Will China overthrow Darwin?

[mindlight]

Chen is dead wrong. Darwin is widely criticized in America.

He was talking to scientists. In many universities it is career suicide to criticise the basic idea of evolution and even more so here in Europe.

 

[mindlight]

On a related note, one of the coolest and most educational exhibits on evolution I've ever seen is at the Shanghai Natural History Museum. The Mankind Evolution Hall at the Beijing Natural History Museum is also very informative.

True Chinese Communism relationship with Darwin as with Mao is a strong one and Chen was not really seeking to overthrow the theory at all but he had some new ideas about how to think of it. The main point was about the freedom of thought

 

[mindlight]

Darwinism Must Die So That Evolution May Live --- By CARL SAFINA

"You care for nothing but shooting, dogs and rat-catching," Robert Darwin told his son, "and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family." Yet the feckless boy is everywhere. Charles Darwin gets so much credit, we can’t distinguish evolution from him. Equating evolution with Charles Darwin ignores 150 years of discoveries, including most of what scientists understand about evolution. Such as: Gregor Mendel’s patterns of heredity (which gave Darwin’s idea of natural selection a mechanism — genetics — by which it could work); the discovery of DNA (which gave genetics a mechanism and lets us see evolutionary lineages); developmental biology (which gives DNA a mechanism); studies documenting evolution in nature (which converted the hypothetical to observable fact); evolution’s role in medicine and disease (bringing immediate relevance to the topic); and more. By propounding "Darwinism," even scientists and science writers perpetuate an impression that evolution is about one man, one book, one "theory." The ninth-century Buddhist master Lin Chi said, "If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him." The point is that making a master teacher into a sacred fetish misses the essence of his teaching. So let us now kill Darwin.

That all life is related by common ancestry, and that populations change form over time, are the broad strokes and fine brushwork of evolution. But Darwin was late to the party. His grandfather, and others, believed new species evolved. Farmers and fanciers continually created new plant and animal varieties by selecting who survived to breed, thus handing Charles Darwin an idea. All Darwin perceived was that selection must work in nature, too. In 1859, Darwin’s perception and evidence became "On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or The Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life." Few realize he published 8 books before and 10 books after "Origin." He wrote seminal books on orchids, insects, barnacles and corals. He figured out how atolls form, and why they’re tropical. Credit Darwin’s towering genius. No mind ran so freely, so widely or so freshly over the hills and vales of existence. But there’s a limit to how much credit is reasonable. Parking evolution with Charles Darwin overlooks the limits of his time and all subsequent progress.

Science was primitive in Darwin’s day. Ships had no engines. Not until 1842, six years after Darwin’s Beagle voyage, did Richard Owen coin the term "dinosaur." Darwin was an adult before scientists began debating whether germs caused disease and whether physicians should clean their instruments. In 1850s London, John Snow fought cholera unaware that bacteria caused it. Not until 1857 did Johann Carl Fuhlrott and Hermann Schaaffhausen announce that unusual bones from the Neander Valley in Germany were perhaps remains of a very old human race. In 1860 Louis Pasteur performed experiments that eventually disproved "spontaneous generation," the idea that life continually arose from nonliving things. Science has marched on. But evolution can seem uniquely stuck on its founder. We don’t call astronomy Copernicism, nor gravity Newtonism. "Darwinism" implies an ideology adhering to one man’s dictates, like Marxism. And "isms" (capitalism, Catholicism, racism) are not science. "Darwinism" implies that biological scientists "believe in" Darwin’s "theory." It’s as if, since 1860, scientists have just ditto-headed Darwin rather than challenging and testing his ideas, or adding vast new knowledge.

Using phrases like "Darwinian selection" or "Darwinian evolution" implies there must be another kind of evolution at work, a process that can be described with another adjective. For instance, "Newtonian physics" distinguishes the mechanical physics Newton explored from subatomic quantum physics. So "Darwinian evolution" raises a question: What’s the other evolution? Into the breach: intelligent design. I am not quite saying Darwinism gave rise to creationism, though the "isms" imply equivalence. But the term "Darwinian" built a stage upon which "intelligent" could share the spotlight.

Charles Darwin didn’t invent a belief system. He had an idea, not an ideology. The idea spawned a discipline, not disciples. He spent 20-plus years amassing and assessing the evidence and implications of similar, yet differing, creatures separated in time (fossils) or in space (islands). That’s science. That’s why Darwin must go.

Almost everything we understand about evolution came after Darwin, not from him. He knew nothing of heredity or genetics, both crucial to evolution. Evolution wasn’t even Darwin’s idea. Darwin’s grandfather Erasmus believed life evolved from a single ancestor. "Shall we conjecture that one and the same kind of living filaments is and has been the cause of all organic life?" he wrote in "Zoonomia" in 1794. He just couldn’t figure out how. Charles Darwin was after the how. Thinking about farmers’ selective breeding, considering the high mortality of seeds and wild animals, he surmised that natural conditions acted as a filter determining which individuals survived to breed more individuals like themselves. He called this filter "natural selection." What Darwin had to say about evolution basically begins and ends right there. Darwin took the tiniest step beyond common knowledge. Yet because he perceived — correctly — a mechanism by which life diversifies, his insight packed sweeping power.

But he wasn’t alone. Darwin had been incubating his thesis for two decades when Alfred Russel Wallace wrote to him from Southeast Asia, independently outlining the same idea. Fearing a scoop, Darwin’s colleagues arranged a public presentation crediting both men. It was an idea whose time had come, with or without Darwin. Darwin penned the magnum opus. Yet there were weaknesses. Individual variation underpinned the idea, but what created variants? Worse, people thought traits of both parents blended in the offspring, so wouldn’t a successful trait be diluted out of existence in a few generations? Because Darwin and colleagues were ignorant of genes and the mechanics of inheritance, they couldn’t fully understand evolution.

Gregor Mendel, an Austrian monk, discovered that in pea plants inheritance of individual traits followed patterns. Superiors burned his papers posthumously in 1884. Not until Mendel’s rediscovered "genetics" met Darwin’s natural selection in the "modern synthesis" of the 1920s did science take a giant step toward understanding evolutionary mechanics. Rosalind Franklin, James Watson and Francis Crick bestowed the next leap: DNA, the structure and mechanism of variation and inheritance.

Darwin’s intellect, humility ("It is always advisable to perceive clearly our ignorance") and prescience astonish more as scientists clarify, in detail he never imagined, how much he got right. But our understanding of how life works since Darwin won’t swim in the public pool of ideas until we kill the cult of Darwinism. Only when we fully acknowledge the subsequent century and a half of value added can we really appreciate both Darwin’s genius and the fact that evolution is life’s driving force, with or without Darwin.

The myth has grown larger than the man to the point that the delusion he fathered is no longer dependent on him. Kill Darwin and you still have the problem of a reductive methodological naturalism reaching well beyond the scope of what it can demonstrate to assert it knows better than God.

 

[Paul of Eugene OR]

As a Creationist I would have to say there was no biblical evidence for common descent but plenty for a common Designer and an intelligence in creation!!!

But you would always have to ignore the physical evidence. And the physical evidence was left us by the Creator. It is therefore consistent with the manner of His creation. Which was, therefore, evolution.

 

[Paul of Eugene OR]

The myth has grown larger than the man to the point that the delusion he fathered is no longer dependent on him. Kill Darwin and you still have the problem of a reductive methodological naturalism reaching well beyond the scope of what it can demonstrate to assert it knows better than God.

If you continue to deny evolution, you do so in spite of the fact that you have a vestigial tail - your coccyx. There are many such pieces of evidence that inform us you are wrong to deny evolution.

 

[JackRT]

to assert it knows better than God.

Science says nothing about God for the simple reason that it can say nothing about God. I have been a Christian for over 70 years and I have no theological difficulties with the ToE.

 

[JackRT]

But you would always have to ignore the physical evidence.

We ignore reality at our peril.

 

[mindlight]

But you would always have to ignore the physical evidence. And the physical evidence was left us by the Creator. It is therefore consistent with the manner of His creation. Which was, therefore, evolution.

The physical evidence of fossils formed in sedimentary rock all over the world are to me evidence of a ferocious flood judgment. This was a supernatural and catastrophic intervention not a patient and gradual one spread over billions of years. But what can be read in this record is minimal because there is no analogy to the way these things were formed, there is no experiment by which we can demonstrate speculated links and patterns to be real and uniformitarian principles cannot be applied to an unanalogous supernatural judgment. So I am actually content to live with saying I know why that fossil is there but I am not sure why it is in this layer of rock and not that one.

 

[mindlight]

Science says nothing about God for the simple reason that it can say nothing about God. I have been a Christian for over 70 years and I have no theological difficulties with the ToE.

I was a TE before I was a YEC. This is not a salvation issue. The scriptures are a more reliable source than the book of nature when it comes to origins and fossils. Science can neither prove nor disprove the existence of God and moves beyond its scope when it can no longer demonstrate the validity of its findings. The discussion of origins as of human nature and remote cosmology are examples of the overextension of science

 

[mindlight]

If you continue to deny evolution, you do so in spite of the fact that you have a vestigial tail - your coccyx. There are many such pieces of evidence that inform us you are wrong to deny evolution.

There is no such thing as vestigial organs. But there is proof of flexibility in our design that allows different types of creature to adapt to their environments. Fortunately we do not need tails.

 

[Paul of Eugene OR]

The discussion of origins as of human nature and remote cosmology are examples of the overextensiion of science

Only because you don't like their findings.

 

[sfs]

As a Creationist I would have to say there was no biblical evidence for common descent but plenty for a common Designer and an intelligence in creation!!!

A healthy majority of Christian biologists disagree with you. Do you know more about biology than we do?

However what Meyer and the ID movement generally has to say relating to the methodologies employed by scientists in reading the patterns in the rocks and plotting the discontinuities and continuities into some kind of diagram of relationships is interesting.

The ID movement generally has nothing at all to say about common descent, or even about the age of the earth. They refuse to take a position on either subject. Some of the more scientifically minded among them (e.g. Behe) accept common descent, but the movement as a whole doesn't want to offend creationists. Thus they're unsure about the most basic of factual questions (the age of the Earth), but are quite sure about a difficult question where there is little evidence.

Launching the discussion on the science forum I was amazed at how quick this became an ad hominem personal response and how little was said about the real issues except the quoting of the party line.

You do realize that almost everything you've written here is (in your sense) ad hominem and a quoting of your party line, right?

If you can propose an alternative theory that predicts genetic data as well as common descent, I'm all ears. What does ID predict about the kinds of genetic differences we'll see between humans and chimpanzees, say?

 

[~Anastasia~]

All partisans, whether western or whatever, can be harsh to anything that challenges certain pet theories. So that is not an argument against the theories.

How about using evidence, instead of pointing out flaws in the people who hold the theories? Aren't we all flawed?

You seem to think I have something to prove here?

I was simply addressing the possibility that western academia might be less tolerant of new theories than the Chinese.

I'm not pointing out flaws in persons, but commenting on the tendency of a system (which is indeed composed of persons) ... but it is not my desire to air old grievances or prove anything. If anyone doubts the culture of western academia, I suppose they can go check for themselves.

And yes of course we are all flawed.

You really seem to be reading something into my posts that I never said. And that's not meant as a personal attack. We don't know each other well but I've seen you around the forums and generally respect your perspective.

So maybe we have some kind of misunderstanding going on. Forgive me please if I'm not inspired to defend my statements, as they weren't meant as arguments. I'm afraid I only find this all mildly amusing. I'm not upset.

Peace to you.

 

[mark kennedy]

Chen is dead wrong. Darwin is widely criticized in America.

Darwin always has been and always will be criticized. If you think the philosophy is limited to how things are selected in nature for adaptation your not paying attention.

 

[mark kennedy]

A healthy majority of Christian biologists disagree with you. Do you know more about biology than we do?

The ID movement generally has nothing at all to say about common descent, or even about the age of the earth. They refuse to take a position on either subject. Some of the more scientifically minded among them (e.g. Behe) accept common descent, but the movement as a whole doesn't want to offend creationists. Thus they're unsure about the most basic of factual questions (the age of the Earth), but are quite sure about a difficult question where there is little evidence.

You do realize that almost everything you've written here is (in your sense) ad hominem and a quoting of your party line, right?

If you can propose an alternative theory that predicts genetic data as well as common descent, I'm all ears. What does ID predict about the kinds of genetic differences we'll see between humans and chimpanzees, say?

I know what creationists would say, it's exactly what was discovered, to much divergence to be explained rationally, let alone scientifically.

 

[Paul of Eugene OR]

You seem to think I have something to prove here?

I was simply addressing the possibility that western academia might be less tolerant of new theories than the Chinese. . . . .

The Chinese are under constant threat of the need to conform to the party line of their governing communist leaders. This threat perhaps frees them up to speculate in areas their leaders don't worry about. This is something that happens over and over again among us humans and there are those who would bring that situation about in our country if we don't watch out.

As it is today, we see how our divided country is able to get both factions to have a president elected, in turn. This is freedom. Which faction is the less tolerant? Which faction is more dangerous? Is that the same thing as asking which faction is more correct in its core beliefs? It is not. But it is worth asking.

 

[~Anastasia~]

The Chinese are under constant threat of the need to conform to the party line of their governing communist leaders. This threat perhaps frees them up to speculate in areas their leaders don't worry about. This is something that happens over and over again among us humans and there are those who would bring that situation about in our country if we don't watch out.

As it is today, we see how our divided country is able to get both factions to have a president elected, in turn. This is freedom. Which faction is the less tolerant? Which faction is more dangerous? Is that the same thing as asking which faction is more correct in its core beliefs? It is not. But it is worth asking.

Ok.

Forgive me, I'm going to have to leave you to it for now.

 

[sfs]

I know what creationists would say, it's exactly what was discovered, to much divergence to be explained rationally, let alone scientifically.

Creationists can say anything at all. Find me one who can tell me what the genetic differences between species should look like.

 

[mark kennedy]

Creationists can say anything at all. Find me one who can tell me what the genetic differences between species should look like.

We have had that conversation and it doesn't include mutations millions of base pairs long and highly conserved genes undergoing massive overhauls. It certainly doesn't include 60 brand new genes appearing out of nowhere related to vital brain function. Creationists simply believe God created life, the alternative comes with baggage.

 

[Paul of Eugene OR]

We have had that conversation and it doesn't include mutations millions of base pairs long and highly conserved genes undergoing massive overhauls. It certainly doesn't include 60 brand new genes appearing out of nowhere related to vital brain function. Creationists simply believe God created life, the alternative comes with baggage.

This seems to assume the alternatives are exclusive. There are many of us who believe God created all things using the process of evolution and common descent of all life. So everything you see that points to a creator is still pointing to a Creator and yet science isn't denied.