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To: Fester Chugabrew
I mean, if intelligent beings manipulate the gene pool, how is intelligence going to be eliminated from the process and result? Has science yet predicted morphological changes between species and watched it happen without guidance?

Yes, if you go to the talk origins web page, there are references to roughtly 50 different known speciation events that were caused by environmental changes.

I don't think enough is known about the genetic content of each living being to accurately predict what any outcome of any of the species currently living on planet earth will be. Even if we did know what the genetic content of each creature is, we already know that changes in a species environment helps determine which mutations survive in the new environment. We can't even determine when the environment is going to do in a week, let alone what we can say any part of the Earth will be like in 100 years, or 10,000 years(which I would guess is the average timescale of a speciation event). So to extrapolate on that scale is nearly impossible because the processes that the Earth acts on, and is acted on are extremely chaotic (one might say stochastic in the more destructive environmental changing events). So while current schools of thought are predictive on past events, our knowledge in other fields is prohibitive when you want to use the to predict the future.

1,096 posted on 12/02/2004 7:52:46 AM PST by ThinkPlease (Fortune Favors the Bold!)
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To: ThinkPlease
So while current schools of thought are predictive on past events, our knowledge in other fields is prohibitive when you want to use the to predict the future.

A science which, by its very nature, attempts to discover the past, and to explain the mechanisms which were involved, is not necessarily going to predict the future.

For example, we know American history. But history is not about predicting the future. We can't predict what this place will be like in 100 years, because we don't know what challenges will come up, or how people will react. We may be more of the same, or we may be conquered by the Arabs, or we may all be dead from disease. That doesn't in any way invalidate American history as a genuine field of study.

Predictions in an historical field relate to the kinds of evidence that are likely to turn up, if our current understandings are correct. And that's how it is with evolution.

1,146 posted on 12/02/2004 11:28:19 AM PST by PatrickHenry (The List-O-Links for evolution threads is at my freeper homepage.)
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