Christianity and Evolution???

Mirror said:

since when did proving evolution become a part this forum. i posted to show you are wrong. my coments are to be taken as constructive and not as insultive. if you choose to take it as insultive .do as you please.

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Hello Mirror.

I'm new here and may not know the etiquette of this forum. If I intruded upon a private exchange between you and Lucaspa, then my apologies to you and Lucaspa.

I will refrain from any further posting on this thread and try to figure out where to go from here.

You're fine. Mirror just has a little case of dysentery.

How's the rectal failure, Mirror, I hear it feels like having a stick up your ***.

ur32212451 said:

Yes Edward Blyth wrote several articles on natural selection ('Magazine of Natural History', 1836), a periodical to which Darwin subscribed, one year before Darwin 'thought' of the idea of 'natural selection'. Darwin biographer, and evolutionists, Loren Eisely, has stated that Darwin failed to give Blyth the credit due him for his ideas on natural selection.

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Your post seems to have 2 themes:
1. Darwin did not discover natural selection.
2. Natural selection works only to eliminate unwanted traits and preserve the phenotype. Let's take those in order.

1. Eisley is not a biographer of Darwin, but a person trying to smear Darwin's name. Somehow creationists think that if they can attack Darwin's reputation they have somehow attacked evolution. Science doesn't work that way. Religion does. After all, if you could show that Jesus regularly made the rounds of prostitutes, gambled, ducked his debts, etc. you would ruin Christianity. But in science the authority isn't a person, but the universe. Whether Darwin or somebody else discovered natural selection, it still exists an works.

In the event, Wallace did independently discover natural selection. Also, in 1831 Dr. Matthew published Darwin's form of natural selection. But as an appendix in a volume on naval timber! Thus no one saw it before Origin was published.

I've gotten the Blythe papers off the internet and read them. Blythe doesn't describe natural selection. What he describes will not change a population and will not make a new species. His papers came after Darwin jotted down the idea in his journal. Finally, Blyth and Darwin corresponded all their lives, and Blythe never complained that Darwin stole his idea.

What we have in Hutton, Paley, and Blythe is what happens to "sports". That is, those individuals that are obviously deformed at birth. They die before adulthood. It was these naked eye visible defects -- sports -- that the writers thought were removed to preserve the "kind". Notice what your source (since I'm pretty sure you haven't read Gould and Hutton) quoted from Gould:
"Darwinians cannot simply claim that natural selection operates since everyone, including Paley and the natural theologians, advocated
selection as a device for removing unfit individuals at both extremes and preserving intact and forever, the created type."

Notice the word "extremes". This refers to the sports. This was the view of Hutton and Blythe also. They did not consider small changes and did not consider a struggle for existence. Therefore they did not have natural selection. Also notice that they emphasize the elimination of individulas. Darwin didn't do that.

"But if variations useful to any organic being do occur, assuredly individuals thus characterized will have the best chance of being preserved in the struggle for life; and from the strong principle of inheritance they will will tend to produce offspring similarly characterized. This principle of preservation, I have called, for the sake of brevity, Natural Selection." [Origin, p 127 6th ed.]

Notice the bolded. Selection wasn't there for elimination of individuals who didn't fit the created type, but it was there to preserve changes from the general population.

Darwin quite rightly gets credit for realizing that natural selection is a means for generating the designs in plants and animals.

As a matter of scholarship, there are two items:
1. You did not give a citation for Hutton. Where did Hutton write this?
2. I love how you characterize people as "evolutionist" and "creationist". Hutton was the first to come out with a geological system in which the earth was very old, not young. Stop characterizing people with your labels. Just say who they are.

2. I have already said that natural selection comes in 3 types: directional, stabilizing or purifying, and disruptive. What you are arguing for only one of them being natural selection: stabilizing or purifying. But, as I said, it is directional selection that is most commonly viewed as natural selection. And directional selection does change populations. It's not around a mean of a characteristic, but shifts the mean to a new characteristic over the course of generations. Therefore, none of your candidates actually discovered natural selection.

Well stated. Also very consistent with Creation by an intelligent Creator (God). Again, as I previously stated, these variations of selection can only select existing alleles, therefore Natural Selection can not be a cause of Evolution.

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And as I stated, NS is a two step process. You keep playing the shell game by trying to say evolution is either selection or mutation. Then saying that neither one is a cause of evolution. But Darwin never said either one was a cause of evolution, but that both selection and variation was the cause. That is, natural selection is both.

Evolution is descent with modification. Also, evolution operates on populations. Therefore, it is natural selection that causes the adaptive modification of populations.

However, I am interested as to why you say humans are undergoing disruptive selection. Could you elaborate on this a little more. It sounds interesting.

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Humans are in different environments. There are studies showing that Andean and Himalayan highlanders have genetic adaptations to living at high altitude, but not the same adaptations. So we have incipient speciation there physiologically -- adaptations in a semi-isolated population in a different environment. Which is disruptive selection.

The !Kung people of the Kalahari also have several alleles unique to their population, not in the rest of the human populations. Again, the !Kung face a desert environment that most of the rest of human populations do not have. What's more, there are studies showing that genes flow out of the !Kung, but no genes from outside populations are flowing in. In the semi-documentary movie The Gods Must Be Crazy, it is noted that neither the English woman nor the !Kung male view the other as a potential mate, each thinking the other is "ugly". This is one of the first of the isolating mechanisms -- mate recognition -- that is used to generate new species. If the two populations choose not to interbreed, they are just as genetically separated as if mating produced an inviable fetus.

ur32212451 said:

I believe I'm responding to issues you have raised here on this thread. Yes, before I came here I was already quite familiar with the Fossil record. It does not support the Neo-Darwinian phyletic gradualism that you allude to in the alleged Therapsida ear movement.

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WAIT! Strawman. Notice that "Neo-Darwinian phyletic gradualism that you allude to".

Neo-Darwinism is not committed to phyletic gradualism. Darwin tended to emphasize it, but he was not committed to it.
"Many species once formed never undergo any further change ... and the periods, during which species have undergone modification, though long as measured by years, have probably been short in comparison with the periods during which they retain the same form." Charles Darwin, Origin of the Species, 4th and later editions, pg. 727

Phyletic gradualism is when the entire population transforms to a new species. Instead, what Mayr discovered in the 1940s is allopatric speciation. That is, most speciation occurs when a small part of a species is geographically isolated and faces a new environment. That small population transforms into a new species. But the parent population, in its original environment, is unaffected.

What Eldredge and Gould realized was that the fossil record looks exactly like it should if the major mode of speciation was allopatric. Small populations geographically isolated in small areas, transforming to new species, and then the new species migrating out, "suddenly appearing" in the fossil record when they migrated into the area where we were looking for fossils.

Now, there are times when we are lucky enough to find the area and time where the allopatric speciation is occurring. Those are the sequences of transitional individuals I posted, but which you are still ignoring. I can understand why: they blow creationism away and ruin your "debate" stand. So just pretend they don't exist and instead focus on your man of straw. However, it may be good debate but it's terrible discussion, and that is what we are doing: discussing and searching for truth, not trying to "win" a debate.

The evolution of mammals from reptiles, amphibians from fish, birds from dinos, or whales from land animals were NEVER claimed to be examples of phyletic gradualism. Instead, they are examples of transitional species. That is, a series of intermediate species linking two "higher" taxa. So you are arguing against something that does not exist. Congratulations for a lot of wasted effort. Now, would you care to discuss the real issue?

The therapsida is a huge collection of diverse creature types, just as the reptiles and mammals are. As Thomas Kemp, a leading expert on Therapsids, pointed out, each type of Therapsida appear abruptly in the fossil record and disappear abruptly some time later, without any ancestral or descendant relationship to any other member of the Therapsida type.

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Right. Exactly what should be there if evolution is continuing and exactly what should not be there if creationism is true. What you have are a series of species spaced in time such that you can trace morphological changes in the bones from reptiles to mammals. Dozens of species that are intermediate between the "kinds" reptiles and mammals. Exactly what we should see if evolution is descent with modification and a bush.

At the American Museum of Natural History, I've seen the Therapsida types that were used to show the alleged Evolution of ear bone movement. None of the specimens shared the same morphology, there were huge differnces between of them in size shape and structure.

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That's because the museum didn't have the space to show you all the Therapsid samples. What they did was take the chronological series that demonstrated the ear bone movement. You were supposed to understand that at each stage there are a multitude of evolutionary cousins of all different shapes and sizes that have nearly identical ear bones.

Instead, what they got was a person not interested in finding truth, but interested in nitpicking:

They clearly did not share an ancestral-descendant relationship with each other. They were simply picked to show how evolution of the ear might look if it were to be found in the fossil record.

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It's circular reasoning to arrange a few specimens from a large mostly contemporaneous group

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But the Therapsids are not a "mostly contemporaneous" group. Instead, what you are seeing is evolution over a period of 80 million years or more. That isn't contemporaneous. Go to that Karoo site I posted and look thru the pages of the mammal-like reptiles found in that 50 million year period. Even within those strata, there are genera that are present in only one of periods. And there is a change as you go from bottom to top in the Karoo.
http://www.museums.org.za/sam/resource/palaeo/cluver/mamlike.htm
http://www.museums.org.za/sam/resource/palaeo/cluver/early.htm
http://www.museums.org.za/sam/resource/palaeo/cluver/later.htm

Dr.David Raup, curator of geology at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago,"Conflicts Between Darwin and Paleontology," Bulletin, Field Museum of Natural History, January 1979 has stated:

"Darwin's theory of natural selection has always been closely linked to evidence from fossils, and probably most people assume that the fossils
provide a very important part of the the general argument that is made in favor of Darwinian interpretations of the history of life.
Unfortunately this is not strictly true. ... The evidence we find in the geologic record is not nearly as compatible with Darwinian natural
selection as we would like it to be. Darwin was completely aware of this. He was embarrassed by the fossil record, because it didn't look
the way he predicted it would, and, as a result, he devoted a long section of the 'Origin of the Species' to an attempt to explain and
rationalize the differences. ... Darwin's general solution to the incompatibility of fossil evidence and his theory was to say the fossil
record was a very incomplete one. ... Well, we are now about 120 years after Darwin, and the knowledge of the fossil record has been greatly
expanded. We now have a quarter million fossil species, but the situation has not changed much. The record of evolution is surprisingly
jerky, and, ironically, we have fewer examples of evolutionary transition than we had in Darwin's time. By this I mean that some of
the classic cases of Darwinian change in the fossil record, such as the evolution of the horse, in North America, have had to be discarded or
modified as a result of more detailed information - that what appeared to be a nice simple progression when relatively few data were available
now appears to be much more complex and much less gradualistic. So Darwin's problem has not been alleviated. ..."

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One of the more famous misquotes in creationist literature. Funny how you never refer to the fossils, but only partial quotes. BTW, you have a number of ellipses there (the ...). Please prove to us that you have read Raup by giving us the whole quote with the ellipses filled in. Thank you.

You won't, of course, because you have never read it, but copied it off a creationist website without telling us which site. I think that falls under false witness, ur. You might want to be a bit more careful of that; it is breaking a commandment.

Now, Raup did the same essay as Chapter 9, pages 147-162 in Scientists Confront Creationism edited by Laurie R. Godfrey, 1983. Now, let's look at what Raup says next.
"How does the evolutionist explain the lack of intermediates? I see three principal areas of explanation, all of which probably operate to some degree. The fist of these is a simple artifact of our taxonomic system of classification. The practicing paleontologist is obliged to place any newly found fossil in the Linnean system of taxonomy. Thus, if one finds a birdlike reptile or a reptilelike bird (such as Archaeopteryx), there is no procedure in the taxonomic system for labeling and classifying the as an intermediate between the two classes Aves and Reptilia. Rather, the practicing paleontologist must decide to place his fossil in one category or the other. The impossibility of officially recognizing transitional forms produces an artificial dichotomy between biologic groups. It is conventional to classify Archaeopteryx as a bird. I have no doubt, however, that if it were permissible under the rules of taxonomy to put Archaeopteryx in some sort of category intermediate between birds and reptiles that we would indeed do that. Thus, because of the nature of classification, there appear to be many fewer intermediates than probably exist."

There's one problem: the classification system.

"A second line of explanation for the underrepresentation of intermediates is the same one that Darwin used, namely that the fossil record is incomplete. We have as fossils a tiny fraction of the species that have existed. There are many ways of documenting this, but one is simply to look at the comparative numbers of extinct and living species. There are something like 2 million species known to be living today. We know that the average duration of a species is short relative to the total span of geologic time. Therefore, there must have been turnover in the species composition of the earth many times since the beginning of the fossil record. If we had even reasonably good fossil preservation, the number of known fossil species should thus be some large multiple of the number of species living today. Yet only about a quarter of a million fossil species have been found. Also, ... the fossils that we do see depend largely upon occasional or unusual physical and biological events, and therefore the record is not a uniform or random sampling of life of the past. Under these circumstances, finding transitional forms (or any other particular form) is unlikely, and it is thus not surprising that our record appears to be quite uneven and jerky."

"A third explanation for the relative lack of intermediates is that transitional forms constitute very short intervals of geologic time if, as many evolutionary theorists now believe, the change from one major type to another occurs rather rapidly (the punctuated equilibrium model of Eldredge and Gould 1972). This simply lessons the probability of finding intermediates." Page 158

The next paragraph is the kicker: "With these considerations in mind, one must argue that the fossil record is compatible with the predictions of evolutionary theory."

So much for using Raup as "evidence".

Steven Stanley (1979) points out:
"In part, the role of paleontology in evolutionary research has been defined narrowly because of a false belief, tracing back to Darwin
and his early followers, that the fossil record is woefully incomplete. Actually, the record is of sufficiently high quality to
allow us to undertake certain kinds of meaningful analysis at the level of the species."

In his book ('Macro-evolution: Pattern and Process', 1979, p.39),
Stanley points out evidence #5 for Punctuated Equilibrium:
"The known fossil record fails to document a single example of phyletic evolution accomplishing a major morphologic transition and hence offers no evidence that the gradualistic model can be valid."

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Again, this is the strawman of phyletic gradualism. Stanley is arguing against anagenesis being the major mode of speciation. However, Stanley is actually wrong. That's another problem of using quotes as your "facts". The accuracy of the quote must be tested against the true facts -- the fossils. These sequences document morphologic transition enough to be called a separate class -- and remember that reptiles and mammals are classes:
1. Principles of Paleontology by DM Raup and SM Stanley, 1971, there are transitional series between classes. (mammals and reptiles are examples of a class)
2. HK Erben, Uber den Ursprung der Ammonoidea. Biol. Rev. 41: 641-658, 1966.
But wait! One of the authors of the first one is none other than Stanley! This lets you know that you are arguing a strawman and misquoted Stanley, not the real one. Because Stanley does have examples of transitional individuals linking classes in the book. Oh yes, Raup is the other author!

Aren't you embarrassed misrepresenting people like this?

The fossil record is a record that looks like Creation: It is a record of the abrupt appearance of Creature types followed by stasis.

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Not all of it. And you have a theological problem with viewing creation this way, with God creating each and every species. Remember, it is at the species level that new types appear abruptly, not the 'higher' taxa.

With regard to types of creatures the fossil record shows bushiness which one would expect from creatures richly endowed with variation from the onset.

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How do you endow "variation" among creatures that can't interbreed? How do you get variation to make all these new species among a population that has to be close enough genetically to interbreed? And then diverge so that they can't interbreed?

I've read all those books by Romer, Colby, Kemp, Carrol et. al.

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But you haven't read the ones I've posted or the papers I've posted, have you? The books give an overview, not the nitty gritty details of the transitionals. Also, they give transitional species series, not the transitional individuals you are looking for. You need to dig into the nitty gritty monographs and papers to find those.

Now, as to your theological problems with your view of creationism -- successive separately created species:
http://www.aaas.org/spp/dser/evolution/perspectives/kennethmiller.shtml
"The first is to suggest that the record is genuine, but that new species, as they appear, are the products of "intelligent design."
This suggestion seems interesting until we consider what it implies about a "designer."
It would mean, for an example, that the designer created four or five species many millions of years ago, all somewhat similar. All of those species became extinct. He then created a few more species, each only slightly different from those that had preceded them. They went extinct, too, and then he repeated the process again and again and again until he finally designed the modern horse less than 2 million years ago. Curiously, two things characterize this "designer's" work. First — lack of competence. More than 99% of the creatures he has designed have become extinct, and nearly all of them went to extinction in only a few million years. Second — a determination to mimic what we now call "evolution." Every time the designer produces a new species to replace one of his failed creations, the new species looks like a slight-modified version of the one that had just died out. In other words, the designer was determined to create in a way that would imply descent with modification. Such a designer would be both deceptive and incompetent, hardly an "answer" that creationists could present as a genuine scientific theory."

ur32212451 said:

You are correct. That was what Darwin believed. Darwin was wrong. Natural Selection acting alone can not be the cause of Evolution (i.e. All creatures extant and extinct share a common ancestry). Darwin did not understand genetics at all, therefore he did not understand the causes of variation. In 1865, Mendel sent Darwin his paper detailing Mendellian genetics. Darwin never commented on it. Alfred Russel Wallace, cofounder of what became known as Darwin's theory believed that Mendel's paper was very damaging to his and Darwin's theory.

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1. Darwin didn't need to understand the causes of variation; all that was required was that organisms do vary.
2. Darwin never read the paper. Not that he read it but didn't comment on it. Darwin was very poor at languages. Mendel wrote his paper in German (since he was Austrian). When Darwin read German, he did so with an English-German dictionary in his hand and painfully translated each word. That takes a long time.
3. Wallace also believed in ghosts and that humans were separately created. Wallace was simply wrong about the effect of Mendelian genetics for evolution. Mendelian genetics was exactly what natural selection needed: variation that came in independent packets that would not be "blended" out.

It looks like you have never read Darwin. So let's start by giving you Darwin's summary of natural selection. Note the two parts of natural selection. Natural selection, alone, can thus account for all the adaptive modifications in "descent with modification".

"If, during the long course of ages and under varying conditions of life, organic beings vary at all in the several parts of their organization, and I think this cannot be disputed; if there be, owing to the high geometric powers of increase of each species, at some age, season, or year, a severe struggle for life, and this certainly cannot be disputed; then, considering the infinite complexity of the relations of all organic beings to each other and to their conditions of existence, causing an infinite diversity in structure, constitution, and habits, to be advantageous to them, I think it would be a most extraordinary fact if no variation ever had occurred useful to each beings welfare, in the same way as so many variations have occured useful to man. But if variations useful to any organic being do occur, assuredly individuals thus characterized will have the best chance of being preserved in the struggle for life; and from the strong principle of inheritance they will will tend to produce offspring similarly characterized. This principle of preservation, I have called, for the sake of brevity, Natural Selection." [Origin, p 127 6th ed.]

Notice also that this is a deductive argument. If the premises are true (variation, high geometric increase within each species, limited resources, struggle for life), then the conclusion is inescapable. Which of those premises would you like to try to challenge?

I believe in both Christianity and evolution. I feel the biggest problem (for most of us Christians) is half of us don't really know what evolution is, and when we hear one person who created some hoax or happened to be wrong, we simply disregard the entire theory. That would be like myself denying Christianity over Catholic priests molesting young boys (even though I'm not Catholic.. but anyway you get the point). Some of my beliefs might differ from those who follow both beliefs and find no contradiction. If you have any questions though, feel free to email me at xninex@earthlink.net

'you can't say "i belive in christ" and then say "i believe in Evolution".'

This is true because you are confusing catagories. "I believe in Christ" is a metaphyical statement about a metaphysical topic. "I believe in evolution" is a metaphysical statement about a process for evaluating information.

Evolution is a process for evaluating information?

WHAT?