Here was one of the many 'gaps' as you called them that we were to discuss. This topic is Animal Sizes and what empirical evidence is there that animals can get much larger from a smaller size?

My side is basically this. We know we can go from larger animals to really small animals such as a great dane into a chihuahua but it's been empirically shown that you can't go from something the size of a chihuahua to something the size of a great dane. Note that I'm not arguing that a great dane became a chihuahua.....I'm just noting that something large can’t be bred down into something much smaller. 

The fossil record shows this as well. We find turtles the size of cars, 39inch centipedes, and dragonfly type insects with 2ft wingspans in the fossil record but none of these are found today and the empirical evidence shows things get, and stay, smaller but not larger. Wiki even states that “Controversy has prevailed as to how insects of the Carboniferous period were able to grow so large. The way oxygen is diffused through the insect's body via its tracheal breathing system puts an upper limit on body size, which prehistoric insects seem to have well exceeded” and yet there they are! Now I will concede that the quote is from Wiki and not a journal so the statement may be flawed. You can refute it if you’d like but the point is we find all kinds of animals that are much larger in the fossil record than we see them today. This fits the creation model but doesn’t fit the evolutionary model since there appears to be no empirical evidence that things get really large from really small. This is where your arguments come in on the subject.

Also keep in mind that I’m not arguing that things can’t get a little larger than what they currently are. 9 ft humans and the occasional large horse or cat or dog are seen in today’s world but these animals come with all kinds of problems and their offspring, if they have any, return to a more normal size and don’t keep the large size. The large humans are usually due to a tumor on the pituitary gland so it’s not a natural growth and it comes with leg problems and other issues with none of them passing larger body size on to future generations. I live in an area with a lot of breeders and they all say there’s a limit to what they can push their cattle/horses/dogs to before they just run into all kinds of problems and the animal either dies or future generations return to a more normal size.

Can you show any empirical evidence for this size issue from an evolutionary perspective?

“1) Animals are diverse with over 1.3 million species and the implicit assumption here is that size will have evolved the same way in all 1.3 million species. That is simply wrong when you are talking about such a vast group. “

Strawman. I’m not assuming anything. This is a smoke and mirrors attempt on your part equal to literary dodgeball. I’m not assuming that size has evolved the same way at all, as a matter of fact, I’m saying size didn’t ‘evolve’ at all when it came to small animals into large animals. There’s no evidence it did. YOU are the one assuming that mutations and nat sel will make creatures bigger.

“2) Size is also a complex quantitative trait. Meaning it is regulated by many, sometimes hundreds of genes, along with significant environmental factors. Only with the advent of next generation sequencing and the accompanying statistical techniques in the last 5 years has it even become feasible to really identify the underlying genetic variation. Previously we were really limited to identifying quantitative trait loci that may have multiple genes. You try to make generalizations regarding the effects of the pituitary gland, but how can you make that generalization when we barely understand the genetics?”

Smokescreen. Point one and two are useless. There’s no need to dive into the actual specifics of where the genome is affected. I can see, through empirical testing such as breeding, that large animals get small and stay small once they’re there. I don’t need to know what changed in the genome to see that. This is the beauty of real science. We can actually observe something happening without having to be PhD’s in biology. Why do we not see small animals become really large animals over time such is observed the other way around? Because mutations and nat sel can’t account for small to large in animals.

“3) How do we define "size"? There are multiple factors that fall under such an overly broad category; height, weight, length, width… “

Smokescreen. And it continues…..gee….I don’t know. Should we discuss what ‘nothing’ means as well Krauss? Should we just change definitions to fit our liking? Come on man….you know exactly what I’m talking about here so you’re being incredibly intellectually dishonest by even bringing something like that up. “height, weight, length, width” Turning a cell into a human or an amphibian tetrapod into a dinosaur would include all of those.

“You argue the existence of extreme animal sizes in the fossil record and how small modern species are. But this is reasoning is flawed.”

Strawman I’m not arguing for anything of the sort. There were equally small species in the fossil record with the dinosaurs but that’s never been the point of contention. You’re wasting my time here. If we all ‘evolved’ from a cell then mutations and nat sel have to be able to account for things getting bigger. There’s nothing flawed with that reasoning. You’re dodging.

“1) The fossil record represents ~3 billion years. If we allow the entirety of written human history and observation, that gives us only ~6000 years. From the advent of modern science and in particular the focused study and classification of species, that gives us less than 300 years since Linnaeus started modern taxonomy. Your argument implies an incorrect view of the ancient world, that there was a prehistoric time when life in general was large and now its not in the span of human experience. However, a 39 inch centipede may not have existed at the same time as the largest dinosaurs. Because when looking at the fossil record you are spanning hundreds of millions even billions of years, not a single epoch when everything existed at once. Giants come and go. Small species come and go. “

This shows nothing…

“2) It is directly contradicted by the fact that the largest animal known to ever live is the Blue Whale. The Blue Whale is larger than the largest dinosaur, it is larger than any creature that has ever existed. It is also larger than every single extinct whale species found in the fossil record. The earliest whale fossils are small. The largest extinct whale species is Basilosaurus, measuring ~65ft long. Blue Whales are on average 80ft long. So you and I live in an age where the largest animal ever lives alongside of us. “

I have no clue how this shows empirical evidence for mutations and nat sel accounting for large organisms.

“3) Your argument assumes a simple diffusion mechanism of Insect respiration. However, there is evidence against this. However, studying respiration in living insects has previously been limited by technological barriers. However, more recent work suggests that Insects have respiration mechanisms that allow for active oxygen movement through rapid tracheal compression and expansion. Such an active mechanism would remove the barriers to body size imposed by diffusion mechanisms. “

This simply asserts that “Such an active mechanism would remove the barriers to body size imposed by diffusion mechanisms.” But it still shows nothing.

“You also make an argument regarding how Chihuahuas cannot evolve to great dane size. This too is a wrong line of reasoning. Dogs evolved from wolves when they were domesticated up to 33,000 years ago. Since then there has been evolution for larger size and many dog species are larger than wolves. Mastiffs weigh almost twice as much as a Grey Wolf. This is evidence for the evolution of larger size from a smaller ancestral population.”

Finally! An attempt at actual evidence! Someone already tried this one on me as well. Here was his post.

“The one thing that I want to address is your comment that we only observe the evolution from wolves to small dogs like chiwawas.  This is not the case, and it can be shown with breeds like the Newfoundland, etc.  These breeds are much bigger then their ancestral population. (wolves)”

Here was my reply

Largest Newfoundland – 180 pounds

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/unleashed/2009/10/boomer-landseer-newfoundland-7-foot-long-dog.html

Largest wolf – 230 pounds

http://ecolocalizer.com/2009/11/27/albertas-record-size-wolf-fact-or-fiction/

Even if this happens to be a fake the largest on record is 175 pounds….right in line with the Newfoundland

You mentioned the mastiff. Largest mastiff I could find was Zorba at 37 inches tall

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zorba_(dog)

Largest current dog is a great dane at 43 inches tall

http://giantgeorge.com/

Most average mastiffs and great danes fall right in line with gray wolves for size. The next step up on the ancestral chart would probably be the Epicyon haydeni which matches what you’d find with the larger dogs. Regardless, if Zorba and Giant George have puppies they’ll go back to the more average sizes. Few, if any, will get as big as those guys are so you’re right back to square one.

“Mastiffs weigh almost twice as much as a Grey Wolf.”

Weight is important but now it’s time to bring up YOUR way of reasoning. So…..a gray wolf that has to run around the forest everyday to find something to eat or a dog that sits on the couch with all the food he could ever want at his disposal. Of COURSE the mastiffs will be heavier! Interesting that you would question my resonating when anyone with a little bit of common sense would realize why the dog weighs more than the wolf. What we need to look at is height which we’ve already addressed. There’s not a huge diff between them in the height department. Certainly not enough to prove anything within our discussion.

After all of your writing you didn’t prove anything. You can call this a ‘gap’ and dismiss it if you want but there’s a real problem here. We know, we know empirically,  after hundreds and hundreds of years of breeding that animals do NOT get larger and stay there. They get smaller and stay there. Period. This is where common sense needs to come into play. Mutations and nat sel cannot account for the size of ANYTHING we see around us. Elephants, mice, whatever. Your only resort is to have ‘faith’ that it all happened via mutations and nat sel but I’ve been told there’s no place for ‘faith’ and ‘science’ in the same arena. Aren’t scientists supposed to follow the truth no matter where it leads? Hmmmm……seems there are exceptions.

Now….if all of the large animals were created large from the very beginning and then became smaller via breeding over time then it fits perfectly with the empirical evidence we’ve collected from the past few hundred years. So go back to the years when you were a Christian. Doesn’t this evidence fit nicely with the Creation model? I’m just sayin’

That's fine. Get back to it when you can. Truth is, if that's all you have for evidence this conversation is pretty much done. I would suggest that maybe you pick another one of my 'gaps', I'll let you choose it this time, and we can start another thread. 

Here's what I don't want you to do. If you have more convincing evidence then great, post it. If you're just going to sit down and write a half page of dribble in an attempt to make excuses for evolution then don't waste your time. We'll start another thread with another topic and move on.

Here's my point to the argument above. In another post you said " Finding gaps in our understanding is not evidence against something." and I would actually agree with that. The problem is there are so MANY gaps that one has to question if the theory really stands up under intense scrutiny. We have to go back to 'what do we KNOW mutations and nat sel can do" and leave behind "what do we ASSUME and ASSERT mutations and nat sel can do." This is the real crux of the argument. As was shown above we KNOW mutations and nat sel, through empirical testing, cannot account for small animals into large animals but they do make really large animals really small over time. It's 'assumed' and 'asserted' that they can also make things much much bigger but that's nothing more than faith science. 

Also keep in mind that this is not something simple like "Why do we have 5 fingers instead of 6" or something like that. Organisms getting much much larger is required to explain the diversity around us and this is extremely simple to test. We don't need the latest machinery to sequence a genome and report on where certain changes are taking place. You just need a male and female dog, or horse, or cow, a little common sense and you're set. With artificial selection, which should be easier to get the required results than nat sel, we can separate the larger cattle from each other and only breed them with larger cattle. In this case we should have been able to breed really large cattle over the past few hundred years but we don't.....because we can't. The old evo dodge technique would be to claim "Well there's nothing limiting mutations and nat sel from doing this" but empirical evidence clearly shows us that there ARE limits to what organisms can do via those mechanisms. The follow up dodge question is then "Well what ARE those limits?" We don't need to define them. Is it 10 inches of height in dogs and 10 feet in humans? Doesn't really matter....we KNOW there are limitations based on the empirical evidence. The onus is still  on the evo to prove there are NOT limitations since that's the claim THEY make. I have empirical evidence right here that proves there are limits......what empirical evidence can be put forth to show there isn't limitations outside of assertions and assumptions when it comes to the size problem?

So I think we should maybe move on to the next ‘gap’ or ‘hole’ in evolution. A cell that eventually ‘evolves’ into a 3 foot dragonfly and then back into a 3  inch organism via the mechanisms of mutations and nat sel? No way. If that was the case then we should be able to breed things up just as easily as we are able to breed things down in today’s world. Can’t be done because those mechanisms have been empirically shown not to be capable of doing that.