Reason #1 Why I Love To Blog -- Feedback From Readers -- Wow! -- October 28, 2019

Updates

October 29, 2019:

• David Gelernter's article in Claremont Review of Books, "Giving Up Darwin."
• Interestingly, all three men in the panel below were mentioned in the article above.  

Original Post

 I never expected this; I never would have found this on my own. But a reader, in response to my inarticulate rambling on evolution earlier this morning sent me this link.


The video lasts an hour so it will be awhile for me to get through it but I expect it to be good:

• it was produced July 22, 2019 (or thereabouts), so it is very, very current; and, 
• the panel included "Gelernter" in the interview, a deep thinker who has "flipped"

We'll see.

Later: I have only watched the first ten minutes of the video; enjoying it very much. Watching it slowly to absorb all of it. I'm disappointed in the interviewer. Seems to be out of his depth.

David Gelernter. I've talked about him before. It was purely happenstance I saw the Gelernter article last month.

I'll come back to this later, but I want to get this posted right away. More later.

[I can't listen to this and blog at the same time so I will have to listen to it later when I can give it my full attention.]

********************************

Later

The three men in the panel above, except David Gelernter who I happened to come across only recently, were completely unknown to me until today. I knew enough of Gelernter  to not spend more time on his bio at this time, but I wanted to learn more about the other two.

The man on the far left is Stephen Meyer, Director of the Center for Science and Culture, at the Discovery Institute:

David Meyer, March, 2019
The gentleman in the middle: David Berlinski, philosopher, mathematician, wiki entry here. This is also the first time I've "met" him. He is also associated with the Center for Science and Culture, Dallas, TX.

Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture.

********************************

Comments

I was surprised by the time frame of the Cambrian explosion. Original estimates: Cambrian explosion lasted 70 million years. Apparently that is being shrunk to 10 million years. The "meme" remains, 70 million years, or perhaps more commonly, 50 - 60 million years, but I am able to find sources suggesting ten million years. The definitions are important here. It's possible the geologic seam is 70 million years thick but the actual explosion within that geologic time frame could have been 10 million years. Like most things in biology, the "explosion" could have been an S-shaped curve.See See abstract at this link.

An explosive episode of biological diversification occurred near the beginning of the Cambrian period. Evolutionary rates in the Cambrian have been difficult to quantify accurately because of a lack of high-precision ages.

Currently, uranium-lead zircon geochronology is the most powerful method for dating rocks of Cambrian age. Uranium-lead zircon data from lower Cambrian rocks located in northeast Siberia indicate that the Cambrian period began ∼544 million years ago and that its oldest (Manykaian) stage lasted no less than 10 million years.

Other data indicate that the Tommotian and Atdabanian stages together lasted only 5 to 10 million years. The resulting compression of Early Cambrian time accentuates the rapidity of both the faunal diversification and subsequent Cambrian turnover.