Posted on 02/13/2017 9:15:51 AM PST by fishtank
How Many More Anomalies Can Darwinism Take?
February 11, 2017
Darwinism survives not because it is empirically verified, but because it is a deduction from a tightly-held materialistic worldview.
Quine spoke of a “web of belief” that absorbs shocks that would normally falsify a theory. Darwin gave rise to a web of belief made of iron – no, titanium. For over 150 years it has resisted shocks that would snap any other scientific theory, but Darwinism is not a scientific theory. Tom Bethell shows in his new book, Darwin’s House of Cards, that Darwinism is a deduction from a worldview, not an induction from observations. Evolutionists, he shows over and over, derive “facts” from an antecedent faith. “As so often in evolutionist thinking, deduction from doubtful premises is substituted for scientific evidences” (p. 100, after he spends a chapter quoting leading scientists over a century who have all agreed there is no observational evidence for Darwin’s belief in unlimited variation). For this reason, you could hit the evolutionary web of belief with an atomic bomb and its proponents would build it back from the rubble, saying nothing happened. Let’s see some recent examples of problematic observations that would falsify any other theory.
Researchers cast into doubt a tenet of the dominant evolutionary biology model (Phys.org). The “tenet” in dispute is that duplicate genes provide robustness against mutations. Not true:
A team of Université Laval researchers has cast into doubt a tenet of evolutionary biology according to which organisms with more than one copy of the same gene in their genome are more resilient to genetic perturbations. In an article to be published tomorrow in Science, the researchers show that this genetic redundancy can also make the genome more fragile, leaving organisms more vulnerable to the effects of harmful mutations.
(Excerpt) Read more at crev.info ...
Why would we want to?
Lots of derogatory comments about evolution on this thread that have nothing to do with the article.
“Darwinism survives not because it is empirically verified, but because it is a deduction from a tightly-held materialistic worldview.”
...........
Now test this sentence as a good critical thinker should, without “antecedent faith” in Darwinism: “Our multilayered approach reveals a complex connection between ecological opportunities, diversification dynamics, and trait evolution.” Hint: read about circular reasoning in the Baloney Detector.
Why would we want to?
OK. Here we go again.
Teleological fallacy:
Conceptual Fallacy
Definition
When there is the claim that some object or idea has a purpose or necessary end point in the absence of evidence for that end point.
Example: Why would God have given us noses if he hadn’t planned that we should wear glasses?
Only after the existence of an end point has been evidentially established can it serve as a foundation for other dependent concepts.
Case Study One
According to Bertrand Russell, it was once claimed that rabbits were created with white tails so they would be easy for hunters to shoot.
Case Study Two
Evolution is often misunderstood as teleological as evidenced by suggestions that humans represent the apex of development. Evolution might be better understood as the genetic movement of a species to better align its genetic composition and related behaviors to the environmental context, rather than striving towards some genetic goal independent of an environmental context.
Case Study Three
One creationist infamously created a video purporting that the hand-shaped banana was evidence of a designer thinking ahead to when humans would grasp bananas. The fact is that modern bananas have been bred by agriculturists to have the shape they do.
I’m not saying that your position is wrong but your argument requires use of fallacies so the way you arrive at your conclusion is wrong.
The watchmaker analogy requires the formal fallacy of composition and the informal mistake of `begging the question’ and some more as well.
But believe what you want to believe. Like Paschal’s Wager, solipsism is a comfort.
So, yes or no, you are not the most complex thing in the room?
All that complexity happened by chance over time?
You believe spontaneous generation and it’s derivatives are a viable theory?
PeterPrinciple, he may be talking pedantically about the term “Darwinism”, instead of the idea of macroevolution.
You see, if you’re a scientist, you’re supposed to disassociate the hypothesis/theory from the man who popularized it, mainly because of all the epicycles that they’ve had to compensate for (addressed by the article in the OP).
Hence, the hypothesis is now referred to as (at worst) neo-Darwinism, or MET, or the modern synthesis. NEVER as Darwinism, that’s entirely too yucky nasty dirty dirt dirt dirty ugh filth.
>>Interesting, isn’t it? The scientific method gives us satellites in space, the internet, television, etc, etc, etc. It’s marvelous. But when it touches on religious sensitives, the thing is just a house of cards. Hmm.
It’s not just about the “religious sensitives”. Darwin’s theory does not pass the tests. You don’t have to create a new theory before you give up on the old one. The house of cards is in the religious devotion to Darwin. I don’t think the world is 6000 years old either.
And the tradition continues....
You will never sway an opposition so long as you mischaracterize their arguments. I already gave you the starting point by referencing the Paley vs Huxley debate, but rather than ask for clarification, you jumped straight into refutation of arguments that haven’t been presented i.e. Straw man.
I’m sure it’s fun to be pedantic, but it works much better when you actually address the dispute under consideration.
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