Posted on 12/18/2001 7:05:45 AM PST by shrinkermd
Evolution was "proved" a hundred years ago. All the real work is in documenting the sequences it went through on the various species. Despite rants from the ID and young earth religious crowd, evolution is simply the accepted fact by any serious student. The debates and fights are over minor details. No one doubts the general nature of evolution or how it produced the multitude of species.
The laws of nature are of themselves evidence.
Mr. Miller also wonders why Mr. Behe, a member of the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, has never presented his ideas at its annual conference, which is his right. "If I thought I had an idea that would completely revolutionize cell biology in the same way that Professor Behe thinks he has an idea that would revolutionize biochemistry," he says, "I would be talking about that idea at every single meeting of my peers I could possibly get to."
Mr. Behe responds that he prefers other venues. "I just don't think that large scientific meetings are effective forums for presenting these ideas," he says.
Ding Ding Ding! If ID is going to make it as a scientific theory, then it better damn well start acting like one. The avoidance of a scientific setting for debate of ID makes the proponents of the theory look like charlatans. According to the scientific method, a workable theory has to have some testable hypothesis that can be worked over via an experiment. Does ID have any testable hypothesis? To be BETTER than evolution, it has to have a workable tested theory that explains something better than evolution? Does it do that?
There are many who doubt it. But if they have any credentials at all they are immediately written off by the scientific community. EVERYONE of them cannot be completely incompetent. IMHO, this makes the scientific community itself look bad.
To these people I say, you've still got a problem. The problem is that evolution, as a doctrine, is so overwhelmingly STUPID that, faced with a choice of wearing a sweatshirt with a scarlet letter A (Adulterer), F (Fornicator) or some such traditional device, or I (for IDIOT), you'd actually be better off sticking with one of the former choices because, as Clint Eastwood noted in The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly:
God hates IDIOTS, too!
The best illustration of how stupid evolutionism really is involves trying to become some totally new animal with new organs, a new basic plan for existence, and new requirements for integration between both old and new organs.
Take flying birds for example; suppose you aren't one, and you want to become one. You'll need a baker's dozen highly specialized systems, including wings, flight feathers, a specialized light bone structure, specialized flow-through design heart and lungs, specialized tail, specialized general balance parameters etc.
For starters, every one of these things would be antifunctional until the day on which the whole thing came together, so that the chances of evolving any of these things by any process resembling evolution (mutations plus selection) would amount to an infinitessimal, i.e. one divided by some gigantic number.
In probability theory, to compute the probability of two things happening at once, you multiply the probabilities together. That says that the likelihood of all these things ever happening, best case, is ten or twelve such infinitessimals multiplied together, i.e. a tenth or twelth-order infinitessimal. The whole history of the universe isn't long enough for that to happen once.
All of that was the best case. In real life, it's even worse than that. In real life, natural selection could not plausibly select for hoped-for functionality, which is what would be required in order to evolve flight feathers on something which could not fly apriori. In real life, all you'd ever get would some sort of a random walk around some starting point, rather than the unidircetional march towards a future requirement which evolution requires.
And the real killer, i.e. the thing which simply kills evolutionism dead, is the following consideration: In real life, assuming you were to somehow miraculously evolve the first feature you'd need to become a flying bird, then by the time another 10,000 generations rolled around and you evolved the second such reature, the first, having been disfunctional/antifunctional all the while, would have DE-EVOLVED and either disappeared altogether or become vestigial.
Now, it would be miraculous if, given all the above, some new kind of complex creature with new organs and a new basic plan for life had ever evolved ONCE.
Evolutionism, however (the Theory of Evolution) requires that this has happened countless billions of times, i.e. an essentially infinite number of absolutely zero probability events.
And, if you were starting to think that nothing could possibly be any stupider than believing in evolution despite all of the above (i.e. that the basic stupidity of evolutionism starting from 1980 or thereabouts could not possibly be improved upon), think again. Because there is zero evidence in the fossil record (despite the BS claims of talk.origins "crew" and others of their ilk) to support any sort of a theory involving macroevolution, and because the original conceptions of evolution are flatly refuted by developments in population genetics since the 1950's, the latest incarnation of this theory, Steve Gould and Niles Eldredge's "Punctuated Equilibrium or punc-eek" attempts to claim that these wholesale violations of probabilistic laws all occurred so suddenly as to never leave evidence in the fossil record, and that they all occurred amongst tiny groups of animals living in "peripheral" areas. That says that some velocirapter who wanted to be a bird got together with fifty of his friends and said:
Guys, we need flight feathers, and wings, and specialized bones, hearts, lungs, and tails, and we need em NOW; not two years from now. Everybody ready, all together now: OOOOOMMMMMMMMMMMMMmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.....
You could devise a new religion by taking the single stupidest doctrine from each of the existing religions, and it would not be as stupid as THAT.
But it gets even stupider.
Again, the original Darwinian vision of gradualistic evolution is flatly refuted by the fossil record (Darwinian evolution demanded that the vast bulk of ALL fossils be intermediates) and by the findings of population genetics, particularly the Haldane dilemma and the impossible time requirements for spreading genetic changes through any sizeable herd of animals.
Consider what Gould and other punk-eekers are saying. Punc-eek amounts to a claim that all meaningful evolutionary change takes place in peripheral areas, amongst tiny groups of animals which develop some genetic advantage, and then move out and overwhelm, outcompete, and replace the larger herds. They are claiming that this eliminates the need to spread genetic change through any sizeable herd of animals and, at the same time, is why we never find intermediate fossils (since there are never enough of these CHANGELINGS to leave fossil evidence).
Obvious problems with punctuated equilibria include, minimally:
1. It is a pure pseudoscience seeking to explain and actually be proved by a lack of evidence rather than by evidence (all the missing intermediate fossils). Similarly, Cotton Mather claimed that the fact that nobody had ever seen or heard a witch was proof they were there (if you could see or hear them, they wouldn't be witches...) The best example of that sort of logic in fact that there ever was was Michael O'Donahue's parody of the Connecticut Yankee (New York Yankee in King Arthur's Court) which showed Reggie looking for a low outside fastball and then getting beaned cold by a high inside one, the people feeling Reggie's wrist for pulse, and Reggie back in Camelot, where they had him bound hand and foot. Some guy was shouting "Damned if e ain't black from ead to foot, if that ain't witchcraft I never saw it!!!", everybody was yelling "Witchcraft Trial!, Witchcraft Trial!!", and they were building a scaffold. Reggie looks at King Arthur and says "Hey man, isn't that just a tad premature, I mean we haven't even had the TRIAL yet!", and Arthur replies "You don't seem to understand, son, the hanging IS the trial; if you survive that, that means you're a witch and we gotta burn ya!!!" Again, that's precisely the sort of logic which goes into Gould's variant of evolutionism, Punk-eek.2. PE amounts to a claim that inbreeding is the most major source of genetic advancement in the world. Apparently Steve Gould never saw Deliverance...
3. PE requires these tiny peripheral groups to conquer vastly larger groups of animals millions if not billions of times, which is like requiring Custer to win at the little Big Horn every day, for millions of years.
4. PE requires an eternal victory of animals specifically adapted to localized and parochial conditions over animals which are globally adapted, which never happens in real life.
5. For any number of reasons, you need a minimal population of any animal to be viable. This is before the tiny group even gets started in overwhelming the vast herds. A number of American species such as the heath hen became non-viable when their numbers were reduced to a few thousand; at that point, any stroke of bad luck at all, a hard winter, a skewed sex ratio in one generation, a disease of some sort, and it's all over. The heath hen was fine as long as it was spread out over the East coast of the U.S. The point at which it got penned into one of these "peripheral" areas which Gould and Eldredge see as the salvation for evolutionism, it was all over.
The sort of things noted in items 3 and 5 are generally referred to as the "gambler's problem", in this case, the problem facing the tiny group of "peripheral" animals being similar to that facing a gambler trying to beat the house in blackjack or roulette; the house could lose many hands of cards or rolls of the dice without flinching, and the globally-adapted species spread out over a continent could withstand just about anything short of a continental-scale catastrophe without going extinct, while two or three bad rolls of the dice will bankrupt the gambler, and any combination of two or three strokes of bad luck will wipe out the "peripheral" species. Gould's basic method of handling this problem is to ignore it.
And there's one other thing which should be obvious to anybody attempting to read through Gould and Eldridge's BS:
They are claiming that at certain times, amongst tiny groups of animals living in peripheral areas, a "speciation event(TM)" happens, and THEN the rest of it takes place. In other words, they are saying:
ASSUMING that Abracadabra-Shazaam(TM) happens, then the rest of the business proceeds as we have described in our scholarly discourse above!
Again, Gould and Eldridge require that the Abracadabra-Shazaam(TM) happen not just once, but countless billions of times, i.e. at least once for every kind of complex creature which has ever walked the Earth. They do not specify whether this amounts to the same Abracadabra-Shazaam each time, or a different kind of Abracadabra-Shazaam for each creature.
I ask you: How could anything be stupider or worse than that? What could possibly be worse than professing to believe in such a thing?
Medved -- always on message.
Evidence of what? An ordered universe does lead one to believe that there may possibly be some form of intelligence behind it all, but you can make any conclusions to the nature of that intelligence (e.g., the universe was created in six days).
The fact that the current state of scientific research can't explain it all does not support one set of superstitions over another. The `holes' in evolutionary theory could just as easily point to humanity being created from ears of corn, as explained in the Popol Vuh of the Mayans.
DOES EVOLUTION? BESIDES moths changing color and bird beaks growing larger? BESIDES microevolution??? The answer is NO.
I guess the truth of the matter in this instance is only TIME will tell....
I don't care what conclusions are drawn once the possibility of intelligence is acknowledged. It is those who wish to damn anyone who wishes to acknowledge intelligence, who wish to slam their "intellectual" abilities because they acknowledge that laws may of themselves be a sign of intelligent design. If there were no fear involved in this argument, there would not be the bitterness and name-calling that is also involved.
A biochemist and molecular biologist who knows nothing about Geology reserves time at the end of his course to advocate the flat earth theory.
"90% of my colleagues would diagree with me, but I find their ideas unpalatable, and most of my church membership agrees with me..." comments the renowned scientist. I like to teach what I like to think is true; I don't worry objectivity in science education.
The fact that a molecular biologist knows nothing about geology makes him uniquely qualified to criticize it. First, he is blissfully unaware of the strength of the ideas he opposes or of the irrefutable data supporting them. Second, none of the professionals in the field in question will waste their time responding.
A recent poll states that 45% percent of Americans, completely unaware of the substance of the issue, are willing to believe the flat earth theory. Armed with public approval and a lack of resistance from professionals in the field, the views of our merry professor from a backwater university is destined to make waves in web forums and chat rooms.
The earth is flat, the sun rotates around it, and Darwin was wrong. A Triple Crown for ignorance.
You have unwittingly stumbled upon the great basic truth of the evolution debate. The fact is that evolutionism with its requirement for an esssentially infinite sequence of zero-probability events is basically stupider than any doctrine or religion which had ever previously been devised. Literally ANYTHING, the Popul Vuh, Shamanism, Rastifari, Voodoo, the doctrine of the Great Punpkin and Pumpkinism, anything at all makes vastly more sense than evolution does. You could even devise a new religion by taking the single stupidest doctrine from each of the existing religions, and even that would be perfectly logical and intelligent compared to evolution.
Face it: Chuck Darwin was the stupidest white man who ever lived.
The dialectic is not between evolution and religion as the evos would have us believe: the dialectic is between evolution and modern mathematics. In order to believe in evolution, you have to take everything we know about modern mathematics, probability theory, and logic, and throw them all in the toilet. Personally, I'd rather flush evolution down the toilet of dead ideological doctrines and keep modern mathematics. Mathematics produces things like computers and automobiles; Darwinism produces things like naziism and communism.
Even though you got the answer wrong, I'll give you partial credit for giving some of the early experiments that began to give evolution scientific credibility. There are four groups of evidence that give Darwin's theory of evolution great credibility, and that is the fossil evidence, biogeography, observed instances of speciation and evolution, and the hierarchical structure of taxonomy. Each of these groups are different parts of biology as a whole cloth theory, and show how Darwin's theory helps tie biology together as a whole. Two of these fields pre date Darwin. Linnaeus' classification of species was developed back in the 17th century as a means of classifying like species, and biogeography as a field came about because like species tended to be grouped in similar places. Evolution, to be a viable theory had to pass the test of explaining how speciation occured, as well as how differing species are spread out across the globe. It has passed each test quite well, and continues to pass new ones.
No, it has never been "proved". You even lost the case in the Scopes Monkey trial, but act as if you won. What particular event "proved" evolution?
And I believe each of the above could also support the genesis account. When you say "hierarchical structure of taxonomy" I'm guessing you're referring to the common features of different species. (That's a wild guess. I'm no scientist and don't feel like looking it up) When man creates machines he uses similar parts to create machines with entirely different functions. I don't think it's a stretch to see a creator doing the same in various species. I've been slammed for using that comparison before but we are creators in our own right, are we not? We advance our technology by using old ideas and tweaking them a bit.
I don't expect scientists to trash evolution, but again, by giving no respect whatsoever to those who would study intelligent design does little to help their "public relations" debacle.
Why do you feel the need to qualify this by bringing up his race?
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