I believe Egnor thinks that “First there were dinos, and they evolved into either reptiles or birds.

I said a little more sense, which amounts to not a whole lot.

Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. Aldous Huxley (1894 – 1963), “Proper Studies”, 1927

Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocrities. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices, but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence and fulfills the duty to express the results of his thought in clear form. Albert Einstein (1879 – 1955), quoted in New York Times, March 19, 1940

So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence. Bertrand Russell (1872 – 1970)

There are three classes of intellects: one which comprehends by itself; another which appreciates what others comprehend; and a third which neither comprehends by itself nor by the showing of others; the first is the most excellent, the second is good, and the third is useless. Niccolo Machiavelli (1469 – 1527), The Prince

His Favoured theory of evolution appears to be Thomistic dualism and teleology, so he’s basing a lot of his idea on Thomas of Aquinas. And whatever he knew of biology.

His evidence for teleology is convergent evolution, which is just evidence of convergent natural selection.

He also deliberately misunderstands Punctuated Equilibrium, thinking that it means that speciation by natural selection is disproved. If a common widespread marine invertebrate with a shell is replaced by a similar common widespread marine invertebrate in a short time on geological time, then that means that God decided to let the first species go extinct and replace it with a similar species.

Or as Ken Miller puts it, God as a serial incompetent creator.

I’m prepared to make a prediction. Michael Egnor will start yet another thread based on Steve’s latest one. And proceed to get everything wrong.

The principle of common descent would in another time or field of science would probably have been called a “law.” Scientific laws are commonly described as descriptions or generalizations about how things work in nature. Common descent was established on a mass of observations from morphology and embryology, and later confirmed further by genetic data. Scientific laws may be refined or possibly even wholly refuted by later observations. For instance, lateral gene transfer in bacteria seems to justify a refinement in the doctrine of common descent. There are antecedents to this principle, for instance, the cell theory, which implicitly requires that all changes in descent be physically possible for cells to carry out. And there are consequences too, such as that new species must come from old species. But is it really useful or enlightening to call these predictions?

Natural selection, on the other hand, is what some would call a theory, a scientific explanation, although I gather others would define “theory” as an algorithm(or verbal/conceptual equivalent) for generating predictions. In that case, this link says that Popper’s claim is that natural selection, equating adaptation to fitness, is non-predictive because all organisms must be adapted to their environments, else they would be extinct. The rebuttal is that 1) the unfit are extinct 2) physically impossible changes will not occur along the chain of common descent and 3) new species descend from old species.

Note that 1) is merely a restatement, not a prediction while 2) & 3) are trivial “predictions,” because they are not unique to the theory of natural selection. At this point, the link goes on to explain that fitness is defined causally, functionally, statistically a posteriori, not logically and semanticaly a priori. And besides that, fitness is not determininistic but dispositional. What is not clear is how fitness being those things makes it possible to make predictions. There have been a number of experiments that have successfully tested predictions about natural selection’s effects on gene frequencies but it seems that the difficulties in defining fitness in a way that you can predict/control makes them the exception rather than the rule in evolutionary science.

The thing worth thinking about, is that Darwin provided masses of evidence in favor of natural selection decades before experiments that teased out a prediction could be performed. Science since has provided masses more. But they weren’t predictions.

You can use natural selection to explain vestigial organs. An organ is no longer adaptive, nature selects agains the waste of resources for it. The mechanics of genetics may not permit an easy way to simply erase the organ, but the slow increment of genetic changes diverts resources from the less fitting organ, it gets smaller and smaller, that is, vestigial. As the resources diverted become less cumbersome, however, the intensity of selection pressure becomes less and less. The vestigial organ can then survive indefintiely until the vagaries of genetic change do possibly succeed in erasing the last trace. Natural selection (particularly gene-selection) says traits are adaptive, increase fitness. We can explain fitness-decreasing vestigial organs as above, using supplementary hypotheses and contingencies that explain away the violation of this prediction.

We cannot predict which organs will become vestigial; we cannot predict which will finally disappear; we cannot predict for which a new function might be found; we can not statistically predict incidence of vestigialization, time for vestigialization, rates of vestigialization or intensity of natural selection against vestigial organs. But, rather than throw up our hands, isn’t the real clarification, not that natural selection is scientific because it is predictive, but, because it is explanatory of massive amounts of data. Charles Darwin made a convincing case for natural selection before the experiments. And the kind of evidence he presented has only been added to.

Even more to the point, if there are experiments confirming predictions of natural selection about speciation (instead of change in gene frequencies,) they are a well kept secret. I suppose it is likely that eventually science will find a way to conduct such experiments. But even if no one were ever ingeniuous enough to find the way, we already have quite a bit of evidence showing that natural selection is a major factor in novel speciation, and overwhelming evidence it is the major factor in maintaining species morphology (the forgotten aspect of speciation?) Is throwing out a lot of straw about predictions inviting the Egnors to make straw men?

I cloudn’t argee more.

I will give Egnor some credit, and assume that he is aware that this argument is fallacious. For the average person in the US, with poor understanding for evolution, this makes a lot of sense. What some people know about the evolution of dinosaurs they learned from Jurassic park. This very popular movie would tend to give a under-educated person the impression that once we thought dinosaurs were reptiles and now we think that they were birds. Also that you can clone from fossil insects. Never mind it was fiction.
I think you don’t give him enough credit Steve. I think that this a “know your audience” type of mistake. Works in every other mode of pseudoscience. A little truth twisted just the right way so that others will say’ You know he has a point”. You are like Houdini watching a magic show. you have no problem seeing such an obvious trick you think it it was a obvious mistake. Or maybe you are just being generous and assuming there is no deception self or otherwise.

“Related to” is a vague term that can never be precise enough to stand in for a specific technical term, so its use will never be technically precise. But sure, the phrase, “birds are related to vertebrates” is problematic. It would have been better to say, “related to other vertebrates”, which is what I meant. “Belongs to the vertebrate group’ would also work.

My point, however, is that this is not the mistake I was pointing to with Egnor. He made it seem like there were two competing theories – dinosaurs are related to reptiles, vs dinosaurs are related to birds. This is not true. Dinosaurs were known to be reptiles at the time (so in a sense dinosaurs are related to both birds and reptiles- these are not competing hypotheses) The competing hypotheses were – birds are related to dinosaurs vs birds are related to some other reptile group. In this case “related to” means “evolved from” or even “is a subgroup of” (in cladistic terms). In fact, this should be stated as “most closely related to” since all life is related to all other life – the question really is how closely different groups are related. So that can be considered another “mistake” (imprecise use of language).

My point is – it’s not the “same mistake” with different implications. It’s a different mistake entirely.