Doom-Bunnies

Having a discussion with JV at JD's joint when out popped the Darwinian Doom-Bunny and VD's rejoinders about it. I love the Darwinian Doom-Bunny just for the Flying Circus appeal of the whole thing but does a find of a rabbit fossil in precambrian rocks do a thing to the theory of evolution?

No. See? Easy. I was about that short there for etiquette but it really does deserve a better treatment and so here we are.

Let us assume that we have such a collection of rabbit shaped sediment in our possession and that there's no argument whatsoever as to its validity, location, or age. That there are no claims of shenanigans in play whether worldly or otherwise. Then we have what we must accept as a valid collection of remarkably rabbit-bone shaped rocks.

If we then play the Queen of Hearts and declare that as it is remarkably rabbit shaped that it was a modern rabbit we get all sorts of fun consequence. And there's no reason not to as there are an incredible number of modern animals that have remained morphologically invariant over millions of years in the standart view of things. But given this presumption we must accept that there was a patch of land for it to be about on eating dandelions and such. And there must be more of its kin for we all know what rabbits are quite good at. Doesn't mean that we'll find their remains, but that they had to be there. Given this then it's then strictly true that we've severely underestimated the age and breeding success of the rabbit lineage.

That alone tells us nothing about the Theory of Dice whatsoever. Oh sure, it will upset a bunch of apple carts amongst the stakeholders that are already quite flustered every time China digs up the same ol' bones in the entirely wrong place and age of rock. But one assumes they're used to it by now. For if Dice is spot on all the find tells us is that we're missing more animal shaped bits of rock then we would have preferred and that the age of things pushes back a bit. But it neither implicates random material processes one way or the other and says nothing about common descent.

It's all an issue of history seen through a dirty mirror. And we're perfectly free to have our looking glass another way about entirely. We may claim, on whatever basis, that our Darwinian Doom-Bunny was indeed a bottom dweller and breathed through gills installed in its tail; much like arthropods. We are also completely free to state that it is not a rabbit at all but simply a remarkably rabbit like creature unrelated to rabbits. All we have, after all, is simply some fancy quartz bits that we're quite in awe over.

Though being who and what we are when it comes to matching like with like by our eyeballs we're more prone to take the Queen of Hearts route anyways. It's responsible, typical, and has good success rates when dealing with other interesting bits of rock such as the Solutrean and Clovis toolkits, various Tells in the Middle East, the migration route in the Poetic Edda, and the city of Troy. Each one of which has caused a great stir when their evidence first started coming in.

The difficulty here is that the cache of the Historian is not in science but in narratives. Fairy Tales largely. Now this upsets a great many Historians, Archaeologists and Paleontologists while others still will tell you this is entirely correct. Their jobs largely exist of finding queer random bits of things and then attaching to them a good jaw for the salesmanship. Nothing at all is in error by doing so but it's far different than stating your priors, your expected posteriors, and then slapping the cadaver on the table to see if lightning will get you throwing little girls in a well. They can all, natch, thwart each others narratives but showing a neat bit of rock that causes a contradiction. But the discussion is limited to that rock alone.

An example suffices better than anything here as to the limits. Let us suppose that the Cultists of Dice find the fossilized remains of the Materialist Creator. The prime mover, seed of everything, and first proto-bacteria that gave rise to it all. In elation they carve out the sandstone backing and install it in the Smithsonian, situated directly behind a very impressive magnifying glass, so that school children can come from far and wide for the sole purpose of pressing their faces against the lense to witness a single discolored grain of sand.

The majesty of it all might have overwhelmed you a bit and you might take a moment to catch your breath as you need. After which ask yourself this alone: What was its genetic code?

In witnessing this grain of sand we are not looking at an organism. Nor are we looking at its remains. We're looking at what remains of the absence of its remains; what became of the hole in the mud left behind by its remains no longer remaining. Now we can do a whole mess of fun things with the remains of the remains that are demonstrable and supportable. What we cannot do is a paternity test.

Our entire historical narrative relies solely on the visual connective between rocks that we describe as either organic remains or as being produced by organisms, such as with various tracks and burrows. Which gets us right back to the Darwinian Doom-Bunny. And a little bit of steamy Greek action.

If I told you that, for all mornings the sun will rise, then I've told you a falsehood if for only one single morning the sun does not in fact rise. I have made a universal claim of what happens in the morning and only a single thwart of that is sufficient to defenestrate things. That's all happy Greek stuff right up until I try to state "I w1n" because it is a morning on which no one can verify that the sun did or did not rise. A step further still if we can never verify that the sun did or did not rise as we're all permanently in the deeper parts of the Bastille and I simply reduce my claim to: For all mornings.

The first case is a proper claim and can be falsified. The second case is a grotesque logical fallacy. The third case isn't even a claim to begin with. The sun comes up in the morning. In the woods the Pope will shit. Zombies have a taste for brains. Those three all get reduced in this manner to: Morning. Shit. For brains.[1]

Now we're all, I assume, agreed to consider that fossils are the remains of life and so may be treated fairly as life itself. Then the claim from Dice is: For all life, genetic mutations occur. Or, as we're absent paternity tests for trilobytes and Doom-Bunnies: For all life.

[1] That's a bald lie, really. It's properly "Morning. Woods. Brains." You can suss out the difference yourself if you like biting the heads off bats.

Addenda: Just before posting this I figured I should satisfy my hunch that the Darwinian Doom-Bunny was one of Dawkins' bits; it's certainly reachable at his cognitive level. It is not, but it is used by him, so I suppose that counts as half-credit. The Wiki page on the deal also mentioned Popper and the notion that historical narratives can be falsifiable. Yarp, and I should likely stress that this can only occur when your historical narrative doesn't include every possible rock a priori.