3 posts tagged “science”
Review of the November 2004 National Geographic Article, Was Darwin Wrong?
The article begins with the following assertion that evolution is as self-evidently true to “scientists” as other laws of physics that our society has come to accept.
“Evolution by natural selection, the central concept of the life's work of Charles Darwin, is a theory. It's a theory about the origin of adaptation, complexity, and diversity among Earth's living creatures. If you are skeptical by nature, unfamiliar with the terminology of science, and unaware of the overwhelming evidence, you might even be tempted to say that it's "just" a theory. In the same sense, relativity as described by Albert Einstein is "just" a theory. The notion that Earth orbits around the sun rather than vice versa, offered by Copernicus in 1543, is a theory. Continental drift is a theory. The existence, structure, and dynamics of atoms? Atomic theory. Even electricity is a theoretical construct, involving electrons, which are tiny units of charged mass that no one has ever seen. Each of these theories is an explanation that has been confirmed to such a degree, by observation and experiment, that knowledgeable experts accept it as fact. That's what scientists mean when they talk about a theory: not a dreamy and unreliable speculation, but an explanatory statement that fits the evidence.”
In other words, there is no debate about it in the scientific community. Only stupid untrained, uncritical commoners and scheming close-minded religious fanatics still have doubts about it. Evolutionary theory, is the only proven fact that resists acceptance because, as the author puts it, it is “such a dangerously wonderful and far-reaching view of life that some people find it unacceptable, despite the vast body of supporting evidence.” (Odd that I would have just finished reading The Sea Wolf by Jack London).
The article, naturally, then goes about trying to present that “vast body of supporting evidence”. It starts by explaining what Darwinism is – basically telling the story. Its eloquent and compelling until it gets to that evidence part in my opinion.
When discussing fossil evidence, the article states:
“Illuminating but spotty, the fossil record is like a film of evolution from which 999 of every 1,000 frames have been lost on the cutting room floor. Still, Gingerich and others have found dozens of intermediate forms – missing links that are no longer missing.”
That’s evidence? Is it any wonder that people
have their doubts? Does this sort of evidence qualify evolution as having the
same evidentiary substance under it as heliocentric universe and the laws of
gravity? Some person named Gingerich has found “dozens” of fossils that he
claims are intermediary. I should like to ask
why, with billions of fossils embedded into the rocks, he can only find a few
dozen that actually even look like they might be transitional? The National
Geographic, with all of its photographic capability, does not line them up for
us to look at. They rest like relics in the Vatican that we must believe exist.
When discussing speciation, the process
by which one species doesn’t just adapt to its environment but becomes a
different species, the authors give this evidence and only this evidence:
“Speciation, when a lineage splits into two species, is the other major phase of evolutionary change, making possible the divergence between lineages about which Darwin wrote. It's rarer and more elusive even than anagenesis. Many individual mutations must accumulate (in most cases, anyway, with certain exceptions among plants) before two populations become irrevocably separated. The process is spread across thousands of generations, yet it may finish abruptly—like a door going slam!—when the last critical changes occur. Therefore it's much harder to witness. Despite the difficulties, Rice and Salt seem to have recorded a speciation event, or very nearly so, in their extended experiment on fruit flies. From a small stock of mated females they eventually produced two distinct fly populations adapted to different habitat conditions, which the researchers judged "incipient species." [italics mine]
“Much harder to witness” in other words, “I personally have never seen it but I believe it happens”. Speciation is absolutely crucial to the Darwinian model. Its something that must have occurred millions and millions of times over the years and must still be happening all over the planet. Surely, if Darwinism is science on the same level as the heliocentric universe, thousands of people can say that they have seen the evidence. I find the language instructive. The author tells me about two researches I have never heard of before who “seem to have recorded a speciation event, or very nearly so”. Seem to have? Did they or didn’t they? Or very nearly so? Was it or wasn’t it? Which the researchers judged incipient species? Does that mean that everyone who looks at their experiment comes to the same conclusion? Or is it a way of saying that this “speciation event” is debatable? And what is "incipient". How many qualifiers can be piggybacked onto a declarative sentence before it becomes interrogative? I think it fair to quote Gould here:
“The extreme rarity of transitional
forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology. The
evolutionary trees that adorn our textbooks have data only at the tips and
nodes of their branches; the rest is inference, however reasonable, not the
evidence of fossils.”
This is the National Geographic doing
its absolute best to convince me that Darwinism should be accepted with the
same veracity as helio-centric universe? This is not evidence in my book. I
think a bit disingenuous to try to make “evidence” of this nature seem anything
but weak.
Mark Ridley, a follower of Richard Dawkins writes:
“However, the gradual change of fossil species has never been part of the evidence for evolution. In the chapters on the fossil record in the Origin of Species Darwin showed that the record was useless for testing between evolution and special creation because it has great gaps in it. The same argument still applies. ... In any case, no real evolutionist, whether gradualist or punctuationist, uses the fossil record as evidence in favor of the theory of evolution as opposed to special creation.” (Who doubts evolution? New Scientist, 90:830–1, 25 June 1981.)
Does this mean that the National Geographic staff are not “real evolutionists”. If an evolutionist can discount this argument, can’t I? Is it fair to discount the fossil record as evidence after it is discovered to be unhelpful to it. To say that DNA testing in a criminal case is unhelpful after the tests conclude that one’s client is guilty?
The only counter-evidence presented in the National Geographic article, the only place where any dissenting argument is even mentioned in the article is the following patronizing dismissal:
“Killing time in the corridor before our appointment, I noticed a blue flyer on a departmental bulletin board, seeming oddly placed there amid the announcements of career opportunities for graduate students. "Creation vs. evolution," it said. "A series of messages challenging popular thought with Biblical truth and scientific evidences." A traveling lecturer from something called the Origins Research Association would deliver these messages at a local Baptist church. Beside the lecturer's photo was a drawing of a dinosaur. "Free pizza following the evening service," said a small line at the bottom. Dinosaurs, biblical truth, and pizza: something for everybody.”
Thus are the considered viewpoints of almost half the
population of America
including hundreds and thousands of people with advanced degrees in various
disciplines dismissed as ignoramuses. We disbelieve evolutionary theory because
Baptists bribe us with pizza.
Sigh. I could respond to more but … I suppose this serves to
get my point across. There were other arguments that were employed in the
article as well ... and some must be kept on file.
Question for Comment: Will a regret writing this post someday? Have I drawn conclusions to early in the search for evidence?
So, by now, you have probably seen Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth. For good or bad, the decision to link carbon emmissions so closely with hurricanes has had an impact on the public mind. Had the 2005 and 2006 hurricane seasons been catastrophic, I think Al Gore would be a candidate for President right now. See the huricane tracking maps for 2005 and 2006 HERE and HERE.) As it is, carbon emissions have gone up but it appears that hurricanes haven't at least not last year or this year (2007). That was the fear that An Inconvenient Truth made ample use of and the fear that has somewhat dimminished in the public mind. It certainly has not diminishd the credibility of the movie among believers but it has not propelled Al Gore into the status of "prophet of our time". Maybe next summer's hurricane season will change that? Or maybe it will take the sound of waves lapping at the foundation stones of the New York Stock Exchange on Wall Street. We shall see.
The counter argument to Gore has been made in the movie-documentary The Global Warming Swindle below.
The counter counter-argument can be viewed in an excellent interview and debate conducted by Alex Jones here:
Still, the argument that arguments should not be heard is, to me, no argument. "Bring them on" I say. Is freedom of speech worth anything if sophists convince us not to avail ourselves of freedom to listen?"... for if the judges but differ in opinion, the clearest thing in the world is made by that means disputable, and truth being once brought in question, the King may then take advantage to expound the law for his own profit."
Question for Comment: What do you think about this issue of global warming? Are human efforts in this respect no more efficacious than farting in a hurricane? Are we heading for warming or coooling as a result of planetary rotation of solar flares or forces beyond our control ... even as the planet has always done? Or are we spitting into our own well here?
Today, I have been continuing my studies in Environmental Science. I am still not sure if "the powers that be" will let me include it in my list of homeschooling responsibilities but I figure with a summer of reading and study and some supervision during the year, I might put together a learning experience worthy of John Muir (founder of the Sierra Club), whom I respectfully quote below.
"Most people are on the world, not in it. - have no conscious sympathy or relationship to anything about them - undiffused, separate, and rigidly alone like marbles of polished stone, touching but separate. . . . Our crude civilization engenders a multitude of wants, and law-givers are ever at their wit's end devising. The hall and the theater and the church have been invented, and compulsory education. Why not add compulsory recreation? Our forefathers forged chains of duty and habit, which bind us notwithstanding our boasted freedom, and we ourselves in desperation add link to link, groaning and making medicinal laws for relief. Yet few think of pure rest or of the healing power of Nature.”
Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountain is going home; that wildness is necessity; that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life."
Do High School Environmental Science courses do a disservice to students who are taught to save a planet that they are not taught how to enjoy? A poem aby Kahlil Gibran that I saw recently comes to mind:
"Trees are poems that earth writes upon the sky;
We fell them down and turn them into paper,
That we may record our emptiness."
Question for Comment: If nature were asked about the way that you relate to her, would she say that she felt more used or enjoyed? Why?
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