In Chapter 7 of Darwin’s Doubt, Stephen Meyer explains that phylogenic trees based on morphological similarity differ greatly from trees based on molecular similarity.
Wikipedia’s article on the phylogenic tree echos the problem, but only if you read down to the bottom. The opening paragraphs state confidence in the single tree theory.
So much for slow changes over time. From PBS Eons on the Triassic.
The evolutionary hypothesis depends on life being a chemical reaction. That certain amino acid chains that were laying around were attracted to each other to the point of making proteins which were attracted to each other which thus made the first anaerobic bacteria. But you can’t make proteins from amino acids without the instructions of dna or rna, or rarely ribosomes, which occur within a preexisting cell. The whole primordial ooze theory is a fairy tale.
‘Evolution can be a dogmatic theory because we knew about black holes and other Newtonian things before we actually observed them.’
According to Netflix’s Black Hole Apocalypse, they mathematically predicted stellar black holes, but not supermassives, which have a different, unintuitive, much more necessary formation, nor that they are probably at the center of every galaxy.
And not all theories and predictions turn out to be verifiable. There are plenty of frustrated alchemists, and medical practitioners such as those that employed leaches and starvations and fever inductions. See the Cranford miniseries for those disastrous theories.
‘Beneficial mutations are more robust and thus persist.’
There are scientific arguments against this in the realm of probabilities and examples of persisting non-beneficial organisms and diseases, but I’m more of a logic person and will posit that the statement is based in circular reasoning that proceeds from the asserted assumption that beneficial characteristics are the result of random mutations. The reasoning goes: we have persisting organisms, so therefore their mutations are the fittest, and that is why they survived. An equally valid theoretical explanation is that God’s designs are robust and therefore persist. The fossil record bears the latter out, as it should have included bad designs. They could say that extinction is evidence of inferior designs, but the record shows that there was thriving until new environmental pressures occurred. The organisms perfectly fit their milieu. The evolutionist says that new environmental niches provided more real estate for certain mutations to thrive, but then there would be organisms that were always maladjusted to any environment that existed during their time. This is not the case. They would then pull up their convenient blind faith argument, established by their founding father, that they just haven’t unearthed them yet.
I’m using this version downloaded to iBooks.
“My chief aim in this work has been thoroughness ; and I make bold to say, that there is not a single meta physical problem that does not find its solution, or at least the key to its solution,here.”
“While I say this, I think I see upon the countenance of the reader signs of dissatisfaction mingled with contempt, when he hears declarations which sound so boastful and extravagant ; and yet they are beyond comparison more moderate than those advanced by the commonest author of the commonest philosophical programme, in which the dogmatist professes to demonstrate the simple nature of the soul, or the necessity of a primal being. Such a dogmatist promises to extend human knowledge beyond the limits of possible experience ; while
I humbly confess that this is completely beyond my power. Instead of any such attempt, I confine myself to the examination of reason alone and its pure thought ; and I do not need to seek far for the sum-total of its cognition, because it has its seat in my own mind”
Kant then proceeds to allow a priori assumptions, opinion if there is consensus, and even intuition. I have the evolution argument on my mind, and this highlights that the reason many people give for believing in it is because “scientists agree”. What if the dissenters have been silenced by the universities, textbook editors and other information gatekeepers? Stephen Meyers and Hugh Ross know many who will testify to this being the case, thus there is not univocal consensus amongst reasonable people.
“No thing can escape our notice ; for what reason produces from itself cannot lie concealed, but must be brought to the light by reason itself, so soon as we have discovered the common principle of the ideas we seek. The perfect unity of this kind of cognitions, which are based upon pure conceptions, and uninfluenced by any empirical element, or any peculiar intuition leading to determinate experience, renders this com pleteness not only practicable, but also necessary.”
I think I’m starting to get it. At first I thought he was being gnostic in avoiding experience, but he’s saying that he’s critiquing the reasoning above experience, which must be what metaphysics is. I thought it was the Holy Spirit and the energies of God in and above things.
Halfway through Robert Paul Wolff’s Lecture 1 of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, he explains that the Rationalists ( such as Descartes and Newton) argue for independent ontology, things as they are, and the Empiricists (Locke and Hume) argue for things as they are perceived by the senses. Before hearing how Kant sought to resolve the conflict, I’ll venture, what if part of the nature of things is to communicate to us through our senses?
Evolutionists believe that genetic similarity proves ancestry and dissimilarity proves how long ago two species diverged by mutations. Stephen Meyer in Darwin’s Doubt says that by comparing the genes of extant Cambrian animals, such as mollusks and sea sponges, and multiplying the differences between them by mutation rates, it would take over a billion years of evolution for them to diversify that much. This is not born out by the fossil record. They have no traceable precursors. Darwin thought they would find them, but alas.
In Darwin’s Doubt (I’m on Ch 3) Meyer gives my old earth creationist intuition even more specific reasons. For example, the critique requested by Darwin of Harvard Paleontologist Louis Agassiz shows how Darwin and his enthusiastic followers rejected the scientific method to back up their confidence. Yet Agassiz is the one labeled as the German Idealist.
In trying to remember Agassiz’s name I came across another contemporary of Darwin, Lamarck, who gives the theory I have hypothesized about giraffes to say how adaptation possibly occurred. Come to find out, this is not natural selection! Chalk up another reason not to believe in evolution. (Instead of lack of environmental stimulation, Meyer critiques Darwin on the unlikelihood of mutations by random happenchance, which is really what the theory of natural selection actually is.) How can Christians believe life came about that way? Seems a decidedly atheist POV.
Lamarck illustrated his theory using the example of the evolution of giraffes. They had short-necked ancestors that had tried all their lives to reach for the juicy leaves of trees. By constantly stretching their necks, they grew longer and longer, a property which they passed on to their offspring. The long neck of the giraffe is said to have come into existence in this manner over generations.
Darwin was, on the other hand, convinced that such features are the result of natural selection. Accordingly, certain giraffes had longer necks through pure chance, and thereby had an advantage over other members of their species in reaching sources of food that had been hitherto inaccessible to them. The animals passed on this “whim of nature” to their offspring, who, for their part, were better able to survive periods of food scarcity. Over long periods, long-necked giraffes survived and flourished
It reminds me of Carl Orff’s “O Fortuna”
