Posted on 03/09/2005 1:46:32 PM PST by metacognative
Opinions
There are valid criticisms of evolution
BY DAVID BERLINSKI
"If scientists do not oppose anti-evolutionism," said Eugenie Scott, the executive director of the National Council on Science Education, "it will reach more people with the mistaken idea that evolution is scientifically weak."
Scott's understanding of "opposition" had nothing to do with reasoned discussion. It had nothing to do with reason at all. Discussing the issue was out of the question. Her advice to her colleagues was considerably more to the point: "Avoid debates."
Everyone else had better shut up.
In this country, at least, no one is ever going to shut up, the more so since the case against Darwin's theory retains an almost lunatic vitality. Consider:
• The suggestion that Darwin's theory of evolution is like theories in the serious sciences -- quantum electrodynamics, say -- is grotesque. Quantum electrodynamics is accurate to 13 unyielding decimal places. Darwin's theory makes no tight quantitative predictions at all.
• Field studies attempting to measure natural selection inevitably report weak-to-nonexistent selection effects.
• Darwin's theory is open at one end, because there is no plausible account for the origins of life.
• The astonishing and irreducible complexity of various cellular structures has not yet successfully been described, let alone explained.
• A great many species enter the fossil record trailing no obvious ancestors, and depart leaving no obvious descendants.
• Where attempts to replicate Darwinian evolution on the computer have been successful, they have not used classical Darwinian principles, and where they have used such principles, they have not been successful.
• Tens of thousands of fruit flies have come and gone in laboratory experiments, and every last one of them has remained a fruit fly to the end, all efforts to see the miracle of speciation unavailing.
• The remarkable similarity in the genome of a great many organisms suggests that there is at bottom only one living system; but how then to account for the astonishing differences between human beings and their near relatives -- differences that remain obvious to anyone who has visited a zoo?
If the differences between organisms are scientifically more interesting than their genomic similarities, of what use is Darwin's theory, since its otherwise mysterious operations take place by genetic variations?
These are hardly trivial questions. Each suggests a dozen others. These are hardly circumstances that do much to support the view that there are "no valid criticisms of Darwin's theory," as so many recent editorials have suggested.
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Didn't see it, but I'll catch up as quick as I can.
Thanks!
But that's already in the ratio so it's not being ignored.
Hurts enough when you let a doctor do it and you can get a few days worth of Percocet.
I hear you.
Because I've read Genesis. It's a myth. You don't need to study Darwin to realize it is a myth, study Galileo and how he describes how the solar system is set up as opposed to how Genesis says. That's why he was branded a heretic. Even if Darwin is wrong, Galileo was right.
I also want to apologize. I should never have taken the thread as seriously and as personaly as I did. I should have known going in that neither side was going to convince the other and that it would have been better to avoid the topic (at least in this format, where it is really hard to elaborate and things come of differently than they do in person). I think on most issues we would probably agree (I am pro-life, pro-military, small government, and consider myself a patriot and lover of my country) On this issue we don't agree. I would rather have you as a countryman than some liberal, mealy-mouthed new-ager who happened to agree with me on evolution.
And for the record, I have been called a lot worse than a jerk and a dumbass; and i've sometimes even deserved it :)
I don't think so. We've been watching for a lot of years worth of seconds already and there's been no detectable outward drift. If, say, the Earth were 6,000 years old now and there has been over this time an accumulating acceleration, the effect might have become at least measurable with the sensitive technology we've been using since the dawn of the space age.
That's your model. The effect is tiny, but it builds and builds until it's whooshing through the galaxy and we're flying right out of the solar system. If we're supposed to be flying trillions of miles out after a billion years, we should be able to tell we're moving after 6,000.
Anyway, the model is still bad. One of your wave-aways was this: "The other noise you were talking about is in random directions and therefore cancels out."
Just in one case, I don't think the meteors do cancel out. If nothing else, I think there's a bias in favor of impacts in the direction we move. It's similar to how there's more rain on your car's front window than the back when you're moving. That's a decelerating effect which would tend to more than cancel your teeny tiny solar sail push.
Thus, maybe your winning ICR contest entry should be titled, "The Earth Would Have Fallen Into the Sun by Now if it is Old." However, orbital mechanics are based upon fairly stable equilibria and are not easily degraded to the point of catastrophe except when big things start banging into each other.
But your effect is so teeny tiny that in any event the Earth just eats it with the mushiness of its atmosphere, oceans, snowpack, etc. Earth is not a SuperballTM, it's a bean bag.
There are many myths. Gilgamesh, Beowulf, lots and lots of others.
Just because you have read them is not a reason to dismiss them. They are all based on things which other generations seemed to have understood.
I have read the Bible myself, and though there are apparent discrepancies, it is still more likely that the so called myths are based on facts which have not been adequately recorded.
Your post seems arrogant and dismissive to me. I doubt that you have read even a fraction of nearly the things which I actually have.
That does not make me a better person, but it does make me think that I have a bit more tolerance than you have expressed.
I assure you, that you do not know everything!
Darwin had no knowledge of DNA or Chromosomes.
Galileo challenged the priests to simply look through his glass, but that does not mean that he knew of many of what are now considered "Laws of Physics."
I cannot say exactly why your post annoys me me, but my sense is that you are just an arrogant little snit.
Have a nice day.
I don't mean to imply that persistent drag effects don't matter. Skylab was supposed to be in a long-term stable orbit. However, in the mission planning stage (early 60s) when we calculated that orbit we didn't yet know that the Earth's atmosphere swells outward during peaks of the 11-year solar cycle. We had made measurements during a quiet phase and didn't appreciate the changeable nature of what we had measured. When the next peak came, Skylab proved to be skimming gas, its orbit decaying rapidly.
But I suspect the meteor imbalance drag effect is too small to do much, never mind that it swamps your solar sail.
That's based on a fundamental misunderstanding of what quantizing a continuum means. Quantizing the continuum is where you draw an imaginary line where reality has no lines. But a fossil is a real entity. Life is a succession of discrete entities - discrete genomes, discrete beings.
There are multiple, consistent, parallel lines of evidence pointing to the history of the solar system. It's in the orbital mechanics, the Herzprung-Russel stellar evolution model, the radiometric dates on the meteorites, etc. You don't make that go away inventing "Stump the Dummies" problems.
You said: That's based on a fundamental misunderstanding of what quantizing a continuum means. Quantizing the continuum is where you draw an imaginary line where reality has no lines. But a fossil is a real entity. Life is a succession of discrete entities - discrete genomes, discrete beings.
Physicist: Well done. I've noticed this before (but not named it) when it comes to speciation. As a population evolves (and leaves traces in the fossil record), we arbitrarily label the individual fossils with different species names. We define species, however, by the ability to produce viable offspring. (We can't test that, of course, but no matter: it's certain that any creature would be unable to interbreed with a distant enough ancestor.)
The problem is that if every individual left a fossil, there would always come a point where a taxonomist would have to change species names between a parent and a child, but by any reasonable definition of species they have to be the same species.
(I could give examples from particle physics, too, but they're more abstruse.)
Our notation often forces us into your fallacy (sorry, to name a thing is to own it). The ignorant then proceed to read more significance into the names (and their attendant problems) than into the ideas.
The counsel of tortoise and Physicist taken together reads to me exactly the way I expressed it: the theory of evolution is a continuum (tree of life) based on the quantizations (fossils) of a continuum (geologic record).
IOW, a fossil is "real" quantization in the geologic record. To use the comic book metaphor from a previous post, by viewing the accumulated quantized evidence like little stick men drawn on pages in a comic book - when the pages are fanned the stickman seems to move and change and another continuum seems to emerge, a divergence or tree of life.
Moving to the latest thread by the doctrinaire Patrick Henry
UH....
I suspect you are WRONG here.
Wrong.
'Mushy' or not, the interia of the infintesimal small particle is STILL added to the Earth mass; it does NOT have to rebound from a hard surface.
Think of hundreds of noisy CCD pictures, in which none of them have a visible image, yet, when added together in a computer, the 'noise' averages out and the image, which was buried in ALL of the frames, nows stands clear and sharp.
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