Posted on 12/05/2005 4:06:56 AM PST by PatrickHenry
Followed by an avalanche of duplicity. Quote-mining (extracting out-of-context quotes to indicate something which was not what the author intended) is lying, pure and simple. You, Sir, are a liar.
Darwin was not afraid to face every imaginable problem of his theory. He was neither a liar nor a coward and he knew he had something real and important.
Your presentation could not be in greater contrast to his. You keep sounding the same few egregiously un-factual talking points and pretending not to see or hear the chorus of objections in which people point out one thing after another after another you have wrong. It's hard to believe you don't see. Start acknowledging some of this stuff and dealing with it.
Isn't morality also part of what is? If so, then it must have evolved, but if that's the case why then wouldn't evolutionary theory have anything to say about it? How can one account for it, though, in evolutionary terms? Why is there any "ought" at all if evolution has nothing to say about it?
Cordially,
There are various theories - descriptive and prescriptive, to be sure - on morality as well. The theory of evolution isn't one of them.
Why is there any "ought" at all if evolution has nothing to say about it?
You might as well ask "why is there any 'gravity' at all if evolution has nothing to say about it?"
Yes, he does, but why don't we give the entire context of that quote within his argument concerning gradualism and discontinuous change:
On the isolated island of Mauritius, former home of the dodo, two genera of boid snakes (a large group that includes pythons and boa constrictors) share a feature present in no other terrestrial vertebrate: the maxillary bone of the upperjaw is split into front and rear halves, connected by a movable joint. In 1970, my friend Tom Frazzetta published a paper entitled "From Hopeful Monsters to Bolyerine Snakes?" He considered every preadaptive possibility he could imagine and rejected them in favor of discontinuous transition. How can a jawbone be half broken? Many rodents have check pouches for storing food. These internal pouches connect to the pharynx and may have evolved gradually under selective pressure for holding more and more food in the mouth. But the Geomyidae (pocket gophers) and Heteromyidae (kangaroo rats and pocket mice) have invaginated their cheeks to form external fur-lined pouches with no connection to the mouth or pharynx. What good is an incipient groove or furrow on the outside? Did such hypothetical ancestors run about three-legged while holding a few scraps of food in an imperfect crease with their fourth leg? Charles A. Long has recently considered a suite of preadaptive possibilities (external grooves in burrowing animals to transport Soil, for example) and rejected them all in favor of discontinuous transition. These tales, in the "just-so story" tradition of evolutionary natural history, do not prove anything. But the weight of these, and many similar cases, wore down my faith in gradualism long ago. More inventive minds may yet save it, but concepts salvaged only by facile speculation do not appeal much to me.
If we must accept many cases of discontinuous transition in macroevolution, does Darwinism collapse to survive only as a theory of minor adaptive change within species? The essence of Darwinism lies in a single phrase: natural selection is the major creative force of evolutionary change. No one denies that natural selection will play a negative role in eliminating the unfit. Darwinian theories require that it create the fit as well. Selection must do this by building adaptations in a series of steps, preserving at each stage the advantageous part in a random spectrum of genetic variability. Selection must superintend the process of creation, not just toss out the misfits after some other force suddenly produces a new species, fully formed in pristine perfection.
We can well imagine such a non-Darwinian theory of discontinuous change—profound and abrupt genetic alteration luckily (now and then) making a new species all at once. Hugo de Vries, the famous Dutch botanist, supported such a theory early in this century. But these notions seem to present insuperable difficulties. With whom shall Athena born from Zeus's brow mate? All her relatives are members of another species. What is the chance, of producing Athena in the first place, rather than a deformed monster? Major disruptions of entire genetic systems do not produce favored—or even viable—creatures.
But all theories of discontinuous change are not anti-Darwinian, as Huxley pointed out nearly 120 years ago. Suppose that a discontinuous change in adult form arises from a small genetic alteration. Problems of discordance with other members of the species do not arise, and the large, favorable variant can spread through a population in Darwinian fashion. Suppose also that this large change does not produce a perfected form all at once, but rather serves as a "key" adaptation to shift its possessor toward a new mode of life. Continued success in this new mode may require a large set of collateral alterations, morphological and behavioral; these may arise by a more traditional, gradual route once the key adaptation forces a profound shift in selective pressures.
Defenders of the modern synthesis have cast Goldschmidt as Goldstein by linking his catchy phrase—hopeful monster—to non-Darwinian notions of immediate perfection by profound genetic change. But this is not entirely what Goldschmidt maintained. In fact, one of his mechanisms for discontinuity in adult forms relied upon a notion of small underlying genetic change. Goldschmidt was a student of embryonic development. He spent most of his early career studying geographic variation in the gypsy moth, Lymantria dispar. He found that large differences in the color patterns of caterpillars resulted from small changes in the timing of development: the effects of a slight delay or enhancement of pigmentation early in growth increased through ontogeny and led to profound differences among fully grown caterpillars.
Goldschmidt identified the genes responsible for these small changes in timing, and demonstrated that large final differences reflected the action of one or a few "rate genes" acting early in growth. He codified the notion of a rate gene in 1918 and wrote twenty years later: The mutant gene produces its effect . . . by changing the rates of partial processes of development. These might be rates of growth or differentiation, rates of production of stuffs necessary for differentiation, rates of reactions leading to definite physical or chemical situations at definite times of development, rates of those processes which are responsible for segregating the embryonic potencies at definite times.
In his infamous book of 1940, Goldschmidt specifically invokes rate genes as a potential maker of hopeful monsters: "This basis is furnished by the existence of mutants producing monstrosities of the required type and the knowledge of embryonic determination, which permits a small rate change in early embryonic processes to produce a large effect embodying considerable parts of the organism." In my own, strongly biased opinion, the problem of reconciling evident discontinuity in macroevolution with Darwinism is largely solved by the observation that small changes early in embryology accumulate through growth to yield profound differences among adults. Prolong the high prenatal rate of brain growth into early childhood and a monkey's brain moves toward human size. Delay the onset of metamorphosis and the axolotl of Lake Xochimilco reproduces as a tadpole with gills and never transforms into a salamander. (See my book Ontogeny and Phylogeny [Harvard University Press, 1977] for a compendium of examples, and pardon me for the unabashed plug.) As Long argues for the external cheek pouch: "A genetically controlled developmental inversion of the cheek pouch may have occurred, recurred, and persisted in some populations. Such a morphological change would have been drastic in effect, turning the pockets 'wrong side out' (furry side in), but nevertheless it would be a rather simple embryonic change." Indeed, if we do not invoke discontinuous change by small alteration in rates of development, I do not see how most major evolutionary transitions can be accomplished at all. Few systems are more resistant to basic change than the strongly differentiated, highly specified, complex adults of "higher" animal groups. How could we ever convert an adult rhinoceros or a mosquito into something fundamentally different. Yet transitions between major groups have occurred in the history of life.
D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson, classical scholar, Victorian prose stylist, and glorious anachronism of twentieth-century biology, dealt with this dilemma in his classic treatise On Growth and Form.
An algebraic curve has its fundamental formula, which defines the family to which it belongs. . . . We never think of "transforming" a helicoid into an ellipsoid, or a circle into a frequency curve. So it is with the forms of animals. We cannot transform an invertebrate into a vertebrate, nor a coelenterate into a worm, by any simple and legitimate deformation. . . . Nature proceeds from one type to another. . . . To seek for steppingstones across the gaps between is to seek in vain, forever.
D'Arcy Thompson's solution was the same as Goldschmidt's: the transition may occur in simpler and more similar embryos of these highly divergent adults. No one would think of transforming a starfish into a mouse, but the embryos of some echinoderms and protovertebrates are nearly identical.
1984 will mark the 125th anniversary of Darwin's Origin, the first major excuse for a celebration since the centenary of 1959. I hope that our "new speaking" these few years hence will be neither dogma nor vacuous nonsense. If our entrenched, a priori preferences for gradualism begin to fade by then, we may finally be able to welcome the plurality of results that nature's complexity provides.
Your complaints in your post are taken out of context. Darwin wrote in a manner where he posed objections to his ideas, then refuted them. You've either never read Darwin and aren't aware you're doing this, or you have read Darwin and are deliberately misreprenting his statements.
That would make you a liar.
However, if you simply haven't read Darwin, Patrick Henry has the refutation to your posted objections in one of the links on his home page. It's pretty short if you're really interested.
A score on a test. There are so many attempts to define intelligence operationally, that they all, taken collectively, could fill a book.
I have no idea what that is supposed to mean but it sounds similar to the question "when did you stop beating your wife"
Give us an example where a supernatural explanation has been demonstrated to be superior to natural explanations.
What the heck does supernatural have to do with what I said. BTW: medicine, human flight, and electricity where all considered supernatural at one time. Supernatural is merely beyond our current understanding of the natural world. The natural world is not a fixed commodity but the reflection of man's current level of knowledge. Based on history, some of the things we consider supernatural will be part of the natural world in the future unless you feel man has reach the summit of all knowledge.
Assuming a Materialistic universe is no less an assumption or dogma as assuming a designed universe. It is still a bloody assumption based on dogma rather than going where the data leads.
To quote Vanilla Ice - "word to your mother!"
Well put!
Bravo!
Right, he says it, then he tries to take it back. Sorry, no take backs. Punctuated Equilibria cannot explain away the absence of the overwhelming transitional fossils there ought to be. If Darwin/Gould/Dawkins were right, then we should be tripping over them on our front lawn. Duplicitous!
The burden of proof is on the Darwinist to demonstrate that the bacterial flagellum could have formed by a gradual Darwinian, undirected process, not for the ID'r to prove a universal negative, and such proof is not the IDr's demand, it is the Darwinist demand. If it possible to show that no Darwinian pathway could reasonably lead to an irreducibly complex biological structure, that, at least in my mind constitutes refutability.
Cordially,
"Author! Author!"
It's absolutely nothing to the way you're dancing around the presence of them. It's getting EXTREMELY hard to give you the benefit of the doubt here.
[Snort!]
Not when the ID'er advances an affirmative claim - e.g., X is impossible. Then they take on the burden of supporting such a claim.
And it's also nothing to the way he dances around the fact that the scientific proponents of ID actually support the theory of evolution that he rejects.
Right, he says it, then he tries to take it back. Sorry, no take backs.
Wow. "No take backs?" That's your idea of a scientific argument?
Darwin anticipated objections to his theory, then addressed each of the objections in turn, showing how his theory withstood such a criticism. For you to single out his anticipated criticisms while then ignoring his response to them is disingenuous at best, and the very definition of "quote mining."
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