Posted on 09/13/2006 3:52:47 PM PDT by 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 Mindells fault, for, if truth be told, evolution hasnt 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 hasnt 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 havent 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 Coynes stereotyping of creationists. Compare also our 02/10/2006 and 12/21/2005 stories on marketing Darwinism to the masses.
You heard it right here. We didnt have to say it. One of Darwins own bulldogs said it for us: evolutionary theory is useless. Oh, this is rich. Dont 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 Charlies 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, whats 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. Hes 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
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
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.
But, still a theory with no application.
He did not mention Christianity at all. Knee-jerk?
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.
My goodness, stultis and stultorum right next to one another. That's got to be a neat little Latin lesson!
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.
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.
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!
What is an "envionmenatist"?
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.
How does this happen when you start with a single organism?
The Democrats are well on their way to becoming Whigs.
What makes you think gravity is simple?
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.
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.
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