Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

Darwin’s Predictions

Share
Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn
Flipboard
Print
Email

Cornelius G. Hunter, known for his books Darwin’s God and Darwin’s Proof as well as Science’s Blind Spot: The Unseen Religion of Scientific Naturalism, has just put up a new website about Darwian Evolution. Entitled Darwin’s Predictions, this site is “living document” in that Hunter intends to update the information as needed.

From the “Executive Summary” Hunter writes:

Many predictions of evolution have been falsified, including foundational expectations. Evolutionists have added explanations to their theory to account for these problematic findings. The drawback is that this greatly complicates the theory. Scientific theories are supposed to be parsimonious, explaining future findings with simple explanations rather than explaining past findings with complicated explanations.

Therefore evolutionists are faced with a accuracy-versus-parsimony tradeoff. The scientific findings make their original theory inaccurate. That is, the theory does not fit the empirical evidence well. The only way to increase the evolution’s accuracy is to complicate the theory tremendously and sacrifice parsimony. Evolutionists have consistently preferred low parsimony over low accuracy, but either way the theory is problematic.

The theory of evolution has consistently failed and as a consequence it has grown far more complex than anything Darwin ever envisioned. Therefore evolution is not a good scientific theory and in this sense it is comparable to geocentrism. Both theories grew ever more complicated in response to the evidences of the natural world, adding epicycle upon epicycle.

In stark contrast to these evidential problems, evolutionists believe that their theory is a fact. Evolution is a fact, they say, just as gravity is fact. This remarkable claim is an indicator that there is more to evolution than merely a scientific theory. In light of the scientific evidence, the claim that evolution is a fact may seem to be absurd. But it is not.

The fact of evolution is a necessary consequence of the metaphysical assumptions evolutionists make. Metaphysical assumptions are assumptions that do not derive from science. They are made independent of science. These metaphysical assumptions that evolutionists make would be difficult to defend as necessarily true outside of evolutionary circles, but within evolution their truth is not controversial. All of this means that the scientific problems with evolution are relegated to questions of how evolution occurred. The science cannot bear on questions of whether or not evolution occurred.

There’s a lot of great material here and Hunter has done a masterful job of careful research and documentation on all that he writes. The sheer number of evolutionary predictions that have been falsified and the strenuous attempts by Darwinists to explain them are presented in highly informative detail.

Enjoy!

Comments
Why in the world do so many people give Darwin credit anyway? His real theory failed completely. Unless I'm mistaken he believed that organisms evolved through natural selection, but that says nothing about how they changed to be selected from in the first place. Besides, others scientists had suggested the same thing as "natural selection" before Darwin did. Notice how neo-Darwinism is called neo-Darwinism? It's because the theory had to be revised for it to possibly work. Yet, it still doesn't seem to work. Mutations don't appear to be able to save evolution either. At least, if they're random. But Michael Behe hits on that idea in The Edge of Evolution. So really the only thing that Darwin brought into the picture is common descent, which still may or may not be true.Domoman
January 25, 2009
January
01
Jan
25
25
2009
06:24 PM
6
06
24
PM
PDT
Hunter's article is an attack on Darwin, not necessarily on naturalistic evolution. We have a tendency here to treat any shortcoming in Darwin's original theory as support for ID and a set back for naturalists. Such reasoning is a non sequitur. Hunter makes a big deal of showing that many genomes contain a large assortment of genes that are different than their neighbor's and that these novel genes could not arise gradually. So he is refuting gradualism, especially with fruit flies, but he has opened the door to naturalistic methods for creating novel genes quickly. So these are examples that contradict Darwin's basic assumptions and are interesting. But they do not support ID and in fact could undermine it. It is results like this that ID has to deal with and see how it affects its arguments. I personally do not think they affect ID's basic arguments that the formation of novel complex capabilities is beyond the power of naturalistic processes to produce. But just shooting down Darwin may be a fool's errand.jerry
January 25, 2009
January
01
Jan
25
25
2009
07:26 AM
7
07
26
AM
PDT
Jerry, That does sound like front-loading, however I believe the developmental programs are not only in the genome:
“Yet by the late 1980s it was becoming obvious to most genetic researchers, including myself, since my own main research interest in the ‘80s and ‘90s was human genetics, that the heroic effort to find the information specifying life’s order in the genes had failed. There was no longer the slightest justification for believing that there exists anything in the genome remotely resembling a program capable of specifying in detail all the complex order of the phenotype. The emerging picture made it increasingly difficult to see genes in Weismann’s “unambiguous bearers of information” or to view them as the sole source of the durability and stability of organic form. It is true that genes influence every aspect of development, but influencing something is not the same as determining it. Only a very small fraction of all known genes, such as developmental fate switching genes, can be imputed to have any sort of directing or controlling influence on form generation. From being “isolated directors” of a one-way game of life, genes are now considered to be interactive players in a dynamic two-way dance of almost unfathomable complexity, as described by Keller in The Century of The Gene.”-- Michael John Denton page 172 of Uncommon Dissent
It was this failure coupled with the rise of our own technological innovations that leads us to infer the information for determining form is not (just?) in the DNA. There are many level of information required for form. Genomes to membranomes to what next?Joseph
January 25, 2009
January
01
Jan
25
25
2009
05:16 AM
5
05
16
AM
PDT
Patrick and DaveScot, You should look at this link from Corneilus Hunter's website. Isn't this Front Loading by a mainstream biologist http://www.landesbioscience.com/journals/cc/article/shermanCC6-15.pdf This is so anti Darwin and anti naturalist that I wonder how it passed scrutiny. A quote: "According to this model, (a) the Universal Genome that encodes all major developmental programs essential for various phyla of Metazoa emerged in a unicellular or a primitive multicellular organism shortly before the Cambrian period"jerry
January 24, 2009
January
01
Jan
24
24
2009
08:45 PM
8
08
45
PM
PDT
Here is an interesting thing that has come to light for me; in order to assert that a process is blind, one must be able to demonstrate that a process doesn't require teleology ... which would require a formal theory of teleological evolutionary process. How would that realistically be accomplished? By formalizing a statistical model that could describe the probability of blind outcomes based on the actual forces and material interactions in question. In other words, without a theory of intelligent design, there's simply no way to evidence the claim that evolution is a blind process, because the very act of asserting that it is blind is a de facto admission that it has been compared to some unspoken, unformalized, assumed "theory of intelligent design" (and one usually convenient to dismissal/falsification). Evolutionist teach that macroevolution **is** a blind process, but in order to support that, they **must** be able to show that it is not a teleological process. Otherwise, it's just a bald assertion.William J. Murray
January 24, 2009
January
01
Jan
24
24
2009
01:31 PM
1
01
31
PM
PDT
First it all depends how one defines "evolution". If it defined as change in allele frequency over time within a population- then it is indeed a fact. As for predictions we cannot predict what will be selected at any point in time (Dan Dennett) and we cannot predict what variation will appear at any point in time.Joseph
January 23, 2009
January
01
Jan
23
23
2009
04:50 AM
4
04
50
AM
PDT
Very interesting site. A lot of good work, and a starting point for fruitful scientific discussion.gpuccio
January 23, 2009
January
01
Jan
23
23
2009
12:02 AM
12
12
02
AM
PDT
Brilliant! And needed online.Bantay
January 22, 2009
January
01
Jan
22
22
2009
10:55 PM
10
10
55
PM
PDT
Absoutely awesome. The article gave me an excellent overview of the scope and magnitude of the problems confronting the theory of evolution. This link would make a wonderful teaching resource. By the way, I was unable to view Figure 15. Cornelius Hunter has done a great job in assembling all this material.vjtorley
January 22, 2009
January
01
Jan
22
22
2009
09:30 PM
9
09
30
PM
PDT
Thanks for the linkbornagain77
January 22, 2009
January
01
Jan
22
22
2009
07:13 PM
7
07
13
PM
PDT

Leave a Reply