Posted on 03/22/2012 7:44:32 AM PDT by Moseley
Here is evolution for you:
http://upressonline.com/2012/03/fau-student-threatens-to-kill-professor-and-classmates/ This is very sad. And it seems crazy at first.
BUT THINK ABOUT IT. It is obvious to me what is going on here. Yes, I am guessing / reading between the lines. But I think it is very clear.
The class was being taught about EVOLUTION:
A fellow classmate, Rachel Bustamante, was sitting behind Carr prior to her outburst and noticed she had been avoiding looking at the professor until 11:35 a.m. — that’s when she snapped. The classmate reported that Kajiura was discussing attraction between peacocks when Carr raised her hand to ask her question about evolution. She asked it four times, and became increasingly upset each time Kajiura’s answer failed to satisfy her.
DID YOU CATCH IT? The professor was discussing the evolutionary role of "attraction between peacocks."
In other words, how do animals / people choose a mate?
If you remember what evolution teaches, it teaches that INDIVIDUALS *MATE* BASED UPON PERCEIVED *SUPERIOR* CHARACTERISTICS for evolution.
So this Black woman Jonatha(?) Carr obviously perceives that BEING BLACK IS ASSUMED (by many) to be INFERIOR and that evolution means that men CHOOSE women based upon what is perceived to be SUPERIOR qualities.
What evolution means to Carr -- and who can blame her, logically? -- is that men are going to choose "BETTER" women than her, and she is not going to get chosen as a valuable person or desirable mate.
Hence, the discussion of how animals, like peacocks, CHOOSE A MATE based upon how they other one LOOKS.
So this Black woman is obviously perceiving that evolution means that men will choose the SUPERIOR candidate for mating and reproduction, and evolution produces "improvement" over time by men selecting SUPERIOR women -- meaning NOT HER.
Whereas Christianity teaches the value and infinite worth of E V E R Y human being in God's eyes, and that every man and woman is not only valuable just for who they are, but infinitely valuable in God's heart, evolution teaches that this Black woman is INFERIOR to other women, to be discarded and rejected in the evolutionary march toward perfection.
Buried in her thinking must be the idea that Black men (so the cliche goes, true or untrue) prefer White women over Black women. (I suspect this flows from Blacks being persecuted and wanting the affirmation of being valued by a perceied more powerful class, not because there is anything inherently superior about White women over Black women in an evolutionary sense.)
God looks over the vast diversity of human types and characteristics, and says IT IS GOOD: ALL OF IT. All of the vast differences and variety. There is no "better" or "worse" in God's eyes. There is no human being more (or less) valuable than this Black woman Carr. Everyone is equally cherished in God's heart.
Somewhere, if we can learn to follow God's plans (which unfortunately is much more difficult and mysterious than it sounds, and can be a frustrating search), God knows the PERFECT CHOICE of a man for Jonatha Carr.
NO, the man isn't perfect, any more than Miss Carr is perfect. No one is perfect. Marriage involves the strange situation of two VERY IMPERFECT human beings trying to live a life together without killing each other. Therein lies the challenge of learning to APPLY God's principles in real life. Marriage is like the "lab class" in comparison with the "class lecture." We get to put into practice during the week what God tries to teach us on Sunday.
But God says that if Miss Carr can put her trust in God's hands, there is a perfect choice of a mate for her. God doesn't move on our time table, and God can be frustrating sometimes. But in God Miss Carr lacks nothing.
However, evolution tells Miss Carr that life is a hostile, adversarial, dog-eat-dog COMPETITION in which she is necessarily going to be the LOSER because (in her mind, as she has been bombarded with negativity) being a Black woman puts her at the bottom of the list of choices.
Evolution means survival of the fittest and (she thinks) that ain't her.
Can you see now why she yells "I HATE EVOLUTION!"
The question is:
DO YOU?
DO YOU HATE EVOLUTION, TOO?
For the very same reason that Miss Carr understandably hates evolution, shouldn't we all?
Evolution is not simply an irrelevant side show for those who believe in God.
EVOLUTION IS A DIRECT AND VIOLENT ASSAULT ON THE WORTH AND DIGNITY AND SELF IDENTITY OF HUMAN BEINGS, TEARING DOWN THEIR UNDERSTANDING OF THEMSELVES, AND PITTING BROTHER AGAINST BROTHER AND SISTER AGAINST SISTER, IN AN UNGODLY COMPETITION. Evolution breeds violence, hatred, depression, and despair.
There is not a single human being alive whom God does not want. And there is not a single human being alive whom God wants any more than any other.
Yet evolution tells this young Black woman - and any one else who has ever, temporarily, felt inferior for a moment in time -- that she is destined to be discarded by life, that she is trash to be excluded and rejected by the world.
Do you hate evolution with a passion, yet?
Evolution only speaks to what life "does," not what life "is."
To me it is easy to conceive of life, and hence biology, without evolution. But not of evolution without life. Thus, evolution is a corollary of the living, the consequence of specific somatic activities, and not the other way around. Indeed, it may very well be more a property of particular realizations of life, rather than of life itself. — Robert Rosen, Life Itself, 1991 [highly recommended!]Thus it appears yet again that you and I are looking at different things, and are decidedly not on the same page, as usual. You are satisfied to know what DNA does. It isn't necessary to inquire into what it IS — the same way you are satisfied to know what life does, while feeling no pressing need to know what life IS. (Indeed, exDemMom suggests in her valuable essay/post at #200 that this may be a metaphysical question beyond the reach of science.)
I do not at all believe that evolution reduces to "a" physical mechanism and nothing more. Life forms are not "machines, " though the "machine metaphor" is widespread in biology nowadays.
The machine metaphor suggests very strongly that the "parts" of organisms are analogous to the parts of machines. Hence they are there for the sake of whatever functions they execute with respect to the organism as a whole....In other words, final cause — e.g., mitochondria's purpose is energy generation — is never to be taken literally. We must not speak of "purpose" at all — for this seems to involve a causal "pull from the future" which is prohibited in the Newtonian picture of causal entailment.
...[I]f the parts of a machine are there by design [for all the machines we know of are human purpose-built fabrications], what does that say about organisms? Obviously, nothing very good. For by invoking the concept of design, and the explanation of parts in terms of design (i.e., in terms of the functions manifested by the parts), we are talking about finality [final cause]. This is all right when we talk about machines as human fabrications, but it is manifestly not all right to consider organisms in such terms.
The central issue for biology here is: how can we have organization without finality? Nowadays, biologists generally believe they have papered over this issue. In a nutshell, Darwinian evolution through natural selection, with its attendant adaptations, serves precisely to do this. The argument is that the produce of an evolutionary process gives the appearance of design but without any of the finalistic implications of design. Through evolution, then, we can have organic machines, in which parts have functions, but shaped entirely by natural selection and not by fabrication. At least, that is the claim.
As such, the explanation of a function then devolves upon the evolutionary process itself, and not upon the particular relation of part to whole that process has generated. It thus remains, strictly speaking, illegal to explain, e.g., the function of mitochondria (i.e., to answer the question of "why mitochondria?) by referring to the exigencies of energy generation; this is only a façon de parler, a shorthand for a whole evolutionary chronicle, and never to be taken literally. — ibid.
Or as Robert Rosen put it,
...[F]inality is ... resolutely excluded from Newtonian encodings. First ... [causal] entailment in that picture is embodied entirely in the recursiveness of state transition sequences. There is nothing in that picture for a state to entail except a subsequent state. Furthermore, a state can itself be entailed only by a preceding state. The presence of time as a parameter for state transition sequences translates into an assertion that causes must not anticipate effects. Therefore, whether we express final causation in terms of "intentionality," or equivalently in terms of what its effect entails, final causation in the Newtonian picture involves the future acting on the present. And of course, this is clearly inconsistent with the encoding categories in the Newtonian picture.Two observations here: (1), Darwin's evolution theory manifests the Newtonian view of causation and time — as a unidirectional linear series of state transitions over time. And yet (2), it seems to me impossible within this framework to speak of a biological function absent the purpose the function serves. And in the Newtonian picture, we can't talk about purpose at all — say, "the purpose of mitochondria is energy generation" — because any idea of "purpose" looks like a "pull from the future," and the Newtonian causal structure does not permit this....In the Newtonian picture, a state can only entail subsequent states.... Subsequent states are necessarily later in time than present states. Finality is expressible only in terms of what is entailed by a state, and hence, in the Newtonian picture, only in terms of future states. Ergo, final causation, as a separate causal category, cannot exist in that picture.
I just love it, dear allmendream, when you engage me with questions of the type, "what is the physical mechanism that drives evolution?" For you to have such an expectation — that ultimately everything in nature devolves exclusively on the physical — is relentlessly reductionist to Newtonian principles which can do nothing to explicate what life is. And so, I use such opportunities to tell you all the ways in which I truly believe Darwin's theory is totally unsuitable to the task of explaining just what it is — LIFE — that is, what is this phenomenon that is "evolving?"
As to this above-mentioned "reductionism" so inherent in Darwinian thinking, Rosen had this to say:
I can epitomize a reductionist approach to [biological] organization in general, and to life in particular, as follows: throw away the organization and keep the underlying matter.In short, study the organization, not the matter. Matter constitutes the physical basis of all physically-realizable systems in nature, both inorganic and organic, but can furnish no principle whereby the inorganic system can bootstrap itself into an organic (i.e., living) system capable of "evolving" in the first place.
The relational [biological] approach to this says the exact opposite, namely: when studying an organized material system, throw away the matter and keep the underlying organization.
A final word on our topic, from Robert Rosen again:
Contemporary biology has concerned itself almost exclusively with the endlessly fascinating phenomena of life, but the secrets are not to be found there, no more than one can fathom the nature of the chemical bond by staring at the periodic table. Thus, we must approach the problem from a new direction....Well, one can only hope that is so....
...I contrasted "contemporary physics" with the "ideal physics" it aspires to be. I argued that a vast discrepancy exists between the two, the discrepancy most blatantly revealed by the inability of contemporary physics to throw light on organic phenomena. The comparable relation between "contemporary biology" and "ideal biology" is far more discrepant still. At the moment, biology remains a stubbornly empirical, experimental, observational science. The papers and books that define contemporary biology emanate mainly from laboratories of increasingly exquisite sophistication, authored by virtuosi in the manipulation of laboratory equipment, geared primarily to isolate, manipulate, and characterize minute quantities of matter. Thus contemporary biology simply is what these people do; it is precisely what they say it is.
On the other hand, a science indifferent to its own basic questions can hardly be said to be in its ideal situation, or indeed, anywhere near it. If the status quo is to be changed, we had better not entirely vest in the contemporary biologist the right to say what biology is in the abstract. For whatever biology will be tomorrow, it will not be merely an extrapolation of what it is today.
For I think the following insight from another great mathematician and theoretical biologist, Nicholas Rashevsky (did I mention that Rosen was a mathematically-based theoretical biologist?) is entirely valid:
As we have seen, a direct application of the physical principles used in mathematical models of biological phenomena, for the purpose of building a theory of life ... is not likely to be fruitful. We must look for a principle which connects the different physical phenomena involved and expresses the biological unity of the organism and of the organic world as a whole. [emphasis added]Darwinism is of no help here. To put it mildly.
Question: Will contemporary biology ever take up Rashevsky's (and Rosen's) challenge?
Thank you ever so much for writing, dear allmendream!
Full retreat into the meaning of words is no answer to my rather simple question.
Even if you believe there is more to evolution than JUST a physical mechanism - it seems that you have no earthly idea, nor does it seem that you are willing to speculate, WHAT that physical mechanism IS.
Natural selection - despite your protestations otherwise - is not magical miraculous or metaphysical - it can be describe accurately as a physical result based upon physical phenomena.
You claim to believe in some sort of evolution that has some basis in this physical universe - yet you are entirely incapable of describing it.
When questioned on what should be a rather simple matter - you retreat into semantics and blather about unrelated subjects.
The point is that you claim to accept evolution, claim that it has SOME physical basis - but have no idea what that physical basis is or how it would work or how it would be different than a “Darwinian” explanation.
This is all too typical of creationists.
They don't know what DNA is, or what it does - but they are SURE it can't do what we see it doing without some sort of miraculous intervention!
Quite amusing.
Thanks for posting. :)
You continue to miss my point: the complete description of natural phenomena does not exclusively reside in physical descriptions.
I give up, allmendream. After five years of corresponding with you, I have not achieved one single success in getting you to think "outside the box" of your Darwinist "conditioning."
Plus, how on earth could you possibly digest in about ten minutes, what it took me several hours to write?
Jeepers, you must be a true genius!
And Darwinism has nothing to say on this point.
JMHO FWIW.
I repeat myself because you seem incapable of understanding.
If it is not ESXCLUSIVELY a physical phenomena - SOME component of it must be a physical phenomena - but you seem to have no idea what it is - or any curiosity about what it is - or any plan to discover what it is. How lazy. How inelegant. How useless. How typical of creationism.
It didn't take long to read through your garbage and discern that it did absolutely nothing towards answering the question I asked - just more inartful dancing around the subject.
I guess you consider physical descriptions of physical phenomena “stupid” - the rest of the world deems it necessary for any sort of discovery or useful application of the scientific method.
Your inability to answer is quite telling.
More inartful dodging and semantic stupidity doesn't answer my question.
What would be the physical component of the evolution you say you accept?
Could you describe it to us using a non-”Darwinian” argument?
Or are you too conditioned by your creationist indoctrination to ever think outside the paltry limits of your self imposed box enough to think scientifically for even a moment?
ROFLOL!!!
ROFLOL!!!
Evolution does not "bottom out" in the "physical."
I have been trying to say that to you for over five years by now, to no effect whatsoever.
You simply cannot see anything at all outside of the physicalist/materialist/mechanistic "Darwinian box."
And that being the case, I only wonder that our conversation has lasted as long as it has....
Frankly, I'm beginning to lose patience with this state of affairs.
If you think that what I write is “garbage,” then why don’t you just “move on?”
But in terms of natural selection, certain characteristics are asserted to be BETTER (more adaptive) than others.
In natural selection, traits can be advantageous, disadvantageous, or neutral. Eye color, for instance, is probably neutral. A trait that in neutral in one environment can become disadvantageous or advantageous in another.
For example, black people in sunny Africa have an advantage because the melanin (black pigment) in their skin absorbs the UV light and protects them against DNA damage. But black people in the US don't receive much sunlight, especially in the more northern parts of the country. Most of the sunlight they do receive is absorbed by the melanin. As a result, it is difficult for their bodies to make enough vitamin D. Their bodies then produce extra cholesterol, so that more of it is available to make vitamin D with the limited sunlight they receive. But too much cholesterol is bad for the heart.
Conversely, white people do fine in the US with light skin; with a little sun, they make all the vitamin D they need because they have so little melanin. But white people in Africa are very prone to skin cancer.
By no means does the evolutionary hypothesis of natural selection -- that is mate selection preferring "better" characteristics - SEEK diversity.
If certain characteristics are more advantageous for survival, diversity is *BAD* because diversity means that some specimens have disadvantageous characteristics. If mating specimens are choosing a mate based upon the selection of "better" characteritics, to select for diversity is to promote WORSE characteristics.
There is absolutely nothing in the hypothesis of evolution or any of its dicussion that supports or even mentions mate-selection to SEEK diversity.
If you are seeking a mate, do you want your mate to be a close relative, or would you rather not be related to your mate? If you are married and your spouse isn't your sibling or first cousin, you've selected for diversity. If you marry someone from a different racial group, as a number of people do, then you have sought maximum diversity.
On a closely related issue, people also select for a mate most likely to deliver reproductive success (in other words, the most "fit" mate, in the sense of "survival of the fittest"). The traits most often associated with attractiveness are also traits associated with health and fertility. People aren't quite so analytical about their mate choices, of course. But the process of evolution has hard wired their brains to seek certain qualities in a mate.
Exactly. The Bible contains a rather simple story of creation which has no predictive or descriptive power. On the other hand, there are rich and complex geologic, fossil, and astronomical records to be examined, as well as the molecular mechanisms of evolution which I can observe directly in the lab. Since I'm inclined to believe the evidence that is all around me, I have to ask the logical question: does God want us to believe the Bible literally, in its entirety? Or does He mean for us to interpret the Bible as a metaphorical instrument for teaching moral lessons? I'll take the latter--otherwise, I'd go crazy wondering why God filled the world and universe with so much evidence of evolution at the time He created everything ~6000 years ago.
If you think asking what the physical basis of the evolution you say you accept is “stupid” why did you dance around the subject without ever attempting to answer it so often?
Five years of us posting together and you still have no idea what DNA is what it does or how it does it?
It would be nice if you could look outside your self imposed box to see that asking what the physical basis of what is happening in the world is not “stupid”.
That is why creationism advances nothing and leads nowhere. Because asking the question about how things happens is “stupid”.
And in another five years will you still not know about DNA or what the physical component of the evolution you say you accept is, or could be?
Oh well.
I share in your frustration in continuing these discussions when our correspondents do not seem to engage on the issues we raise.
allmendream, for instance, seems to gravitate to the physical-chemical aspects of molecular biology. As far as I know, we have not questioned his credentials but rather have raised the point - repeatedly - that it is not the whole story.
More importantly, your post goes to the issue of what life "is" not merely what it looks like or how living organisms behave. That of course is vital to a mathematician's modeling of life whether Rosen, Schneider, etc. And such models are necessary not only to advance our knowledge and wisdom but also for technical reasons, e.g. pharmaceutical research.
In a later post, allmendream says he knows what life "is" - well then please tell us what life "is" in your words - not what it looks like, not what it does, but what life (vs. non-life/death in nature) "is."
I very strongly suspect you'll agree that the physical-chemical aspects are not the entire story, that the whole of a living organism is greater than the sum of its parts.
Actually, I was trying to get YOU to think your way through it in a biblically theological kind of way.
Of course, I already know the answers to the questions I’m asking. Would you expect anything else?
So, the narrator is recounting the story of certain events.
First, you need to know the details of the recounting.
Do you know the answer to the question that I asked?
I believe you’ve asked more than one question along the way.
We were talking about biblical theology being the starting point for historic Christianity.
Does the text not describe events that happened before the existence of anyone to observe and record them?
You can question my credentials all you want - but can you dispute my knowledge of the subject? It would be hard to do so considering how little you know of it and how easily I can demonstrate my knowledge of it.
As to what life is - life is a highly organized collection of molecules that consumes energy in order to maintain and reproduce their highly organized structure.
I agree the physio-chemical aspects of life are not the entire story - but they are as far as science can deal with the subject. Biology is the scientific study of life - not the philosophical study of life, not the theological study of life, not the metaphysical study of life - it is scientific.
Science deals with the physical. That is why it is of use while creationism is useless.
And asking how things proceed in our physical world via physical mechanisms is not a “stupid” question. But it is illustrative of why after so long posting on this subject, creationists never seem to learn even the basics of the theory they oppose, or even the basics of a physical mechanism they say they accept - but are ABSOLUTELY UNABLE to describe via any physical means.
Thus we see again how creationism is an intellectual dead end leading to no further knowledge or discovery or useful application.
Of course not. It starts with “In the beginning, God...”
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