John Hayes wrote:
Evolution is not science, it's a worldview that fits a set of
religious beliefs and as such is really only a religious
precursor. Certainly not science.
And what of the fact that I can place selective pressure on
bacteria in a culture and get them to evolve a new trait, like, oh
say, antibotic resistance? And then I can publish how I did it, and
then Bob, who is 1000 miles away, can replicate it exactly, without
us ever having met or spoken?
Adaptation represents a loss of genetic information, not a gain.
Evolution represents a systemic gain of information, since we move
from lower completity to higher complexity over great spans of time.
From virus to single cells to multi-cells, etc.
We can breed out sensitivity to a particular antibiotic, but we
aren't creating a new organism. We still have the same kind of
bacterium,
although it's adaptation may look like a different 'color'.
We've been breeding dogs for centuries and selecting for various
traits. We still only have dogs.
Best regards... Tim
So it seems you deny that evolution is capable of creating new
species, and therefore there's no need to believe that we humans are
descended from mere monkeys, would that be about right?
This is then the brunt of your argument:
Look, an unobserved series of historical events happened. No
transitional species have ever been found (notwithstanding several
publications' attempts to present them from time to time) that
has stood up to scrutiny. Remember whole hominid skulls fashioned
from one pig's tooth? No? That's because it isn't of general
interest to the evolutionary *scientists*, and thus we still find
Piltdown stories being published in children's 'science' textbooks.
Hm. Parts of an Australopithecene africanus were found in the back
garden of a place I lived at once, at Sterkfontein, though that was
before I arrived there. I've visited the digs in the caves there
several times, where many remains of these little pre-men were found
(and are still being found), where they'd been dragged by the
dinofelis false sabre-tooth tigers that preyed on them (until we
learnt to use fire, more than a million years ago, and now it's
dinefelis that's extinct, not us).
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/1544717.stm
BBC News | SCI/TECH | Major hominid find in southern Africa
(Poor explanation of how they got there though.)
Many hominid species have been found and identified. They're not
human, and they're not monkeys either. Are you saying that people
like the Leakeys and their findings at Olduvai and elsewhere are
frauds like Piltdown? You'd be facing a mountain of science to debunk
if you want to claim that. Have you ever argued about it with a real
palaeontologist? Try telling it to someone like C.K Brain (Bob) for
instance - there's something about him here ("The Hunters or the
Hunted?" is excellent):
http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/s/shakespeare-chatwin.html?oref=login
We've been breeding dogs for centuries and selecting for various
traits. We still only have dogs.
As far as human development is concerned, we're talking of at least
six million years, not a few hundred.
Or was the world only created 4,000 years ago?
So what's your alternative "theory" of our genesis, Tim? Intelligent
Design or something?
Best wishes
Keith
Intelligently Designed Scam
First, Galileo challenged the geocentric teachings of the Catholic
Church, then Newton figured out classical physics, then Darwin
noodled through evolution. As science has pushed back the borders of
the unexplainable, it has also reduced the operating parameters of
the biblical conception of God. Intelligent design is a desperate
attempt of conservatives to hold the line on science once again.
Michael Shermer explains the ID movement's strategy-and its failed
logic.
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-shermer30mar30,0,
6816062.story?coll=la-news-comment-opinions
March 30, 2005 E-mail story Print Most E-Mailed
COMMENTARY
Not Intelligent, and Surely Not Science
By Michael Shermer, Michael Shermer is founding publisher of Skeptic
magazine and the author of "Science Friction: Where the Known Meets
the Unknown" (Times Books, 2005).
According to intelligent-design theory, life is too complex to have
evolved by natural forces. Therefore life must have been created by a
supernatural force - an intelligent designer. ID theorists argue that
because such design can be inferred through the methods of science,
IDT should be given equal time alongside evolutionary theory in
public school science classes. Nine states have recently proposed
legislation that would require just that.
The evolution-creation legal battle began in 1925 with the Scopes
"monkey" trial, over the banning of the teaching of evolution in
Tennessee. The controversy caused textbook publishers and state
boards of education to cease teaching evolution - until the Soviets
launched Sputnik in the late 1950s and the United States realized it
was falling behind in the sciences.
Creationists responded by passing equal-time laws that required the
teaching of both creationism and evolution, a strategy defeated in a
1968 Arkansas trial that found that such a law attempted to
"establish religion" in a public school and was therefore
unconstitutional. This led to new equal-time laws covering "creation
science" and "evolution science." In 1987, the Supreme Court, by a
vote of 7 to 2, said teaching creation science "impermissibly
endorses religion by advancing the religious belief that a
supernatural being created humankind."
This history explains why proponents of intelligent design are
careful to never specify the true, religious nature of their theory
and to insist that what they are doing is science. For example,
leading ID scholar William Dembski wrote in his 2003 book, "The
Design Revolution": "Intelligent design is a strictly scientific
theory devoid of religious commitments. Whereas the creator
underlying scientific creationism conforms to a strict, literalist
interpretation of the Bible, the designer underlying intelligent
design need not even be a deity."
But let's be clear: Intelligent-design theory is not science. The
proof is in the pudding. Scientists, including scientists who are
Christians, do not use IDT when they do science because it offers
nothing in the way of testable hypotheses. Lee Anne Chaney, professor
of biology at Whitworth College, a Christian institution, wrote in a
1995 article: "As a Christian, part of my belief system is that God
is ultimately responsible. But as a biologist, I need to look at the
evidenceÉ. I don't think intelligent design is very helpful because
it does not provide things that are refutable - there is no way in
the world you can show it's not true. Drawing inferences about the
deity does not seem to me to be the function of science because it's
very subjective."
Intelligent-design theory lacks, for instance, a hypothesis of the
mechanics of the design, something akin to natural selection in
evolution. Natural selection can and has been observed and tested,
and Charles Darwin's theory has been refined.
Intelligent-design theorists admit the difference, at least among
themselves. Here is ID proponent Paul Nelson, writing last year in
Touchstone, a Christian magazine: "Right now, we've got a bag of
powerful intuitions, and a handful of notions such as 'irreducible
complexity' and 'specified complexity' - but, as yet, no general
theory of biological design."
If intelligent design is not science, then what is it? One of its
originators, Phillip Johnson, a law professor at UC Berkeley, wrote
in a 1999 article: "The objective is to convince people that
Darwinism is inherently atheistic, thus shifting the debate from
creationism versus evolution to the existence of God versus the
nonexistence of God. From there people are introduced to 'the truth'
of the Bible and then 'the question of sin' and finally 'introduced
to Jesus.' "
On March 9, I debated ID scholar Stephen Meyer at Westminster College
in Fulton, Mo. After two hours of debate over the scientific merits
(or lack thereof) of IDT, Meyer admitted in the question-and-answer
period that he thinks that the intelligent designer is the
Judeo-Christian God and that suboptimal designs and deadly diseases
are not examples of an unintelligent or malevolent designer, but
instead were caused by "the fall" in the Garden of Eden. Dembski has
also told me privately that he believes the intelligent designer is
the God of Abraham.
The term "intelligent design" is nothing more than a linguistic
place-filler for something unexplained by science. It is saying, in
essence, that if there is no natural explanation for X, then the
explanation must be a supernatural one. Proponents of intelligent
design cannot imagine, for example, how the bacterial flagellum (such
as the little tail that propels sperm cells) could have evolved;
ergo, they conclude, it was intelligently designed. But saying
"intelligent design did it" does not explain anything. Scientists
would want to know how and when ID did it, and what forces ID used.
In fact, invoking intelligent design as God's place-filler can only
result in the naturalization of the deity. God becomes just another
part of the natural world, and thereby loses the transcendent mystery
and divinity that define the boundary between religion and science.
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