Posted on 12/27/2004 2:34:25 PM PST by Ed Current
You really don't get this argument, do you? The Darwinist rejected the science that supports **her own argument** - not me. I do not reject the proven facts of fossil evidence, carbon dating, or even geological strata dating methods.
What I take umbrage at are the unscientific religious beliefs some people - such as my Darwinist friend - invest in their particular faith-based belief in evolution. They have opinions they spout as fact that are totally unsupported by scientific fact.
She *believes* in evolution yet she simultaneously rejects the science that would support it. That makes her no different than the religious Creationists (capital 'C') who *believe* something else that is also completely devoid of scientific support.
I accept the science but I do not agree with the multitude of unsupported conclusions that are drawn from it. I also fully expect that as new facts are literally unearthed that evolutionary theory will be replaced with a completely new theory. Call it the evolution of evolutionary theory, if you want.
My main problem with evolutionary thought being unscientific is that almost all of the science involved starts with an evolutionary conclusion and works backward to see how whatever new fact will support evolution instead of letting the fact speak for itself.
A good example of this would be the recent discovery of the 'Hobbits' - the three foot tall homonids whose existence as recently as 12,000 years ago in the south western Pacific have no evolutionary trail as such homonids were thought to be extinct long before this period. One anthropological group online has posited that the Hobbits are a modern Australipithicus - and the leaves the question of how Aust. has a four million year gap and a six thousand mile gap in evolution and migration.
So here's a discovery that, from a laymans' point of view, blows the crap out of previous doctrinology with regards to hominid development. There's no 'evolutionary' explanation for these new homonids. So now the scramble will not be to find a truth, but rather to make this new fact fit into a preconception. Give it a year and there'll be an acceptable hypothesis explaining why there's a four million year gap in current homonid evolutionary theory with regards to the Aust. branch of the genus.
In a nutshell, the fact comes before the conclusion in good science. Evolutionists turn that on its head and use each new fact to support a preconceived conclusion - this prejudice inevitably excludes facts and conclusions that do not support the conclusion of evolution.
You could make exactly the same sort of argument about any number of historical or present issues in natural science. When the ether paradigm was upon us, we did our thinking backwards from the assumed existence of ether. We presently do our physical astronomy backwards from the assumed correctness of the law of gravity--even though there are literally astronomically large discrepencies in our data, particularly with respect to outlying galactic orbits, from the ideal law of gravity. This is not suspect science. This is how science works. We can either assume what we think is a correct paradigm with which to construct our observational and analytical tools, or we can go back to digging up grubs and worms for a living.
The fact that we assume a paradigm doesn't not imply that we don't critically test it. The theory of ether eventually died under the weight of conflicting results. The theory of evolution gets critically tested every time we send out students to dig where we think particular stuff is, and they find it with greater frequency than that with which random digging turns up the same stuff. It is patently obvious, except to those determined not to see, that the natural world passes up endless globs of opportunities to gainsay evolutionary theory, without any such gas having been seriously passed.
When the oil companies stop tracing devonian shorelines to find oil, maybe it will be time to reconsider the evolutionary paradigm. Until then, reasonable as you make your position sound, it is not: it is like putting up a contrary fart against a hurricane of evidence. No natural science paradigm presently lies on firmer ground, amongst those qualified to judge it (scientists) than does evolutionary theory, on account of the endless opportunities for devastating countervailing evidence to show up--yet which persistently does not.
I have no idea why this presents a problem to you. What on earth makes you think 6000 miles or 4 million years since branching makes a modern Astralipith. impossible?
So your complaint is that evolutionists operate only on evidence they have at hand when they construct the evolutionary tree, and ignore evidence that might eventually turn up but which they presently have no knowledge of?
"I have no idea why this presents a problem to you. What on earth makes you think 6000 miles or 4 million years since branching makes a modern Astralipith. impossible?"
Where in HELL did you get this from what I wrote? I did NOT say a modern Aust. was "impossible". >>I<< brought it up as a FACT!!!! Don't posture yourself as enlightened by reading things into my words that ARE NOT THERE!
And my complaint is that, as you call them, 'evolutionists' take whatever new evidence they find and explain it away into their theory instead of scientifically evaluating the evidence on its own merits.
The existence of a line of Aust. in Indonesia only 12,000 years ago is, in anthropological terms, earth-shattering news. It makes homo sapiens a contemporary of homo habilis, homo erectus, and homo australopithicus which was previously thought to have been extinct four million years previous. H.Aust. is supposed to be a progenitor of H.Sapiens and now the books have to be rewritten to show it as a contemporary.
It means your 'facts' weren't facts at all. Just suppositions based on the facts at hand.
My point is that given this humoungously significant example as a precedent it is now also reasonable to consider that homo sapiens is NOT a descendant of Aust. since they are also contemporaries in separate populations.
It is now reasonable to extrapolate that homo sapiens may also be much older than previously thought and the whole current line of thought on homonid evolution may be absolutely wrong.
All we need now to cap it off is to have the Leakeys find a homo sapiens skull in Bed 1.
Our australopithicene has been labeled "Homo floresiensis".
Why?
It makes homo sapiens a contemporary of homo habilis, homo erectus, and homo australopithicus which was previously thought to have been extinct four million years previous. H.Aust. is supposed to be a progenitor of H.Sapiens and now the books have to be rewritten to show it as a contemporary.
Homo habilis is not an ancestor of homo sapiens. Why is this a problem now?
It means your 'facts' weren't facts at all. Just suppositions based on the facts at hand.
Be specific - which "facts" do you think are now changed?
My point is that given this humoungously significant example as a precedent it is now also reasonable to consider that homo sapiens is NOT a descendant of Aust. since they are also contemporaries in separate populations.
So? What's changed? Make a point, would ya?
It is now reasonable to extrapolate that homo sapiens may also be much older than previously thought and the whole current line of thought on homonid evolution may be absolutely wrong.
Finally. Oh, and that's utter bullsh!t. Twice even.
One species can be a progenitor of another without going extinct. Two subpopulations of a species can separate genetically and one can diverge from the other to the extent that they become different species. There is no reason why the one that remains essentially unchanged must go extinct. That's why a modern Australopithicus presents no problem for the theory of evolution. It simply is a new finding that wasn't really expected, and will cause our theories of hominid development to be revised, but will cause no serious problem for the theory of evolution in general. The problem here is that you can't destroy a theory by falsifying particulars that have been derived from that theory. Whether H. Erectus evolved from Aust. or vice-versa is irrelevant to the theory of evolution, for example. If either of the two are true, then the theory is supported. Debunking evolution is possible, but much more difficult than that. You must show that common descent is impossible or that speciation by the mechanism of natural selection is not possible, or that there is not a general trend toward increasing complexity in organisms over time. Some specific observations that could do so: find a new species that doesn't use polynucleotides for a genetic material (would show that these organisms don't arise from common descent), find a reliably dated precambrian fossil of a modern human, horse, cow, rabbit, or other relatively complex organism (destroys the general trend from simple to complex over time), or provide a mechanism that prevents genetic variation from causing organisms to be unable to interbreed (would show that speciation via natural selection is not possible.) Even if you succeed in falsifying evolution, however, don't expect science to automatically start believing in ID or creationism. Neither of these are scientific theories because they can't provide criteria for falsification such as those I presented above for evolution. If an idea can't provide ways to show that the idea can't possibly be true, then the idea isn't science. Most likely, should evolution be falsified, science will, for a time, have no answer to the question of how the diversity of life arose. This will be the case until a new scientific theory is developed which is consistent with all the evidence that currently favors evolution in addition to that hypothetical observation that falsified evolution.
You got your underware in a knot over 6000 miles and 4 million years. Huffing and puffing over how I characterize this doesn't make it go away. you are trying to make a big hairy stink about that fact that some branch of natural science didn't know about the little mini-guys until they turned up. Duh. I have already characterized your thories about how science works as rather naive, and you haven't said anything in your recent repetition of this message to change my opinion. This recent discovery is in no manner the "bombshell" you are attempting to pretend it is.
Oh, sure, because "Darwinists" aren't debating here, and are trying to "censor" posts, eh? ROFL! You clearly haven't been reading the same thread I have...
Back to the bear, no one here even knew it was part of Darwin's original theory.
In another post you falsely claim that: "Darwin theorized that the whale evolved from the black bear." Even leaving aside your confusion over the difference between "hypothesizing" and "theorizing", Darwin did *not* even *suggest* that whales evolved from bears.
Instead, as the passage in full makes quite clear, he was arguing that due to their habit of feeding in streams in Darwin's day, over future eons evolutionary pressures *could* conceivably shape bears into an aquatic animal more like a whale than a bear, and that perhaps whales had come similarly come about from some *other* (non-bear) land creature which fed in the water in the distant past:
" In North America the black bear was seen by Hearne swimming for hours with widely open mouth, thus catching, like a whale, insects in the water. Even in so extreme a case as this, if the supply of insects were constant, and if better adapted competitors did not already exist in the country, I can see no difficulty in a race of bears being rendered, by natural selection, more and more aquatic in their structure and habits, with larger and larger mouths, till a creature was produced as monstrous as a whale."Again, Darwin was clearly *not* arguing that modern whales came from black bears. He was using the *present* behavior of black bears and their possible *future* evolution to make a point about the processes which could have given rise to *present-day* whales from *ancient* land animals.
-- Charles Darwin, 1859
I do not think the collective knowledge on this thread justifies the emotion and vitriol.
I agree, but that's just how the creationists like to do things, apparently.
It isn't a bombshell that a branch of homonids that everyone thought was extinct over four million years ago suddenly shows up as a contemporary to modern man from only 12,000 years ago?
Your reaction is precisely what I'm talking about here. No matter what fact surfaces that blows your previous ideas out of the water Darwinists get all Orwellian and act non-plussed as if this new fact had been known to them all along.
Finding a population of plesiosaurs living in the Reflecting Pool of the Capitol Mall would leave you unmoved as well, I'd assume.
No, it isn't. We operate on the evidence we have, so long as modifying the details of the current paradigm is substantially less of a stretch than abandoning the paradigm. The tree of life is subject to minor modification every time a critter's bones that haven't shown up before is uncovered, and nobody blinks. 4,000,000 years is a drop in the bucket in that regard--the tree of life has undergone far more radical surgery than that many times, without biologists throwing up their hands in fear and trembling.
Do you feel inclined to throw out the law of gravity because the orbits of ourlier stars around their galaxies don't square with the law of gravity by a few orders of magnetude?
Your reaction is precisely what I'm talking about here. No matter what fact surfaces that blows your previous ideas out of the water Darwinists get all Orwellian and act non-plussed as if this new fact had been known to them all along.
And your reaction is precisely what I am talking about: operating on the assumption that the mealy-mouthed scientists are engaged in an enormous orgy of denial, bad will, or stupidity that makes uncritical of the evidence or the paradigms they operate under. It's insulting, and it's silly.
Finding a population of plesiosaurs living in the Reflecting Pool of the Capitol Mall would leave you unmoved as well, I'd assume.
Indeed. A fish from the devonion showed up on the african coast about half a century ago, and that's way more surprising, but it still doesn't mean squat regarding what we can see happening in the geological column. The existence of anomolous survivors is perfectly within the realm of allowable behavior under darwinian theory--nature doesn't execute a writ on survivors of an era--if they manage to survive, they manage to survive, big deal. You seem to be operating on the theory that life is some sort of linear reservation system, and when your table is gone, your ticket is punched. Get over it--evolutionary theory is not going to pay much attention to your critiques unless you get right what it is that it actually says, and focus on the evidence it actually presents. Science isn't in the business of jumping through
No problem. God did it. Now go back to your prayers.
bttt
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