… persuade them to stop being rightwingers[1]
I have a piece in Inside Story arguing that the various efforts to “frame” the evidence on climate change, and the policy implications, in a way that will appeal to those on the political right are all doomed. Whether or not it was historically inevitable, anti-science denialism is now a core component of rightwing tribal identity in both Australia and the US. The only hope for sustained progress on climate policy is a combination of demography and defection that will create a pro-science majority.
With my characteristic optimism, I extract a bright side from all of this. This has three components
(a) The intellectual collapse of the right has already proved politically costly, and these costs will increase over time
(b) The cost of climate stabilization has turned out to be so low that even a delay of 5-10 years won’t render it unmanageable.
(c) The benefits in terms of the possibility of implementing progressive policies such as redistribution away from the 1 per cent will more than offset the extra costs of the delay in dealing with climate change.
I expect lots of commenters here will disagree with one or more of these, so feel free to have your say. Please avoid personal attacks (or me or each other), suggestions that only a stupid person would advance the position you want to criticise and so on.
fn1. Or, in the case of young people, not to start.
John Quiggin 
@Jack King
Hmm … Your impulse, it seems, when confronted by complexity, it to reach for simplicity regardless of its inability to satisfy the standards that prompted your flight from complexity.
I see a pattern here. This roughly approximates the epistemology of pre-literate humanity.
@Ikonoclast
Sure, 75% of a very small figure. The point of my post is that CO2 represents a very small per cent of the total atmosphere….in fact it would best be described as minuscule. Nonetheless, it plays a very important role, and needs to be in a variant range. Obviously if oxygen jumped from 20% to 30%, we would probably have fires spontaneously erupting all over the place. I don’t believe anyone needs to worry of CO2 levels < 1%.
I would just like to defend oral language societies Fran, the ones here kept everything pretty much sustainably for 40,000 or so years 🙂
Jack King,
“I don’t believe anyone needs to worry…”
But people who have studied the matter say this change will have great effects. Why should we listen to your off the top of your head unstudied version of the non-effect of rising co2 levels instead of climate scientists’ studied account?
@ZM
The 1972 model by Jay Forrester did have one scenerio resulting in an overshoot by the mid-21st century, but that would only be because of favorable policy changes which never happened. Most pictured scenerios picturing a collapse by now….primarily from the depletion of natural resources like oil reserves. And in 1972 Forrester never envisioned the exponential growth of economies in China and India which would chew up resources even quicker. Still, no global overshoot…or even a hint of one. Still, feel free in putting faith in these models….your zeal rivals that of fundy christians.
@Jack King
I explained to you how a very small concentration of a potent chemical can radically change a system. I gave the example of a strong poison like ricin. A very tiny dose can kill a human; that is it can disrupt the entire physiological system. This was an analogy. Do you know what an analogy is? Then I went on to explain that CO2 is not a poison in the ranges we are discussing but it is a potent greenhouse gas. So it is still a potent compound in the matter under discussion (climate change) because of its physical properties in the atmosphere.
Do you know any science? Do you know what a greenhouse gas is and what physical properties make it a greenhouse gase? I did explain it higher up in the thread. But clearly you are a total science illiterate so as J.Q. said one is wasting one’s typing fingers.
It amazes me how often and how many people rate what they believe above empirical evidence. The scientific revolution might as well not have happened for many. Their reasoning is still medieval faith-reasoning.
Jack King,
This article I read a while back says phyla are related to the older trilobites
“In the fossil record, the nearest ancient relatives of horseshoe crabs are the trilobites, a successful group for hundreds of millions of years. Because trilobites had shells made mostly of calcium carbonate, they fossilized better than horseshoe crabs, whose shells are composed of chitin. Most trilobites had ovoid, segmented bodies that would make good paperweights. The last species of trilobites disappeared in the Permian Extinction, between two hundred and fifty-two million and two hundred and fifty million years ago. Horseshoe crabs survived that extinction and the others—at least a dozen extinctions in all. Having exoskeletons of chitin rather than of calcium carbonate may have helped during times when the oceans acidified. Horseshoe crabs can tolerate low-oxygen water and other life-killing conditions. Animal life probably began in the bottom of the sea. Horseshoe crabs still live in the mud and sand at the bottom of shallow inland waters, and on continental shelves out to about a hundred feet deep. They are like our old neighbors who never left our home town.”
Some phyla like got fossilised with the trees that turned into coal that we burn and cause climate change by doing (thus is like an unfortunate metamorphosis , if only Ovid could recount it)
“Lunataspis aurora did not fall prey to birds, because there weren’t any, and wouldn’t be any for hundreds of millions of years. Horseshoe crabs saw the aeons come and go. In the Carboniferous period, when most bacteria able to digest wood had not yet evolved, a planetary reservoir of plant carbon was buried and became coal. The remains of Euproops, another early horseshoe-crab species, have been found in fossilized feces in coal deposits in England.”
This is the somber conclusion to the article
“I remembered a famous horseshoe-crab fossil I’d seen pictures of. The horseshoe crab is in a matrix of rock that includes the fossilized imprint of the animal’s final tracks. In some distress, it left a wobbly, winding set of tracks and, at the end of them, died. Its fossil lies at the conclusion of its preserved last pages. Perhaps it found itself in anoxic water and couldn’t get out. But there is sense in what happened to it, a one-thing-after-another set of consequences, as there was, in fact, to everything around it and to all existence after and before. When no human consciousness existed, everything that did exist, including this dying horseshoe crab, had its own story and made its own sense.
Humans may drive horseshoe crabs to extinction, or not. Sea-level rises may cause shoreline reinforcement that wipes out their habitat. Or perhaps there will be even more beaches for them when sea levels rise; probably we won’t be able to reinforce every foot of shoreline. In any case, there will be a future where natural events continue to make their own sense, as they’ve always done, as they will whether we are still here to see the sense in them, or not. Based on past performance, horseshoe crabs may well survive us. Next to the road, where most people never look at them, they show how life goes about living on the actual earth.”
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/04/14/blue-bloods
@Jack King
And you say, ” Still, no global overshoot…or even a hint of one.” I guess you haven’t checked the data from the Global Footprint Network. We have already overshot the limits to growth. How can we have overshot the limits and still be growing? Easy. It’s a matter of natural income and natural capital. Natural income is using a stock sustainably and only taking up to the replenishment rate. Think of wild fish stocks of forests. Using up natural capital means using the resource faster than it can replenish. We can keep growing while using up natural capital but once it is exhausted then there is no natural capital and no natural income to live on.
It’s like living off your savings when your income is inadeqaute. Sure, you can keep getting fatter for a while but you have overshot sustainability and a crash in your reserves and your existence is coming.
What’s the proof that we have overshot the limits? Well;
(1) Collapse of natural fisheries.
(2) Collapse of natural forests.
(3) Global warming.
(4) Ocean acidification.
(5) Topsoil depletion.
(6) Fresh water depletion (lakes, dams, rivers and aquifers are all declining).
(7) Oceans full of plastic junk.
(8) Peak oil has passed.
(9) Peak uranium has passed.
(10) Nitrogen cycle disrupted.
I could go on but I will leave it there.
Correction: Think of wild fish stocks or forests.
@ZM
Trilobites?! My god, man, these where precisely some of the creatures that appeared in the Cambrian. Stop your cut and pasting and answer the question.
@Ikonoclast
My god, man that has been happening for decades. Are the oil reserves being replenished?! When we finally do get to that point (now reserves are going out for decades), the price system will give rise to substitutes. The price of gas, for example, will become so expensive that only the very rich could afford it. This will spur investment in other technologies to replace it. We are already seeing that with hybrid and all electric cars.
@Fran Barlow
“This roughly approximates the epistemology of pre-literate humanity.”
Nice insult….probably the nicest I’ve ever received. But here is the problem Fran. When one resorts to insults instead of logic, I know I’ve won.
@Ikonoclast
“Their reasoning is still medieval faith-reasoning.”
Have you seen “Deadwood”? Jack King is surely George Hearst, the ‘great man’?
The ‘great man’ has faith only in his superior ability to know things and to see the faults of others and a clear understanding of the natural order of things.
Jack King,
On Trilobites:
“Trilobites?! My god, man, these where precisely some of the creatures that appeared in the Cambrian. Stop your cut and pasting and answer the question.”
I am actually female not a man, thank you, unless you mean man in the general human sense – it is hard to tell. That is the only article I can remember ever reading on phyla, and it said their ancestors were trilobites. What was the question you had about them?
If you were asking how something so quickly evolved and got trapped in the fossil record – this could be because it must have been a very changeable time indeed during that period when trees were turned into coal because of geological events, so phyla and trilobites likely quickly evolved from something to try to stay safe from all the geological turmoil but unfortunately kept getting trapped in the fossil record despite their evolution… But these are just my thoughts and they are not very worthy because I have only read that one article on the matter. You could suggest key articles for us to read, although I am not sure anyone is very interested in learning about the origins of phyla. This thread is for discussing climate change (phyla have survived a lot of geological events and climate change being such an old species – so maybe you could argue we need to learn from them. On the CT version of this someone said Phillip K Dick thought people could get shells like trilobites – but I don’t think this was a serious proposition)
On Limits to Growth:
You keep referring to Forrester not the a Limits to Growth. Forester published an earlier book. I think the Limits to Growth people might have used some of Forrester’s program but they published a different book.
I think you are misrepresenting the Limits to Growth book – this might be accidentally since you might have read it a long time ago and forgotten it. Please give citations for your claims about the book if you are not just engaging in purposeful misrepresentation.
> When one resorts to insults instead of logic, I know I’ve won.
Ban the crazy, would you prof?
It think the most serious insult here is the presumption of incompetence and or fraud by Australia’s and the world’s climate scientists. It’s not even like climate science is dominated by the ‘liberal arts’ element of academia – the fundamentals of climate science is the province of the maths, physics and chemistry crowd.
Jack, your opinions are clearly deeply held, but have demonstrated no superior knowledge or understanding. Quite the contrary. Yet I doubt that confronting your stated misunderstandings of science based understanding of climate would be where to start with someone as sure climate science is wrong as you appear to be.
I’m not sure that engaging in debate over your misapprehensions would serve any purpose. Whilst you are fully entitled to your opinions, and have no obligation or requirement to closely examine their basis, those who hold positions of power, responsibility and trust within our society do have such obligations – or should have. Our leaders need to be well informed and to take expert advice seriously where it involves significant consequences and impacts for our security and prosperity. Economic fear mongering, to encourage the (far less well grounded than climate science) view that appropriate climate policy will be economically ruinous, is a far more disturbing and dangerous trait in our leaders IMO than climate science exploring the more damaging possibilities that can be foreseen from unmitigated GHG emissions changing the heat balance of our planet’s atmosphere.
Chris, I’m pleased that I could make any kind of impression but as you can read, I am not above being harsh in my criticisms. Sometimes scathing. But, whilst Pr Quiggin suggested people stop being right wing as a solution, I’m not as interested in getting people to abandon their political affiliations as have their politics and political leaders face up to the climate problem squarely and honestly.
Whilst confronting mis-comprehension of climate science within the community is important, I think it’s encouraging our leaders and opinion shapers and policy makers to be aware of their obligations to be well informed and act rationally and responsibly is most crucial. It’s an ethical requirement that must supercede their obligations to be loyal advocates for the interests of their parties, sponsors, allies and supporters.
@ZM
Correct, but Mr. Quiggin made the statement that climate change deniers where akin to those who question evolution. It is really amusing to me that whenever I challenge someone who claims that XYZ is “settled science”, that they usually curl up in a fetal position. Most who accept evolution as fact, know precious little about it and accept blindly whatever someone says who has letters after his name. The truth is that none of them can explain what happened in the early Cambrian. Evolution is supposed to go from the simple to the complex very slowly over 100’s of millions of years. Slow steady transitions in the fossil record…with some breaks because no one expects it to be perfect, but enough to see body plans morph. We see none of that with the Cambrian Explosion. A theologian would call it a creation event. I am not a theologian. I’m a deist, and I would certainly be open to that possibility.
@Jack King Quoted me:
Then added:
Actually, it’s an evaluation of your claim and its epistemic provenance, if you read it carefully. I’m noting that you don’t read carefully, so it’s unsurprising that you have erred here. I grant it’s possible that you are simply being disingenuous in order to make the argument about you and your feelings.
The evaluation was the result of a coherent set of propositions, none of which you’ve contested.
FTR I don’t doubt that self-serving and specious reasoning about what you know and how you have fared salves your discomfort. As with the rest of what you have advanced here, your claims are at odds with observable reality. Your attempts at misdirection are futile.
@Ken Fabian
Here is the crux of the problem. This is not about science…on either side. It is about politics. Look, let us assume for a minute that the Al Gore crowd is correct….that the earth has a fever, and it’s getting worse. The biggest offenders are the huge emerging economies like China and India whose populations are climbing out of poverty with exponential economic growth. Don’t think for a minute that your special pleadings will move them away from that improving lifestyle. In short, if the earth is indeed heading for a meltdown, we might as well party until the sky falls. As for me, I have little faith in flawed computer models that predict disaster.
@Fran Barlow
Nice backpedal….sorry, even though you couch your phrase in obfuscation, I know an insult when I see it. I win.
In case you haven’t noticed I’ve got about 10 different conversations going. Do you feel slighted because I didn’t show you more attention?
@Jack King
My feelings, and yours for that matter, are moot. Our feelings are not germane to the operation of ecosystem services. You seem keen to see yourself as a winner, but unless adequate policy is implemented, most of humanity, and very probably you too, will lose.
“This is not about science…on either side. It is about politics”
That is the rightwing view, in a nutshell. Thanks, Jack.
BTW, is that your real name? I’d be keen to quote you in illustration of the argument of the OP.
@Jack King
I wrote that there are a lot of people who are educated in science and who think they can objectively see serious flaws in Darwinism and who are wrong about that. I stand by that assertion. All you’ve done is illustrate the point. Some people who are educated in science think the ‘Cambrian Explosion’ is a serious flaw in Darwinism, and they’re wrong about that. None of what you’ve written about the ‘Cambrian Explosion’ shows a serious flaw in Darwinism; indeed, in what you’ve written about the ‘Cambrian Explosion’ you have said nothing whatever about Darwinism.
@Fran Barlow
Energy comes to the Earth from the sun mostly in the form of visible light. The Earth radiates energy into space mostly in the form of infrared radiation. Most of the atmosphere is transparent both to visible light and to infrared radiation, but some gases, including carbon dioxide, are transparent to visible light but not to infrared radiation, which they absorb as well as radiating.
As scientific facts go, those are neither complex nor arcane: if there are some people who find them beyond their cognitive capacity, they are a small number. And those facts are enough to explain how it is that putting more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere has the direct effect of making the planet’s temperature higher than it would otherwise be.
Of course there are more details that can be added, but the problem is not one of complexity in the underlying picture. In my experience deniers are keen to introduce complex issues of detail into the discussion in order to avoid confronting the underlying simplicity.
@phoenix
Without tendering evidence that would have to be, at best, an opinion
Rog, as it is an opinion supported by facts, it could at best be an argument, unlike the ‘group opinion’ or belief of 97% of scientists.
If you read the excerpt from the essay published by Karl Popper in “Conjectures and Refutations”(linked to in my last post), it is quite clear from Popper’s definition of science/pseudo-science, that AGW/CC is more akin to the pseudo-science of astrology and not the science of astronomy.
There seems to be an “incessant stream of confirmations, of observations which “verify” the theory” of AGW/CC. The temperature readings, the computer modeling, the glaciers melting, the droughts, the polar bears dying, the sea levels rising, the cyclones, the floods, the increased co2 levels etc etc etc. What evidence doesn’t fit the AGW?CC theory? nothing can you believe it, Sweet FA.
“It was precisely this fact—that they always fitted, that they were always confirmed—which in the eyes of their admirers constituted the strongest argument in favor of these theories. It began to dawn on me that this apparent strength was in fact their weakness.”
From Popper’s documented viewpoint AGW/CC could be considered a pseudo-science!
@rog
@Rog @Phoenix We can keep demonstrating the point of the OP as many times as necessary here. 275 comments in, and every one of them illustrating the point that rightwingers are utterly immune to any kind of rational argument. We’re up around 500 over at CT.
@Fran Barlow
Futile? I’ll tell you what is futile. As I’ve pointed out to other posters (and been ignored — should I declare victory?), the emerging economies like the Asian Tigers, China, India, and Brazil which represents roughly 1/3 the population of the planet, and who are digging themselves out of abject poverty toward a reasonable standard of living because of economic growth, THEY are the biggest greenhouse offenders. And you are not going to be able to convince them to halt their progress because of a flawed computer model. And your whining and hand waving is not going to make a damn bit of difference.
@phoenix
From your quote of Popper I presume he also considered evolution, relativity and most modern science disciplines as “pseudo-science” since they have always been confirmed by evidence.
@John Quiggin
Have to disagree with you John, but yes this is my real name.
@J-D
Nothing I’ve stated about the early Cambrian period is flawed. All I’ve done is raise a question…to which all I get in return is the sound of crickets…including your vapid remark which says nothing about the question. Why don’t you show everyone your knowledge on the subject and answer the specific challenge I raised. Only one person among all these very smart people have even attempted, and it was a pathetic cut and paste which actually confirmed my position.
@phoenix
Popper was wrong.
@Jack King
You said there were serious flaws in Darwinism. You haven’t shown one.
You asked me to explain the Cambrian Explosion. I haven’t even tried. If I can’t explain the Cambrian Explosion, my failing is not a serious flaw in Darwinism. If ZM can’t explain the Cambrian Explosion, ZM’s failing is not a serious flaw in Darwinism. If you can’t explain the Cambrian Explosion, your failing is not a serious flaw in Darwinism. Your challenge for somebody to provide an explanation of the Cambrian Explosion functions in this discussion as a way of changing the subject from your assertion that there are serious flaws in Darwinism and whether you can back it up. That’s the subject I’m interested in discussing. If you think the Cambrian Explosion is a serious flaw in Darwinism, you have not explained how. You are, of course, not obliged to discuss the subject I want to discuss (even though you are the one who originally brought it up), but I am not obliged to discuss a different subject because you prefer to change the subject.
@John Quiggin
What is more professor, in Phoenix’s case, the very fact that multiple lines of independent evidence confirm the general proposition — Charney forcing — is the very thing that convinces him that it is ‘pseudoscience’. The greater the evidence the more he doubts and reaches for his own pseudo-scientific paradigm. I am not the first to notice this phenomenon amongst the deniers, and will surely not be the last.
Phoenix’s argument reminds me of that famous vignette in The Life of Brian in which Brian, seeking to avoid being cast as the messiah, is confronted with the maxim that ‘only the true messiah denies his divinity’. For Phoenix, if the evidence were sketchy that would be a cause for rejecting anthropogenesis, and if it’s compelling, then that too.
@Jack King
Whether humans will act with the coherence to abate climate change has nothing at all to do with whether climate change is predisposed by human activity. These are two entirely distinct propositions.
For the record though, China and India are probably doing more to abate climate change than any major western state. The people of China are demanding of their regime a cleaner and more liveable environment, and the regime is responding. If, controlling for GDP per capita, every other state matched them the prospect of averting disaster would be palpably greater.
@Jack King
That statement contains so many assumptions posing as immutable facts that it would be a waste of time to engage with you. So I’ll just agree Jack. You’re right, the human race is too f*cking stupid to save itself.
@zoot
The jury is still out on that one. The stupidity lies in allowing elite control of investment and public policy, since, self evidently, the elite will always suffer less if their policy goes awry.
When the policy especially concerns the interests of people who are marginalised or living in the future, the tendency to prefer reckless risk when immediate private benefit is available is simply irresistible.
Of course, elites did not fall from the heavens. Elite rule has marked all civilised life, so the business of inclusive governance, which we must eventually have, is not something one can author just because there’s an emergency. Stupidity is probably the wrong noun. It’s more like longstanding culture, reinforced by elite control of public discourse and whole dollops of Stockholm Syndrome.
@J-D
OMG! I am not going to get side tracked on some debate effete debate about the relationship between Darwinism and evolution. So let me restate……The THEORY OF EVOLUTION cannot explain what happened in the Cambrian Explosion. In a tiny sliver of geological time, we see the sudden appearance of every phyla that we have today. What mechanism could have pulled this off? We know that saltation doesn’t explain it. Genetic drift doesn’t explain it. Not even macro-mutation doesn’t explain it. And certainly punctuated equilibrium doesn’t explain it. So give it a shot, genius.
@ZM
That’s true. I didn’t claim they weren’t sustainable. They drew far less from the ecosystem than we draw. They weren’t able however, to explain the physical processes shaping the ecosystems in which they lived.
@Jack King
Fixed it for you Jack.
@Fran Barlow
Whenever someone claims an issue is “settled science”, the purpose is to end all debate. I will be the first to admit that there are logical arguments that indicate there may be something going on, but to take a half truth and worship it as a full-blown reality is akin to a fundamentalist walking lock step with biblical dictums. In short, it becomes canonical, even with high priests who will excommunicate someone who steps out of line.
As far as China, good luck. Every emerging economy early in their growth curve overshoots on environmental issues. Eventually EPA-like (In US EPA is Environmental Protection Agency) structures emerge. In the 1960s in the US, the air and water was a mess. Today they are pristine. This is a very common pattern. But it is a long evolutionary process which takes decades. And the focus will not be on green house gases but rather particulants, smog, and water…areas which could result in immediate health problems. By the time 1/3 of the human population gets their act together, we’ll all be under ten feet of water. Given that, I’d be happy to sit down with you and have a few drinks…and party together. If the end is coming we might as well enjoy ourselves first.
@zoot
A, yes…..the ubiquitous yet. That always goes with other pregnant words like “perhaps”, “might”, “could”, and even the very bold “probably”. Kind of like weather forecasters who couch their forecast in probabilities. “Only a 10% chance of rain today.” Ipso facto, if it does rain, they’re STILL not wrong.
@Jack King
No, it isn’t. The claim that something is settled science merely implies that is the benchmark we should use to assess alternative propositions. Wegener overthrew the settled science on continental drift all those years ago by coming up with better science, which is now the settled science.
No scientific body wants to shut down inquiry or research. Your use of the term ‘debate’ is an attempt to muddy the frontiers between scientific study and political argument, and in so doing, reduce science to a series of contestable thought bubbles. The logic of this position is nihilistic.
Well no, you won’t be the first.
It is a well-attested account of atmospheric and resultant biological processes.
Again your language is slippery. You now want to assert that it is a matter of faith, much as your belief that doing nothing may work out OK is a declaration of faith. You’re trying to win with cheap rhetoric — equivocation — but it won’t work.
Those would be dicta, but declension aside you have not shown anywhere in this topic why anyone should see the collective work of thousands of highly experienced physicists, hydrologists and biologists as akin to biblical canon.
That’s just silly. Nobody has been excommunicated. The denier advocates are at perfect liberty to publish in journals of record. Nobody has sanctioned them, though their bizarre conduct has tarnished their standing.
SLRs of 3m are unlikely this century, and I suspect that neither of us will be in a position to share a drink by then. Your cavalier attitude to human well-being is however, entirely typical of your cultural cohort. You imply others won’t act, but you are amongst those others furnishing them with flimsy excuses. It’s a sad place you are in.
@Jack King
Wrong again Jack. You really don’t know much about science, do you?
I claim no expertise in the area of evolution, but I searched some of the terms being used here and I’m guessing Jack is a creationist(?). This is from “creation.com”, a piece titled “Exploding Evolution”:
Rationalwiki disagrees:
If the question was: ‘How can we convince rational people to become creationists?’ then, sorry, but the whole ‘phyla’ creationism stuff just isn’t doing it for me.
@Fran Barlow
Good for you! But I have news for you. When most advocates use that term, it is to imply
that anyone who disagrees is a throwback to the 20th century….kind of like when you said of me “the epistemology of pre-literate humanity.”
You are truly naive if you don’t understand the pressure that is put on rogue scientists who stray from the orthodoxy. For example, when anthropologist Louis Leakey supported Hans Reck’s discovery in Tanzania which would have greatly pushed back human origins, it created such an uproar that he recanted. Another example….At the Hieyallco, Mexico dig, a highly sophisticated bi facial stone tool was found in situ, and it dated to 250,000 b.p. The date would have revolutionized New World Anthropology. But the date was unacceptable to the high priests, and when an attempt to publish it was made, it was squelched. This kind of stuff goes on all the time, and it is generally hidden from the public (not that the public would care).
Actually, the explosion was closer to 5 million. — Dinosaur in a Haystack; Stephen Jay Gould; p. 97.
“In a geological moment near the beginning of the Cambrian, nearly all modern phyla made their first appearance. The 500 million subsequent years have produced no new phyla, only twists and turns upon established designs.” “Wonderful Life”; Stephen Jay Gould; p. 64
Gould makes a weak attempt to explain how fully formed metazoans could suddenly appear in the fossil record with his punctuated equilibrium thesis, but it falls far short of explaining this profound mystery.
Anyway, thanks having the courage to at least attempt. The theory of evolution cuts across at least 6 different scientific disciplines. Everyone here speaks about the importance of science and unless you have studied it in detail you don’t know what the hell you are talking about so just shut up. Then when I challenge them to discuss it, it becomes like what happens to cockroaches when you turn the lights on.
@Jack King
It is not the case that inability to explain the Cambrian explosion is always a flaw in a theory. Many theories cannot explain the Cambrian explosion without that being a serious flaw in those theories. An argument which says only that a theory is seriously flawed because it can’t explain the Cambrian explosion is missing something.
@Jack King
Humanity wasn’t pre-literate in the 20th century.
@Jack King
Looking back at Leakey, this is not the story of someone who was ‘ex-communicated by high priests’. He went on to have a long and distinguished career after the Reck matter. As to Hieyallco (Huatulco usually) in Mexico, I can find no reference to this. Do you have a link?
Jack King, 37, you are completely wrong in your Cambrian explosion being unexplainable.
The Pylum division, body plan, is precisely the rank where the most dramatic change to life will take place in a short period of time given favourable conditions, and successful genetic precursors. Apart from that, the fossil record is anything but complete as soft bodied creatures of which there were likely to have been a large variety are mostly lost.
Your lack of understanding does not mean that there are not answers.