Keith Addison wrote:
You said:
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.
I think you're the one who's religious about it. You say a lot of things
that you expect us to accept sight-unseen, but there some rather visible
holes in it. I've seen quite a few purportedly scientific articles
trying to debunk evolution, they raise a chickle - when you approach
them as an editor would, asking questions, you'd soon have to spike them
as unpublishable. Quite a lot of what you say seems rather similar.
Please don't put words in my mouth. One of the
most interesting things about challenging dogma is trying
to deal with the emotional reaction that follows. Most
of the rhetoric dealing with evolution expects the great
'unwashed' masses to accept it's tenants sight unseen.
They make their appeals to the seasoned and baptised
practitioners of science.
By the way, attack of the person and guilt by association are
two arguing techniques that attempt to disarm the opponent
without dealing with the arguments.
A few snippets...
What we're looking at is interpretation of objects through the lens
of personal beliefs.
But you're not?
Of course I do; so does everyone... even those that retreat
to call their views 'scientific' when they are actually more
a religious view. All we must do is repeat the word
'science' enough... a different kind of mantra I suppose.
[snip]
How was this date determined?
That's easily ascertained, but I think you'd reject it anyway and
whatever, just as you've been doing, and also without offering any basis
for your own presuppositions in the doing. As with this, for instance:
Question: When someone wants to date an object, why must they
tell the selected lab a date range you expect the answer to fall
within?
Answer: Because the lab crafts its tests and their results to the
expected age of the sample. If we don't do that, we won't get
repeat business.
The primary presupposition(s) of the tests are incorrect. For
example, one primary presupposition of Carbon-14 dating is that
the ratio of c-12 to c-14 has remained unchange for millenia.
There is no way to actually prove this presupposition. Yet c-14
dating is used to 'prove' the age of materials far beyond its
ability to do so. Trying to date anything older than 5-10,000
years with c-14 is completely unreliable. The tests have
only been calibrated with artifacts dated by recorded
history, prior to that we must rely on extrapolation which
depends on the truth of our presuppositions.
Question: Why do none of the dating methods used to date rock
agree within 1 to 2 orders of magnitude (if they can be
applied at all to your specific sample)? If I dated you, and
told you that by three methods of measurement you are 7.5,
75 or 750 years old, how much credibility would you give my
'scientific' methods? My first question about your 'results'
would be "why not 7.5 days, or 7500 centuries?"
Answer: Because there are no reliable methods to date rock that
cooberate one another. For example, one test gauges the age
by determining the decay of radioactive isotopes. However,
if your sample has no isotopes, then this test cannot be used
to cooberate any other test. The primary presupposition of the
test is that the sample did not contain any decayed isotope
when it formed. Unprovable assertion. The age of your sample
could be anything from 0 to millenia unless you know for certain
the original ratio.
Are these presuppositions presented to the public? Not a chance.
Evolution is a fact, don't you know.
What happened to your pig's tooth skull and the Piltdown scam? You kind
of evaded the question, didn't you?
What was the question I supposedly 'evaded'? Was it:
"Are you saying that people like the Leakeys and their findings at
Olduvai and elsewhere are frauds like Piltdown?"
I can't answer for the motivations of other people. Is it possible
for me to become an acceptably educated expert like the Leakeys without
adopting the current evolutionary dogma? If one argues against it, one
is immediately branded as 'religious' at best, or at worst 'an unstudied
idiot'. If I try to truthfully answer the questions, I fail the tests.
Doesn't it bother you that a relatively few (but growing number) in the
scientific establishment will address the intellectual dishonesty of
this (evolutionary hypothesis) question? What about avoiding
the issue of interdisciplinary circular reasoning? Any
comments on that?
This:
As far as human development is concerned, we're talking of at least
six million years, not a few hundred.
Again, how did you arrive at this dating? If we select to breed a
hairless dog, can we take only that stock and select for a long
hair? No, we must actually re-introduce other genes to allow us
to reselect on the information that was eliminated by our
previous breeding.
Probably not so - I think the gene will be repressed, not removed. Do
you know much about domestic animals that have gone feral?
So my original comment that the environmental
pressure that creates a new trait actually arguably better represents
de-evolution still stands.
Again, the first part is easily ascertained. As for the second part, for
one thing, your hairless dog example is shorn of the entire context of
evolution and environment, leaving nothing but a kennel and a few mutts
- a bit like the early (Victorian) studies of ape behaviour, confined to
captives in European zoos, and almost entirely wrong as a result. You
think breeding is the same thing? I don't.
I'm only addressing the assertion made by others that they had made
a 'new species' of bacteria by using environmental pressure. Thank
you for making my point. Remove the environmental pressure, and
let our friend's bacteria go 'feral'.
I think you're getting confused by a modernist idea - evolution doesn't
necessarily mean "Progress", or not with a capital P anyway. A common
result is an ever-better adaptation to an ever smaller ecological niche;
increased efficiency notwithstanding, whether this specialisation is
Progress or not depends on how secure the niche might be, and it often
isn't: when conditions change, as they will, these species are often
unable to back out of it and fail. But this outcome is external to the
process of evolution itself, not a relevant argument in the current
context.
So what then of your concern for origins? How can you explain our
existance if there hasn't been "Progress" from the first amino
acids?
Ever-adaptible human generalists with their big brains (which they
hardly use) are perhaps an exception, a sport. (Or an experiment, some
argue, very attractively, Eugene Marais for instance.)
An experiment implies an intelligence, which implies an initial Cause.
The true question then becomes "What is the nature of that
intelligence?"
Anyway, your horizons are too narrow:
To what standard are you making your appeal? Why should this standard
be better than mine?
For example:
A current leading evolutionist, Jeffrey Schwartz, professor of
anthropology at the University of Pittsburgh, has recently
acknowledged that:
. . . it was and still is the case that, with the exception of
Dobzhansky's claim about a new species of fruit fly, the formation of
a new species, by any mechanism, has never been observed.
Jeffrey H. Schwartz, Sudden Origins (New York. John Wiley, 1999), p. 300.
Oh, so Schwartz is not an authority on evolution? No comments?
And of course, we still have a fruit fly, not something else.
Over what, the immense time-span of 150 years? What a surprise! Quite
aside from the fact that a very large number of species, probably the
majority, have not yet been studied, many not even identified, which
doesn't leave us in any position to pontificate about it.
Sure... so why make a statement about evolution being a mechanism of
development? Surely we have no data to pontificate, indeed Schwartz
says we don't.
So, Tim, where do all these different species come from then? And how
have we evolved, or whatever it is you think it is that's brought us
thus far if you don't think we evolved?
It does pose an interesting problem. Some have commented that
"evolution must be true; the alternative is unthinkable!"
Regardless of what the real origin of life is, it can't be
evolution. If it was, there would be a plethora of transitional
forms. Notwithstanding some folks arguing bone fragments into pre-men,
we find no real transitional forms. If there were, folks like Schwartz
et al would point to them as proof.
As we look for solutions to sustainable energy production and
use, incorrect presuppositions may very well prevent us from
finding the answer.
As with life, so what's new? We're rigorous here, we make good progress.
Over the last five years the group as a whole seems to have steered
itself rather unerringly between the Scylla and Charybdis of
unimaginative conformity on the one hand and gullibility on the other -
plenty of initiative, inventiveness, imagination and enterprise (and a
huge pool of knowledge), and there are those here who keep our
collective feet on the ground.
My point is that there is a huge difference between the
science of fuel development, and guesses about origins. The
idea of evolution is not science given how scientists themselves
qualify the definition of science.
Best regards... Tim
Hi Keith:
Please see my comments below.
Keith Addison wrote:
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.
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?
I'm saying that the process put forward by the evolutionary hypothesis
doesn't exist in reality. So anything that uses it as a foundational
presupposition is ultimately in error. In any way that the hypothesis
resonates with reality, it will seem to 'work'. So when you look at
processes that are based in proper genetics your explanations work.
Where you depart from this, your explanations are broken.
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
Thanks for the link.
What we're looking at is interpretation of objects through the lens
of personal beliefs. There are skeletons, no doubt. Of what, we
can only attempt to make 'educated' guesses. However, they really
are only guesses, since we have no true observation point to see
the living thing that used to be carried by the skeleton.
(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
No, what I'm saying is that we explain the objective evidences of
fosselized skeletons through the lens of our presuppositions. For
example, the article claims an age of 3.5 million years. Really?
How was this date determined?
Question: When someone wants to date an object, why must they
tell the selected lab a date range you expect the answer to fall
within?
Question: Why do none of the dating methods used to date rock
agree within 1 to 2 orders of magnitude (if they can be
applied at all to your specific sample)? If I dated you, and
told you that by three methods of measurement you are 7.5,
75 or 750 years old, how much credibility would you give my
'scientific' methods? My first question about your 'results'
would be "why not 7.5 days, or 7500 centuries?"
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.
Again, how did you arrive at this dating? If we select to breed a
hairless dog, can we take only that stock and select for a long
hair? No, we must actually re-introduce other genes to allow us
to reselect on the information that was eliminated by our
previous breeding. So my original comment that the environmental
pressure that creates a new trait actually arguably better represents
de-evolution still stands.
Or was the world only created 4,000 years ago?
So what's your alternative "theory" of our genesis, Tim? Intelligent
Design or something?
One doesn't need an alternative explanation to reject an obviously
flawed one. Yet, many in leadership positions within the 'scientific'
community feel it necessary to 'keep the faith' in evolution.
For example:
A current leading evolutionist, Jeffrey Schwartz, professor of
anthropology at the University of Pittsburgh, has recently
acknowledged that:
. . . it was and still is the case that, with the exception of
Dobzhansky's claim about a new species of fruit fly, the formation of
a new species, by any mechanism, has never been observed.
Jeffrey H. Schwartz, Sudden Origins (New York. John Wiley, 1999), p. 300.
And of course, we still have a fruit fly, not something else.
As we look for solutions to sustainable energy production and
use, incorrect presuppositions may very well prevent us from
finding the answer.
Best regards... Tim
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