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To: Titus Quinctius Cincinnatus
No, it's not.

No it is. Evolution isn't a philosophy. Evolution -- allele change of a population over time -- is an observed, settled scientific fact, explained by four basic mechanisms of evolutionary theory.

Philosophy doesn't enter into the equation.

31 posted on 08/06/2007 7:10:22 AM PDT by Alter Kaker (Gravitation is a theory, not a fact. It should be approached with an open mind...)
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To: Alter Kaker
No it is. Evolution isn't a philosophy. Evolution -- allele change of a population over time -- is an observed, settled scientific fact, explained by four basic mechanisms of evolutionary theory.

Philosophy doesn't enter into the equation.

Ah, now you're confusing macro and microevolution. It's one thing to say that fruit flies can be bred to have longer wings or red eyes (which is observable). It's quite another to show that fruit flies can evolve into amphibians (which is, by its very nature, NOT observable, nor has the like been confirmed by fossil evidences). Creationists have no problem with the former proposition, just the latter.

And this is where the philosophy comes in. The only thing that we can directly and empirically observe about development of new types is, well, that these types exist. We haven't observed this take place, nor have we seen any fossil evidence to suggest that such occurred. Traditional Darwinism, with its proposition of gradual diversification through natural selection, has failed to be experimentally or evidentialy substantiated. This is why some prominent evolutionists have resorted to propagating alternative theories generally centering around some sort of "punctuated evolution" mechanism - long periods of no change, interspersed with very brief periods of gangbuster speciation.

All of this, ultimately, rests not on any solid empirical evidence, but on the philosophical necessity that evolution be true, and thus that it be the way in which we explain the world around us.

41 posted on 08/06/2007 7:23:09 AM PDT by Titus Quinctius Cincinnatus (Fred Dalton Thompson for President)
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