For some evolutionary processes, we don't need to continue to look at the fossil record alone to corroborate evolutionary processes. Indeed, the more we decode the human genome, the more we understand how evolution happens on a fundamental level and the hypothetical predictions are strikingly accurate. Ken Miller, author of Finding Darwin's God, breaks down one critical prediction that confirms the common ancestry hypothesis.
The problem with many arguments against evolution is that they rely on assumptions about what the fossil record can and cannot support. Even though we have uncovered numerous transitional specimens, the assertion is that there are still gaps. Think about this for a second. What does a fossil record of discontinuous species look like if there are no discernible gaps in how species make transitions over millions and millions of years? Perhaps it is like the final totally grotesque scene of a nasty B grade horror flick called Society where members of this social group find a host and join themselves to it and then each other in this grotesque continuous life-form? The same thing happens in another gross flick called Slither.
At the risk of a gross oversimplification of complexities I honestly do not completely understand, the way that this works is that you can plot an assortment of variables on a graph and mathematically map out the various transitional phases of species. As more transitional fossils are discovered (see tiktaalik here and here as well as the more recent "Ida") through various statistical methods you can then measure what is a reliable prediction and what is not. Since datasets are discontinuous methods are needed to smooth out the transitions as much as is mathematically reliable that the predictions are sound. If this sounds like "making stuff up" pray for the people on the space shuttle, people who are turning the ignition of cars, as well as all those medications that people are taking because they are built on the same scientific foundations of discontinuous data.
So… The fossil record will always be incomplete. The data for all instances of a drug being taken to determine if it will kill someone will also be incomplete. Yet we are fine with the drugs we are prescribed, or at least trusting enough until something bad happens. Yet the fossil record and the predictions we can make with it to support the fundamental hypotheses of evolution are somehow "hot air"?
As Pope John Paul II said, "We know, in fact, that truth cannot contradict truth." If two theories of the world are true and we do not know how they are consistently related, it is not responsible to reject either truth in favor of another. It is our responsibility to work out the relationship. Ken Ham and his ilk do exactly the opposite and so, they lie to their constituents not only by rejecting one truth, evolution, but by distorting what evoltuon is and the evidence for it. The end of this exercise is only to support their ideological claims and so abuse Scripture through irresonsible hermeneutics in service of their ideology alone. Or is Kenneth Miller blowing "hot air" too?
Related posts:
[...] dr. ken miller breaks down human evolution [...]
Fascinating propositions from Ken Miller; however, the Creator ***spoke*** everything into existence, all fully formed, etc. Maybe science could look into that fact and propose, theorize, etc., to come to conclusions. Anyone for parsing what "spoke" means and how to hypothesize a conclusion from it?
there is no evidence that god spoke anything into existence, at all. what we have is a narrative that one ought to take on faith. that does nothing to offer a counterfactual to miller's claims at all. the best evidence suggests that the genesis creation narratives are to illustrate the ordering activity of god, not the creation out of nothing. this is not unlike the ordering of the temple to suggest that the cosmos was ordered to inspire worship. reading it like a science (or history) text not only betrays the scripture itself, but renders an unlikely and i would say very wrong reading of it.
in short, if you can present evidence from another source that god actually spoke anything into existence then it might work. however, we cannot get that from any other source than religious texts and so, it is incompatible with any scientific hypothetical construct.
Drew,
Miller offers a natural explanation; the Bible offers a supernatural explanation.
How do you know there's no evidence that everything was spoken into existence?
If your reference is science, you don't know because your faith is in science which is only capable of describing present nature…not origins.
All knowledge is of one piece; what you suggest is to separate scientific theories of origins from consideration of the supernatural resulting in a dichotomy between faith and reason; even science fails if one could be successful at that task.
C.S. Lewis stated, "If popular thought feels 'science' to be different from all other kinds of knowledge because it is experimentally verifiable, popular thought is mistaken and one should abandon the distinction."
In short, you have asked for some evidence (experimentally verifiable proof). According to C.S. Lewis, you should abandon your distinction that "…it is incompatible with any scientific hypothetical construct."
Miller is merely suggesting that chromosome 2 is some combination of two chimp chromosomes. He would like to do the experiment of breaking apart human chromosome 2, etc., and finding out if the result is a chimp…a sort of "reverse engineering" experiment. What is the evidence for other "chromosome combinations" of what appear to be (in science faith) near kin? Perhaps Miller could attempt his reverse engineering experiment with those…if they exist.
[There was another Miller (Stanley) who boasted of manufacturing amino acid in a sparkling test tube apparatus; however, all of his manufactured stuff has, since, been found to be lifeless. So goes the Nobel Prize to another "deserving" laureate...]
Science does fairly well when it explains what's in front of it; but is out of its element when it goes off into origins where it refuses to use the appropriate tools.
So, Drew, are you an "evidentiary scientist" a la Popper or a "metaphysical scientist" a la Kuhn?
Where do you find truth outside of Scripture? Certainly not in anomaly-laden paradigms because that form of "truth" is humanly-determined, without rationality leading to postmodernism and superstition.
Are you comfortable in the "paradigm of the world" where all views are admitted ***except those of the Bible***?
"How do you know there's no evidence that everything was spoken into existence?"
If we don't know if something is there or not, it is not evidence.
I am not claiming a faith in science at all, simply what science can know and what it cannot. Similarly what theology can explain, and what it cannot.
The idea that science only does well with what is empirically "in front of it" betrays the nature of hypothesizing and theory. In Baconian science only what was empirical was acceptable, hypothesizing was not. Science is about making predictions about reality as much as a reality that is immediately present to the senses. Because of this, that computer you are using to debate this is possible. No one could actually "see" quanta until they were predicted to be there.
It just seems that your expectations of science and your expectations of what the bible reasonable tells us are confused and therefore make no sense.
Drew,
What is science's proof that order and complexity arose out of chaos?
d.
there are countless mathematical proof that demonstrate this phenomenon from the formation of crystals to the quantum mechanics on which that hard drive operates in your computer. bohr was right and einstein was wrong. einstein argued that order must come from order. bohr, a christian by the way, argued that quantum mechanics predicts a far more irrational and disordered basis for the order we perceive. what's fantastic is that even that disordered and chaotic sub-atomic "world" is still mathematically predictable. pretty much axiomatic in physics for the past 50 or so years.
The Second Law of Thermodynamics could well be stated as follows: "In any ordered system, open or closed, there exists a tendency for
that system to decay to a state of disorder, which tendency can only be
suspended or reversed by an external source of ordering energy directed
by an informational program and transformed through an
ingestion-storage-converter mechanism into the specific work required
to build up the complex structure of that system."
If either the information program or the converter mechanism is not available to that "open" system, it will not increase in order, no matter how much external energy surrounds it. The
system will proceed to decay in accordance with the Second Law of
Thermodynamics.
"The point is that in a non-isolated system there exists a possibility
for formation of ordered, low-entropy structures at sufficiently low
temperatures. This ordering principle is responsible for the appearance
of ordered structures such as crystals as well as for the phenomena of
phase transitions. Unfortunately this principle cannot explain the
formation of biological structures. The probability that at ordinary
temperatures a macroscopic number of molecules is assembled to give
rise to the highly-ordered structures and to the coordinated functions
characterizing living organisms is vanishingly small. The idea of
spontaneous genesis of life in its present form is therefore highly
improbable, even on the scale of the billions of years during which
prebiotic evolution occurred." Ilya Prigogine, Gregoire Nicolis & Agnes Babloyants, "Thermodynamics of Evolution," Physics Today, (Vol. 25, November 1972) p. 23.
I doubt that there are "countless mathematical proofs"
Without quibbling: Bohr was not "right" and Einstein "wrong" as those words have moral meaning and in evolution there is no morality. One might say that Bohr observed what he observed and noted it mathematically; Einstein observed what he observed and noted it mathematically. They left their mathematics up to others to prove/disprove and neither of their mathematics have been adequately tried to conclude any one way or another…except by faith in a worldview.
Whether Bohr was a "christian" or not is irrelevant. You are mistaken to conclude that his argument was in favor of "irrational and disordered basis (sic) for the order we perceive." Your next statement, if correct, proves predictability and therefore NOT disorderly and/or chaotic.
Whether rank-and-file evolutionists know it or not, this problem they have with entropy is thus "one of the most fundamental unsolved problems in biology." It
is more than a problem, in fact, it is a devastating denial of the
evolution model itself. It will continue to be so until evolutionists
can demonstrate that the vast imagined evolutionary continuum in space
and time has both a program to guide it and an energy converter to
empower it. Otherwise, the Second Law precludes it.
einstein was wrong, dead wrong about particle physics. his formulae to harmonize relativity with complementarity don't work. bohr's do as further tests concluded over the decades since. it's not faith in a worldview that makes nuclear fission work. it's mathematical proof. the irrationality here is that you can predict the unpredictable. but maybe you should talk about this with an evolutionary biologist and a particle physicist who can far more adequately demonstrate these basic principles and even more.
i think evolutionists know what problems they are working with including miller. to tell him that he does not understand his science is just stupid. it's like dawkins telling me i don't understand theology. you have a pretty impressive straw-man a-brewing here.
Splendid, science uses its tests and provides insight into einstein's proposal about particle physics…a science subject. Comparing apples with apples is why science is so adept at performing tests and experiments, hypothesizing, theorizing, etc. As long as it stays within materialistic boundaries, it will be able to provide solutions to puzzling (you may call them "irrational") questions…even to the extent of predicting the "unpredictable."
Evolutionists have no way (using materialistic means) of proving where matter came from let alone the laws that make matter what it is after/before it became matter. Evolutionists can hypothesize about the present configuration of the local universe and what they consider "quantum" leaps about the distant. Evolutionists are loathe to use all of the tools at their disposal, though, for to do so would be materialistically illogical. As far as an evolutionist is concerned, nothing exists but matter and only matter can come from matter.
I assume that evolutionists are continuing in their vain attempt(s) to story-tell their way out of the consequences of the 2nd law of thermodynamics…just as you did with your suggestion that crystals explained it away.
Perhaps you understand theology; perhaps the Creator doesn't know you. Which is more important?
"evolutionists" i am assuming you mean evolutionary biolgists lest we confuse science with ideology, make no assertions about the origin of matter, only its change in populations over time – and that includes bacteria. cosmology and evolutionary biology make two very different sets of arguments about matter and you cannot confuse the two. so you claim here is again, a strawman.
Evolutionary biologists must make certain assumptions ***so that*** they can "make assertions." After all, matter is here.
Please allow me to review briefly some of the assumptions that are "must haves" for evolutionists whether biologists, cosmologists, paleontologists or what have you.
a. the universe had a beginning 15-20 billion years ago (pretty big spread, but let's go with it anyway);
b. "before that" the universe was about the size of a walnut: with the "potential" for every molecule in the universe (stars, galaxies, water, humans, you name it);
c. there was no time "before that" and there was no "space"; laws underlying the universe have not changed over time
d. life came from the "primeval oceans" ("pre-biotic soup)";
e. somehow amino acids got formed;
f. then DNA (no telling where the information came from to do that);
g. then single-celled leading to multi-celled organisms;
h. cold-blooded leading to warm-blooded animals; invertebrates leading to vertebrates;
i. "higher" animals became "moral" "rational" ("spiritual"?);
j. there's lots more…
++++++++++++++++++
paleontologists point to vast geologic strata and using some tools "postulate" lower life forms in "older/deeper" strata and higher life forms in "younger/superficial" strata. these "findings" coupled with "evolving features" of fish, birds, etc., evolutionists offer these theories as "fact" in thousands of volumes, documentaries, videos, etc.
I don't have to build "strawmen" because thus far, accepting ANY of the aforementioned is preposterous. Yet, this is what passes for "science" and I am appalled that it's gotten to this point. Surely you are being facetious when you assert that evolutionary biologists…"make no assertions about the origin of matter, only its change in populations over time…" as if they are just these humble statisticians, observing and describing change: hah. How honorable is the evolutionary biologist community? I don't see a groundswell of tens of thousands of members of this community rising up and demanding editing, reprinting texts (especially in middle and high school), conducting seminars, releasing news items, producing videos, etc., explaining that they didn't really mean all the stuff they've been claiming over the years and that's still being taught (On the ***Origin*** of Species?). Naw, that's just not going to happen. So, who's left to set the
record straight? Maybe what you're telling me is that evolutionary biologists have painted themselves into the "just watching and describing the changes" corner. Please don't tell me that there are significant differences between the arguments of cosmology and evolutionary biology ***about matter*** and then assert that I'm building strawmen; not when you've just finished saying that the evolutionary biologist "…asserts…only (matter's) change over time." If the evolutionary biologist only describes change in matter over time, that's not an argument, it's a description (on the way to a theory); so they have no argument. If, on the other hand, you are saying that the evolutionary biologist argues that matter changes over time, I have to disagree (1st Law of thermodynamics). But, more importantly, I doubt that the evolutionary biologists would agree that their discipline is concerned with the change in matter over time.
In an earlier post you said something about Einstein getting it wrong and the proponents of quantum theory getting it "right." Relativity and quantum mechanics are two distinct disciplines with two distinctly different applications (big things vs little things). Are they connected somehow by string theory?
the strawman is that you are assuming these are must haves for evolutionary theories to have muster. they are not! evolution is the theory that populations naturally select genes and mutate over time. that it. that's all that it is. the notion of human origins argues that homo sapiens shared common ancestry in a POPULATION with other primates and the gene pool we share simply won out and THEN adapted over time. that's why all of your confusion with cosmology here is a strawman. you want evolutionary biology to be what ken miller is NOT arguing and thus you are reaching wrong conclusions.
moreover, the "assertions" to which you refer are actually called "hypotheses" that when tested either confirm phenomena or disconfirm pheonomena. when confirmed over time, these hypotheses become theories due to their power to explain and predict phenomena. that's the fricking scientific method! you almost equate evolution to the search for aliens or alien abductions which bear no predictabilty, are not the BEST explanations for phenomena, and cannot be dublicated with various sources of evidence other than personal narratives. that's why it is an ethnographic interest in anthropology, not a scientific matter!
Also, saying "e. somehow amino acids got formed;" just shows how little you clearly understand the theories that are used to describe how amino acids form. for instance, we can create these acids in labs in a water base under specific conditions. we know what the conditions were like on earth when these acids developed over a very very long time with intense heat, base chemicals, and glass-like surfaces at the boiling hot bottom of crater wells. university scientists at institutions like oregon, harvard, and others are studying these pheonomenon that CAN be replicated with a compelling argument that the origin of human life is of alien origin. that would explain in part how the base chemicals got on this planet and makes sense if you think about how raw the planet was in its first few millenia.
some physicists are convinced that string theory works. others are not. it's up for debate. why is it up for debate? no none has observed the phenomenon! it was only decades after special relativity that it the theory was confirmed again and again which is why it is the basis of physics today. likewise it was only decades after bohr that it was confirmed he was right about quantum fluctuations and einstein was wrong.
arguing about whether evolution is true or not is like arguing with a physicist is gravity is real or not. just because you do not "See" them in the academic field arguing different evolutionary models to explain observed phenonena does not mean that they do! regularly. they present papers, which pass through peer-review, which get presented at conferences etc…
the strawman is that you are assuming these are must haves for
evolutionary theories to have muster. they are not! evolution is the
theory that populations naturally select genes and mutate over time
(So, are yousaying that natural selection and mutation over time are two “must
haves?”). that it. that's all that it is. the notion
(what the heck to do mean by
“notion?” sounds as if you're asserting that science is
stimulated and controlled by notions.) of human origins
argues that homo sapiens shared common ancestry in a POPULATION with
other primates (so, are you
saying that homo sapiens and other primates were interbreeding at
some time in the distant past?) and the gene pool we share
simply (what do you mean by
“simply” here? Nothing about evolution seems simple.)
won out and THEN adapted (“adapted?”
distinguish that from natural selection.) over time.
that's why all of your confusion with cosmology here is a strawman.
you want evolutionary biology to be what ken miller is NOT arguing
and thus you are reaching wrong conclusions (this
is where you may have gone off the mark: I'm not confused with
cosmology; I'm asserting that the principles of how cosmology
“evolves” – to use the evolutionist's word – are similar to the
principles of the “evolution of species.” nothing more, nothing
less.)
moreover, the "assertions"
to which you refer are actually called "hypotheses" that
when tested either confirm phenomena or disconfirm pheonomena. when
confirmed over time, these hypotheses become theories due to their
power to explain and predict phenomena. that's the fricking
scientific method! you almost equate evolution to the search for
aliens or alien abductions which bear no predictabilty, are not the
BEST explanations for phenomena, and cannot be dublicated with
various sources of evidence other than personal narratives. that's
why it is an ethnographic interest in anthropology, not a scientific
matter! (no comment other
than this sounds like a rant.)
Also, saying
"e. somehow amino acids got formed;" just shows how little
you clearly understand the theories that are used to describe how
amino acids form. for instance, we can create these acids in labs in
a water base under specific conditions. we know (just
HOW do you “know?”) what the conditions were like on
earth when these acids developed over a very very long time with
intense heat, base chemicals, and glass-like surfaces at the boiling
hot bottom of crater wells. university scientists at institutions
like oregon, harvard, and others are studying these pheonomenon that
CAN be replicated with a compelling argument that the origin of human
life is of alien origin. that would explain in part how the base
chemicals got on this planet and makes sense if you think about how
raw the planet was in its first few millenia. (so,
are you saying that the chemicals used in live organisms formed under
specific conditions but they needed alien life to give the chemicals
life? Were they illegal aliens?)
some
physicists are convinced that string theory works. others are not.
it's up for debate. why is it up for debate? no none has observed the
phenomenon! (wow, you
haven't observed this phenomenon, yet another phenomenon – the
beginning of everything – which you also have not observed, you
feel very comfortable structuring an entire science – evolutionary
science. Do you see the dichotomy?) it was only decades
after special relativity that it the theory was confirmed again and again which is why it is
the basis of physics today. likewise it was only decades after bohr
that it was confirmed he was right about quantum fluctuations and
einstein was wrong. (as I
understand it, string theory explains quantum theory's inability to
explain where anything is at any moment. Which makes it highly
useful.)
arguing about whether evolution is
true or not is like arguing with a physicist is gravity is real or
not. (this is another “from
left field” comment because evolution, at least as you've described
it, doesn't have much explanatory utility.) just because
you do not "See" them in the academic field arguing
different evolutionary models to explain observed phenonena does not mean that they do! regularly.
they present papers, which pass through peer-review, which get
presented at conferences etc… (paper
presentations, peer-review, conferences, etc. equals many
opportunities for group-groping but not much, if any, reproducing.
Which leads me to ask how did reproduction start?)
Nice one. I have stumbled and twittered this for my friends. My friends will enjoy reading it also.