Posted on 02/22/2009 10:58:04 PM PST by GodGunsGuts
Opinion
Monday, Feb. 23, 2009
Evolution debate persists because it's not science
By Raymond H. Kocot
...
But did you ever wonder why Darwinism's general theory of evolution, sometimes called macroevolution, has been debated for over 150 years without resolution? The surprising answer is Darwin's macroevolution theory is not a legitimate science. The National Academy of Sciences clearly defined science in its 1998 guidebook for science teachers. The definition begins with [stating that] science is a particular way of knowing about the world, and ends with, "Anything that can be observed or measured is amenable to scientific investigation. Explanations that cannot be based on empirical evidence are not part of science." In other words, a legitimate scientific theory (a hypothesis or idea) must be observable in real time and must be testable, yielding reproducible results. That is the core of the scientific method that has brought man out of the Dark Ages.
Because confirmable observations and generating experimental data are impossible for unique events like life's origin and macroevolution theory, world-famous evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr prompts evolutionists to construct historical narratives to try to explain evolutionary events or processes. In other words, stories are all evolutionists can muster to support macroevolution theory. If macroevolution theory, which must rest on faith in a story and is considered to be scientific, why not the creation story. With that in mind, it is no wonder the molecules-to-man debate has persisted for 150 years...
(Excerpt) Read more at myrtlebeachonline.com ...
So why do you suppose that a dolphin looks so much like a fish?
Inherent in that answer is the answer to your question.
Thank you so much for your encouragements, dearest sister in Christ!
Inherent in that answer is the answer to your question.
The same reason that a submarine does.
Inherent in that answer is the answer to your question.
LOLOL!
Because both are "naturally selected" to swim in water? And thus must have similar body plans? Well fine, allmendream. But you still haven't answered my point about the non-appearance of large numbers of "failed" body plans in the fossil record.
To put it another way, random mutations will not be "selected for" if they do not provide fitness value for survival and self-perpetuation. The fossil landscape should be littered with evidence of creatures whose mutations did not provide fitness value.
Just in the case of fitness to survive in an aquatic environment would require a body plan that is hydrodynamically suitable. "Nature" would have to "select" for this. Fish and dolphins "made the grade." (The first a member of the superclass Pisces, the second, a mammal.) But how many random mutations were there that didn't "make the grade?" Shouldn't there be evidence that they once existed, even if they weren't sufficiently viable in terms of survival fitness in their natural environmental niche to leave many offspring?
Then again, given that evolution reveals very few basic biological body plans, are we to understand this as the result of a long trial-and-error search by Nature to come up with just those few suitable basic forms? If so, we can see the "successes." But where are the "failures" in the fossil record?
allmendream, do you think such questions are meaningless? If so, please tell us why.
Thank you so much for writing!
That is like asking why you don't see failed auto designs on the road. For an animal to be fossilized is a one in a million shot. “Failed” body plans don't get to grow into the million population group, they die young if they are even born at all.
So a non streamlined dolphin born with a big obstruction that drags in the water will not live to produce a large number of descendants among whom a fossil will most likely be preserved.
But a more streamlined dolphin will live to reproduce a more streamlined pack of descendants, and among those one might well get fossilized.
The fossil record is a record of animals that were prolific and successful enough to “win the odds” at being fossilized.
Brilliantly put, xzins! Thank you so very much!
And so you admit that the fossil record is not, in principle, complete, "exhaustive?" That what is there is pretty much the result of a crap shoot? That it's sketchy at best?
Well jeepers, that's a fine admission from somebody who's committed to a theory that depends on the fossil record for its justification. Jeepers, even Darwin knew that evolution theory stands or falls on the fossil record!
Drawing a blank?
Only if you are completely ignorant of the support that all of the above lend to the theory could you state that the theory “stands or falls on the fossil record” alone.
Moreover, in as much as the fossil record is a “crap shoot” it paints a very compelling picture of land animals arising from amphibians, mammals arising with traits that previously were only in reptiles, etc etc.
The fossil record need not be “exhaustive” or perfect in order for it to be a treasure trove of data that supports the theory of evolution through natural selection of genetic variation.
Also, the fossil record cannot tell you anything about HOW evolution happened, but it sure does show you that the species that inhabit the Earth have not always been the same from the beginning, and that 99% of all species that ever existed are extinct.
You’ll never get an answer for that either. Evo-cultists want us to believe that the fossil record will one day turn up all the “missing links”, but it is painfully obvious that the record is so spotty and that by far most organisms that have ever lived have never been fossilized. There is no way the so called fossil record will ever record what Darwin prophesied. If the record isn’t absolutely complete and exhaustive, it logically follows that Darwin’s claims fall to dust.
Truly, the fossil record is quantized. Few creatures actually left a fossil for us to examine.
And indeed, the "tree of life" is a theoretical continuum which stands or falls based on those quantizations.
If scientists were to discover the fossil of a modern man in the same place as a fossil of a T-Rex, the tree would fall.
Why does the fossil record always show a different page out of the same story?
Why are there only extinct temperate fossils buried under the Antarctic ice, but no modern species?
Could it be that the fossil record, as incomplete as we all acknowledge it is, shows a story about what life forms inhabited the Earth at what times and in what sequence?
It seems the easiest explanation to me for why we only find rather small and mostly marsupial mammals in strata laid down during the age of the dinosaurs.
Because submarines are designed to be "streamlined" in the first place? Such that anything that wasn't so designed would not meet the definition of "submarine," and thus would not be in the Naval Warfare Museum in the first place? For it wouldn't even qualify as a "submarine?"
The "spotty" fossil record seems to be of no help to you here, allmendream. One could crudely say that the fossil record is a crap shoot (by your own admission) in the service of the defense of another crap shoot (biological speciation as a random walk).
And yet it seems you inadvertently may have stumbled into the periphery of design theory here. Be careful!
Then again, what is the meaning of your comparison of the Naval Warfare Museum to natural selection? There's nothing "random" about a Naval Warfare Museum....
Actually Darwin based his theory on living organisms.
Since then the fossil record has developed into supporting evidence.
However, the example of finding dinosaur fossils mixed with human fossils of the same age would pretty much doom modern thinking about evolution.
All good points, bb.
Obsolete submarines are recorded by the droves....even the Merrimac & Monitor.
It is like saying that people in the past were more extraordinary than today, because all the people you read about in history did extraordinary things. Yep, because dull people rarely make history.
There is nothing “random” about a successful body plan. What works is a rather limited subset. Natural selection is in no ways “random”.
And obsolete animals are recorded in the fossil record in droves as well. But they were successful FOR THEIR TIME.
Simply no market for a marsupial tiger anymore. They are obsolete, as well as extinct.
I didn't state that, allmendream. Darwin did. I was merely quoting him.
You wrote: "The fossil record need not be “exhaustive” or perfect in order for it to be a treasure trove of data that supports the theory of evolution through natural selection of genetic variation."
Question: Has the term "random mutation" of the original orthodoxy been officially replaced by the term "genetic variation?" It seems to me there is a vast difference of meaning between the two terms. Was there something "faulty" about Darwin's original thinking that had to be corrected in light of new knowledge?
Well, I'll answer my own question: Of course there was. Darwin never heard about DNA, or relativity or quantum theory for that matter. His theory is constructed in terms of late Newtonian/classical thinking based on materialistic presuppositions. With DNA, we have learned that "immaterial" factors play out in nature — specifically, information from a "source" that no one's been able to localize in the spatiotemporal world of direct human experience. If such "corrections" keep going on what, at the end of the day, will remain of Darwin's theory?
And yet how passionately, even seemingly desperately, some people cling to it!
What non-materialistic presuppositions led you to conclude that DNA has “immaterial” factors that play out in nature?
What do you conclude was the “source” of the information that enabled a bacteria to digest nylon?
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