydrothermal vent environment would seem ideal in that case.
There is progress on all fronts. But other researchers still favor a metabolism-first approach over the more popular and IMO plausible RNA-first avenue. A version of the Krebs cycle does however occur in nature independently of biochemistry.
DonM June 9, 2017 at 1:53 pm
Re. Harvard’s Nobel laureate geneticist and “literal creationist”, a talk from last month:
Much origin of life research is funded by the Simons Foundation, set up in 1994 by the “smartest billionaire”, quant Jim Simons, formerly of private hedge fund Renaissance Technologies, and his second wife.
… and may he be rewarded by living to the ripe old age of 167.
DonM,
He’s already almost half way there, aged about 79.
Unfortunately, he’s also a big Democrat Party donor, like so many Wall Street denizens. He’s worth around $18 billion, as wealth is estimated.
He suffered two tragedies. One son was killed by a car while biking on Long Island in the 1990s, then another drowned while on vacation in Bali from his work in Nepal. One son survives, in the investment industry.
I utterly reject the entire idea that anyone (commenting here ; ) can do more than believe things like “The Earth is 4.5 Billion years old” or “Birds evolved from dinosaurs”, or many other things that people just casually assert as flat statements of fact here.
No one observed any such things. Grow up, little kids, and stop treating what you can see inside your head as if actual observations, I suggest . .
>>
Chimp
June 9, 2017 at 2:51 pm
<<
The talk isn’t particularly impressive. I thought abiogenesis would be further along than it is.
It’s interesting that the genetic code is universal on this planet (with only minor exceptions). Considering that it’s completely random (i.e., the assignment of codens to amino acids, etc.), that means it was probably only created once. I wonder if there are planets with more than one planet-wide genetic code–assuming there are other planets with DNA based life.
Jim
JohnKnight June 10, 2017 at 4:50 pm
It’s astonishing that you are so utte