Discussion of evolution as a scientific theory

[lucaspa]

In the thread "God and 'natura'" Anthony Puccinelli began to question the validity of evolution. I set that thread up specifically to talk about Christian theology, and the theology of God and "natural". not to discuss the scientific validity or truth value of particular theories. We can continue that discussion in this thread. I'll start from Anthony's post:

It does not make sense to believe that natural selection and genetic mutation have produced the variety of species. These processes do not themselves produce anything. The former is a process of elimination,not a creative process,and the latter affects only a few traits,not nearly enough for change above the species level. It is reproduction that produces variety of species.

1. What you have done here is separate a two-step process into the individual steps and then say that each step by itself is insufficient to get new species.
Natural selection is a two step process:
1. Variation
2. Selection.
Genetic mutation is part of variation. So, you have illogically separated genetic mutation from natural selection. Genetic mutation is part of natural selection. In separating them you have committed the logical fallacies of composition and strawman.

2. You have also misstated natural selection as "process of elimination". It's not. Go back to Darwin, it is a process of preservation.

"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 103 6th ed.]

So again we have a logical fallacy of strawman.

3. The phrase "above the species level" is confusing. What was the title of Darwin's book? Origin of Species. He wasn't talking "above the species level". A new species is evolution! The only biological reality is species. What we call "higher taxa" ("above the species level") are simply groups of species. A genus is a group of species. A family is a larger group of species, usually consisting of 2 or more genera, but the genera are themselves groups of species. And so it goes as you go to higher taxa.

So, those "higher taxa" are simply multiple speciations spread out thru time. Darwin showed how logical this is in the (there is only 1) diagram in Origin. The diagram is on page 90 here if you want to see it for yourself:
http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?viewtype=text&itemID=F401&pageseq=1

This goes back to the fact that changes accumulate.

And it does not make sense to believe that God works through evolution to creates species because we know that living creatures come into being immediately as individuals. That is how God creates living creatures. Species exist as individual creatures,which have specific beginnings.

Species are populations of individuals. Individuals are members of the population, but species don't "exist" as individuals. Maybe it will help to think of a basketball team. A basketball team is composed of individuals but the team does not exist as each individual. Having Kobe Bryant on the court does not make a basketball team. You must have 4 other players to get the team. Similarly, YOU alone are not the species H. sapiens.

Evolution is not about what happens to individuals, but what happens to populations. What is more, it is not about what happens to the population thru the lifetime of any particular individual, but rather over many, many generations.

Evolution says that populations change over generations. That is, the aggregate composition of the individuals change. Again, think of basketball teams. Over the years the composition of the team changes, and this shows up in the win-loss record of the team and how the team plays. The Chicago Bulls today is not the same team as it was when Michael Jordan was on it. "My" football team the Minnesota Vikings is not playing the same type of football as they did back in the 1970s. The team has different traits because the individuals in aggregate have different traits.

Darwin talked of "traits". The traits are based in the genetics. The genetics are based on the alleles (forms of genes) in the genome of the individual. Over generations, the composition of alleles in populations change. Some alleles disappear entirely: no individual has that allele anymore, even tho once many generations back every individual had that allele. New alleles appear by mutation. Those alleles that confer an advantage in the "struggle for life" to the individuals that are lucky enough to have them increase in frequency in the population. That is, more and more individuals have that allele because their parents were preserved in the struggle for life and passed that allele down to them. The population changes.

Also, the changes accumulate. That means that one change is there and then a second change is added. The first change doesn't go away. Then there is a 3rd change. After generations, so many changes have happened that the population is really not the same as the original.

This has been documented in the fossil record. Traits in populations follow a bell-shaped curve. Take height in humans as a trait and if we plot the height on the x-axis and the number of individuals at that particular height on the y-axis, you get a bell shaped curve. In several studies on both living organisms and fossil ones, the bell shaped curve can be plotted generation by generation. It shifts. In fact, it shifts so much that the new bell shaped curve no longer overlaps with the old. It's a brand new curve. Two papers that document this in the fossil record are:
1. PR Sheldon, Parallel gradualistic evolution of Ordovician trilobites. Nature 330: 561-563, 1987
2. McNamara KJ, Heterochrony and the evolution of echinoids. In CRC Paul and AB Smith (eds) Echinoderm Phylogeny and Evolutionary Biology, pp149-163, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1988 pg 140 of Futuyma's Evolutionary Biology 2nd Edition.

Theistic evolution attributes to God the creation of all species but it does not acknowledge any specific points of creation. But if there are no points of creation,then God does not create anything at all.

First, evolution says we cannot find the specific point in the transition. If it takes 1,000 generations to go from species A to species B, we cannot point to a specific generation and say "Here at genertion 500 we have species A and here at generation 501 we have species B". Evolution simply does not work that way.

Second, I don't see how you can apply any limitation on God as to how He created. How does anyone get the chutzpah to tell God "unless there are time points of creation, then You didn't create"?

What we are doing when we study God's Creation is trying to figure out how God created, not start out by saying how He had to create. Creationists talk a a lot about "presumptions". Here is a very clear one: a presumption that creation by God has to be a specific point in time.

I say discard the presumption. God can create any way He chooses and is not limited to creating "at a specific point".

The immediate creation of a species is not,properly speaking,a miracle,because it is not contrary to the laws or normal ways of nature.

I am a little confused here. Anthony has claimed that natural selection cannot change populations and that genetic mutations do not introduce enough change in individuals to make them a new species. So how did the first individuals of existing species get here if it was not by miracle? Evolution has found that our species -- H. sapiens -- evolved from H. ergastor. But Anthony says that changes introduced by mutations are not sufficient to do this. So how did the species H. sapiens originate?

 

[Harry3142]

First, let me state that I am a believer in Intelligent Design. I do not accept the creation stories of genesis as literal fact, nor do I accept the theory of evolution as literal fact.

The theory of evolution has a presupposition which does not conform to what scientists themselves have discovered, and recorded in various journals and publications. Specifically, it states that following the meteor impact which occurred circa 65 million years ago, eliminating the last of the dinosaurs and making it possible for mammals to develop, this planet has been free of extinction level events. That simply does not hold up under unbiased scrutiny. Instead, there have been many ELE's since the one which occurred 65 million years ago.

35 million years ago a meteor hit this planet, creating an impact crater 53 miles in diameter in Chesapeake Bay, Md., USA. A theory of evolution apologist claimed that it only made 'a big splash', which in all likelihood caused some scientists to laugh uproariously. In order for the meteor to have caused nothing more than a tsunami, it would have had to hit in an area where the water is deep enough to prevent it from hitting the sea bed. Chesapeake Bay is less than 300 feet deep at its maximum depth.

Also, a meteor travelling at 40,000 miles per hour (64,371 KPH) causes the air ahead of it to compress and heat up to well over 1,000 degrees celsius. This mass of superheated air would be pushed ahead of the meteor itself, and so would make first contact with whatever water was there at that time. That temperature would have immediately turned the water into steam, a gas rather than a liquid, and enabled the meteor to proceed to the sea bed as if it were on dry land.

As well, a meteor travelling at that speed would have covered the distance between the water's surface and the sea bed in less than .005 seconds. So to say that the surrounding water had time to re-enter the area, affecting the meteor in any way, does not conform to science itself. The time is simply too short for that to have happened.

Another impact occurred circa 10 million years ago in Tajikistan, creating an impact crater 32 miles in diameter. This occurred on a landmass, but has been 'swept under the rug' by those who want us to believe that there was no interference with a slow, progressive evolution.

There have also been 3 meteor impacts (2 in Canada; 1 in Germany) dating from 38 million years ago to 15 million years ago, each of which created impact craters 15 miles in diameter. These impacts also occurred over the landmasses themselves, rather than in deep water.

The supervolcano under presentday Yellowstone National Park, USA, has erupted 3 times in the last 2 million years. Mt. Toba, another supervolcano located in Sumatra, erupted only 70,000 years ago.

And what do all of these events have in common besides the enormous destruction they would have immediately caused in a widespread area (ash from Mt. Toba's eruption has been found in Greenland)? They were all powerful enough to send ash and sulfurous gasses into the stratosphere, where they proceeded to envelop the entire planet in a 'cocoon'. This 'cocoon' prevented the sun's rays from arriving at the surface of the planet, and so turned the planet into the equivalent of a walk-in freezer year-round for years, if not decades. Only those animals which could live entirely underground, feeding on other animals, such as worms and insects that live entirely underground, could have survived. Any animal, including those whom evolutionists claim were man's ancestors, who depended on what they could obtain on the surface of this planet, would have been doomed. And the last time this planet was under these conditions was not 65 million years ago; it was 70,000 years ago.

When asked about this, the standard answer of evolutionists is, "If some of the animal species hadn't survived, they wouldn't have evolved, and we wouldn't be here now. So some of them had to have survived." That's called a circular argument, and has no place in a serious discussion. If animals survived in temperatures which we know to be fatal to any animal exposed to them for even a few minutes, let alone years, then scientists need to reveal how those animals survived, and their explanation needs to be seperate from the promotion of any theory.

Theories such as the theory of evolution are to be based on real evidence that indicates there were no problems of sufficient magnitude to render that theory false. Facts are never to be either 'swept under the rug', or deliberately described as a lesser consequence than the facts themselves support in order to maintain the legitimacy of a theory that has serious flaws attached to it.