One of Darwin’s theories is FINALLY proved? Jonathan Wells explains

_{Denyse O'Leary

March 19, 2020

Darwinism, Evolution, Intelligent Design, speciation}

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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?

Comments

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.BobRyan_{March 19, 2020
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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”
What is a species? The most important concept in all of biology is a complete mystery – July 16, 2019 Excerpt: Enough of species? This is only the tip of a deep and confusing iceberg. There is absolutely no agreement among biologists about how we should understand the species. One 2006 article on the subject listed 26 separate definitions of species, all with their advocates and detractors. Even this list is incomplete. The mystery surrounding species is well-known in biology, and commonly referred to as “the species problem”. Frustration with the idea of a species goes back at least as far as Darwin.,,, some contemporary biologists and philosophers of biology have,,, suggested that biology would be much better off if it didn’t think about life in terms of species at all.,,, https://theconversation.com/what-is-a-species-the-most-important-concept-in-all-of-biology-is-a-complete-mystery-119200 The Species Problem, Why Again? – Igor Ya. Pavlinov – February 6th 2013 Excerpt: Discussants, even belonging to opposite research schools, can quite agree with each other in recognition of fundamental status of the above “Boethian question”, whatever its particular answer might be. For instance, both “methodist” Linnaeus and “naturalist” Buffon (in his later years) believed in objective (real) status of the species as a universal and fundamental “unit of the Nature”. On the other hand, evolutionist Darwin, rejecting alongside with logician J. Bentham distinctiveness of the species as a fundamental taxonomic and eventually natural category, called however his famous book just “The Origin of Species…”, and not of races or of something like that. https://www.intechopen.com/books/the-species-problem-ongoing-issues/the-species-problem-why-again-
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.,,,”
“I look at the term species as one arbitrarily given, for the sake of convenience, to a set of individuals closely resembling each other, and that it does not essentially differ from the term variety, which is given to less distinct and more fluctuating forms. The term variety, again, in comparison with mere individual differences, is also applied arbitrarily, for convenience’s sake.” – Charles Darwin
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..
Darwin, Design & Thomas Aquinas The Mythical Conflict Between Thomism & Intelligent Design by Logan Paul Gage Excerpt:,,, In Aristotelian and Thomistic thought, each particular organism belongs to a certain universal class of things. Each individual shares a particular nature—or essence—and acts according to its nature. Squirrels act squirrelly and cats catty. We know with certainty that a squirrel is a squirrel because a crucial feature of human reason is its ability to abstract the universal nature from our sense experience of particular organisms. Denial of True Species Enter Darwinism. Recall that Darwin sought to explain the origin of “species.” Yet as he pondered his theory, he realized that it destroyed species as a reality altogether. For Darwinism suggests that any matter can potentially morph into any other arrangement of matter without the aid of an organizing principle. He thought cells were like simple blobs of Jell-O, easily re-arrangeable. For Darwin, there is no immaterial, immutable form. In The Origin of Species he writes: “I look at the term species as one arbitrarily given, for the sake of convenience, to a set of individuals closely resembling each other, and that it does not essentially differ from the term variety, which is given to less distinct and more fluctuating forms. The term variety, again, in comparison with mere individual differences, is also applied arbitrarily, for convenience’s sake.” Statements like this should make card-carrying Thomists shudder.,,, The first conflict between Darwinism and Thomism, then, is the denial of true species or essences. For the Thomist, this denial is a grave error, because the essence of the individual (the species in the Aristotelian sense) is the true object of our knowledge. As philosopher Benjamin Wiker observes in Moral Darwinism, Darwin reduced species to “mere epiphenomena of matter in motion.” What we call a “dog,” in other words, is really just an arbitrary snapshot of the way things look at present. If we take the Darwinian view, Wiker suggests, there is no species “dog” but only a collection of individuals, connected in a long chain of changing shapes, which happen to resemble each other today but will not tomorrow. What About Man? Now we see Chesterton’s point. Man, the universal, does not really exist. According to the late Stanley Jaki, Chesterton detested Darwinism because “it abolishes forms and all that goes with them, including that deepest kind of ontological form which is the immortal human soul.” And if one does not believe in universals, there can be, by extension, no human nature—only a collection of somewhat similar individuals.,,, https://www.touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=23-06-037-f
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.”
“Over the past 150 years or so, paleontologists have found many representatives of the phyla that were well-known in Darwin’s time (by analogy, the equivalent of the three primary colors) and a few completely new forms altogether (by analogy, some other distinct colors such as green and orange, perhaps). And, of course, within these phyla, there is a great deal of variety. Nevertheless, the analogy holds at least insofar as 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.” In other words, they have failed to find the paleolontogical equivalent of the numerous finely graded intermediate colors (Oedleton blue, dusty rose, gun barrel gray, magenta, etc.) that interior designers covet. Instead, extensive sampling of the fossil record has confirmed a strikingly discontinuous pattern in which representatives of the major phyla stand in stark isolation from members of other phyla, without intermediate forms filling the intervening morphological space.” Stephen Meyer – Darwin’s Doubt (p. 70) “In other words, the morphological distances — gaps — between body plans of crown phyla were present when body fossils first appeared during the explosion and have been with us ever since. The morphological disparity is so great between most phyla that the homologous reference points or landmarks required for quantitative studies of morphology are absent.” Erwin and Valentine (p. 340)
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. "
“For all the diversity of species, I found the cichlids to be an unmistakably natural group, a created kind. The more I worked with these fish the clearer my recognition of “cichlidness” became and the more distinct they seemed from all the “similar” fishes I studied. Conversations at conferences and literature searches confirmed that this was the common experience of experts in every area of systematic biology. Distinct kinds really are there and the experts know it to be so. – On a wider canvas, fossils provided no comfort to evolutionists. All fish, living and fossil, belong to distinct kinds; “links” are decidedly missing.” Dr. Arthur Jones – did his Ph.D. thesis in biology on cichlids – Fish, Fossils and Evolution – Cichlids at 29:00 minute mark (many examples of repeated morphology in cichlids) – video http://edinburghcreationgroup.org/video/14
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.”
‘Now one more problem as far as the generation of information. It turns out that you don’t only need information to build genes and proteins, it turns out to build Body-Plans you need higher levels of information; Higher order assembly instructions. DNA codes for the building of proteins, but proteins must be arranged into distinctive circuitry to form distinctive cell types. Cell types have to be arranged into tissues. Tissues have to be arranged into organs. Organs and tissues must be specifically arranged to generate whole new Body-Plans, distinctive arrangements of those body parts. We now know that DNA alone is not responsible for those higher orders of organization. DNA codes for proteins, but by itself it does not insure that proteins, cell types, tissues, organs, will all be arranged in the body-plan. And what that means is that the Body-Plan morphogenesis, as it is called, depends upon information that is not encoded on DNA. Which means 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. So what we can conclude from that is that the neo-Darwinian mechanism is grossly inadequate to explain the origin of information necessary to build new genes and proteins, and it is also grossly inadequate to explain the origination of novel biological form.’ – Stephen Meyer – Functional Proteins and Information for Body Plans – video – 5:55 minute mark https://youtu.be/hs4y4XLGQ-Y?t=354
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
Darwinism vs Biological Form – video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JyNzNPgjM4w Scant search for the Maker Excerpt: “But where is the experimental evidence? None exists in the literature claiming that one species has been shown to evolve into another. Bacteria, the simplest form of independent life, are ideal for this kind of study, with generation times of 20 to 30 minutes, and populations achieved after 18 hours. But throughout 150 years of the science of bacteriology, there is no evidence that one species of bacteria has changed into another, in spite of the fact that populations have been exposed to potent chemical and physical mutagens and that, uniquely, bacteria possess extrachromosomal, transmissible plasmids. Since there is no evidence for species changes between the simplest forms of unicellular life, it is not surprising that there is no evidence for evolution from prokaryotic to eukaryotic cells, let alone throughout the whole array of higher multicellular organisms.” – Alan H. Linton – emeritus professor of bacteriology, University of Bristol – Scant Search For a Maker – April 20, 2001 http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=159282
Verse:
Genesis 1 24 And God said, “Let the earth bring forth living creatures according to their kinds: livestock, land crawlers, and wild animals according to their kinds.” And it was so. 25 God made the beasts of the earth according to their kinds, the livestock according to their kinds, and everything that crawls upon the earth according to its kind. And God saw that it was good.…
bornagain77_{March 19, 2020
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