An egg and sperm are not viable organisms. We don't classify them as different species. They are gametes produced by organisms to reproduce. AFTER they combine, the fertilized egg is a SINGLE cell.
Your argument is seriously confused. Sexual reproduction does not argue for or against evolution per se. It allows the genetic diversity of a population to be increased much more quickly, probably speeding up the process of speciation.
Sexual reproduction is not basic to life. Many forms of life, even vertebrates, reproduce asexually. The prevelance of sexual reproduction is simply evidence that it provides a selective advantage.
Your hurdle of "replication" is absurd. It's like asking an historian to replicate the Battle of Waterloo so we can be sure it happened.
You are a fucking moron. Nothing like even 0.0001% of organisms die in such a way that their remains are preserved as fossils.
"Ashes to ashes and dust to dust" and all that. Ever see roadkill, or dead wildlife? Not much left after the carrion-eaters and the insects and the fungus and everything get done with it. Gone in a few days. It turns into dirt. UNLESS it gets quickly buried in an anoxic environment. And geological processes leave it in a place that human fossil hunters can access it.
Fossilization is exceedingly RARE, and fossil discovery by scientists is even RARER. We're lucky to have found the fossils that we have! Demanding that we produce millions more to satisfy you is preposterous.
Why don't you provide a few dozen more letters from St. Paul? Why don't you show us where the cross is?
I didn't start with the assumption that the universe is old.
I started (and astronomers started) with the idea that light has a consistent speed through space, and that light is produced by the same atomic processes in stars that produce light here on Earth and in the sun. Then, we make observations, and see that they are consistent with 15 billion year old quasars and whatnot emitting light that we are just seeing today.
THE OBSERVATION OF AN OLD UNIVERSE IS THE CONCLUSION, NOT THE ASSUMPTION. THERE IS NO CIRCLE IN THE ARGUMENT.
To argue that the universe was created a short time ago with the *appearance* of age requires an ADDITIONAL assumption (or MORE). That is, requires something like the change of speed of light over time (which is ruled out by other physics consideration), or the supposition that there was some "magical" event that made everything just so to look old, but happened just, say, 10,000 years ago, but otherwise everything looks exactly like an old argument.
Where is the evidence for any young age? What justifies the assumption? No credible scientific observation that I know of.
Adding these unnecessary assumptions that add NO PREDICTIVE VALUE to the model is the unscientific part. Conventional cosmologists don't make them. Young creation apologists do. That's why the first are acting scientifically, and the latter are not.
Bad textbooks are not a reason to stop teaching well-proven biology, including evolution in the classroom.
The main reason textbooks are so execrable in the U.S. is because purchasing decisions are made by state and local school boards that are filled with people who have political agendas, but little scientific or educational background. So topics like evolution get watered down and reduced to inoffensive pap, and there is no motivation to make the scientific material accurate, informative, interesting or challenging.
That said, you apparently have been using crappy sources for your biology information.
NO ONE BELIEVES THAT SEPARATE, GENETICALLY DIFFERENT, SINGLE CELLED ORGANISMS SIMPLY COMBINED TO FORM MULTICELLULAR ORGANISMS. It is nonsensical; look in the mirror: all of YOUR cells have the same genetic makeup. They all arose from a single fertilized egg. In that sense YOU are a single-celled organism that just grew.
It is much more likely that multicellular life first formed because single-celled organisms that reproduced by dividing continued to divide, but without separating into single-celled organism, but forming multicellular colonies. Then, it is a natural step that such colonies would adapt so that different cells could be specialized to perform different functions.
You might be confusing that with the idea that eukaryotic cells developed by a symbiosis where smaller organisms lived within larger organisms, finally losing their independence. This is one theory for how mitochondria, for instance, came to be part of eukaryotic cells. That they have their own genetic material is evidence of this scenario.
For the billionth time on slashdot, "Macroevolution" is a nonsense term made up by creationists, ID'ers, or whoever decides they want to disbelieve the theory of evolution.
It is a non-existent distinction, and every attempt to make such a distinction is a distortion, either deliberately or through ignorance, of what evolution means.
If you believe there is some way to classify evolutionary change between "micro" and "macro" evolution, you simply have no clue what you are talking about.
Your use of the term "degenerate" is nonsensical. Species do not go up and down some ladder of "degeneracy", they don't "improve" or decay. They change, and part of changing is that separate populations of a species sometimes diverge from each other to the point where they are different enough that they become distinct species.
You simply do not understand the concept you are criticizing.
Evolution DOESN'T "cross" boundaries between kingdoms, anymore than you can give birth to your grandparents or great-uncle.
Larger groupings contain organisms that had what appears to be common descent. If two subspecies, of frog, let's say, evolve until the individuals in each group cannot interbreed, they have become separate species. They are still frogs, but different species of frogs. If the process continued until those two subgroups evolved to supplant all life on Earth, then some future biologist (who would be descended from a frog) would probably classify life into two major kingdoms. He would look into the fossil record and possibly see that there were other non-froglike organisms in the distant past that look sufficiently different from frogs that they also deserve their own kingdom.
Today's fish does not evolve into today's bird. Instead, roughly speaking, ancient vertebrates diverged to create the ancestors of today's fishes, and the ancestors of land animals, including reptile-like dinosaurs, which diverged into birds.
Nowhere does a branch cross some magic line. The lines of classificiation are drawn BY HUMAN TAXONOMISTS around the tree of descent, not the other way around, anyway. The process you describe as macro-evolution is absolutely nonsensical.
But seeing that "further away" stuff is exactly one of the things that makes us believe that the universe is approximately 15 billion years old, see? Light coming from the sun takes 8 minutes to get to my eyes, light coming from alpha centauri takes about 4 years, and light from the very furthest objects takes about 15 billion years to get here.
We see it today here on Earth, therefore, it appears to have been around long in the past, and presumably the universe was there to contain it.
STATE ESTABLISHMENT of religion IS. And it applies to the states as well by the 14th amendment.
Pennsylvania and it's localities can't force me to send my kids to church on Sunday, or any other day of the week. It can force me to send my kids to school, and therefore, schools cannot act as churches. There is a constitutional standard that governs what religious activities a school must allow, and what religious activities a school cannot allow or mandate.
Just declaring something "a community" doesn't give it the power to take away constitutional liberties, like the freedom to not follow a state-mandated religion. Dover, PA can't violate my constitutional liberties for free speech, against unreasonable search and seizure, or remove my right to vote based on race, color, creed, or national origin, or any of those other constitutional liberties.
Haven't read it, but Sagan was not a trained psychologist or cultural historian. He didn't deal clinically with these cases, where other investigators have and continue to do so.
Evolution is NOT "accumulation of incremental POSITIVE changes" it is the "accumulation of incremental of NEUTRAL or NET POSITIVE changes." If you don't understand the difference, you don't understand the theory of evolution.
Evolution doesn't have to work in one consistent direction. That's teleology. Evolution can work by moving in one direction, conditions change, either in the environment or in the organism itself, and what was previously a neutral change becomes a negative change or a great advantage, or what was once a great advantage can become neutral or negative. Things can change again, and different changes can interact.
Look at sickle cell anemia: it is hardly a purely positive change, because it causes anemia. Yet it is a NET positive for populations living in the tropics, because it is correlated to resisting malaria.
The most obvious way that "irreducible complexity" can evolve through natural selection is analogous to a scaffold. While one builds a bridge, scaffolding is necessary because a partly-built bridge cannot stand on its own. Once the bridge is complete, the scaffolding is redundant and tearing it down is possible. Then, the bridge might be "irreducible" in the sense if you take a single brick away, the bridge falls down.
Similarly, an organism might change in ways that involve jury-rigged redundant versions of functionality. At some point, a threshold is reached where part of the redundant structure can work on its own, or is able to function in a novel way. Then, the original supporting structure no longer faces selective pressure, and can evolve away through neutral changes or through the positive advantage of saving the organism mass and/or energy. Afterwards, it is irreducible, yet it never needed intervention by an intelligent agent to come into being.
The point of evolution is that things can APPEAR designed, in the sense that they are extremely well-suited for certain purposes, without actually BEING designed. The evidence for evolution vs. an intelligent designer is the way in which structures, under close scrutiny, are related to structures that serve a quite different purpose (e.g. mammalian ear bones which are derived from what serve as jaw bones in reptilian precursors), or are actually not optimal in the design sense (nerves which take some circuituous route through the body, or the panda bear's digestive tract). These things are locked in by historical accident, namely past development of ancestors in ways which were not relevant to current conditions.
Evolution predicts that some properties are preserved from ancestors simply because there is NO selective pressure to cause them to be eliminated. It predicts that the process of adaptation is conservative, in that it makes use of borrowing and incremental change, or change of certain limited kinds (e.g., duplication of identical segments, with later divergence among the segments, single-point mutations which affect developmental mechanisms in radical ways), strongly constrained by the mechanisms of growth and development, instead of totally new invention. Intelligent designers don't do such things. This kind of unintelligent non-design is practically everywhere in nature.
Irreducible complexity is a complete red herring, an argument against a strawman version of evolution. If that's your only evidence against evolution, you lose, plain and simple.
The evidence that computers were designed includes a big building marked "Intel" in Santa Clara, filled with engineers doing design. I drove by it last week. And the fact that they came out of a computer catalog. And so on and so forth. Only the most extreme skeptic would question the reality of those things.
Computers don't reproduce themselves, for one thing. If computers were able to have sex and little computers were born, (maybe they start out as 4-bitters and grow into 32-bit computers after a pupal metamorphic state?), then you might expect a great deal of random variation between computers, and the question of why some architectures are big-endian and some are little-endian would be a complicated issue to sort out, for instance. But it just ain't so. No equal time for computer evolution by natural selection in computer science curricula, I guess.
The fact that you apparently can't understand the basic differences between computers and biological organisms is a serious obstacle to you understanding anything at all, not just evolution.
I wasn't saying that Deism has to cover the whole of your philosphical, ethical, and moral belief system.
But for purposes of science, you can believe in a Deistic basis for the creation of the physical universe, including Earth and its biological contents, and a more conventional Christian treatment of the soul, good & evil, sin, immortality, etc.
Christ's teachings leave a whole heck of a lot uncovered. In retrospect, it would have been nice if Christ had also given some seminars on biology and quantum mechanics, cosmology, etc., to avoid some of this debate between Bible-readers and laboratory scientists, but if he did, they have been lost to history.
Now, there is not much in science that can go very far in determining a basis for ethics (although we can wonder why and investigate how insects, fish, chimps, etc., don't go in for morality in the same way humans do), or how people should treat one another. Leaving a perfectly reasonable space for religious beliefs to prosper.
No, actually the ID people insist that *their* pet theory be included, not only that the philosophical foundations of scientific belief be thoroughly treated.
The idea that we can teach high school children, in general, the subtle and complex reality of how science (and scientists) work, and the subtle distinctions between evolution and natural selection, is hard enough to believe. It gets much worse when the Bible-thumpers like Pat Robertson are saying that believing in evolution will result in God's wrath.
Imagine someone suggesting "2+2=5" is an alternative theory of math, and the response being, OK, we'll teach children the very basics of mathematical logic, working up to some inductive model of the integers, and then we can show them, logically and completely, the difference betweeen "2+2=4" and "2+2=5". (In the 1970's, people tried something like this with "New Math", and the only result was parents couldn't help their 3rd grade kids with math homework.)
Forget it. You learn 2+2=4, because that's the truth, as far as elementary arithmetic is concerned, and later on in Mathematical Logic in junior year as a math major, you might learn *why* it is true.
Similarly, teach "Evolution happened through natural selection. Period." And if you want, some junior year philosophy of science class can teach exactly the meaning of "happened" in that sentence, and sophomore biology can teach more clearly what "Evolution" and "natural selection" mean.
The whole freaking year of high school biology could (and probably should!) be on evolution in its huge variety. Instead we get a huge controversy when evolution is included for two weeks in their whole freaking K-12 education.
Since there's no way I'm going to say I believe in ID, what is the term for someone who thinks that God made everything through the processes that science is revealing to us?
Well, it depends on what you mean by "tolerate" people who claim they were abducted by UFOs.
I think it is an interesting psychological question as to what these people claim to have experienced, what basis this experience might have (and the basis "it really happened just so" isn't one I would waste much time on), and even what people like this believed in before UFO's existed as a cultural phenomenon.
People believe all kinds of stuff that doesn't make much sense. If UFO-abductess insisted that UFOs be taught as science in the classroom, I would vociferously object. But you should have some sympathy and tolerance for people who honest believe they had some experience that affected them.
I don't give a hoot about what *you* happened to read in some book your mommy or your priest, or somebody told you to believe in it or you'd go to hell, or whatever. My mommy and daddy and minister didn't teach me that, and I don't have any convincing reason to believe it, so I don't believe it. I suggested you might try to think about what kind of evidence would convince me to share your beliefs, compared with the idea that I could take you out on a geological field trip, and show you exactly the kind of thing that geologists believe in.
Instead, you didn't give me a single reason to do so, and made a nonsensical retort, based on an apparent total misreading of my post.
If I took you out in the field and tried to teach you geology, including hundreds of millions of years of history, how would you respond?
Sure, you hear scientists all the time saying evolution is a "fact."
Of course, if you press them, they will qualify it and say something like "the apparent descent of organisms with modification is observed in the fossil record so often in so many cases, that it strains credulity to worry that genetically similar organisms did NOT arise from common ancestors; furthermore, as a totally separate question, the adaptedness of organisms for their particular mode of existence does NOT require that they were 'designed' for that purpose, or arose from some mystical teleological drive, but rather is a forseeable consequence of the process of natural selection."
And if you continue to press them, they will admit that the particular facts of how natural selection led to a particular feature might be debatable or unclear, so that any particular piece of evidence in isolation is hardly ironclad "fact."
The point is, there are a huge number of practicing biologists who get up every day and go to work as honest scientists WITHOUT seriously doubting Darwin. They treat evolution and the theory of natural selection as facts, in the same way they treat the multiplication table as fact; not because they go out of their way to prove it, but because it is what they learned, it makes a huge amount of sense, and it is almost guaranteed to be fruitless to question it.
You might as well argue that "atoms" and "nuclei" and "protons" and "neutrons" are just a model put forth as part of "atomic theory." Nobody serious doubts anymore that they exist. Yes, in principle, the whole thing could be overturned by some immense revolution in particle physics, but almost nobody believes its going to happen.
The difference between ID and "evolution" (to use a vague general term to represent a huge amount of biology) is that evolution actually DOES have a tremendous amount of persuasive evidence on its side, while ID just has a bunch of "betcha can't explain to my satisfaction the evolution of the flagellum, HUH!"
Science is based on making observations, generating hypotheses, making more observations, and generally trying to figure out what the hell happened, without saying "oooh, I learned in Sunday School that God did it. Well, that about wraps it up."
Not having a convincing explanation for abiogenesis which happened billions of years ago, where almost every bit of biological material around at that time has been eaten, excreted, buried, or otherwise disposed of in the mean time, does not mean that we just throw up our hands and say "God did create life, after all!"
Instead we have to say "We don't have a convincing scientific explanation. We'll keep investigating as long as we can come up with ideas for where to look next."
Naturalists had worked for a long time before Darwin to try to understand how various organisms lived, reproduced, were structured, and how they were related to one another, because it was clear that lots of things did have a kind of resemblance to each other. But until Darwin put forth his theory, they had no scientific theory to explain the "great chain of being" other than "God created each creature, special in its own way". After Darwin, it is clear that things can LOOK designed, but without having BEEN designed, that common descent can explain resemblances, and natural selection can explain why many organisms are well adapted to their mode of existence, and we don't need God's careful planning to explain it all.
Good thing those naturalists didn't give up so easily, huh?
OK, well thanks for the Bible study session, although you don't actually give much concrete backing for your vague assertions.
What does that have to do with geology?
More importantly, why should I give a hoot what is written in your book of choice, when I can go out in the field with a hammer and figure out what is really out there in the geological record?
"Macro-Evolution" is a nonsense term made up by people who refuse to understand Darwin's theory, even before they decide to not believe in it. It is a distinction that cannot be observed.
The point is that NOTHING in geology points to "6000 years" as the magic number. You can't point to a single observation in the field that says anything out of the ordinary happened at that point in time to distinguish Moment Genesis from anything in the last 100,000 years, or million years, or billion years. (Although, of course, we can see that climate changes have happened, etc., which make one period generally differ from another, and there *are* huge events such as the K-T boundary, or whatever, which seem to correlate with significant shifts in biological diversity.)
So where do you pull that number from? Genesis? Exactly my point: a preconceived notion that is driving your theorizing.
Just like people trying to come up with archaeolgical evidence to support, say, the Book of Mormon's chronology of Latin America are not generally acting scientifically.
The examples proffered by ID advocates are certainly interesting examples, but the problem is their lack of integrity in assuming they can "prove" natural selection did not cause them. That lack of integrity threatens science by letting all sorts of sloppy discourse into the pool of scientific ideas.
They set up some arbitrary criterion (like "irreducible complexity"), claim a particular example meets that criterion, then claim that supports their alternative theory.
The flaw is that "irreducible complexity" does not imply "could not have arised by natural selection", just "could not have arisen through some *straightforward* process of evolution."
Nature is big enough and has been around long enough that there is a good likelihood that some things will exist that have not left enough evidence behind to determine their natural origins. The fact that we don't have, for instance, hard evidence of the genealogy of the Japanese emperors does not mean we accept that they arose from the Sun god. We might be able to figure out that they came from Korea because of similar customs, or whatever, but we also might never figure it out.
In a similar way, we might NEVER figure out, for example, exactly how DNA became the genetic material of choice. That's not evidence in favor of ID or against evolution, its a lack of evidence for anything. We can HOPE to get enough indirect evidence to make a compelling case, but we might not get what we want.
It's hard to see how you can claim God to have "created" something as non-material as evolution by natural selection.
Anything that reproduces with the possibility of variation in an environment that cannot support an unbounded population is going to undergo evolution by natural selection. What part of that has to do with an act of creation by God?
The genius of Darwin was not to suggest a way in which God created things, but to realize that natural forces could lead to forms of life that were exquisitely adapted to their environment WITHOUT having been designed that way from the start. That is, the "obvious" conclusion of naturalists that God created all of nature, all creatures great and small, all specially designed for His purposes, etc., need not be true.
Now, if you want to say God caused matter and space and time to arise out of nothingness in the Big Bang by "creating" quantum mechanics, or that he "created gravity," then, hey, it's hard to dispute that. Because we've got no really testable scientific alternative, even including string theory.
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An egg and sperm are not viable organisms. We don't classify them as different species. They are gametes produced by organisms to reproduce. AFTER they combine, the fertilized egg is a SINGLE cell.
Your argument is seriously confused. Sexual reproduction does not argue for or against evolution per se. It allows the genetic diversity of a population to be increased much more quickly, probably speeding up the process of speciation.
Sexual reproduction is not basic to life. Many forms of life, even vertebrates, reproduce asexually. The prevelance of sexual reproduction is simply evidence that it provides a selective advantage.
Your hurdle of "replication" is absurd. It's like asking an historian to replicate the Battle of Waterloo so we can be sure it happened.
You are a fucking moron. Nothing like even 0.0001% of organisms die in such a way that their remains are preserved as fossils.
"Ashes to ashes and dust to dust" and all that. Ever see roadkill, or dead wildlife? Not much left after the carrion-eaters and the insects and the fungus and everything get done with it. Gone in a few days. It turns into dirt. UNLESS it gets quickly buried in an anoxic environment. And geological processes leave it in a place that human fossil hunters can access it.
Fossilization is exceedingly RARE, and fossil discovery by scientists is even RARER. We're lucky to have found the fossils that we have! Demanding that we produce millions more to satisfy you is preposterous.
Why don't you provide a few dozen more letters from St. Paul? Why don't you show us where the cross is?
I didn't start with the assumption that the universe is old.
I started (and astronomers started) with the idea that light has a consistent speed through space, and that light is produced by the same atomic processes in stars that produce light here on Earth and in the sun. Then, we make observations, and see that they are consistent with 15 billion year old quasars and whatnot emitting light that we are just seeing today.
THE OBSERVATION OF AN OLD UNIVERSE IS THE CONCLUSION, NOT THE ASSUMPTION. THERE IS NO CIRCLE IN THE ARGUMENT.
To argue that the universe was created a short time ago with the *appearance* of age requires an ADDITIONAL assumption (or MORE). That is, requires something like the change of speed of light over time (which is ruled out by other physics consideration), or the supposition that there was some "magical" event that made everything just so to look old, but happened just, say, 10,000 years ago, but otherwise everything looks exactly like an old argument.
Where is the evidence for any young age? What justifies the assumption? No credible scientific observation that I know of.
Adding these unnecessary assumptions that add NO PREDICTIVE VALUE to the model is the unscientific part. Conventional cosmologists don't make them. Young creation apologists do. That's why the first are acting scientifically, and the latter are not.
Bad textbooks are not a reason to stop teaching well-proven biology, including evolution in the classroom.
The main reason textbooks are so execrable in the U.S. is because purchasing decisions are made by state and local school boards that are filled with people who have political agendas, but little scientific or educational background. So topics like evolution get watered down and reduced to inoffensive pap, and there is no motivation to make the scientific material accurate, informative, interesting or challenging.
That said, you apparently have been using crappy sources for your biology information.
NO ONE BELIEVES THAT SEPARATE, GENETICALLY DIFFERENT, SINGLE CELLED ORGANISMS SIMPLY COMBINED TO FORM MULTICELLULAR ORGANISMS. It is nonsensical; look in the mirror: all of YOUR cells have the same genetic makeup. They all arose from a single fertilized egg. In that sense YOU are a single-celled organism that just grew.
It is much more likely that multicellular life first formed because single-celled organisms that reproduced by dividing continued to divide, but without separating into single-celled organism, but forming multicellular colonies. Then, it is a natural step that such colonies would adapt so that different cells could be specialized to perform different functions.
You might be confusing that with the idea that eukaryotic cells developed by a symbiosis where smaller organisms lived within larger organisms, finally losing their independence. This is one theory for how mitochondria, for instance, came to be part of eukaryotic cells. That they have their own genetic material is evidence of this scenario.
For the billionth time on slashdot, "Macroevolution" is a nonsense term made up by creationists, ID'ers, or whoever decides they want to disbelieve the theory of evolution.
It is a non-existent distinction, and every attempt to make such a distinction is a distortion, either deliberately or through ignorance, of what evolution means.
If you believe there is some way to classify evolutionary change between "micro" and "macro" evolution, you simply have no clue what you are talking about.
Your use of the term "degenerate" is nonsensical. Species do not go up and down some ladder of "degeneracy", they don't "improve" or decay. They change, and part of changing is that separate populations of a species sometimes diverge from each other to the point where they are different enough that they become distinct species.
You simply do not understand the concept you are criticizing.
Evolution DOESN'T "cross" boundaries between kingdoms, anymore than you can give birth to your grandparents or great-uncle.
Larger groupings contain organisms that had what appears to be common descent. If two subspecies, of frog, let's say, evolve until the individuals in each group cannot interbreed, they have become separate species. They are still frogs, but different species of frogs. If the process continued until those two subgroups evolved to supplant all life on Earth, then some future biologist (who would be descended from a frog) would probably classify life into two major kingdoms. He would look into the fossil record and possibly see that there were other non-froglike organisms in the distant past that look sufficiently different from frogs that they also deserve their own kingdom.
Today's fish does not evolve into today's bird. Instead, roughly speaking, ancient vertebrates diverged to create the ancestors of today's fishes, and the ancestors of land animals, including reptile-like dinosaurs, which diverged into birds.
Nowhere does a branch cross some magic line. The lines of classificiation are drawn BY HUMAN TAXONOMISTS around the tree of descent, not the other way around, anyway. The process you describe as macro-evolution is absolutely nonsensical.
But seeing that "further away" stuff is exactly one of the things that makes us believe that the universe is approximately 15 billion years old, see? Light coming from the sun takes 8 minutes to get to my eyes, light coming from alpha centauri takes about 4 years, and light from the very furthest objects takes about 15 billion years to get here.
We see it today here on Earth, therefore, it appears to have been around long in the past, and presumably the universe was there to contain it.
"religion" is not unconstitutional, of course.
STATE ESTABLISHMENT of religion IS. And it applies to the states as well by the 14th amendment.
Pennsylvania and it's localities can't force me to send my kids to church on Sunday, or any other day of the week. It can force me to send my kids to school, and therefore, schools cannot act as churches. There is a constitutional standard that governs what religious activities a school must allow, and what religious activities a school cannot allow or mandate.
Just declaring something "a community" doesn't give it the power to take away constitutional liberties, like the freedom to not follow a state-mandated religion. Dover, PA can't violate my constitutional liberties for free speech, against unreasonable search and seizure, or remove my right to vote based on race, color, creed, or national origin, or any of those other constitutional liberties.
Haven't read it, but Sagan was not a trained psychologist or cultural historian. He didn't deal clinically with these cases, where other investigators have and continue to do so.
Evolution is NOT "accumulation of incremental POSITIVE changes" it is the "accumulation of incremental of NEUTRAL or NET POSITIVE changes." If you don't understand the difference, you don't understand the theory of evolution.
Evolution doesn't have to work in one consistent direction. That's teleology. Evolution can work by moving in one direction, conditions change, either in the environment or in the organism itself, and what was previously a neutral change becomes a negative change or a great advantage, or what was once a great advantage can become neutral or negative. Things can change again, and different changes can interact.
Look at sickle cell anemia: it is hardly a purely positive change, because it causes anemia. Yet it is a NET positive for populations living in the tropics, because it is correlated to resisting malaria.
The most obvious way that "irreducible complexity" can evolve through natural selection is analogous to a scaffold. While one builds a bridge, scaffolding is necessary because a partly-built bridge cannot stand on its own. Once the bridge is complete, the scaffolding is redundant and tearing it down is possible. Then, the bridge might be "irreducible" in the sense if you take a single brick away, the bridge falls down.
Similarly, an organism might change in ways that involve jury-rigged redundant versions of functionality. At some point, a threshold is reached where part of the redundant structure can work on its own, or is able to function in a novel way. Then, the original supporting structure no longer faces selective pressure, and can evolve away through neutral changes or through the positive advantage of saving the organism mass and/or energy. Afterwards, it is irreducible, yet it never needed intervention by an intelligent agent to come into being.
The point of evolution is that things can APPEAR designed, in the sense that they are extremely well-suited for certain purposes, without actually BEING designed. The evidence for evolution vs. an intelligent designer is the way in which structures, under close scrutiny, are related to structures that serve a quite different purpose (e.g. mammalian ear bones which are derived from what serve as jaw bones in reptilian precursors), or are actually not optimal in the design sense (nerves which take some circuituous route through the body, or the panda bear's digestive tract). These things are locked in by historical accident, namely past development of ancestors in ways which were not relevant to current conditions.
Evolution predicts that some properties are preserved from ancestors simply because there is NO selective pressure to cause them to be eliminated. It predicts that the process of adaptation is conservative, in that it makes use of borrowing and incremental change, or change of certain limited kinds (e.g., duplication of identical segments, with later divergence among the segments, single-point mutations which affect developmental mechanisms in radical ways), strongly constrained by the mechanisms of growth and development, instead of totally new invention. Intelligent designers don't do such things. This kind of unintelligent non-design is practically everywhere in nature.
Irreducible complexity is a complete red herring, an argument against a strawman version of evolution. If that's your only evidence against evolution, you lose, plain and simple.
Um, what the hell are you talking about?
The evidence that computers were designed includes a big building marked "Intel" in Santa Clara, filled with engineers doing design. I drove by it last week. And the fact that they came out of a computer catalog. And so on and so forth. Only the most extreme skeptic would question the reality of those things.
Computers don't reproduce themselves, for one thing. If computers were able to have sex and little computers were born, (maybe they start out as 4-bitters and grow into 32-bit computers after a pupal metamorphic state?), then you might expect a great deal of random variation between computers, and the question of why some architectures are big-endian and some are little-endian would be a complicated issue to sort out, for instance. But it just ain't so. No equal time for computer evolution by natural selection in computer science curricula, I guess.
The fact that you apparently can't understand the basic differences between computers and biological organisms is a serious obstacle to you understanding anything at all, not just evolution.
I wasn't saying that Deism has to cover the whole of your philosphical, ethical, and moral belief system.
But for purposes of science, you can believe in a Deistic basis for the creation of the physical universe, including Earth and its biological contents, and a more conventional Christian treatment of the soul, good & evil, sin, immortality, etc.
Christ's teachings leave a whole heck of a lot uncovered. In retrospect, it would have been nice if Christ had also given some seminars on biology and quantum mechanics, cosmology, etc., to avoid some of this debate between Bible-readers and laboratory scientists, but if he did, they have been lost to history.
Now, there is not much in science that can go very far in determining a basis for ethics (although we can wonder why and investigate how insects, fish, chimps, etc., don't go in for morality in the same way humans do), or how people should treat one another. Leaving a perfectly reasonable space for religious beliefs to prosper.
No, actually the ID people insist that *their* pet theory be included, not only that the philosophical foundations of scientific belief be thoroughly treated.
The idea that we can teach high school children, in general, the subtle and complex reality of how science (and scientists) work, and the subtle distinctions between evolution and natural selection, is hard enough to believe. It gets much worse when the Bible-thumpers like Pat Robertson are saying that believing in evolution will result in God's wrath.
Imagine someone suggesting "2+2=5" is an alternative theory of math, and the response being, OK, we'll teach children the very basics of mathematical logic, working up to some inductive model of the integers, and then we can show them, logically and completely, the difference betweeen "2+2=4" and "2+2=5". (In the 1970's, people tried something like this with "New Math", and the only result was parents couldn't help their 3rd grade kids with math homework.)
Forget it. You learn 2+2=4, because that's the truth, as far as elementary arithmetic is concerned, and later on in Mathematical Logic in junior year as a math major, you might learn *why* it is true.
Similarly, teach "Evolution happened through natural selection. Period." And if you want, some junior year philosophy of science class can teach exactly the meaning of "happened" in that sentence, and sophomore biology can teach more clearly what "Evolution" and "natural selection" mean.
The whole freaking year of high school biology could (and probably should!) be on evolution in its huge variety. Instead we get a huge controversy when evolution is included for two weeks in their whole freaking K-12 education.
Since there's no way I'm going to say I believe in ID, what is the term for someone who thinks that God made everything through the processes that science is revealing to us?
"Deism" is one option.
Well, it depends on what you mean by "tolerate" people who claim they were abducted by UFOs.
I think it is an interesting psychological question as to what these people claim to have experienced, what basis this experience might have (and the basis "it really happened just so" isn't one I would waste much time on), and even what people like this believed in before UFO's existed as a cultural phenomenon.
People believe all kinds of stuff that doesn't make much sense. If UFO-abductess insisted that UFOs be taught as science in the classroom, I would vociferously object. But you should have some sympathy and tolerance for people who honest believe they had some experience that affected them.
Uh, you didn't answer my question.
I don't give a hoot about what *you* happened to read in some book your mommy or your priest, or somebody told you to believe in it or you'd go to hell, or whatever. My mommy and daddy and minister didn't teach me that, and I don't have any convincing reason to believe it, so I don't believe it. I suggested you might try to think about what kind of evidence would convince me to share your beliefs, compared with the idea that I could take you out on a geological field trip, and show you exactly the kind of thing that geologists believe in.
Instead, you didn't give me a single reason to do so, and made a nonsensical retort, based on an apparent total misreading of my post.
If I took you out in the field and tried to teach you geology, including hundreds of millions of years of history, how would you respond?
Sure, you hear scientists all the time saying evolution is a "fact."
Of course, if you press them, they will qualify it and say something like "the apparent descent of organisms with modification is observed in the fossil record so often in so many cases, that it strains credulity to worry that genetically similar organisms did NOT arise from common ancestors; furthermore, as a totally separate question, the adaptedness of organisms for their particular mode of existence does NOT require that they were 'designed' for that purpose, or arose from some mystical teleological drive, but rather is a forseeable consequence of the process of natural selection."
And if you continue to press them, they will admit that the particular facts of how natural selection led to a particular feature might be debatable or unclear, so that any particular piece of evidence in isolation is hardly ironclad "fact."
The point is, there are a huge number of practicing biologists who get up every day and go to work as honest scientists WITHOUT seriously doubting Darwin. They treat evolution and the theory of natural selection as facts, in the same way they treat the multiplication table as fact; not because they go out of their way to prove it, but because it is what they learned, it makes a huge amount of sense, and it is almost guaranteed to be fruitless to question it.
You might as well argue that "atoms" and "nuclei" and "protons" and "neutrons" are just a model put forth as part of "atomic theory." Nobody serious doubts anymore that they exist. Yes, in principle, the whole thing could be overturned by some immense revolution in particle physics, but almost nobody believes its going to happen.
The difference between ID and "evolution" (to use a vague general term to represent a huge amount of biology) is that evolution actually DOES have a tremendous amount of persuasive evidence on its side, while ID just has a bunch of "betcha can't explain to my satisfaction the evolution of the flagellum, HUH!"
but I'm a bit confused
I'd say more than a bit...
Science is based on making observations, generating hypotheses, making more observations, and generally trying to figure out what the hell happened, without saying "oooh, I learned in Sunday School that God did it. Well, that about wraps it up."
Not having a convincing explanation for abiogenesis which happened billions of years ago, where almost every bit of biological material around at that time has been eaten, excreted, buried, or otherwise disposed of in the mean time, does not mean that we just throw up our hands and say "God did create life, after all!"
Instead we have to say "We don't have a convincing scientific explanation. We'll keep investigating as long as we can come up with ideas for where to look next."
Naturalists had worked for a long time before Darwin to try to understand how various organisms lived, reproduced, were structured, and how they were related to one another, because it was clear that lots of things did have a kind of resemblance to each other. But until Darwin put forth his theory, they had no scientific theory to explain the "great chain of being" other than "God created each creature, special in its own way". After Darwin, it is clear that things can LOOK designed, but without having BEEN designed, that common descent can explain resemblances, and natural selection can explain why many organisms are well adapted to their mode of existence, and we don't need God's careful planning to explain it all.
Good thing those naturalists didn't give up so easily, huh?
OK, well thanks for the Bible study session, although you don't actually give much concrete backing for your vague assertions.
What does that have to do with geology?
More importantly, why should I give a hoot what is written in your book of choice, when I can go out in the field with a hammer and figure out what is really out there in the geological record?
OK, now pay attention.
"Macro-Evolution" is a nonsense term made up by people who refuse to understand Darwin's theory, even before they decide to not believe in it. It is a distinction that cannot be observed.
It ain't being "suppressed." You can post a web site filled with creationist, or ID, or Pastafarian ideas, or whatever, without fear of prosecution.
Just don't fucking put it in school curricula and pretend it is non-religious, OK?
See the difference?
The point is that NOTHING in geology points to "6000 years" as the magic number. You can't point to a single observation in the field that says anything out of the ordinary happened at that point in time to distinguish Moment Genesis from anything in the last 100,000 years, or million years, or billion years. (Although, of course, we can see that climate changes have happened, etc., which make one period generally differ from another, and there *are* huge events such as the K-T boundary, or whatever, which seem to correlate with significant shifts in biological diversity.)
So where do you pull that number from? Genesis? Exactly my point: a preconceived notion that is driving your theorizing.
Just like people trying to come up with archaeolgical evidence to support, say, the Book of Mormon's chronology of Latin America are not generally acting scientifically.
The examples proffered by ID advocates are certainly interesting examples, but the problem is their lack of integrity in assuming they can "prove" natural selection did not cause them. That lack of integrity threatens science by letting all sorts of sloppy discourse into the pool of scientific ideas.
They set up some arbitrary criterion (like "irreducible complexity"), claim a particular example meets that criterion, then claim that supports their alternative theory.
The flaw is that "irreducible complexity" does not imply "could not have arised by natural selection", just "could not have arisen through some *straightforward* process of evolution."
Nature is big enough and has been around long enough that there is a good likelihood that some things will exist that have not left enough evidence behind to determine their natural origins. The fact that we don't have, for instance, hard evidence of the genealogy of the Japanese emperors does not mean we accept that they arose from the Sun god. We might be able to figure out that they came from Korea because of similar customs, or whatever, but we also might never figure it out.
In a similar way, we might NEVER figure out, for example, exactly how DNA became the genetic material of choice. That's not evidence in favor of ID or against evolution, its a lack of evidence for anything. We can HOPE to get enough indirect evidence to make a compelling case, but we might not get what we want.
It's hard to see how you can claim God to have "created" something as non-material as evolution by natural selection.
Anything that reproduces with the possibility of variation in an environment that cannot support an unbounded population is going to undergo evolution by natural selection. What part of that has to do with an act of creation by God?
The genius of Darwin was not to suggest a way in which God created things, but to realize that natural forces could lead to forms of life that were exquisitely adapted to their environment WITHOUT having been designed that way from the start. That is, the "obvious" conclusion of naturalists that God created all of nature, all creatures great and small, all specially designed for His purposes, etc., need not be true.
Now, if you want to say God caused matter and space and time to arise out of nothingness in the Big Bang by "creating" quantum mechanics, or that he "created gravity," then, hey, it's hard to dispute that. Because we've got no really testable scientific alternative, even including string theory.