the unfolding argument...
I'm in the middle of a conversation over on Facebook. I thought it best to put it here because FB has posting limits, and a really small font.
C. For me the science of evolution is uncompelling.
We have yet to find any true transitional lifeforms. In point of theory, ALL species ought to be transitional. But every last thing we find, living or dead, is not in process of transition. This was a flaw that Darwin recognized, which has not been successfully addressed by all those dead animals.
Darwin’s theory stands on three legs; the deist, watchmaker god, Malthus’ rotten demographics (The fact that a parson was arguing against charity is abominable) and pre-Industrial Revolution agriculture, and an all-encompassing gradualism. The first is not in the least what the Bible describes, and is a separate issue from the science, except for the fact that what drove Darwin’s thinking is finding things he did not expect. The second has been completely destroyed by human ingenuity, and the application of “competition for scarce resources” to the animal and plant kingdoms also exhibits a rather tenuous grasp of biology. The third point has been abandoned, albeit from a strict materialist perspective.
Darwin’s natural selection hangs in thin air.
I’ve just finished a rather disappointing book (Out of 9 chapters, only the last one addresses the topic, and in the end, it actually fails to; only a poorly contextualzied, faint allusion to a single verse, and a closing quote from TS Eliot), Saving Darwin; the author is a physicist. Late in the book he details Francis Crick’s transition from physics to biology, as part of a critique of Phil Johnson’s attack on any and sundry writing about evolution as though experts. Apparently Johnson claims that a scientist who is not a biologist is no more than a layman, whereas Karl Giberson argues that this is not the case. Curiously, Giberson quotes Crick saying, “…he found the transition so dramatic that it was ‘almost as if one had to be born again’.” Crick apparently had to stop thinking like a physicist in that biology is complex and messy, in contrast to physics’ “elegance and simplicity.”
I mention this because Giberson gives Johnson the point without realizing it; if Crick had to start over again in order to be a competent biologist, then merely being a scientist is not qualification for explaining evolution. There is of course the curiosity that Giberson and Johnson are both doctors, an academic distinction based on one’s ability to master intellectual knowledge. I lean more toward Johnson’s point, but they both push their positions too far. For me, the problem posed in this little disagreement points up a deeper problem in biology.
When Bacon formulated the scientific method, he did it conscious of a certain realm of reality into which man could not, was not truly able to, intrude. He carefully warned against any knowledge that might imply that God was not behind all existence. Science was predicated on the God of the Bible creating a world that was predictable and understandable.
By the beginning of the 19th Century, European scientists had developed a scheme of knowledge in which God had formulated laws, think of gravity, by which He managed the world. Unfortunately by this time, the theologians had begun distancing God from creation. Part of this was because of how well it seemed things worked; God was not envisioned as a puppet master, but rather as a somewhat distant overseer; Paley’s watchmaker sadly followed closely on the heels of Deist thinking on God’s lack of interaction with both the universe and especially man himself.
Where this leads to is Darwin finally coming up with the law that governed life itself, natural selection. The theory was intended to be a law on a par with that of gravity or inertia.
So when Giberson argues that biology is science even though it does not resemble physics, he is missing the point. Again, he gives away his argument, although I will give him a pass on this very point because I should hope he can realize his faulty rhetoric here; “Evolution is a solid and robust scientific theory, because it explains many things about the world and relates countless otherwise disconnected fact to each other.” How this differs from the Bible, or Galen’s four humors, or astrology, is not exactly clear. As I said, this depiction of evolution as science is rather empty, but not only because there are so many other philosophical systems that fit this definition; it also ignores both the history of evolutionary biology and the practice and rhetoric of modern evolutionary biology today.
Everywhere we turn, biologists tell us of any number of successful experiments proving/demonstrating/supporting evolutionary theories. This is indeed how physics works; a hypothesis is tested, under “laboratory conditions”, and it is either proven, or today, after Popper reconceptualized science, falsified. But if Francis Crick recognizes that physics and biology are indeed that disparate, then how do we continue to practice biology as we practice physics? Or rather, if we continue, and I think we ought, to study biology the same way, then what is it that makes them so different? Either 19th Century biology is perfectly analogous to 19th Century physics, and so with the 20th Century versions, and we can still discover the various “laws” that govern life, and the origin of species, or it is something which requires an entirely different kind of scientific method.
As an example, in 1952 Miller/Urey generated amino acids in a lab, simulating the atmosphere on primordial Earth, thus demonstrating the possibility of abiogenesis. Strictly speaking this goes beyond evolutionary theory, but it typically gets discussed as added evidence that life does not need supernatural agency. There are two problems with this, one scientific and one philosophical, as far as Giberson’s “ugly” science is concerned.
The composition of the ancient atmosphere, even accepting an old Earth, is not pure conjecture, but pretty bloody close to it. Basing any conclusions on this experiment, or any so designed, is merely philosophy with a diorama. It has since been found that Miller-Urey actually generated even more amino acids than they realized, although Urey did suggest this. It has also been shown that the amino acids produced in this way do not mimic those found in living beings on Earth; life has somehow managed to eliminate fully one-half of the amino acids which are chemically possible.
Added to this, as far as replicating the ancient atmosphere, are the various manipulations and isolations required to maintain the experimental conditions. This also goes for current experiments that claim to demonstrate evolution in the lab, like all those funny fruit flies, which remain fruit flies, forever it seems. Either the experimental method is valid for biology today, just as it was for both physics and biology a century ago, or it is not. I think it obvious that the scientific method is valid for biology, else germ theory would still be just a theory, and soldiers would still be dying from sepsis rather than bullets. The trouble is when a theory demands that the methods that spawned it change so that it can maintain its status as “scientific”.
And this is what evolution is demanding of biology. This is most noticeable, and most egregious, when evolutionists point to breeding as proof that nature can blindly do what man does consciously. Beyond the simple fact that selective breeding (Artificial selection is, in my mind, a misnomer which should, like microevolution, be put to pasture) does not create new species, is the curiosity that the animals produced thereby are less fit than their progenitors.
There are two main streams of thought in evolutionary writing concerning mutations, although I wonder if many authors quite catch the distinction. Darwin hypothesized that changes in the ecosystem would act upon random changes within the organisms, leading to descent with modification; mutations would simply occur, and unless the environment had changed so that a competitive advantage had been generated, the mutations would be lost. There seems to be an unrecognized implication here that the same mutation can occur quite often, remaining inert until environmental pressures, or rather lack of food, changed the survival paradigm within that species.
Reading today, it appears that many writers accept that mutations occur in response to environmental changes. I think this most noticeable in global warming/climate change writing. The ice pack is shrinking, so polar bears respond by moving south. Coastal waters off Australia are warming, so sharks are hybridizing. There is drought in the Galapagos, so the finches cross previously existing niches and likewise hybridize. Let us leave the question of how species is defined, and just what hybridization implies, for now.
The issue here is that Darwin’s idea should manifest visibly, with various animals producing offspring that are different from parent pretty much over and over, constantly. This is not what we see around us or in the fossil record. The other line of reasoning presumes a much greater influence of external factors over genetics. This would imply, again, much more rapid and dramatic changes in flora and fauna than we see. This would also suggest devolution, something which I understand evolutionary theory flat rejects.
Clearly, I hope, I am working through some of this. Some I am already quite certain of, despite the continued demands that evolution fits into the Bible.
C. For me the science of evolution is uncompelling.
We have yet to find any true transitional lifeforms. In point of theory, ALL species ought to be transitional. But every last thing we find, living or dead, is not in process of transition. This was a flaw that Darwin recognized, which has not been successfully addressed by all those dead animals.
Darwin’s theory stands on three legs; the deist, watchmaker god, Malthus’ rotten demographics (The fact that a parson was arguing against charity is abominable) and pre-Industrial Revolution agriculture, and an all-encompassing gradualism. The first is not in the least what the Bible describes, and is a separate issue from the science, except for the fact that what drove Darwin’s thinking is finding things he did not expect. The second has been completely destroyed by human ingenuity, and the application of “competition for scarce resources” to the animal and plant kingdoms also exhibits a rather tenuous grasp of biology. The third point has been abandoned, albeit from a strict materialist perspective.
Darwin’s natural selection hangs in thin air.
I’ve just finished a rather disappointing book (Out of 9 chapters, only the last one addresses the topic, and in the end, it actually fails to; only a poorly contextualzied, faint allusion to a single verse, and a closing quote from TS Eliot), Saving Darwin; the author is a physicist. Late in the book he details Francis Crick’s transition from physics to biology, as part of a critique of Phil Johnson’s attack on any and sundry writing about evolution as though experts. Apparently Johnson claims that a scientist who is not a biologist is no more than a layman, whereas Karl Giberson argues that this is not the case. Curiously, Giberson quotes Crick saying, “…he found the transition so dramatic that it was ‘almost as if one had to be born again’.” Crick apparently had to stop thinking like a physicist in that biology is complex and messy, in contrast to physics’ “elegance and simplicity.”
I mention this because Giberson gives Johnson the point without realizing it; if Crick had to start over again in order to be a competent biologist, then merely being a scientist is not qualification for explaining evolution. There is of course the curiosity that Giberson and Johnson are both doctors, an academic distinction based on one’s ability to master intellectual knowledge. I lean more toward Johnson’s point, but they both push their positions too far. For me, the problem posed in this little disagreement points up a deeper problem in biology.
When Bacon formulated the scientific method, he did it conscious of a certain realm of reality into which man could not, was not truly able to, intrude. He carefully warned against any knowledge that might imply that God was not behind all existence. Science was predicated on the God of the Bible creating a world that was predictable and understandable.
By the beginning of the 19th Century, European scientists had developed a scheme of knowledge in which God had formulated laws, think of gravity, by which He managed the world. Unfortunately by this time, the theologians had begun distancing God from creation. Part of this was because of how well it seemed things worked; God was not envisioned as a puppet master, but rather as a somewhat distant overseer; Paley’s watchmaker sadly followed closely on the heels of Deist thinking on God’s lack of interaction with both the universe and especially man himself.
Where this leads to is Darwin finally coming up with the law that governed life itself, natural selection. The theory was intended to be a law on a par with that of gravity or inertia.
So when Giberson argues that biology is science even though it does not resemble physics, he is missing the point. Again, he gives away his argument, although I will give him a pass on this very point because I should hope he can realize his faulty rhetoric here; “Evolution is a solid and robust scientific theory, because it explains many things about the world and relates countless otherwise disconnected fact to each other.” How this differs from the Bible, or Galen’s four humors, or astrology, is not exactly clear. As I said, this depiction of evolution as science is rather empty, but not only because there are so many other philosophical systems that fit this definition; it also ignores both the history of evolutionary biology and the practice and rhetoric of modern evolutionary biology today.
Everywhere we turn, biologists tell us of any number of successful experiments proving/demonstrating/supporting evolutionary theories. This is indeed how physics works; a hypothesis is tested, under “laboratory conditions”, and it is either proven, or today, after Popper reconceptualized science, falsified. But if Francis Crick recognizes that physics and biology are indeed that disparate, then how do we continue to practice biology as we practice physics? Or rather, if we continue, and I think we ought, to study biology the same way, then what is it that makes them so different? Either 19th Century biology is perfectly analogous to 19th Century physics, and so with the 20th Century versions, and we can still discover the various “laws” that govern life, and the origin of species, or it is something which requires an entirely different kind of scientific method.
As an example, in 1952 Miller/Urey generated amino acids in a lab, simulating the atmosphere on primordial Earth, thus demonstrating the possibility of abiogenesis. Strictly speaking this goes beyond evolutionary theory, but it typically gets discussed as added evidence that life does not need supernatural agency. There are two problems with this, one scientific and one philosophical, as far as Giberson’s “ugly” science is concerned.
The composition of the ancient atmosphere, even accepting an old Earth, is not pure conjecture, but pretty bloody close to it. Basing any conclusions on this experiment, or any so designed, is merely philosophy with a diorama. It has since been found that Miller-Urey actually generated even more amino acids than they realized, although Urey did suggest this. It has also been shown that the amino acids produced in this way do not mimic those found in living beings on Earth; life has somehow managed to eliminate fully one-half of the amino acids which are chemically possible.
Added to this, as far as replicating the ancient atmosphere, are the various manipulations and isolations required to maintain the experimental conditions. This also goes for current experiments that claim to demonstrate evolution in the lab, like all those funny fruit flies, which remain fruit flies, forever it seems. Either the experimental method is valid for biology today, just as it was for both physics and biology a century ago, or it is not. I think it obvious that the scientific method is valid for biology, else germ theory would still be just a theory, and soldiers would still be dying from sepsis rather than bullets. The trouble is when a theory demands that the methods that spawned it change so that it can maintain its status as “scientific”.
And this is what evolution is demanding of biology. This is most noticeable, and most egregious, when evolutionists point to breeding as proof that nature can blindly do what man does consciously. Beyond the simple fact that selective breeding (Artificial selection is, in my mind, a misnomer which should, like microevolution, be put to pasture) does not create new species, is the curiosity that the animals produced thereby are less fit than their progenitors.
There are two main streams of thought in evolutionary writing concerning mutations, although I wonder if many authors quite catch the distinction. Darwin hypothesized that changes in the ecosystem would act upon random changes within the organisms, leading to descent with modification; mutations would simply occur, and unless the environment had changed so that a competitive advantage had been generated, the mutations would be lost. There seems to be an unrecognized implication here that the same mutation can occur quite often, remaining inert until environmental pressures, or rather lack of food, changed the survival paradigm within that species.
Reading today, it appears that many writers accept that mutations occur in response to environmental changes. I think this most noticeable in global warming/climate change writing. The ice pack is shrinking, so polar bears respond by moving south. Coastal waters off Australia are warming, so sharks are hybridizing. There is drought in the Galapagos, so the finches cross previously existing niches and likewise hybridize. Let us leave the question of how species is defined, and just what hybridization implies, for now.
The issue here is that Darwin’s idea should manifest visibly, with various animals producing offspring that are different from parent pretty much over and over, constantly. This is not what we see around us or in the fossil record. The other line of reasoning presumes a much greater influence of external factors over genetics. This would imply, again, much more rapid and dramatic changes in flora and fauna than we see. This would also suggest devolution, something which I understand evolutionary theory flat rejects.
Clearly, I hope, I am working through some of this. Some I am already quite certain of, despite the continued demands that evolution fits into the Bible.