Dissecting the Evolutionist Approach to Explanation and Persuation

I'd agree with you, Mark24 phrased that a bit oddly.I imagine what he was trying to say is that what evidence we currently have in terms of the fossil record and molecular data has been in line with predictions based on theories of evolution and, with some exceptions which can be ascribed to horizontal gene transfer in terms of molecular evidence, common descent.Evolutionary theory and common descent make certain predictions as to the patterns we would expect to see in the fossil record and the molecular data and what evidence we have now is consistent with those predictions.Maybe that didn't make it any clearer.TTFN,WK

Surely that is exactly what a prediction is? And if you say 'This would likely be the case' about data that has yet to be collected and it does indeed turn out to be the case then surely that was a correct prediction?For instance if we look at the morphology of primates and birds and conclude that the primates all share a more recent common ancestor than any primate has with birds then we can make specific predictions about the levels of relatedness we would expect to see within primates and between birds and primate, if subsequent genetic analyis bears this out then in what way have we not made a correct prediction?TTFN,WKThis message has been edited by Wounded King, 09-Mar-2006 03:14 PM

This doesn't sound like real science, it sounds like the sort of shoddy scientism that is all too prevalent.You can't know for sure whether any scientific theory is correct or not, but you can confirm it and exclude alternative possibilities to such an extent that it is taken as highly reliable and useful.Other than in a simple matter of degree I'm not sure what distinction can be drawn between a prediction of something like the motion of celestial bodies and predictions of patterns of genetic relatedness.TTFN,WK

I'd suggest that if anything molecular evidence is considerably more direct. We can have much greater confidence in the provenance of genetic sequences, indeed it is quite possible for anyone to extract DNA from an organism and analyse it genetically, whereas not everyone can go out and dig up a virtually identical fossil to some specific 'transitional'.And if you don't need to collect the data yourself then it is even easier since almost all gnetic information used in the published literature is deposited on online databases like Genbank from which anyone can get vast numbers of sequences. Even entire genomes can be downloaded by anyone. There are similarly a large number of freely available tools to allow exactly the same anlayses as are performed in the vast majority of papers to be conducted on a personal computer.So anyone anywhere with access to a computer with an internet connection can perform their own investigations of the genetic evidence for common descent and evolution.TTFN,WK

That is a commonly made assertion, do you have anything to actually support it? Why would gods economy be so haphazard and inconsistent? Why have patterns of relatedness visible at effectively functionless bases, i.e. the third codon base for most amino acids?TTFN,WK

It doesn't seem at all obvious to me.TTFN,WK

You seem to have a whole lot of unspoken assumptions rolled up in there with the phrase 'special creation ocurred'.There seems no more reason why special creation should allow for the conservation of non-morphologically relevant genes or even non-functional genes than why it should allow for god to put some interesting structures which resemble living organisms into particular geological strata in particular patterns.You may argue that it is more parsimonious and certainly I would agree that a God who only steps in to kick start abiogenesis might be considered more parsimonious than one who hand crafted every species on the planet and carefully placed them at particular intervals in time and space to make patterns which appear to detail an evolutionary history of nature. But once you have made the giant leap against parsimony of bringing in a supernatural creator it seems penny ante to de-bar him from any particular activity because it would violate Occam's razor even further than one already has. You are assuming here that transitional fossils could only result from evolution, this is clearly not true if you bring god into the picture. If you allow special creation there is nothing barring the special creation of organisms, or even the direct creation of fossils, which resemble transitional states between other fossils/ organisms.TTFN,WK