Searching for Truth with a Broken Flashlight

Hi Jeff,Did youknow that you shouldn't just trust everything you find on some website?A great many items on that list are either terrribly misleading or factually incorrect. No, it does not. However, it does say that we are monkeys (that being a much larger classification than the species-specific "chimpanzees"), in the same way that we are also apes, mammals, vertebrates, etc. This item is inaccurate to the point of being misleading. The final paragraph of Origin of Species says this:

quote:

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These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduction; inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the external conditions of life, and from use and disuse; a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less-improved forms. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows.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.

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Darwin may not have specifically said the exact words "evolution" or "survival of the fittest," but he did use the word "evolved" and define specifically what "survival of the fittest" means (except that he did so more accurately).Your list bears the hallmarks of a person who did a casual word search through text for specific phrases and words, but never actually read a single word Darwin wrote.Just that much tells me to be suspicious of this list, and of course my suspicion is vindicated as the list contains yet more misleading or outright false information: Not by any definition of "kinds" used by Creationists, which is kind of the point. Again, this is misleading and requires significant further explanation. In this case, "kinds" would have to be redefined to match the taxonomic term "clades." Essentially each "kind" would be each subdivision of the nested hierarchy of the taxonomic tree. For instance, all vertebrates would be a "kind," and all vertebrates do in fact give birth to more vertebrates; mammals would be a "kind" within the vertebrate "kind," and all mammals would give birth to mammals, etc.The part that Creationists tend to not like about that sort of classification (even though it appears to satisfy the requirement that all creatures reproduce after their own "kind") is that it allows for the emergence of new "kinds" after the Creation event is completed. I doubt you'd find argument from less literalist Christians, however. No, it's not. Microevolution (meaning genetic variation within a single species) can and does happen, and is in fact the only way that a species can diversify and subdivide into new species. The only impossibility is that Microevolution could ever be restrained from becoming Macroevolution given sufficient generations and selective pressures (and even that's not impossible - but no such restricting mechanism has ever been found, and Macroevolution has been directly observed to result from small Microevolution changes within a population, so it's just factually incorrect). ...not really. The Flood was supposed to have been world-wide, and there is zero evidence supporting the occurrence of a global Flood of any extent, whether that be 10 feet or 22 or 100. The global Flood and die-off recorded in the Bible never happened. There very likely was a local flood, but that's not what the story is about. You may as well talk about how we discovered the remains of the very real city of Troy; there's still no reason to believe that Achilles was some super-warrior whose only vulnerable point was his heel. Yet that's exactly what modern Creationists say, because there would have necessarily been some global sedimentary layer from a global Flood, and they typically use the global Flood to explain features that require more than the allotted 6-10,000 years of the Earth's existence. Geology tells us that it took millions of years fro the Grand Canyon to be carved out by slow erosion; Creationists cannot accommodate a time-line including millions of years, and so claim that the Flood carved it. That doesn't even make sense. How are layered sedimentary rocks "proof" of a global Flood? No single global layer exists. How would this be a "dirty secret" for Creationists? For them, knowledge through revelation is sacred, not shameful. While Mr. Hawley got a few things right (his comparison of gravity and evolution as theories is spot-on, for instance)...that's not exactly a list I would ever display publicly. Particularly the Darwin bit - the last paragraph of Origin of Species is perhaps the best-known of the entire text, and it flatly counters the meaning if not the specific wording of Mr. Hawley's claims regarding Darwin's words.

You made the specific claim that Darwin never used specific words and phrases.I then posted a quote directly from Darwin's most famous book where he used the word in a different tense ("evolved" instead of "evolution"), and where while the phrase "survival of the fittest" was not specifically used, the definition of the phrase was stated.That means that your claim is false. It doesn't matter which edition - that wasn't part of your initial claim, so I'm not even going to bother verifying it - Darwin did say what you claimed he did not say, your claim was still false.Or do you want to claim that since the exact words "evolution" and "survival of the fittest" weren't specifically used, then it doesn't matter? If so, then you're just a semantics-obsessed git who thinks words are more important than the meaning they convey.

I'm well aware of common Creationist claims - I've been participating actively on this site alone for several years, so clearly the EvC debate is something of an interest of mine.However, I can only respond to what you've actually posted. You make claims, and I respond, particularly when they're inaccurate. So far, you've made a great many inaccurate claims while appealing to the authority of Hawley.I don't give a flying fuck who Hawley is or what he says. He's not here. You are. I respond to your words. If you think you have some sort of evidence that proves your claims to be accurate, you post them yourself, because the burden of proof rests upon the claimant. We don't do bare links here, it's not my job to investigate Hawley's site and make your argument for you.Microevolution (defined as variation within a species) does happen, and it is in fact the accumulation of microevolved changes within a population that eventually leads to macroevolution (the subdivision of new and distinct clades from the parent population).If you want people to understand your meaning, I;m afraid you're going to have to show your fucking work and use more words than "by the way, did you know that x is genetically impossible?" Particularly when your claimed impossibility has been directly observed to happen.

What I get is that Hawley is being intentionally misleading. Darwin wasn't even the first to come up with evolution - but that's irrelevant to the point. Darwin is widely regarded as the creator of the Theory of Evolution because his book, Origin of Species, specifically outlined the mechanism by which populations of living organisms change over time through variability and inheritance guided by natural selection - in other words, evolution through survival of the fittest. It doesn't matter in the least what specific words he did or didn't use (and I'm sorry, but the word "evolved" being the past tense of the verb form of the word "evolution" is the same fucking word) - he did describe the mechanism that today we identify as the Theory of Evolution.End of fucking story. Hawley may be trying to be clever by pointing out semantic nonsense to throw Creationists off guard and open them to accepting new information, but he's doing so with misleading information and outright lies. So fuck him.