Posted on 06/03/2009 8:42:23 PM PDT by gobucks
Charles Darwin’s discovery of evolution is common knowledge but Darwin the person is barely known. Even on his 200th birth anniversary this year — he was born in England on Feb. 12, 1809 — much has been said about his works but little about his inner life of contrasts.
Darwin loved the natural world from childhood. He roamed the wilderness to study insects while neglecting Greek and Latin, the essential subjects. He said of his schooling, “I was considered by all my masters and by my Father as a very ordinary boy, rather below the common standard in intellect.”
Sent to medical school at age 16, he quit after seeing an operation on a child. Anesthesia was not yet introduced, and frightened patients stayed awake while surgeons sawed through their legs. His father was upset with him for leaving medicine, as fathers are when their offspring disappoint them. Charles was warned that he would be a disgrace.
He then went to Cambridge University to be a minister. There he found a mentor who would change his life, the Rev. John Henslow, a botanist. He and a geology professor taught Darwin how to observe and interpret nature’s ways.
After Cambridge, while Darwin was pondering entering the ministry, Henslow recommended him as a naturalist for a British survey ship, HMS Beagle, which planned an around-the-globe voyage. Darwin’s father was opposed, calling it a waste of time, but Charles prevailed with the help of his maternal uncle.
After four years, in 1835, the Beagle landed in the Galapagos Archipelago in the Pacific. What Darwin saw there changed our concept of biology. For millions of years, the animals and birds in these isolated islands had evolved in their unique way to survive and propagate. And they had no fear of humans. How and why did these creatures become the way they did? These questions germinated the idea of evolution in Darwin’s mind.
At 29, Darwin married Emma Wedgwood, his first cousin. The marriage saved his life. Emma was 30. An educated woman, she spoke French, German and Italian. And despite their differences in belief — she was a devoted Christian while he turned agnostic — she read Darwin’s papers before they were sent out. Emma, however, is not given the recognition she deserves for supporting her husband’s works, and accepting the demands of his almost constant illness. Moreover, she bore 10 children; the last one, born when she was 48, had Down syndrome.
Darwin’s favorite child, Annie, died of tuberculosis when she was 10. His anguish expresses a father’s loss and his deep love for a child: “Her face now rises before me ... her whole form radiant with the pleasure of giving pleasure ... her dear face bright all the time, with sweetest smiles. ... We have lost the joy of the household, and the solace of our old age.” This loss, some say, turned him into an agnostic.
Darwin’s radical idea — evolution of species over millions of years — starkly contradicted the doctrine on creation. Fearing the church’s hostile reactions, he waited about 20 years before publishing his seminal book, “The Origin of Species,” in 1859. The book transformed science and human thought forever.
Though zealots impede teaching evolution in school, some churches now believe that evolution is compatible with faith. Zealotry diminishes both religion and science.
Why is Darwin universally remembered while other original minds have remained obscure? It’s not just because of his big idea on evolution and change. After all, the idea was not his alone. Another naturalist, Alfred Wallace, came to the same conclusion as that of Darwin. Even philosopher Heraclitus said 2,500 years ago, “There is nothing permanent except change.”
What has kept Darwin alive is the power of his observations and his writings. He has integrated diverse fields of knowledge — including geology, zoology, botany, marine biology, horticulture, animal husbandry and history — to make compelling points for evolution.
We are part of nature, not above it. The poetic conclusion of “The Origin of Species” pictures our kinship to nature: “Contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and ... reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other ... have all been produced by laws acting around us.”
Truly neither Special Creation nor Panspermia can be falsified at all.
And there is precious little that could falsify macro-evolution theory, e.g. unexpected fossils. I imagine whenever such things have been found or will be found, the first priority is to develop a plausible explanation for the anomaly - because the theory itself is more of a paradigm than a theory.
The same can be said of other "historical" sciences such as archeology, anthropology and Egyptology.
The reason for this glaringly insufficient inability to falsify "historical" science theories is that the absence of evidence, uniquely to them, is not evidence of absence.
Precious few of the creatures that ever lived left a record of themselves. And none of them left a complete record.
Therefore, in my view all historical science disciplines are inferior to the hard sciences, e.g. physics and chemistry. All of them require good story-telling and faith.
Darwin was not a prophet - he couldn't foresee DNA and information theory much less quantum field theory or string theory.
I strongly believe his theory will eventually be seen as a "special case" within a comprehensive theory of biological life.
Science was involved to be sure, but there would have been no Information Theory at all without Claude Shannon's Mathematical Theory of Communications.
Thank you so very much for all your insights, dearest sister in Christ!
I asked the question and posted excerpts of various Darwin writings so that you might see that the strange juxtaposition of metaphysical speculation and negative theology that Darwin posited as confirmation (or potential refutation) of his theory does not meet your stated criteria of what constitutes scientific enterprise.
Darwin's whole program was to exclude teleology from science. By "Natural selection", he meant entirely natural processes, unguided and without purpose or design. That is why his suppositions and speculations often amounted to nothing more than, ""God wouldn't have done it that way so natural selection must be true." As illustrated by:
"If it could be proved that any part of the structure of any one species had been formed for the exclusive good of another species, it would annihilate my theory, for such could not have been produced through natural selection."For clearly there are indeed countless examples of evolution for mutual benefit in the complex ecologies of tropical rainforests. Of course, "mutual benefit" and "exclusive good" are not identical concepts.
The irony, though, being that "mutual benefit", and "exclusive good", are not scientific statements, are not derived from science, and do not comport with the presuppositions of evolution and natural selection.
Cordially,
If so, a whole lot of things in this universe would be utterly inexplicable.
Physical causality requires both space and time.
And yet from the CMB measurements since the 1960s we know there was a beginning of real space and time.
Or to put it more clearly, there was a real beginning of physical causality ex nihilo.
That means that all of creation, including that portion which science observes and measures, is a miracle per se.
To God be the glory!
The writers who created the fictional character, Captain Kirk, and had him apparently extemporaneously invent a game with complicated rules called "Fizzbin" cannot be considered an unintelligent source for the aforementioned information content. In every case where the origin coded information is known, it is the product of a mind.
You said that intelligence from non-intelligence is not as mysterious (as life from non-life) But there is no naturalistic, physical/chemical process known to science that creates coded information. The examples of animal intelligence that you listed are derivative of the coded information programmed into the animals DNA, which begs the question of the source of the original coded information in the DNA in those animals.
Cordially,
Cordially,
I strongly disagree with you, freedumb, that no "supernatural entity" has stepped into this scenario. For what was doing the observing and measuring? What was doing the deducing?
Your last essay/post simply screamed "Newtonian Paradigm at work!!!"
The role of the machine metaphor in science goes back to Descartes. Newton and those who followed built it into what has become modern science. The success of this world-view was so great that it became as strong as any of the other belief structures we might identify as religions. In this case, however, science was to liberate us from superstition and myth and to give us a basis for evaluating those things that were to be candidates for truth.I'd love to ponder these insights further right now, but it's past my bedtime. I hope we can resume our discussion tomorrow.Hence physics dealt with the fundamental laws of nature and chemistry and biology were to use these laws to deal with specific applications of the general laws physics discovered. In other words, the relation of physics to biology, in particular, is that of the general to the special. Rosen was able to see that, in fact, this was a prison for our thought and an extreme handicap to our understanding. It was a legacy of the machine metaphor. How could this be? It is so because the world of the machine is a "simple" world. Its laws and inhabitants are simple machines or mechanisms. What if the objects in chemistry and biology are not that simple? Then we must reduce them to subunits that are. By this reductionist path we will learn all that there is to learn about the real world. Robert Rosen discovered that this approach was a dead end. He discovered that when the reduction is performed, something real and necessary is lost and in a way which made it unrecoverable. This profound realization turned the ontology of our world upside down. It isn't the atoms and molecules that are at the hard core of reality, it is the relations between them and the relations between them and things called processes which are at the core of the real world....
Traditional science as described above is the result of many efforts, yet it has a core set of beliefs underlying it which Rosen refers to as The Newtonian Paradigm. There is no strict definition of what this is, but it is the entire attitude and approach that arises after Newton introduced his mechanics, especially, his mathematical approach. It certainly embodies the ideas of Descartes and the heliocentrists, for example. It also embodies all of the changes brought about by quantum mechanics. It is so much what modern science is that it could almost be used as a synonym. For these reasons, it has had a profound effect on our perception. It is so powerful a thought pattern that it has seemed to make the modeling relation superfluous. For The Newtonian Paradigm, all of nature encodes into this formal system and then can be decoded. All our models come from this one largest model of nature. In the modeling relation, the formal system lies over the natural system and the encoding and decoding are masked so that the formal system is the real world. The fact that this is not the case is far from obvious to most. The task then, is to understand why. [from the Mikulecky paper cited earlier, emphasis added]
Thank you so much for writing freedumb! Good night!
And he predicted that transitional fossils would be found. Boy howdy have they! Over 10 species of homids alone.
It also predicts how many species interact. Of course if you don’t believe in evolution you are free to disregard the advice of your physician, and only take the older medicines. After all, they worked before, and evolution would be necessary for new diseases to occur, or else the new diseases would be created by G-d... so it would be blasphemous to try to cure yourself of them...
I know this is way off the topic.
But my excuses are it is late, I am tired, and I really needed a good laugh.
_____________________________
“You some kinda Communist, boy?” (/Foghorn Leghorn character)”
______________________________
I haven’t thought of Foghorn Leghorn in years. I always loved him.
Great line. Really funny if you get the accent right to go with it.
I realized with some sadness a long time ago that most of the people responding to creation versus evolution threads were unlikely to change their minds based on evidence presented, or arguments pro or con on either side.
My purpose in posting is to say, "lighten up" to anyone getting too immersed in the inconsequential. There's a lot of humor in these threads, most of it unrecognized.
I find it especially hilarious when someone points out that the other side is being obtuse about a concept that he has clearly mis-applied himself. This can usually be recognized by simply switching labels around.
It’s a good thing I don’t drink coffee and FReep. I couldn’t afford what it would cost me in monitors and keyboards.
Variation within species explains all that is needed for disease. Whether it's on the human end or the bacteria end. A minor change in some component of the species is not necessarily a whole new species. The human who is lactose intolerant is still human. That bacteria which can digest nylon is still a bacteria only with a different appetite.
Claiming that *new* strains of disease have *evolved* would also require knowing that that strain never existed before, as opposed to simply having been exposed.
At the rate that new plant and animal species are being discovered when they are much more accessible than bacteria, certainly makes it feasible that whatever causes these diseases has merely flown under the radar.
so it would be blasphemous to try to cure yourself of them...
Chapter and verse?
Why are one's decisions on health care related to one's view on whether the disease evolved or not?
I said what I intended on the subject in the five paragraphs following the pull-quote about "intelligence from non-intelligence is not as mysterious". I'll add this: Many remarkable abilities developed spontaneously in the long chaotic time following the Cambrian Explosion. Flight would be one of the more interesting ones. Why not intelligence?
That I do not adhere and respond to your challenge to explain rigorously how information theory, or any other, applies to my casual suggestion need not be taken as a surrender to your mastery of understanding on the subject, but more perhaps to its irrelevance to the discussion.
Animals involved in the day-to-day challenges of survival and procreation did not have time to formulate complex understandings of the underlying principles involved in the remarkable things they were doing. They simply did them, whether they were impossible or not.
"But there is no naturalistic, physical/chemical process known to science that creates coded information."
However, The functioning of genetic material during mitosis, meiosis, and reproduction in general is such a process. It involves the functioning of imperfect reproduction, along with a selection process, and the introduction of various means of modification of the subject matter. Under this scenario, coded information cannot help but change, and necessarily also grow in size.
Such a process may not explain the origin of this kind of information, but it does explain its growth and continuing "creation".
==After all, they worked before, and evolution would be necessary for new diseases to occur...
DM is letting his faith in evolution take the place of the available data:
Is the H1N1 Flu Evolving?
Money quote: “Mutations are observed, so their existence is scientifically verifiable and factual. The story asserting that these changes are critical to eventually creating whole new organisms is not observed and therefore remains—at best—unsupported speculation.”
http://www.icr.org/article/4611/
What an astute insight, dearest sister in Christ!
And oh so true!
I don't think it could, because neither candle, lit or unlit, would be a complex system within Rosen's meaning. In general, inorganic systems are not complex systems.
Just thinking through what you wrote, how does one "disassemble" a candle? I suppose one could melt it, or smash it up with a hammer. But to "reassemble" it would not reconstitute the original candle. The only thing about that candle (or any candle) that doesn't change is the "form" or idea of "candle." But coming straight from Plato, "form" (i.e., formal cause) is usually regarded as an unscientific notion of the sort Francis Bacon wanted to banish from science.
Also it seems unscientific to ascribe "ineffable properties" to a candle; i.e., its quality of "litness." Its "litness" has nothing to do with the internal properties of a candle. I.e., it doesn't itself produce the fire. That has to be added to it, from outside the candle system.
In short, I'm not sure what your question is, NicknamedBob. Maybe some of the above ideas might help in refining/reformulating it?
Thank you so much for writing!
In the earlier post, NicknamedBob said: "However, if you disassemble a lit candle, you may "extinguish" an ineffable property of the candle that cannot be reassembled readily. "
That point strikes home with me because if you break down a rock, a live rabbit and a dead rabbit - a similar phenomenon occurs. Ultimately, having broken them down, we observe they are all made of the same particles and fields. But some non-physical thing was lost along the way that the live rabbit became dead.
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