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From: Science boy - http://science_boy.blogspot.com/
Category: Category 1
Date: 8/09/05
Time: 00:25:33
Remote Name: 60.234.148.24
Brendan, I'm going try addressing a few of the points you made
>The idea that so called 'macro evolution' is a reliant on happy accidents - a thoery of chance
The role of chance it modern evolutionary theory is limited to generation of mutations. Mutations happen at random - most are of no consequence some are bad and a very few are good. Organisms with such food mutations have more children and the good mutation spreads throughout a population.
The important thing though is that natural selection (NS) is cumulative. In each generation it gets to act on a set of very sophisticated genes because NS has honed them for billions of years. Each generation it throws out the rubbish and saves the very best as the basis for another round.
So though the mechanism underpinning adaptation may be random the accumulation of it is anything but.
>That NS implies ‘mind-like qualities such as purpose’
I’d agree that selection shows the hallmarks of a directed process but it emphatically does not require purpose. Selection acts to preserve organisms that are good at bearing offspring that are good at bearing offspring. That’s it. No one stands over the Serengeti picking out which Zebra a lion takes down or which chemical a bacterium can eat. The Zebras with genes that make them slow die, along with the genes that made them slow just as a gene for eating a new chemical spreads with the success of the bacteria that carry it. Thus the illusion of purpose is created.
>The conception that materialistic scientists are becoming IDists.
That’s really just not true. Flew did convert to some sort of deism based on what he perceived as a gap in evolutionary theory. But he’s not a biologist. There are a few scientists who back ID, but there are scientists that don’t back the HIV hypothesis of AIDS – it’s hard to see why we should take either camp seriously until they provide something to support their views.
>That chimp-human similarities on the genetic level don’t suggest common ancestry.
Sure, there are still differences between us. We have been on different evolutionary trajectories for 5 million years or so. . But there’s plenty of difference between any two chimps too. I don’t know if you know but the Chimp genome was published last week (the first draft at least) and it makes interesting reading. The few proteins with a large degree of divergence are related to the immune system (unsurprising as this is an area of rapid evolution to keep pace with pathogens) sperm recognition and smell receptors. That’s the big difference at the genetic level between us and chimps. You even have some of the same broken genes as chimps, broken in exactly in the same place. If you believe in a separate act of creation for humans and chimps then you believe an intelligence provided you and the chimp with genes that really could help both of you out then chose to break them both, in exactly the same way. A tough piece of theodicy required there.
I really find it hard to fathom why people are so offended by the idea they share ancestry with chimps or fish or bacteria. It has become popular for people to trace back their genealogy, apparently being proud of relationships to 15th century Prussian kings. Isn’t it infinitely more wondrous that you are connected by an unbroken chain of mothers and fathers back through apes that brachiated through the Miocene forests, through the small, scuttering mammals that lived in the shadows of the dinosaurs, through the verterbrates that eked out an existence in Cambrian sea and back, even, to the very first cells? In the very least such thinking opens the mind to a kind of reverence to life, both on the grand scale and at a personal level, that few people seem to possess.
You are welcome to your faith but don’t expect that you will find any evidence to support itin Creation. Of course, in the same way showing that the great and glorious spectacle of life on earth can come about without the hand of God doesn’t disprove the existence of god.