Pope's astronomer dismisses ID and says Church was "spectacularly wrong" in its treatment of Galileo

[Touchstone]

The first prediction is that Darwinian theory is not a sufficient explanation for the development of life on earth.

That’s the Darwinian claim – the evolution explains the development of all of nature.

ID’s prediction is validated when we discover aspects of nature which Darwinian theory cannot explain.

Additionally, we don’t merely cite various instances where Darwin made claims which appear to be validated. The theory claims to explain (in the mind of least some prominent evolutionists) all of biological nature. It’s one of the most (the most) arrogant claims in all of science.

So, my hypothetical theory that 2+2=4 and 2+2=5 can be tested.

We took 2 apples and combined with 2 more. We added them and came up with 4.
Thus, my theory is true. A prediction was validated.

But what about the second corollary that 2+2=5 also?

We test that again and see that it’s falsified.

Now what?

Using a Darwinian process, we “evolve the theory”.

1. My original theory had a true prediction, therefore it is true.
2. My orginal theory was partially correct, therefore it is true
3. Testing on the theory brought new insights which enabled us to adjust it to this:

2+2=4 and 2+2 “might” = 5, athough we don’t know enough yet about that. We are studying it.

In physics, when one part of the theory is falsified, then the theory itself is false.
In evolution, when one part of the theory is falsified, the theory adds-on explanations even when none exist.

Another proof of this is claims for validation of evolution by citing micro-adaptations in existing species as if that validates the sweeping claim that evolution explains the development of all of nature.

I think you are unaware of how predictions obtain in science. A prediction is not just a pronouncement, a statement of opinion. A prediction proceeds from a theoretical framework, by necessity.

For example, a prediction of evolutionary theory is that more primitive organisms should be found in lower (older) geological strata, and the more developed organisms should have fossils (if any) that occur in the more recent strata.

That’s not a “guess” by a paleontologist. It is entailed by the evolutionary theory itself. If species diverge and evolve into nested hierarchies over long periods of time, this requires an ordering of fossils in the geological record.

For ID, there is no theoretical basis for such a prediction:

“Darwinian theory is not a sufficient explanation for the development of life on earth”.

First, that statement trades on a uselessly subjective term “sufficient”. Sufficient for what? Young Earth Creationists? No explanation is sufficient for them, no evidence is persuasive.

But even if we could agree on some reasonable criterion for “sufficient”, there’s nothing in ID theory that produce such a prediction. Behe’s “edge of evolution” is as close as it comes, and to the extent it does make a necessary prediction, it’s stillborn, as just the breeding of all the dog species from the wolf ancestor over the last 50,000 years – a mere blink of the eye in geological time – shows that mutation has plenty of creative and development capability that puts paid to the folly of Behe’s conjectures on the limits of mutation. He must then retreat to simply doubting, or maybe more precisely theologically rejecting evolutionary theory like the rest of the ID crowd.

The situation for the larger ID movement is a non-starter. There is no theory of ID that is even available as a source of predictions, entailments that will put it to the test. As a political and religious movement, slathered in pseudo-scientific terms, it offers “predictions” (see the prediction that “junk DNA will be functional” for another example of such bogosity) that equivocate on the word, and suppose that a prediction is just something someone might hazard a guess about in quasi-scientific language.

-TS

Edited to Add: The “2+2=4 and 2+2=5” example you gave seals the error, and nicely illustrates the point of ID’s “predictions” being ungrounded. Just as you “2+2=4 and 2+2=5” is a free floating stipulation, not proceeding from any calculus, ID simply pronounces propositions that obtain from nothing theoretical. As it happens, if you were to show that “2+2=4 and 2+2=5” is a necessary prediction from your mathematical model, it’s quite likely, or even necessary that “2+2=5” would necessarily be true, given that model. The point being that free floating whims, intuitions and doubts aren’t useful in knowledge building when they remain just that. Knowledge is built by grounding them in coherent models, which can then be stress tested in the real world.

 

[Touchstone]

ID is about describing systems that cannot self assemble. That is its value. So-called Junk DNA was predicted to be useful and this ‘discovery’ was later admitted by mainstream scientists. What science is discovering is that the cell is more complex than what was understood even a year ago. What that is showing is that as the order of magnitude of complexity goes up, the idea of self assembly goes down.

God bless,
Ed

Huh. I just threw out the “junk DNA” canard in a recent post, and whaddya know, here it is. Ed, why do you think ID predicts that non-coding DNA must be functional. This is not a prediction of ID theory, even under the very charitable aegis of granting that ID critiques of evolution somehow are a theory. What is it in ID thinking that entails that DNA be fully functional?

There’s nothing. A designer God could just as well have designed the system to produce non-coding DNA as a part of the intended process. “Genetic exhaust”, so to speak. That doesn’t militate against a Cosmic Designer even a little bit, and so the idea that non-coding DNA should really be found to be functional is just a theological notion resident in the minds of ID advocates: My intuition is that God would be wasteful like that, or use mechanisms that look so much like what we’d expect from an impersonal process, so that can’t be true.

That’s a theological objection, but it does not stem from any scientific feature of ID. It’s not a prediction in the technical sense of the word, but a theological objection.

-TS

 

[Leela]

Huh. I just threw out the “junk DNA” canard in a recent post, and whaddya know, here it is. Ed, why do you think ID predicts that non-coding DNA must be functional. This is not a prediction of ID theory, even under the very charitable aegis of granting that ID critiques of evolution somehow are a theory. What is it in ID thinking that entails that DNA be fully functional?

There’s nothing. A designer God could just as well have designed the system to produce non-coding DNA as a part of the intended process.

This argument seems so clear. I don’t understand why people don’t get it. It goes back at least a hundred years to William James. Sure, some things appear designed and some things do not, but if we are talking about God as the possible designer, no matter what we observe, it could have been designed to look exactly that way. Nothing could ever look more or less like it was designed by God since God can do literally anything. People don’t look more designed by God than the particular arrangement of wreckage from an airplane crash. If either one looked completely different, it would still look just as designed by God. There is no way to rule out the hypothesis of divine design, but then for that reason there is also no way to make use of it, no reason to keep it from a scientific perspective. It may be good for other things, but it doesn’t help us do science.

 

[edwest2]

The notion of “obviously manufactured” implies that we are talking about a designer sufficiently like ourselves so that we could distinguish the object as obviously designed.

If we allow for the possibility of of omnipotent and omniscent designer, then there is no way to say that a house found on another planet is any more or less evidence of a designer than a rock is. We don’t know how to make rocks, but we do know how to make houses, so we may conclude that something like us perhaps made the house.

Ed, I am not arguing like another on this thread that we can’t recognize design when we see it. It is the appearance of design that evolutionary theory was created to explain. In the case of SETI we are looking for aliens that are suficiently like us to me able to detect them. How could we detect an omniscient omnipotent designer?

The problem for ID is that if we are allowing for an omnipotent designer, then something that appears designed is no more evidence of such a designer than something that looks completely random. Either one could have just as easily been designed to look exactly that way, so such a hypothesis for science is a blank cartridge that carries nothing with it.

Like us? How do you know? How do scientists know? If we contact intelligent life, will we meet multi-tentacled, lizard-like creatures? Seriously, there is zero certainty in SETI. None. Yet the scientists patiently watch and wait.

Your “we can’t tell it’s designed because literally anything can be made to look a certain way” is 100% avoidance of the specific case in question: the cell. It’s not a statement like, Gosh, this is just too complicated to be like this through a random series of events. The cell can do things. “DNA is like a software program, only much more complex than anything we’ve ever devised.” - Bill Gates

Your “what good is it,” utility mind-set is trying to ignore the obvious.

By the way, science is not the be all and end all. It’s just a tool. And life is about much more than just using tools like science.

God bless,
Ed

 

[Touchstone]

This argument seems so clear. I don’t understand why people don’t get it. It goes back at least a hundred years to William James. Sure, some things appear designed and some things do not, but if we are talking about God as the possible designer, no matter what we observe, it could have been designed to look exactly that way. Nothing could ever look more or less like it was designed by God since God can do literally anything. People don’t look more designed by God than the particular arrangement of wreckage from an airplane crash. If either one looked completely different, it would still look just as designed by God. There is no way to rule out the hypothesis of divine design, but then for that reason there is also no way to make use of it, no reason to keep it from a scientific perspective. It may be good for other things, but it doesn’t help us do science.

Yes, here is why rigorous thinkers of all stripes – theistic or no – understand the imperative for methodological naturalism. Just a " divine foot in the door", to use Lewontin’s term. Here is the case in vivid form with ID. As soon as you erect a facade of theory over an omnipotent, impassable, supernatural God, you can’t make any predictions at all. God could have done it – anything – any way he pleased. God as the designer entails perfectly nothing, phenomenally. And so a “godful” science is castrated, impotent, inert in terms of knowledge building.

And ID shows how this plays out. The “science” is then just a euphemism for culture warrior theology. Anti-science.

-TS

 

[Anselm33]

There’s nothing. A designer God could just as well have designed the system to produce non-coding DNA as a part of the intended process. “Genetic exhaust”, so to speak. That doesn’t militate against a Cosmic Designer even a little bit, and so the idea that non-coding DNA should really be found to be functional is just a theological notion resident in the minds of ID advocates: My intuition is that God would be wasteful like that, or use mechanisms that look so much like what we’d expect from an impersonal process, so that can’t be true.

That’s a theological objection, but it does not stem from any scientific feature of ID. It’s not a prediction in the technical sense of the word, but a theological objection.

-TS

The argument against ID from efficiency. I’ve just been reading a section in Penrose’s “Road to Reality” in which he puts a similar argument: setting up an initial volume in phase space that would be thermally mixed, the volume is so large that the probability is very small (1/ 10 to some huge number); Penrose said that if the Creator were of a mind to do things efficiently, then He (/ She?) would have selected say 100 smaller pieces of uniformity, each 100 times smaller in phase space, so that the probability
would then be much larger (1/[100* 10 to (some large number/100)] , i.e. you get more probability by making the exponent smaller and multiplying the exponential. As I read this I thought, does God really need to worry about being efficient? As Penrose also remarked, it would have been more probable for atoms and molecules to come together by a random collision to form life, humanity a world, etc. So, I’m not sure the argument from efficiency is necessarily an impressive theological one. My thought is that God can be wasteful, if it suits His /(Hers?) purpose.

 

[Touchstone]

The argument against ID from efficiency. I’ve just been reading a section in Penrose’s “Road to Reality” in which he puts a similar argument: setting up an initial volume in phase space that would be thermally mixed, the volume is so large that the probability is very small (1/ 10 to some huge number); Penrose said that if the Creator were of a mind to do things efficiently, then He (/ She?) would have selected say 100 smaller pieces of uniformity, each 100 times smaller in phase space, so that the probability
would then be much larger (1/[100* 10 to (some large number/100)] , i.e. you get more probability by making the exponent smaller and multiplying the exponential. As I read this I thought, does God really need to worry about being efficient? As Penrose also remarked, it would have been more probable for atoms and molecules to come together by a random collision to form life, humanity a world, etc. So, I’m not sure the argument from efficiency is necessarily an impressive theological one. My thought is that God can be wasteful, if it suits His /(Hers?) purpose.

Right, and conversely, I’ve never understood or credited the criticism of ID that depends similarly on the very intuition the critic resists – the intuition of “how God would do it”. On both sides, pro and against, it’s totally ungrounded; we have no way to limit, scope or constrain such a God. Even the idea of “efficiency” in a general sense is problematic; If a putative god were concerned about efficiency, there’d be no universe at all – minimal waste! Going further, along the lines of Plantinga’s Free Will Defense, natural evil is a kind of “waste” that serves a higher objective. Once you get to that point, where God can and does adopt “waste”, “inefficiency”, “loss” and “decay” as byproducts of some other telic interest, this whole area of inquiry collapses.

We can’t know, even a little bit, what the real engineering goals were, and given that the Designer is ostensibly omnipotent, this is a completely nowhere discussion.

That means that PZ Myers’ critique of ID as vacuous because of the ostensibly pathetic God that would design an organism this way or that relies on the same bogus intuitions that theists indulge in supposing God is the designer in the first place: this is theologically how it must be.

In Myers’ defense, I think often he is just pointing out that on the IDist’s own terms - look at these marvelous designs! – a lot of nature looks pretty rude and Rube Goldbergian for any supposed super-creator. But that’s just the kind of thinking we are wont to avoid if we take these questions seriously.

We should be consistent. God as omnipotent, supernatural designer makes ID, or any theoretical framework that admits such a being, a cipher in terms of science, a framework that can predict nothing, and can falsify nothing. But that being the case, critics can’t say, “God wouldn’t do it that way!” If ID is going to own the intellectual sins of acknowledging a supernatural resource in their conjecture, it should at least be credited with the escapes those sins allow. Fair’s fair.

-TS

 

[reggieM]

For example, a prediction of evolutionary theory is that more primitive organisms should be found in lower (older) geological strata, and the more developed organisms should have fossils (if any) that occur in the more recent strata.

Ok, this has been falsified already.
The earliest known organisms ever found are not “primitive” at all. They are as immensely complex, and in many ways, indistinguishable from modern organisms.

250 million year old bacteria: “genetically identical to modern bacteria”

Thus, the theory is falsified. That should seal the deal.

But again, in Darwinian fashion, the theory can adapt to falsifications.

We will now learn that the term “primitive” really means “less evolved”. That’s the scientifically-precise definition, of course.

Now, evolution progresses from primative to sophisticated. Except that it starts with overwhelmingly complex organisms (that remain inexplicable to science).

And the next great thing about Darwinian theory is its wonderful ability to absorb and utilize contradictions. Evolution does not progress from less to more.

To learn more about evolution? Consult whatever atheistic-biologist you want and get his personal opinions, and proclaim them as facts.

 

[edwest2]

To reggieM -

Thank you. By ignoring the identical bacteria behind the curtain, the game continues. It’s unfortunate that science had to be manipulated for purely ideological purposes.

Let’s just be honest.

God bless,
Ed

 

[grannymh]

If everything is designed, it just becomes a flat statement and the concept of properties is irrelevant.

I truly doubt that everything is designed means that everything is equal in design.

I would not offer that the design involved in a bird’s egg is equal to the design involved in the magnificent Alaskan mountains. Nor is the design of my beloved Alaskan mountains equal to human’s ability to fly over these same mountains.

In my humble opinion, Intelligent Design comes from the observation that when one looks at the unity of creation, one can realistically conclude that the very existence of some components or some living organisms requires an intelligence beyond natural happenings such as modification by adaption or selection. The presence of an intelligence beyond natural chance can actually be understood by an analytical examination of another theory. The operative word is understood.

Out of respect for the current ban, my observation ends here.

 

[reggieM]

Penrose said that if the Creator were of a mind to do things efficiently, then He (/ She?) would have selected say 100 smaller pieces of uniformity, each 100 times smaller in phase space, so that the probability
would then be much larger (1/[100* 10 to (some large number/100)] , i.e. you get more probability by making the exponent smaller and multiplying the exponential. As I read this I thought, does God really need to worry about being efficient? As Penrose also remarked, it would have been more probable for atoms and molecules to come together by a random collision to form life, humanity a world, etc. So, I’m not sure the argument from efficiency is necessarily an impressive theological one. My thought is that God can be wasteful, if it suits His /(Hers?) purpose.

It also assumes that we can fully judge the ultimate effect of things.
This was a problem that evolutionists already encountered when they claimed that certain organs were vestigial, or useless. It was discovered later that some of those organs have a function today, so one shouldn’t eliminate that possiblity.

A better falsification for ID is merely to show that natural law produced the effect. Showing that natural processes “could” produce the effect is different because then you have to look at the probability that it was cause that way.

Rocks roll down the mountainside and produce a pile at the bottom. The laws of physics that cause that to happen are understood. The pile at the bottom is not evidence of intelligent design, as the theory explains it. It’s evidence of chance and physical laws.

Someone could argue that the random pile of rocks “is not random because God meant it that way”. Or you could argue “the law of gravity that caused the pile is evidence of design”.

Both of those statements could be true, but they’re not what Intelligent Design theory is looking for.

As to “why would God design things that way”? That question follows after the reasonable conclusion that “some intelligence was involved in the result”.

 

[Touchstone]

Ok, this has been falsified already.
The earliest known organisms ever found are not “primitive” at all. They are as immensely complex, and in many ways, indistinguishable from modern organisms.

250 million year old bacteria: “genetically identical to modern bacteria”
Thus, the theory is falsified. That should seal the deal.

No, that doesn’t falsify the theory, and is an expected outcome if the theory is correct. Horseshoe crabs, for example, are virtually unchanged over the last 500 million years. How can that be? No evolution? Well, they have found a stable, long term “niche”, a configuration that is “built to last”. Evolution seeks local optima, it’s not a process that drive X amount of change over period Y, no matter what. If the horseshoe crab is “optimized” for its environment as it is, novel developments won’t bring the benefits they would if the population was struggling to adapt towards fecundity.

Similarly, the bacteria is, hands down, the most rugged, optimized, survival-centric organism ever designed by evolution. Lots of variants and offshoots have sent species development off in interesting and diverse directions, but the bacteria abides, and has and will have a very profitable environmental niche to inhabit where it can thrive.

The prediction about primitive was related to morphological and systems complexity. We’d be starting over if we found, for example, prehensile tails, or eye sockets with nerve cavities leading to a brain cavity in the earliest organisms. There’s no problem in the really old hanging around – good designs by nature are built to last – but there is a problem if what evolution demands as a “later design” is found at the beginning.

Sorry if that was confusing for you in my earlier post.

But again, in Darwinian fashion, the theory can adapt to falsifications.

Well, it does adapt to misunderstandings of the theory, just by giving a clear account of itself. What you understand to be a prediction of evolution is not a prediction of the theory, at all. You’re confusing a falsification of your misconception about the theory for a falsification of the theory itself.

We will now learn that the term “primitive” really means “less evolved”. That’s the scientifically-precise definition, of course.

We’re trafficking in retail vernacular here, of course, but for real scientists testing these ideas, there are precise and testable conditions that proceed necessarily from the theory. For example, we have a bright line distinguishing vertebrates from invertebrates, and while it’s NOT a falsification to find invertebrates hanging around the place today (see your misconception above regarding bacteria) it IS a falsification if we find vertebrates at the head of timeline. Darwin was wrong, and neo-Darwinism is wrong in the most fundamental way, if vertebrates are found at the beginning.

Now, evolution progresses from primative to sophisticated. Except that it starts with overwhelmingly complex organisms (that remain inexplicable to science).

They’re neither overwhelmingly complex nor inexplicable. We don’t have the nano-scale technology yet to assembling them ourselves, we understand the compounds they are made of, the information encoding and decoding process at the chemical level (right down to the physics factors that control how a particular protein folds). Inexplicable is a limitation any scientist may have to face, but inexplicable is never accepted up front. We don’t know what is inexplicable, we can only advance the frontiers of “explicable”.

And the next great thing about Darwinian theory is its wonderful ability to absorb and utilize contradictions. Evolution does not progress from less to more.

Not clear what you mean by “less” and “more”. The “lowly” bacterium is a champion of the evolutionary wars, and is arguably “more” than a human or a whale or an eagle on evolutionary principles. It will almost surely outlast all of us on this planet, likely by many tens of millions of years, so hardy and flexible and efficient and optimized is the bacterium. Less is more when it comes to evolutionary success, often enough, as the bacterium shows.

To learn more about evolution? Consult whatever atheistic-biologist you want and get his personal opinions, and proclaim them as facts.

A theistic biologist will do just as well; in science, a fact is a measurement, something obtained objectively. We’re entitled to our own opinions and interpretations, but the facts are a shared resource.

-TS

 

[tonyrey]

God as omnipotent, supernatural designer makes ID, or any theoretical framework that admits such a being, a cipher in terms of science, a framework that can predict nothing, and can falsify nothing.

If that were the case the universe would be valueless and purposeless - which is clearly not the case. It has served as a basis for life, development, enjoyment and fulfilment for billions of years. The richness and beauty of nature is evidence of its rational origin. Few would agree with Schopenhauer that it would be better if life had never existed on this planet. The inevitable “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” do not outweigh the immense worth of existence.

If Design cannot be falsified atheists have been wasting their time and energy for over two millenia! They (have) attempt(ed) to show that the concept of Design is unintelligible, the universe is pointless, the amount of evil in the world is excessive, religion is superstition, free will is an illusion, materialism is the best explanation of reality, persons are biological machines derived from atomic particles and intangibles like truth, goodness and love are man-made constructs.

Design can be falsified by the success of any of these projects and also by **natural **events which lead to a predominance of disease, disasters and deformities or the extinction of life on this planet. I stress “natural” because the element of free will makes it possible that we could frustrate the purpose of Design as a result of our selfishness, carelessness and greed.

Design predicts that none of these events will occur and persons will continue to be (and be considered) moral, responsible agents with rights to life, freedom and happiness instead of accidental freaks of nature, the activity of which is simply the result of fortuitous combinations and rearrangements of molecules…

 

[tonyrey]

It will almost surely outlast all of us on this planet, likely by many tens of millions of years, so hardy and flexible and efficient and optimized is the bacterium.

You have succeed in establishing beyond all doubt that an increase in complexity, awareness, sensitivity, autonomy and control of oneself and one’s environment is not adequately explained by survival value or a sequence of fortuitous events!

 

[reggieM]

Well, they have found a stable, long term “niche”, a configuration that is “built to last”.

I appreciate your thoughts on this topic and I don’t want to get into a full-scale debate about evolution so I’ll drop it after this comment. I’m very confident that you have found evolutionary theory convincing, as many do, and I doubt that there’s anything I can contribute to your opinion on this matter.

But I’ll just offer this …

The concept of evolutionary “niches” was not predicted by evolutionary theory, and it is one of those tautologies (as I see it) that was added on to the theory as an attempt to explain the many examples of stasis.

Evolutionary theory predicts that organisms will have a slow gradual change over millions of years.

When we find organisms that haven’t changed for 500 million years – then it is said that evolution predicted that also. Those organisms reached “optimal development” and “filled their niche”.

What is optimal development? That is when an organism no longer shows any evolutionary change over a long period of time – then we know it has reached that optimal point.

In the same way, it is predicted that organisms are adapted to fill their niche.
Then niches are defined as environments that correspond with traits of certain organisms.

So, it all works out very well that way.

 

[buffalo]

I appreciate your thoughts on this topic and I don’t want to get into a full-scale debate about evolution so I’ll drop it after this comment. I’m very confident that you have found evolutionary theory convincing, as many do, and I doubt that there’s anything I can contribute to your opinion on this matter.

But I’ll just offer this …

The concept of evolutionary “niches” was not predicted by evolutionary theory, and it is one of those tautologies (as I see it) that was added on to the theory as an attempt to explain the many examples of stasis.

Evolutionary theory predicts that organisms will have a slow gradual change over millions of years.

When we find organisms that haven’t changed for 500 million years – then it is said that evolution predicted that also. Those organisms reached “optimal development” and “filled their niche”.

What is optimal development? That is when an organism no longer shows any evolutionary change over a long period of time – then we know it has reached that optimal point.

In the same way, it is predicted that organisms are adapted to fill their niche.
Then niches are defined as environments that correspond with traits of certain organisms.

So, it all works out very well that way.

What is turning out to be even more of a problem is the knowledge that earliest cells were complex as well as the complex language of DNA the driver.

 

[buffalo]

**More DNA repair mechanisms - mutations just keep getting harder.
**

**
**

Newly Discovered DNA Repair Mechanism

…One method to repair such damage that all organisms have evolved is called base excision repair.

more…

All organisms have evolved this mechanism? Why? How?

Or maybe they just had this right from the beginning.

Remember - IDvolution is the solution.

 

[rossum]

What is turning out to be even more of a problem is the knowledge that earliest cells were complex as well as the complex language of DNA the driver.

A single cell is less complex that a multicellular organism with trillions of cells of many different types.

DNA was probably not the driver. More probably RNA was the driver of abiogenesis, or possibly something even simpler.

rossum

 

[buffalo]

A single cell is less complex that a multicellular organism with trillions of cells of many different types.

DNA was probably not the driver. More probably RNA was the driver of abiogenesis, or possibly something even simpler.

rossum

Nah.

 

[Touchstone]

I appreciate your thoughts on this topic and I don’t want to get into a full-scale debate about evolution so I’ll drop it after this comment. I’m very confident that you have found evolutionary theory convincing, as many do, and I doubt that there’s anything I can contribute to your opinion on this matter.

But I’ll just offer this …

The concept of evolutionary “niches” was not predicted by evolutionary theory, and it is one of those tautologies (as I see it) that was added on to the theory as an attempt to explain the many examples of stasis.

I think you do not know your Darwin. Really, can I recommend just a small project of getting outside of the creationist box and going to primary sources? You’d be surprised how much you learn, and how much contempt the sources you do rely on have for your mind.

The ecological niche was one of the key points of inspiration that sparked Darwin’s big idea. What are now known as “Darwin’s Finches” impressed upon Darwin the adaptive influences of the local environment – the niche occupied by each of what became 13 separate species. It’s no exaggeration to say that the role of ecological niches for the finches was the spark for Darwin in forming the theory; the varying pressures of dryness, wetness, plants, etc. play on local populations that drive adaptation, and thus divergence and eventually speciation.

Evolutionary theory predicts that organisms will have a slow gradual change over millions of years.

No, it does not, not in a macro sense. It predicts that what change occurs comes about via gradual, step-wise changes. But where a population has reached and hovers around a local optimum, evolution predicts stability. Evolution is an optimizer, cumulatively working towards local optima. It is not a theory that products equal and uniform amounts of change over a given amount of time. Mutations provide the opportunity to change, but adverse mutations tend to be selected out of the gene pool, which means that if the population is somewhere near an optimum, changes will be much more likely to be deleterious or neutral, than in cases where there are strong adaptive pressures, where a population is much farther from a local optimum.

When we find organisms that haven’t changed for 500 million years – then it is said that evolution predicted that also. Those organisms reached “optimal development” and “filled their niche”.

Right.

What is optimal development? That is when an organism no longer shows any evolutionary change over a long period of time – then we know it has reached that optimal point.

There is no optimal point per se. The environment is constantly changing, even if by small amounts, so a theoretically optimum is a moving target that even fast-reproducing populations can’t hope to keep up with.

But this is a tautology. Evolutionary theory says that the environment exerts adaptive pressure on organisms, meaning, as a way of restating the same idea, that populations that achieve long term (macro) stability are by definition those that are successful in their adaptation to the local niche they exist in.

In the same way, it is predicted that organisms are adapted to fill their niche.
Then niches are defined as environments that correspond with traits of certain organisms.

So, it all works out very well that way.

We can observe the niches that exist, and see that they vary from place to place, and vary for a place over time. This is a fact in evidence. Given that, Darwin supposed that living organisms ere adaptive via their reproduction, and that populations would diverge and diversify as a way to find energy-efficient, reproductively successful adaptations to the particular niche they exist in. The tautology is just a way to see the same principle from two sides of the same coin, but it’s a grounded tautology, attached to the facts of the varying environmental features we see in the world around us. If Darwin is wrong, the varying features of the environment won’t promote and reward changes that make gene propagation more efficient and successul in that environment, producing nested hierarchies of populations and species as that happens.

-TS