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The Talk.Origins Archive: Exploring the Creation/Evolution Controversy

Feedback for January 2004

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Response: Hi there. Thanks for the giggle. The page you linked is a joke. It does serve to point out how hard it is to satirize creationists as they are their own self-parody.

One clue is the "Gould recanting" which is a clear reference to the creationist's old fraud of Darwin "recanting evolution" on his deathbed. The latter is known as the "Lady Hope Story" as is debunked so often that even the arch-creationists at the Answers in Genesis Ministry have acknowledged that it should be dropped from the creationist screed.

Did Darwin recant?

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Response: First, I did not alter the spelling or gammar.

Second, searching on "elephant" and "fossil" will return thousands of hits on google. A useful outline of the major elephantine groups is available here at TalkOrigins:

Transitional Vertebrate Fossils FAQ Part 2B

Now, there were indeed some small elephants, and I am sure it will be a total mystery to our anonymous friend that some of the smaller animals were in fact among the later members of the group. There are but three surviving members, but a vast array of sizes and shapes of elephants are known to paleontology.

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In addition, I'll challenge the reader to produce a collection number for any fossil passenger pigeon. These birds were present in such enormous numbers that their migrations were reported to darken the sky. Yet not one passenger pigeon fossil is known. These animals certainly fit the "recent" category, and nobody is saying that "gaps" explain this lack. The answer to why our museums are not full of passenger pigeon fossils, and a great many other species, lies instead in the realm of taphonomy.

Wesley

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Response: After looking around, I noted that Wikipedia has an article on Webster's dictionary which tallies with what I have read in Simon Winchester's The Meaning of Everything.

Basically, any edition before 1914 is copyright exempt now, so publishers are free to update their own. Merriam-Webster of course still produce their own versions, and have one online.

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Response: No, creationist fantasies notwithstanding, evolutionary theory is not a religion. See:

Evolution Religious and Is evolution just another religion?

Furthermore while it is true that Darwin did obtain a B.A. degree in theology from Christ's College, Cambridge, and that he did consider becoming a pastor, he was never ordained as a minister.

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Response: The quick answer is that some creationist claims cannot be proven or disproven, and other claims have been disproven. In particular, unprovable claims include:
  • God created things with the appearance of age. (How would that be different from them really being old?)
  • Biological change is bounded within a created kind. (What's a "kind"?)
  • Certain things look "intelligently designed". (But we are further told that we can know nothing about the designer, including what sorts of things it would make.)

Claims which have been disproven include:

  • The earth is less than 10,000 years old.
  • A global flood occurred within human history.
  • A dense vapor canopy once greatly prolonged human lifetimes.
Of course, all of the disproven claims can be moved to the unknowable category if one resorts to "God did it." Disproof refers to what the evidence indicates; it does not apply (indeed, nothing applies) if evidence may be dismissed out of hand by appeal to magic.
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Response: There is a procedure for submitting articles to the TalkOrigins archive. You can read it here:

Submission Guidelines

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Response: I for one would love to hear which "evolutionists" say the earth is 40+ billion years old. I'm not aware of any scientist anywhere who believes the earth to be that old. I strongly recommend doing some actual research on the subject before you make statements like this.
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Response: We promote "mainstream science" not because it's "mainstream", but because there's a good reason why it's mainstream - because the evidence supports it. Evolution is "mainstream" because 150 years of research in a dozen fields of science all validate the theory as accurate, because it is the only theory which has real explanatory power, and because nothing makes sense in numerous areas of inquiry without it. If the evidence supported creationism, then we would advocate that idea. The cardinal rule of science is to go where the evidence leads.
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Response: Well, I always like positive reviews. And in honor of our friend Chris, I will try to include all other positive feedback posts this month. Typically, there are at least a few overlooked.
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Response: Thank you for your comments. I have revised that page (CA320.1) accordingly.
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Response: There is a procedure for submitting articles to the TalkOrigins archive. You can read it here:

http://www.talkorigins.org/origins/faqs-submit.html

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Response: There has been more interesting results in the last 10 years than in the prior 20. Much of this is the product of the NASA program in exobiology. Some websites for you to review are:
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Author of: Evolution and Philosophy
Response: This is not circular reasoning - it is abductive inference, to use the technical terms of the philosophy of science. We know that we can observe the results of things that happened a short while ago, because we see them happening and see the results. We know this for longer and longer periods by direct inspection, back to the beginning of reliable and objective records (about 4 centuries).

When we see results of processes before that, and they are of the same kind as what we have seen since then, we have good reason to accept that the causal processes are the same, too. Again, this is not circular reasoning. In this way we build up a picture of the past that is coherent, based on presently observable and experimentally verifiable causes, and on evidence of things past.

Historical knowledge is not ever complete, because information is lost over time. But we do know that the same general processes, such as physics, chemistry, astronomy, geological and biological processes, applied then as they do now. Were we to abandon that knowledge, we would need to give up all science, historical or not.

A lecturer of mine used to say, "all knowledge is historical", because by the time we have observed and measured some event, it is already in the past. All we are doing with evolution (or astronomy, geology and so on) is extrapolating a bit or a lot further.

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Author of: Evolution and Philosophy
Response: 1. We do not know, nor are we ever likely to know for sure, what the simplest life form was. However, we do know a lot more now about what might have happened, and we will eventually be able to generate an artificial life form using prebiotic chemistries.

2. It probably didn't - but anything that is generated now will be very simple compared to the complex voracious predators of modern life - any products will be eaten up before they go much further. We would see that as a form of chemical process on which modern forms now live.

3. Artificial selection (which remains natural, unless there's something about human capabilities that became supernatural when I wasn't looking) has not been able to create species in things like dogs or sheep because there is a limited amount of genetic variation in a wild species that we can play with. However, if we played with it long enough for novel mutations to arise (and some have, for example, in Manx cats) which, taken together, would interfere with interbreeding with the ancestral forms, new species would therefore arise.

And guess what - it has been done, in the 1960s, with Drosophila fruit flies. And with plants so many times one could not list them all - but that is by hybridisation, which involves rather different mechanisms.

4. They do not. I know personally and by reputation a number of Christians who accept the reality of God, and many like myself who simply do not know one way or the other. There are also atheists who accept evolution. The science is basically neutral on the topic, as all science ought to be.

Evolutionary hypotheses are tested and debated and scrutinised by evolutionary biologists, and they can be very harsh on each other - which is how science should proceed. Evolution itself cannot be questioned any more than the existence of gravity - it's been seen, tested, played with and it explains more biology than anything else remotely can. To abandon it now would be an act of extreme stupidity or know-nothingness. It cannot be justified for any scientist. I am unsure why anyone would think this is a criticism - science learns, and does not throw hard-won knowledge away because some religious objections arise.

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Response: It's also worth noting that, although it seems to be a bit contradictory, active and lively debate is actually a sign that a theory is alive and healthy. In science, the only theories which are not still being actively investigated and debated are those which have failed, and been abandoned.
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Response: Interesting idea.
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Author of: Punctuated Equilibria
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Interesting. My FAQ on PE does note that even the original paper expounding the theory of punctuated equilibria gave positive evidence. Look in the section on "Common errors in discussion of PE". And one does not have to have complete knowledge in order to demonstrate a transitional fossil sequence conforming to the description of PE. Please read the PE FAQ, or read it again.

Wesley

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Response: You can find out yourself at Robert William's site. Click on the link "Comparison of the Human and Great Apes Chromosomes as Evidence for Common Ancestry". Raw images can be downloaded from Indiana University.
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Chromosomes can merge (fusion) or split (fission). It appears that there was a fusion event in the lineage leading to humans, which means that all of the genetic information was still there at the time of the change, it was just packaged a little differently. 48 and 46 are the diploid, or 2n numbers for chimps and humans, respectively. We're really talking about a change from 24 paired chromosomes to 23, which is handily explained by a fusion event.

There are a number of good introductory books on genetics available these days. I'd recommend visiting a library or bookstore near you.

Wesley

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You have to have a scientific theory in order to test it. Whether you have a Ph.D. is irrelevant to the results of tests of theories.

Wesley

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Response: I enjoyed teaching at community colleges as well as in graduate programs, and art colleges. My first teaching assignment was to middle school (12-14 year olds) science classes.

And after around 30 years of teaching, I have never stopped marveling at the fact that everyone is born ignorant of just about every thing. Further, it takes an active effort from both teachers and students to minimize that ignorance. That effort an be easily reduced for the student by rejecting complicated knowledge and utilizing simple belief systems. "duh, its a mircul," is much easier than learning physics, chemistry and biology. Basic laziness is aided and abetted by professional creationist charlatans promoting falsehoods including that true believers have much to lose, and little to gain by adopting a rational perspective.

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Author of: Evolution and Philosophy
Response: I fail to see how anything I wrote could be construed as logical positivism. For a start, I am more influenced by the later Wittgestein, himself an opponent of the Vienna Circle, and by Thomas Kuhn, who is anything but a positivist, logical or otherwise. Moreover, most often when people are accused of being logical positivists, it is because the term has become a byword for bad philosophy (David Hull calls them "The all-purpose evil demons of modern philosophy"), when in fact they were very good philosophers and their arguments took considerable hard work to dismantle. If the reader has specific criticisms of them or me, it would pay to hear them in detail on the Usenet newsgroup talk.origins.

The term I use is "metaphysical naturalism" - "philosophical" is Johnson's term, and it is ambiguous. You trade on that ambiguity here. I do not assert that metaphysical naturalism is known to be true. That is not disbelief; it is reserving judgement on a matter than is not (as yet, if ever) decideable. And I do not then "turn around on the assumption it must be true". The reader has failed to appreciate that method and metaphysics are distinct. One can, in fact I think has no alternative, use methodological naturalism to learn about the world. But this is not to proceed on the grounds of metaphysical naturalism of any kind. Indeed, if one is a thoroughgoing theist, as a scientist one still has to proceed using method that is naturalistic in science (and in a great deal of ordinary life as well).

You say the issue is twofold: what is real and true? and How do we know? I agree. Reality and truth are ontological and metaphysical questions. Knowledge is an epistemological question. One knows what one knows through the exercise of reason and evidence, and nothing else in science. Intuitions, internal revelations, and mystical experiences won't cut it in science, no matter how some might wish that is did. But for all science knows, they may still be real. I fail to see why this is a contradiction, or that hard to understand.

How do I know (I presume non-circularly) that science is the most successful way of learning about the world? Simply put - because we can do a lot more and more reliably through science with the world than we ever could with anything else. And I would claim that the criteria for success in this regard are not dependent on science itself. More people live through disease, we treavel farther and faster, we can communicate better, we can live longer, we can build bigger and better (sometimes) and we can explain more, through science than through astrology, alchemy, divination, or ritual. Deny it if you please, you won't convince many.

The rhetorical questions are unanswerable, mainly because they appear to mean nothing. Is truth to be taken as correspondence to the physical world of a statement? Then I answer, yes, you can test the truth of statements. is it coherence to the larger body of knowledge we have about the world? Then yes, I can test the truth of a statement. But to assume that sense perception is in need of justification, or induction for that matter, before we can say we know anything leads us to what Hume called "Pyrrhic Skepticism" - a denial that there even is knowledge. At that point, I have to say, your use of the word "knowledge" is faulty. You must be talking about something else - perhaps mathematical certainty, I don't know.

The reduction of science to regularities is itself a standard doctrine of positivism. Do you really want to adopt that view here?

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Response: I personally think the topic of "origins" can quite easily be delt with without theology. But, if you disagree, I suggest that you stop whining, write out your case, and submit it for T.O. consideration. When you propose a theological/philosophical presentation supposedly predicated on scientific matters, you invite scientific criteria of review. Astronomy is not a scientific support for astrology any more than biology, or cosmology are a scientific basis for supernatural ideation.

Be prepared for a very severe review under the policies of TalkOrigins which are clearly posted. I recently withdrew one of my own articles from T.O. because I didn't want to make the changes requested by the reviewers. This is the reality of review.

I appreciate that you found my remarks "oh so witty," as I tire of dealing with those with too little wit to defend themselves. So again, my advice to you is send in your Kalam theory of biology. Otherwise there will be no other responses made.

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