This should definitely be in the Religion category for discussion, if for no other reason than that many here think Evolution is a religion. Well, I welcome you into the courtroom of our discussions (we faithful worshipers of the theory of evolution, or however you see us); for you I want to resolve and clear up our dispute, lest you think that our apparent confusion on our part was on account of any disagreement about the cold hard facts of reality upon which we readily agree. You lot can’t agree on any hard “spiritual” facts at all… and you have no way to resolve disagreement… no method. Anyway, that’s not what this is about…
I recently had cause to Google lazily for an image to represent “evolution”. To follow in my footsteps, one only has to go to that most well-known of search engines and type “evolution” then click on “images”… and I now paste a prettier (IMHO) depiction of the same thing, only this time from the Smithsonian Magazine site as the subject for this discussion.
I am too lazy right now to create images of my own and to do so might help my case but is not essential for my case and… besides… to discipline myself to communicate my ideas in well-defined words is one of my goals, so I’ll try to keep this to words… and to be as clear as I can… but… I will not be clear in this post, sorry. Heck, I might even cheat and use other people’s pictures.
It seems that there was strong feeling that the image I chose was in some way wrong.
I want to put it to you all that, in fact, that view is wrong – and in an important way.
To understand the view more fully that I imagine was behind the group sentiment, check out one of Aron Ra’s latest videos (YTCOM watch?v=HzDr3BM7WpE Supposed Lies in the Textbooks Ep 25). It is, as is so much of his work, excellent.
So… we all need to understand the orthogenetic view… and why that is wrong… or, at least, we do to keep up with where I’m interested in going with this.
My agreement to the false, pernicious and specious nature of old views that we’d all like see consigned to history does not mean that I agree that the images we are talking about are necessarily wrong.
Consider.
Take YOUR PERSONAL father sequence (or mother sequence, but not in most images I’ve seen floating about).
From that sequence one might “accurately” cartoonize exactly what we see in these images. And given no other data, that’s an acceptable explanation of why we chose that sequence of gradually changing pictures (which must be possible to draw for the Theory to be right). IF we drew them understanding that that view only “makes sense” if we are looking backwards in time, from after the fact, and we all know that people do win the lottery… why, then we’ve made no mistake. Plus, it’s an image that tells an important story. I’m sticking to it.
I also noticed, of course, that Aron’s video had examples of another type of cladogram… if you watch the video, look out for the way that species “flow” in “bifurcations” (that may also be trifurcations, or something in between!).
I’d argue that the most pernicious diagrams going around (pernicious because they make the mistake of a simplification which creationists have in their heads, when all we are doing is deriving utility from one particular way of arranging data and not intending to imply anything about how the process works…from that perspective we want things to fit in nice scientific boxes and that’s fine too) are the one’s that Aron used himself in his most excellent series (Systematic Classification of Life) covering the biological history of our species in the way that one is forced to conceive it if one is to really understand The Theory – namely forwards in time. Those diagrams are like these:
I recently described wanting to see less of the HARD LINE type diagrams and more diagrams that had “webbing” “like on a duck’s feet”… and that’s true… but like a duck’s webbing (and like leaves), that’s three dimensional and with areas of stronger and weaker interconnection.
In fact the only “right” way of doing it would be to account for the fact that genepools of groups that are slowly diverging (who will go on to pass the [fuzzy] “event horizon” of separation past the point of possible interbreeding but who could, by means of intermediaries, share “splashes” between gene pools even then)…
I mean to say… that the correct view is more like a bushy thing… more like a living organism itself… more like the topology of lungs (and akin in having a fixed space to inhabit with some flexibility as to it’s size – being that there’s only so much resource and that factors like warmth vary globally… this analogy seems sweet to me and suggests that the pulsing of the “space available for the lung” [being Gaia’s gentle breathing] might be a driving force for evolution – the “lung” in this analogy being the only cladogram I’d accept as being anything close to reasonably representative… only… NOT like a lung… more like… more like… SLIME MOLD [but at the same time being more like a tree’s roots])
And I hope that the Smithsonian would forgive me if I have broken a copyright rule and I hope my pointing out that it is the excellence of their content that makes them the top of the Google search for an image I wanted to illustrate a point.
Now consider a more three-dimensional version of that… and have IT now form the broad outline of a tree.
NOW you see the beauty of the tree of life in your mind’s eye… if that’s something you can visualize.
For me now, that sort of visualization is far more ultimately rewarding than any visualization of angels that I had when a believer (and, believe me, I had many).
I’m going to go off and see if I can code some Python in Blender to illustrate the sort of thing I’m talking about.
No… I’m not… I think I prefer an animated version of a depiction of the events… a 3d one where time is on the time axis!
Maybe I’ll just spend a few more days thinking… then… yes, I think… a nice animation…
What do you think? If you’re one of the people who objected to the image I used, do you still object?
If you object, why do you object?
Oh, and I note the following as an afterthought: a GOOD diagram of the overall nature of the beast would help intuitively answer the “why are there no transitional fossils” question in a way… sure, the real answer is that “every organism [that reproduces] is transitional“… part of a link from what came before to what came after.