The Fuss About Evolution
This isn't a new topic for me, and my answer to most of the important questions involved is usually along the lines of "I don't know; I'm not a biologist. I don't think the biologists know either...." But still, it's interesting to revisit every now and then.
One interesting fact is that one of the great pillars of Darwinism, is not the adaptation of creatures to the environment, but the lack thereof. Darwin once wrote, rather gloatingly, about all the useless, perverse works of Nature that he could list; since his day, the Darwinists have been torn between a love for preposterous just-so stories as to how this or that trait arose, and an arrogant presumption that whatever they do not understand is quite pointless. I wonder if any of Darwin's examples of "pointless" works of Nature would withstand scrutiny today...in any case, the follies of this latter presumption are now becoming evident. We have known for some time, for instance, that most of our genes do not encode proteins; the scientific consensus, then, was that the vast portion of our genome was "junk DNA". Of course, it is nothing of the kind. Likewise, this paper, which the Intelligent Design theorists are fond of citing, may not provide a ringing endorsement of their claims but it certainly gives another black eye to the old "oh, that? We can't figure out any point in it, so it's just garbage" mentality. Despite my still-lingering memories of college biology classes and the accessible character of the paper, parts of it were still a bit beyond me; however the idea is this: two organisms often have similar proteins that perform identical functions. The differences in sequence between two such proteins ("homologues" is the classy term for such sets of related proteins...scientific Greek starts to sound pretty weird the more you learn about actual Greek, but never mind...) were apparently regarded as insignificant products of genetic drift. But according to Dr. Axe here, the differences between two homologous proteins do not indicate a simple interchangeability of the amino acid residues which differ from protein to protein (at least on the exterior). Rather they indicate two different "designs" that perform the same function.
Darwinists have been, since Darwin himself, ideologically motivated to find randomness and simplicity in all of the processes they study. They often find it when it's not there. I am unconvinced by the arguments of Intelligent Design theorists that Darwinism is demonstrably incapable of explaining evolution - but it is interesting to consider, that Darwinists have often been led astray by the implications of their theory. This is rather the opposite of what one expects from a true scientific theory. It is further remarkable that in refuting the I.D. theorists they must invariably - I have yet to find an exception - have recourse to sophistry, particularly the hilarious idea that to hypothesize design is "not science"...the I.D. theorist Dembski brushed that aside by asking substantially, "what if every cell came with the inscription 'made by Yahweh'? Wouldn't you have to consider design then? And if you allow 'science' to hypothesize design in that case, why is this the only sort of demonstration of design you will accept?" and considered the point sufficiently clear. Yet one hears this patent idiocy almost every time a Darwinist bravely sallies forth against the creationist hordes! They can't seem to help saying it. A theory that is primarily espoused my men who cannot think, arouses somewhat of suspicion on my part.
But let's ignore all that, and look at some ancient history. Specifically, Belloc's "A Companion to Mr. Wells's 'Outline of History'". The first thing he attacks in Wells's book is the beginning, which treats of the origin of life. Belloc describes Natural Selection, the theory to which Wells held, as "dead."
The "well-educated" modern reader will smile at this out-of-touch crank...but I wonder what this reader would think if he ever got to the appendix, where Belloc quotes several eminent scientific contemporaries, saying quite clearly that Natural Selection was an inadequate explanation for evolution. Belloc may have been wrong, but it was not a matter of "him and William Jennings Bryan" vs. "Science". There seemed to be a great deal of "science" on his end of things; just what on earth was happening back then, anyway? We can be sure that if there ever was some academic reaction against Darwinism during which it became unfashionable, the Darwinian propagandists have smoothed over this little bump in Progress. Or did it never happen? Was every one of those professors Belloc quoted simply a crank? I have my doubts.
But there are other, very interesting things in there. Consider this passage from Belloc's "wrong-headed" attack on Natural Selection:
"Organic Genetic Evolution, i.e. the theory that one kind of living being arises from another kind, is as old as human observation and human thought. Common experience suggests it to everyone, because we know of no way in which living beings can appear upon earth save as the product of other living beings.
"When, therefore, men first took notice of, say, donkeys and horses, or tigers and cats, they naturally said to themselves, "These things look as though they had a common ancestor." The next step is to suppose that there would be a common ancestor to more widely different types. It is even admissible, though not probable, that all life on this earth sprang from one very simple origin. Our old Pagan forefather - those of them who were civilized - discussed all this centuries ago, and the Fathers of the Christian Church spoke in the same terms."
There is some other very interesting stuff in this "outdated" chapter....
But to consider that passage for a moment: unless you have been wise enough to study the Classics, these two paragraphs were perhaps a bit contrary to what you had previously thought about the past? Well, in my case I knew that a few of the Greeks had held to an evolution-like theory, and that Aristotle had said something-or-other about it, but I was shocked to hear Belloc discuss it as a mere commonplace of ancient thought.
It is an interesting thing about modern education, that it tends to exaggerate the glories of the present by demeaning the past. All the fallacious notions we have of ancient thought - that nobody knew the world was round until Columbus (all educated Westerners had known it for over a thousand years), that the idea of natural explanations for...natural events...came only gradually as science progressed, fought by religion every step of the way (the so-called "God of the gaps" rubbish...in fact, as soon as the Greeks began to think, their philosophers put forth natural explanations for everything...nobody significant ever resisted the idea. St. Thomas discusses right in the beginning of the Summa the claim that "nature is sufficient to explain everything" and refutes it by demanding a need to explain nature, not by denying that natural process explain the world), all of these just happen to paint our ancestors as much stupider, much more superstitious and backwards than they actually were. Coincidence, perhaps?
One interesting fact is that one of the great pillars of Darwinism, is not the adaptation of creatures to the environment, but the lack thereof. Darwin once wrote, rather gloatingly, about all the useless, perverse works of Nature that he could list; since his day, the Darwinists have been torn between a love for preposterous just-so stories as to how this or that trait arose, and an arrogant presumption that whatever they do not understand is quite pointless. I wonder if any of Darwin's examples of "pointless" works of Nature would withstand scrutiny today...in any case, the follies of this latter presumption are now becoming evident. We have known for some time, for instance, that most of our genes do not encode proteins; the scientific consensus, then, was that the vast portion of our genome was "junk DNA". Of course, it is nothing of the kind. Likewise, this paper, which the Intelligent Design theorists are fond of citing, may not provide a ringing endorsement of their claims but it certainly gives another black eye to the old "oh, that? We can't figure out any point in it, so it's just garbage" mentality. Despite my still-lingering memories of college biology classes and the accessible character of the paper, parts of it were still a bit beyond me; however the idea is this: two organisms often have similar proteins that perform identical functions. The differences in sequence between two such proteins ("homologues" is the classy term for such sets of related proteins...scientific Greek starts to sound pretty weird the more you learn about actual Greek, but never mind...) were apparently regarded as insignificant products of genetic drift. But according to Dr. Axe here, the differences between two homologous proteins do not indicate a simple interchangeability of the amino acid residues which differ from protein to protein (at least on the exterior). Rather they indicate two different "designs" that perform the same function.
Darwinists have been, since Darwin himself, ideologically motivated to find randomness and simplicity in all of the processes they study. They often find it when it's not there. I am unconvinced by the arguments of Intelligent Design theorists that Darwinism is demonstrably incapable of explaining evolution - but it is interesting to consider, that Darwinists have often been led astray by the implications of their theory. This is rather the opposite of what one expects from a true scientific theory. It is further remarkable that in refuting the I.D. theorists they must invariably - I have yet to find an exception - have recourse to sophistry, particularly the hilarious idea that to hypothesize design is "not science"...the I.D. theorist Dembski brushed that aside by asking substantially, "what if every cell came with the inscription 'made by Yahweh'? Wouldn't you have to consider design then? And if you allow 'science' to hypothesize design in that case, why is this the only sort of demonstration of design you will accept?" and considered the point sufficiently clear. Yet one hears this patent idiocy almost every time a Darwinist bravely sallies forth against the creationist hordes! They can't seem to help saying it. A theory that is primarily espoused my men who cannot think, arouses somewhat of suspicion on my part.
But let's ignore all that, and look at some ancient history. Specifically, Belloc's "A Companion to Mr. Wells's 'Outline of History'". The first thing he attacks in Wells's book is the beginning, which treats of the origin of life. Belloc describes Natural Selection, the theory to which Wells held, as "dead."
The "well-educated" modern reader will smile at this out-of-touch crank...but I wonder what this reader would think if he ever got to the appendix, where Belloc quotes several eminent scientific contemporaries, saying quite clearly that Natural Selection was an inadequate explanation for evolution. Belloc may have been wrong, but it was not a matter of "him and William Jennings Bryan" vs. "Science". There seemed to be a great deal of "science" on his end of things; just what on earth was happening back then, anyway? We can be sure that if there ever was some academic reaction against Darwinism during which it became unfashionable, the Darwinian propagandists have smoothed over this little bump in Progress. Or did it never happen? Was every one of those professors Belloc quoted simply a crank? I have my doubts.
But there are other, very interesting things in there. Consider this passage from Belloc's "wrong-headed" attack on Natural Selection:
"Organic Genetic Evolution, i.e. the theory that one kind of living being arises from another kind, is as old as human observation and human thought. Common experience suggests it to everyone, because we know of no way in which living beings can appear upon earth save as the product of other living beings.
"When, therefore, men first took notice of, say, donkeys and horses, or tigers and cats, they naturally said to themselves, "These things look as though they had a common ancestor." The next step is to suppose that there would be a common ancestor to more widely different types. It is even admissible, though not probable, that all life on this earth sprang from one very simple origin. Our old Pagan forefather - those of them who were civilized - discussed all this centuries ago, and the Fathers of the Christian Church spoke in the same terms."
There is some other very interesting stuff in this "outdated" chapter....
But to consider that passage for a moment: unless you have been wise enough to study the Classics, these two paragraphs were perhaps a bit contrary to what you had previously thought about the past? Well, in my case I knew that a few of the Greeks had held to an evolution-like theory, and that Aristotle had said something-or-other about it, but I was shocked to hear Belloc discuss it as a mere commonplace of ancient thought.
It is an interesting thing about modern education, that it tends to exaggerate the glories of the present by demeaning the past. All the fallacious notions we have of ancient thought - that nobody knew the world was round until Columbus (all educated Westerners had known it for over a thousand years), that the idea of natural explanations for...natural events...came only gradually as science progressed, fought by religion every step of the way (the so-called "God of the gaps" rubbish...in fact, as soon as the Greeks began to think, their philosophers put forth natural explanations for everything...nobody significant ever resisted the idea. St. Thomas discusses right in the beginning of the Summa the claim that "nature is sufficient to explain everything" and refutes it by demanding a need to explain nature, not by denying that natural process explain the world), all of these just happen to paint our ancestors as much stupider, much more superstitious and backwards than they actually were. Coincidence, perhaps?
