Age of the Earth and Evolution

[buffalo]

“Random chance” is usually used as a dismissive term and it ignores non-random selection. It would be like saying a game of poker is strictly random chance, ignoring that there are non-random elements, in the case of poker the players, in the case of evolution natural selection, non-random mating, etc.

Now we know there are many cell directed mutations.

 

[buffalo]

What you’d call “microevolution” is the best evidence for macroevolution, since macro is just many micros. Why wouldn’t many small changes add up to larger change?

It has not been observed. What we see is the organism adapting and hovering about a mean. Random mutations are most often breaking things. Natural selection is a conservative process not a creative one. Most of what we learned, but still in biology textbooks has been overturned.

 

[Dan123]

It has not been observed. What we see is the organism adapting and hovering about a mean. Random mutations are most often breaking things. Natural selection is a conservative process not a creative one. Most of what we learned, but still in biology textbooks has been overturned.

We’ve never observed Pluto orbit the sun either, some things take a very long time to observe, and since what we’re calling macroevolution takes place over very long periods, as in millions of years, it’s not exactly reasonable to expect direct observation, we have to rely on the evidence.

Without strong selection pressures of course organisms stabilize around a mean. When those selection pressures change such as due to a shift in climate or geography or what have you, things will change “faster”, again in geologic timescales.

Natural selection prefers suitability, for a creature already suitable for its environment it would be conservative, for a creature not well suited it would select for mutations that provide some/any benefit.

That you find someone offering an opinion that goes against these ideas does not mean it’s overturned. Not until they collect actual evidence or provide a better working model.

 

[buffalo]

Natural selection prefers suitability, for a creature already suitable for its environment it would be conservative, for a creature not well suited it would select for mutations that provide some/any benefit.

That you find someone offering an opinion that goes against these ideas does not mean it’s overturned. Not until they collect actual evidence or provide a better working model.

Royal Society Meeting - Modern Synthesis is Broken​

Read a report on the Royal Society Meeting

“The Modern Synthesis, while undoubtedly productive for a time, is a misconception of reality that has reached the limits of its explanatory power. The problems are fundamental. No amount of cosmetic surgery is going correct them.”

“To the contrary, Darwinian competition causes not the evolution of species but the destruction of species. It is collaboration in its various forms that causes biological evolution. Hence I’m sur prised by calls for extending the neo-Darwinian Evolutionary Synthesis. You can’t extend something that is broken. Surely what is needed now, after 65 years, is using the empirical evidence to develop a new paradigm for biological evolution.”

"If you want the definition of the Modern Synthesis, take a look at how Neil deGrasse Tyson explains evolution in the 2014 remake of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos series. Tyson, an astrophysicist, is unaware that he is misinformed, as are most in science, academia, government, literature, the arts, and the public by this outmoded theory of evolution."

“Shuker tried to interrupt but Noble held his ground:
‘No, YOU need to listen. I used to think exactly like you. I embraced the reductionist mindset for years. When I got out of school I was a card-carrying reductionist. Reductionism is powerful and it’s useful. I am not dissing it. Many times we need it. But it is not the whole story.’ Noble described how bacterial regulatory
networks rebuilt those genes in four days by hyper-mutating, actively searching for a solution that would give them tails and enable them to Nind food. Natural selection did not achieve that. Natural genetic engineering did.’”

“It’s appropriate that this meeting is being held at the Royal Society, whose motto, we were reminded yesterday, is “Nullius in verba”: Accept nothing on authority."

“Not one whit of empirical evidence shows that new species arise from the neo-Darwinian mechanism. To the contrary, Darwinian competition causes not the evolution of species but the destruction of species.”

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www.envevo.org

 

[tafan2]

The examples, would all be putting faith in science. And science is about things they can prove, and therefore, opposed to faith.

I hope you do not mean this. Reason and faith cannot be in conflict. That is Catholic doctrine. To say otherwise is heretical.

 

[steve-b]

steve-b:

The examples, would all be putting faith in science. And science is about things they can prove, and therefore, opposed to faith.

I hope you do not mean this. Reason and faith cannot be in conflict. That is Catholic doctrine. To say otherwise is heretical.

I never said faith and reason conflict. Science doesn’t promote faith.

 

[Dan123]

Tyson, an astrophysicist, is unaware that he is misinformed, as are most in science, academia, government, literature, the arts, and the public by this outmoded theory of evolution."

So their interpretation is not accepted by the wider scientific and academic community. That’s what I’m pointing out you’re trying to appeal to authority and claim that this group somehow is authoritative on what evolution is or isn’t. They characterize it as being misinformed but perhaps their ideas just aren’t compelling to the wider community. You’re taking their line of thinking and because it agrees more closely with yours declaring it correct, and then asserting everyone, even experts, who disagree are in fact wrong or denying truth. That’s cognitive bias.

Now included in your quote is exactly what they need to do. "Surely what is needed now, after 65 years, is using the empirical evidence to develop a new paradigm for biological evolution.” Have they done that? Have they presented a new paradigm for biological evolution in peer reviewed papers? in lectures? a TEDx talk maybe? It sounds like they’re just saying “someone should do this.” Perhaps they could publish or just share their work to date.

 

[buffalo]

Now included in your quote is exactly what they need to do. "Surely what is needed now, after 65 years, is using the empirical evidence to develop a new paradigm for biological evolution.” Have they done that? Have they presented a new paradigm for biological evolution in peer reviewed papers? in lectures? a TEDx talk maybe? It sounds like they’re just saying “someone should do this.” Perhaps they could publish or just share their work to date.

This is an ongoing process. Now they are working on self organization - the EES. This has happened because of the aggregate findings over the last few decades. I add:

Sweeping gene survey reveals new facets of evolution​

Sweeping gene survey reveals new facets of evolution

It is textbook biology, for example, that species with large, far-flung populations—think ants, rats, humans—will become more genetically diverse over time.
But is that true?
“The answer is no,” said Stoeckle, lead author of the study, published in the journal Human Evolution .
For the planet’s 7.6 billion people, 500 million house sparrows, or 100,000 sandpipers, genetic diversity “is about the same,” he told AFP.
The study’s most startling result, perhaps, is that nine out of 10 species on Earth today, including humans, came into being 100,000 to 200,000 years ago.
“This conclusion is very surprising, and I fought against it as hard as I could,” Thaler told AFP.

“another unexpected finding from the study—species have very clear genetic boundaries, and there’s nothing much in between."

“If individuals are stars, then species are galaxies,” said Thaler. “They are compact clusters in the vastness of empty sequence space.”

The absence of “in-between” species is something that also perplexed Darwin, he said."

Read more at: Sweeping gene survey reveals new facets of evolution

 

[JM3]

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www.aish.com

 

[JM3]

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www.aish.com

 

[Dan123]

This is an ongoing process. Now they are working on self organization - the EES. This has happened because of the aggregate findings over the last few decades. I add:

Neat. Yes I agree lots of research is ongoing to study the nuances of the processes of evolution. None of this challenges the core concept that species change and adapt over time. The world has been geologically pretty stable for awhile now, I don’t think it’s some crazy earth shattering idea that you’d have specialization in that type of environment.

Perhaps I shall add:

Dr. Fazale Rana of the apologetics group Reasons to Believe told The Christian Post that he feels “ambivalent” about the study when it comes to the debate over origins.

“I am ambivalent about this study’s usefulness for those of us engaged in scientific apologetics. This study has yielded unexpected results, but I personally wouldn’t rely too heavily on this study to challenge the evolutionary paradigm,” said Rana.

“There are much more powerful evidences for intelligent design available to Christians and many more significant problems faced by the evolutionary paradigm than the minor inconveniences caused by this study.”

Dr. Rana doesn’t feel this is a particular good case against evolution, as it’s still built on evolution itself.

 

[buffalo]

Dr. Rana doesn’t feel this is a particular good case against evolution, as it’s still built on evolution itself.

Right, the Royal Society is not about to proclaim “we have been wrong all along”. This is happening over time with new discoveries. remember, they will not let the “divine foot in the door” so they are now gathering impetus to get more funding to study this new natural paradigm.

Here is a roundtable discussion at the Royal Society Meeting in 2016

19 minutes - no empirical evidence and leads to destruction. - And then Jablonka says “without God, we are excluding God”.
Here is a roundtable discussion at the Royal Society Meeting in 2016

 

[Inquiry]

buffalo:

This is an ongoing process. Now they are working on self organization - the EES. This has happened because of the aggregate findings over the last few decades. I add:

Neat. Yes I agree lots of research is ongoing to study the nuances of the processes of evolution. None of this challenges the core concept that species change and adapt over time. The world has been geologically pretty stable for awhile now, I don’t think it’s some crazy earth shattering idea that you’d have specialization in that type of environment.

No, of course it doesn’t. I am largely staying out of this argument, but I want to point out something most people miss. The idea of descent with modification is two generations older than Charles Darwin (it goes back to his grandfather actually). Lamarkian evolution also had the idea of species changing and adapting over time and it was a fundamentally different idea than anything we have now. The kind of rethinking that @buffalo is talking about may be a significant overhaul, but it will probably still include some kind of adaptation over time. We could throw out everything to do with C Darwin or anyone who came after him and we’d still probably have that.

 

[BigRon]

I believe God created the world in six days around 600 years ago and don’t care at all about science. Evolution is false and if Jesus can be present in every Eucharist around the world at the same time (which is true) then why can’t He create the world in six days?

 

[Dan123]

The kind of rethinking that @buffalo is talking about may be a significant overhaul, but it will probably still include some kind of adaptation over time. We could throw out everything to do with C Darwin or anyone who came after him and we’d still probably have that.

Indeed. Paradigm shifts still have to explain the existing ideas. Relativity still has to explain newton’s laws of motions even if it also explains phenomenon that Newton’s laws couldn’t. Likewise any new understanding of evolution still has to explain the huge amount of evidence for inherited adaptation.

remember, they will not let the “divine foot in the door”

They will if you demonstrate it to exist. You’d win a Nobel if you could show it to exist. Science doesn’t attempt to explain things by appealing to the supernatural as it doesn’t actually explain anything it just shifts the explanation back a step. It’s the same reason you won’t find physicists explaining that God makes planes fly. It doesn’t actually tell you how a plane flies or how you could make one fly better or what have you, even if ultimately you believe the planes wouldn’t fly if it were against God’s will.

 

[buffalo]

Listen to the dialogue at 35:30 minutes.


Late for tea - hilarious…

 

[buffalo]

They will if you demonstrate it to exist. You’d win a Nobel if you could show it to exist. Science doesn’t attempt to explain things by appealing to the supernatural as it doesn’t actually explain anything it just shifts the explanation back a step.

However, now that ID is on the table they will ask for more research dollars to prove a natural solution.

There is evidence for inherited adaptation, aka micro-evolution… No one argues this.

 

[Tis_Bearself]

I’ll take a stab at your first question. Your second question does not apply to me, I’m not a Young Earther.

For those Catholics who believe in evolution as laid out by Darwin and others (and I will just say that I do not believe in macro-evolution, and it seems the science is more and more calling it into question) but of course accrediting it to God, how is this a logical position to take as a Catholic, considering if it were the case, that it would mean that before the creation of Adam and Eve there was millions of years of chaotic life, and death and evolution, all which contradict the Biblical account of a world created perfect by God and into which death only entered after Adam and Eve’s sin?

1. As someone else said, the “death” that entered after Adam and Eve’s sin was human death. It does not necessarily refer to plant and animal death.
2. Regardless of whether (1) referred to plant and animal death or not, the “chaotic” millions of years could have been part of God’s creation process. God is outside time, and doesn’t define his days as a 24-hour earth rotation. If one takes the Scripture account literally, he didn’t even create the Earth until day 3, so for at least 2 of God’s “days” there was nothing to define a “day” as we humans define it.
3. The Biblical account also does not rule out the possibility of Adam and Eve’s fall as having retroactive effects as well as proactive ones, especially since God is not bound by time. We humans are bound by time (we can’t go backwards), we think in a linear fashion, and we impose other limits (such as thinking of a day as being 24 hours) that simply don’t apply to God.

Secondly, for those in this category who accept human evolution from primates, do you really believe that a sub-human primate without a soul gave birth to Adam? And Eve?

Could well have happened, if God wanted to run his creation process that way. God put the soul into Adam and Eve. They didn’t have to inherit it from their bio parents, if indeed they had bio parents on Earth, which is something we don’t know. For all we know God created Adam and Eve through some means other than evolution and plopped them down into an Earth that also contained humanoid creatures formed through evolution.

That Adam was born into a world already filled with death and savagery? How do you reconcile all this with the Bible?

See above comments, I discussed that already.

(Continued next post due to character limits)

 

[Tis_Bearself]

(Continued from last post)

Also, it’s important to remember that the Scriptural creation story is a divinely inspired, poetic expression of creation in a way humans can understand. It’s likely impossible to capture every dimension of what God did, and the full effects of the Fall of Man, in printed words on a page. The Creation story does a great job of conveying the main and most important parts of what God did, and the Catechism elucidates those points. With respect to things like technical mechanics of creation, and questions like how long did it take measured in 24-hour earth days (if that’s even possible given that God is outside time and could have made a million years go by like a millisecond), there’s a whole lot of “we just don’t know” involved. Oh, we can scientifically posit that the earth is however many years old in Earth years, but again in the time before man we have no way of knowing how fast or slow God might have actually made that time go by.

We are free to take the Bible literally or not. I could take it literally, but then I would need to also admit I have no way of knowing exactly what process God used to “create” or exactly how long a “day” is in God’s view as I discussed above, so taking it literally only gets me so far.

In the end I don’t really worry about this stuff, I’m fine with what the Catechism says I need to believe and I look forward to God perhaps explaining the rest of it to me if it be his will at some time in the future, probably after death.

 

[Thorolfr]

For all we know God created Adam and Eve through some means other than evolution and plopped them down into an Earth that also contained humanoid creatures formed through evolution.

The problem with this is that our DNA shows how we’re related to other primates with whom we share a common ancestor in the distant past.

What you proposed would only work if it was supposed that God had created Adam and Eve and gave them DNA that only made it look like they were genetically related to other primates. But that seems kind of deceptive.