Hello Blue Jay:
It's been awhile.
Having three creationists on one thread also kind of brings back the "good ol' days" again!
I don't remember that myself, I more remember being one against a half dozen or so evolutionists, and the last encounter I remember with you was on this same topic and I don't remember any other creationists joining in.
Unfortunately we creationists are always pursuing different arguments. I now have a notion of what Bolder is trying to argue but it's not my argument, and it's clear to me that he can't get into my argument either. And the evolutionists also all have their own individual emphases and styles which makes the whole thing seem utterly impossible.
Faith writes:
Again, the ToE in actual fact has nothing but similarity, homology, the ability to classify living organisms according to structural similarities, which of course includes fossils, from which you ASSUME genetic relatedness but have never proved it and cannot prove it.
Not at all hard to understand, really, it's just a mental trick that you pull on yourselves as well as the rest of us and everybody has fallen for it.
I know it can be hard to accept evolution: it wasn't so long ago that I thought the same way you did about it. As religious people, we're so used to seeing everything in black-and-white. For example, your language here suggests that you think "assume" and "prove" are the only two possible ways to develop a conclusion.
I STARTED OUT believing in evolution, Blue Jay, and although I didn't get deeply into the scientific issues involved I did make an effort to understand how it worked, and even back then I found that it was almost impossible to trace out a convincing path of evidence. I read Darwin, I thought him brilliant (I still do, and even now I think he rightly answered some really insane "creationist" notions of his day), I read Stephen Jay Gould here and there, found him extremely entertaining, I subscribed to
Skeptical Inquirer, which I assumed would give me the solid evidence I wanted but instead often left me again with a sense that the evidence didn't lead where it should. I kept being driven back to accepting evolution, but only "on faith" that it must be true. This of course proves nothing, but I do want to show you that I am not coming at evolution from a previous creationist point of view but the other way around. I did not become a Christian until my mid forties -- in the late 80s, and it was a few years later that I began to read up on Christian creationism.
But, the whole point of science is to allow us to deal with information and draw conclusions when things aren't strictly black-and-white, using principles of trial-and-error and inductive reasoning.
Blue Jay, I was a teenager during the "Sputnick era" when there was such an emphasis on science you were hardly permitted to consider any other career. As a Biblical Young Earth Creationist I'm used to being called stupid and unscientific and ridiculed for my supposed lack of appreciation of science but back in those days I was considered quite bright and quite savvy about what science is about. This also is neither here nor there with respect to this argument but please don't try to lecture me on what science is. My opinions NOW are not against science at all although that is the prevailing assumption because of the false idea that evolution is science. I really do believe that evolution itself, the theory, is NOT supported by real science and that you all are laboring under a delusion. Oh I can see how convincing that delusion is but it is still a delusion.
The two together are very powerful. For example, my two-year-old daughter can draw good conclusions using trial-and-error and inductive reasoning. If she gets punished for jumping off the couch, and she gets punished from jumping off the chair, she is able to infer that she will also get punished from jumping off the bed, and adjust her behavior accordingly.
And, that's really all we do with science. It's not perfect, and it doesn't prove anything, but it lets us draw reasonable conclusions from incomplete information.
Please do not talk to me as if I were a two year old.
For me, I see lots of reason to attribute all the differences in genotypes and phenotypes among animals to a process of "genetic accumulation," that is, each organism's attributes can be described as additions to, subtractions from, or modifications of some other organism's attributes. But, it's hard to transform my reasoning into a little blurb or sound byte that creationists won't interpret as an incomplete (and therefore dishonest) logical argument.
Well, you think like an evolutionist.
All three creationists on this thread have argued that the apparent "additions" are not actual "additions," but simply evidence of common design principles. And, that's a fair enough hypothesis, but it needs some support.
I believe it has a ton of support but the argument keeps getting dragged in so many different directions with so many different styles of thinking and so many different objections it is hard to keep the focus where it would have to stay for a while to make the case. And the three creationists here do NOT all agree on the basics of the argument which makes the whole thing just about impossible.
We are talking mega paradigm conflict here at the very least. (Yes I read Kuhn's book back in the day as well, I was really trying to grapple with all this stuff long before I was a Christian).
What I see is this:
In one population of chickens, eggshells are blue.
No other chicken population has blue eggshells, and the trait has never been seen in any population is likely to be ancestral to the blue-egged chickens.
The allele that makes blue eggshells differs from the one that makes white eggshells in two locations: one is an A where the white-egg allele has a T, and the other is a T where the white-egg allele has an A.
Random replication errors can make an A change to a T, or a T change to an A.
Also, blue eggshell pigment seems to be an "added" function, rather than a modification of an existing function, because it can co-exist with other, similar functions (e.g., brown eggshells)
When I pool all these observations together, I see no reason to think mutations couldn't have added this new pigment function to chicken eggshells. I can't prove that mutations actually did create this new pigment function, but I do know that mutation is a possible explanation, because all the evidence I am aware of is consistent with that hypothesis.
I can't say mutation isn't the explanation in this particular case, but I'd also argue that it's more likely that it is a very rare combination of built-in genetic factors, alleles at different gene loci or whatever, that basically follow Mendelian principles even though other factors may be involved.
Then, I combine that with lots of other examples of very similar things, like the beneficially-mutated gyrase that I presented to you in our Great Debate all those many moons ago, and the black-pigmented field mice Taq mentioned. All of these are consistent with the mutation explanation.
Again in some cases mutation COULD be the explanation, although I'm basically committed to the view of mutations as so preponderantly deleterious that it's highly unlikely. And also I stick pretty much to the population-genetics level of this and don't venture too far into the genetic side of it, because I think the argument is ultimately to be won at the population-genetics level. At least my own argument, maybe not Bolder's or mindspawn's who seem to get much further into the genetics than I can or want to go.
I'm seeing a pattern: every time I see differences between two organisms, some error that DNA-replication machinery is known to make is always a possible explanation. There are other hypothetically possible explanations in every case, but most of them have ever been observed before, and none of them has the ubiquity of the mutation explanation. A pattern like this tells me that mutations are a very powerful explanation, even though I can't necessarily prove directly that mutations actually caused every single one of these differences between organisms.
What's wrong with the idea that new combinations of normally occurring alleles in the gene pool that get passed on in new populations that become reproductively isolated are sufficient explanation?
Does this reasoning at least make sense to you, even if you don't agree with it?
It's not implausible, of course, but I'm committed to my own way of looking at it.
Although this IS on topic here it does go in a different direction from Bolder's argument and I'm not sure I want to get any further into it.
He who surrenders the first page of his Bible surrenders all. --John William Burgon, Inspiration and Interpretation, Sermon II.
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