Posted on 12/09/2004 9:21:27 AM PST by Michael_Michaelangelo
Is Darwin winning the battle, but losing the war?
As soon as one challenge to the teaching of evolution is beaten in the courts, another emerges to take its place.
The current contender is “intelligent design,” a theory that according to advocates at the Discovery Institute “makes no religious claims, but says that the best natural evidence for life’s origins points to design rather than a process of random mutation and natural selection.”
(Excerpt) Read more at firstamendmentcenter.org ...
Sorry, I meant to address that to everyone, not you in particular.
So genetic drift, the imperceptable movement of a jawbone occuring over centuries that results in an organism with no selective advantage over its ancestor, do you define that as evolution? The population changed, but they're still capable of breeding with eachother.
This is an important point. You define evolution in these very stark terms... isolation, inability to interbreed. But evolutionists claim that genetic drift occuring in an intact population, resulting in healthy breeding populations is evolution just the same as freak accidents of nature that isolate groups as in your example.
True. I was overly simplistic. I am still looking for a good definition of "species", though for creatures that reproduce exclusively asexually. (or for certain plants that reproduce by self-pollination or for hermaphroditic animals that self-fertilize.)
Look at dog breeding, as an example.
Exactly. That's called natural selection.
Genetic drift is evolution. It is not speciation.
Could you elaborate on what you're trying to say here? I hope this is not a reference to one of the debunked calculations that supposedly prove the probability of evolution impossible.
I call it an increase in the number of one kind of bacteria and a decrease in the number of another kind of bacteria. One kind of bacteria hasn't transformed itself into another kind of bacteria.
Suppose we (scientists) say they don't. How do you enforce your claim of privilege?
Absolutely. Entropy is better seen as a quantity that deals with dispersion of energy. Energy tends to become more dispersed over time. It is only through a single equation in statistical mechanics that it became associated with the concept of disorder, namely the Boltzman equation S=klnW. Even here, "disorder" is not a completely appropriate term. The W refers to the number of available microstates of the system, which is only a loose measure of disorder. Usually what we would consider a more disordered system will have more available states. This is not necessarily always the case, however, as your work with di-block copolymer systems demonstrates.
"Species" is tough to define. On the other hand, some people think it's a property of individuals.
"Can I still be the first one to bring up Jesus and Hitler?"
Hitler was a Christian; therefore all Christians are Nazis?
Evolution is exactly as I stated. The theory of evolution (which is actually misnamed. It attempts to explain the diversity of life, not evolution) is that evolution has led to the production of all of the many species of life present on earth. The theory is that evolution produces new species. This has been observed in the lab and in nature. In your example, if there are now more organisms with an imperceptably moved jaw than there were centuries ago, then it is possible that this movement DOES confer some advantage to the organism (even if we don't know what that advantage is.) Your example is an example of evolution. What I have stated is one possible mechanism (believed to be a fairly commonly occurring one in nature) of speciation. I don't claim that all speciation events occur via this mechanism.
Unfortunately, the falsifying experiment has been done many times, including once by yours truly. You start with a monoclonal culture - that is, all the bacteria are descended by asexual reproduction from a single bacterium. You expose the culture to a mutagen, and then look for resistance. The original number of antibiotic resistant bacteria was zero. The culture evolved into a fully resistant population.
Hitler was a vegetarian. Jesus ate the flesh of animals. Therefore Hitler was more ethical than Jesus.
Call it what you want. The increased survivability of a variant of an organism with a given trait in a given environment over the same organism without that trait in that environment is the definition of natural selection. The theory of evolution states that natural selection is one possible mechanism for speciation. That is what you disagree with.
The answer to the first question is easy: of course we do.
...
The second question - can people with an ideological agenda take control of the scientific curriculum out of the hands of scientists? - is harder.
Question 2A: Can scientists with an ideological agenda take control of the scientific curriculum?
Answer: yes, and more easily if you take the stance that only scientists can decide what constitutes science.
Do only football players determine what constitutes football?
Sometimes you need referees, and sometimes referees from outside perspectives can bring insight that insiders don't. It's my observation that many scientists overlook the lab coat theologians in their midst, even as they decry the intrusions of theologians from without.
Players and coaches, and coaching associations, yes. Participants in football, in other words. I haven't seen any sign that the NBA is trying to force football to abandon two-deep zone defenses.
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