Comments on: Falsehood: Is it ever OK to use the term “Missing Link”?

By: Greg Laden

Greg Laden — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 19:49:00 +0000

Mike, good point.

By: Mike from Ottawa

Mike from Ottawa — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 19:46:09 +0000

With an interest in military history, I’ve no particular prejudice for seeing a ‘missing link’ in the context of a linear chain only. One can have a missing link in a piece of chain mail and that’s as far from The Great Chain of Being as one can get.

By: Rob

Rob — Mon, 03 Jan 2011 21:25:27 +0000

I remember the indignation over Missing Link and I remember thinking it was a valid complaint but a waste of effort. Why not just ignore poorly phrased babbling and talk about the interesting science?

By: AliceB

AliceB — Mon, 03 Jan 2011 20:55:30 +0000

I agree that you cannot ever see the actual genetic link, of if you do, can’t claim it, but Ida is not only a joovie but a bit of a dead end.

Nothing personal, Ida.

By: Henry

Henry — Mon, 03 Jan 2011 20:36:57 +0000

daedalus2u: To me, the term â??linkâ? connotes the joining of two things. In the case if Ida, Ida is not a â??linkâ? because Ida is a juvenile fossil. Ida never reproduced, Ida is not the ancestor of any extant organism. Ida links to nothing.

But they never find the fossil of the actual individuals who contributed to the glow of genetic information into the future, so this is technically true but rather trivial.

By: Enoch

Enoch — Mon, 03 Jan 2011 20:31:49 +0000

Your best falsehood yet.

By: LarianLeQuella

LarianLeQuella — Mon, 03 Jan 2011 04:49:53 +0000

My apologies Greg, I think you may have misunderstood. I was not “responding” but rePOSTING. I found this to be a brilliant post and wanted to spread this around! I agree wholeheartedly with you!

By: Thales-Naturalist Griggsy

Thales-Naturalist Griggsy — Sun, 02 Jan 2011 05:25:34 +0000

Lamberth’s naturalist teleonomic argument notes that science reveals teleonomy- no planned outcomes rather than teleology at work in Nature, Paul B.Weisz in ” The Science of Biology,” where in the introduction he contrasts causalism – teleonomy- with teleology.] and Ernst Mayr in ” What Evolution Is” [ He uses the term teleonomy elsewhere.] affirm teleonomy at work.
So, both evolutionary creationism – Francisco Jose Ayala, Kenneth Miller, Karl Giberson and creationist evolutionism- Michael Dembske, elevate obscurantism before the public! Theistic evolution then is an oxymoron!
And the naturalist atelic argument notes that all teleological arguments- to design, from reason- the self-refutation of naturalism, fine-tuning,probability- beg the question of those planned outcomes- that divinity had us in mind. Jerry Coyne in ” Seeing and Believing” underscores teleonomy at work and Amiel Rossow in his essay on the yin and yang of Miller shows how evolutionary creationists take ID through the front door, only to reintroduce it through the back one under the guise of directionality. Both essays appear @ Talk Reason.
Yes, let’s eschew teleology and directionality!

By: Greg Laden

Greg Laden — Sat, 01 Jan 2011 00:24:57 +0000

Joe, I agree. But I think that if you look only at the literature of 1840-something through the publication of the Origin and the first five or ten years of subsequent reaction, you can’t separate the underlying meaning of the term “missing link” and, simply “link” as used by various people. I’m not sure Darwin ever used the term “missing link” through the time period I specified, and yes, it is usually used either in reference to an ape-man sort of idea or, as I document above, as an allusion to that. But the broader concept of “links,” Darwin’s consternation regarding continuity and lack of continuity, and the discussions among various scientists is pretty clear: There are phylogenetic links (in which case the human-chimp “missing link” is not known to us) and there are trait-related links (“forms”) (these are overlapping concepts, of course). PZ Myers just posted something very correctly talking about the stupididy of the “missing link” concept when talking about a species (or closely related species), but the concept (of “links”) is very real and very valid in over a hundred years of conversation about the steps involved when one thing evolves into another thing over a period of time.

One of the really annoying problems is that the part of the conversation that involves the “creationism-evolution” debate has become little more than a batch of knee-jerk reactions. I am pretty sure that some of our evolutionary concepts, such as we are talking about here, have been damaged internally (internal to the science community) because of this conversation. At a certain taxonomic scale (fully inclusive of interbreeding populations, so above the “species level”) evolution is in fact linear, in that one can define a line of descent over time. But “linear” does not mean teleological nor does it mean directional. But in eshewing teleology and directionality, the linear nature of evolution has been tossed out by people who are not quite thinking about it deeply enough (what i just said has exceptions, of course, endosymbionts being one).

And then there’s the concept of mosaic, which is very important, and I think often misunderstood.

I may have to write another post about this, but first I want to observe some more of the reaction.

By: MadScientist

MadScientist — Fri, 31 Dec 2010 11:22:39 +0000

I think it’s fine to use the phrase “missing link” in cases such as when your tow chain breaks and you can’t find that goddamned spare D shackle.