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?
...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 reproduction—as 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 observable—as 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 species—such 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 rate—and 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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