CharlieM wrote:snip...
You obviously don't understand what an archetype is. An "archetypal specimen" is an oxymoron. The archetype encompasses all the attributes of any physical specimen throughout all their stages of development, it is not something that can be dug up.

Rumraket wrote:What use is the term then, and how can it qualify as science?

Thank you very much Rumraket!

This was where I was hoping to lead CharlieM. He previously referred to a thing he called an archetype in a manner that lead me to believe there was such a beast, and from what I can see this term is not something we can now connect with a real physicality. This is the supposed ideal creature that held all the physical features to follow. The trouble is that the earliest archosaurs gave rise to a branch of creatures that eventually developed feathers and flew. These feathered wonders were not present in the fossil record when these most basal archosaurs were extant. If anything is an archetype it is those most basal archosaurs that gave rise to all the crocodilians, and all the pterosaurs and all the dinosaurs which includes all the birds.

Horwood Beer-Master posting the best question to date in this thread. I might find the time to address it this weekend, but suffice it to say the most basal archosaurs give us a hint why there is a well documented evolutionary pathway and that pathway is eventually expressed, as a preserved set of traits, in birds.

We could go over this for months at this rate and be no further along than we were at page 1. I suppose that would be a good thing for the exposure to real science involved here, but it's getting tedious already.

Until the conciliate evidence already presented is refuted with something more than I've seen so far I'm not too worried about the philosophical day tripping I've seen lately.

RS

Rumraket wrote:

You haven't presented a single scientifically credible piece of evidence for the assertion that evolution is guided, at all. The presence of beta keratin is an argument for an evolutionary precursor to the later feathers adapted for flight.

Yes and the presence of brain matter in a developing human embryo which is not being used for rational thought but will be used at some point in the future, does not mean that it wasn't pre-programmed for this use.

I have presented evidence that evolution is directed towards emancipation from earthly forces which in popular terms is called Mother Nature. This involves the move towards bipedalism, towards internal self regulation of temperature in the organism, towards consciousness and then on to self-consciousness.

Rumraket wrote:

CharlieM wrote:Do you have any hard evidence that protofeathers lead to flight feathers via a Darwinian process?

What's a Darwinian process? Are you talking about selection? It doesn't have to have arrived through selection for it to have evolved in an 'unguided' fashion.

Any process where a feature or attribute fortuitously turns up and is then carried on in the line without any consideration for the future I would call a Darwinian process. And I'm still waiting for evidence that the protofeathers that have been discovered are what lead to flight feathers.

Rumraket wrote:
The question at hand is: how did feathers and flight evolve?
A lack of a 'darwinian process' (whatever you mean by this) doesn't magically prove that design took place, neither that 'guidance' is true.

And just being able to figure out that there are steps involved in the transition from flightless animals to flying animals doesn't mean that these steps were unguided.

Rumraket wrote:

CharlieM wrote: to Theropod:
You obviously don't understand what an archetype is. An "archetypal specimen" is an oxymoron. The archetype encompasses all the attributes of any physical specimen throughout all their stages of development, it is not something that can be dug up.

What use is the term then, and how can it qualify as science?

Electrons, protons and neutrons cannot be dug up, they cannot be observed directly, we only know them through their effects. Does this mean that these terms do not qualify as science?

CharlieM wrote:

Rumraket wrote:

You haven't presented a single scientifically credible piece of evidence for the assertion that evolution is guided, at all. The presence of beta keratin is an argument for an evolutionary precursor to the later feathers adapted for flight.

Yes and the presence of brain matter in a developing human embryo which is not being used for rational thought but will be used at some point in the future, does not mean that it wasn't pre-programmed for this use.

Neither does it's presence mean it was. What is worth noticing here is that the idea of 'guidance' isn't a requirement for evolution to be possible, and therefore requires positive evidence instead of the mere existence of phenomena that could have been guided.

In science we work with a principle of the least amount of assumptions. We tend to prefer a simpler explanation that explains our observations. The existence of natural physical laws that work on their own is the minimum amount of assumptions we need to explain the observations of past and present evolutionary transitions. To argue that 'guidance' or 'intelligent design' of some sort is taking place, is to make an additional assumption we don't need in order to explain the phenomena. If the goal is to explain the phenomena, the design assertion is superflous to requirements and irrelevant. If you additionally wish to argue that despite this, the design assertion is true, you have to present evidence for this, which is distinguishable from phenomena we can explain without recourse to a designer. You haven't come close yet.

I have presented evidence that evolution is directed towards emancipation from earthly forces which in popular terms is called Mother Nature. This involves the move towards bipedalism, towards internal self regulation of temperature in the organism, towards consciousness and then on to self-consciousness.

No you haven't, you have merely asserted that this is the case. What we have is a series of snapshots, testifying to a change having taken place. We've still not seen any evidence that says "this process was guided by something with a specific goal in mind", since we know the same process could have happened without guidance.

Rumraket wrote:

CharlieM wrote:Do you have any hard evidence that protofeathers lead to flight feathers via a Darwinian process?

What's a Darwinian process? Are you talking about selection? It doesn't have to have arrived through selection for it to have evolved in an 'unguided' fashion.

Any process where a feature or attribute fortuitously turns up and is then carried on in the line without any consideration for the future I would call a Darwinian process.

That's a bit misleading I think, since Darwinian is often understood to involve selection, and in some cases gradualism in small increments. But evolution, in the sense that it is known to work in an 'unguided' fashion, involves more than selection, and can be seen result in quite drastic change with little or no 'incremental gradualism'.

And I'm still waiting for evidence that the protofeathers that have been discovered are what lead to flight feathers.

A kind of open question. Are you asking for evidence that the discovered protofeathers are on the direct line of descend that lead to flight, or simply that they are similar to the kind of protofeathers that lead to flight?

Rumraket wrote:
The question at hand is: how did feathers and flight evolve?
A lack of a 'darwinian process' (whatever you mean by this) doesn't magically prove that design took place, neither that 'guidance' is true.

And just being able to figure out that there are steps involved in the transition from flightless animals to flying animals doesn't mean that these steps were unguided.

It's the assumption we can at best be justified to make, since our knowledge of the evolutionary processes are compatible with, and observed to function, in such a fashion. The "it was guided" assertion requires additional, positive evidence of it's own.

We have a process that we know can work in an unguided fashion, and we have no evidence, from out direct observations of this process in laboratory and wild populations, that it is happening in a 'guided' fashion. We have snapshots of an evolutionary transition. We are thus only justified in assuming that what happened in the past is what we observe happening today. If you wish to construct a scientific case for the guided evolutionary transitions of life, both in the past and the present, you have to present something more than the results of the process. You would probably have to demonstrate how this guidance takes place, and by what. What mechanism is used to guide it, what testable predictions does it make?

Rumraket wrote:

CharlieM wrote: to Theropod:
You obviously don't understand what an archetype is. An "archetypal specimen" is an oxymoron. The archetype encompasses all the attributes of any physical specimen throughout all their stages of development, it is not something that can be dug up.

What use is the term then, and how can it qualify as science?

Electrons, protons and neutrons cannot be dug up, they cannot be observed directly, we only know them through their effects. Does this mean that these terms do not qualify as science?

The theories of electrons, protons and neutrons make testable predictions, wich, among other things, allow you to sit here and argue nonsense with your computer, on the internet for all to see. In fact, depending on where in the world you live, there's a good chance that a powerplant build functioning on the fundamentals of atomic theory is supplying the flow of current (electrons) making your computer function.

So, again, what use is the notion of "an archetype that encompasses the attributes of any physical speciment throughout all their stages of development" ?

ElDiablo wrote:
This topic should be a thread unto itself, would you mind starting it so we can explore your concept?
The Emancipation from Earthly Forces would be an excellent title.

That's not a bad idea, I wasn't sure if I should carry on with this, considering the topic of this thread. Sometime over the weekend I might start a thread over at "Evolution and Natural Selection".