Posted on 02/22/2009 10:58:04 PM PST by GodGunsGuts
Opinion
Monday, Feb. 23, 2009
Evolution debate persists because it's not science
By Raymond H. Kocot
...
But did you ever wonder why Darwinism's general theory of evolution, sometimes called macroevolution, has been debated for over 150 years without resolution? The surprising answer is Darwin's macroevolution theory is not a legitimate science. The National Academy of Sciences clearly defined science in its 1998 guidebook for science teachers. The definition begins with [stating that] science is a particular way of knowing about the world, and ends with, "Anything that can be observed or measured is amenable to scientific investigation. Explanations that cannot be based on empirical evidence are not part of science." In other words, a legitimate scientific theory (a hypothesis or idea) must be observable in real time and must be testable, yielding reproducible results. That is the core of the scientific method that has brought man out of the Dark Ages.
Because confirmable observations and generating experimental data are impossible for unique events like life's origin and macroevolution theory, world-famous evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr prompts evolutionists to construct historical narratives to try to explain evolutionary events or processes. In other words, stories are all evolutionists can muster to support macroevolution theory. If macroevolution theory, which must rest on faith in a story and is considered to be scientific, why not the creation story. With that in mind, it is no wonder the molecules-to-man debate has persisted for 150 years...
(Excerpt) Read more at myrtlebeachonline.com ...
My point is the submarine is designed to work. That is, it's not the end-product of a virtually endless chain of prior random events that somehow ended up by (serendipitously!) getting it "just right" to do what submarines do.
Surely you can discriminate the difference between "design" and a "crap shoot" that somehow gets things right by accident.
Natural selection is not random either. It is a trial and error process that keeps designs that work and discards designs that do not work.
Check out “directed evolution” as an example of how novel enzymes are made for industrial purposes by random variation and selecting for the necessary traits.
It is a MUCH more powerful system for designing enzymes, right now, then attempting to design an enzyme with the necessary traits on paper and then making it in the lab.
If there is debate, then it is not Science. However, what is not debatable is Science. Genesis is not debatable. Genesis is Science.
I respectfully think not.
This sounds like standard fair from the cult of evolution.
You can tell that evolution is neither theory or science because anytime it's criticized, like a swarm of army ants the cultists attack any and all criticisms, including so-called peer review as "religion" or "attacks on science".
What's equally fascinating is the cultists don't seem to understand this is a floundering and failing tactic and harming the theory, or what's left of it, more than any actual peer review ever could.
Yes — and Merrimac & Monitor would be "fossils" of the species "submarines."
But this does nothing to detract from the fact that every member of the class "submarines" is a purpose-built machine, constructed by an intelligent, creative agent.
A typhoon blowing through a junk yard cannot construct a Boeing 737 no matter how much time is "available" for this process. Especially because there's nothing to "tell" the process how it could ever know whether it had achieved its purpose (construction of a Boeing 737); i.e., whether the process was successful or not.
No purpose can be invoked by a "random" process. Indeed, the specification of "randomness" is usually made when the idea of "purpose" in nature enters the public debate/discussion. The advocates of randomness purport to show the unshowable: that an ordered system can emerge without prior reference to a functional purpose. They think they can dispense with purpose in nature altogether.
allmendream didn't specifically answer my question as to whether "random mutation" has been morphed into "genetic variation" as the proper language to use nowadays. Yet he clearly deemphasizes the use of the word, random, in descriptions of biology. Though that's the very language that Darwin used.
And moreover, is the language still used by some of the most eminent biologists of recent times. For instance, the Nobel prize-winning biologist Jacques Monod, who insists that everything we see all around us in nature, biological and otherwise, is the product of "sheer, blind chance."
I dunno, xzins. Seems to me if a claim like that were true, it would refer to a process nothing short of the miraculous. For a chain of accidents is to be credited with the order of the natural world. On this principle, order rises, spontaneously you see, from disorder.
But jeepers, when exactly did Darwinists start believing in miracles like this?
I did answer your question. You asked about genetic variation and random mutation. I told you that genetic variation is produced by mutations in a random manner.
Are you suggesting that God has no control over random processes? That “random” is synonymous for “out of God's control”?
Prov 16:33 The dice are cast into the lap but every result is from the Lord.
As to your ‘miraculous’ ideas of how evolution works, do you feel a “miracle” is needed for random variation and selection to produce novel molecular machines?
Did you not read what I posted to you about “directed evolution”?
Do you suppose that miraculous intervention is needed for this process to derive novel and useful proteins for industrial purposes?
As forerunners of ships with a low profile, the M&M are likewise forerunners of those with a below the surface profile. They are obsolete because they died.
The unmentionable process is death. Just where does that fit with rational, sentient beings who realize their own mortality? Who anguish over lost love, lost hopes, lost strength?
Evolution cannot account for the human spirit, and as you say, reassembling junk from a junk heap will not construct a single mili-liter of conscious, self-aware spirit.
There is one Wind (pneuma) blowing through existence, though, which can. "The wind blows where it wants to, but you can't tell where it comes from or where it's going. The same with everyone born of God's Pneuma."
All living things are mortal. From the dust they were formed and into dust they shall return. One thing alone is not mortal.
And so please tell what standard against which this process of trial and error — non-random! as you say (but it still looks pretty random to me, especially if we are to think of it as "goal-less" and "undirected") — is to be measured? What is the standard that decides what works and what doesn't work in Nature? Especially if Nature is said to have no purposes of her own?
If there are no purposes in Nature, then how can natural selection not be random ?
No. I am absolutely not saying that, allmendream. God uses what we view as "randomness" for achieving His creative purposes in Nature. Broadly speaking, "randomness" refers to the potentiality of newness arising in nature. And "newness" arises in biological beings literally with each and every time-step.
In short, God loves "random!" It's what keeps the universe from becoming perfectly static; of allowing for its development; in leaving room for, among other things, human free will.
But because the total system contains random elements (potentialities) does not mean that the total system is "unguided," let alone purposeless.
As to what standard is used in this trial and error it is known in biology as “differential reproductive success”. A favored variation will have leave more offspring than a unfavorable variation.
This is what is observed in countless experiments on the ability of natural selection to shape experimental populations. If you turn up the heat on a population, those variations amenable to high heat have more offspring.
What “works” in nature is surviving and reproducing.
What “doesn't work” is dying before you reproduce, having sickly or few offspring, etc.
Detection of “purpose” is beyond the scope of science.
If I lose at cards then I see it as God's will.
An atheist may well see it as just random bad luck.
There is no scientific way to differentiate or discern between these two views.
Amen!
Yes. Beautifully said dear brother in Christ!
Yet your beautiful insight is no help (nor consolation) to our Darwinist brethren, I feel pretty sure. For most of them, it seems, don't mind that their dear theory not only cannot account for the origin of life, but that it's also stupified by the problem of the origin of consciousness, not even to mention spirit (the existence of which many categorically deny in the first place). So one has to ask: As a fundamental theory of biology — of living, sentient life forms — what does it really have to offer?
To me, Darwin's theory is not without merit. The problem with it is it overreaches. My sense is it has solid insights in terms of dynamic intra-species response to environmental change. This is within the domain of microevolution. To extrapolate from the micro- to the macroevolution seems an unwarranted step. It uses the "part" to explain the "whole." Generally speaking, this is rarely if ever a fruitful procedure.
To my scientist friends, a message from George Gilder:
Throughout the history of human thought, it has been convenient and inspirational to designate the summit of the hierarchy as God. While it is not necessary for science to use this term, it is important for scientists to grasp the hierarchical reality it signifies. Transcending its materialist trap, science must look up from the ever dimmer reaches of its Darwinian pit and cast its imagination toward the word and its sources: idea and meaning, mind and mystery, the will and the way. It must eschew reductionism – except as a methodological tool – and adopt an aspirational imagination. Though this new aim may seem blinding at first, it is ultimately redemptive because it is the only way that science can ever hope to solve the grand challenge problems before it, such as gravity, entanglement, quantum computing, time, space, mass, and mind. Accepting hierarchy, the explorer embarks on an adventure that leads to an ever deeper understanding of life and consciousness, cosmos and creation. — "Evolution and Me," National Review, July 17, 2006Thank you ever so much for your beautiful, insightful essay/post xzins!
If so then you believe that “microevolution” takes place with a strength and at a speed not proposed by anything observed in the scientific literature.
Meanwhile what we do observe is an elegant process whereby minor and random variations along with selection can accomplish amazing things; and at a observable rate consistent with what we observe in the fossil record corroborated by physics and radioatomic decay, and know about the age of the Earth and the movement of continents.
We can observe this same pattern cropping up in diverging populations, and this process is at a speed consistent with the observed rates of interspecies difference accumulation.
That is Science. (to take it back to the title of the thread)
You observe a process. Measure its rate. Explain natural phenomena with natural observed and measured causes. Determine if what you observe is consistent with current theory. Publish. Publish and get a Nobel if you get to change the theory in light of your new evidence.
This micro macro drivel is like saying that the “micro” erosion observed and measured currently is not sufficient to explain the “macro” erosion of valleys and canyons.
Maybe its not true...
Another evolutionary bottleneck.
If groups as large as ones like the Amish are having difficulties because of (essentially) inbreeding, then how did all these evolutionary bottlenecks which allegedly reduced the population to a few thousand go on to produce healthy individuals?
Are you telling us then that only the successful designs somehow were the only ones to get fossilized by some chance?
“Failed” body plans don't get to grow into the million population group, they die young if they are even born at all.
What ever happened to the changes being gradual? Evos constantly mock non-evos for their comments about one species giving birth to another significantly different progeny, but that is exactly what you are implying needs to happen. The gradual changes didn't make it. They would have had to be more dramatic to survive birth and reach age of reproduction.
Those gradual changes would be considered *failed* if they weren't enough to allow stunning success but not all those *failed* plans need be fatal, as in the case of limbs developing to flippers. A limb going to flipper is not a serious enough failure in change that the individual would not not make it to birth. That is not a fatal birth defect.
But what good would a partially formed limb that is transitioning from leg to flipper be? It would be a liability to a land creature, leaving it more susceptible to injury and death as the land creature could not use a hybrid leg/flipper for locomotion very easily, nor could it use a hybrid arm/flipper to gather food.
The hybrid limb/flipper would not be a great advantage in the water as it would not be as useful as a fully developed flipper to escape being preyed on by those creatures such as sharks which have fully functioning flippers.
An animal in process of going from land to water or water to land is not well suited to survive either on land nor in water in the transition stage.
So how did it manage to do that?
Well jeepers, that's a fine admission from somebody who's committed to a theory that depends on the fossil record for its justification.
Details, details.....
Don't confuse them with the facts.
Could it be that it really doesn't? That it's just wishful thinking by people who want it to look that way so that they can eliminate God from the equation?
It seems the easiest explanation to me for why we only find rather small and mostly marsupial mammals in strata laid down during the age of the dinosaurs.
And that proves what, exactly? Besides the fact that it appears that marsupial type animals existed in proximity to dinosaurs?
Similarly a river living mammal could easily develop a multipurpose leg that also had function as a flipper, like a seal. A seal has not lost function of its front legs, they are now better flippers than legs.
And I am not implying ‘hopeful monsters’, I am saying that any gradual deviation from a successful body plan will be weeded out by natural selection. Obviously what is “successful” will change as circumstances change, from needing to be streamlined, to being a tetra-pod, back to needing to be streamlined, as all evidence suggests marine mammals went through.
These gradual changes can be observed in short periods of time that make large changes over large periods of time no problem at all. And none of the fossil intermediates will be ‘monsters’ or some sort of half formed creature, they will be a fully formed species that was just gradually more marine than its predecessors.
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