I think this question refers to a “young-earth creationist.” I don’t know much about what they believe, so I can’t adequately answer for them. I’m guessing (just guessing) that they would observe the relationship between certain geological structures and the likely presence of oil, without necessarily subscribing to a theory of remote origins which is not directly useful to their quest.
But I don’t think this has anything to do with a critique of the divergence of species via the gradual accumulation of inherited modifications, which is what I’m mainly looking at.
”Explain how vets would go about treating animals they did not train on, if they did not believe in the commonality of biochemical, structural, and morphological claudisms that evolutionary theory predicts?”
Again, any vet can observe anatomical, physiological, and biochemical similarities, no matter what his or her notions might be about their ultimate origins. I might believe they all evolved via random variation + selection pressure. My non-Darwinian counterpart might suppose they were designed with these similarities. People practiced veterinary science successfully for many years before Darwin published his hypotheses.
”There is no sound evidence for a micro-macro barrier between "species" or families, or phyla”
Well, if you observed lots of changes in Drosophilia melanogaster resulting in the development of new kind of fruit-flies, but you never observed the development of new, complex organs and systems, or the evolution of fruit-flies into something else (houseflies? butterflies?), you’d be justified in maintaining a sober agnosticism. Variation in fruitflies does not necessarily parlay into something as huge and as minutely ramified as ‘The Origin of Species and the Descent of Man.’
”There are a number of variations in the ID conjecture. Including naturalistic ones. It is very easy to accept the general notion of ID, without requiring any particularly profound modification of Darwinian evolutionary theory, and which does not require the acceptance of creationism.”
Thank you. I have often thought so, myself.
”The argument from irreducible complexity, ... is best stated: "since my giant brain can't comprehend how something was built, it must be a miracle!"
No, one might maintain that design is empirically detectable, and then when it is detected, it is not necessarily evidence of a “miracle” (in the sense of an intervention by a supernatural entity) but of some designer (Could be LGM’s! Or directed panspermia! Just joking, Haha: with apologies to Captain James Kirk and Dr. Francis Crick.)
Endeavors like cryptography, forensic investigation, archaeology and even SETI have developed empirical criteria for determining whether something is an artifact or a natural formation, and for separating message from noise. Applying such criteria to, say, DNA as an information system is legitimate, is it not?
”Go back up a few posts in this thread and read about the heart surgeon who thought transplanting a baboons heart into a human was a good idea because he "did not believe in evolutionary theory".
This Bailey guy’s problem was that he was shockingly ignorant about neonatal immune function, antigens, and other factors related to tissue rejection. Again, this has nothing to do with the theoretical descent of humans and other primates from common ancestors by heritable modification. If he had transplanted a heart of a much-closer-related primate (say, a chimpanzee) --- or even an unrelated human ---- into the unfortunate Baby Fae, she would have died anyway.
So though Bailey is bizarrely interesting in his way, he is not directly relevant. Indeed Bailey’s crossing of species boundaries would undoubtedly be repugnant to most non-Darwinians, precisely because of their general view that the species do not blend into each other.
you can't make this true just by saying it with a confident air. Of course tissue rejection, and a number of other issues in applied biology, such as growing human parts replacements on pigs, or anticipating cross-grafts that will bear fruit, has quite a bit to do with mutational distances between the entities in question.
I suppose that's possibly true, much as you might assume that because there were a hole in the fence, and the cat had feathers hanging from his mouth, and some of your chickens were missing--that space aliens teleported your chickens to another dimension.
The argument for evolutionary theory does not rest on observing every minute step in the process, any more than the theory of universal gravitation relies on observing its effects in every square inch of the known universe, or the theory of continental drift relies on someone seeing south america and africa separate.