Anyone know of this website? I haven’t gone through and examined it. I don’t know enough about evolution to really delve deeply into the debate so I usually abstain. I am willing enough to accept evolution, but I do it not out of my own well-reasoned conclusions but because I have faith in Scientists.
I understand the gist, something mutates if that mutation survives into the next generation it might propagate, a sufficent number of mutations and supposedly it branches off into a new species. Natural Selection makes sense, but so does the idea that it lacks sufficient explanatory power.
So is this website on the up and up or is it some kind of clever Intelligent Design site?
What are the legitimate arguments going on regarding evolution today?
Here is a quote from one of the signatories: “Darwinism is a trivial idea that has been elevated to the status of the scientific theory that governs modern biology.”
Dr. Michael Egnor, Professor of Neurosurgery and Pediatrics at State University of New York, Stony Brook
It doesn’t seem to me to be that people are arguing against Evolution, they are just trying to wrestle it away from the stranglehold that Charles Darwin maintains. Is that an accurate viewpoint?
The site and the statement were originated and currently maintained by Discovery Institute, known for promoting ID.
I don’t think it’s particularly clever.
I’ve only ever encountered the term “Darwinism” used by those who are attempting to associate the study of evolution with a straw man. The brief statements made by people who may or may not be the credentialed people they claim to be, are not particularly illuminating.
I’m reading through the three papers they link on their site, the first two were interesting. I thought that, perhaps, they were arguing for multiple life origin points, i.e. different phyla evolving independently from different instances of the same phenomenon (amino acid generation, abiogenesis) rather than the common ancestor theory. I thought it was maybe a little weird, but okay. The third one seemed to continue the trend, pointed out some flaws that may exist. It started sounding, little by little, more like an ID theory (a particularly well reasoned one, I’ll admit) from the language, but I wrote it off as a little bias from reading your post.
Then you get to page five…
That rang the alarm bells. I kept reading though to see if perhaps it was just an illustration, just saying “oops!” And that they were just using it to show a hole in Darwinian evolution rather than argue for ID. It got a little better for a bit, and they made a good point with this:
being a terrible point of view. But if you want to see where this is all going skip down to page 7, the section titled “What’s going on here?” It suddenly just goes into how now that we’ve seen this evidence we know that Darwinian evolution has holes (sure, why not, offer something better) we are going to show you that not every Intelligent Design proponent is a moronic creationist, take a look at this molecular biologist for example!
So yeah, it takes a lot of reading, but in the end it’s an ID ninja site.
Gotcha. That’s kind of what I thought but I thought that maybe there was some sort of internal dissent within the biology community that might be conflated by know-nothings as being evidence of a problem with evolution when it’s not so much a problem with evolution as much as it is dissent regarding the process.
I do find natural selection to be a woefully inadequate explanation. It still doesn’t get me from raw matter floating in the void to complex organism with the ability to contemplate itself. But then again, there are whole levels of my scientific education that I could complete and probably have a better understanding of why things are the way they are.
Read The Ancestor’s Tale by Richard Dawkins. He starts at the present (Homo sapiens) and works backwards to the primordial soup, explaining how each main branching occurred along the way.
It’s long, but it’s not overly technical. (I skimmed some of the biochemistry-heavy sections, I’ll admit.)
Natural selection doesn’t go back to inanimate matter, by the way. Abiogenesis is a different process than evolution.
There is no internal scientific dissent over the basics of evolution and common descent. Those are as proven as the atom. Objections from personal incredulity are not exactly devastating.
(my bolding)
I think you hit the nail on the head here and in a way tackle one of the OP’s issues. The basics are pretty well established, but the nuances may be up for discussion so the “Darwinian stranglehold” can be challenged of it hinders further research on evolution.
Yeah, there is discussion, for instance, over whether natural selection is the only sorting mechanism, but not over the essentials of mutation, adaptation and speciation.
As soon as I saw this (and a reference to denouncing “Darwinism” I knew you’d found yet another bogus Intelligent Design website.
Egnor is one of a handful of physicians who boast impressive-sounding titles that do not in the least back up their opinions, which make sense from a religious point of view but are woefully lacking as far as a scientific framework.
I’ve run into Egnor when he appeared in response to postings on this blog, and he truly comes across as laughably ignorant. Or if you prefer, Egnorant.
The thing is, no actual biologists think that Darwin was the last word on evolution. The man died 100 years ago.
Helpful hint: anyone who uses the term “Darwinism” is a creationist of one sort or another. Invariably. It’s a concerted effort on the part of the creationists to discredit the idea of evolution by blaming it all on one fallible human being. It’s an attempt to create a parallel with “Marxism”. Some guy thought up a wacky idea back in the 1800s and millions of stupid people fell for it.
And the funny thing is, if Darwin had died as a young man, we’d still have the theory of natural selection, only the creationists would call it Wallacism, not Darwinism. Alfred Russel Wallace - Wikipedia
None really. Sure some scientists will bicker over fine details but they all agree on the overall arc of evolution being the mechanism at work.
Remember these are scientists…if one could find a gaping (and legitimate) hole in evolution their career would be made and they’d be famous. They’d jump all over it.
Thing is many thousands of scientists from a myriad of specialties have been working on this for 150 years. Everything they keep finding and adding to the body of work only supports evolution, not debunk it. Keep in mind the numerous fields this encompasses as well as advances in technology allowing ever deeper insight. It is not just biologists. It is archaeologists, it is bio-chemists, it is molecular biologists, geneticists, paleontologists, bioinformaticians and so on.
All those fields coming at the question from all sorts of angles adding in new levels of testing due to advancing technology and the pile of evidence in favor of evolution just keeps growing.
If you are a betting man the smart money is on evolution.
Whack-a-mole has brought up one of the most amazing things about evolutionary theory. Darwin’s original assertion has proven to be one of the most enduring theories in science. The details are debated, but the basic principle remains just as Darwin posited. It’s pretty unassailable as science goes. And yet, it’s the one that the religious folks rail against. At least they’re ambitious.
(my bolding)
In theory yes, but that sientist also has a spouse and kids and mortgage payments. A complex (and true) theory like Evolution would require massive experiments and analises that could not be done by a single man.
The ammount of criticism and name-calling would be amazing. Even if the guy/gal had some pretty good ideas he’d/she’d be going against massive opposition and being befriended by some religious groups would only hurt the case.
I’m not saying that any credible challenges against Evolution are even remotely likely to appear.
Science is not about ideas, it’s about proof. If anyone could show hard evidence against evolution, there couldn’t be any ridicule.
It wouldn’t have to be that complicated either. All anyone has to do is find a fossil in the wrong strata. Find a human skull in the precambrian and you have falsified evolution.
More likely that would reflect on geology. Given that we can see evolution in the lab and in the wild, even what you describe wouldn’t be enough. Basically, the evidence for evolution is so large and diverse that you basically have to go all the way to “the world is an illusion” or “Earth was created ten minutes ago and our memories are false” or “all of science is a conspiracy and the evidence is fake” in order to falsify evolution. It would be like falsifying gravity.
I don’t see how that’s true. I get what you’re getting at, but I think you’ve oversimplified it.
A precambrian human skull would just have moved hominid origins waaaay back. Even today we have species essentially indistinguishable from Ordovician fossils, for example, like the horseshoe crab.
Fossils are rare (compared to the billions of potentially-fossilizable animals now dead) and discovering them is chancy. If we hadn’t stumbled across horseshoe crab fossils before now, would finding a 445-million-year-old horseshoe crab fossil undo evolution?
Besides, we’re really discussing natural selection, not “evolution,” when discussing “Darwinism.” Evolution – the observable fact that things change over time – was accepted by churchmen and natural philosophers before Darwin and Wallace supplied an explanation for the means by which it operates: natural selection. Even today you can directly observe evolution, so there’s no way to falsify it. Natural selection as its engine is susceptible to replacement by competing theories. In fact, as I understand it, current thought is that sexual selection and genetic drift play parts in evolution too, and exactly what proportion of change is due to each of those mechanisms is not yet established, although consensus for best guess seems to be natural selection is the major force, with proportionally smaller contributions from sexual selection and genetic drift.