Posted on 02/21/2005 4:03:29 AM PST by PatrickHenry
Nineteenth-century English social scientist Herbert Spencer made this prescient observation: "Those who cavalierly reject the Theory of Evolution, as not adequately supported by facts, seem quite to forget that their own theory is supported by no facts at all." Well over a century later nothing has changed. When I debate creationists, they present not one fact in favor of creation and instead demand "just one transitional fossil" that proves evolution. When I do offer evidence (for example, Ambulocetus natans, a transitional fossil between ancient land mammals and modern whales), they respond that there are now two gaps in the fossil record.
This is a clever debate retort, but it reveals a profound error that I call the Fossil Fallacy: the belief that a "single fossil"--one bit of data--constitutes proof of a multifarious process or historical sequence. In fact, proof is derived through a convergence of evidence from numerous lines of inquiry--multiple, independent inductions, all of which point to an unmistakable conclusion.
We know evolution happened not because of transitional fossils such as A. natans but because of the convergence of evidence from such diverse fields as geology, paleontology, biogeography, comparative anatomy and physiology, molecular biology, genetics, and many more. No single discovery from any of these fields denotes proof of evolution, but together they reveal that life evolved in a certain sequence by a particular process.
One of the finest compilations of evolutionary data and theory since Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species is Richard Dawkins's magnum opus, The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution (Houghton Mifflin, 2004)--688 pages of convergent science recounted with literary elegance. Dawkins traces numerous transitional fossils (what he calls "concestors," the last common ancestor shared by a set of species) from Homo sapiens back four billion years to the origin of heredity and the emergence of evolution. No single concestor proves that evolution happened, but together they reveal a majestic story of process over time.
Consider the tale of the dog. With so many breeds of dogs popular for so many thousands of years, one would think there would be an abundance of transitional fossils providing paleontologists with copious data from which to reconstruct their evolutionary ancestry. In fact, according to Jennifer A. Leonard, an evolutionary biologist then at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History, "the fossil record from wolves to dogs is pretty sparse." Then how do we know whence dogs evolved? In the November 22, 2002, Science, Leonard and her colleagues report that mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) data from early dog remains "strongly support the hypothesis that ancient American and Eurasian domestic dogs share a common origin from Old World gray wolves."
In the same issue, molecular biologist Peter Savolainen of the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm and his colleagues note that even though the fossil record is problematic, their study of mtDNA sequence variation among 654 domestic dogs from around the world "points to an origin of the domestic dog in East Asia" about 15,000 years before the present from a single gene pool of wolves.
Finally, anthropologist Brian Hare of Harvard University and his colleagues describe in this same issue the results of a study showing that domestic dogs are more skillful than wolves at using human signals to indicate the location of hidden food. Yet "dogs and wolves do not perform differently in a nonsocial memory task, ruling out the possibility that dogs outperform wolves in all human-guided tasks," they write. Therefore, "dogs' social-communicative skills with humans were acquired during the process of domestication."
No single fossil proves that dogs came from wolves, but archaeological, morphological, genetic and behavioral "fossils" converge to reveal the concestor of all dogs to be the East Asian wolf. The tale of human evolution is divulged in a similar manner (although here we do have an abundance of fossils), as it is for all concestors in the history of life. We know evolution happened because innumerable bits of data from myriad fields of science conjoin to paint a rich portrait of life's pilgrimage.
Er, not to pick nits or anything, but I believe that it is the "Law of Gravity," not the "Theory of Gravity."
Creation is it's own evidence of design...to those with an open mind and no axe to grind.
Shubi:
I remember when you first arrived and found yourself immersed in one of these mudslinging threads. People from everywhere were chewing on you posterior.
Congratulations on weathering the storm.
Thanks for the ping!
I beg to differ with you on this point. Already, this year, the liberals and their mouthpieces have begun to assault conservatism and the GOP as being dumb, country-dwelling and ignorant rednecks. In this regard, the anti-intellectual position of creationism is being cited as a concrete example of the accuracy of their allegations, and they paint all conservatives by the same brush because of a few creationists.
Unfortunately, it is not just a "few".
Since AG has thanked PH for the ping, I guess it means this is the end?
And that would be your not so humble opinion.
"and science doesn't take an unknown outside force or actor into consideration at all."
As for this, I'd say that an unknown force and or forces combining to create the "BIG BANG would qualify as a very BIG Unknown. Science can no easier explain where the "Big Bang" came from than can Billy Gramm explain where God came from.
Kirk out.
Thanks for the post!
Wouldn't it be better if there were a Science forum?
There might be somewhat less bickering on the main news forum.
How often do you speak to Jesus of Nazareth Shubi?
1 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
That's it Shubi, in a nutshell.
I'll 2nd that.
Gravity is still a theory, but I don't see those people trying to get stickers on the front of science textbooks asking students to "approach it with an open mind".
I always wondered about that myself.
I like your suggestion about the source of the problem.
Possibly, but I think Mid East oil may have had more to do with it. They had the most to lose financially.
hey, bud... never seen you on a CREVO thread before.
Altright fine however my point is that evolution is not fact. Gravity is a fact, evolution is a religion based on faith like, say,
CHRISTIANITY
I stay out of them typically because most of the creationists wouldn't know a logical thought if it was taped to a 2x4 and you whacked them about the head repeatedly with it.
What's the saying about wrestling with pigs? It just gets the pig mad and you dirty?
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