Porillo writes:
Thanks for your replies everyone. I just need your expert opinion on one more quote by Julian Huxley.
As I didn’t know who Julian Huxley was, I got him from Wiki :
Julian Huxley - Wikipedia
Wiki writes:
Sir Julian Sorell Huxley FRS[1] (22 June 1887 — 14 February 1975) was an English evolutionary biologist, humanist and internationalist. He was a proponent of natural selection, and a leading figure in the mid-twentieth century evolutionary synthesis. He was Secretary of the Zoological Society of London (1935—1942), the first Director of UNESCO, and a founding member of the World Wildlife Fund.
OK. He was an evolutionary biologist who studiedbiology. I’m not an expert in evolutionary biology in any way.
May I ask you a question, Portillo? Why don’t you quote from all those other thousands of evolutionary biologists, all over the world, alive today? I hope you realize that thousands of peer-reviewed, scientific articles from evolutionary biologists, are published in scientific journals every month?
Portillo writes:
"The concept of evolution was soon extended into other than biological fields.
The concept of evolution has been around from before the Romans. The word evolution comes from Latin (evolutio), which means unrolling. The concept has thus been around for a very long time. From way before Christian creationism started.
Portillo writes:
Inorganic subjects such as the life-histories of stars and the formation of the chemical elements on the one hand, and on the other hand subjects like linguistics, social anthropology, comparative law and religion, began to be studied for an evolutionary angle, until today we are enabled to see evolution as a universal and all pervading process.
Of course it is. That’s what all the evidence indicate. Things change in more than 13 billion years! They unroll to get to what they are today.
Portillo writes:
Furthermore, with the adoption of the evolutionary approach in non-biological fields, from cosmology to human affairs, we are beginning to realize that biological evolution is only one aspect of evolution in general.
Biological evolution certainly is only one aspect of the concept of evolution, because, for example, the earth does not reproduce. Life does. Biological evolution is only one aspect, although it is very important to us, as it indicates where life, and therefore us, come from.
Portillo writes:
Evolution in the extended sense can be defined as a directional and essentially irreversible process occurring in time,
Of course it does. More than 13 billion years is a very long time. It’s been unrolling from the Big Bang to us.
Portillo writes:
which in its course gives rise to an increase of variety and an increasingly high level of organization, in its products.
Of course it does. The earth, for example, started out as elements accumulating. Now you even have, for example, snowflakes and biotite crystals forming every day. Way more organized than water vapor or lava.
You must also realize that the concept of evolution can give you less variety, for example, a meteorite could strike the earth again, vaporize all those snowflakes and biotite crystals and most life could be wiped out. Rolling out can also give you less variety. Or, as in the case of Mars, the atmosphere and liquid water could just "disappear". That’s unrolling giving less variety.
Portillo writes:
Our present knowledge indeed forces us to the view that the whole of reality is evolution - a single process of self-transformation."
Of course it is. That’s what all the evidence we have indicate.
You still should not make the mistake of thinking that biological evolution happens by the same process as happens for the evolution of stars, for example. That’s why we have one theory for the variety of species and completely different theories for the variety of stars. Completely different methods.
Edited by Pressie, : Added qs quotes
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