Is Darwin's Theory of Evolution True? Part 4.1

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No, they don’t. There are a lot of variables involved: magnetic iron core, a large moon, and many other things that when combined probably make the Earth fairly rare.

And even if you could get micro-organisms through an abiogenetic process in a lab, there’s still a deeply important philosophical question: would they actually be experiencing the world around them, or would they be organic machines with no actual experience?

Science has done, in my opinion, a good job of explaining why animals are the shapes they are. What it hasn’t even begun to do is to explain what mind is, and why a material Universe has such a thing.
 
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Much speculation is going on in scientific circles about Mars. Some scientists are predicting water ice a certain distance below the surface that could be brought up to the surface, perhaps through a heated pipe. Would there be microorganisms at a certain depth? Actual liquid water at a greater depth? Some are saying Mars has enough underground water that if liquefied, it would cover the planet at a depth of four feet.
 
I’d say only this: if we DO find similar conditions (especially liquid water), then that indicates a good place to try and look for life. Mars would be a nice first try, and given that Mars seems once to have had liquid water, and that rocks from Mars have found their way to Earth, it’s even possible that life started there. It’s also possible that somehow material ejected from Earth might have contained micro-organisms which ended up landing on Mars and taking root.

My own guess is that it’s much more likely that we’ll accidentally start new life on Mars through contamination, than that we’ll find existing organic life there. But I think it’s worth sending space missions there just for curiosity’s sake.
 
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Glark!

Hkw good of you to respond - but why the need to continue to misrepresent?

I do not base my knowldege of evolution solely on my personal observations of fossils. I never said I did. But that does not mean my knowledge is based on the opinions of others. Of course I read their opinions - but I base my knowledge on the observations they have made that led to those opinions, which they have had to demonstrate. The fact that I agree with their opinions is not due to their ‘authority’, but to the clarity of their demonstration and argument.

We’ll have to disagree about the meaning of ‘empirical’ and ‘evidence’. I disagree with your understanding of the words, but there’s no point in bickering about them.

Your biblical exegesis seems confused. Many of the differences expressed in this thread boil down to differences of interpretation. Generally speaking, clinging to a literal reading is defensible, and admitting that there are a variety of other interpretations is defensible. Claiming that any particular interpretation is the only one, and that all others are heretical, is indefensible. If you are ‘allowed’ (your word) to believe that fossils were created before the six-days, then I am ‘allowed’ to interpret Genesis as a theological metaphor. |f not, then you should explain why not.

I follow your ‘belief’ versus ‘fact’ distinction and to a certain extent agree with it. Facts, like truth, may not be provably accessible to the human mind. Thinking of them as the same is a convenient practical shorthand for most purposes, but we are wise to make distinction in philosophical forums.

Your comment about aliens explaining crop-circles is germane, so I will deal with it in another comment, a bit later.
 
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edwest211 said:
"Benedict added that the immense time span that evolution covers made it impossible to conduct experiments in a controlled environment to finally verify or disprove the theory.

“We cannot haul 10,000 generations into the laboratory,” he said."
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Why do you continue to post this incorrect statement when I have already pointed out that it is wrong? Do you think that posting such incorrect statements does either yourself or the Pope any favours?

Lenski’s Long Term E-coli experiment has passed 50,000 generations in the laboratory.

The Pope made an understandable error in a non-biologist. For you to repeat that error, after having been corrected, is a greater error.

rossum
 
Glark said:
Thank you, but I was already aware of the concept of “quotemining”.
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If you are aware of the concept then you should avoid doing it. And also avoid copying quotemines from creationist websites. Apart from anything else, they are ineffective because it is obvious that Gould, to take an example, was not against evolution no matter what the quotemeine appears to say.

rossum
 
On the idea that believing in evolution is as ‘lunatic’ (your word) as believing aliens created crop circles.

When Techno posed the question “Is Darwin’s Theory of Evolution True?” the question pre-supposed a number of definitions, both practical and philosophical. It presupposed, for a start, a knowledge of the theory of evolution, which, it has become painfully obvious, Techno didn’t have then, and, if his on-going persistent questioning of its basic principles is anything to go by, still doesn’t.

It also suggests that the questioner wished to distinguish between Charles Darwin’s personal theory of evolution, as published in the Origin of Species in 1859, and any other theories of evolution, particularly all the extensions and modifications of Darwin’s original formulation, of which he could have known nothing. It also suggests a common understanding of the words “theory” and “true”.

The word theory means different things to different people in different contexts, with little consistency, so what folllows is only how it should be read in connecftion with evolution. A theory is an explanation, and the theory of evolution is an explanation for the diversity of living things and the successive appearance of fossils in rock strata. Further, it is an explanation based entirely on observation.

There is a little more. A scientific theory (=explanation) not only explains some particular phenomena, but also fits, coherently and comprehensively, into the overall explanation of the entire universe, its history and operation, which is Science. If it clashes with other scientific disciplines, it must be modified or rejected.

Finally, Science, and all its theories, is a continuous process, not a done deal. New observations expand, refine, and occasionally overthrow previously accepted explanations for a set of phenomena.

[continued]
 
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The ancient Greeks (some of them, anyway) understood that the sun was a fire in a bronze chariot drawn by horses and driven by Apollo along a crystal road which arched across rhe sky. Universally recognised as a myth today, this was a valid scientific theory, in the sense that I defined these words in the previous post. By observing that the sun gave out heat and light, and by looking around for something with which to compare it, the idea that the sun was a fire was a reasonable explanation. Indeed it is only fairly recently that new observations have suggested a better explanation. As the fire was observed to move across the sky, correlated to other methods of moving thing, the idea that the fire was sitting in a metal (not wood, obviously, and bronze was the only alternative) cart of some kind was not a stupid extension of the explanation. Just as a bright fire stops you from seeing the things around it, so the wagon, and its horses, were invisible from the ground, but the path on which it travelled must have been invisible for a different reason. Glass provided a reasonable explanation. And then finally, the only reason why the horses should follow such a regular pattern of behavior was that somebody was controlling them.

This theory was based on observations, and fitted in with other ideas about the world as the ancients knew it. Other explanations were also possible - that the horses were flying horses, for example, or that the glass road was in fact a glass hemisphere.
Other theories were available. The Jews also saw the sun as a fire, but theirs hung in a giant lamp-holder, and seems to have been moved by some kind of invisible mechansim rather than organically.

Both these theories were superceded by better observation, particularly by relating observations of the moon to observations of the sun, well before 500 BC, but the original stories clung on for centuries among ordinary people, first as fact, then as colourful description, and finally as myth. Why this was so is interesting in itself. It seems that the ‘science’ as ‘explanation of the phenomena’ was not as important to the story as its reflection of the relationship between man and the divine, the all powerful driver of the universe, which could be benificent or malevolent, and whose purpose could, perhaps, be modified by human behaviour.

[continued]
 
[continued]

Several thousand years after the collection and correlation of data became a human enterprise, evolution is our current ‘best explanation’ for the observations we have made, and continue to make. In the light of science in general, it seems that living things are made of exactly the same basic particles as non-living things, and its molecules connected following the same rules as inorganic molecules. All living things ever observed have derived from previous living things, and historical observation shows that an increase in diversity characterises their descent. From all this derives what we currently know as the theory of evolution.

So, is Darwin’s Theory of Evolution True? To make sense of this question, I will reword it.
Is Our Current Enhancement and Modification of Darwin’s Theory of Evolution the best explanation for the history of biology that we have?

I think it is. In the last ten thousand posts, I have not seen a better explanation. I have read any number of claims that it is not a good explanation, but that’s not the point. I have read any number of admissions of ignorance. But that’s not the point either. If the theory of evolution is not the best, however imperfect, then there must be a better one.

I shall explore this later.
 
Later!

(It must be nighttime where everybody else lives!)

If evolution is not the best explanation for the development of life, what are better ones?

These seem to me to be the extremes of the Creationist ideas:
  1. All living species, or non-interbreeding groups of organisms, were created spontaneously out of nothing, over a six-day period of time about 6000 years ago.
  2. All living species are varieties of several thousand ‘kinds’, created spontaneously out of non-living matter, at various times over the past three billion years or so.
Most of the Creationists here, it seems to me, hover within these parameters.

Now, what evidence is there to suggest that these are better explanations than Evolution?

Different ‘kinds’ of organisms appear quite suddenly in the fossil record.

These observations fit the second, but not the first, alternative. If the organisms were all produced within a week of each other, we would expect all their remains to appear more or less together in the fossil strata. However, if they were produced over the period of time indicated by the fossil record, then this explanation is, so far, possible. But is it a better explanation than evolution?

Many series of fossils, to my mind, argue for Evolution and against Punctuated Creation. The emergence of limbs, and the emergence of feathers, are commonly adduced observations.

Over a period of several million years, fossils are found in sucessively younger strata with successively massive limbs, starting about 450 million years ago. Evolution explains this as snapshots of the gradual development, by tiny changes, of different species adapted to increasingly terrestrial environments, every single organism being descended from its parents. Punctuated Creation has two views. One is that all these groups of animals only represent two ‘kinds’, fish and amphibians. The organisms older than some defined time are ‘varieties’ of fish, the organisms found immediately after that time are new and spontaneously created ‘amphibians’, and subsequent organisms are ‘varieties’ of that. The other view is that all the different organisms are separate spontaneously created ‘kinds’ of animal.

These are both explanations - but are they better explanations than evolution?
In the first case, that two successive strata contain a variety of an earlier ‘kind’, and a spontaneously created new ‘kind’, we must notice that it is difficult to assign the point at which one kind ends and the next begins. Wherever a line is drawn, the new kind resembles the old kind much more closely than it does any of its descendents today. For this reason, I think that successive descent is a better explanation than successive creation.

In the second case, we find that, as the fossil record shows endless numbers of extinct organisms, that the number of extinct ‘kinds’ vastly exceeds the number of living ones, each extinct kind being only slightly different from its predecessor. Whether this profligacy is purposeless or purposeful, for this reason, I think that successive descent is a better explanation than successive creation.

Shall I go on?
 
Do go on … it’s not night here in the beautifully sunny West of England.

When you have completed your tour d’horizon I’d be grateful (as very much a non-scientist) for any thoughts you may have on the new approaches to evolution that have been raised in this thread in relation to the Royal Society/British Academy event. My ill informed impression is that these challenge the current state of the theory (but not the existence of biological evolution) by suggesting that horizontal transfer of genetic material makes common descent dubious. Any thoughts?

 
Well, OK.

Still looking for evidence for evidence that suggests Creationism is a better explanation for the observed phenomena of life than Evolution. Unfortunately, all the rest I can find is entirely negative, and comes in two flavours.

1) Some organic structures could not have evolved.

This, of course, is an opinion. To have any kind of credibility, it must be based on evidence (empirical: something you can see), which is wholly lacking. Mostly the argument is probability based, but such arguments are logically unsound, as well as lacking in data. Mathematically, it must not be assumed that “vanishingly improbable” equals “impossible”. As soon as it is admitted that there is a non-zero probability for something, it becomes a viable possibility. Not only that, but it becomes an immediate possibility. It is a mistake to imagine that because you have a one in a million chance of winning a lottery, you can never win it, (that’s obvious) but it also is a mistake to imagine that you will have to buy a million tickets before you can win. Some people win with their first and only ticket. A tiny probability of an occurrence is not a dictator of when the occurrence will take place.

What’s more, in order to show by probability that Creation is a better explanation for the history of biology than creationism, one would have to show that spontaneous creation was more probable. I do not believe this has been attempted, let alone achieved, and for that reason I think that Evolution is a better explanation than Creation.

2) The theory of evolution is “only a theory”, a mere speculation, and has never been proved.

This announcement confuses mathematical proof with scientific truth, and is irrelevant to the Evolutionist argument. I think that evolution is soundly based on the observed fossil record and the observed similarities and differences among living organisms, and is a comprehensive and coherent explanation for them. An alternative theory would no doubt claim the same, so the question resolves into which explains the phenomena better. In the absence of any evidence to sustain Creationism, I think that Evolution is a better explanation than Creation.
 
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PickyPicky said:
When you have completed your tour d’horizon I’d be grateful (as very much a non-scientist) for any thoughts you may have on the new approaches to evolution that have been raised in this thread in relation to the Royal Society/British Academy event. My ill informed impression is that these challenge the current state of the theory (but not the existence of biological evolution) by suggesting that horizontal transfer of genetic material makes common descent dubious. Any thoughts?
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Two Things. Horizontal Gene Transfer and Epigenetics (which I gather was the more contentious topic at the meeting you referred to).

Both of these have been observed in various forms over the last few decades, and both may play a part in the progress of evolution. Horizontal Gene Transfer is the transferring of genetic material from one organism to another outside of the process of reproduction, and Epigenetics (in this context; it’s meaning has changed over the decades) is the study of the effect of the environment on the genome of an organism. Note that neither of these can have any effect on evolution if they do not effect the gametes, or a very early embryo. Inserting jelly-fish genes into my skin-cells so my fingers light up like ET, or freezing the toes of one foot and observing that the DNA of its cells has become different from the DNA of the other, will have no evolutionary effect as I will not pass these new traits onto my children. As my skin continues to grow, the changed DNA will be passed on to the new cells of the hands or feet, but not the gametes. What’s more, as almost every study of heredity (except in bacteria) has worked very well without any consideration of HGT or Epigenetics, it seems that the part either has played so far is quite small.

However, far from damaging the concept of common descent, they both go a good way towards strengthening it, as all the ‘vastly improbable probability’ considerations become considerably more probable under their influence, as they both act as ‘directors’ towards the improvement of fitness, unlike otherwise more random changes which could lead either way.

None of this gene jiggery-pokery has any effect on the theory of common ancestry. As long as we can say that every baby has (at least one) mother, then the ancestry of all living things still leads inexorably towards LUCA, the Last Universal Common Ancestor, from which we all descended.
 
For every transitional stage/ step there is a corresponding reproductive advantage… yes- no ?
 
rossum said:
Why do you continue to post this incorrect statement when I have already pointed out that it is wrong? Do you think that posting such incorrect statements does either yourself or the Pope any favours?

Lenski’s Long Term E-coli experiment has passed 50,000 generations in the laboratory.

The Pope made an understandable error in a non-biologist. For you to repeat that error, after having been corrected, is a greater error.
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The Pope was talking about historical generations. You are misrepresenting…

Lenski did not “haul” 50 generations of the past into the lab for study. He created an experiment that is current and the study ONLY involves this very limited scenario.
 
Hugh_Farey said:
Still looking for evidence for evidence that suggests Creationism is a better explanation for the observed phenomena of life than Evolution. Unfortunately, all the rest I can find is entirely negative, and comes in two flavours.
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Are you wedded to methodological naturalism?
 
Hugh_Farey said:
However, far from damaging the concept of common descent, they both go a good way towards strengthening it,
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Not so. It is HGT that has felled the tree of life and UCD with it.

Yes, it i now known epigenetics are passed through several generations and then the organism tries to get back to the mean.
 
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