I asked you both to back up the claims you made and/or cited in the thread above. See comment #21 and #25. Any response. I was hoping you just wouldn’t walk away from this one. Thanks

So can we please return to the far more interesting topics of Behe, intelligent design?

Sal’s ideas about marsupials and mammals indicate that he is not really familiar with how evolutionary science explains these convergences as he claims that convergence

Natural selection absolutely fails as an explanation for these similarities.

As they say in the business, garbage in, garbage out. Anyone familiar with the evolutionary argument would realize that selection is argued to play a major role, but so do constraints.

Excellent papers exist that explain these topics. Why is it that so many ID proponents seem to be so unfamiliar with the (recent) work of science in these areas?

And while we are talking about work, how does ID explain convergence?

Poof?…

Really, the scientific vacuity of ID should be self evident every time claims of scientific relevance are made since support for these claims seems to be quite… lacking imho of course.

Could you please refute the following instances of speciation which I have copied from the Talk.Origins website:

Example 1-Formation of five new species of cichlid fishes which formed since they were isolated less than 4000 years ago from the parent stock, Lake Nagubago. The citation is: Mayr, E., 1970. Populations, Species, and Evolution, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press. p. 348

Example 2- Evidence that a species of fireweed formed by doubling of the chromosome count, from the original stock. The citation is: Mosquin, T., 1967. “Evidence for autopolyploidy in Epilobium angustifolium (Onaagraceae)”, Evolution 21:713-719

Example 3- A naturally occurring speciation of a plant species, Stephanomeria malheurensis, was observed in Burns County, Oregon. The citation is: Gottlieb, L. D. 1973. Genetic differentiation, sympatric speciation, and the origin of a diploid species of Stephanomeria. American Journal of Botany 60(6):545-553

Once you have refuted these three examples of speciation, please refer to the Talk.Origins website under the keywords of “examples of speciation.” There you will find hundreds of other examples of speciation to refute.

Next, you said, “Like ontogeny, phylogeny has also resulted driven entirely by the controled release of endogenous, front-loaded information introduced by an unknown number of programmers an unknown number of times at an unknown number of places and times in the geologic column.” You state this claim as a fact. You must provide evidence for such a claim or else it is meaningless. As of yet you have provided none.

Now, refute the above three examples, or please withdraw the claim that new new species have appeared in historical times. Thank you for you good faith effort.

Furthermorem, evolution is finished and has been for at least two million years at the genus level and no new species have appeared in historical times.

“Any system that purports to account for evolution must invoke a mechanism not aleatory and mutational.”
Pierre Grasse, Evolution of Living Organisms. page 245, (the entire sentence in italics)

A past evolution is undeniable, a present evolution undemonstrable.”
John A. Davison

“All great truths begin as blasphemies.”
George Bernard Shaw

I don’t want to derail Allen’s thread, so interested readers who wish to hear more are invited to:

Marsupials and Placentals: a case of front-loaded, pre-programmed, designed evolution?

If we even partially succeed in triggering these software modules on the way to getting a placental to become a marsupial or a marsupial become a placental, we have evidence of front loaded evolution.

“Marsupials are mammals in which the female typically has a pouch (called the marsupium, from which the name ‘Marsupial’ derives) in which it rears its young through early infancy. They differ from placental mammals (Placentalia) in their reproductive traits. The female has two vaginas, both of which open externally through one orifice but lead to different compartments within the uterus. Males usually have a two-pronged penis which corresponds to the females’ two vaginas.”

If I’m to understand this “case of front-loaded, pre-programmed, designed evolution” correctly, not only would we be able to make bobcats with two-pronged penises and a taste for kangaroos, we’d be able to turn any marsupial into other marsupial. We could turn a flying phalanger into a Tasmanian wolf, right?

I am interested in how you can support this claim. Thank you.

Yes it mentions ID, but does it prove anything? What data was gathered to put ID beyond mere conjecture and into the realm of science? Does the author gather data from observations, form a hypothesis, and makes predictions that can be tested by future researchers?

The answer . . . no.