We see no evidence that there is significant genetic variation in every generation of any species, while the notion that few individuals survive from each generation, never mind so few that we can say they are better adapted than their less mutated brethren, is risible.

Certainly in many species the survival rate is extraordinarly low; in humans it is quite high. And really, any variation will do for the mathematics, so even granting both of these complaints would alter only the speed of evolution, not its effectiveness.

I'm not sure I buy gradualism myself, but that's something of a side issue.

OJ

As a refutation of Mayr's explanation of natural selection, this won't do. You've just heard of the guy, so you skim around, grab a few quotes and state:

"the last (ie natural selection) is simply false."

What rubbish.

You also suggest that natural selection is an argument 'from faith'.

No it isn't, it is an application of the scientific and logical rule of the non-proliferation of theories. ie. when you have a sufficient explanation for something, you don't then believe another explanation for it without good reason.

Brit:

Creationism is a sufficient explanation too--in fact more sufficient--but likewise wrong.

In fact, that might well be the crux of the matter:

A belief in natural selection is not an application of faith, but an application of Occam's razor.

In that sense, it is the very opposite of 'faith.'

no, creationism requires enormous amounts of faith.

natural selection is a minimal theory that accounts for observable scientific facts.

that's why scientists believe in natural selection. they like their explanations to be as non-supernatural as possible.

Brit:

Mayr disagrees: "Laws and experiments are inappropriate techniques for the explication of such events and processes. Instead one constructs a historical narrative"

that's not a disagreement with anything I've stated.

Brit:

What is the Creation story but a "historical narrative"?

Brit:

That which follows no laws and is not subject to experiment must be taken on faith. You've your faith. No one begrudges it.

Let's change the wording just slightly-- "[Geology], in contrast with physics and chemistry, is a historical science - the [geologist] attempts to explain events and processes that have already taken place. Laws and experiments are inappropriate techniques for the explication of such events and processes. Instead one constructs a historical narrative, consisting of a tentative reconstruction of the particular scenario that led to the events one is trying to explain."

Except that in geology, one can create laws and experiments. Some areas of geology are quite mathematical and precise (seismology, for example). The "historical narrative" in geology has to fit these laws and experiments, or else we are forced to concluded that the laws of geology have changed over time.

For evolutionary biology to be taken seriously as a science, it has to travel down the same road that geology has taken, a road that it's most ardent supporters deny even exists, because where evolutionary biology ends up will conflict with their present beliefs and prejudices.

Since nobody else has asked this, I'll bite: Orrin, you obviously believe Darwinism to be wrong. However, you said earlier in this thread that creationism is _also_ wrong. If you don't accept Darwinism and you don't accept creationism, then how do *you* explain the whole business of the appearance/development of living creatures and the rise of man?

OJ

No, that's not how it works.

I ask why this pen falls to the ground. Person A explains gravity to me. Person B says it was gravity, plus God wanted it to. Person C says it was gravity, plus God wanted it to, plus at the same timea powerful demon sucked it from the underworld.

I'll take explanation A for now, since I have no reason to believe B and C in addition. I am not able to 'prove' B and C wrong, nor gravity right, but I have no reason to believe any theory in additon to A, which is sufficient. That's Occam's Razor, or if you want to put it another way, common sense.

Natural selection is the most minimally scientific, economical expalantion for evolution that seems to fit the facts as we know them. It requires no leaps of faith, or Gods, and no divine direction.

So I, a sceptic, will take it for now as the best explanation that I've heard for evolution.

Raoul:
Evolutionary theory is proceeding down the same road as Geology. It just hasn't gotten as far.

Witness Plate Tectonics. People had noticed nearly congruent opposing coastlines for years. Some even suspected this was not mere coincidence. Divergence in the phylogenetic tree (discreet dinosaur species appearing after S. America and Africa separated, where they had been common on both sides of the new coastlines before)was the first hard evidence substantiating plate tectonics. Magnetic alignment in igneous rocks provided the rest of the story. At one time, plate tectonics was pure conjecture. No longer. Oddly, however, evidence used as one basis to prove plate tectonics seems, at least to some, to be unavailable to substantiate evolution plate tectonics itself is proved.

Yet plate tectonics doesn't specifically follow any known physical laws (that is, we have a reasonably good guess as to the mechanism, but can't yet formulate the accompanying mathematics), isn't testable, the continents haven't detectably moved over the course of human history, and no one can predict where they are going next.

So why doesn't anyone dispute plate tectonics?

Simple: that theory doesn't rock anyone's theological boat.

Further, unlike Intelligent Design, Evolution does allow for disproof through contradiction. As recently as 50 or so years ago, Evolutionary theory was nearly on the rocks--following the discovery of DNA, scientists estimated roughly 30,000 genes had to mutate in order to explain the difference between chimpanzees and humans. If true, given the known genetic drift rate, there simply wasn't nearly enough time for that required number of mutations.

However, the human genome project found there are far fewer genes than previously estimated, and the number of gene differences between humans and chimps far fewer still, around (I think) 900.

Does that prove Evolution? No. But it removed a fatal contradiction, replacing it with a factual observation completely consistent with what the theory required.

Therefore, Evolutionary Theory is less a matter of "faith" than Intelligent Design. The former is open to contradiction, the latter is not.

Based on a recommendation from Harry, I read Mayr's "What is Evolution." In deference to OJ's objections, BTW, I also read "Of Moths & Men." In addition, I have just finished "How the Leopard Changed its Spots," which describes significant advances in putting Evolutionary Theory on a more rigorous scientific basis. It finds precisely the same shortcomings as does OJ; however, what the book describes will come as no comfort to Intelligent Designers.

They are all good books; Of Moths and Men could be about 120 pages shorter and convey all the necessary information about the Pepper Moth controversy.

Joe -

I speak for myself, not OJ, but creationism is wrong and Darwinism (and all its variations) is wrong.

At this point in time the correct answer to your question is nobody knows - or if they do, they have not succeeded in proving it.

Personally, I really don't care much one way or the other but one thing that gets in my craw abort Darwinism it that it depends almost entirely on faked evidence and short term observations that in time prove to be totally false.

Joe:

I don't think we have any idea. Natural processes appear to be adequate--and this is Darwin's great insight--to duplicate something like what we do when we breed animals. So, just as we took wolves and made everything from poodles to Rottweilers, nature may be able to take birds and end up with different sizes, beaks, etc. However, constant natural processes seem a spectacular failure at creating large scale changes and significant speciation (not just donkeys can't breed with zebras--the paltry definition that Darwinism has had to settle for--but donkeys descendants developing wings). This seems more likely to be produced by some unusual and very intermittent interventionary events, whether natural (bursts of radiation or cosmic rays causing mutation) or intelligent (aliens, God, gods, etc. dipping into DNA structures and fiddling with them). I'm fairly agnostic among those choices as a scientific matter, though choose God as a theological matter.

Brit:

No. Occam's Razor would award the argument to D. God. That's the simplest. It may well be wrong, but that's secondary.

Here's an especially amusing instance of Mayr vs. Mayr:

On how science differs from theology:

"A primary tool used in all scientific activity is testing. Every new fact and every new explanation must be tested again and again, preferably by different investigators using different methods."

On Darwinism:

"Laws and experiments are inappropriate techniques for the explication of such events and processes."

That's quite wrong, OJ. For the scientist, that is, the agnostic or religiously-indifferent observer trying to find the most rational or reasonable explanation for a natural phenomenon, the minimal sufficient answer (the Occam's Razor answer) will never be God. Because 'God' raises far too many prior questions - Who, Why etc.

For the independant observer, the minimal explanation will no more be God, than it will be: "The pen fell to the floor because you're in the Matrix and robots programmed you to imagine that series of images.'

I can't prove either wrong, but I have no particular reason to believe it either.

Similarly, I ask: how did giraffes get long necks? Person A tells me about evolution and explains natural selection, which is based on natural, physical principles. Person B tells me about evolution and then says God chose to give giraffes long necks. My first question: Who is God? And why yellow giraffes? And why not make the trees shorter? And what's He got against dodos?!

No thanks, I'll take explanation A, since it requires a much smaller leap into the unknowable.

We may not understand every detail of natural selection yet...but we can one day, and it is knowable. God's reasons for creating evolution are inherently unknowable.

That's why natural selection is a scientific theory, and belief in God is a leap of faith.

Brit:

Where'd Nature come from? See, you have all the same problems but no answer at all. God may be the wrong answer, but is the simplest answer.

Merely saying over and over again that you believe in Nature instead of God, like little kids chant that they believe in fairies in order to save Tinker Bell, does not move your belief out of the realm of faith.

That's all we have here is a difference in faiths.

OJ writes:

This seems more likely to be produced by some unusual and very intermittent interventionary events, whether natural (bursts of radiation or cosmic rays causing mutation) or intelligent (aliens, God, gods, etc. dipping into DNA structures and fiddling with them).

Who says the two options are mutually exclusive?

A big story lately is that the earth's magnetic field is somewhat unstable; apparently it flips every few hundred thousand years, with an intermediate period where the earth is exposed to higher-than-normal levels of solar radiation. (And we're more-or-less due, by-the-way).

How convienent...

No, it is not 'a difference in faiths' in the way that you try to portray it. And that is the absolute crux of the issue.

I take your position to be this: evolution is a fact. Natural selection can't fully explain every aspect of evolution, so therefore you may as well believe that God directs evolution. So either way, you're making an equal leap of faith into the unknowable.

I'm sorry, but that's just not how science works. The scientist looks at the world as it is, and tries to find the most rational explanation for it.

'God does evolution' is no more valuable as a rational explanatory theory than 'Many Gods do', or 'Zeus and Hera' do, or 'Ganesh does'...which leads to Why questions, Why not questions...etc

Natural selection, on the other hand, need concern itself with 'Why?', but only with 'How', and 'Does it answer all the problems?' It can also be disproved if compelling evidence is found. God cannot.

If you want to have faith that God has designed evolution, that is your prerogative.

But my acceptance of natural selection as the most reasonable explanation we currently have for evolution is a 'belief' of a quite different order to your Faith.

I am disinterested, open-minded and agnostic, and if natural selection is disproved or a better theory comes along, I will change my 'belief'.

You are always at a disadvantage because you start with God, and have to squeeze Him into what is observed. The scientist starts not with an equivalent belief in 'Nature', but with what is observed, and he works outward from from there, believing nothing without good reason, and rejecting what he previously believed if it is disproved.

Mr. Guinn;

Forgive me, but we can in fact detect continental drift. It's roughly 1 inch per year for the North American plate and it is in fact detectable.

See here, here or here.

Brit:

The last paragraph of your last post could almost be put to music. It reminds me of Theodore Rozack's quip about how modest, diffident scientists will, if pressed, admit that they really are the only ones who can tell the difference between truth and error as they and they alone possess the sole means of knowing the difference.

Brit, any theory that is still so nascent from the evidentiary point of view but whose adherents are such passionate believers that they gladly scorn and do political battle with those who demur (not to mention demanding exclusive rights in the educational systems) is a faith, and a somewhat nervous one at that.

"nature may be able to take birds and end up with different sizes, beaks"

More false conclusions based on faulty data. Beak size varies, on the same bird, depending on rain fall and the resulting nut size and shell hardness.

So you watch the birds for a couple of seasons and wow, Darwin was right. Come back a couple of seasons later and the beak size has changed again.

This is rather watching any animal species stuck on an island. When food is plentiful they get fat. When the food runs out they get skinny. What the heck as that got to do with Darwin?

Peter

Your comments are fair.. I am not a passionate 'defender to the death' of natural selection, like Dawkins is.

I am interested in it, I think its a wonderful explanation for an awful lot of things and yes, having read several books on it I guess I basically 'buy it'.

But I wouldn't demand exclusive education rights, (in fact I wouldn't even ban praying in schools!)...this is wishy-washy, but I'd just allow my offspring to be exposed to the various options and let them make their own minds up.

I have no taste whatsoever for bashing religion or the religious for the sake of it.

I do however, 'scorn' disingenuous arguments or wilful failures/refusals to understand what the other side is actually saying.

Brit:

Belief in Reason is of course nothing but a faith.

Oh good lord, you people and "Darwinism". The church lost this debat about a century ago, like it lost that whole Sun-going-around-the-Earth thing.

Get over it, evolution is a fact of nature.

Amos:

Well, if you really promise, I guess that's good enough for me.

AOG:
You are right. The movement is detectable. (Thanks for playing the straight man.)

But it is so small, and so slow, it couldn't possibly lead to "significant" movement.

Just like changes in beak lengths can't lead to significant speciation, or differing allele frequencies in isolated populations can't lead to speciation. They are so small, and so slow.

The depth and breadth of the evidence substantiating plate tectonics is virtually identical to that for Evolution. If one accepts the evidence for continental drift is sufficient, then it is hard to argue that for Evolution is insufficient. Especially since evidence for the latter is dispositive for the former.

The problem with Intelligent Design is that it completely ends inquiry. Once you state God is behind Evolution, then you are concluding the problem is completely solved forever. Nothing more to see here, move along.

There is the biggest difference between Evolutionary Theory and ID. Existing Evolutionary Theory absolutely begs skepticism and further inquiry.

That is the difference between religious faith and rational inquiry.

I strongly recommend "How the Leopard Changed its Spots: The Evolution of Complexity" by Brian Goodman. It makes a pretty good case for a way in which "Darwinism" may be very incomplete. And it directly addresses Hoyles quote from The Mathematics of Evolution.

However, unlike Intelligent Design, it invokes no deus ex machina to make evolution go.

It is also worth noting that some are extremely vested in denying Evolution. For if Evolutionary theory is true, and humanity is just the result of a random sequence of events, then their whole concept of morality goes right out the window.

Earthquakes always seemed significant to me, of course, I saw the movie Earthquake in Sensurround. But the point is that if you put out a seismograph you'll measure tectonic activity. Meanwhile, even Mayr concedes Darwinism won't allow experimentation.

Your point on I.D. is classic, no one's arguing for it, but when shown Darwinism's weaknesses, best to attack.

However, you are right about one thing, the choice is between complete randomness or morality.

Now we're getting somewhere. Thanks all.

Although we cannot run an experiment that, say, takes an early lizard and gets a bird after a few tens of millions of years, that does not mean we cannot run experiments about how Darwinism works.

Darwin had a lot of holes in his theory, the biggest being inheritance. He could not figure out how to get species if inheritance was blending, as animal breeding led him to expect.

Notoriously, the year after he published his book, Mendel published an experiment that called blending inheritance into question.

40 years later, DeVries and others revived Mendel, although the mechanism by which inheritance maintained its particulateness was totally unknown.

That question was intensified by experiment (the Waring blender experiment) about 1947, and within six years a structure was found to account for particulateness but which raised another objection that seemed completely baffling -- how could the structure vary 4 discrete units in such a fashion as to get billions of separately functional genes.

Yet within 7 years, the code was cracked.

None of these were experiments on speciation, but all were experiments on darwinism. The results were spectacular. Not only did they answer old questions, each step revealed a new, much more difficult and hitherto unsuspected question. And yet the pace of answering these newer, harder questions speeded up.

The pace of discovery was the fastest in any science. The only similar sequence would have been the 60+ years between Maxwell's equations and the demonstration of the neutron in 1930.

When a guy covers 22 on the roulette wheel and wins again and again and again and again, you have to choose. He's either cheating or he's actually got it doped.

"Laws and experiments are inappropriate techniques for the explication of such events and processes. Instead one constructs a historical narrative"

Harry:

"The only similar sequence would have been the 60+ years between Maxwell's equations and the demonstration of the neutron in 1930."

This is a poor analogy. This period in physics saw the overthrow of Newtonian mechanics by special and general relativity (which incorporated Maxwell's results) and quantum mechanics, which is at odds with relativity since the two can not be unified.

In biology, by contrast, the classical Darwinian theory (analogous to Newtonian theory) is still defended to the death. Where is the relativity and quantum mechanics of biology, for the analogy to be accurate?

OJ:

"Belief in Reason is of course nothing but a faith."

Yes, that's true, if you want to put it like that. But of course unless we can accept there are basic grounds for argument, argument is just noise. If you want to reduce to that level of doubt, you're talking chapter 1, page 1 of modern western philosophy: Descartes' Meditations.

as for:

"the choice is between complete randomness or morality."

...now this is where it gets interesting. evolutionists (Dawkins has masses of stuff about defect-cooperate game theory in The Selfish Gene) and philosophers (eg. Hobbes) have told many stories accounting for morality without God. basically they reduce to: man needs moral rules to survive in the company of other men.

but i accept that there are as many questions as answers.

Brit:

exactly. Since no one's ever gotten past page one it's naught but fanaticism to speak of Reason as superior to Faith. Reason is but a tool of the Faithful.

However, you're quite wrong about evolutionists offering an alternate account of morality--they offer an alternative to morality.

Brit:

One problem with your argument is that you are appropriating the definition of what constitutes evidence. As its most basic, if religion is debating science and science starts by saying "Of course we must agree that the only evidence we can accept is scientific evidence.", then the deck is a little stacked. That is why you are so sure Occam's razor favours you rather than OJ, even though probably more people in history and perhaps just as many today might take his choice, "D". (I go for "C", but then I have always believed the Devil doesn't get enough good press.)

Suppose we were able to convince you, using much of the West as an example, that the following proposition is either true or even credible enough to be worrisome: "Widespread belief in a random, purposeless existence leads to demographic decline, a closing of the mind to the future (beyond our personal, immediate gratification) and social dislocation such as to point us in the direction of extinction or disintegration as a society."

Again, assuming you saw that argument as credible, would that proposition by itself cause you to doubt the truth of natural selection or would you simply say facts are facts and where they lead us to is irrelevant to their veracity?

OJ:
Having been through a Big One, I most certainly agree that earthquakes are significant. But the landscape was entirely unchanged afterwards. No earthquake in human history has produced any change you could ever find on a map. Just like DNA mutations are an obvious fact, but haven't led to "significant" speciation during human history.

Laws and experiments are inappropriate techniques for the explication of plate tectonics. Instead, one constructs a historical narrative.

That one constructs an historical narrative does not make Evolutionary theory immune to inspection. The narrative still has to conform to observations. It does, however, make absolute proof a far more difficult thing.

JD:
Relativity did not overthrow Newtonian mechanics, but rather showed Newtonian mechanics to be incomplete (which was known by the 1700s, BTW). If you want to send a probe to orbit Saturn, you use Newtonian mechanics, not relativity.

OJ:
The choice is not between randomness or morality. That is a false dichotomy. It is a choice between concluding part of being human includes some innate, although far from perfect, moral sense, or God is behind morality.

It is there either way. Just like deciding between plate tectonics, or "turtles all the way down" has no effect on how tall mountains are.

Jeff:

You can see whole sections of the San Andreas faultline that are uneven. You can read the effects of tectonics with a seismograph. In the absence of such actual evidence you would indeed look at the continents and assume that they'd once fit together and you'd be right. But evidence confirms the activity and so you're not left with mere assumption. Unlike natural selection, which too may enbd up being true, but is unsupported by experimental evidence and, as Mayr concedes, can't be.

If there are physical natural laws that drive the behavior of all living organisms it's foolish, unnatural even, to insist that they govern their behavior themselves. If no such natural laws bind us it's foolish to believe that they do.

Peter:

I'd say facts are facts. Otherwise you're into the extremely dodgy territory of truth-relativism. Which is sixth-form (US = high school?) philosophy and in which case the word 'true' is quite meaningless.

OJ:

"Reason is but a tool of the Faithful."

You're attempting to use reason, that is, to use rational argument in this very thread. Let's face it, the evolutionary scientist has left the intelligent-designer and the creationist behind a long time ago in this debate. If you want to engage the scientist in a debate, you must use reason. its no good screaming 'but I believe!'. the place for that is the church. the scientist will say 'good for you, but what's that got to do with me?'

as for:

'However, you're quite wrong about evolutionists offering an alternate account of morality--they offer an alternative to morality.'

Only if you insist on defining 'morality' as being 'God's given law'.

if that is your definition and you accept no other, then you're quite right: in the absence of God there are only alternatives to morality.

but i choose not to define it so narrowly. i would define morality as (very roughly) something like: a belief that there are right and wrong ways to behave, and an imperative to act right accordingly, and a sense of remorse when failing to act right accordingly.

and there are 2 things here anyway: philosophers, eg. Hobbes, Kant, Mill have all sought to show why we SHOULD be moral in the absence of divine absolute externally-given laws. ie. a proscriptive account of morality.

evolutionary biologists on the other hand, eg. with game theory, have merely observed that we DO HAVE morality, and have sought to find ways to explain it in the absence of God. ie. a merely descriptive account of morality.

Brit:

A wise man once said: "If you want to reduce to that level of doubt, you're talking chapter 1, page 1 of modern western philosophy"

A silly man once responded: "If you want to engage the scientist in a debate, you must use reason."

You can't cede the ground upon which Reason stands and defend it at the same time without becoming incoherent.

You're right that Science admits only Reason--that is how it demonstrates its closed nature and that it is a theology.

OJ

The 2 statements you quote are not mutually exclusive: they refer to two different categories of argument.

say you think its better to wear a skirt to play hockey and i disagree. relevant things to a meaningful debate are items like: you move more freely in a skirt, skirts offer more protection than shorts etc.

irrelevant items are such things as: hockey might not even exist, and nor might skirts, and 'better' might not exist, right might mean wrong, since they may all be figments of my imagination inside the Matrix.

questions such as 'what is reason?' belong to a quite different level of debate. (the Cartesian doubt level)

I can quite coherently think its better to wear shorts for field hockey at one level, and at admit that it is impossible to prove that hockey even exists at another level.

the point being...

when you, the believer, seek to argue with the rational scientist that he is wrong about evolution, argument is quite impossible unless you are able to use 'reason'. and OJ, you do try to use reason, with your discussions of speciation etc.

that's why two christians can have a meaningul debate over whether the bible permits gay relationships by arguing for the strength of different passages of the NT...

but a buddhist and a christian can't have meaningful debate about whose God really exists, just by yelling "but I believe more strongly than you!" at each other.

geddit?

Brit:

Western Philosophy 101 demonstrated, conclusively, the impossibility of our knowing anything with any certainty, including that we exist. Thus, Descartes is famous for his rationalists's statement of faith: I think, therefore I am. Unable to prove itself via Reason, Reason is reduced to an avowal based on faith.

This proves perfectly adequate to our purposes as human beings, but places Reason firmly within the realm of faith. To then speak of Reason as something superior to or more reliable than faith is a sign of fanaticism, derangement, or unrigorous thought. We recognize such pathologioes easily enough when manifested by the religious, but they are even more common to the rational, whose argument so often depends on yelling "I believe in Reason more strongly than you believe in religion".

Harry -- Nice Casablanca reference.

Unconscious, David, but perhaps related to your posts earlier.

I eat, therefore, I am. The present non-existence of the boiled egg I had for breakfast is reality enough for me.

Demanding to know what is behind the curtain is a meaningless question. The answer could be, nothing, what you see is what you get; and that might be the real answer (I think so), but there is no conceivable way to know for sure. Asking unanswerable questions is profitless.

It's only purpose is to jeer at people who have what -- even if they are only interim answers -- is useful.

Pending a final answer, preponderance of evidence requires the wise man to accept Darwinism.

Investigation continues at a rapid and expanding rate.

It produces a residue of "facts." What is accumulating?

Not evidence for ID. Whatever evidence there ever was for that (I'd say zero), millions of experiments have not produced any more. You would think that, if ID were valid, so many experiments, even if looking for something else, would from time to time produce an ID-positive result.

Not evidence for creation. It is hard to imagine what that might be, short of the Big Spook coming down, tapping you on the shoulder and saying, "Yes, I did it," and then whipping up a couple of new species on the spot to show how."

As a practical matter, there is no antidarwinian position. Turtles and Darwin all the way down.

Jeff:

If you want to send a probe to orbit Saturn, you use Newtonian mechanics, not relativity.

No Jeff, in this you are wrong. All planetary positions are now calculated using general relativity - relativistic effects are significant enough that if you depended on Newton, you would miss.

Harry:

Bravo! That's an admirably forthright statement of faith. We can't know, but you do know.

JD:
I'm sorry, you are wrong.

No planetary positions are calculated using anything remotely like general relativity. Unless, that is, you are asserting that Newtonian mechanics is relativity at non-relativistic speeds. At the speeds planets and spacecraft travel, Newtonian mechanics is mathematically (and physically) indistinguishable from relativistic mechanics. And among the planets, not even Jupiter is massive enough for its gravitational field to have relativistic consequences (unlike Mercury orbit around the far more massive Sun, which has tiny errors not explainable through Newtonian mechanics alone).

In fact, Newtonian mechanics calculate the positions of planets so accurately that Neptunes existence was predicted by perturbations in Uranus' orbit. Long before relativity.

Now, if you want to design a particle accelerator, than Newtonian mechanics will utterly fail.

Newtonian mechanics is incomplete, not incorrect.

OJ:
All the things of which you speak constitute an historical narrative that isn't testable in the laboratory--there is no experimental evidence to support plate tectonics. And, other than extrapolating historical trends, plate tectonics allows no accurate prediction of where the continents will be at some time in the distant future.

All of which means the kind and quality of evidence supporting plate tectonics is the same as that supporting evolution.

"If there are physical natural laws that drive the behavior of all living organisms it's foolish, unnatural even, to insist that they govern their behavior themselves. If no such natural laws bind us it's foolish to believe that they do."

The ambiguous reference in the second sentence makes them both impossible to parse. Does "us" equate to "all living organisms?" Does "they" refer to natural laws or organisms?

That said, the first sentence is a strawman. Natural laws statistically determine population dynamics, not the discreet behavior of individual organisms; your implication that behavior is the result of discreet, deterministic, physical states is far too simplistic to be useful.

Jeff:

What are seismograph readings?

OJ

I admire your heroic attempts at mental gymnastics, but i can't remotely agree with you.

Let me try to put it as succinctly as possible:

You, the intelligent-design theorist, initially try to (use reason to) claim that the Darwinist's position is no more valid that your own.

When the Darwinist points out that he accepts natural selection because of all the current explantions for evolution it is the most minimal and rational, you are now reduced to saying...yes, but 'rational' might not really exist, so you may as well have faith in an ID.

Which might even be a coherent position, but
1) shows how much ground you've had to concede
2) unwisely, from your point of view, sets a belief in God against reason
3) means that your belief in God designing evolution is no more valid than someone who believes that the world was created an enormous, intelligent carrot.

The problem for you is that you are basically a rational person. Why do you believe in gravity? Why do you believe in evolution and not creationism? I would guess, evidence and reason.

Trust me, if you're chucking reason out of the window when it suits you, you may as well be a creationist.

So, if i were you, i wouldn't take that line. I'd stick to exploiting the gaps in natural selection...

...until they're all closed, anyway.

Brit:

Sorry to be stuck in the sixth form, but I really wasn't talking about truth relativism. I was talking about our ability to be confident we are actually perceiving truth and to trust our perception of what it is without denying it is there somewhere. That has to be at least an eighth form issue.

Eugenics is now a widely discredited science. That is, in large part, because of the results that accrued when we decided to give it practical application. Even though there are still a few eugenicists around (actually, more than a few), most of us don't even want to know what they say, and we ain't apologizing for it. We dismiss it, not, for most of us, because we challenge the science, but because we know it simply can't be "right" it its apparent significance. Something about the overall thrust of the discipline is noxious and we are satisfied that that is enough to question the veracity of its specific claims. Germ theory does good things and eugenics doesn't, which is why most of us embrace one and not the other.

So, with natural selection, if the proposition I put has any credibility, why can't we be safe in concluding, not that it is factually in error, but "something is very wrong about all this, even if we can't say precisely what it is.". Why can one not be an agnostic about science?

Harry, Jeff and others use this argument all the time about religion. They start innocently enough by simply saying they don't need it, but then it becomes clear they are actively opposed, largely because they believe it leads inexorably to witch burning and sectarian slaughter. Why can't this approach be applied to test the veracity of science?

As one of our wisest posters once said: Goose, gander.

OJ:
Seismograph readings are indications of movement in the earth. None of which, in recorded history, has ever been big enough to cause a change you could see on a map.

Those readings constitute precisely the same sort of evidence that changes in allele frequencies between separated breeding populations. Seismograph readings might well be considered less persuasive evidence of plate tectonics than artificial selection is of evolution.

The point here is not to say that because plate tectonics is, at least at this point, an indisputably true concept, then so is Evolution simply because of they both share evidentiary bases.

As Mayr said ""Laws and experiments are inappropriate techniques for the explication of such events and processes. Instead one constructs a historical narrative."

That precise approach has been sufficient to prove plate tectonics to your satisfaction. Therefore, it begs further explanation to conclude such an approach will not be adequate to prove Evolution.

We observe that the continents appear to have fit together at one time. Plate tectonics is proposed as the way they drifted apart. We observe and measure that they do indeed move just as proposed.

We observe that evolution has occurred. Natural selection is proposed as the process. We observe..... Nothing.

Brit:

You make a common error--the irrationality of Creatonist arguments does not tell us anything about natural selection.

OJ:
We observe the results of artificial selection: significant.

We see the results of natural selection: flightless birds on isolated islands; sightless animals whose entire life cycle is in complete darkness.

Finally, Natural selection is A, not THE, process underlying evolution.

Peter:
The religious problem I (not wishing to speak for Harry) keep returning to is that there is no means to distinguish between competing religious claims. Who was right, the Church or the Albigensians?

I'm not opposed to religion; in fact, I believe it exerts an important stabilizing force on society while providing an important means of handing down social mores--which as often as not reflect what works in the society, not what the Gospels explicitly say. But I am strenuously opposed to the mixture of religion and government.

Like Harry has said many times, free private exercise and strict governmental secularism has proven to be a pretty darn good mix.

Jeff:

I know you do personally, and I admire you (yeah, yeah, Harry too) for it. If secular society were made up of Jeff Guinns, it might work quite nicely. But I do not believe your philosophy leads to the kind of tolerant, healthy society you do, and that is what we are arguing about.

Jeff:

No, we see the results of evolution. We've no idea whether it's caused by natural selection. The fact that we never observe natural selection in action mitigates against it. The fact that we can produce artificial selection suggests that it is a possible tool used to drive evolution.

On the other hand, we observe the shifting of the Earth's plates at every moment of every day. That doesn't prove that there was once a single land mass, or a couple, but suggests that the mechanism we've identified does work.

OJ:
You are right, we don't know whether the changes we observe are caused by natural selection. Actually, natural selection seems to be one component among at least several.

Your comparison to plate tectonics isn't appropriate, however. The first para goes to the mechanics of evolution, while the second para goes to observed changes and says nothing about mechanics. Or rather, you say the mechanism we have identified does the work, without acknowledging what it is, or the complete inability to confirm it in the lab without artificiality (or, maybe, even with it).

Therefore, Evolution as a concept--the self contained, goal free change of a natural system--is every bit as well substantiated as Plate Tectonics.

However, as you point out, the mechanics underlying both are far from settled.

Jeff:

It appears we've finally reached agreement: Natural Selection is a self-contained, unobserved, unproven concept. That's all we skeptics say.

YOU refuse to observe natural selection, Orrin. That does not mean no one else observes it. I have several times given examples.

Except in uncommon but not unusual circumstances, natural selection works to bring a population back to its mean. Tall parents have tall children, but they are (on average) less tall than the parents.

Only when something occurs to interfere with the recurrence to the mean (what Mayr calls a "founder event") can speciation occur.

This does not happen very often, but more often for some kinds of organisms than others. Particularly labile organisms in an unsettled envirnoment -- I have given the example of picture-wing fruit flies in a rain forest that is frequently carved up by lava flows -- speciate on time scales that humans can observe, and some of my friends have actually observed it.

That you have not observed it is irrelevant.

Wilt Chamberlain is hardly a different species from us, is he? Nor is a fruit fly with four spots different from one with four spots in the way that Darwinism attempts to explain evolution to us. When have we observed a fruit fly become something else?

OJ:
Evolutionary theory is more than just natural selection.

Evolution, therefore, is just as well grounded as plate tectonics, and just as little in need of outside, teleological, input.

Jeff:

Agreed. That's why no one questions evolution. It's only Natural Selection (Darwinism) that most people consider a form of religion.

Well, it seems that those who view "Darwinism" as a form of religion have their own religious axe to grind. And they also seem to ignore how little people knew at the time, and how much what we have learned since substantiates the theory that goalless, non-deterministic processes--whatever they may be in detail--may very well have led to what we see around us today.

BTW:
I am impressed you took the time to read Mayr.

No, we have not observed an event in our lifetimes that resulted in a new phylum or division, much less a kingdom.

Yet we have evidences of when and, to a lesser degree, how such events happened. We see the progression of reptiles to therapsids, who are showing some characters that seem mammal-like. And somewhat later, therapsids that are even more like mammals. And, eventually, mammals.

The big steps are not impossible to break down into smaller ones, the increasing mobility of limb joints, for examples.

Other jumps are far less obvious. The appearance of the grasses and their advantage through the C4 pathway of ATP synthesis, compared with the older C3 path, is obvious enough, but the steps by which C4 arose are rather mysterious.

However, there is no special pleading involved. Other biochemicals processes change, too, and we can trace some of them (hemoglobin, myoglobin proteinsynthesis) in considerable detail.

Your insistence that you have to see an event in your lifetime is, as I have said many times before, not an objection to darwinism.

The average interval between successful colonizations of the Hawaiian islands by any organism is estimated to be around 25,000 years. In any human lifetime, or even 100 of them, we would not expect to see even one plant or insect establish itself here.

We have never seen it happen (except by human agency, which doesn't count). Yet I bet you will not assert that Hawaii is a lifeless rock just because no human has ever seen an organism arrive and establish itself here.

Jeff:

Yes, well, if you go back and read the original post, Mayr makes the point that the Darwinists' intent was to replace God, so sectarian warfare really had to follow the attack, no?

Harry:

How many different types of organisms are there in Hawaii? if 5 billion divided by 25,000, then you're right, we might have just missed the last one and have to wait another few thousand years. Odd though that such things occur in 25,000 year cycles yet you insist they're gradual and ongoing.

Peter:

"So, with natural selection...why can't we be safe in concluding, not that it is factually in error, but "something is very wrong about all this, even if we can't say precisely what it is.""

I can see where you're coming from, but i guess we're on different wavelengths here: I don't feel anything 'icky' about natural selection, and I can't see how a widespread acceptance of it would lead to the collapse of law, morality and civilisation as we know it.

I would say however, to quote David Hume, another great British philosopher (perhaps the greatest, after myself :) ), that you can't derive an 'ought' from an 'is'. Natural selection is a purely explanatory theory about how evolution has occured.

Nazi experiments in 'eugenics' is a political and moral disgrace, but never a reason to discredit good medical science....just like the disgrace of the Spanish Inquisition should not be used to discredit the Bible.

Brit:

Thank you. But haven't you seen above that some of us here are revisitng the Spanish Inquisition? It was really a compassionate effort to save people from being butchered by proto-secularists!!! I swear, the older I get, the more I learn. :-)

Yes, I know I am on shaky ground here and getting close to simply taking my religious ball home because everybody is being mean. I really am not sure where this leads me. But the experience of everyday life and empirical observation means something too, especially in human affairs, even if it results in induced rather than deduced truth.

You say that you can't see how darwinism would lead to the collapse of civilization, etc. Bully for you. That is as sweeping a generalization in the negative as in the positive. I don't think you would gainsay the proposition that ideas make a difference and that they can filter down to popular behaviour, however slowly and unevenly. Do you really think the proposition that life is random and meaningless and that our sense of right and wrong is purely artifical wouldn't have practical implications if we all ever came to actually live life in conscious, immediate belief in that, as Mr. Dawkins wants us to?

Anyway, I didn't ask you whether you believed it. I asked whether, if you did, would it make a difference? I take it your answer is no and that you would be resigned to having us all join hands and jump off a cliff shouting "Thanks for the good times. Whoops, we forgot. Nobody to thank."

Cheery thought.

Peter, OJ:
It is hard, well, probably impossible, to believe in Evolution on one hand, and the pivotal importance of God in people's lives in the other.

But I don't think that will make any difference, for at least several reasons. First, religion is part of being human, and demontrates our capacity to compartmentalize mutually exclusive ideas simultaneously. For most people, religion and evolution coexist without problem.

Second, even if our existence is the accidental result of a goalless process, that doesn't make morality "artificial," any more than it makes religion artificial.

But, thinking evolutionarily, it does make the expression of morality dependent upon the environment. Some actions thrive better than others depending on the environment.

A free society like ours leads to a different morality than a totalitarian society, or a theologically repressive one.

"Cheery thought." You hit the nail on the head why atheism/deism will never, no matter what science proves, be popular.

Jeff:

That's silly. Why wouldn't God just use Evolution as His means of Creation--the same way we breed animals?

But if there is no God then there is no morality, only law and the law is whatever rulers say it is, making Nazism, theocracy, etc, perfectly acceptable. That's why belief ion morality is sufficient to make moral people believe in God.

Peter:

If you are a devout Christian with a very strong belief, it is always going to be hard for me to convince you that morality can properly exist in a non-religious society.

But i would point out some things about the theory of natural selection:

1) i've never heard of a darwinist who says that, because morality has developed without God, morality is therefore meaningless, or worthless, or that concepts of right and wrong should be abandoned. Instead, they observe that we do have morality and try to find other ways of explaining how it came about.

Furthermore: i don't believe God gave me two eyes and vision. I don't think therefore that eyes are worthless and should be abandoned.

Similarly, I don't believe that God gave me my sense of right and wrong, my sense of duty, my abhorrence of criminal activity. But i do think that these things are essential for human beings to function, so why should i think them meaningless or seek to rubbish them?

2) The issue of scale. Individual day-to-day decisions by human beings are of a quite different order to the effects of natural selection on populations over vast timescales.

Whatever OJ says, there is plenty of room for Darwinism and human freedom.

(in my opinion, if its real determinism vs free will problems that you want, think about neuroscience, not darwinism...eg. if my decision Z was caused by neuron Y reacting with neuron X, which was caused by visual impression W....etc...where did 'I' make the decision?...argh!...but that's a different philosophical nightmare)

Brit:

But that's preciselty what Darwinists say and the necessary logical outcome of their beliefs--it's why Stephen Jay Gould, a morally serious man, was considered a creationist by fellow Darwinists.

http://www.nonzero.org/newyorker.htm

Brit:

Easy on the devoutness there. I am here debating this stuff. You know, Christians aren't like secularists. We actually have doubts to cope with. Fortunately, arguing with you, Jeff and Harry always cures mine.

As Orrin has said and shown many times, and as we have debated frequently here, the darwinist explanation for morality is pretty unconvincing and peters out quickly in the face of truly tough moral dilemnas. Admit it, it's not your strongest suit. I can certainly see why darwinists (or evolutionists or whatever we are calling you heathens today) are fairly comfortable in condemning killing and stealing generally, but how about staying with your spouse when you fall in love with another or taking care of your deceased brother's disabled child because there is no one else. I haven't seen anything that would say darwinists can be remotely helpful there. Philosophies of morality expressed in abstract terms are all very nice, but the proof is in the pudding. What do you think "beyond good and evil" meant?

OJ/Peter

Dawkins seems to be the darwinist that you bash most heartily. And that's probably because he's the one everyone can actually read.

Which makes it amazing that you overlook the massive chunks of stuff he's written about genes and morality. (There's loads in The Selfish Gene on the prisoner's dilemma, and the famous 'green beards and altruism gene' explanation.)

And his writings also include these two absolute key observations:

- "nature red in tooth and claw' is the 'is' not the 'ought'. Dawkins takes pains to point out that genetic scientists are not arguing that the world ought to be a certain way.

Your chemistry teacher tells you that steel is an alloy of iron and carbon. He doesn't tell you to go and make a bullet with it.

- he also argues, which is key - and i'm utterly amazed that you ignore this - that though genes may predispose us to a behavior; nurture, environment and free will all determine whether we will give in to the genetic tendency.

Finally, as for religion being a strong foundation for moral behaviour...well, yes it is.

But as a complete explantion for it?...as a Roman Catholic child I've had a problem since I found out that there were millions of Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims and Jews out there. Not to mention the Anglican church, which allowed priests to get married, would you believe!

The Crusades, sectarian violence in Ireland and now atrocities committed in the name of Allah haven't helped me either. And I've never heard of a psychopath or an army killing in the name of 'natural selection'

Don't get me wrong, western Christian values are wonderful and they are important to me...but God as a complete explanation for human moral behaviour? I just can't buy it, sorry.

Brit:

Nazism was just Darwinism applied.

OJ

If that statement is meant to be serious, I'm diappointed, because frankly it is the argument of an intellectual pygmy.

Ignoring the ridiculous slander that that statement implies against Darwinists, it just shows that you

a) don't understand Darwinism
b) can't grasp the difference between an 'is' and an 'ought'
c) don't realise that eugenics has nothing to do with darwinism whatsoever.

If all of life is an unending struggle of me and the folks most genetically similar to me to survive against folks with genes that are different, then we may as well get them before they get us. Of course, when you put it that way, the notion of Darwinian struggle to survive is such obvious nonsense that no one not addled by faith would think the theory serious.

OJ

Ah, now I get it. You genuinely don't understand Dawkins, let alone Darwinism.

Here's some things to meditate on. You may suddenly achieve enlightenment:

Dawkins and morality, lesson 1:
1) 'selfish' genes are not actually consciously 'selfish'. they don't have little geney minds. The word is a metaphor to help you understand replicating genes and their relative success in the environment.

2) 'the selfish gene' theory says the following: one can make powerful predictions about the process of natural selection by IMAGINING that the gene has a selfish motive to make copies of itself

3)Here is the misinterpretation: People think that genes are our deepest hidden self, our essence, so if our genes are selfish, that means that deep down we're selfish

4) But there is no claim that the metaphorical motives of the genes are somehow a more fundamental or honest version of the real motives of the entire person.

5)Consider: sometimes the most "selfish" thing a gene can do, in this metaphorical sense of selfish, is to build a brain that is not selfish -- not selfish at an unconscious level, not selfish at any level - even if the genes are themselves metaphorically selfish.

6) Consider: When we help a stranger, behave with honesty or love our children we aren't at any level of the brain calculating that it will increase our inclusive fitness. The love can be pure and in and of itself in terms of what's actually happening in the brain. The metaphorical 'selfishness' of genes only explains why we have that pure emotion.

7) The idea that morality itself would be a fiction if our moral reasoning came out of some evolved moral sense is a non sequitur.

How about thinking about it for a bit, instead of immediately coming back with a knee-jerk one-liner?

Brit:

If Darwinism is accurate then the selfish genes are what matter, not the ethereal notion of a hidden self. And it would be absurd to hiold people responsible for the kind od selfs they construct when their every behavior is in reality being driven at the level of blind genetic preservation.

OJ

stop it! it's getting silly now

"their every behavior is in reality being driven at the level of blind genetic preservation"

that's not what Darwinism says in any way, shape or form!

Once again, here is the MISINTERPRETATION of what Darwinism says: People think that genes are our deepest hidden self, our essence, so if our genes are selfish, that means that deep down we're selfish.

Brit et al.

Will the real Darwinism please stand up! Are we disowning or touting Dawkins here?

So, what is the source of morality beyond collective utilitarianism based upon self-interest? (I note you ducked the specific challenges I threw down).

I don't know about Orrin, but I do not fear that an atheist society would descend into rape and pillage or rule by Hell's Angels. What I fear is something far more ordered, examples of which abound in 20th century history and modern society.

Finally, "The love can be pure and in and of itself in terms of what's actually happening in the brain." Can you elaborate on this please, remembering that I'm very busy and only have a free lifetime.

Peter

Heh heh...ok, let me try and untangle some of the threads here.

First, Dawkins versus Darwinism...right, not all Darwinists agree with each other about every aspect of evolution. However, they do all agree about the very basics. These include the notion that evolution directionless and accidental.

Dawkins wrote a book arguing that the basic 'block' of natural selection is the gene. He called it 'The Selfish Gene'

In it he explained that one can make powerful predictions about the process of natural selection by IMAGINING that the gene has a selfish motive to make copies of itself.

The word 'selfish' is a metaphor to help the reader to understand how some self-replicating genes mhave been more successful than others, and are thus more prevalent in the world.

(Note the word 'metaphor'. I gave a similar analogy in another thread. Imagine water flowing down a mountain. it follows the path of least resistance. You might explain its route to a child by saying it 'wants' to get to the bottom as quickly as possible. Of course, the water doesn't literally 'want' to do anything - it just falls according to the laws of physics.

So with genes: they aren't literally 'selfish' little buggers, 'striving' to replicate themselves at the expense of other genes. They aren't even 'telling us' to act selfishly. It's just a metaphor for explaining how some self-replicating genes happen to me more successful in the environment than others.)

The problem is that many people misinterpet this 'selfish' metaphor. OJ has done just that here when he says "(accoring to Dawkins, our) every behavior is in reality being driven at the level of blind genetic preservation."

People who haven't got their head round Dawkins think:

1) genes are literally "selfishly motivated"
and/or
2)that genes are our deepest hidden self, our essence, so if our genes are selfish, that means that deep down we're selfish too.

But actually, Dawkins takes pains to point out that he says nothing of the sort.

Not only does he think that genetic evolution is just as likely to produce altruistic people as self-motivated people, but he argues that, although genes may predispose us to some kinds of behaviour, it is the environment and human free will that ultimately makes the decisions.

Once you've grasped all the above, its pretty obvious what this means:

"The love can be pure and in and of itself in terms of what's actually happening in the brain."

It means that whatever happens in the brain is nothing at all to do with any 'promptings' being given to it by your 'selfish' genes. Gentic evolution just explains why the brain is there in the first place.

Again, for absolute clarity:

A) here is the MISINTERPRETATION of what Dawkins says: People think that genes are our deepest hidden self, our essence, so if our genes are selfish, that means that deep down we're selfish.

B) here is what Dawkins ACTUALLY says: one can make powerful predictions about the process of natural selection by IMAGINING that the gene has a selfish motive to make copies of itself

Ah, the Magic Eight-Ball theory of Darwinism--all it does is make some predictions which may or may not come true?

Brit:

OK, so evolution says we are not necessarily selfish and that some of us can be altruistic. Why should I care which I am?

OJ:

"the Magic Eight-Ball theory of Darwinism--all it does is make some predictions which may or may not come true?"

Correct...or to put it another way, if natural selection at the genetic level as Dawkins describes it is true, we would expect certain things to have happened in the history of evolution.

And Dawkins provides countless examples in his book where they have happened in practice, exactly as natural selection would predict. Giraffes having long necks is one. Hence the reason why so many scientists, and lay men like myself, find natural selection so powerful an explanation for evolution.

It can also be disproved, if, for example, a characteristic detrimental to the survival of an individual animal suddenly flourished in a species. So far, it hasn't been disproved.

Peter:

Evolution has created the human brain, a very very complex organism. (Even OJ's :) )

Brit:
Excellent set of explanations.

What puzzles me is that people have no problem with Adam Smith's Invisible Hand imposing a very serviceable utilitarian morality. Yet when faced with evolution, which is essentially nothing more than the Invisible Hand writ large, the idea that some sort of inherent morale sense could be one outcome is inconcievable. Isn't just at least possible that morality is itself evolutionary, and will adapt to its environment? After all, theocracies have different moral environments than dictatorships than market economies. Same beast, different environments.

We evolved as social animals, which would be impossible without some innate ability to get along in groups.

Peter: Religion itself fails in the face of truly difficult moral dilemmas. In fact, there is no non-trivial moral dilemma that you can't find religion camped decisively on both sides. Slavery, a seeming slam dunk if there ever was one, had religion both condemning and defending it. Even today, some religionists are unable to conclude slavery is immoral.

I acknowledge materialism can't come up with an "objective" morality. Unfortunately, neither can religion. The best humanity has been able to achieve so far is the shambolic morality that comes about in a free secular society.

Finally, I think you overrate free will. In choosing between altruism and selfishness, you have much less choice than you think you do. Next time you go out to a group dinner where the check is split evenly, try ordering the most expensive item on the menu. I could well be wrong, knowing nothing beyond these pixels, but I'll bet you can't do it. Not won't. Can't.

And here's an interesting question:

are natural selection and God logically compatible?

I would say...of course.

Natural selection and intelligent design are incompatible.

But you could believe:

A) natural selection explains evolution
or
B) natural selection explains evolution but God 'started it off'
or
C) natural selection explains evolution and in each instance of it God also wanted the identical thing to happen.

Occam's razor forbids me from believing B or C, :)

but a man of faith can logically hold either of them.

Jeff:

The Adam Smith analogy is excellent. Try reading him--his economics presupposes a Christian society.

Brit:

You mean like the size and slowness of large herd animals?, which led to their extinction in places like Australia and North America.

I haven't read my usual run of blogs for a while, but lo and behold when I find a moment to do so, OJ has finally come forward with something approaching a basis for his oft-repeated antipathy for Darwinism (my apologies if he has done so at greater length in the past; I hadn't yet encountered it). It is perhaps unfortunate that the resulting argument winds up looking like something that Behe, Berlinski or the rest of the gang at the Discovery Institute could have come up with, although, to be fair, OJ never once comes right out and mention "intelligent design," "irreducible complexity" or NFL theorems. Standards that low are not to be emulated.

Regardless, given the occasionally high level at which intellectual discourse occurs on this blog (despite OJ's anti-intellectualism), the criticism of Mayr's five points was disappointing. For starters, "the notion that few individuals survive from each generation" is not "risible." It's true. A much higher number of people than that which "accepts that evolution has occurred" can understand that if each and every mouse/rat/rabbit in each and every litter somehow reached maturity and managed to breed, the resulting Malthusian disaster would wipe out all other life on the planet. Substitute any other mammal--any other animal or plant--for "mouse/rat/rabbit," and you get the same result, with only some minor (geologically speaking) variations in the timescales required. _Something_ is killing off the majority, even the vast majority, of those offspring--disease, starvation, predators, accidents, what have you.

We come to the crux of the matter. OJ claims that we "see no evidence that there is significant genetic variation in every generation of any species." Huh? Does the full run of humanity look identical to you? Or do we exhibit "significant" differences in height, body proportions, levels of various types of intelligence, behavioral patterns, skin and hair color, hand-eye coordination, etc.? Some of those differences aren't entirely in the genes, but all of them are to at least some degree. I grant you that I can take a strain of inbred mice and fail to find phenotypically "significant" variation that a mechanism of natural selection could latch onto, save for "mouseness," but in any wild population the levels of genetic variation can be enormous.

All that remains is to combine these two rather bluntly obvious facts--significant genetic variation, and the failure of the majority of progeny to mature and mate--and you have the template for Darwinism. I can fully understand that for some Darwinism may well represent a faith. I do not comprehend where that leap comes in, above.

[As an aside, I imagine the main quibble might be what constitutes "significant" genetic variation, i.e. what degree of variation is necessary for natural selection to act upon it. The mathematics on that is straightforward; what they can come down to is the difference between, say, .05% of a plant's seeds germinating vs. .06% of another's.]

OJ

Wow - so you mean with that example that you've just proven natural selection wrong? Get in touch with the scientists quick! They'll want to know!

Gimme a break. Try thinking about your statement a wee bit longer. Darwinism does not forbid extinction...it explains it!

Brit:

So, contrary to your point, thiongs evolve towards extinction, not just survival. Which suggests that Natural Selection is not the process driving Evolution but instead something like random variation.

OJ

Have you actually understood anything I've said? Its like you get some of the details, but have failed to get your head round the fundamentals.

Here's the thing...

I'm not trying to prove to you that God doesn't exist.

I'm not even trying to tell you that natural selection is correct.

I'm just trying to explain what natural selection ACTUALLY SAYS.

Because all your objections are very obviously based on misinterpretations of the theory.

Like someone else on here said: if that's what Darwinism was, I wouldn't believe it either.

I honestly don't think I can explain it any clearer than I have in this thread, so I'm giving up in exhaustion!

Brit:

God wins again!

M:

The point of these discussions is to amuse the non-vbelievers who get to read the theology of the Darwinists--for example, your argument that the enormous variety of genetic variation with each species (despite the fact it's never led to a new species), combined with the fantastic rate of non-survival in each species (other than humans) demonstrates that genetic variation and the survival benefits it conveys drive evolution. So combine something that you concede never happens with something that's internally inconsistent (you're saying, after all, that because of ferocious survival pressures populations must decrease from generation to generation but that they also increase because of fitness) and, voila: Natural Selection.

It's like turning loose a Wiccan.

25,000 into 75 million years, Orrin. Hawaii has not been around 5 billion years.

But there's nothing to say that the events are distributed evenly.

There are an estimated 11,000 species in Hawaii today, about 90% insects. Some were imported by humans, which distorts the picture, prehumanity.

But if we stick to plants, there are rather less than 1,000 native species, extant and extinct. That is, considerably fewer than 1,000 colonization events, because some colonists speciated luxuriantly once they got here, and some did not speciate at all. The California tarweed, or example, has 27 daughter species in Hawaii, the greenswords and silverswords. (How do we know which was the mother species? DNA.)

For simplicity, take 1,000 plant colonizations over 75 my. That's one every 75,000 years. No wonder we haven't observed one during our lifetimes.

Different classes of organisms have different dispersal potentials. There were no ants in Hawaii and even with human intervention there still are no seagulls. Yet there are native spiders and native geese.

It is usually fairly easy to see why one group made it and another didn't. The failure of social insects to migrate over 2,000 miles of water is not mysterious.

See, M., what could be more fun than that. First Harry narrows it down to just plants, then says there's no reason to believe there are large pauses in speciation, then argues that since we've not seen a colonization event they must indeed be spaced out every 75,000 years. It's a Darwinian self-parody that practically sings.

OJ:
Only someone numerically challenged could think 3,000 years is a large amount of time, never mind that only the last several hundred of which have people had even the slightest notion of looking for this sort of thing. According to that line of thinking, plate tectonics never happened.

"...despite the fact it's never led to a new species..." And you know this how? Your evidence would be?

Your distortion of Harry's point--his narrowing to plants is obviously for expository purposes--is intellectually dishonest, and reveals a thoroughgoing misunderstanding of statistics--75,000 years on average means it is very unlikely to observe an event within any 3,000 year period.

For you to conclude he means that such events must be spaced over precise 75,000 year intervals is as wrong as wrong can be.

You have succeeded in parodying only yourself.

Jeff:

Of course, we just happen to be in the middle of the 3,000 year gap for every single organism on Earth. What are the odds?

4. Gradualism. According to this theory, evolutionary change takes place through the gradual change of populations and not by the sudden (saltational) production of new individuals that represent a new type.

5. Natural selection. According to this theory, evolutionary change comes about throught the abundant production of genetic variation in every generation. The relatively few individuals who survive, owing to a particularly well-adapted combination of inheritable characters, give rise to the next generation.

I'm never able to participate in these discussions to any degree more than a few posts/replies (the family beckons), which means that everyone else gets the last word. My last word, based entirely on OJ's response:

"despite the fact it's [genetic variation] never led to a new species"--actually, there are very good examples of naturally occurring genetic variation leading to speciation. The most elegant examples I know of are the so-called "ring species." A species of bird lives on the shore of a lake (I believe the specific example is the Caspian Sea, but I'll have to look it up; another example is a mammal that lives on the African shoreline). For some geographical reason the species spread along the lake in one direction only. What has been observed is that the birds at one end of the continuum are unable to mate successfully with the birds at the other, which is one definition of speciation.

Now, I suppose no one actually observed the centuries- to millennia-long process by which these birds spread along the lakeshore, with genetic variation accumulating as they did so. But the observation seems rather clear.

Although it is generally true that the majority of offspring for a given species do not survive to adulthood to mate, it does not immediately follow that "populations must decrease from generation to generation." And while it may be true that the majority of humans today do survive to adulthood, that is a relatively new development, reflecting improvements in health and hygiene that have occurred over the past several centuries; as late as the nineteenth century, after all, it was the norm for a family to lose children before adulthood.

Finally, populations do not "increase because of fitness." A population with greater fitness is more likely to increase in numbers than others. Changes in environmental conditions will similarly result in changes in fitness even if genetic makeup remains the same.

Your Wiccan is a straw man.

Jeff:

"The best humanity has been able to achieve so far is the shambolic morality that comes about in a free secular society:

Like in Europe?

M:

Yes, that inability to mate is kind of the Alamo of speciation. No one thinks there's any serious difference between the two populations of the species, which even you refer to as one species. But if that's the best you can do, I'll concede the ring neck grebe to one side of the lake is different than the ring neck grebe on the other. Both are ring neck grebes though, right?

OJ:
How many species are there on Earth today?

Not approximately. Exactly.

How many species were there in 1953? Again, not approximately.

If you don't know either the former or the latter, then you have no earthly idea how many new species have come about over the last 50 or 3,000 years.

Which means "Of course, we just happen to be in the middle of the 3,000 year gap for every single organism on Earth." is a completely unsubstantiated statement upon which it is impossible to draw any conclusion.

Peter:
No. I mean like in the US. A free market economy has self-organizing complexity and a characteristic morality that operates virtually without coercion. Adam Smith was really on to something.

Jeff:

E.O. Wilson there are less than there were.

Wilson is probably, but not demonstrably, right. We're creating a great extinction right now.

It's happened before, usually without our help.

I specifically stated that there is no expectation that the colonizations would be evenly distributed.

As a matter of fact, natural scientists, besides having observed actual speciations, have also observed incipient speciations -- founder events in progress that, if trends continue, will result in complete reproductive isolation of two populations, which often results in speciation due to nothing more than genetic drift.

Since life is a continuum, examples of just about every physically possible combination have been observed. Partial reproductive isolation has the effect, generally, of reducing diversity within the gene pool of the distant species -- which is why there is more genetic diversity in an East African village than in all the rest of the humans in the world; us non-East Africans left, each ancestor taking with him just a fraction of the diversity he left behind -- and opens the way to divergence.

The two populations can merge later, and the divergence will be wiped out. Or they can become completely isolated, resulting in sibling species.

You like the example of dogs. Great Danes and chihuahuas cannot mate directly, but belong to the same species, because they can mate with intermediates and within about 3 generations revert to type -- the yellow dog a Democrat would vote for.

But if it happened that all the middlep-size dogs were eliminated, than chihuahuas and Great Danes would be different species, because they could not interbreed, which is the definition.

Furthermore, they would be morphological species by anybody's taxonomy.

The amount of variation in a species is large.

But they'd still just be dogs, so hardly meaningful for what Darwinism is attempting to explain.

Canids.

The taxonomists would have to decide which was Canis familiaris and which a daughter or sibling species. This would be easy in the scenario I've sketched but not for the morphological taxonomist.

Nowadays, of course, you could do DNA sequencing and reconstruct the whole thing.

It's conceivable unlikely that one or the other might mutate sufficiently to create a new kingdom, or even phylum. Life generated a great number of bauplans early, most of which failed to survive.

It's probable that the more established bauplans there are, the harder it would be for a novel one to establish itself. Certainly the rate of production has decreased geometrically over time.

OJ:
E.O. Wilson may well be right regarding the overall of species. But that number is net.

If you don't know within, say, several hundred thousand, how many species there are on the planet, then you have no idea how many have appeared. Or disappeared, for that matter.

Dr. Wilson is making a very educated guess that the net number is species is smaller. But he can't tell you by how much.

BTW, if memory serves, the estimates for the number of species on the planet today vary by millions, not mere thousands.

Your assertion there have been no new species in 3,000 years is completely unsupportable.

Jeff:

Name one.

OJ:
I forget the count exactly, but there are roughly 1,000 new insect species reported each year.

Any one of them.

Jeff:

Those are the we find in the Amazon and stuff, not that evolve

OJ:
You cannot possibly state that factually.

In order to do so, you would have to know the history of every one of them, which you don't. Just as you don't know how many species there were, or are, or their individual histories, or the likelihood we would actually observe speciation in progress.

Which absolutely means your assertion they didn't evolve is a classic example of conclusion from ignorance

Jeff:

Do you feel uncomfortable saying that no miracles have occured in the last thousand years? Of course not, even though you can't prove it. You can't prove a negative--but you can observe the curious persistence of the negative.

OJ:
That would be a lot more persuasive if your range of observation went beyond a tiny fraction of both the total instantaneous quantity, and the total time the range has been under observation mutliplied by the rate of change.

That number is tiny. It is so small that one would be astonished were we to actually observe such a thing in such a short time.

As for miracles, I wouldn't make such an assertion. Based on the number that have been carefully examined and still declared miracles, it is unlikely any of the rest are miracles.

But unlikely is a far cry from none.

Well, there you go, I'm more skeptical. I think miracles and Darwinism are both bunk.

OJ:
That is because you are completely comfortable making conclusions from ignorance.

Our ignorance is infinite.

The amount that we don't yet know may be infinite, but that is not the same as saying we don't know anything.

Not the same, but Reason demonstrates we don't.

Acknowledging our ignorance is virtually infinite is no justification for ignoring our ignorance by drawing firm conclusions from nothing.

Jeff:

Agreed. Nothing justifies it rationally. Instead, we accept on faith that we can draw some conclusions. Otherwise life would be unlivable.

That would be fine, so long as the conclusion drawers understood their conclusions had no more inherent worth than differing conclusions on the same subject.

Unfortunately, religionists far too often fail to achieve that understanding.

Jeff:

Not at all, most Intelligent Designers and Creationists would likely acknowledge that your Natural Selection is as valid. In fact, it seems the means by which the Intelligence Designed and Created. They just wouldn't accede to the claim it is somehow more valid.