Who Owns the Standard Definition of Evolution

I don't have the exact number, but somewhere between 6000-7000 years.

Greetings dwise:From your posts I can say that we have some commonality in background, and I suspect we would agree many things. On those things we don't I would hope we could agree to disagree.I always enjoy a good truism, and a phrase that comes to mind is "be humble, you could be wrong".

- May seem like a silly question to you but what is TOE?

Evolutionary Biology posits a common ancestry for all lifeforms based on a process/mechanism whereby one lifeform eventually procreates into a different life form, and presents this process/mechanism as scientific fact conforming to the Scientific Method. In other words, the claim to scientific factuality means this process/mechanism should be demonstrable per the Scientific Method.So far all I have seen to support this claim are lengthy explanations pieced together from incomplete and sometimes discontinuous data points. This is necessary up-front work in the effort to prove the process/mechanism, but test data it is not.I am simply asking for proof of this process/mechanism, in the form of controlled observation or repeatable demonstration. And, yes, scientific fact is a high bar.The Bible is not subject to science, science is subject to the Bible. So there is no bar for the Bible, high or low.In this thread we're talking about Evolutionary Biology, and how it is defined. Once this discussion settles down we can bring in the age of the earth.

In the American judicial system the threshold for proof is "beyond reasonable doubt". In any technical sense this threshold is absurd: "Reasonable" and "doubt" are super-abstractions and it's anybody's guess as to how 12 random individuals will interpret these. Nevertheless, this is what we have since a yes/no decision must be had.Scientific proof is something else entirely. Until you can prove something through repeated demonstration you have an argument that is indeterminate - the yes/no urgency isn't there. Evolutionary Theory is mired in this indeterminate stage.Discussing the evidence at a DNA level is pointless because 99% of the population that is aware of evolution is thinking at the macroevolution level: How did land creatures turn into whales, how did apelike creatures evolve into humans, etc. These are the big questions of evolution.Consider these questions:
1. What was/were the initial lifeform(s), i.e., what organism(s) are at the root of the evolutionary tree?
2. How did the eyeball evolve? How did all of the eyeball sub-components develop concurrently through random mutation to eventually create such a profoundly useful feature? Without these sub-components working in tandem the eyeball would be entirely useless and would be naturally de-selected.
3. In the cardiovascular system which developed first - The organs that required oxygen, the blood that carried the oxygen, the lungs trat oxygenated the blood, or the heart that pumped the blood?
4. Any number of unique features, like the chameleon's tongue, whose development through gradual mutation defies comprehension?I realize you've probably heard these all before. I suspect there are no definitive answers, and I suspect the answers that do exist are riddled with "might have", "could have", "potentially", etc. Within these indefinite answers is where the great evolutionary leap of faith occurs.

Yes, I read Message 146. Unfortunately, bacterial mutations are still bacteria, and statistical organization of microbiological data does not demonstrate a macroevolutionary process.From the evidence and explanations I've encountered in my quest for understanding evolutionary theory, I've concluded that evolutionary theory is an elaborate house of cards, a delicate hypothesis built on other delicate hypotheses (ages of rock sediment, locations of ancient seas, ancient weather patterns, etc.). If any element in any theory is incorrect, down comes the house of cards.

For #1 the response is that TOE has no answer for this, nor is TOE interested in answering this.For #2 the response is that TOE has no answer to this, and tells the questioner to go figure it out for himself.For #3 the response is that TOE has no answer for this, and replies with an irrelevant counter-question.For #4 the response is that TOE has no answer for this, and replies, irrelevantly, that other features of the chameleon are similar to other creatures.We see a pattern: TOE has no answers to the big macroevolution questions, but seems to have a ready set of go-to evasive responses.

Hello Dr. Jack – Thank you for your thoughtful response.The Theory of Evolution is presented to school kids and the general public as Macroevolution in the form of Zallinger’s “March of Progress”, sketches showing the evolutionary iterations of creatures between a land mammal and a whale, and so on. These depictions are intellectually stimulating to most, much more so than talk of bacterial mutation, taxonomy, and statistical likelihood of DNA similarities.Yet I’m finding that there is no real evidence for the most commonly asserted examples of Macroevolution. The evolutionary biologist is left to explain how extrapolation of microevolution DNA comparisons to some unknown degree is inarguable proof of the Macroevolution.This all seems intellectually dishonest at best, out-and-out balderdash at worst.In all of this back-and-forth I am trying to understand what the real TOE is all about, and what real proof we have for it.

I don’t have a problem with scientific inquiry, I realize that all science is tentative, I realize that we have to start somewhere, and that somewhere is ponderance/speculation/idea formulation.However, Science is characterized by perpetual inquiry and relentless skepticism. This is why I have a problem with TOE being presented as settled fact, such as it is. There is more about TOE that is as yet inadequately addressed – like my questions above which are met with generalized speculations that defer to microevolution as much as possible – than has been addressed.The bewildering part of this is that those who so vehemently advance TOE in the name of science are so willing to eschew the most fundamental aspects of science. They are only willing to apply known natural processes, and if those processes don’t fit then the perpetual foregone conclusion is “yes, they do fit and it’s only a matter of time before we figure out how”. There is no accounting for completely unknown processes blowing the whole thing out of the water.Supernatural would be the term for these processes, but that introduces the debate of where natural ends and super begins.

Hello Granny M. - Through all of this argle-bargle I have come to understand that my contention with TOE is in the Macroevolution that is fed to countless middle-schoolers and the general public in digestible chunks, as discussed in my entries immediately previous.

I’m not here to demonstrate anything one way or another, I’m simply asking the question of how the Macroevolution that is fed ubiquitously to the public can be substantiated.Nested hierarchies based on statistical analyses of microbiological classifications do not substantiate or demonstrate this.

We always seem to skip over the big evolution ideas, the ones depicted in schoolkids diagrams, and go straight to the observances performed through a microscope. It is not at all unreasonable to ask for a demonstration showing how a and mammal becomes a whale. If this demonstration is not feasible because it takes a long, long time, then, yes, that does cast significant doubt on the land-to-sea mammal theory. The default is not that something is true, the default is that it has not been shown to be true.There have been many spectacular failures in Science - and many spectacular successes – and many of these failures are discovered when the paper studies are put into practice/experimentation, the point where the unknowns are discovered, the impetus for necessitating that a thing be repeatedly demonstrated before we celebrate.And why can’t a nested hierarchy be explained by Creationism? The Creator, by definition, creates everything we believe we can understand and then some.

I see hypothetical common ancestor, and character change inherited by all descendants. This seems like a paper study, a classification of things that can be further investigated, and I’m not sure what it demonstrates.And I can’t explain your last sentence, and I can’t imagine how it demonstrates that long ago a simple organism developed into all of the creatures we know today, and all of the creatures whose bones we dig up.

I think you misinterpret my response. I am not refuting evolutionary theory, I am demonstrating that there is no concise explanation for these specific features. Microscopic observations do not demonstrate these developments.(…and the unique thing about the chameleon’s tongue is the hinging.)

I won’t disagree with any of this. I will point out that the simplified version of evolution that is presented to schoolkids is precisely the part of evolution that cannot be demonstrated, and is precisely the part that refutes Creation, and is precisely the impetus for this evcforum website. This simplified version is what some scientists believe to be true based on their other observations, but which they cannot show or “prove” to be true.Anywhere else this belief would be known as faith.