Posted on 07/24/2003 1:55:39 PM PDT by Mr.Atos
I was just lisening to Medved debating Creationism with Athiests on the air. I found it interesting that while Medved argued his side quite effectively from the standpoint of faith, his opponents resorted to condescension and beliitled him with statements like, "when it rains, is that God crying?" I was reminded of the best (at least most amusing)debate that I have ever heard on the subject of Creationism vs Evolution, albeit a fictional setting. It occurred on the show, Friends of all places between the characters Pheobe (The Hippy) and Ross (The Paleontologist). It went like this...
Pheebs: Okay...it's very faint, but I can still sense him in the building...GO INTO THE LIGHT MR. HECKLES!!
Ross: Whoa, whoa, whoa. What, uh, you don't believe in evolution? Pheebs: Nah. Not really. Ross: You don't believe in evolution? Pheebs: I don't know. It's just, ya know, monkeys, Darwin, ya know, it's a, it's a nice story. I just think it's a little too easy.
Ross: Uh, excuse me. Evolution is not for you to buy, Phoebe. Evolution is scientific fact. Like, like, the air we breathe, like gravity... Pheebs: Uh, okay, don't get me started on gravity.
Ross: You uh, you don't believe in gravity? Pheebs: Well, it's not so much that ya know, like I don't *believe* in it, ya know. It's just...I don't know. Lately I get the feeling that I'm not so much being pulled down, as I am being pushed.
Ross: How can you NOT BELIEVE in evolution? Pheebs: [shrugs] I unh-huh...Look at this funky shirt!!
Ross: Well, there ya go. Pheebs: Huh. So now, the REAL question is: who put those fossils there, and why...?
Ross: OPPOSABLE THUMBS!! Without evolution, how do YOU explain OPPOSABLE THUMBS?!? Pheebs: Maybe the overlords needed them to steer their spacecrafts!
Pheebs: Uh-oh! Scary Scientist Man!
Pheebs: Okay, Ross? Could you just open your mind like, *this* much?? Okay? Now wasn't there a time when the brightest minds in the world believed that the Earth was flat? And up until what, like, fifty years ago, you all thought the atom was the smallest thing, until you split it open, and this like, whole mess o' crap came out! Now, are you telling me that you are so unbelievably arrogant that you can't admit that there's a teeny, tiny possibility that you could be wrong about this?!?
Pheebs: I can't believe you caved. Ross: What? Pheebs: You just ABANDONED your whole belief system! I mean, before, I didn't agree with you, but at least I respected you. Ross: But uh.. Pheebs: Yeah...how...how are you gonna go in to work tomorrow? How...how are you gonna face the other science guys? How...how are you gonna face yourself? Oh! [Ross runs away dejected] Pheebs: That was fun. So who's hungry?
Have you ever designed programs and written software? If so you know that you "borrow" extensively from previous designs where appropriate, and absolutely reuse code wherever you can. Why write something from scratch if you can take something that does 70% of what you need and re-work it? So you end up doing a bunch of copy&paste. Not to mention that the object oriented model is designed to enable this through the concept of inheritance.
So -- in fact your point is equally applicable to intelligent design as it is to evolution. Except for evolution, it must imply a common ancestor, whereas with intelligent design, it just implies "mostly" common ancestry.
You bring up something I have been arguing for a long time -- that designs evolve. Unless the designer is completely outside of time, it is impossible to design a complex working system without cut and try.
This is precisely the fundamental issue. As I understand it, the "theory" of evolution predicts that speciation will occur given enough time and isolation of the populations. The problem is two-fold.
1st, a weak definition of species does not verify the theory. If, as you suggest, we redefine dog breeds as "ring species", where ring species can in fact interbreed, we are assuming our conclusion, which is that given enough time and isolation, those ring species will in fact eventually reach the point where they cannot interbreed. But this is an assumption that is inferred!!!
2nd, as far as I can tell by reading up on the experiments, they have been run on flies (because of the rapid reproduction cycle) and have produced populations which, by preference, choose not to mate with one another. There again, by inference it is assumed that they would eventually drift far enough apart that they could not mate with one another. This may or may not be true, but it is not proof. Remember the joke about "inductive proof" I provided in a previous post illustrating the danger of assuming this form of proof.
The primary reason I criticize the theory is that the weakly worded versions merely apply to breeds within a species while assuming that eventually speciation would occur, and the strongly worded versions do not show absolute proof but again depend upon inference. Now a good theory should be constructed such that one can run an experiment and if one cannot verify the result absolutely, the theory should be chucked out (unless it has some other redeeming traits such as predictability which evolutionary theory lacks because of the time frames involved). Now with evolution no one, as far as I have seen, has really run an experiment under earth natural conditions that shows speciation of isolated populations with a common ancestor population. And that is where the problem comes in.
Let us be perfectly blunt. Science rejects homeopathy and astrology on the grounds that experimental results do not absolutely prove the theory, and those experiments that do support the theory require assumptions and inference. So why do we reject those two theories yet accept evolutionary theory? I argue that the reasons are sociological, cultural, and political, and not scientific.
People define species to fit the needs of their ideology. Evolutionists would expect a rather fuzzy definition. Darwin said he had come to regard species as just strong varieties. So it is not surprising that evolutionists regard the species boundary as anything that, in the wild, results in groups not intermating.
Whereas creationists, seeing a need to explain observed variation among living things, regard species as comprising all individuals that are biologically capable of mating with fertile offspring, regardless of what happens in the wild.
It is interesting that even this position has fuzziness, because there are varieties where interbreeding produces some fertile offspring and some infertile. Actually, there are humans with atypical chromosome counts, some of whom can have childrem.
As I pointed out in a previous post, this is not precisely correct. In plants, where I concede there is evidence for evolution, once genetic mapping of DNA was performed botonists found that they had misclassified many species. In some cases they not only had to move a classified species from one genus to another, they even had to move it from one family to another.
What is not compatible with intelligent design (but is compatible with stupid design) is the existence of shared errors in the dna of related species.
The counter example I give for this comes from software development. It is common practice to borrow extensively from previous designs and programs when building a new system. If there exists a section of code that is poorly written but "works", then time is not spent investigating it (since it works) but it is just copy/pasted and reused. Furthermore, even if there are errors in the copied code, if those exist in logic paths that are not exercised by the new programs then those errors remain. As an example, suppose that the errors occur in code used to print to some printers that are obsolete. Since those printers do not exist in the new environment, the fact that the code has errors in that area doesn't matter. Finally, since projects have contraints, minor errors that do occur are accepted if the value of copy/pasting previous code outways the impact of those minor errors.
It might (or might not) make sense for a designer to make use of common parts - it doesn't make much sense to me that both chimps and apes (to use my favorite example) should have been 'designed' to be susceptable to scurvy, by using the exact same scurvy mutation.
But in fact your example illustrates my point. If chimps and apes live in an environment where they have access to fruits or other vegetation that contains vitamin C, the fact that they are susceptible to scurvy is not that relevant.
A fundamental error, I think, made by those who reject intelligent design is that they assume something like: if speciation is directed by intelligent design, and intelligent design is performed by God, and God is perfect, why then we wouldn't see all this sloppy work. Ergo it was not directed by God, ergo there is no one to do intelligent design, therefore intelligent design is rejected. I suggest this:
In Western culture for all of recorded history there was a belief both in angels and "nature spirits". In Eastern culture for all of recorded history there was a belief in devas. (Devas might be considered to have the attributes of both angels and nature spirits.) The purpose of nature spirits was, in fact to guide and protect the growth and population of plants and animals.
One could hypothesize that for intelligent design, God simply subcontracted the work to angels (designers), who in turn had the nature spirits do the actual modifications (coders). And as someone who has extensive project experience and understanding of project constraints on the final result, one would absolutely expect errors, DNA coden reuse for new functionality, defects (mutations) that provide advantages but with damaging limitations, and so on.
Actually, evolutionary theory and intelligent design are not that far apart. The major difference is that evolutionary theory says "well, given enough time and geographical isolation it just happens" and intelligent design says "except what just happens is guided."
I know this was true for a while in the 1980s but I would hope the word is out about the hybrids. They're particularly dangerous to small children.
That not gonna go over well with the "God Doesn't Make Any Junk" bumpersticker crowd.
So our planet lucked out and got Clarence for its guide.
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