Is Darwin's Theory of Evolution True? Part 4.1

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PetraG said:
The issue with making this a science is that the purposes of God cannot be put to the test. We can test the patterns and learn the patterns, but we also have to accept that some things are beyond our probing.
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ID advocates are not trying to test the purposes of God which as you correctly say cannot be put to the test. Probing the purposes of God belong to other sciences such as philosophy and theology and especially the science of sacred theology. In fact, the advocates of ID Theory are not proposing a theology about God at all although the theory can certainly have theological implications as any natural theory can. They recognize that the idea of ‘God’, whether he exists or not or whether there is one or more gods, his nature or essence, and whatever else might be said of God belongs to other fields of studies or sciences such as philosophy and theology. They are simply proposing an interpretation and reasonably so of the facts of nature that we observe, especially from organisms, as intelligently designed and they hypothesize that intelligent design can be tested.

It is an historical fact that in the Christian Tradition and even among ancient pagan cultures that the world has been considered intelligently designed. Indeed, it is a truth of the catholic faith and God’s word itself. It is a common sense interpretation of the reality of the world that we observe and it is in accord with reason or intelligence, the very faculty of reason that God created us with in his image and likeness and through which by contemplating nature and the world around us we might recognize the Creator of it. The very ‘laws of nature’ we observe is evidence of intelligent design and excludes the very notion of ‘blind chance.’ Indeed, as St Thomas Aquinas observes, the fact that we observe so-called ‘chance’ events in the world is evidence in itself that there is design and order in the universe because otherwise we wouldn’t observe or even have the notion of ‘chance’ events.
Quote from Buffalo: Of course. God will not lay down on a lab table for our investigation. But He certainly leaves evidence all over the place. Why wouldn’t we think we could find it in biology?
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Yes, intelligent design in organisms is simply a matter of common sense and reason and it is a natural observation as we are confronted everywhere in life with the artifacts, simple and complex, made by ourselves.
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Glark said:
If I’ve misquoted Gould, please explain how.
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“There is no God” – The Bible.
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If I’ve misquoted the Bible, please explain how.

Here is some more Gould for you:
Since we proposed punctuated equilibria to explain trends, it is infuriating to be quoted again and again by creationists - whether though design or stupidity, I do not know - as admitting that the fossil record includes no transitional forms. Transitional forms are generally lacking at the species level, but they are abundant between larger groups.

S J Gould “Evolution as Fact and Theory” Discover Magazine May 1981.
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What you did was a quotemine, just as I did with the Bible. Cutting away the context of the statement to make it appear to say something the originator did not intend.

rossum
 
buffalo said:
Read this one and please comment

http://bio-complexity.org/ojs/index.php/main/article/view/BIO-C.2011.1/BIO-C.2011.1
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Right. I’ve read it. As I doubt if any creationists have, this is what it says. Gauger and Axe have set out to examine in precise chemical detail the general evolutionist idea that widely different organic structures may share a common ancestor. They attempt to show that this is impossible, and that therefore, they do not have a common ancestor, thus weakening, perhaps fatally, the theory of evolution.

To do this, they chose two enzymes whose functions are very different, but which share distinct morphological similarities, and identified the differences between them responsible for their different functions. Then, they attempted to change one enzyme into the other, Specifically “We set out to convert one of these enzymes … to perform the metabolic function of the other.” They did not succeed, but from their results inferred that “successful functional conversion would in this case require seven or more nucleotide substitutions.”

So far, I have to say, so good. Gauger and Axe have reported everything they have done in careful, precise, referenced detail, and I find no fault with their experiments nor their observations. However, what they were trying to do was not at all evolutionary, and their estimation of the probability of successful conversion happening by chance (“probable only on timescales much longer than the age of the earth”) irrelevant.

Considering the similarity of both the enzymes and and their cellular environment, one explanation may be that they are both derived from a common ancestor. An evolutionary approach would be to determine what that common ancestor may have looked like, and how it may have diversified into the two descendants. Simply attempting to change one into the other is like trying to change me into my sister, and, finding it impossible, saying that procreation is impossible. Jumping from one end of a bifurcation to the other may indeed require improbable alteration, while getting to either end from the bifurcation point would be considerably easier.

It will surprise our readers to know that the ‘correct’ experiments, in other words attempting to derive two new and different organic structures from an ancestral original are plentiful and ongoing. Anyone interested could begin by looking up “ancestral sequence reconstruction” and going from there.
 
edwest211 said:
… Humani Generis, Pope Pius XII …
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Did you have anything to say yourself, or did you think that lobbing chunks of vatican.va at us would constitute some kind argument for something? Will you appreciate my argument better if I hurl a lump of the Origin of Species back?

Don’t you ever have any ideas of your own?

Some time ago I wanted to know what Creationists actually think about their beliefs, as we’re forever being told that Creationism is a better explanation for our observations of the world than evolution. It’s taken a while, but little by little the Creationist side is emerging. Sadly, it mostly consists of the honest admission “I don’t know”. I find it difficult to understand how ignorance is a “better idea” than almost any other explanation.

Can you help?
 
“edwest211 said:
God/gods are not scientific concepts. That’s where the Church has the advantage of knowing two things the world prefers not to mix together. While recognizing the place of science and faith, the fact is the Church is not limited to only faith and morals…
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I would just like to clarify (not particularly addressing Edwest) that the concept of God is indeed a ‘scientific’ concept though obviously not according to the concept of ‘science’ as you are using it here or as the application of the word ‘science’ has become to be understood in modern times. Philosophy is a ‘scientific’ body of knowledge using the natural light of the reason and the reason or the spiritual intellectual faculty found in humans is the highest power found (along with the spiritual will power) in the created material world, the summit of the material/physical world linking as it were the material world with the angelic world.

Aristotle called Metaphysics, First Philosophy, the science of being as being. Metaphysics is the highest and most universal natural science attainable by human beings and, indeed, the most difficult because it is the most abstract from matter. The highest natural science and the most abstract from matter because that branch of Metaphysics called Natural Theology deals with the First Being, namely, God who is supremely immaterial and who is also the First and Universal Cause of all reality, indeed, is Being, Existence, or Reality itself. Accordingly, it is wrong to assert that the idea of God is only a matter of divine revelation (I’m not saying that you Edwest are asserting this). Using the natural light of reason and beginning with a study of the natural world, human beings can mount to a first cause of the world and into an investigation of the nature of this first cause which we call God. Since Metaphysics is the science of being as being (or universal being) and Natural Theology is about the First Being or God who is the universal cause of whatever exists apart from Him, there is nothing that exists or has being that does not fall under the ‘radar’ of metaphysics or which cannot be an object of metaphysical investigation at least in some way.

A good example of the limitations of the natural sciences (study of particular kinds of beings or phenomena) and the philosophical interpretations (naturalism and materialism) and theories associated with it such as the theory of evolution is in the fossil record itself containing millions upon millions or billions of fossils. For the theory of evolution and what one would expect if the theory were true such as the transitional forms, the evidence from the fossil record is an inexplicable enigma, it defies any credible explanation. If the fossil record does not support macroevolutionary theory, what will pray tell? The only credible and reasonable explanation concerning the evidence from the fossil record is that evolution does not explain it, that is, the theory is not true. Conversely, the evidence from the fossil record supports what one would expect from the creationists’ belief and the Genesis 1 creation narrative.
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Hugh_Farey said:
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Techno2000:
That’s why this thread has gone on for so long, all I get is gibberish answers …as Glark says.
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Ooh, you naughty man! How dare you trail your nonsensical “red sheep with three horns” and then accuse me of gibberish. If you read my reply, you would see that I treated your attempt at mockery as good humour, and replied in good faith.

Yes, I know you only speak in jest, but look at the effect you’ve had on the poor baa-lambs. They’ve taken it seriously!
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Maybe you’re right , I’m going to repost my hypothetical question and see if anyone gets the gist of what I’m trying to say.
 
let’s say hypothetically sheep are the next candidate for evolution.The new species will be red sheep with three horns.The very first transitional stage/ step is a sheep that is slightly pink with a tiny little bump on its head.How is this transitional form of sheep going to cause the demise/ die out of the population of regular white sheep?
 
Let’s leave out the “candidate” bit and the fortune telling about how this might all turn out. We have a population of white sheep, but somehow mutations have entered one of the sheep, making it pinkish and with a bump on its head. We don’t know whether white two -horned sheep will disappear from the population, or whether pinkish bumpheaded sheep will disappear from the population, or neither.

To get to grips with what happens next we need to know from you whether pinkishness or bumpheadedness conveys any reproductive advantage in this hypothetical situation,
 
PickyPicky said:
Let’s leave out the “candidate” bit and the fortune telling about how this might all turn out. We have a population of white sheep, but somehow mutations have entered one of the sheep, making it pinkish and with a bump on its head. We don’t know whether white two -horned sheep will disappear from the population, or whether pinkish bumpheaded sheep will disappear from the population, or neither.

To get to grips with what happens next we need to know from you whether pinkishness or bumpheadedness conveys any reproductive advantage in this hypothetical situation,
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How could the slightly modified transitional form have any kind of reproductive advantage ?
 
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Certainly I find it difficult to see the advantage. Perhaps there isn’t one, and the population will continue to be mostly white and two-horned with perhaps (if the pink and bump mutation is neutral) the occasional pinkish bumped individual. Or perhaps a second mutation will later appear, and perhaps the combination will confer an advantage. Dunno: it’s your screenplay, you’ll have to tell us.

The theory of evolution by natural selection, you know, suggests that evolution occurs because a mutation or combination of mutations confers a reproductive advantage. If your hypothetical situation doesn’t involve a reproductive advantage it won’t involve evolution.
 
If pinkishness and bumpheadedness conferred a reproductive advantage, in each succeeding generation a greater proportion of the population would be pinkish and bumpheaded. Eventually, one day, all the population would be pinkish and bumpheaded. The white sheep just “die” like any sheep dies. The white sheep population “dies out” when the whole population is pinkish and bumpheaded.
 
PickyPicky said:
If pinkishness and bumpheadedness conferred a reproductive advantage, in each succeeding generation a greater proportion of the population would be pinkish and bumpheaded. Eventually, one day, all the population would be pinkish and bumpheaded. The white sheep just “die” like any sheep dies. The white sheep population “dies out” when the whole population is pinkish and bumpheaded.
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The white sheep are still out there reproducing and multiplying they ain’t going nowhere.
 
If the whole population has become pinkish and bumpheaded there ain’t no white sheep in the population breeding and multiplying.
 
PickyPicky said:
If the whole population has become pinkish and bumpheaded there ain’t no white sheep in the population breeding and multiplying.
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The white sheep would still be reproducing “according to its kind”… what exactly is it that is stopping this from occurring .
 
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