Cozen said:
Firstly, facts do not speak for themselves, they are interpreted. It is like finding a glass of water that is half full. Fact: It is a glass of water that is half full. (Lets ignore the question of Why, and only ask How.) 2 possible very simple interpretations are that someone only filled the glass half way, or that the glass was full, and then someone used half of the water. We will now start looking for supporting facts to interpret our preconceptions of why the glass is half full. It is important to note, that if your starting assumptions are wrong, your end result will always be wrong.
Sure. So? This is precisely why we need a scientific process to weed out poorly made assumptions. And in the case of biology, this is exactly what happened: many of the assumptions people had prior to the 18th century turned out to be in serious error when you looked at the situation more closely.
It is very unlikely that I will be able to change the preconceptions of anyone to accept my world view only, but if I can get people to accept that my interpretations of the facts are also viable, then we are making progress.
Having read your interpretation, I don't think it's viable.
Lets start by defining ‘Kind’, as it is used in the Bible.
Why? Why not start definfing things based on an examination of them directly? Why use a classification system that was developed prior to scientific inquiry?
Gen 1:24 “And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so.” If a creature can breed and have offspring, they are of the same Kind.
Where does this leave bacteria: are all asexually reproducing bactera the same "kind" even if they are radically different? Or bdelloid rotifers (which reproduce by parthogenesis)?
What about ring species? With ring species, you have a population of animals spread out over a large area, in the ideally interesting case, in a full circle. Start with population "A" located at 12 o'clock in the circle. As we move in the circle in a clockwise direction, we find that all the adjoining populations can interbreed with each other. They are, however, in each place generally morphologically a little different, and the differences increase as we move around the circle. Once we reach 11 o'clock, however, we find that the creatures living there, population Y, do not interbreed with the ajoining population A. And there is even a population Z living in the same area as A that cannot interbreed with A. And all this, even though we had an unbroken circle of potential interbreeding all the way around the circle.
What you are describing in terms of interbreedability is actually a sort of rule of thumb called the "biological species concept" that scientists use to help classify things into species. But by and large, this is done for convienience rather than what we know to be the real situation, which is that there is no "bright line" separating that makes one population unable to breed with another.
The fact that their offspring might be sterile; is proof of bio diversity between them, but they had a common ancestor.
And here your argument seems to fall apart completely. Because what you are describing is part of a gradient of genetic incompatibility that builds up over time as populations are separated and grow more and more different (which is inevitable: when they don't interbreed, the gene pools drift, having lost the genetic interchange and pressure for compatibility that would otherwise keep them together). We see creatures on all ends of this spectrum. Some can interbreed just fine. Some interbreed only in rare situations, but still produce totally viable offspring. Some will breed only in captivity under forced conditions, but still produce viable offspring. Some have all of the above, and yet because they are already so different, produce hybrids with blended traits (for instance, wolphins: half dolphin, half false killer whales: they have 66 teeth, exactly halfway between their dolphin parent (88 teeth) and false killer whale parent (44 teeth). Very often, by the time we've reached the hybrid stage, there is already less and less viable offspring, because many of the basic gamete combinations do not work together. But some still do, and some of these hybrids can themselves produce offsping (i.e., they are not sterile). And so on, until we reach sterile offspring, and then finally no viable offspring at all.
And even that is simplifying things a great deal, and real life examples don't actually need to follow the exact pattern I laid out. Because the genetic factors that cause incompatibilities are so complex, and because their underlying logic is digital rather analog blending, any number of different paths away from compatibility can be mapped out.
So you can see that this makes the idea of distinct "kinds" a very problematic idea that doesn't really capture what we see in nature. And it's not like the underlying causes of genetic incompatibility are total mysteries either: in many cases, we know exactly what is happening to the genes that makes them less and less likely to succeed in produceing viable offspring. In humans, for instance, 1 out of every 900 people has something called a Robertsonian translocation.
http://gslc.genetics.utah.edu/units/disorders/karyotype/robertsonian.cfm
This is a chromosome change that still allows some viable combinations, but not others, hence reducing the amount of viable combinations of gametes. Over time, it's easy to see how further changes to the genes could produce some people capable of breeding with RT people, and some that could not. While I'm not implying that this is the sort of thing that habitually does or definately will cause speciation in humans, its certainly an example of how speciation can happen genetically in a way we understand pretty well.
Now, the study of morphology to group extinct and living species together. I agree that this is an interesting science, and the similarities between some fossils are awesome. But, putting two skulls next to each other and claiming they are related, is ultimately only an assumption, and not a true fact. (You can never know that 100%)
In science, you never know anything "100%" But all the assumptions involved in comparing fossils can be tested, and that's the point. You are acting like science just stops, instead of continuing on to refine and further delve into and test every assumption it can, thus making something more and more certain. In the case of common descent, this certainty is just overwhelming. It's hard to describe to someone who is new to the subject, because there is just so much evidence all confirming things in so many different ways, that you really need to learn quite a lot before you see how it all comes together into a single picture: what we call a convergence of evidence. This is the strongest sort of empirical proof possible, and in fact, evolution has one of the strongest convergences of evidence in all the sciences, mostly because there are so many different ways to prove the same thing, and they all arrive at the same answer.
Compare this to historical events, where we often have only a few lines of evidence and eyewitness reports: the evidence is there, but there just isn't enough of it in many cases to converge.
Try and understand my point of view. If we all had the same Creator (Not nature, but God), then we will expect to see striking similarities.
Why? When I create something, I often use very different methods for different things. I use different programming languages for different tasks, and when I'm building a workbench as opposed to a car, I use completely different tools and engineering principles. So there is no reason per se to expect that a Creator would be so basally uncreative. The fact that you can imagine a particular Creator that might for some motive create exactly the sort of life we see is also not very interesting: you could do the same thing no matter WHAT life was like. If it was all different, you'd claim that this was evidence of a Creator because only that would produce such radically different things.
So your explanation here is what's known as "ad hoc" or after the fact. Your explanation "Creator" doesn't REQUIRE life to look any which way at all: whatever it was, you could just as easily make up a reason for why the Creator might have wanted it that way. Thus your explanation risks nothing to empirical evidence: no new find would confirm or disconfirm the explanation. But this means that the evidence is never really telling us anything about the Creator explanation, and so isn't really evidence FOR it. In contrast, the success of the evolution explanation REQUIRES that life to look and be a certain very very very particular way, arranged in a very particular pattern. The evidence could easily be any number of other ways, but it is not: it continually reaffirms that one very particular pattern. Thus, the evidence relaly does serve to confirm or disconfirm the evolutionary framework, and the explanation earns its reputation because it actually risked being wrong, but was found not to be.
I as a software developer always have a set of dynamic reusable code that you will find common in all my systems. This same explanation goes for DNA similarities.
Maybe on a rather abstract level. But look at the fine detail of the similarities (and the differences) and a pattern emerges that is very much unlike your "code library." It is a pattern of particular relationships from one species to the next, with all sorts of rules that only make sense in light of DNA being transmitted only forwards in time via reproduction, rather than design.
For instance, I imagine that you refine your code library with new functions and bug fixes, which then can be distributed back down into all your applications. Likewise, you might hit upon a neat new bit of code and transfer it over to another application. But we never see anything like that in nature. There are no rewrites of the basic library that trickle down. There are, at least for most modern life, no lateral transmissions of "good ideas" which bely an origin in one family of life and then jump into another family of life. The most we see is bacteria and viruses splicing in new genetic material into genomes that's useful for them.
I am going to use the “irreducible complexity” argument, set forth my Michael J Behe, Phd. Bacteria are propelled by a flagellum, that has all the parts of an electric motor.
As with much pseudo-science, the flagellum claims are based on a pretty weak analougy along with sloppy reasoning. Flagella do not have "all the parts of an electric motor." The point of claiming that is to imply that if we find electric motors in nature, and electric motors are designed, flagella are designed. But even that would be a vrey sloppy use of analogy. And in fact, flagella are very diverse in their structure and work in a way that is bizarrely and uniquely electro-bio-chemical, not mechanical.
Now try to explain to me (if you are not a theist evolutionist), how something so complex could have evolved, if any of the single parts of this motor will be useless and confer no advantage to survival.
Okay: here's a good crack at it:
http://www.talkdesign.org/faqs/flagellum.html
Note that because we still have a lot to learn about flagella (including exactly how it works, we still dont know entirely, which makes asking how it evolved a little premature!) and the early history of life on earth, we cannot easily prove that any given scenario was "the" way. The problem is not finding the only way in which it could have happened, but in ruling out all of the many possible ways we can think of and showing that this or that one was the historical one. But since Behe's incredulity is based on possibility, possibility is all we really need to show to show that his argument is weak. And it is.
Now I understand the idea of having different evolutionary starting lineages, instead of a single common ancestor, but from what I understand, you also agree that all life began as something like bacteria.
Yes, though something rather unlike modern bacteria. And, as I noted, the waters of heritage become cloudy back then precisely because early life likely juggled around bits of genetic code outside of reproduction.
