Darwin however published several editions, some of which was later than Mendel’s publication. I’ve read that he had the journal with the work in his library, but it was unopened.
Yes. In fact, The Descent of Man was published several years after Mendel’s paper. It would have been interesting if he had seen Mendel’s work, but it wasn’t available when his key ideas were developed.
While the claim has often been made, there’s no evidence that Darwin ever owned a copy of any issue of the proceedings of the Brunn Natural History Society, unopened or otherwise. Darwin scholars do recognise that it’s possible that he saw a couple of references to Mendel’s work in the course of his reading, but there’s no reason to believe that he took any particular notice of them.
(The “unopened” detail here suggests cross-pollination with the true story that the copy of Das Kapital that Marx foistered on him has its pages uncut and hence unread - while unwanted, Darwin didn’t dispose of the book and it’s now on display in the study at Down House. It is however a myth that Marx wanted to dedicate the work to him.)
It’s not the same thing, macro evolution would indicate all the diversity evolved from a few or one life form, micro evolution only would indicate some ‘islands of stability’ of life, where a life form has some flexibility but really can’t evolve too much.
The point you’ve missed in Diogenes post is that there’s no logical reason for a life form to be prevented from evolving “too much.” If an animal can evolve a little in one direction, and then evolve a little more, and then a little more, and then a little more, eventually you end up with animals as different as wolves and whales, despite the fact that both creatures descended from the same ancestor. Short of divine dictate, there’s no point along the way where the animal suddenly evolves “too much.” It’s always a micro-change from whatever it previously was.
Here is a discussion of the editions. Clearly he came up with the theory before Mendel’s work - his discussion on inheritance in the sixth edition, at least, shows not a glimmer of understanding of genetics. It would have been interesting if he noted Mendel’s work in a later edition. However, even if he had read it, and I’ll accept that he never even saw the journal, there would have been no reason for him to have noticed the significance. So there was a chronological opportunity for him to have seen it before one of the later editions, but he of course didn’t.
BTW, by open I mean cut the pages apart. I bought a copy of some of Huxley’s essays over Thanksgiving, and found that many of the pages were never cut open since the book was published about 75 years ago.
Regardless, the same mechanisms of natural selection apply. Biologists use the terms “microevolution” and “macroevolution” to largely distinguish the scope of work they are doing. The divisionary elements of the Creationist crowd, largely the same folk who seek to promote Intelligent Design as a viable scientific hypothesis, have descended on this and have co-opted the terms to attempt to demonstrate a fissure between scales and create a strawman to burn. In truth, speciation is not a rigorously demarcated categorization, and it is often the case that two or more groups that were previously categorized as a single species are divided, or that two separate species are found to be reproductively compatible and produce viable, non-hybrid offspring. Indeed, arguments about the “species problem” were part of the formation of modern biological synthesis.
Because there is some degree of arbitraryness in the indentification of a species among similar cladistic groups, there is no clear line between “micro” and “macro”. In any case, speciation has been observed, both in nature and in the laboratory. It was in no small part the speciation of the closely related but non-interbreeding Galapagos finches which helped to form Darwin’s theories.
Stranger
Not just a few. Considering the millions of species that exist, even if there a thousand at the beginning, what you call macroevolution would be required to explain the diversity of life.
You’d of course have to explain why life “can’t evolve too much.” Do you have any reason, besides your personal incredulity and the words of a book written before genetics could have been imagined, that this is so?
Although we see somewhat of a continuum in the extant species, I think if the OP looks closely and carefully at the fossil record, he will see that there is a real continuum and that micro blends into macro. Imagine seeing a bush only from the outermost branches. You wouldn’t automatically know that they all trace back to the same starting point.
For instance, just look at the fossil record for humans. We don’t have the corresponding fossil record for chimps, but it’s probably the case that our common ancestor looked a lot more like a chimp than a human. And that’s exactly what we see as you “go back in time” and look at our various ancestors. Just a little over 2M years ago, our ancestors (the Australopithecines) looked pretty much like bipidal chimps (without the large canine teeth).
Further, if you look at our DNA, the first thing you notice is that we have one less chromosome than chimps do. But then if you look more closely, you’ll see that one of our chromosomes is just a fused version of 2 of the chimp chromosomes.
And you can see a the remnants of evolution in how certain species can interbreed. Those that are closely related, like wolves and coyotes, can even produce fertile offspring. Those that are more distantly related (like horses and donkeys) can interbreed, but they generally don’t produce fertile offspring. Animals even more distantly related cannot interbreed at all.
timtupp I just wanted to say thanks for coming in with an open mind. It’s a rare person who will say, “I’m just here to listen,” especially about evolution.
Note also that very small changes in a single gene can have very large results in the resulting organism, even further erasing the distinction between “micro-” and “macro-evolution”.
timtupp, when you ask about macroevolution, do you mean speciation or something else?
Word. Hox genes are an ideal example.
Wow. That was a far more thorough response than I expected, and I really appreciate you all taking the time to reply in such detail. I read it all and looked at all the links and I must say you’ve given me some new and interesting things to think about, which is exactly what I was hoping for.
An attack on the biblical account will not be useful here. My belief does not arise from my innate desire to blindly accept myths. I believe, for a great number of reasons that the Bible is inspired by God. It thus follows that I would view the Genesis account as having authority, and that I would be interested in determining how the specific creation described in the Bible meshes with what has been observed.
Good point. By macroevolution, I am essentially referring to the development of large sets of characteristics, not simply to speciation. For example, I would see dogs, cats, horses, etc. as distinct groups which would require macroevolution to produce. Variations in fruit-flies, finches, and cave-dwelling fish would fall into the category I would describe as microevolution.
Question:
Is evolution consistent [or not] with Biblical creation?
Examine the creation accounts given in Genesis [KJV used]
The text uses two verbs, chiefly, to describe the world’s origin.
Gen. 2:3 he had rested from all his work which God created and made.
Examine what is “created” and what is “made”.
Three passages use the verb create.
Create [ex nihilo - make something from nothing]
Gen 1:1. God created the heaven and the earth.
Gen 1:21. God created … living creature[s] …
Gen 1:27. God created man in his own image. elaborating, Gen 2:7. God … breathed into [man] … the breath of life
More often the verb made is used.
Make [fashion - from something that exists]
Gen 1:7. God made the firmament …
Gen 1:16. God made two great lights …
Gen 1:16. … he made the stars also.
Gen 2:9. … out of the ground made the LORD God to grow every tree …
Gen 1:25. God made the beast of the earth after his kind …
Gen 2:22 And from the rib, which the LORD God had taken from man, made he a woman
Gen 3:1 … the serpent was more subtil than any beast of the field which the LORD God had made.
Gen 3:7 … and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons.
Other passages use the verb Let [allow or permit]
Things that are said to have appeared by use of the verb Let, as with Made, came from existing stuff: light, firmament, dry ground, grass, sun, moon, stars.
Genesis asserts three things were created by God from nothing:
[1] The physical universe: matter.
[2] Life.
[3] Man [in the image of God; energized by the spirit [breath] of God].
Apart from these, other things [both inert and living] were made
Examine scientific knowledge on these three points.
1(a) Big Bang - Time Zero.
1(b) God created the heaven and the earth.
Evidence continues to mount that the Big Bang [BB] occurred 15-20 billion years ago: chiefly, the red shift of receding stars [optical Doppler effect]. Hubble’s law that states the furthest stars are receding at the greatest velocities. Second, the distribution of chemical elements in the galaxy. Big Bang theories predict that hydrogen atoms collided to form helium roughly in a ratio of 25% helium to 75% hydrogen, and we observe that ratio in our galaxy. Third, radioactive decay. Carbon-14 [half life about 5000 years] and Uranium 238 [half life about 4 billion years] date the oldest earth and moon rocks at 4-5 billion years, the approximate age of the solar system, and by inference from stars whose evolution is well studied, we date our galaxy about 10 billion years. Last, we observe a cosmic echo of the Big Bang. By theory, 300,000 years or so after BB, the universe cooled enough to begin radiating according to the Stefan-Boltzmann law, and, the frequency [energy] of this radiation decreased with time by known principles to the microwave range consistent with 3 degrees Kelvin, the current temperature of interstellar space.
As we trace the physical evolution of the universe backwards, we are stopped at a cosmic age of about 10-47 seconds. Previous to that, the temperature and density of the universe are so great all our theories and equations break down. Our first picture of the universe is a perfectly symmetrical, 10-dimensional space-time. The four known forces: gravitational, electromagnetic, strong and weak nuclear were unified by the super-string. Ten dimensions soon became four, as six of them collapsed. the universe was an opaque ionic soup for about 300,000 years. Then matter condensed into atoms and molecules. Stars and galaxies formed, and things became something resemblant to what we see today.
Genesis says In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
Science knows nothing before 10-47 seconds.
We have no theory - descriptive or causal - for the beginning.
There is no inconsistency between two points of view, one of which does not exist.
2(a) Life itself evolved from primordial soup
2(b) God created … living creatures
There is an understandable difference between an elephant gun and an elephant. The elephant possesses something the gun does not - although in the hands of a marksman the gun can remove that difference - namely life. Darwin taught that living beings could defy the 2nd law of thermodynamics - that disorder must follow order - through the process of natural selection. While the overall disorder increases, as the carcasses of the non-survivors decay, more developed species - those better suited to the environment - could come into existence through favorable mutation. And so evolution can take one understandably from an amoeba to a homo sapiens. With plants thrown in for good measure.
But Darwin does not describe the origin of the amoeba.
To get the amoeba, we need something called primordial soup. And a bolt of lightning. Or maybe cosmic radiation. Something. Anything. In the laboratory, elemental carbon has been coaxed into hydrocarbon rings - the building blocks of life. But so far, that’s it.
Genesis says God created life itself.
Science has made a hydrocarbon but not made something living from something inert.
Darwin does not address origins of life.
There is no inconsistency between two points of view on the origin of life. Only one exists.
There is no inconsistency between Genesis’ “made” and Darwin’s “evolved.”
3(a) Man is evolution’s highest achievement - the most complex of all species
3(b) Man, uniquely, bears the image of God and lives by the spirit [breath] of God.
For the secularist who has gotten past the origin of matter and the origin of life, it’s the simplest of processes to get to homo sapiens. Time plus chance. Oodles of time to be sure, and the most favorable of chances. But the chances don’t have to be so terribly favorable, if they’re provided with say trillions of years to play out.
Here the comparison of two views is the most subjective. On the one hand, neither point of view sports compelling evidence: creationists have two or three verses in Genesis to support their belief; science has no experimental evidence to dispute it.
More so than with the first two creative acts, belief here seems to be personal choice.
Having said some things with the motivation of framing debate on what is claimed by Christians to be the acts of ex-nihilo creation vs what parts of evolutionary thought may not be inconsistent with Biblical text – having said these things, I share some personal thoughts, for what they may be worth.
I am a Christian. I take the Bible as a rule of practice in my personal life. I believe that the God described in the Bible exists and did and does and will do the things written therein. I have an experiential acquaintance with God. That experience is intrinsically personal, and I cannot transfer it to another. I have experienced enough of God to trust God - and I do trust God - for the things I do not know. And they are many.
I believe with Einstein that there is truth in simplicity. I strive to find answers that have the fewest assumptions and the fewest arbitrary parameters. I believe that the parameters that can’t be squeezed out of a theory are the keys to understanding the fundamental nature of things.
That said, I’ll write briefly about the third comparison above.
I had a dog once who amazed me with his sixth sense. On moving day, I planned to drive him to friends who own a farm since I could not take him along with me. Until that moment, the jingle of car keys propelled him to the car - he loved to ride. But on that day, he hid. I coaxed him into the car, but two blocks from the house he jumped out and ran, into a field. I parked and went to him and talked with him for half an hour. Then he got in the car, and we finished the trip. I don’t know, between the two of us, for whom the trip was harder.
I’ve read research on animals that have primitive forms of speech. The evidence of human-like traits in other species is large and growing. Nevertheless: if I discount evolutionary teaching and discount religious teaching altogether, and test my personal experience, I come down on the side that says man is fundamentally different from – not just more complex than – every other species. To me it is manifestly evident that when and how homo sapiens originated, it was different - different in a way that can be experienced and understood - from other species.
On the other two points, I once believed there were six days of creation and that creation occurred about 4004 B.C. First because Genesis speaks of six days, and second because Bishop Usher used the Genesis-named ancestors of people dateable by secular history to arrive at 4004 BC. I no longer believe either. Rather that Genesis correctly tells us what was capable of our understanding: the nature and action of a pre-existent, creating God. The essential knowledge of God that leads to a life lived in accord with the character of God does not rely upon cosmological detail. Neither could a human without knowledge of physics, mathematics or cosmological theory have understood those details or have recorded it to advantage for his readers.
What is said of God in Genesis is corroborated by later biblical writers. When Job later argued with God over his plight, God responded with a question: Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? declare, if thou hast understanding. [Job 38:4] Genesis does not stand in a biblical vacuum. The point is made that God is the creator, and Job is the creature. Quarks, leptons and super-strings do not enhance that relationship.
I cannot grasp the idea of life. As a schoolboy I saw a dog run into the street and be struck dead by a car. I looked long as his lifeless body, unable to understand how, only a moment before, he was a healthy animal, no doubt loved by a human family. Now he was motionless. Same appearance, same color, same molecules. Still warm. But fundamentally and forever changed. I still marvel at life. Primordial soup and lightning bolts don’t do it for me.
As for the Big Bang. It looks compellingly probable. If there’s eternity [double-ended infinity of time] and a pre-existent God, then what or who was there, before the Big Bang? Scientifically, it seems certain that we can’t go back beyond that 10-47 seconds of time. And probably there is nothing like what we experience as time that precedes the Big Bang. If that’s true, then time is single ended - everlasting - but having the BB as a starting point.
Which leaves me with the amazing notion – that if God is eternal [doubly ended infinite time] and the Big Bang was but a single creative word uttered by God, then God is awesome beyond comprehension.
Speaking only for myself, I find microevolution a lot easier to grok or accept intuitively than macroevolution. Mainly, I guess, because I can see variations within species, and can easily imagine one sort of characteristic thriving and another dying out over the course of years or centuries; but I can’t see variations between species; I can’t see one species turning into another.
To take a species at random, I can imagine rabbits coming in different sizes and shapes and colors. Some are bigger, others smaller. Some have longer ears, some shorter. Some have bigger feet, or longer bodies, or whiter tails. I can easily imagine rabbits, over time, evolving in whatever direction best fits them for their environment. But it’s a lot harder to imagine a rabbit evolving into a non-rabbit, a different kind of animal—or vice versa. I can’t observe, and have trouble imagining, all the intermediate steps between one species and another the way I can between a longer-eared and a shorter-eared rabbit.
That’s not quite true. While I don’t think Darwin speculated as to the origins of life itself, abiogenesis theory is fairly vibrant. You allude to the Miller-Urey experiment, but theories exist to bring those organic molecules up to cellular life. For example, some hypothesize that RNA monomers (generated in a fashion similar to the Miller-Urey experiment perhaps) could polymerize on some non-organic substrate and form ribozymes–catalytic RNA enzymes. This is essentially the RNA world hypothesis with RNA both storing and modifying information. These could then become incorporated into lipid micelles, and cellular evolution might continue from there.
Wikipedia’s article on abiogenesis is pretty good.
Granted, none of these theories is as solid as evolution, which from a scientific standpoint, is really well accepted. But it’s not fair to claim that science does not provide alternatives to theistic biogenesis.
Your post is way too long to fully respond to, tintupp, but it does raise some thoughts.
Most of those responding here have no interest in discerning how current understanding of science corresponds with the accounts in Genesis. The simplest answer is: it doesn’t. Only people pleading special cases would even make the attempt and doing so, as you’ve shown, requires logical contortions that are totally beyond anything that can be called science.
You also continue to confuse abiogenesis - the creation of life - with evolution. Evolution describes what happens after life exists. It does not speak to how life came into being.
We have many theories for the beginning. We don’t know which one of them is right. That’s not the same thing as having no theory. Many of the theories are inconsistent with an equivalent creator spark. BTW. The more recent investigations into multiple universes especially move the issue more and more distant from needing a miraculous creation.
No modern scientist holds this view. It is itself a creation of 19th century Christianity trying to reconcile faith with science. The notion that evolution or life exists just to create mankind as the pinnacle is anti-scientific.
The rest of your lengthy post can be dismissed as attempts to force science - not even real science, but a muddled and often false understanding of a few general points within science - into the straitjacket of your belief in Christianity. Science doesn’t exist to reduced in this way. It is an independent body of knowledge, a magisterium, as Stephen Jay Gould once put it.
Those answering here tried to address a specific issue, macroevolution. That needs to be understood for what it is. You are free to try to reconcile your beliefs with that understanding, but recognize that we won’t do the work for you.
Microevolution is pretty easy to grok intuitively. If there are leaves higher on trees, then the longer-necked giraffes will be the ones that survive, and over time giraffes as a whole have longer necks on average. Macroevolution, speciation and all that is much harder; how can a dog become a cat? One thing can become a slightly different version of that thing, but how can one thing become something entirely different?
I find that there’s a few good things to think about to help understand it. The first is that dogs didn’t actually become cats. Chimps didn’t become humans. Rather, things that were sort of like those modern creatures became those modern creatures; things that were sort of like monkeys/humans became monkeys and humans. Dogs are actually reasonably closely related to bears, if I remember right; so a few million years ago, you’d have things that were somewhat doggish and somewhat bearish.
And that’s the second thing; time. We’re talking millions and billions of years. Speciation in insects and viruses have been observed within people’s lifetimes; no-one’s saying that the differences between animals and their ancient relatives aren’t really significant, but there’s a huge amount of time for microevolution to add up in. I can picture a sort of bear-ish, dog-ish thing becoming bears, dogs, wolves and the like. They’re different, certainly, but there’s enough time in there for small changes to really, really change things.
The third thing is to think of it in small steps. A good many creationists (and i’m not accusing you of anything here, don’t worry ;)) will say “Oh, so fish became dogs? Where’s the fossil of a fishdog, then?”, as if expecting some kind of animal with a fish’s head and the body of a dog. It doesn’t work like that. A fish doesn’t become a dog; it becomes another fish, but perhaps with stronger, more limb-like fins. And that creature becomes something with even stronger limbs, and maybe a bigger lung capacity. And that thing becomes something amphibious that can survive on land for a while. And perhaps that thing… you get the idea.
timtupp, you would do well to not conflate abiogenesis and cosmology with evolution. Others will be along to point out the errors of your ways there, so I won’t bother here. Suffice to say that those concepts are completely unrelated to biological evolution. It matters not one whit how the universe was formed, or where the first single-celled organism came from. All that matters is that evolution works regardless of how it all began.
I think a large portion of the rejection of speciation (and, by extension, the origins of higher-level taxonomic groupings) comes from a mistaken belief that speciation is thought to arise via anagenesis – that speciation occurs because one species gradually transforms into another, and so on.
We’ve known for some time now that anagenesis is very probably not the most common source for species origins. Rather, it is cladogenesis, the branching off of populations from one another, which produces diversity. Darwin really didn’t address the origins of species in his book, despite its name. But the one illustration he did provide in his book was of exactly this sort of branching of populations. To put it another way, adaptation, in and of itself, does not account for increasing diversity over time.
Cladogensis is the process whereby one portion of a population becomes isolated from the parent stock. Typically, this is a much smaller sub-population. Separated from the parent stock, this daughter population is free to vary independently of the larger, likely more stable, parent population; and it will vary independently becasue the smaller population will likely now face new selection pressures.
So, we now have two groups evolving and adapating – in different directions, mind you – instead of one. The larger population will change slowly, barring some catastrophic event which reshapes its own environment. The smaller population is, in essence, forced to change quickly or die out (or, more correctly, if it is unable to change quickly, it will likely die out; the ability to adapt within a relatively short time, geologically speaking, is necessary for any such group’s survival). Once established, the smaller population will grow and become a “parent” population in its own right, and the process continues.
So, the point, then, is that we may start with one population of rabbits. We wind up with two poulations of rabbits, which now differ in some key way(s). Over time, as these populations change and bud off, the populations at the tips of the branches of this little “family tree” will resemble less and less the “original” parent stock represented by the trunk. This is a process that takes many millions of years (not to be confused the process of speciation itself, whch can occur on the order of 100,000 years).
Over millions of years, and hundreds of thousands of generations, new populations arise and vary. It is certainly not a great stretch to imagine that Generation #1,000,000, removed from the original rabbit (or whatever) stock by millions of years, may bear only a passing resemblance to their original forbears, as a result of countless instances of branching and transformation. It is in this fashion that we can have a four-legged grazing animal be ancestral to whales, or birds arising from theropod dinsoaurs, or humans eventually evolving from small, ratty-looking creatures.
Another thing to keep in mind when talking about “species” or “kinds” is that these categories are things that we make up in order to describe the world around us. When I wolf and a coyote mate and produce offspring, they don’t care that we call them separate species. Same thing when an Asian Elephant and an African Elephant mate in a zoo even though the two species would never encounter each other in the wild.
As I said in my earlier post, the only reason we see these different “kinds” is that we are looking only at extant populations. When you look at the fossil record, you see the continuum. That is not to say that we have every link in every evolutionary chain documented with fossils, but we have enough that we can see the same thing happening over and over again-- earlier populations merge into later populations. We have a remarkably well documented fossil record for whales, showing a gradual change from a semi-aquatic animal to a fully aquatic one. Human evolution is also surprisingly well represented in the fossil record even if we don’t know exactly how all the pieces fit together.
I’m not sure if anyone has mentioned this book yet, but I would strongly recommend it to anyone having trouble understanding macro-evolution: YOUR INNER FISH. Neil Shubin, the author, does a great job explaining how seemingly different organism share common structures and how we can trace our own evolutionary history back to the simplest animals. And he does so in language that any layman can understand.