Evolution Is Practically Useless, Admits Darwinist

Creation Evolution Headlines ^ | 08/30/06 | Creation Evolution Headlines

[DannyTN]

Evolution Is Practically Useless, Admits Darwinist    08/30/2006  
Supporters of evolution often tout its many benefits.  They claim it helps research in agriculture, conservation and medicine (e.g., 01/13/2003, 06/25/2003).  A new book by David Mindell, The Evolving World: Evolution in Everyday Life (Harvard, 2006) emphasizes these practical benefits in hopes of making evolution more palatable to a skeptical society.  Jerry Coyne, a staunch evolutionist and anti-creationist, enjoyed the book in his review in Nature,¹ but thought that Mindell went overboard on “Selling Darwin” with appeals to pragmatics:

To some extent these excesses are not Mindell’s fault, for, if truth be told, evolution hasn’t yielded many practical or commercial benefits.  Yes, bacteria evolve drug resistance, and yes, we must take countermeasures, but beyond that there is not much to say.  Evolution cannot help us predict what new vaccines to manufacture because microbes evolve unpredictably.  But hasn’t evolution helped guide animal and plant breeding?  Not very much.  Most improvement in crop plants and animals occurred long before we knew anything about evolution, and came about by people following the genetic principle of ‘like begets like’.  Even now, as its practitioners admit, the field of quantitative genetics has been of little value in helping improve varieties.  Future advances will almost certainly come from transgenics, which is not based on evolution at all.

Coyne further describes how the goods and services advertised by Mindell are irrelevant for potential customers, anyway:

One reason why Mindell might fail to sell Darwin to the critics is that his examples all involve microevolution, which most modern creationists (including advocates of intelligent design) accept.  It is macroevolution – the evolutionary transitions between very different kinds of organism – that creationists claim does not occur.  But in any case, few people actually oppose evolution because of its lack of practical use.... they oppose it because they see it as undercutting moral values.

Coyne fails to offer a salve for that wound.  Instead, to explain why macroevolution has not been observed, he presents an analogy .  For critics out to debunk macroevolution because no one has seen a new species appear, he compares the origin of species with the origin of language: “We haven’t seen one language change into another either, but any reasonable creationist (an oxymoron?) must accept the clear historical evidence for linguistic evolution,” he says, adding a jab for effect. “And we have far more fossil species than we have fossil languages” (but see 04/23/2006).  It seems to escape his notice that language is a tool manipulated by intelligent agents, not random mutations.  In any case, his main point is that evolution shines not because of any hyped commercial value, but because of its explanatory power:

In the end, the true value of evolutionary biology is not practical but explanatory.  It answers, in the most exquisitely simple and parsimonious way, the age-old question: “How did we get here?”  It gives us our family history writ large, connecting us with every other species, living or extinct, on Earth.  It shows how everything from frogs to fleas got here via a few easily grasped biological processes.  And that, after all, is quite an accomplishment.

See also Evolution News analysis of this book review, focusing on Coyne’s stereotyping of creationists.  Compare also our 02/10/2006 and 12/21/2005 stories on marketing Darwinism to the masses.

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¹Jerry Coyne, “Selling Darwin,” Nature 442, 983-984(31 August 2006) | doi:10.1038/442983a; Published online 30 August 2006.

You heard it right here.  We didn’t have to say it.  One of Darwin’s own bulldogs said it for us: evolutionary theory is useless.  Oh, this is rich.  Don’t let anyone tell you that evolution is the key to biology, and without it we would fall behind in science and technology and lose our lead in the world.  He just said that most real progress in biology was done before evolutionary theory arrived, and that modern-day advances owe little or nothing to the Grand Materialist Myth.  Darwin is dead, and except for providing plot lines for storytellers, the theory that took root out of Charlie’s grave bears no fruit (but a lot of poisonous thorns: see 08/27/2006).
    To be sure, many things in science do not have practical value.  Black holes are useless, too, and so is the cosmic microwave background.  It is the Darwin Party itself, however, that has hyped evolution for its value to society.  With this selling point gone, what’s left?  The only thing Coyne believes evolution can advertise now is a substitute theology to answer the big questions.  Instead of an omniscient, omnipotent God, he offers the cult of Tinker Bell and her mutation wand as an explanation for endless forms most beautiful.  Evolution allows us to play connect-the-dot games between frogs and fleas.  It allows us to water down a complex world into simplistic, “easily grasped” generalities.  Such things are priceless, he thinks.  He’s right.  It costs nothing to produce speculation about things that cannot be observed, and nobody should consider such products worth a dime.
    We can get along just fine in life without the Darwin Party catalog.  Thanks to Jerry Coyne for providing inside information on the negative earnings in the Darwin & Co. financial report.  Sell your evolution stock now before the bottom falls out.
Next headline on:  Evolutionary Theory

[Radix]

"I'm getting tired of seeing creationists attempt to constantly grossly mislead the public so badly. Have they no shame, no concern for truth?"

 

Are you for real? 

 

 What are you John Kerry's campaign manager?

[Dark Knight]

This junior-level introductory course emphasizes the application of biological and geological principles to the interpretation of fossils, with an introductory overview of such subdisciplines as taphonomy, morphology, functional anatomy, evolution, systematics, paleoecology, paleobiogeography and biostratigraphy.<<

An overview class with eight subdisciplines including evolution. Thanks for the cite, I KNEW evolution HAD to be the underpinning theory for petroleum engineers.

DK

[BeHoldAPaleHorse]

I guess what I was trying to say is that sometimes a species dies out due to no fault of man.

Agreed.

Humans are not the cause of every single extinction that ever happened.

Agreed.

Further, some extinctions are unavoidable short of unreasonably restricting human activities.

[aimhigh]

Thanks for the cite, I KNEW evolution HAD to be the underpinning theory for petroleum engineers.

But, still a theory with no application.

[stands2reason]

He did not mention Christianity at all. Knee-jerk?

[editor-surveyor]

" Yes, bacteria evolve drug resistance..."

That statement is one of the biggest piles of horse hockey that evolutionists dump on us. It's like equating racial genocide with evolution. Bacteria have not 'evolved' drug resistance; the resistant bacteria have always been there; all the drugs have done is tilt the population demographics in favor of the resistant strains by killing off the non-resistant ones. If this is evolution, then the genocide in Africa is evolution too.

[Radix]

"I'm 49 years old and I could count all the flu's I've ever had on hand....}

 

Do you live in a bubble, or are you simply unable to count?

 

The Aztecs and the Incas as well as few others could have made even greater claims about their immune systems for thousands of years  before their families met the Cortez's and the Pizarro's et al.

 

It is indisputable that viruses and Influenza have caused the deaths of untold millions. Even Louis Pasteur did not know what he was doing when he stumbled upon the vaccine process. Trust me, it works.

 

Your post reads as if a child wrote it.   

[Mamzelle]

My goodness, stultis and stultorum right next to one another. That's got to be a neat little Latin lesson!

[AndyJackson]

But, still a theory with no application.

Oh boy! Just why would a petroleum engineer be interested in a theory with no application? Perhaps the point is that understanding the evolution of organisms in the fossil record gives you a record of time which helps you to understand the geological strata through which you are drilling which tells you something about the likelihood of finding oil, which is after all the point of the whole exercise - keeping the lights on so we can blog away on FR.

[AndyJackson]

It isn't god. It is satan, and he tinkers with life forms in a way to manufacture the appearance of evolution in order to mess with the minds of you credulous so-called scientists. It is all deception to delude you from adhering to the One Truth. And don't try out that Occam's razor nonsense on me - that is another trick of the Devil.

[muawiyah]

No doubt you are familiar with that case where the parents had a secret camera installed to record what the baby sitter was doing with the baby.

They got their first film and it looked like she was tossing the kid in the air like a football, bopping it around, just disgusting.

They called the law on that ol'gal right now.

In the end the sitter got off scott free ~ the reason was the "speed" of the video. It wasn't set up to do a full 30 frames per second or anything like that ~ more like 3 frames per second, and when it was slowed down to the rate of actual time flow it was shown she was not tossing the baby!

Evidence of evolution is rather like the film of that baby. The frame rate is pretty slow, but speeding up what we do know doesn't necessarily give us a true picture.

Eventually we will hae the ability to overcome the time-dilation factor, and maybe even go back in time and "fix" things eh!

[stands2reason]

What is an "envionmenatist"?

[js1138]

Perhaps one might begin by defining what the word "evidence" means. I think that many here might disagree on the different meanings of a word which is not really that controversial most of the time.

Evidence is nothing if it isn't for or against something.

I don't think there is an anti-evolutionist on this thread who can give a coherent definition of the thing they oppose, a definition that actually matches something a biologist would say.

[js1138]

all the drugs have done is tilt the population demographics in favor of the resistant strains by killing off the non-resistant ones.

How does this happen when you start with a single organism?

[muawiyah]

Whigs may have become Republicans, but the Whig party DID NOT become the Republican party.

The Democrats are well on their way to becoming Whigs.

[stands2reason]

What makes you think gravity is simple?

[dagoofyfoot]

Trust me, it works.

Your post reads as if a child wrote it.

And who are you? The Surgeon General?

Vaccines contain a lot of things I would never put into my body voluntarily, like mercury and formaldehyde and worse things (foreign blood cells).

I spend a lot of time all winter in the cold water out here in the pacific, (not on it, but in it)and I very rarely ever catch a cold even.


But like the child in me said, if you are so inclined to do so...have mine this winter.

[Liberal Classic]

Oh, please. You asked for an example, and I gave you one. Why do I have the sneaking suspicion that you're not debating in good faith? Evolutionary theory is fundamental to paleontology, and micropaleontology is vitally important to oil exploration. Deep sea exploration is at the bleeding edge of upstream technology.

Consider this description of the U.S. Ocean Drilling Program's Micropaleontology Reference Center at Texas A&M University. Deep sea cores are kept in museums all over the world, and A&M is one such site.

Since 1968, deep-sea drilling ships have recovered sediment cores from all the major ocean basins. This wealth of deep-sea material has yielded a unique record of biologic evolution in the form of abundant preserved skeletons of marine microfossils. These fossils are important for synthesising larger scale patterns of plankton evolution, to determine the geologic age of sediments and are key recorders of past environmental change. The Micropaleontological Reference Centers (MRCs) have been developed over a 30 year period to provide a scientific collection of this microfossil record.

[muawiyah]

Then there are the petroleum engineers who argue that the existence of any biological fosils in petroleum deposits is coincidental ~ that the petroleum was there since the beginning of the Earth.

[editor-surveyor]

"How does this happen when you start with a single organism?"

It doesn't. Bacteria do not live as single animals, but in huge colonies called a biofilm. Even if you tried to isolate one, you would not be sucessful, since they are constantly in the process of replication.