Ant:
Then he goes on to say "every person, every animal belonged to the same species as his parent."
He concludes by stating the following:
Quote:
take it back as far as you like - I take it back 185 million years ago and you reveal your 185 million years greats granfather was a fish
Every person and every animal do belong to the same species as their parent, but that is not true of our 1 millionth ancestor. Remember the branching tree diagram. Where any divergence occurs in the branching, everything that shoots off from that node is all part of the same clade, or lineage, up to the point of branching. All the lineages which shoot off become their own thing not involving their sister branches, but they will all forever remain in the same clade up to the point of their divergence.
So imagine a node labeled “tetrapoda” which means a bony skeleton adapted for four extremities. This branches off into a wide variety of animals. Dogs, cats, deer, elephants, apes, dinosaurs, birds, lizards etc… but it also includes whales, dolphins and seals.
There is a very wide variety of animals here and they are indeed different species. They cannot interbreed and the offspring of the lizard is not the same as the offspring of the bird. Dawkins was not saying that all offspring of everything from the node “tetrapoda” would all be the same species, only that each of those diverging branches would have children of the same species, within that lineage, but with slight variation until those variations add up to a different species.
So, you can never evolve out of being a tetrapod, even when you lose your hind legs as the whales did. And the offspring of a set of parents will only be like the parents. In other words, no fish gave birth to a lizard. No lizard gave birth to a snake. Instead small variations add over time until the “ten thousandth” generation would not have been able to breed with the “first” generation (generation numbers are arbitrary and only relatively accurate).
There is some nit-picking we can do with Dawkin’s statement. For instance our ancestor would not be in the same clade as a trout. It was not a “fish” since it lacked many of the definitive characteristics that identify fish (they had lobes instead of the fin you see on fish), but for brevity the word “fish” gives people the rough idea of what to picture in their heads. Fish is really a colloquial word and difficult to assign to a clade, just as the word reptile also is not really appropriate.
“Like saying all things that are grey”
Really? A fish? That's a scientific fact, as he stated in his introduction to the thought experiment?
Where is the fossil evidence for this claim?
The fossil record is the evidence for this claim.
We were taken back 185 million years, stopped at homo erectus as being a parent because "every person every animal belonged to the same species as his parent" and then wound up with a fish.
So the difficulty you encounter is that he didn’t present you with every ancestor in a continuous lineage from modern man back to a single celled organism?
I recommend you check out AronRa’s youtube channel and find the “falsifying phylogeny” playlist as an interesting primer. He sets out in those videos what it is the theory of evolution says should happen, how we could tell if that were incorrect, and how we know that it is not.
"The whole process is incredibly gradual."
Uh., well, duh.., yeah, but what evidence is there that the process was as he stated - regression to a fish?
Literally all research about evolution and cladistics points us to this conclusion, and still further… you have ancestors that looked like flat worms and eventually a single celled organism, and before that, some kind of proto-cell chemical reaction.
Did you not realize this about evolution? Everything springs from a common ancestor. If you trace the lineages back and end up with a “fish” and a plant, you haven’t traced back far enough, because that plant shares a common ancestor with the “fish”.
Are you just going to babble on… by saying it all took millions of years and that it's so slow that we don't have one parent to point to but that it surely in the end points to a fish?
From now on I might start calling “accusing others of the things you are guilty of” “Anting”.
by saying it all took millions of years and that it's so slow that we don't have one parent to point to but that it surely in the end points to a fish?
What don’t you like about the time frames of evolution, and how do you propose we do anything about it?
And again, how do we test this hypothesis to prove it's a scientific fact?
Haha.
This isn't the sharing of scientific facts.
He wasn’t presenting a research paper to peer review. He was explaining evolution through a story that would be easy to comprehend and give people an understandable representation of what it is that the theory is telling them.
This is dressing up biological narrative as fact in the hope of indoctrinating minds that won't question beyond the claim that there was no parent ancestor, no first human being because you can't pin-point when you became and adult in time, and because evolution is a process on a time scale of millions and millions of years, we can nevertheless safely say it's a fact that your 185 million year greats grandfather was a fish.
Directionless tantrum.
But this is a great post because it's so silly.
“Anting.”