Posted on 07/22/2005 4:46:53 AM PDT by Nicholas Conradin
...and you determine truth from nontruth by...? What reality-checks do you perform on your notions of what is true or not?
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And, I ask you the same about your notions.
Since evolution does not attempt to demonstrate how the first life came to be, I find your ability to debate this subject lacking.
Now that I've cleared that up. Any attempt by a creationist reading this, and then continuing to accuse the theory of the evolution of stating that humans descended from chimps, is a liar.
That's a little rash. I think "chimp" is a close enough describe a non-human primate, without getting precious about it.
Over the course of 20 years, I wrote about evolution as describing the origin of man for for mass-market magazines. Talking to scores of evolutionary specialists among biologists, anthropologists, and zoologists, I never found a convincing, or even logical explanation of how you get one species from another through reproductionas in, how we get to Mozart from a non-human primate. They weren't even interested in the question. An undirected mechanism driving the multiplication of species on earth was just a given for them. That's why the article author's riff about the number of articles a creationist would have to refute is meaningless. The number of articles that even address the issue is infinitesimal, and the rest take a God-free origin of species as an assumption.
Where the human (or chimp) species came from is a different question from whether species undergo natural selection, which I view as one of God's tools, like the law of gravity. Natural selection is reasonable and observableas the author said, "what survives, survives." A better statement might be "What survives, lives to reproduce itself." If you're a bird who wants to fish in a pond and you have webbed feet, you'll probably survive and leave more offspring than a bird that doesn't. Darwin's inspiration was watching animal breeders select for desirable traits along the generations. Could that be happening in the natural world? It was a good hypothesis.
But the origin of species is something completely different, and much thornier.
The definition of a species is that it can't reproduce with anything outside the species. This gets really tough when you're talking about sexually reproducing speciessuch as chimps and us. Let's say you get a freak that has a different number of chromosomes from its parents, a new species. Where do you get two of them (male and female), to reproduce? A brother and sister? The offspring of such unions have a low survival rateand we're asked to believe they flourish and multiply better than the competition? And yet this is assumed to have happened, not just once, but for all of the billions of sexually reproducing species on, pardon the expression, God's green earth.
The closest attempt I've seen to explain the origin of a new species through unintelligent design was an argument that an asexually reproducing bacterium had mutated into a genotype different from its forebears. But that doesn't get you there.
That's why the question of why we're us instead of chimps, I mean non-human primates, is more completely explained through theology than biology. At least, at present.
You err in three different ways:
1. The validity of evolution in no way depends on the question of how life first arose, just as the validity of meteorology (the study of weather) depends in no way on where the air came from originally. Whether the atmosphere was poofed into existence by God, coalesced out of a solar nebula, was belched out by volcanos, or was poured into place by gigantic alien space ships, the properties and behavior of the atmosphere remain the same and depend only on its current composition, and meteorology is just as valid no matter what the source of the atmosphere. And it's the same for evolution -- evolution concerns the history of life on Earth, and the properties of living things and how they change over time due to the relevant processes, once life existed, no matter *where* it "came from". When you drive a car, does the physics of energy and momentum by which it works -- and you drive -- depend upon the source of the metal it's made from? No. Does the operation of an internal combustion engine depend upon the source of the gasoline it burns -- or only upon its chemical composition? *Wherever* life came from, evolution accurately describes what has happened to it since.
In fact, anyone familiar with evolutionary biology would understand that it is *isolated* from whatever processes originally formed life. Evolution can only take place when *reproduction* exists. Since reproduction obviously was not occurring before the first things which we might accurately label as "living", the original formation of life *necessarily* occurred by processes other than evolution. The nature of those processes, whatever they might have been, are irrelevant to evolution itself, and evolution is irrelevant to the original formation of life. It is either ignorant or dishonest to try to pin the validity of evolution to whether or not anyone can demonstrate how the NON-evolutionary origin of life occurred. It's like blaming the Bush administration for events which occurred before he took office. Abiogenesis was pre-evolution, and occurred by different processes. Evolution stands or falls on its own, it is not dependent upon any theory (or lack of theory) of life's ultimate origins. Even if God dropped the earliest life forms onto the planet, evolution *still* demonstrably shaped them thereafter.
2. Evolutionists *have* "checked the accuracy of their belief" in a mind-boggling number of independent methods, countless times over the past 100+ years. It has passed these tests with flying colors, and has survived all potential tests of falsification.
3. Contrary to your unfounded presumption, research into abiogenesis (the origins of life) have been extremely fruitful. The picture is still incomplete of course (but then, so is the atomic theory of matter and every other scientific field of study), but there have been a vast number of findings which, while not conclusive, *very* strongly indicate that the "life arose naturally" hypothesis is on the right track. Your apparent notion that science "cannot demonstrate" or support any aspect of this paradigm is extremely mistaken. The hypothesis of abiogenesis makes a huge number of predictions about what we should find when we look at the evidence, and in the many ways which we have to date been able to test these predictions, they have been confirmed.
Since evolution does not attempt to demonstrate how the first life came to be, I find your ability to debate this subject lacking.
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One word. Abiogenesis.
You do it all the time!
(Yuck! I think I have some primordial ooze on my shoe.) ;)
Yes, abiogenesis. While it does not contradict the theory of evolution, it is not part of the theory of evolution. Thus anyone who states that evolution is wrong because life cannot be created in a lab (or other various "first life" hasn't/can't happens) is just proving that they don't know what the theory of evolution is.
Bottom line. All of the work concerning abiogensis could be completely wrong. But the theory of evolution won't care one bit. The theory of evolution stands on its own merits, not on the merits of abiogensis.
I bet you'd like "Forbidden Archeology - the Hidden History of the Human Race" by Michael Cremo. There are two versions - one is long with many scholarly footnotes etc, and one is somewhat shortened for lay readers. I have both.
You should try to get it. I found it fascinating, and of course, evolution believers scoff at it. Cremo states that there is a knowledge filter and that archeologists and others in the field who find evidence, for instance, of much older modern appearing humans are black balled, fired, evidence covered up or denied, etc. There is a strong vested interest in the status quo.
He has a website, and a new book "Human Devolution - an Alternative to Darwin's Theory" which evolutionists naturally scoff at even more.
I know! Wedding present time! Freepmail me how I can send you a present!
Christians could also believe that God created chance and built the right circumstances for evolution.
But that would be over their heads.
I always try to get my biological information from engineers. Of course, I have heard it said, by a biologist no less, that since the wings on an airplane don't flap up and down, they can't possible fly
Hindus also do not accept the Darwinian theory of evolution, if they have faith in the Vedas.
Oops - possibly. (He was a biologist, not a linguist.)
read later
It goes heavily into why evolution is so thoroughly accepted by the scientific community. You could do an abbreviated ping (sorta like a pi).
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