A friend wrote to say that this headline is “a complete head-scratcher”:
One of Darwin’s evolution theories finally proved
Scientists have proved one of Charles Darwin’s theories of evolution for the first time — nearly 140 years after his death. Researchers discovered mammal subspecies play a more important role in evolution than previously thought. Her research could now be used to predict which species conservationists should focus on protecting. – St John’s College, University of Cambridge
Huh? We had been given to understand that Darwin’s theories were as dead certain as math. Jonathan Wells, who has a beagle’s nose for Darwin hype, offers some thoughts on this example:
According to Science Daily, “One of Darwin’s evolution theories finally proved.” The report quotes University of Cambridge PhD student Laura van Holstein, who said her research “proves that sub-species play a critical role in long-term evolutionary dynamics and in future evolution of species. And they always have, which is what Darwin suspected when he was defining what a species actually was.”
Yet the scientific paper in Proceedings of the Royal Society does not claim proof, only a correlation of (at best) 0.31. And Darwin did not define “what a species actually was.” According to evolutionary biologist James Mallet, Darwin “spent only a little space discussing what he meant by species. Perhaps, as a naturalist, he thought that the existence and nature of species would be self-evident to his readers. Even in later editions of the Origin, to which he added a glossary, there is no formal definition of species.”
The closest Darwin came to defining species was this sentence from the Origin of Species (1859): “[T]he only distinction between species and well-marked varieties is, that the latter are known, or believed, to be connected at the present day by intermediate gradations, whereas species were formerly thus connected.” But this definition assumes the truth of Darwin’s theory (namely, that modern species were in the past connected by intermediate gradations). As a definition of species, it is an example of the fallacy of begging the question.
The ScienceDaily report, like so much other reporting on evolution, is hype.
Well, if it’s just hype, it won’t feel out of place, will it?
A coherent, rigorous, and therefore scientifically useful definition of the term ‘species’ is forever beyond the reductive materialistic explanations of Darwinian evolution.
Darwinists ultimately seek to ‘scientifically’ explain everything in materialistic terms. i.e. Reductive materialism. And yet, if something is not composed of particles or does not have physical properties (e.g., length, mass, energy, momentum, orientation, position, etc), it is abstract, even ‘spiritual’.
Numbers, mathematics, logic, truth, distance, time, beauty, ugliness, species, person, information, etc.. etc.. all fall into that category of being an abstract property of the immaterial mind. It is amazing how many things fall into that ‘abstract’ category even though most everyone, including atheists, (“atheists” also happens to be an abstract term itself), swear that they exist physically.
Take for instance the abstract concept of species, The term species is an abstract property and/or definition of the immaterial mind that cannot possibly be reduced to any possible materialistic explanations. i.e. How much does the concept of species weigh? Does the concept ‘species’ weigh more in English or in Chinese? How long is the concept of species in millimeters? How fast does the concept go? Is the concept of species faster or slower than the speed of light? Is the concept of species positively or negatively charged? Or etc.. etc.. ?..
You don’t have to take my word for it. Last year a Darwinist admitted that “The most important concept in all of biology, (i.e. species), is a complete mystery”
In fact, Charles Darwin himself admitted that he did not have a rigid definition for what the term ‘species’ actually meant when he stated that, “I look at the term species as one arbitrarily given, for the sake of convenience.,,,”
As should be needless to say, the inability for a supposedly scientific theory, a supposedly scientific theory that seeks to explain the “Origin of Species” in the first place, to clearly define what a species actually is is a clear indication that that supposedly scientific theory cannot possibly be the proper ‘scientific’ explanation for the “Origin of Species” in the first place!
Whereas Darwinists cannot even provide a rigid ‘scientific’ definition of what a species actually is, on the other hand, normal people in general, and Christians in particular, have no problem whatsoever recognizing what a species actually is when they see it. People never confuse a dog, with a cat, with a rodent, with a squirrel, or etc.. etc.. etc..
Darwinists, besides being unable to define exactly what the term species actually means, also have no evidence for the ‘blending together of characteristics’, as would be predicted under the assumption of ‘continual gradual transformations of ‘species’ into new ‘species’ (whatever the term ‘species’ is suppose to mean for a Darwinist)
As Stephen Meyer explained, “the differences in form between any member of one phylum and any member of another phylum are vast, and paleontologists have utterly failed to find forms that would fill these yawning chasms in what biotechnologists call “morphological space.”
Here is an interesting quote from a researcher who, during working for his PhD thesis, was ‘surprised’ to find ‘Distinct kinds’ instead of a ‘blending together of characteristics as would be expected under Darwinian presuppositions. He even states “this was the common experience of experts in every area of systematic biology. ”
On top of all that, Darwinists simply have no proof that it is possible to change one type of body plan into another type of body plan by mutating DNA alone.
As Stephen Meyer commented, “you can mutate DNA indefinitely. 80 million years, 100 million years, til the cows come home. It doesn’t matter, because in the best case you are just going to find a new protein some place out there in that vast combinatorial sequence space. You are not, by mutating DNA alone, going to generate higher order structures that are necessary to building a body plan.”
Darwinists, with their reductive materialistic framework, simply have no clue how any organism might achieve its basic biological form. Much less do they have a clue how to transform one type of species into a new type of species
Verse:
To say subspecies play an important role has proven Darwin right after almost a century and a half, does not mean Darwin has been proven right. The hypothesis remains a hypothesis until macoevolution is actually observed in nature and the results can be replicated. Neither has happened and no amount of circular reasoning can ever make it so.