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Re: Evolution/Creation debate



At 21:29 -0400 9/3/02, Steve Clark wrote:

After all, how would one go about showing that the
theory of evolution (life starting as some muck in the primordial soup
and continuing up the ladder to us) is wrong?

A. Evolution says nothing about how it all started. That's another
field entirely. Evolution only talks about how things went once they
got started.

B. Now that we can leave out the startup, the way one proves that
evolution didn't happen is to gather counterexamples in the fossil
record--fossils of antecedent species embedded clearly in strata that
are newer than those of the purported descendents. This mean actually
younger strata, not just strata on top of the older ones, since we
all know that there is lots of folding of the strata which often lays
an older layer atop a younger one, but tracing the strata back to the
unfolded areas will show which is really older and which is younger.
To my knowledge (and I'm not a paleontologist) such have never been
found.

In the statistical sense,
what would be the null hypothesis? And what if you show the null
hypothesis to be more likely than evolution?

I don't think it fully qualifies as a null hypothesis. Finding
counterexamples, as noted above would serve to disprove evolution (at
least as it is presently understood). But science is in the business
of finding natural explanations for natural phenomena. To simply
throw up one's hands (as Michael Behe and the proponents of
Intelligent Design have done) and say, well there is no way I can
explain this. God must have done it, is to give up. Just because I
can't explain how something could have come about naturally doesn't
mean someone else, either now or in the future, won't. To argue that
if we have no natural explanation, therefore God did that part, is to
fall into the "God of the gaps" error, where the justification for
God, is that he did whatever we can't explain. And the problem is, of
course, that we keep figuring out how things that we couldn't explain
before could have happened, or how the did happen. Wew'll probably
never have all the answers, but it is clear that the "gaps" are
getting narrower.

The evolutionists require a tremendous amount of faith to come to
accept the doctrine of macroevolution, and still have the problem of
"what makes something alive?"

Again, "what makes something alive" is not part of evolution.
Darwinians are only trying to explain what happened, not why it
happened, and to only offer "hows" to the extent that they fall into
naturalistic paradigms. First causes are not offered, either for the
beginning, or for the processes. If one desires to believe that God
guides (or guided) this process along its path, they are free to do
so, and science cannot refute that belief.

The biologists take the "theory" of evolution more as a "model" than a
true explanation.

Why do you put the quotations marks around theory here? The theory of
evolution is as well-founded a scientific idea as most any that we
have. And of course it's not put forth as a "true explanation." No
scientific theory ever is. All we have are models that we hope come
"close enough" to they way things really are to meet our current
needs. As our needs change and our capabilities improve and we learn
to ask better questions, the models will change. Some more than
others.

And when taken in that light, it becomes as good a
model as creationism.

The problem is that creationism doesn't try to explain how it came
about, other than on a whim of the deity. That is not a scientific
was to approach things, and so, as a scientific approach creationism
is fatally flawed, and not nearly as good a model as evolution.

After all, how many times do you hear the
biologists say that a creature is the way as if it were designed that
way? (Example: The elephant has very large ears so it can cool itself
better. That sounds like a design decision to me.)

And you know that that is just a shorthand for what would otherwise
be a long and convoluted sentence. The characteristics came before
the purpose. Evolution is the ultimate opportunist. The reason it
looks like the elephants large ears were designed for the purpose of
cooling itself, is that those elephants, in climates where cooling
was important, and who happened to have large ears survived and left
larger number of progeny behind than did those elephants who didn't
happen to have large ears. This same argument can be made for every
adaptive innovation that nature has foisted upon its living denizens.

It may even happen that large ears provide no particular reproductive
benefit to elephants, but they are linked to some other trait that
does, perhaps a longer trunk, which enables it to reach the tasty
morsels higher in the trees, or whatever. When the elephants with the
longer trunks survived in larger numbers, the large ears came along
with them. And perhaps a climate change then made the large ears
useful as a cooling device. This is only one possibility. There are
countless others. These don't sound like design decisions to me. As
any engineers will tell you animal bodies are hardly optimally
designed. Nature has often simply taken what was there and made use
of it in an ad hoc manner. Kind of like building a raft to escape a
desert island by using whatever materials happen to be at hand. As
illustrated in the movie Castaway, the resulting craft will hardly be
an optimal design, but in this case, it worked well enough.

And "well enough" is all that nature asks.

Hugh
--

Hugh Haskell
<mailto:haskell@ncssm.edu>
<mailto:hhaskell@mindspring.com>

(919) 467-7610

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