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?
Well, with a name like that, how could he go wrong?
It follows, therefore, that the only way to insure no ID impurities taint the Darwinist experiments and observations, all ID tools must be excluded.Congratulations, you've just destroyed the logical underpinnings of all science!If Darwinism cannot stay within the logical outlines (as mentioned above) and still supports the notion that ID is wrong, then we are leaving the realm of logical reasoning and entering the non-empirical kingdom of religious reasoning.
Every experiment that has ever been conducted by anything involves some "intelligent design" to be able to artificially hold some parts of the phenomenon under study constant, while other parts are free to act as they would in nature. This is why all scientists do experiments in the first place.
The alternative would be simple observation of the phenomenon as it occurs in nature. But most interesting natural phenomena are too complicated to fully understand without holding some things constant and examining only one or two parts at once.
Are you really willing to destroy all of science to keep your dogma alive?
think you meant to say creationists rather than christians
My point is that scientists will do whatevr they feel necessary to further their careers. It doesn't matter if it is true, just whether it will get you funding and attention. To pick and choose what you believe from scientists seems to defeat the purpose of science. Why would some say something is true if it isn't?
I'd be glad to, but your following ramble is far from the realm of actual logic.
and describe to me, from a logical perspective, Darwinism standing on its own without ID support. Since Darwinism (in this exercise), as a logical construct, has to exist on its own,
No it doesn't.
only tools and observations outside the domain of ID are allowable.
Wrong.
This is because, at the current time (as Darwinists have a habit of telling me), ID is neither testable nor falsifiable (though that may change in the near future).
A specific enough ID hypothesis would be testable, but the problem is that ID proponents never want to be pinned down that far -- for obvious reasons. ID *as* the ID proponents try to put it forth is indeed non-testable.
It follows, therefore, that the only way to insure no ID impurities taint the Darwinist experiments and observations, all ID tools must be excluded.
Complete twaddle. Try to actually understand a topic before you blather about it.
If Darwinism cannot stay within the logical outlines (as mentioned above)
Your meandering is hardly "logical".
and still supports the notion that ID is wrong,
The point is not that ID is "wrong". Try to remain coherent.
The application of intelligence in the analysis of evolution -- or any other field of knowledge -- is in no way "tainted" by the unrelated observation that the notion of "ID" as put forth by the IDers is so poorly developed that it's an untestable hypothesis. Nor does that observation somehow make the application of intelligent analysis into any sort of "religion", as you goofily claim next:
then we are leaving the realm of logical reasoning and entering the non-empirical kingdom of religious reasoning.
Yeah, sure. Now run off and play with your other ID friends. Leave the science to people who actually understand something about epistemology.
Dogs and wolves can interbreed.
They certainly can but they are different species.
Sorry but I cannot see how a dog could evolve into a wolf. No transitional dog-wolf fossils have ever been found and until a poodle turns into a wolf in a lab it is just based on faith.
"When reflecting upon it, I was quite taken aback by the immense hostility and contempt that I expressed toward the entire subject of faith. In short, my conclusion is that I have unresolved issues."
Your faith will forever be stunted if you bury your doubts. You must be honest with yourself. Seek the Truth, and the Truth will set you free.
I suspect that the root of your doubt is based on the age old question, "How did God ever allow evil to exhist?"
The reason people ask that question is because they think that the Trinity is nothing more than the captain of the Good Ship Lollypop. That is obviously a lie. God dwells in Light, to be sure. He is also a vengeful God. "Vengeance is Mine, sayeth the Lord." Does that sound like the Good Ship Lollypop? There is a sweetness in vengeance, which is why God desires it so much. Love and hate are different flavors. I've been dwelling on the scripture Savage recently emphasized, 'there's a time to hate'. To be fully alive, perhaps we must experience both emotions? [although petty, unjust revenge is forbidden to us mortals]. And perhaps 'hatred of the wicked' is necessary for civilization to survive? We can attempt tough love, and we can shame them with kindness and prayers. But without the thirst for righteousness, perhaps the wicked would ultimately overwhelm us.
I came up with this a few months back: "Justice at its best is love at its most savage." This is one way I look at the scripture, "Blessed are those who thirst for righteousness, for their thirst will be quenched." Should we feel ashamed when we delight in that thirst? I don't think so.
Back to why God allows evil to exhist:
There is an element of truth in the concept of 'yin' and 'yang'. Without darkness, light would be taken for granted, essentially invisible. But what is wrong-- completely wrong about the way people speak of 'yin' and 'yang' is that it is not our job to aid the darkness. Our purpose is to always be on the side of light. Without that purpose, our lives are meaningless. If anyone were to ever consider 'the balance' between good and evil, that is well beyond our pay grade-- and thank God for that!
Too shallow...perhaps it'd be better to say as "necessarily both necessary and sufficient" for proof.
There are passages in Hilaire Belloc's The Great Heresies which take the opposite view (faith is necessary to defend reason; as well as the argument of G.K. Chesterton (IIRC in The Everlasting Man) which defend empiricism--to paraphrase, "If you have a flawed theory of how to build an airplane, and you insist on the theory, the airplane will correct it by crashing to the ground."
Cheers!
True within scientific usage of the words, but confusing to a layperson. A lot of the smoke an noise on these threads would disappear if people defined their terms, as you just did.
Full Disclosure: If (say) gorillas and the like are great apes, are humans "wonderful" apes? and homosexuals "fabulous" apes?
Cheers!
Well, we now have a "mutant topic"--this would be a nice segue to "free will" vs. "determinism".
We will see how well this conversational genotype survives in this thread...
Cheers!
Full Disclosure: Was it design or chance that I posted this remark, and helped a new topic on its way? Yes, I saw the thread, read, and posted on purpose: but if the cat had come by five minutes earlier, I'd have missed this thread entirely...
You're preaching to the choir saying that on these threads.
Groups that can interbreed to some degree can still be separate species. Consider lions and tigers, for example.
Leave Napoleon Dynamite out of this!
A more technical way to put it is that they are independent breeding populations. But there are exceptions and gray areas -- this is because nature itself does not recognize the "species" concept. It's a manmade label applied for convenience and utility to certain groups.
Ahh! (Cartoon image of--not a lightbulb, but merely a flickering match--appears above my head.)
I'd better put on my asbestos suit. :-)
So in other words, "species" were originally defined or characterised according to cladistics. Then when DNA was discovered, there was a rush to match outward physical characteristics to certain genes, and it was assumed there was an exact one-to-one match: for each and every gene sequence, there was some protein, or arrangement of toes, or what have you, and vice versa. *AND* some people (maybe some laypeople) somehow got the idea that this one-to-one match of DNA to appearance uniquely defined a "species". *AND* since a literal interpretation of Genesis demanded that all species appeared "instantaneously" at the same time, in their present form, *AND* without the possibility of variation, "evolution is nonsense".
So in effect, many of the opponents of evolution are tilting not at windmills, but at poorly drawn caricatures of windmills--and they won't stop tilting enough even to listen to someone saying,"Wait! You're even holding the lance wrong!"
The first is that species formation involves a sudden "freak" with a massive mutation that occurs in a single individual in one generation.
*GASP* You mean this isn't the basis of punctuated equilibrium? (See also "Science Made Stupid" by Tom Weller, from about 1986.)
Cheers!
Humor columnist Dave Barry once said on this topic (and I quote):
Life is anything that dies when you stomp on it.
Works for me!
Cheers!
What is the basic criteria that distinguishes one species from another?
Rhetorical nonsense.
There can be no evidence that scientology isn't the One True Faith, that aliens from space seeded consciousness, or that Santa Claus didn't create the universe. It doesn't mean that any of those beliefs are scientific in anyway or that they need seriously be discussed.
Science is only concerned with facts. You may choose to believe that an inability to disprove a negative somehow proves something, but in reality it does not.
Correct. So is it your opinion that it is appropriate for scientists to state these things as established facts? I disagree. A scientist has no business asserting *as proven fact* that Santa Claus didn't create the universe, because he was unable to observe such, and therefore his claim is not scientific.
It doesn't mean that any of those beliefs are scientific in anyway or that they need seriously be discussed.
So *don't* take them seriously. But that is different from asserting that science shows them to be false.
Science is only concerned with facts. You may choose to believe that an inability to disprove a negative somehow proves something, but in reality it does not.
Where did I claim that?
You're not really being intellectually honest, my friend.
That's not what's being said here at all. What's being said is that ID is not scientific, and has no place being taught as science. It's religion.
Kindly provide citations for scientists asserting *as proven fact* that God did not create the universe or stop making such claims.
You're not suggestion that a wolf and a dog are the same species?
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