You're giving a hostage to fortune, Orrin.



What if somebody does find extraterrestrial

life? I think it highly likely there is some,

very unlikely we will encounter evidence of it.



But you never can tell. The Judeo-Christians

you admire so much gave hostages to fortune

on every conceivable physical question over

a period of 1,500 years and have had to

back down on every one.



A record of 15 centuries of never being right.

Now, what are the odds of that?

That's a tad too cryptic for me to follow.

Just summarizing "Warfare between Science

and Theology" by Andrew D. White. Like

Strauss, somebody most people never heard

of, but should have.

That doesn't actually clear things up much.

What Harry (the OTHER Harry) means is that concrete, verifiable predictions of specific events have been made by Judeo-Christians (as in: "the world will end at midnight") on many occasions and have been proven false, thereby making them look like doofuses. Your closing comments, which appear to predict both the absence of evolution here on earth and the absence of extra-terrestrial life fall into this same category.



For my own part (now I'm referring to THIS Harry, and not THAT Harry), I would simply observe that the lack of fossils showing life on this planet for the first 600 million years of its existence appears, from this article, to be based more on geological phenomena (i.e. plate tectonics and a possible collision with a Mars-sized body) than an actual lack of life. In this case, absence of evidence is truly not evidence of absence. Also, you ignore the subsequent, relatively well-documented 3.5 billion years of evolutionary data in your quipsterish conclusion.

Ah, I see. So the party of the peppered moth is wroth about Bishop Usher.

Oooh, good one. Now, for your homework assignment, comment on the numerous other examples of evolution that are still standing the test of time and critical review (hint: horses, whales, cichlids, primates, birds, etc. etc.). Please remember, in a discipline that DEPENDS on its practitioners to analyze, criticize, and if possible disprove the conclusions of others, (a process called, coincidentally enough, the "scientific method") occasionally you are going to get an item or two that doesn't hold up to the test. I can't actually recall the details of the Great Peppered Moth Scandal, but I will concede you that point FOR FREE and IN PERPETUITY (in other words, I will assume that you are correct on that point and never, never, never try and use those spicy little moths as an example of evolution. Mmmmm...pepper). You are similarly now in possession of a "get out of jail free" card in regard to Piltdown Man and Bigfoot. Now go and deal with the main body of evidence, instead of some carefully selected boo boo(s). The great body of evidence still supports (i.e. organizes most logically around) some version of the theory of evolution, especially if you understand genetics.



OK. Responded to the first part of your riposte: check. Now, as for the second, please tell me what is it about James Ussher (1581-1656), Archbishop of Armagh, Primate of All Ireland, and Vice-Chancellor of Trinity College in Dublin that I am supposed to be wroth about, other than the fact that he dated Creation to Sunday, 23 October, 4004 B.C.? (Which does make me wax sore wroth, to be sure, but I just don't see how that fits here).

Weren't the secularists wrong about Malthus, Marx, and Freud?



BTW, wasn't Andrew White responsible for the myth that Medieval thinkers thought the Earth is flat? (Or was that someone else?)

When I prescribe an antibiotic, and in several days my patient relapses with a now-resistant organism that laughs at a drug that was looking effective before, can I assume monumentally bad luck?

AUTHOR: Gideon
EMAIL: gideon7@pobox.com
IP:
URL:
DATE: 01/10/2003 05:39:00 AM
AUTHOR: Gideon
EMAIL: gideon7@pobox.com
DATE: 1/10/2003 05:39:00 AM

You guys have to get out more!!

Harry implies that 'science' has been right on absolutely every physical question over the past 15 centuries.



That kind of like giving hostage to modernity.

I don't think it's fair to science to call Rachel Carson a scientist.

White and flat-earthers. No, White pointed

out that by about 500 AD, the church had

somewhat grudgingly accepted that the

earth is a sphere. (Hard to reconcile with

Scripture.)



It is true, of course, that every first hypothesis

about how the world works was wrong. The

difference between science and religion is that,

after investigation, science adjusts its

theories. Religion is stuck with its first drafts.



The peppered moth scandal consisted of the

fact that a popular book on the subject used

photographs of dead moths, without labeling

them as Disney-style "Vanishing Prairie"

re-enactments. The example of Biston betularia

remains valid.



A few days ago, I advised Orrin to read up on

Neopilina. An interesting example of a

darwinist hypothesis.



Based on radiation of certain types of

apparently related fossils, it was hypothesized

that an ancestral form, never yet found in

the fossil record, would have had such and

such characteristics.



Later, deepsea dredgers came up with a

living animal, Neopilina, that answered in

every detail the hypothesis.



What are the odds of that?

Orrin, Once again I think I'm not misunderstanding what you're unsaying.

AUTHOR: Gideon
EMAIL: alank@pobox.com
IP:
URL:
DATE: 01/10/2003 04:43:00 PM
AUTHOR: Gideon
EMAIL: alank@pobox.com
DATE: 1/10/2003 04:43:00 PM

Harry:



The odds of something not evolving in any significant way in 400 million years would seem to be pretty low, that is if things evolve.

Gideon:



90% of geniuses are treated as crackpots; but 99% of people treated as crackpots actually are.



Our models for how evolution works have some holes, but no other theory is very plausible in light of the evidence.

mike:



That to me is the crux of the matter. Evolution doesn't hold up but it's the dominant theory so we have to go with it. That seems inadequate as science. I believe, as Gideon suggested below, that we're on the verge of one of those breakthroughs when we realize that Darwinism is nonsense and are left wondering how we ever bought it in the first place. That's not to say there isn't some nice tidy secular naturalist theory that will replace it, just that it will be replaced.

Aargh.



But evolution DOES hold up. If it didn't, it wouldn't be the dominant theory, because scientists would have developed another theory that better fit the facts. And yes, they might have been swearing at each other and calling each other names in a knock-down drag-out brawl while they settled the matter (nobody ever said the scientific method was pretty or polite), but they would have been arguing over actual facts while they did so.



BTW, "intelligent design" doesn't count as a serious scientific alternative, in part because it is based on a complete ignorance of both genetics and the laws of probability (in particular the concepts of prior and cumulative probability).



We are in the process of refining the understanding of some of the mechanisms and some of the specific examples of evolution, but the overarching theory fits the available data very well (thousands of fossils and geographic strata organizing themselves into a very coherent picture). The only "problems" come from, I am sorry to say, people who just don't understand the relevant scientific principles very well, and/or choose to listen to others who deliberately misrepresent them. I am not trying to turn this into an ad hominem attack, in particular because this might be interpreted as one of the legitimate scientific disagreements to which I referred above, but when one side is using science and the other is ignoring it, that's the only way to describe the situation.

Harry:



The problem is the hubris of science. You believe that because you refer to it as science it is therefore of a higher order than the similar theories, like intelligent design. Your belief system is rational, that of others is irrational. Both evolution and intelligent design fit the facts completely, because both are closed circles and neither is science. Both are forms of religion.

The problem with intellegent design as a theory is why the designer would have gone to so much trouble to keep his work consistant with evolution...



It's fine to complain about a lack of proof of evolution, but intellegent design could fit just about any concievable set of evidence.



Given two theories that fit the evidence, it seems logical to favor the one whose predictions were more specific.

Gideon, you need to spend less time with Kuhn

and more with the likes of Michael Ruse or

Bernard Cohen.



Wegener's hypothesis was rejected because

no one could think of a mechanism. Once

the mechanism was discovered, the hypothesis

was accected overnight.



Darwinism was also accepted overnight. Ruse

is able to say that by 1862, antidarwinism

had disappeared in England, at least among

informed people.



But, unlike Wegener, Darwin proposed both

an hypothesis (evolution) and a mechanism

(natural selection).



All objections to darwinism are theological.

There never has been any naturalistic

alternative hypothesis. There is no -- none,

nada, not any -- nondarwinian biological

research.

mike:



The point being that life on Earth is inconsistent with evolution. Evolution created Man and then stopped functioning.

"The point being that life on Earth is inconsistent with evolution. Evolution created Man and then stopped functioning."



According to whom? I'm not at all sure what you're trying to say here.

Why hasn't anything involved in written history?

That was pretty incoherent, but I suppose you

are trying to say that evolutionary change

in the human line has stopped.



Too soon to tell. If you accept that Homo

sapiens sapiens appears in the fossil record

around 100,000-140,000 years ago, then

there has been some change since, though

less than specific.



The obvious example are the flattened faces and

changed subcutaneous fat distribution of

Mongols. The natural selective value of this

change, in extremely cold climates, is evident.



But to get speciation, you need some kind of

isolating mechanism. Humans have devised

all kinds of de-isolating mechanisms, so it may

be that evolution for the last hominid has, indeed,

ended.

Harry;



Anything--why hasn't anything evolved in the time humans have been observing and writing about the natural world?

Humans brought bananas to Hawaii a kiloyear ago. Since then, a species of moth has appeared in Hawaii and nowhere else that only lives on bananas. It apparently evolved in the last kiloyear.

"Why hasn't anything evolved in the time humans have been observing ... the natural world?"



Besides antibiotic resistant bacteria, you mean? Because the time scale is almost unimaginably huge. Assume a Wayback Machine which allowed you to observe just one second of each of the 3.5 billion years for which we have geological evidence of life. It would take over 972,000 YEARS to see the resulting "movie." Generously speaking, it is only over the last four hundred years that humans have even begun to master rational inquiry. Given the time span over which evolution operates, finding an actual case of evolution, as in a case of speciation, since the 1600s is impossible.



But that isn't to say analogues don't exist. Think of a market economy. It clearly is extremely complex, and just as clearly is not an example of intelligent design--compare the results to Communism, which purported to be "intelligent design." And market economies evolve just as the theory of evolution would predict for the natural world.



Think also of languages. They evolve, and clearly are not the result of intelligent design, no matter what the French language nannies think.



Evolution's mechanisms explain more than just the natural world, and are amenable to rational inquiry. Intelligent design is untestable, and completely fails to explain the existence of extremely complex phenomena such as a market economy or language.



Jeff Guinn

Actually, Orrin's assertion that evolution has

not been observed in action is not accurate.



On the Big Island of Hawaii, speciation (not

just variation short of speciation) has been

observed among picture-wing fruit flies who

have been isolated (in kipukas, which are

sections of forest cut off by broad lava flows)

in as little as 20 years.



And in plants, you can drive evolution in the

greenhouse, through exploitation of

polyploidy.



Speciation has also been observed within

recent years among African cichlids.

Jeff:



Your examples are apt. Language and market economies are obviously the creations of intelligent beings.

Harry/Joseph:



That's mere breeding. In what way did they evolve, which is to say change in some fundamental way from the species they began as?



Laplanders and Polynesians aren't truly different just because one eats reindeeer and the other eats bananas.

OJ:



A market economy is an example of an evolving, impenetrably complex system that came about without any overarching intelligent DESIGN. That is a far different thing than a system populated with a multitude of intelligent actors pursuing their own best interests.



Similarly, languages (save, perhaps, Esperanto) are the products of evolution, not design, as even a cursory examination of English's history would show.



Correction: In my previous post I gooned up the units--it should be 972,000 hours, which works out be roughly 111 years.

Gideon, you write

"P.S.

Oh and 'religion' is anything but static. Ask Martin Luther, the Calvinists, the 30 Years War, the Hugenot purges, the 2nd Vatican Council, ... "



Yes, religion does change, which is a very strange thing for something that is based on the immutable foundation of objective Truth as revealed by God to do.

OJ: your statement that the examples of evolution provided are "mere breeding" is incorrect. To deal specifically with the example of African cichlids (cited by the other Harry), isolated populations of cichlids in the Rift Lakes have evolved from common ancestors into new, separate species. Proof that this is so comes from the fact that they can no longer produce a viable, genetically stable population when interbred back to each other.



I also agree with (the other) Harry in his comments regarding human evolution. Considering that we all arose from essentially identical stock, which dispersed itself over the globe relatively recently, the differences in characteristics that arose among populations residing in different parts of the globe in response to local environmental conditions are clear evidence of evolution in progress. It had not yet progressed to the point of separating humanity into separate species, but was clearly headed in that direction. The advent of technology, however, has mitigated the impact of environmental stresses and mostly eliminated the factor of population isolation that is an important part of speciation. Thus, for humanity, macroevolution may have come to an end, although microevolution may still occur.

Harry:



We can do the same thing with dogs, breed them until they can't mate, but they're still dogs. When the chiclet becomes something else, call me.

Jeff:



I'm not certain you're even making sense, though maybe it's me that's misunderstanding. Are you saying that market economies and languages would have arisen even in the absence of intelligent beings? that they are the product of a natural force like gravity, time, or evolution?

Orrin, I have suggested -- rather mildly for me

-- that you need to go study evolution. Your

dog example is a pretty serious reason why.



You cannot breed a chihuahua with a great

Dane, that's true. But you can breed a

chihuahua with a small terrier, and a great

Dane with a Labrador;and so on, and within a few

generations, you will get the yellow dog that

Democrats would vote for.



Size is not a completely isolating mechanism

among domestic dogs.



But, in my example of the picture-wing fruit

flies, the isolating mechanism is a genetically-

controlled mating behavior. The flies of

the two daughter species are the same size

as the parent species and even look alike.



However, they can no longer interbreed because

of a drastic difference in mating behavior.



The daughter populations are now true species.



You want some dramatic morphological change

to have been observed within the past 150

years. It doesn't happen that quickly, except,

of course, in plants, where it can occur in a

single year. There are numerous examples.

Several are named for my friend Bob Hobdy,

who discovers examples all the time.



But you have to know where to look.

Harry:



It's still a fruit fly--big whoop? And that's your best example of a force so massive that it has shaped all life in the Universe?



Meanwhile, isn't it odd how much Earth itself resembles a breeding experiment, an isolated environment where you let the survival pressures play out to produce what you want or just to see what happens?.

But it's a new species of fruit fly. That's

what darwinism set out to explain.



QED.



You are the one who inserted the

preposterous requirement that the

effects had to be observable within the

past 150 years or so.



Give me more time, and I can give you

plenty big whoops. The hypothesis calls

for time. Lots and lots of time.

OJ:



RE: Languages & market economies as analogues of evolution.



My thesis is that the underlying precepts of evolution--variability, inheritance, competition for survival and reproduction--are sufficient to explain natural history without invoking intelligent design.



Unfortunately, the immense time spans over which evolution operates make it practically impossible to provide proof along the lines of "speciation in progress" that you seem to require.



Hence my suggesting analogues to evolution that proceed under the same few precepts evolution does, but with much shorter cycle times.



A market economy is impenetrably complex, and clearly evolves over time. Yet there is no market economy "intelligent designer."



Similarly with languages. If you plot language relationships over time, you will get a tree that looks precisely like the result from plotting relationships among species over time. Clearly, languages speciate--given isolation and time, eventual mutual unintelligibility is certain--and for the same reasons organisms do.



Spoken languages do not have an intelligent designer (think of each language as an organism, and the speakers as sources of variataion and inheritance transmitters). Market economies do not have an intelligent designer (think of companies as the organisms and people as the genetic inheritance transmitters).



Both of these Theory of Evolution analogues produce change and extreme complexity over time just as the ToE would predict. You may choose to believe that an intelligent designer created brains that in turn had the capacity to evolve languages and economies, but, search as you might, you will never find the entity that designed English or the US Economy.



Further, if ToE's precepts are sufficient to explain extremely complex systems such as spoken languages and market economies, then there is at least a very strong likelihood those same precepts explain natural history, which means no intelligent designer is required to explain the existence of humans.



This pushes your intelligent designer back to the point of originating life, a survivable environment and four (or so) simple rules to get the ball rolling.



v/r

Jeff Guinn

Jeff:



But the market economy does not arise naturally. It required theoreticians (Smith, Ricardo, etc.), politicians, voters, etc. to put it in place. Moreover, it's terribly fragile. All it takes is a change of government or a crisis or what have you and it is tampered with. And it is completely dependent on intelligent beings every step of the way--that, after all, is who makes the choices that define its freedom. I'm willing to accept it as an analog for Evolution, but it seems to demonstrate the exact opposite of what you propose.

Harry:



The concept of the Second Coming requires time too. I don't begrudge you your faith; I'm merely amused by how closely it parallels that which you reject.