Posted on 04/15/2006 11:44:16 AM PDT by SirLinksalot
Posted: April 15, 2006 1:00 a.m. Eastern
© 2006 WorldNetDaily.com
I suggested here last week that the established authorities of every age act consistently. They become vigilantly militant against non-conforming dissidents who challenge their assumptions.
Thus when the dissident Galileo challenged the assumptions of the 17th century papacy, it shut him up. Now when the advocates of "intelligent design" challenge the scientific establishment's assumptions about "natural selection," it moves aggressively to shut them up. So the I.D. people have this in common with Galileo.
I received a dozen letters on this, three in mild agreement, the rest in scorn and outrage. This calls for a response.
Where, one reader demanded, did I get the information that 10 percent of scientists accept intelligent design? I got it from a National Post (newspaper) article published two years ago, which said that 90 percent of the members of the National Academy of Science "consider themselves atheists." Since if you're not an atheist, you allow for the possibility of a Mind or Intelligence behind nature, this puts 10 percent in the I.D. camp.
I could have gone further. A survey last year by Rice University, financed by the Templeton Foundation, found that about two-thirds of scientists believed in God. A poll published by Gallup in 1997 asked: Do you believe that "man has developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God guided this process, including man's creation?" – essentially the I.D. position. Just under 40 percent of scientists said yes. So perhaps my 10 percent was far too low.
Two readers called my attention to a discovery last week on an Arctic island of something which may be the fossil remains of the mysteriously missing "transitional species." Or then maybe it isn't transitional. Maybe it's a hitherto undetected species on its own.
But the very exuberance with which such a discovery is announced argues the I.D. case. If Darwin was right, and the change from one species to another through natural selection occurred constantly in millions of instances over millions of years, then the fossil record should be teaming with transitional species. It isn't. That's why even one possibility, after many years of searching, becomes front-page news.
Another letter complains that I.D. cannot be advanced as even a theory unless evidence of the nature of this "Divine" element is presented. But the evidence is in nature itself. The single cell shows such extraordinary complexity that to suggest it came about by sheer accident taxes credulity. If you see a footprint in the sand, that surely evidences human activity. The demand – "Yes, but whose footprint is it?"– does not disqualify the contention that somebody was there. "Nope," says the establishment, "not until you can tell us who it was will we let you raise this question in schools."
Another reader argues that Galileo stood for freedom of inquiry, whereas I.D. advocates want to suppress inquiry. This writer apparently did not notice what caused me to write the column. It was the rejection by a government agency for a $40,000 grant to a McGill University anti-I.D. lobby to suppress the presentation and discussion of I.D. theory in the Canadian schools. Suppressing discussion is an odd way of encouraging "freedom of inquiry." Anyway, the I.D. movement doesn't want to suppress evolution. It merely wants it presented as a theory, alongside the I.D. theory.
Why, asked another reader, did I not identify the gutsy woman who stated the reason for the rejection, bringing upon herself the scorn of scientific authority. That's fair. Her name is Janet Halliwell, a chemist and executive vice president of the Social Science and Humanities Research Council. She said that evolution is a theory, not a fact, and the McGill application offered no evidence to support it.
The McGill applicant was furious. Evolution, he said, needs no evidence. It's fact. Apparently Harvard University doesn't quite agree with him. The Boston Globe reports that Harvard has begun an expensive project to discover how life emerged from the chemical soup of early earth. In the 150 years since Darwin, says the Globe, "scientists cannot explain how the process began."
The most sensible letter came from a research scientist. "I think that the current paradigm of evolution by natural selection acting on random variation will change," he writes. "I think that evidence will accumulate to suggest that much of the genetic variation leading to the evolution of life on earth was not random, but was generated by biochemical processes that exhibit intelligent behavior."
Then he urges me not to disclose his identity. Saying this publicly would threaten his getting tenure, he fears. Galileo would understand.
I remainin the discussion. I have the impression, however, that you have a list of killer arguments and are trying them out. You seem quite intelligent, but rather uninformed about the history of biology. You seem unaware that your lines of discussion have been examined by thousands of researchers over a couple hundred years. Science is not something that you can come into from the outside and blow people away. They've seen it before.
The researchers who found the fossil fish were looking for it because of the age of the strata and because there were geological indicators that the location had been a coastline.
Stalin persecuted scientists who supported Darwinian evolution -- they were fired from their posts, many sent to Siberia. Instead, he supported Lysenko's pseudo-ID beliefs. Blaming Darwin for Stalin is a little bit of a stretch.
The theory of evolution, which posits common descent, requires there to have been transitional species between fish and land animals, and allows scientists to predict the dates and morphologies of those species (which they did succesfully). If you believe that God is responsible for guiding evolution, then you can't make predictions, because God can do anything, whenever He wants to. I am a believer in God, but you can't use the divine for scientific theories, because there isn't anything to discuss -- you can't make predictions of the omnipotent and omnipresent.
So you've invented you own little creed now. How cute.
Natural selection and sexual selection are not about any "rational" criteria. They are simply a formal statement of the fact that some traits result in more offspring. You can see it happening right now in real time.
The implication of your statement is that species come into existence purely randomly. Is this what you meant to imply?
Random is a mathematical property. Selection is not random. Perhaps from a human perspective it seems irrational or quixotic, but it is not random. This, by the way, is one of the reasons some highly religious people have denounced ID and called it "malevolent design".
Notably, a major difference is that “Chance” is subject to statistical analysis and prediction algorithms (within certain confidence limits). However, I am unaware that such prediction algorithms have yet successfully predicted specific speciation in a complex, large, multi-cellular organism. Am I mistaken?
Animal and plant breeders have used stochastic variation and selection for thousands of years. We have produced plants and animals that cannot survive without their symbiotic relationship to farmers. That certainly looks like a species.
The term species is rather fuzzy anyway, and there are all gradations of fertility with cross species hybridization. This fuzziness in the concept of species (even genus, in some cases) is to be expected with common descent.
No one will ever explain things to your satisfaction.
This isn't a very good formulation of the question. It isn't necessarily a quantitative question at all. There is only a single mutation (I think) that changes felinine parvo virus into canine parvo virus. (Of course, it's not clear that the concept of species is useful for viruses.)
There are many genetic differences between horses and donkeys, but they can interbreed. There are fewer differences between chihuahuas and great Danes, but they cannot (in vivo or in the wild.) The type of mutation is of more importance than the number.
Your questions indicate an unfamiliarity with the territory. You seem surprised by so many things that were argued to death many decades ago.
The fact that they were argued to death does not "prove" that the arguments are settled, but you are not breaking any new ground with your version of the arguments.
"Festival of the Invariant Tagline" placemarker
Festival of Convergently Evolving Taglines
Festival of the Broad-tent Tagline
So true.
Reminds me of the recent Sopranos episode where the preacher had Tony's attention until he said that the earth was formed 6000 years ago and that man and the dinosaurs co-existed. Christopher's response had me ROTFLMAO:
"So it must have been pretty tough for all those guys when the dinosaurs were chasing them down."
Anybody who denies the theory of evolution is not qualified to teach at any level.
As has been pointed out a few times here, the concept of "species" is a bit arbitrary, considering that all living things are related. There is no clear line between closely related species, other than the observation that two groups have diverged sufficiently that they no longer readily breed together.
If not, then there is no way of countering the objections against evolution as just “hand waving and semantics.”
Oh? Are you contending that mutation does not occur? Are you contending that the fitter individuals don't more frequently survive and pass their genes to the next generation? Are you contending that, over time, this process won't change the gene pool?
If you acknowledge the basics in the foregoing paragraph, how in the world can you, as a presumably intelligent and sincere person, contend that evolution is just “hand waving and semantics”?
If I've misunderstood you, I shall be pleased to be corrected. If not, then you're a darn fine troll, but the jig is up.
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