| | Robert Davison said:
As to these comments: Dean Michael, evolution is one species changing into another. There is no proof for it. Natural selection is another matter. Your comment is typical of academe, knee jerk and defensive. It implies a faith based belief in whatever Science says at the moment. Science is not always correct, for example, the first Coelacanth was netted in the 1930s and examples of the 'fish' kept popping up all through the 40s and 50s. Science denied its existence well into the 60s insisting that it was extinct. Wegener who theorized that the continents drifted said so in the 20s, he was ostracized, deprived of his career and livlihood, and died in abject poverty. The theory only became respectable in the late 60s. Continue to guard the faith, I am not a 'faither'.
Robert, the only thing you demonstrate here is your complete and utter lack of understanding of the scientific process, methodology, and bank of knowledge. I spent years in the 'Skeptics' movement before getting very interested in politics and objectivism, and have gone through hundreds of debates with people such as yourself. Your comment is demonstrative of gross ignorance, you cite small objections, which are purely based on your own lack of knoweldge (i.e. In the few seconds I have thought about this I cant possibly imagine any way this could occur, therefore it is impossible for it to have occured. 'It' being the evolution of the eye, speciation, natural selection creating complex organisms, etc. etc.) and extrapolate them into grandoise blanket statements about all of science. No, science is not always correct, but most of the time it is, as evidenced by our skyscrapers and space ships. The very same principles of science which dictate how that immensely complex computer you type on to complain about science are the ones that describe evolution by natural selection as the mechanism by which complex beings arise. Yes, sometimes lone invididuals stand in opposition to the common scientific paradigm and turn out to be right, but most of the time they are not, and are just nuts with delusions of granduer who fall victim to nearly every form of perceptual bias and fallacy of logic. Science is getting progressively better at describing reality, and is likely approaching a perfect description of reality asympotically (we'll never know when we get there, since that would require ominscience) but our predictions continue to be ever more and more accurate and technology ever more advanced.
Evolution by natural selection basically requires accepting only 4 premises
1) individuals are different
2) individuals compete
3) individuals pass their design onto offspring
4) offspring can be different from their parents through mutation.
To deny evolution by natural selection occurs you must deny one of these premises. Each of these is easily verifiable and evolution is the direct logical consequence of all of them. Evolution is a process of change. Mutation is the process that creates the variation. Natural Selection is the process by which variations are selected for or against. There are a host of other things that go on in evolution. A species devoid of selective pressures, for instance, can develope a wide pool of variation. If it is suddenly (in geological time scales) subjected to intense selection pressures, the species now has a wide gene pool that it's continuation can select from. This can create rapid changes over short periods, or very few changes over long periods (for example, ocean creatures change very slowly since their environment remains stable over vast periods of time) Not all selective pressures are environmental, some are behavioral or sexual (as in the peacok's tail, the crab one large claw) If you wish to have a real discussion and are genuinely inquisitive about how evolution explains the incredible diversity around us (and continuity, known as convergent evolution) then I suggest you peruse over to http://forums.randi.org/ and post your comments in that forum.
"There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved." - Charles Darwin Michael F Dickey
(Edited by Michael F Dickey on 4/05, 11:23am)
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