Posted on 10/15/2007 8:41:34 AM PDT by SirLinksalot
The enormous variety of dog breeds has been created in just a few hundred years. Why doesn't anyone consider that human beings have evolved any since the stone age?
Awful human beings making beautiful music seems to be the modern standard.
What used to rile Darwins critics most was his account of the phylogeny of our species. They didnt like our being just one branch among many in the evolutionary tree; and they liked still less having baboons among their family relations. The story of the consequent fracas is legendary, but that argument is over now. Except, perhaps, in remote backwaters of the American Midwest, the Darwinian account of our species history is common ground in all civilised discussions, and so it should be. The evidence really is overwhelming.
You did read the article, right?
The article seems to make two main points: 1) that natural selection is limited in what it can select for, because it can only select from phenotypes that are available and 2) that traits can become widespread (or ubiquitous) in a population even when they themselves are not specifically selected for.
Neither point is wrong, but then neither point is new, surprising, original or incompatible with Darwinism.
Yah, it doesn’t seem to me to be anything but a warning against overreaching when you try to logically reverse Darwinian natural selection to get to an answer of “why” a trait exists in a species.
This is what Michael Behe’s latest book, The Edge of Evolution was trying to explain.
In his observation, no new variation develops to allow natural selection to go anywhere other than within its limits. I think the author is trying to say this -— natural selection is a conservative force, not because it cannot drive novelty but because it doesnt have the resources on which to act.
It would have been very easy for Natural selection to act as the driving force of evolution if only variations exist to drive it. The weakness of Darwinism is not natural selection but the lack of diversity in the genome to drive it anywhere.
The wings kept breaking trying to get all that lard airborn and they gave up.
That's nowhere in this article, and it's not remotely what the article is about.
That one statement knocks this whole lengthy diatribe off its pins. All beings have minds thats why theyre called sentient beings.
??
The statement I quoted ignores the fact that, by definition, sentient beings have minds. “Natural selection” doesn’t necessarily occur randomly without the input of mind.
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