Ken Ham says something stupid and dishonest again.
The fish that forgot to evolve? Here’s the difference between observational and historical science: https://t.co/gDBi6iQhjh
— Ken Ham (@aigkenham) November 6, 2015
The fish that forgot to evolve? Here’s the difference between observational and historical science: ow.ly/Ug1wU
If you bother to read the awful article, it includes a standard creationist canard: Coelacanths haven’t changed a bit over their long history, and this disproves evolution.
Well, this fish apparently forgot to evolve for 65 million years! You see, the living coelacanth is easily recognizable from the fossils. Despite having supposedly “primitive” features, many of these features not seen in any living vertebrates, this fish has survived basically unchanged for an alleged 70 million years.1 How is this possible?
Well, it’s a matter of interpretation. You see the fossil of the coelacanth is studied in the present—we observe it today. But what happened to make it a fossil is in the past—it’s historical science because we can’t directly test, observe, or repeat the past. So what you believe about the past is going to influence your interpretation of the evidence. In the case of the coelacanth, evolutionists have the presupposition that the fossil record shows Earth’s history over millions of years. So when they find this fossil that doesn’t have a living match today, they interpreted that fossil to have gone extinct millions of years ago. Now, the fossil itself didn’t tell them that. Their interpretation of that fossil through their evolutionary worldview drew that conclusion. And that conclusion turned out to be very wrong. Coelacanths were happily swimming deep in the ocean all along and were even being sold in fish markets, unbeknownst to scientists.
It’s wrong in a couple of ways. Stasis is also part of evolution, and natural selection typically acts conservatively, to cull variants from a successful norm. The basic coelacanth body plan hasn’t changed much, but then, coelacanths haven’t been particularly successful, either, and are now reduced to just two extant species.
When we find a fossil, we determine its age by its provenance, not by whether it looks like something that’s alive today. The reason coelacanth fossils were dated at 70 million years (or much older — they’ve been around for hundreds of millions of years) has nothing at all to do with comparing them to extant species, and then deciding that because we can’t find a modern example, it must have died a long time ago. That’s simply a lie by Ham. Those other species of coelacanth did go extinct millions of years ago.
And that’s the other problem with Ham’s half-assed analysis. There has been change within coelacanths.
Coelacanths are an order within the class Sarcopterygii, just like primates are an order within the class Mammalia. It was thought that the whole order went extinct at the end of the Cretaceous, and the discovery of Latimeria told us that one species of a large group had survived. If we humans manage to exterminate all gorillas, orangutans, chimpanzees, and gibbons, and then our lineage manages to survive for a long time afterwards, we’d be able to say that that unsuccessful clade of primates went extinct, except for one holdout. That does not, of course, imply that humans never evolved, or that all primates were the same.
As for his utterly bogus misuse of the distinction between historical and observational science, he’s got that all wrong. The death and relative stasis of a few remnant species was determined by observation of the evidence…evidence that dishonest frauds like everyone at Answers in Genesis ignore. Get into the literature, and you’ll discover lots of careful examination of the evidence to determine the evolutionary history of this order. Here’s an example: Earliest known coelacanth skull extends the range of anatomically modern coelacanths to the Early Devonian.
Coelacanths are known for their evolutionary conservatism, and the body plan seen in Latimeria can be traced to late Middle Devonian Diplocercides, Holopterygius and presumably Euporosteus. However, the group’s early history is unclear because of an incomplete fossil record. Until now, the only Early Devonian coelacanth is an isolated dentary (Eoactinistia) from Australia, whose position within the coelacanths is unknown. Here we report the earliest known coelacanth skull (Euporosteus yunnanensis sp. nov.) from the Early Devonian (late Pragian) of Yunnan, China. Resolved by maximum parsimony, maximum likelihood and Bayesian analyses as crownward of Diplocercides or as its sister taxon, the new form extends the chronological range of anatomically modern coelacanths by about 17 Myr. The finding lends support to the possibility that Eoactinistia is also an anatomically modern coelacanth, and provides a more refined reference point for studying the rapid early diversification and subsequent evolutionary conservatism of the coelacanths.
Note that when a scientist is talking about a conserved body plan, they are not claiming that there has been no evolutionary change. Rather, that a successful general form persists for a long time, but may contain many different species, each unique in its own way. After all, people and chimps are all the same in this broad sense of their shape and structure, but I think we’d all agree there are also significant (to us) differences.
But the observational science of paleontology is telling us that there are diverse species of coelacanths that radiated rapidly and then exhibited a notable degree of retained similarities. The paper digs deeper into the variety of coelacanths, and just the fact that they are making a distinction between anatomically modern coelacanths and primitive coelacanths should tell you right away that not all coelacanths are the same.
And even within the anatomically modern coelacanths, they describe distinct differences between species.
The body plan of anatomically modern coelacanths in comparison to that of primitive coelacanths and non-coelacanth sarcopterygians. (a) Parietonasal or parietal shields from selected sarcopterygians showing different proportions of preorbital, orbital and postorbital regions. Elongated preorbital portion (purple) and orbital portion (green) represent a derived feature characterizing Euporosteus and other anatomically modern coelacanths. Miguashaia resembles primitive sarcopterygians such as Psarolepis and Styloichthys in having elongated postorbital portion (red). Parietonasal or parietal shields drawn to comparable anteroposterior length and are not to scale. (b–e) Differences in caudal fin between anatomically modern coelacanths and primitive coelacanths. Miguashaia (b) resembles primitive rhipidistians such as Glyptolepis and Osteolepis in having a heterocercal tail. Diplocercides (c), Coelacanthus (d) and Latimeria (e) have a diphycercal or trilobed tail with symmetrically developed dorsal and ventral lobes. Illustrations not to scale. Cd, dorsal lobe of caudal fin; Cv, ventral lobe of caudal fin; Ra, endoskeletal radial. Scale bar, (c) 1 cm.
Here’s the thing, too: to pursue their bizarrely blinkered version of observational science
, the know-nothings at AiG have to throw away a tremendous amount of evidence. The dates and species in this chart are not imaginary, but all backed up by lots of data, data that contradicts everything AiG believes in.
Primitive coelacanths are in light blue and the anatomically modern coelacanths including extant Latimeria are in red. Euporosteus is positioned either crownward of Diplocercides or as its sister taxon, indicating that the distinctive body plan of anatomically modern coelacanths must have been established no later than 409 million years ago (Ma). Euporosteus also lends support to the possibility that Eoactinistia may represent an early member of the anatomically modern coelacanths with the dentary sensory pore. Eif, Eifelian; Giv, Givetian; Loc, Lochkovian; Pr, Pragian.
What’s the difference between observational and historical science, as presented by Ken Ham? Observational science is the stuff that they can accommodate in their narrow, twisty interpretations of the Bible; historical science is all that data and evidence and science that shows that their holy book is bullshit.
The other thing that completely distorts their thinking is that they believe the “purpose” of evolution was to get us where we are today – ie with human beings in their present form as a successful species. They can’t get their head round the fact that there is no predestined “purpose” to evolution, and the here and now is just one of many previous and future states of the planet and the biosphere, because that ruins their misguided sense of self importance . Hence the (wrong) notion that the coelocanth didn’t evolve proves that evolutionary way of “getting to here” must be wrong.
Yep, beings just decide whether or not they are going to evolve. :eyeroll:
Once again, people who don’t know a fucking thing about biology, drawing absolutely flawed conclussions about it and arrogantly declaring that their ignorance makes them right.
Hey, most salamanders and most lizards have the same body plan, that means they must be identical and that no significant differences could possibly exist betwen these groups because the same body plan implies the same everything, at every level, clearly…..right?
Mind you, i know a lot of people who think salamanders ARE lizards…but at least these people, though ignorant, are not asserting they know better than biologists…
Always found it peculiar how fundies like Ham rail against post modernism for evils such as moral relativism yet are happy taking a leaf from the post modernist playbook if it helps them deny evidence they don’t like. You could show them all the multitudes of data and lines of evidence that show that although morphologically conservative throughout their evolutionary history, coelacanths alive today are not identical to coelacanths of the Devonian and rather than admit their error or even reconsider their opinion on this subject, the creationist can just go Just say you have a different way of interpreting the evidence and yours is just as valid and your worldview is nice and safe from that mean ol´reality. Very infuriating tactic.
Ahem, cough, cough. I was under the misapprehension that doctors had to learn biology:
http://bit.ly/1QjqKGl
Found at Little Green Footballs, URL shortened. I did listen. He did say that, and implies that he said it to Dawkins in a debate. I dont know if the whole debate is online.
The mildly deranged penguin used to sell an Evolving Evolution’s Evolution Kit™ for adjusting the various knobs, levers, buttons, and big cranky wheels that control evolution. It didn’t sell, perhaps because results require a timeframe measured in inconveniently large units, perhaps because it didn’t change the buyer at all, but mostly do the the name: EEEK! (She also made the Frakenpedal too easy to push, so most of the time the body strapped to the table just blew up.)
Getting worked up over creationists being dishonest is like getting angry at a dog for licking it’s balls. It’s what they do.
I think one should always point out, whenever Ham or one of his cohort hold up a fossil to bolster their Young Earth Creationist case, that they haven’t the faintest clue how fossils are made. From ScienceViews
That has to take more than 6000 years.
FTFA:
In other words, George Washington and the other Founders did not exist.
Also, the South never lost the Civil War, which never took place.
America was never a colony of the UK.
Thank god for Ken Hammmmm
The historical vs. observational science thing has to be the most ignorant, idiotic thing I’ve ever heard. For one, it uses the bogus “if I can’t see it it’s not real” rhetoric that completely ignores how most scientific evidence is indirect and inferential. Just because you can’t watch something happening right in front of you doesn’t mean that it doesn’t happen.
The second problem is that the “historical vs observational” argument is built on flat-out denial of a basic, foundational idea in epistemology that even most children can understand; that physical processes and events alter the world around them in distinct, detectable ways. Allow me to spell it out; If you know of a particular physical process or event that alters the world around it detectably, and you later observe an object that has properties known to be produced by said alteration, then it is reasonable to conclude that the physical process in question acted on the object in question. If you see that parts of a tree that are carbonized, then you know that it was on fire at one point. If you see footprints on a floor, then you know that someone walked through the room. If you see a rock that shows traits produced by water erosion, then you know that it came into contact with water at some point.
This has practical value in everyday life as well, unless Ham is willing to give up entirely on detectives and crime scene investigators. Forensic technology might not be perfect, but it’s still far more reliable than witness testimony.
All of the fields of science that Ham wants to throw out rely on the above concept, and use observable evidence to piece together how events in the past played out. While it’s (sometimes) true that evidence can be ambiguous and allow for several different interpretations, scientists don’t resolve these by just choosing one on faith. They do more research and look for further evidence that can rule certain interpretations out until they’re left with the most likely answer.
Ham’s “science” is a farce. It consists of blindly asserting that he’s right, and then cherry picking evidence that supports him while simply ignoring or rejecting outright any evidence that doesn’t fit with what he wants to be true.
petesh @ 5:
Really? He did the “I didn’t come from no monkey!” line? I don’t get why they find being the inbred descendants of a man made of mud and his female clone more appealing than being descended from apes. The fact that he thinks people are stupid for not blindly believing in the former says more negative things about him than it does about the people who disagree with him.
I like the creationist reaction to coelacanths. The discovery of living specimens happened so recently that they don’t have a traditional explanation for it – Ken Ham is on his own.
First, the coelecanths found were strong evidence that scientists have been doing a good job of reconstructing fossils. The creationists can no longer say that scientists just dig up some rocks and interpret them into imaginary animals. They are now saying that the reconstructions are exactly like living animals.
Second, when the scientists were confronted with living fish that supposedly screwed up their entire view of the past, they did not attempt to cover it up or to hide the fish. The first coelacanth was trumpeted around the world. Creationists keep saying that when scientists discovered Noah’s ark, they set fire to it.
Third, the fish were never required to be extinct. There was no reason to think they weren’t, but nothing depended on it. I wrote a rant based on two interpretations of a sentence in a creationist book. It contained the phrase “coelacanths were supposed to be extinct”. The scientist’s meaning of it was a shrugging, “I suppose so, I have no evidence”, while the creationist interpretation was a vampire-hunter’s scream of “you are supposed to be dead, and I will hunt you down with fire.”
So much time wasted refuting Ken Ham’s creationist bullshit.
Frustrating. Think of all the good stuff that could be done with that time.
On the time spent refuting, besides seeming-like a hamster running madly in its wheel, it also results in numerous bruised foreheads and broken desks. Lots of training for the medical interns, material for the recycling centre, and exercise, but insufficient cheese. And a very sore head.
@ Lou #8: “they haven’t the faintest clue how fossils are made”
No kiddin’ there, Einstein ;-) If they knew the first thing about science we wouldn’t have this discussion.
@7 Erlend Meyer
-Taking the time to tell other people they are wrong to care about issue “x”. Check
-Gratuitous dehumanization of the opposition. Check
-Feeling of superiority over everybody else. Check
It’s what arseholes do…
I highly recommend the book by Samantha Weinberg A Fish Caught in Time, which tells the dramatic and odd story of the discovery in 1939 of the living coelacaths. It covers their subsequent study and some of their biology, and the discovery of a second species in Indonesia much more recently.
Interestingly, as noted in Weinberg’s book, there is a silver model of a coelacanth that was found in a Spanish cathedral. It seems not to show Latimeria, but has morphological similarities to a different group of fossil species. So there is quite possibly a second genus of modern coelacanth out there, perhaps in the Americas.
That’s not to say there isn’t just a bit of jelousy there. If men had that ability, they’d never leave the house.
So, I assume the Hamster was there when Joseph built the pyramids to store all that grain? And he personally inspected Mary’s hymen before she was raped by the holy spook?
.
Whoever wrote the bible thought the earth was flat. Many think the bible is the inerrantwordagod. So either their god is an idiot, or the earth really IS flat, and an illusion to test our faith?
Look, I was going to get around to that whole evolving thing at some point, but I’ve been a bit busy with the whole not going extinct thing. Sheesh, rush, rush, rush, it’s almost like you primates know you’re running out of time or something….
@ Dreaming of an Atheistic Newtopia #16:
My intention was not do dehumanize the opposition, but I accept that intentions and results aren’t always the same. My bad. And I’m certainly not against PZ exposing creationists and their abuse of science. Heck, that’s part of the reason for visiting. But it does feel a bit pointless at times, don’t you think? It’s the same shtick over and over again, ignorance, cherry-picking, dishonesty and flat out lies. How will telling the truth to someone hell-bent on ignoring it ever have any effect?
It just gets depressing at times…
Well, on the upside I learned something new today about coelacaths.
emergence @11: Yes, he did. I find that even more disturbing than his self-aggrandizing stories about his adolescence or his unoriginal biblical interpretation, because dammit Carson must have had basic biology — it’s a prerequisite, right? Francis Collins is a Christian, but I cannot imagine him saying anything so stupid, and I imagine there are many doctors who remain Christian without mangling the relationships among the primates. Carson is delusional or lying or both and I no longer care which. Off the island with him!
Nope, not saying something is the equivalent of accepting it to a lot of people, especially those on the fence. They need to know Hammikins if full of bullshit EVERY time he opens his mouth.
You’re probably right, Nerd. I just get so frustrated with the fact that we need to do this shit in a time where everybody has virtually unlimited access to good knowledge. But you’re right, one has to consider those on the fence, those with lingering doubts. If this thread has managed to convince even one of those to pick up a proper text book on any scientific topic it’s a win.
ajbjasus @1, people thinking evolution leads to something or has a purpose, which is to create us and our future, even better successors, is pretty common across the spectrum of beliefs about evolution. I blame that classic monkey turns into man sequence picture, which is actually called The March of Progress, that we’ve all seen innumerable variations on. It first appeared in 1965 in Time-Life Books Early Man volume of their Life-Nature Library. It wasn’t intended to show a linear progression from the earliest creature show to modern humans, but it’s been commonly interpreted that way.
there is more about that evolution has a purpose or is a progression forward. It takes for granted that we are that purpose . we are the great end result. If we take it as given that all that has gone before is true and it is a progression toward some great pinnacle there is no reason to expect that we are anything more than but one step along that path and a rather short one at that.
of course it has no discernible purpose nor direction.
creationists are so obstinately ignorant and pushy about it.
uncle frogy
It seems to be a very natural instinct to assume a purpose or intention behind events, suppressing the “why” in favor of the more open “how” is where many fail.
I know it seems pointless sometimes, but it is necessary. It has taken a long time, many arguments, and lots of information I learned from posts like this one, but one of my best friends, who grew up in the same fundie hellhole as me, has finally come to see the truth of evolution and given up on being a YEC. Now just gotta get him questioning the rest of the bible…
Baby steps, but its still progress.
Good for him.
petesh @ 22:
You know, if Carson thinks that people who think they’re descended from apes are acting like it, then what does that say about someone who believes that they’re descended from a pile of clay? At least apes are fairly intelligent as non-humans go.
While I hate (yes, I said it) Carson, I have to defend this single line of his:
@31: [arrgg] html fail. lost the closing /q tag. obvious where it should have been.
I did a project on coelacanths in my first year as an undergrad. As part of my research I went looking for fossils of ancient coelacanths to compare them to the modern genus. The silhouette of modern coelacanths is extremely familiar to me, and when I saw those fossils it was immediately obvious that I was looking at not simply different species, but completely different families. Nothing like Latimeria was represented.