re: #180 UncleRancher

I’m having a bit of a curiosity attack here. Howcome those most concerned with extinction seem to also be following the evolutionist dogma. One would think it should be the other way round, with evolution naturally eliminating those species no longer fit for the environment and producing new organisms that will more likely survive.

OK, you asked for an explanation.

Biblical literalists, quranic literalists, and people who understand evolution, all realize that on the scale of human concerns, extinction is forever. Not in our lifetime, and not in seven generations, or seventy, will we see the likes of passenger pigeons, or moas, or mastodons. From this perspective, it is of no importance whether evolution might eventually generate something new in their place.

To your rhetorical tactic of tarring as “dogma” the “evolutionist” position, well, it’s not a dogma. It’s a scientific theory, and people believe it because they see the evidence as strong verging on overwhelming.

Evolution doesn’t exactly “produce new organisms that are more likely to survive.” It just quietly shuffles gene frequencies around, so that genes that have a fitness advantage in whatever environment the organism is presented with become more common. If that leads to a new species, so be it. If it leads to stasis, as with horseshoe crabs, that’s OK too. If not for mutations, evolution would eventually run out of options, but replication is imperfect and mutations crop up from time to time. Most of them are bad for the organism and evolution flushes them right back out of the gene pool, but a few turn out to be useful and they become more common. With enough new genes and enough recombinations and changes in frequency, you may get a new species. Whether it lasts a long time or not is of no concern to evolution, which has no mind, no will, and no purpose of its own. Like gravity, it doesn’t care. Like gravity, it’s real whether you believe in it or not. It’s just part of how the world is.