EVOLUTION: what about this

[Gottle_of_Geer]

In that case, you are interpreting the story symbolically as Genesis 3 makes no mention if the devil and identifies the serpent clearly as an animal; so you are agreeing that the story as written cannot be literally true, because you don’t believe in talking snakes any more than I do. See Genesis 3:
…

That is typical of Fundamentalist exegesis. Genesis 3 says nothing of:​

• satan
• sin
• the Messiah
• the Fall
• Jesus
• Mary
  **- so to be found in the text they have to be imported into it. This is like interpreting Magna Carta by the Bill of Rights; what did the barons at Runnymede in 1215 know of the Bill of Rights ? No more than the author of Genesis 3 knew of the Book of Revelation; so the latter can’t be used to interpret the former. And in any case, Rev. 12 is not interpreting Gen. 3 - it employs an element found in the narrative of Gen. 3, but that is not the same as an interpretation of Gen.3; it is not interpreting it. **

**“But the Bible’s true Author is God” Very well - but that does not alter matters, not unless God swamps human authorship & human thinking & ideas. There is no reason to suppose this - & plenty of reason to deny it. For this is how no other book is written: all other books are human works, & God’s working is no less needed for all of them to exist than for the Biblical books to do so. **

 

[Gottle_of_Geer]

I quite agree with all of this and concur on the consequences of an unbridled reliance on “God can…”. That is precisely what I am arguing against.

By the way I can’t help but be reminded by this:
**This is a world of nightmare, a world in which trees can bleed, men turn to stone, children turn to birds, & women to trees. **
of the some of the literal beliefs of the mediaeval world, where belief in these sorts of things was literal, and where, although they were held to be remarkable, they were also believed to be not uncommon. We live in a very different intellectual milieu.

Alec
evolutionpages.com

**Thanks Actually, I was thinking of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. **​

---

**I can’t take the credit - any good in that post is thanks to C.S.Lewis, who made exactly the point you’ve quoted - but much more elegantly than I did. He wrote a short story about landing on the Moon which also draws on the theme of metamorphosis. **

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FWIW, without belief that shape-shifting was possible, the witch-mania would be short of one its of features. That sort of highly rational irrationality we can do without…

 

[edwest2]

I’ve never defended “Dawkinism” – whatever that is. And I am a Catholic theologian who believes in creation. There is no contradiction between creation and evolution. They are not even in the same category of concept.

StAnastasia

Unless revelation and scientific knowledge are combined, modern evolutionary theory is atheist.

bringyou.to/apologetics/p81.htm

Pope Benedict XVI

Monod nonetheless finds the possibility for evolution in the fact that in the very propagation of the project there can be mistakes in the act of transmission. Because nature is conservative, these mistakes, once having come into existence, are carried on. Such mistakes can add up, and from the adding up of mistakes something new can arise. Now an astonishing conclusion follows: It was in this way that the whole world of living creatures, and human beings themselves, came into existence. We are the product of “haphazard mistakes.”

What response shall we make to this view? It is the affair of the natural sciences to explain how the tree of life in particular continues to grow and how new branches shoot out from it. This is not a matter for faith. But we must have the audacity to say that the great projects of the living creation are not the products of chance and error. Nor are they the products of a selective process to which divine predicates can be attributed in illogical, unscientific, and even mythic fashion. The great projects of the living creation point to a creating Reason and show us a creating Intelligence, and they do so more luminously and radiantly today than ever before. Thus we can say today with a new certitude and joyousness that the human being is indeed a divine project, which only the creating Intelligence was strong and great and audacious enough to conceive of. Human beings are not a mistake but something willed; they are the fruit of love. They can disclose in themselves, in the bold project that they are, the language of the creating Intelligence that speaks to them and that moves them to say: Yes, Father, you have willed me.

We are not the product of haphazard mistakes.

Peace,
Ed

 

[edwest2]

Ed I agree with you. I had lunch with PZ at my institution last year, and found him to be quite facile and ignorant in his dismissal of relgious belief. I also met Cardinal Schoenborn when he came through town on his book tour, and found him to be very engaging on a personal level, even if his book makes some wild and regrettable claims about science.

StAnastasia

Would you mind mentioning one or two of the Cardinal’s “wild and regrettable” claims? Why do you think he holds these ideas?

Peace,
Ed

 

[edwest2]

Whatever may appear, it is possible. You made three three points: new, beneficial, functional.

1 New

Start with a piece of DNA: GATTACA

Duplicate it: GATTACA GATTACA

Mutate one copy: GATGACA GATTACA

The final state has increased the amount of information in the genome measured both as Shannon information and as Kolmogorov information. We can observe gene duplications in nature and in the laboratory. We have a number of them in our own genomes. We can observe point mutations in nature and in the laboratory. We can observe point mutations in duplicated genes in our own genomes - we have many different globin genes: myoglobin, haemoglobin-alpha, haemoglobin-beta and the various foetal haemoglobins. All of these different globing were derived by just the process above, along with a number of broken globin pseudogenes.

3 Functional

I will deal with functional before beneficial because all beneficial genes must be functional by definition, but not all functional genes must be beneficial. Most mutations are neutral, they have no effect on our phenotype at all. Some mutations are functional but neutral - for example it is probable that the genes for eye colour are selectively neutral. They have a function but they are not beneficial.

There are many functional mutations, for example the various responses to malaria in humans. Many of these are new. There are also mutations which provide some resistance to HIV, again these mutations are functional.

2 Beneficial

A new mutation may be both functional and beneficial, for example the Apolipoprotein AI-Milano mutation which protects aganst chloresterol in the Western diet and which arose within the last 300 years in North Italy: see A Rare Protein Mutation Offers New Hope for Heart Disease Patients.

In malarial areas the anti-malaria mutations such as Hb-S and Hb-C are beneficial. The various anti-HIV mutations are also beneficial. The Native Americans were denied the benefits of the anti-smallpox mutations posessed by the European settlers; those mutations were beneficial for some but not for others, indirectly.

In summary new information can be added to genomes. The new information can be functional and the new information can be beneficial.

I spent a whole five minutes looking at a blade of grass and it didn’t grow at all! It does not appear possible for grass to grow.

Don’t use fruit flies, use bacteria. They can evolve resistance within weeks, see the the Luria-Delbrück experiment. Alternatively speed up the mutation rate by using a radioactive source, then you will see new and functional (though usually not beneficial) information.

rossum

Thank you for the first part of your reply. I don’t understand why you were so flip and dismissive of the fruit fly experiment. All I will point out about bacteria is that they have built-in mechanisms to deal with outside threats, like lateral gene transfer between different species. It’s built-in.

On the macro level, I am unconvinced that besides a small range of possible changes that are triggered by the environment, gross morphological changes are possible. A fin turning into a leg and foot, for example, or gills becoming lungs. We have different human races with certain physical differences but they are all human beings.

I’d like to point out that after the PZ Myers’ youtube interview, in the comments section, is the following: “Given enough time, anything is possible.” Really? In a science-fiction story, sure, but it does not seem possible in real life.

Some years ago, I took it for granted when scientists on TV said things like, “Given the right conditions, life could arise on alien worlds.” Now, in the midst of the same old but new atheism, I’ve thought about it. Life could arise? How? I have now reexamined a number of scientific statements and have grown more aware of an entrenched bias. A bias that comes from and leads to atheism. Namely, the idea that life all happened by itself, given enough time. I don’t think so.

Peace,
Ed

 

[StAnastasia]

Would you mind mentioning one or two of the Cardinal’s “wild and regrettable” claims? Why do you think he holds these ideas?Peace,Ed

Ed. I don’t have the book in front of me (it’s at my office), but I know that on the bottom of one of the pages between 42 and 52 he makes the extraordinary and completely false claim that “to date no transitional fossils have been found.” To the paleontologists in my institution, that’s so egregiously false it’s laughable.

StAnastasia

 

[edwest2]

I am skeptical that there are transitional fossils. For example, a common seal “walks” on its flippers. It is quite comfortable doing that. I don’t think it is on its way to developing hands. So I think what the Cardinal has to say is reasonable. If all dogs had died in the past and were only available today as fossils, could anyone say the largest was a transitional form, or a further development, of the smallest? We have flightless birds living today and they live in the environment quite well.

I think an anti-Creation bias could lead scientists to the wrong conclusion. Just go to google and type — ancient “bacteria learned” Apparently, it is supposed that bacteria could somehow learn to live with changes in their environment, an absurd claim. I don’t think human beings would learn to live in an atmosphere that contained more methane. We don’t do well in atmospheres that contain high concentrations of industrial pollutants.

If there is a genetic relationship between living things, it is because they were designed to perform a similar function, or parts of certain assemblies were reconfigured for use by humans and, say, plants in different ways.

Peace,
Ed

 

[StAnastasia]

I am skeptical that there are transitional fossils.Peace, Ed

Well, I’m a theologian, not a biologist, but I work with numerous biologists and paleontologists, and they assure me that the world’s natural history museums are crammed with transitional fossils in many lineages.

If it’s a question of trusting all the poaleontologists in the world who have studied the matter extensively, and trusting a cardinal who knows nothing about it, the choice is not difficult!

StAnastasia

 

[Gottle_of_Geer]

Ed. I don’t have the book in front of me (it’s at my office), but I know that on the bottom of one of the pages between 42 and 52 he makes the extraordinary and completely false claim that “to date no transitional fossils have been found.” To the paleontologists in my institution, that’s so egregiously false it’s laughable.

StAnastasia

Unless churchmen are scientifically qualified - John Polkinghorne is an Anglican example, Stanley Jaki a Catholic one - maybe they should keep clear of talking about matters in which they have no competence. Others, their mistakes just make Christians look foolish. ​

 

[rossum]

What has Michael Behe contributed that has the slightest whiff of truth behind it?

From a scientific point of view Behe’s idea of Irreducible Complexity was a failure, though it was an interesting failure. In order to refute it a lot of very good and interesting work was done on the evolution of the vertebrate blood clotting system, the vertebrate immune system and the bacterial flagellum. There was also good work done on how IC systems evolve in general, as with the paper by Lenski et al. There is nothing wrong with having a failed idea in science, especially if it is an interesting failure.

Behe’s latest paper (Behe and Snoke 2004) shows that simple IC systems can evolve in bacterial populations well within known population sizes. It seem to me that he is moving away from “IC cannot evolve” to “IC is unlikely to evolve”. Unfortunately for him, the correct answer seems to be “IC is reasonably likely to evolve”. At any rate, that is the effect of his 2004 paper.

rossum

 

[rossum]

All I will point out about bacteria is that they have built-in mechanisms to deal with outside threats, like lateral gene transfer between different species. It’s built-in.

That is irrelevant in the case of the Luria-Delbrück experiment as all the bacteria involved are from the same clone - they will all have descended from a single ancestor so initially they will all be genetically identical. All variation in the population must have originated since the original bacterium was picked.

On the macro level, I am unconvinced that besides a small range of possible changes that are triggered by the environment, gross morphological changes are possible. A fin turning into a leg and foot, for example, or gills becoming lungs. We have different human races with certain physical differences but they are all human beings.

Your own personal incredulity is not a correct logical argument. You do yourself no favours by showing your lack of knowledge in this area. Gills did not “become lungs”, lungs evolved alongside gills - as with modern amphibians which can have both. Lungs are much more closely related to the swim-bladders of modern fish.

As to limbs, we have a good series: fins on stumps, fins on stumps with knees/elbows, fins on stumps with knees/elbows and ankles/wrists, fins on stumps with knees/elbows, ankles/wrists and digits. Later in the series the number of digits reduces from 7 or 8 down to five as we see today on our own hands. It is also worth pointing out that the early models all had the same arrangement of bones as we do: a single bone from hip/shoulder to knee/elbow, a pair of bones from knee/elbow to ankle/wrist, a cluster of small bones for the ankle/wrist and separate bones for the digits. Evolution is a gradual process - even the punctuations in punctuated equilibrium take many generations.

The point of the observation of grass is precisely that we do not see new features appearing fully formed, we see them arise gradually in the fossil record. The fin to limb series above took hundreds of million of years. For something as complex and well adapted as a fly we would need a long time to see a new feature evolve.

rossum

 

[redneck22]

Well, I’m a theologian, not a biologist, but I work with numerous biologists and paleontologists, and they assure me that the world’s natural history museums are crammed with transitional fossils in many lineages.

If it’s a question of trusting all the poaleontologists in the world who have studied the matter extensively, and trusting a cardinal who knows nothing about it, the choice is not difficult!

StAnastasia

The reason the world’s natural history museums are crammed with transitional fossils is because ALL fossils are transitionals (by definition). Evolution is assumed first, as true, and then the Darwinian tree is adorned and arranged to suit. Post hoc, ergo propter hoc.

 

[ricmat]

Get ready for the wave of Darwinist pro-atheism. Here is an article that comments on that phenomenon.

Despite the euphoria, it was still surprising to see that The Economist, the world’s most influential news magazine, has marked the event by adopting Darwinism as its official ideology. After promoting evolution sotto voce for many years, it burst out of the closet in its special Christmas issue and declared that Darwinism can explain everything about human nature.
Everything?
Well, for such an erudite publication, it’s embarrassingly naïve, but, Yes, everything.

 

[StAnastasia]

People come on these webboards pretending to be Catholic clergy and theologians all the time. There are all sorts of frauds and con-artists out there.

I have a parallel concern: people come to these web boards interested in Catholicism. If they read your posts and those of others who reject science, they might sadly leave, assuming that you cannot be both Catholic and intellectually alive. It would be regrettable if someone decided not to convert simply for that reason.

StAnastasia

 

[StAnastasia]

The reason the world’s natural history museums are crammed with transitional fossils is because ALL fossils are transitionals (by definition).

Yes, all fossils are transitional fossils.

 

[StAnastasia]

Behe’s latest paper (Behe and Snoke 2004) shows that simple IC systems can evolve in bacterial populations well within known population sizes. It seem to me that he is moving away from “IC cannot evolve” to “IC is unlikely to evolve”. Unfortunately for him, the correct answer seems to be “IC is reasonably likely to evolve”. At any rate, that is the effect of his 2004 paper.rossum

With his own intellectual evolution, is Behe receiving a warmer recepetion from his biology colleagues?

 

[rossum]

With his own intellectual evolution, is Behe receiving a warmer recepetion from his biology colleagues?

Not really, his latest book, “The Edge of Evolution” got panned by scientific reviewers. Until Intelligent Design can provide more scientific substance than it currently has, I suspect that Behe will not get a good press from other scientists. Technically he is a biochemist rather than a biologist.

rossum

 

[edwest2]

Get ready for the wave of Darwinist pro-atheism. Here is an article that comments on that phenomenon.

Evolution has become god. The source of good and bad and what is to come.

If any Catholic here wants any further proof that Atheism is the new ideology for the intellectual elite, here it is.

Peace,
Ed

 

[edwest2]

I have a parallel concern: people come to these web boards interested in Catholicism. If they read your posts and those of others who reject science, they might sadly leave, assuming that you cannot be both Catholic and intellectually alive. It would be regrettable if someone decided not to convert simply for that reason.

StAnastasia

So, people say, I will reject Christ if the Church, or members of the Church, deny evolution? No, that is wrong.

Intellectually alive? The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, not the fear of man. A belief or disbelief in evolution is not the core of being “intellectually alive.” As you know, the Catholic Church allows the faithful to believe in Evolution but in Theistic Evolution only. I know you know this. To even imply otherwise is not right.

Peace,
Ed

 

[Namesake]

Evolution has become god. The source of good and bad and what is to come.

I am beginning to think that evolution is more important to you than it is to most scientists. That’s kind of sad.