Why you should think that the Natural-Evolution of species is true

[Rubee]

If you’re calling DNA “code”, then yes it most certainly does. And it was preceded by RNA.

Early life bore no DNA.

Hadn’'t seen this. Suffice it to say that’s your strong belief. You can’t point to a hypothesis as proof of itself. I say chem doesn’t create code because the only instance in which it’s purpoted to have done so is this unproved hypothesis.

And yes, DNA is a code. It has symbols (or an alphabet), a language or logical rules that attaches them arbitrarily to an unrelated real thing or idea, a set of instructions, and a highly specific message, all contained in it. The only thing that produces alphabets and the rules that constitute language are minds. Ditto descriptions of processes that have yet to occur. If we were to say that “chem” or “physics” are doing it, it’d be no different than attributing the computer code or any engineering system to Physics.

 

[rossum]

I meant extant species. There was some kind of study I heard about and looked at from a layman’s perspective that said 90% of creatures on earth today just turned up together a few hundred to a hundred thousand years ago and had hard boundaries from species to species.

You are right. See Sweeping gene survey reveals new facets of evolution.

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.

As you say, that only applies to extant species. Trilobites, for example, started a lot earlier than 200,000 years ago.

 

[William_Scott]

Hello Rubee, I wish I had time to delve into a discussion on BBT…but my schedule is requiring a departure from the thread for another week or two (or more). Have a great Lord’s Day.

 

[Aloysium]

Molecular evolutionary biologist Masatoshi Nei says Darwin never proved natural selection is the driving force of evolution — because it isn’t.

Now they say natural selection created everything, but they don’t explain how. If it’s science, you have to explain every step.

There appears to be quite a variety of ToE. This guy sounds like he’s taking a materialist approach focussing only on the chemical changes that can occur in DNA. Clearly, that would be the driving force with natural selection mopping up the mess.

What can be understood as natural selection has actually to do with the relationships between the individual organisms and the elements, which together constitute an environment.

What we find on a cellular level, is the built-in potential for diversity that involves the genome and its processes. Although we were taught to scoff at Lamarck, there are genetic and epigenetic changes in the offspring of organisms as a consequence of what they encountered in their lives.

Studies have shown that mice exhibit more sensitivity to alcohol’s effects, such as anxiety reduction and motor impedement if their fathers were chronically exposed to the substance before mating. Consequently they are less likely to drink it and are worse drunks if they do. In another experiment, the offspring of lab-bred stupid mice, whose performance improved when they were raised in an enriched environment could run mazes better than the offspring of those whose parents hadn’t.

We see here that the factors which affect the phenotype, the total animal in its environment seem to impact not only on the neuronal development of the individual mouse but have an impact on the next generation. According to modern understanding, presented in the quote above, this occurs at a molecular level in the gametes, which give rise to their offspring.

The reality is that both the environment and the organism within it are more than just a collection of atoms. They are sytems in themselves, that of the encompassing conditions forming a whole, a garden, made up of the relationships between the individual creatures and the elements. This activity operates under a different order of interactions than those of molecules and atoms. In other words, there is more going on than the fundamental forces of nature, and the impact of these interactions, involving the individual creature with its environment, is felt at that larger encompassing sphere, which includes the psychological dimension of existence, and down to the molecular level.

Natural selection is the shadow of the reality of how different kinds of being relate to one another within the hierarchy of life, which stretches down to the elements of the earth given light by the sun, and how those relationships come together to create this garden planet.

Not meaning to bore anyone, but here’s a couple of nice shots from a trip to Costa Rica:

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[buffalo]

And it was preceded by RNA.

The RNA world hypotheses is being abandoned.

 

[Vonsalza]

Vonsalza:

And it was preceded by RNA.

The RNA world hypotheses is being abandoned.

sigh
Whatever you say, Buff.

 

[Rubee]

What does it matter when it is an empty guess without a single shred of evidence in addition to it’s reliance on an incredibly improbably idea? It’s nothing. As far as I’m concerned, there isn’t a single explanation yet on the table (besides ID which is the natural response, given we already know one way code is created).

From my (current) understanding, Darwin thought the cell was a far simpler structure than it is. He thought complexity arose with higher organization only. He had no way of knowing about the DNA and likely might never have theorized a bunch of the things he did had he any idea about the shockingly sophisticated engineering evident in that tiny thing we call a cell, beginning with the DNA.

 

[Aloysium]

My understabding currently is that it’s the most rigorously established theory. I like it because it ended the “universe doesn’t need a creator because it has no beginning” materialist arguments that prevailed in the era of Newtonian physics.

Going backwards in time, the assumption is that the future shape of the universe, although randomly happening as it did, was definitely a potential existing at the very beginning, that the laws of physics that govern the randomness are eternal essentially. So time and space began, and the universe cooled in the formation of matter.

As you say it is the most rigorously established theory, but I quibble with how it is presented. God did first create light, as well as cyclical progressive time with the bringing of space-time into existence. And, He utilized that light in the creation of a new kind of being, the atom. Each progressive step, a workday for our Divine artictic Creator, sees new kinds of being, living forms in a hierarchy of life, culminating in mankind. In a garden universe which we are meant to tend, we do His work helping one another and trying to maintain various disappearing ecosystems.

What initially caused my disenchantment with the various aspects of evolution that were drilled into me, was the fact that I could not include God in that picture. I must say that it was second nature to think that way, as it is to look into the night sky and see Hubble images in my mind. For myself, it could make some sense that adding code here and there God might have transformed some rat-looking kind of animal into a whale. But, things got really iffy, trying to figure out how God could cause some simian creature to give rise to myself, given that I am expression of one human nature. But, most definitely any of this was more plausible than imagining stuff that can’t be done in the controlled conditions of a lab, could ever happen randomly and spontaeously.

On the other hand, It seems more trouble to hatch a placental creature from an egg than to simply make it, as He does me right here and now, this moment a node in my lifeline. It’s creation of the first of a thing either way, one is merely all wrapped up in the genetics and epigenetics of an embryo, placed in the environment of an egg, and the other complete, as part of its environment. Favouring an evolutionary perspective is tied to being used to thinking of things happening of their own accord, even their own creation.

We shouldn’t forget the existence of mind - perceptions, feelings, cognition and action, which shapes the neuronal connections of the brain, and results in a kind of being operating within a wholely different set of relationships than those that govern basic matter.

And of course, primary is the existence of things in themselves, like you or me, or my cat. The world is filled with individual expressions of very different kinds of being, which had a beginning in time and have the capacity to express themselves in diverse and unique ways.

 

[edwest]

I have found that some people do tend to go with a group mentality. It’s easier and there’s no pressure to ‘fit in.’

 

[edwest]

Not credible. Even RNA is too complex.

 

[IWantGod]

Since the Church allows for the belief that the ToE is an acceptable interpretation as long as it is understood God was behind it all, is a fact, not just an opinion.

The concept that God directly plans massive killing events, such as hurricanes, tsunamis, etc., I find illogical coming from a loving God.

Exactly. It’s better to accept that God created a naturally developing reality where potential possibilities are allowed to express themselves, rather than a designed one where things happen in a strict deterministic sense; otherwise it would mean that God directly intended or planned the existence of the Ebola virus disease for the direct purpose of killing people.

It’s intellectually short sighted to think that the acceptance of randomness and chance is opposed to the idea of God having a plan, it’s just not the simplistic immature plan that human-beings would come up with.

If your opponent thinks they are doing God and his children a favour by pushing the intelligent design narrative, they are wrong. In fact they are causing harm to our faith and the potential faith of future generations. That is the sad irony of it all.

 

[edwest]

According to St. Thomas Aquinas: “The effect of divine providence is not only that things should happen somehow, but that they should happen either by necessity or by contingency. Therefore, whatsoever divine providence ordains to happen infallibly and of necessity happens infallibly and of necessity; and that happens from contingency, which the divine providence conceives to happen from contingency” ( Summa theologiae, I, 22,4 ad 1). In the Catholic perspective, neo-Darwinians who adduce random genetic variation and natural selection as evidence that the process of evolution is absolutely unguided are straying beyond what can be demonstrated by science. Divine causality can be active in a process that is both contingent and guided. Any evolutionary mechanism that is contingent can only be contingent because God made it so. An unguided evolutionary process – one that falls outside the bounds of divine providence – simply cannot exist because “the causality of God, Who is the first agent, extends to all being, not only as to constituent principles of species, but also as to the individualizing principles…It necessarily follows that all things, inasmuch as they participate in existence, must likewise be subject to divine providence” ( Summa theologiae I, 22, 2).

• Communion and Stewardship

 

[IWantGod]

According to St. Thomas Aquinas:

I have already answered this. Aquinas is not arguing for a deterministic creation here and it has nothing to do with whether or not chance or randomness exists and so it is specious to use this as a reply and i am sure your intent is not to deceive.

 

[buffalo]

If your opponent thinks they are doing God and his children a favour by pushing the intelligent design narrative, they are wrong .

How so? ID does not say Ebola was designed to kill humans by God. Why would you think that?

 

[IWantGod]

How so. ID does not say Ebola was designed to kill humans by God. Why would you think that?

Well if everything is designed…

 

[edwest]

You did see the word “infallibly” right?

 

[Rubee]

By definition, the only thing not designed in a creation of God would have to be due to creaturely free will alone. All potentialities have to be designed. Nothing gives itself being and no possibility would exist or come about if it were not deliberately included as a possibility by God. To think it could would be to suggest you can have being independently of God.

 

[edwest]

From the Catechism:

295 We believe that God created the world according to his wisdom.141 It is not the product of any necessity whatever, nor of blind fate or chance. We believe that it proceeds from God’s free will; he wanted to make his creatures share in his being, wisdom and goodness: "For you created all things, and by your will they existed and were created."142 Therefore the Psalmist exclaims: “O LORD, how manifold are your works! In wisdom you have made them all”; and "The LORD is good to all, and his compassion is over all that he has made."143

 

[IWantGod]

By definition, the only thing not designed in a creation of God would have to be due to creaturely free will alone. All potentialities have to be designed. Nothing gives itself being and no possibility would exist or come about if it were not deliberately included as a possibility by God. To think it could would be to suggest you can have being independently of God.

Possibility in the strict sense is not a being and is not designed. Possibilities exist because of God’s nature. The possibility of something has always been present in God because they are an expression of his perfect being and power. True, God’s existence is required in order to give actuality or existence to those possible realities, or for there to even be such a thing as a possibility at all, but to think that God designed the Ebola virus is an error. Giving actuality to something and directly designing a particular system with an operation is two different things, or at least its not necessarily the same thing.

 

[Rubee]

Possibility in the strict sense is not a being and is not designed. Possibilities exist because of God’s nature . The possibility of something has always been present in God because they are an expression of his perfect being and power. True, God’s existence is required in order to give actuality or existence to those possible realities, or for there to even be such a thing as a possibility at all, but to think that God designed the Ebola virus is an error. Giving actuality to something and directly designing a particular system with an operation is two different things, or at least its not necessarily the same thing.

The Ebolah virus has being.

Well, God has no potentiality, so I’m not sure I agree with your phrasing but I won’t quibble because I think I understand what you mean. We are nothing and had no reality before our creation.

But as to possibilities, I utterly disagree that it’s not designed. No possibility would ever be actualized if it were not capable of being actualized and that capability can only come from the one who gives reality in the first place.

For example, in a sinless universe, it’s possible the Ebolah virus might not present a danger to human beings. But the Ebolah and its “properties”, as well as our bodies and their properties (including our vulnerability to the Ebolah virus) are both creatures that receive their being from God. God created the virus as well as the human body in a way that it could be affected by the virus. If he wanted, he could’ve created us with different properties.

So I disagree. Nothing can happen in any creation that is not included in God’s design for it: where else would it come from? If Adam hadn’t sinned, we wouldn’t die. God did not want us to die but he absolutely DID design us to be able to die. It’s not possible that it would’ve happened otherwise. For example, demons don’t die. Because God did not design them as beings that can die.

God made the universe a place that could house immense suffering even though he did not want that suffering. It’s part of it’s design. It’s the kind of world where suffering results from certain things that don’t have to be but that can be depending on certain acts of creaturely freedom.

The only question that should concern is: why? Why did God think this “very good”? And the answer our faith gives is the power to exercise true acts of love.