Comment

Another Stealth Creationist Bill in Florida

185
docjay2/10/2009 7:38:08 pm PST

Hi everyone - There were a couple of loose ends last night that I have looked into. Based on the reception (or lack thereof) I got the first two times out, I assume there will be little agreement as well on what I have to say tonight.

First with the most recent, tomorrow night for the loose ends.

Sharmuta at #181. I read further some of the debate about ID, and I think we’re going to have to agree to disagree on this (without I hope being disagreeable). After Behe’s “Darwin’s Black Box” was published there were a number of Darwinists who disagreed with his conclusions. I read Behe’s responses to them and I think he quite ably defended his thesis. At least some of Behe’s responses can be found at discovery.org and trueorigin.org. As for there being (or not being a working hypothesis supporting intelligent design, I would point you to the following site:
ideacenter.org.

Salamantis at #182 & 183. Found out where you the rabbit example - it’s from population geneticist Robert Haldane (and later picked up by Richard Dawkins). In any event, if you actually found a rabbit in pre-Cambrian strata, would you really reject Darwinism, or would you try to figure out how the rabbit got there?
But coming back to falsifiability, there are two parts to the Darwinian model. The first is random variation, or as Ernst Mayr rephrased it, random mutation. (Correct me if I am wrong on that.) The second is survival of the fittest.
When we look at the first part, we actually never observe a favorable random mutation. Indeed, Lynn Margulis, a Darwinist (of sorts) said as much. Then we have Marc Kirschner’s book, The Plausibility of Life. and it too rejects random mutation (see pp. 13-14). Instead, it recasts the Darwinian model as being plausible based on the first cell’s having everything needed for future development (and that itself raises all kinds of questions). Yet Darwinists continue to view random mutation as the engine for evolution. That is what I mean by not being falsifiable. Secondly, when we come to natural selection, we find Darwinists using it to explain everything. When you do that, you are positing something that is not falsifiable. Also, if natural selection worked, it would just select away the weakest of the current crop of species; how would it add information to the gene pool?

Next you imply that 530 million years is plenty of time for all the variations to occur to take us from the creatures then to forms today. There are simply too many variations between the Cambrian period and the present to account for the changes that have occurred to have occurred randomly. When you start doing the probabilities, you quickly run out of time. Also, note my earlier comment about random changes. As a rule, order does not arise from disorder.

Your next statement about punctuated equilibrium and gradualism not being mutually exclusive I find quite contradictory. For the most part what we observe in the fossil record is punctuated equilibrium. Even the transitional forms you pointed me to at wiki are not persuasive. As Denton has pointed out, the gaps between the first form and the subsequent one are quite large. In any event, I don’t find the fossil persuasive. What the fossil record has is forensic evidence. We see fossil A become (kinda) fossil A’ (or A”). We don’t know how that happened which is what you must explain. I would say the same thing is true for the close relationship between chimps and humans. Again it is forensic evidence which must be explained.

Let me close with an example from Kant (who also had a watchmaker example predating Paley). If you were to discover a perfect hexagon carved in the ground in a wilderness, what would you conclude? Similarly, when I look at the nanotechnology of the cell, I am lead to the same conclusion.

I have some other things to say, but I gotta get to sleep.

Docjay