Evolution's Mechanism

Thanks Pro. I. Preamble It’s a shame that that this format was badly structured, as I have already alluded to with CT. I will follow suit and use this round for summaries & closing. II. Burden of Proof Note that Pro took the affirmative position in this debate, and hence needed to provided reasons to accept the resolution as true. However this debate has been very much reverse-format, and Pro has given very little support for the positive position. I could have offered zero contentions, and win if Pro doesn’t fulfil his BoP, which he hasn’t. So, even if the negative case of mine fails (and I don’t believe it has), it is irrelevant if Pro’s Positive case fails (which it clearly has). III. Pro’s Case Pro has provided precious few arguments in favour of this resolution. His more significant argument, the argument from required information is lacking a coherent definition and evidential support. What is information, and why does a cell need it beforehand to produce macroevolutionary parts? At no point has Pro demonstrated that this type of information is required for evolution to occur, and my card-dealing analogy has dealt with this. Information about the hand you will deal yourself is not necessary to get the resulting card-hand. Pro might have a case if he could show that evolution had to aim at this target in the first place, and showed it was not an emergent property, yet has not. I also gave a number of naturalistic processes which would result in parts changing and developing to be adapted to their environment, and this very conceivably includes every change required for ‘macroevolution’ to occur. The other of Pro’s arguments is that only what is already in the gene pool is selected from, which is partially true, yet I showed that mutations are highly extant, and it’s known they occur in virtually every generation and can often be very substantial. Moreover Pro’s own numbers regarding the diversity of dogs (0.2%) defeats his own position given that only marginally smaller differences than this are needed for mammalian speciation, and given these differences occurred over relatively minute timescales (thousands vs. millions of years). Pro’s only other significant point was that evidence for micro-changes are not evidence for macro-changes, hyet he ignores my planetary and clock analogies. The evidential mechanisms I presented ARE evidence of macro-changes, and we observe with these mechanisms abundant examples of ‘micro-changes’ with very convincing macroscopic changes, to which no physical barrier has been demonstrated to prevent them from continuing this trend. Again if there is a barrier, I implore Pro to actually provide evidence for such a barrier, and what the mechanism is as a bonus. He has not done that in this debate, which would have beena triumphant fulfilment of his BoP in this debate if he did. The fact that he hasn’t means we can safely assume for this debate that there isn’t one. IV. My negative case: I have provided abundant evidence of these mechanisms, and Pro has literally conceded that these mechanisms existed from Round 3. Pro has dropped virtually all rights to this debate right there. Furthermore Pro in his closing made a startling assertion: “Apes are apes, dogs are dogs, etc.” This I feel highlight’s Pro’s misunderstanding on what macro-evolution is. Macro-evolution (or evolution, whatever) does not predict, or even postulate that one species ever becomes another, ir only predicts that species are related via. common ancestry, and that these resulting ‘baby-species’ can be significantly different from one another. All mammals give birth to mammals, and they have since the first mammalian species existed, all primates give birth to primates, and they will continue to do so, what Pro misunderstands is that our notions of ‘families’ and ‘genus’ for example, just move up the hierarchy as the sub-species becomes more and more divergent. If all mammals except for dogs for example were exterminated, then every single descendent will in some sense always be a dog, just like every descendent of the first ‘mammal’ was always a mammal. These ‘dogs’ will most certainly evolve and develop an array of adaptions, body changes to the extent that they would appear as radically different to each other as every mammal today is from one another, but that is exactly what macro-evolution predicts.[1] In some sense, we still are fish, and we still are reptilian, albeit a greatly changed variant of them. That’s exactly that evolution predicts, and that’s exactly that the mechanisms of macro-evolution I have provided so far are expected to generate. Large changes yes, species becoming genus’s, becoming families etc, yes. V. Conclusion Pro has not only failed to uphold his BoP, but he clearly demonstrates a lack of understanding on what evolution on large scales is, and what it predicts. Moreover he concedes most of my arguments. As such I strongly recommend voting Con. VI. References 1. http://en.wikipedia.org...