How Crazy does Evolution Seem?

[Purple Knight]

This is not a question of whether or not evolution is crazy, but how crazy it seems at first glance.

That is, when we discard our experiences and look at claims as if through new eyes, what do we find when we look at evolution? I Believe we can find a great deal of common ground with this question, because when I discard my experience as an animal breeder, when I discard my knowledge, and what I've been taught, I might look at evolution with the same skepticism as someone who has either never been taught anything about it, or someone who has been taught to distrust it.

Personally my mind goes to the keratinised spines on the tongues of cats. Yes, cats have fingernails growing out of their tongues! Gross, right? Well, these particular fingernails have evolved into perfect little brushes for the animal's fur. But I think of that first animal with a horrid growth of keratin on its poor tongue. The poor thing didn't die immediately, and this fits perfectly with what I said about two steps back paying for one forward. This detrimental mutation didn't hurt the animal enough for the hapless thing to die of it, but surely it caused some suffering. And persevering thing that he was, he reproduced despite his disability (probably in a time of plenty that allowed that). But did he have the growths anywhere else? It isn't beyond reason to think of them protruding from the corners of his eyes or caking up more and more on the palms of his hands. Perhaps he had them where his eyelashes were, and it hurt him to even blink. As disturbing as my mental picture is of this scenario, this sad creature isn't even as bad off as this boar, whose tusks grew up and curled until they punctured his brain.





This is a perfect example of a detrimental trait being preserved because it doesn't hurt the animal enough to kill it before it mates. So we don't have to jump right from benefit to benefit. The road to a new beneficial trait might be long, going backwards most of the way, and filled with a lot of stabbed brains and eyelids.

Walking backwards most of the time, uphill both ways, and across caltrops almost the entire trip?

I have to admit, thinking about walking along such a path sounds like, at very least, a very depressing way to get from A to B. I would hope there would be a better way.

[Sherlock Holmes]

What genetic information do you have from the Cambrian?

We can look at the DNA of existing members of each phylum to see what relationships are. DNA phylogenies give something like this:


Which is consistent with the transitional forms in the fossil record.

I see, so we have no actual genetic material from the Cambrian at all.

Thought you realized that. All we can do is look at the descendants of those phyla and see what their genetics will tell us. As you see, genetics confirms what the fossil record says.

Genetic similarities are not evidence of common ancestry either,

We can test that with organisms of known descent. Turns out, they are evidence of common descent.

How can you prove, that because true common descent leads to some common genes then any common genes are definitely due to common descent?

Because, in cases where we can actually check, there has never been a case of a DNA phylogeny not being due to common descent. It's kinda like asking how I can prove that if I let go of a ball, it will fall to the ground. It just always does.

You can only do that if you can prove there is absolutely no other way for organisms to have common genes except for common descent but you cannot prove that.

You can't prove that all the oxygen molecules won't diffuse to the other side of the room and suffocate you. Just in case you were wondering, it's never going to happen, although it's not impossible.

Logic is my profession.

Pity they never taught you about induction. And yes, there are inductive proofs.

I am very familiar with induction Barbarian more so than you are familiar with decorum it seems.

But unfortunately this is not an inductive proof that all gene commonality is caused by biological propagation; rather it is an inductive proof that every time there's sexual reproduction then gene commonality always ensues, that is what is induced here.

Induction is used for gravitation for example, every time someone throws a ball it will always follow a parabolic trajectory, we do not induce that every time we see an object following a parabolic trajectory then someone threw something.

See? "every time" -> "always" - that is the pattern of induction, proving for some cases leads to the inference for all cases.

Logic is my profession.

[JoeyKnothead]

...merely confirms evidence from other independent sources.

I think this gets missed in our debates.

Where a single 'problem' with evolutionary theory may occur, we still have reams of varied data, spanning across disciplines, to support the fact of evolution.

And, as this thread has shown, so often these 'problems' are merely objections to, not refutations of the fact of evolution.

The fact of evolution.

[JoeyKnothead]

...
Logic is my profession.

Even a blind man can paint a picture. It's determining the quality thereof where it gets tricky.

[Sherlock Holmes]

...
Logic is my profession.

Even a blind man can paint a picture. It's determining the quality thereof where it gets tricky.

And a blind man cannot determine quality of said painting can they...

[JoeyKnothead]

...
Logic is my profession.

Even a blind man can paint a picture. It's determining the quality thereof where it gets tricky.

And a blind man cannot determine quality of said painting can they...

This ain't the killer reply you think it is.

[Sherlock Holmes]

...
Logic is my profession.

Even a blind man can paint a picture. It's determining the quality thereof where it gets tricky.

And a blind man cannot determine quality of said painting can they...

This ain't the killer reply you think it is.

I thought it was funny myself, anyway what's your problem? you got a problem with me personally?

[EarthScienceguy]

[Replying to The Barbarian in post #0]

St. Augustine never heard of "higher criticism." He merely noted that where scripture was not clearly supporting any particular thing, we should be very careful not to add our own ideas to it, and we should be willing to revise our ideas if new information became available. You're probably thinking of what is now called "textual criticism." You see it in creationist organizations like "Answers in Genesis" for example when they point out that the development of new species from older species is not anywhere denied in Scripture

I am not even sure why you are thinking that Augustine's quote has any bearing on whether there is deep time or whether there is not deep time. In Augustine's day, there was no such thing as a naturalistic theory of the creation of the universe, there were no intellectuals that believed that there was deep time or that God did not create the Universe.

With the rise and dominance of Christianity in the West and the later spread of Islam, metaphysical naturalism was generally abandoned by intellectuals. Thus, there is little evidence for it in medieval philosophy. The reintroduction of Aristotle's empirical epistemology as well as previously lost treatises by Greco-Roman natural philosophers which was begun by the medieval Scholastics without resulting in any noticeable increase in commitment to naturalism

So then you have to define what you mean by "not clearly supporting." Are you trying to say that Augustine thought that Genesis 1-11 should be interpreted allegorically? Augustine did not know. And this was not the time when a theological view of creation was being argued out by theologians. This was a time when theologians were focused on the Nature of Christ and the atoning work of Christ on the Cross. There are many things the Church fathers of the 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th centuries were incorrect on simply because it had not been argued through as to what Scripture actually said. Creation and eschatology were the last two theologies to be argued through. Most of the time in Church history a doctrine was not argued through until a heresy came up. And in the case of creation, it did not come up until Hutton and Darwin put forward their theories.

Deep time was not taken seriously until Hutton came along in the 1700's.

It had been long held that the Earth had been created 6,000 years ago based on a literal interpretation of the Bible. Hutton’s bold ideas won him many enemies in the clergy, and he was largely proclaimed as an atheist, although he personally believed in God but opposed the literal interpretations of the biblical texts, as well as their meddling with science.

https://www.ed.ac.uk/alumni/services/no ... mes-hutton

Fred Schleiermacher (1768-1834) and others came along in the early 1800's and paved the way for the "Enlighten" in the church to believe in deep time with is higher criticism.

Regarding the views of the Continental Critics, three things can be confidently asserted of nearly all, if not all, of the real leaders.

1. They were men who denied the validity of miracle, and the validity of any miraculous narrative. What Christians consider to be miraculous they considered legendary or mythical; "legendary exaggeration of events that are entirely explicable from natural causes."

2. They were men who denied the reality of prophecy and the validity of any prophetical statement. What Christians have been accustomed to consider prophetical, they called dexterous conjectures, coincidences, fiction, or imposture.

3. They were men who denied the reality of revelation, in the sense in which it has ever been held by the universal Christian Church. They were avowed unbelievers of the supernatural. Their theories were excogitated on pure grounds of human reasoning. Their hypotheses were constructed on the assumption of the falsity of Scripture. As to the inspiration of the Bible, as to the Holy Scriptures from Genesis to Revelation being the Word of God, they had no such belief. We may take them one by one. Spinoza repudiated absolutely a supernatural revelation. And Spinoza was one of their greatest. Eichhorn discarded the miraculous and considered that the so-called supernatural element was an Oriental exaggeration, and Eichhorn has been called the father of Higher Criticism and was the first man to use the term. De Wette's views as to inspiration were entirely infidel. Vatke and Leopold George were Hegelian rationalists and regarded the first four books of the Old Testament as entirely mythical. Kuenen, says Professor Sanday, wrote in the interests of an almost avowed Naturalism. That is, he was a free-thinker, an agnostic; a man who did not believe in the Revelation of the one true and living God. (Brampton Lectures, 1893, page 117). He wrote from an avowedly naturalistic standpoint, says Driver (page 205). According to Wellhausen the religion of Israel was a naturalistic evolution from heathendom, an emanation from an imperfectly monotheistic kind of semi-pagan idolatry. It was simply a human religion.

https://www.blueletterbible.org/Comm/to ... als/01.cfm

At the height of modern thought and Age of Enlightenment when scientists were the rock stars of the day, higher criticism was very attractive to most intellectuals. And then the argument began as to what the Bible actually said about the creation account.

Eschatology was not argued through until the Jehovah's witnesses and others began to predict when the return of Christ was going to happen.

[Sherlock Holmes]

[Replying to The Barbarian in post #0]

St. Augustine never heard of "higher criticism." He merely noted that where scripture was not clearly supporting any particular thing, we should be very careful not to add our own ideas to it, and we should be willing to revise our ideas if new information became available. You're probably thinking of what is now called "textual criticism." You see it in creationist organizations like "Answers in Genesis" for example when they point out that the development of new species from older species is not anywhere denied in Scripture

I am not even sure why you are thinking that Augustine's quote has any bearing on whether there is deep time or whether there is not deep time. In Augustine's day, there was no such thing as a naturalistic theory of the creation of the universe, there were no intellectuals that believed that there was deep time or that God did not create the Universe.

With the rise and dominance of Christianity in the West and the later spread of Islam, metaphysical naturalism was generally abandoned by intellectuals. Thus, there is little evidence for it in medieval philosophy. The reintroduction of Aristotle's empirical epistemology as well as previously lost treatises by Greco-Roman natural philosophers which was begun by the medieval Scholastics without resulting in any noticeable increase in commitment to naturalism

So then you have to define what you mean by "not clearly supporting." Are you trying to say that Augustine thought that Genesis 1-11 should be interpreted allegorically? Augustine did not know. And this was not the time when a theological view of creation was being argued out by theologians. This was a time when theologians were focused on the Nature of Christ and the atoning work of Christ on the Cross. There are many things the Church fathers of the 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th centuries were incorrect on simply because it had not been argued through as to what Scripture actually said. Creation and eschatology were the last two theologies to be argued through. Most of the time in Church history a doctrine was not argued through until a heresy came up. And in the case of creation, it did not come up until Hutton and Darwin put forward their theories.

Deep time was not taken seriously until Hutton came along in the 1700's.

It had been long held that the Earth had been created 6,000 years ago based on a literal interpretation of the Bible. Hutton’s bold ideas won him many enemies in the clergy, and he was largely proclaimed as an atheist, although he personally believed in God but opposed the literal interpretations of the biblical texts, as well as their meddling with science.

https://www.ed.ac.uk/alumni/services/no ... mes-hutton

Fred Schleiermacher (1768-1834) and others came along in the early 1800's and paved the way for the "Enlighten" in the church to believe in deep time with is higher criticism.

Regarding the views of the Continental Critics, three things can be confidently asserted of nearly all, if not all, of the real leaders.

1. They were men who denied the validity of miracle, and the validity of any miraculous narrative. What Christians consider to be miraculous they considered legendary or mythical; "legendary exaggeration of events that are entirely explicable from natural causes."

2. They were men who denied the reality of prophecy and the validity of any prophetical statement. What Christians have been accustomed to consider prophetical, they called dexterous conjectures, coincidences, fiction, or imposture.

3. They were men who denied the reality of revelation, in the sense in which it has ever been held by the universal Christian Church. They were avowed unbelievers of the supernatural. Their theories were excogitated on pure grounds of human reasoning. Their hypotheses were constructed on the assumption of the falsity of Scripture. As to the inspiration of the Bible, as to the Holy Scriptures from Genesis to Revelation being the Word of God, they had no such belief. We may take them one by one. Spinoza repudiated absolutely a supernatural revelation. And Spinoza was one of their greatest. Eichhorn discarded the miraculous and considered that the so-called supernatural element was an Oriental exaggeration, and Eichhorn has been called the father of Higher Criticism and was the first man to use the term. De Wette's views as to inspiration were entirely infidel. Vatke and Leopold George were Hegelian rationalists and regarded the first four books of the Old Testament as entirely mythical. Kuenen, says Professor Sanday, wrote in the interests of an almost avowed Naturalism. That is, he was a free-thinker, an agnostic; a man who did not believe in the Revelation of the one true and living God. (Brampton Lectures, 1893, page 117). He wrote from an avowedly naturalistic standpoint, says Driver (page 205). According to Wellhausen the religion of Israel was a naturalistic evolution from heathendom, an emanation from an imperfectly monotheistic kind of semi-pagan idolatry. It was simply a human religion.

https://www.blueletterbible.org/Comm/to ... als/01.cfm

At the height of modern thought and Age of Enlightenment when scientists were the rock stars of the day, higher criticism was very attractive to most intellectuals. And then the argument began as to what the Bible actually said about the creation account.

Eschatology was not argued through until the Jehovah's witnesses and others began to predict when the return of Christ was going to happen.

The BBC have a weekly radio show that's a round table discussion of subjects from history, science and so on, often there are three or four academics who freely discuss stuff while being steered (paced) by the host.

Here are some particularly interesting ones available on Youtube, typically about 45 minutes and commercial free:

Augustine's Confessions.

Science and Religion

Space in Religion and Science

Bertrand Russell

David Hume

The Mind/Body Problem

The Age of the Universe

Goethe and the Science of the Enlightenment

there are many many more too, a superb show, been running for years and I hope for many more.

[The Barbarian]

St. Augustine never heard of "higher criticism." He merely noted that where scripture was not clearly supporting any particular thing, we should be very careful not to add our own ideas to it, and we should be willing to revise our ideas if new information became available. You're probably thinking of what is now called "textual criticism." You see it in creationist organizations like "Answers in Genesis" for example when they point out that the development of new species from older species is not anywhere denied in Scripture[/quote]

I am not even sure why you are thinking that Augustine's quote has any bearing on whether there is deep time or whether there is not deep time.

I'm pointing out that projecting "higher criticism" on St. Augustine is an error.

In Augustine's day, there was no such thing as a naturalistic theory of the creation of the universe, there were no intellectuals that believed that there was deep time or that God did not create the Universe.

If you think so, you don't know much about philosophy. Most of the Ionian philosophers thought the world was eternal. And many, like Democritus, thought that there was nothing but atoms, with nothing else at all.

With the rise and dominance of Christianity in the West and the later spread of Islam, metaphysical naturalism was generally abandoned by intellectuals.

But the scientists of the Renaissance, borrowing from the Greeks and Arabs, focused on methodological naturalism. Galileo and Bacon, for example, explicitly ruled out supernatural or magical issues in understanding nature.

So then you have to define what you mean by "not clearly supporting." Are you trying to say that Augustine thought that Genesis 1-11 should be interpreted allegorically?

He pointed out that the text itself made that clear. He saw the "days" of creation as categories, not literal periods of time.

Deep time was not taken seriously until Hutton came along in the 1700's.

When the evidence for long ages became obvious, most Christians realized that their earlier assumptions about scripture were incorrect.

It had been long held that the Earth had been created 6,000 years ago based on a literal interpretation of the Bible.

A literal interpretation of the Bible does not give a 6,000 year old Earth. It takes a good amount of exegisis and assumptions about what it means to arrive at that new doctrine.

Hutton’s bold ideas won him many enemies in the clergy, and he was largely proclaimed as an atheist, although he personally believed in God but opposed the literal interpretations of the biblical texts, as well as their meddling with science.

"Literal" would be "what it actually said." Christians generally do not accept the addition of a young Earth to scripture. They object to such unwarranted additions. So did St. Augustine:
Often, a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other parts of the world, about the motions and orbits of the stars and even their sizes and distances, … and this knowledge he holds with certainty from reason and experience. It is thus offensive and disgraceful for an unbeliever to hear a Christian talk nonsense about such things, claiming that what he is saying is based in Scripture. We should do all we can to avoid such an embarrassing situation, which people see as ignorance in the Christian and laugh to scorn.

The shame is not so much that an ignorant person is laughed at, but rather that people outside the faith believe that we hold such opinions, and thus our teachings are rejected as ignorant and unlearned. If they find a Christian mistaken in a subject that they know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions as based on our teachings, how are they going to believe these teachings in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think these teachings are filled with fallacies about facts which they have learnt from experience and reason.

Reckless and presumptuous expounders of Scripture bring about much harm when they are caught in their mischievous false opinions by those not bound by our sacred texts. And even more so when they then try to defend their rash and obviously untrue statements by quoting a shower of words from Scripture and even recite from memory passages which they think will support their case ‘without understanding either what they are saying or what they assert with such assurance.’ (1 Timothy 1:7)
St. Augustine, De Genisi ad litteram

[William]

[Replying to The Barbarian in post #959]

Indeed - the argument being that there are some who take account of Scripture without resorting to "mischievous false opinions" by being so literal that an evidence to the contrary is ignored.

One could ask the question;

Q: Why - in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven - is the age of this universe a necessary matter of contention?