Posted on 07/22/2005 4:46:53 AM PDT by Nicholas Conradin
In a recent TCS essay ("Darwin and Design: The Evolution of a Flawed Debate") I attacked what I regarded as the excesses of both sides of the evolution-creationism debate. There were angry responses in the mail and the blogosphere from both the creationist and the evolution sides, which pleased me, since there were clearly oxen on both sides that felt they had been gored, and caps in my piece that were felt to have, uncomfortably, fit. The angry evolutionists were especially interesting, as they often wound up admitting implicitly that their real agenda was atheism -- while denying that there was any social policy message in that agenda.
In the essay I did state flatly that the theory of evolution had been proved. I wanted it to be clear where I stood. Much of the mail I received protested about that statement. I hold to it, and hold to it not as my own opinion, but as a fact, like the existence of Australia, which is not my opinion but a fact. But I do know that there are many who sincerely, and given their range of knowledge, rationally, do not believe in the theory of evolution.
By the theory of evolution I mean the origination of new species from common ancestral forms by an iterated process of genetic mutation, natural selection, and hereditary transmission, whereby the frequencies of newly altered, repeated, and old genes and introns in a given lineage can cross ecological, structural, and behavioral thresholds that radically separate one species from another. In one sense, this can be summed up in a syllogism, which must be true if we make the basic and essential act of faith that logic itself is true: survivors survive. Given enough time, variation among the genes of individuals, variations in habitat in space and time, the process by which genes translate into proteins, tissues, and organs, and the thresholds that define biological species, all of which can be observationally verified, the principle of the "survivors survive" syllogism must bring about a huge branching of different kinds of life.
The above summary statement of the theory will not convince opponents, who will be able to pick philosophical holes in it (which holes have been sewn up by countless scientists and philosophers in the last 150 years). But what opponents of evolution do not perhaps realize is what they are up against in terms of sheer human and civilizational achievement based on the evolutionary paradigm. This is not a proof of evolution, any more than the four-thousand year history of the survival of the Jewish people is a proof of Judaism or the worldwide congregation of Christianity is a proof of that religion; but it is an indication of the kind of scholarship that would be needed to refute it.
There are at least 50 major journals in the academic field of biology. All accept without question the theory of evolution as I outlined it above. They are not attempting even to prove the theory, any more than math journals attempt to prove that the sum of the internal angles of a plane triangle is 180 degrees, or engineering journals revisit the existence of gravity. But they would be nonsense without the theory of evolution, just as engineering would be nonsense without gravity. Each of those journals is published about four times a year; several of them have been in existence for over a hundred years. Each journal contains at least ten articles of about 2-20 pages, and each of those articles represents several months' or years' work by a team of trained biologists whose most compelling material and moral interest would be to disprove the work of all their predecessors and to make an immortal name by doing so. The work of the biological teams is required to be backed up by exhaustive experiment and observation, together with exact statistical analysis of the results. There is a continuous process of search through all these articles by trained reviewers looking for discrepancies among them and demanding new experimental work to resolve them. Since every one of these articles relies on the consistency and truth of the theory of evolution, every one of them adds implicitly to the veracity of the theory. By my calculation, then, opponents of evolution must find a way of matching and disproving, experiment by experiment, observation by observation, and calculation by calculation, at least two million pages of closely reasoned scientific text, representing roughly two million man-years of expert research and perhaps trillions of dollars of training, salaries, equipment, and infrastructure.
But the task of the opponent does not end here. For biology is not the only field for which the theory of evolution is an essential foundation. Geology, physical anthropology, agricultural science, environmental science, much of chemistry, some areas of physics (e.g. protein folding) and even disciplines such as climatology and oceanography (which rely on the evolutionary history of the planet in its calculations about the composition of the atmosphere and oceans), are at least partially founded on evolution. Most important of all for our immediate welfare, medicine is almost impossible as a research discipline without evolutionary theory. So perhaps the opponent must also throw in another 4 million pages, four million man-years, and ten trillion dollars -- and be prepared to swallow the billions of human deaths that might follow the abandonment of the foundations of medical, mining, environmental, agricultural, and climatological knowledge.
If what is at stake is a proposition in the theology of biblical interpretation that is not shared by a large minority or possibly a majority of Christians and Jews, perhaps it might be more prudent to check the accuracy of the theology, which, after all, is a human creation even if scripture itself is conceded to be divinely inspired. Might not God's intentions be revealed better in the actual history and process of nature, his creative expression, than in the discrepancies we might hope to find in its self-consistency and coherent development?
It's sad that you believe there is no objective truth. I wouldn't have pegged you as a relativist.
You think there's something in there?
Fabulous post on Galileo. I have to say that reading the similarities in argument between then and now actually lifts my spirits a bit. After all, the world marches on, and even after condemnation and suppression by an authority with much more power than the creatinoids today, Galileo was eventually justified.
I only wish that the biblical literalists would find the same hope. After all, Galileo was proven correct, and yet Christianity hasn't crumbled into dust.
Not so...
Jesus came to make ALL religion obsolete, AND DID...
Christianity, according to Jesus, is a family, not a tax exempt organization..
Christianity NOT according to Jesus can be anything and CAN be a tax exempt organization..
i.e. not all christians are christians and not Evos are atheists..
I wish I shared your optimism. Gallileo was on the leading edge of a storm of pent up intellectual thought and curiosity.
I think we are on the downhill side of that mountain.
Intelligent as they are, using an engineer as an information source for biology is a logical fallacy called appeal to authority. Don't bet on it.
"True? I don't know. But I know enough that the idea that evolution is somehow a proven fact is nearly as laughable as stating that the Earth orbits the moon. Mathematically, since all things in the universe are relative, this can be shown, but that doesn't make it so.
Strictly, the Earth does orbit the moon as the moon orbits the Earth. You can prove it to yourself with a little experiment. Take a short stick, say .5m long. On that stick affix a weight on one end. Now take another weight twice as heavy as the first and stick it on the other end. Tie a string to the stick close to the heavier weight and move the string until the two weights are level. Start the weights spinning around the string and you will notice an exaggerated example of the relationship between the earth and the moons orbits. In this case you can believe your eyes.
It's not much of a theory, scientifically speaking, since it has next to no math.
And your refutation is full of bald assertions, red herrings, well poisoning and does not address evolution in the least, either the Theory of Evolution or the observed fact of evolution.
I think it's a pendulum really. We may be on the downhill side now, but there's bound to be another uphill followed by a peak at some point. Ironically, I have faith in this :)
I have told you straight up that the theory of evolution does not care how the first life forms came to be. Now that I have revealed this fact to you, any attempt by you to say otherwise makes you a liar. It is as simple as that.
Writers often describe their characters as taking on a life of their own. Don't worry about it. It takes a special skill to write fiction and some of that skill doesn't translate well into English.
Give me a break. You know what the point is, and focusing on a niggling detail not germaine to it isn't intellectually honest.
But hey, if that is all you have...
I have a really tough time with this one in that I relate deeply with Christian values and principles and yet my "God-given" intellect suggests rather strongly that God, as with all gods societies have recognized, is a human-manufactured entity.
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