In the article Evolution is a Big Word, I cover several issues. In our last installment, we discussed what the multiplicity of theories means for the claims of a consensus opinion about evolution. In this installment, I wanted to talk about the theories themselves. There are several questions I would like to propose to our readers:
- Of the theories listed, which ones do you think have the best evidence?
- Of the theories listed, which one is your favorite?
- What theories did I miss? (If you list a theory, please provide a link to a paper or book describing the theory)
- Which theories of evolution are consonant and/or dissonant with Intelligent Design?
- What are the theological and political corollaries of the different theories? I should note that many of the founders of the different theories espouse theological or political corollaries for them (including Darwin). (NOTE TO ALL – the goal of this is not to engage in a religious shouting match, but rather engage the ideas themselves on a deeper level)
- How does the given theory interact with other biological theories? I am specifically thinking about the origin of life, taxonomy, and common ancestry, but I would also enjoy any other theory for discussion.
- What other sources should be included in the list? I tried to list sources which were generally interesting to both educated laymen and experts. What other works should I have included?
I numbered the questions, so if you just want to respond to one or two of them, just list the number and your answer.
2 days later, doesn’t seem like anyone is interested.
johnnyb, you need to realize adult scientific discussions don’t play here.
Try atheist or gay baiting. You’ll get far more comments!
Maybe I’ll jumpstart this thread for you.
Intelligent design is indistinguishable from theistic evolution. Debate.
“Intelligent design is indistinguishable from theistic evolution. Debate.”
If evolution is defined as “change over time” then the thesis is correct. If evolution is defined as “Darwinism” then the thesis is incorrect.
However, I should point out that neither the ID’ers nor the non-ID’ers (such as yourself) were interested in talking through the science. So it would be silly to paint it as an ID phenomenon, when the regular posters on UD are pretty split between ID and non-ID.
However, I think there is a simpler explanation – on any site, most people don’t click all the way through to read the article. My post presupposes that you not just read my post, but also the article at the other end. Did you read it all the way through?
Nobody seriously defines evolution as “Darwinism”. Darwin certainly didn’t.
Darwin’s preferred mechanism was “evolution by means of Natural Selection”. He also had a preference, not shared even by all his contemporaries, for sticking an implicit “gradual” in front of that sentence. That’s more or less what “Darwinism” would mean – gradual change through NS. There are other mechanisms of change, not all of them gradual.
He was hazy (and incorrect) about the source of his variation.
Nonetheless, the essence of ALL ‘materialist’ theories of evolution is a genetic continuum. Evolution is the change in that continuum, and in populations within which such changes become established/are lost. DNA sequences do not arise from snapping together bases de novo like a child’s pop-beads, but by means of template-based copying from a prior sequence. Separate lineages follow different trajectories, but are nonetheless commonly descended through this continuum.
There seem to be two main ‘options’ for ID mechanism: those that involve discontinuity in that copying continuum (including ‘special creation’-style restarts), and those that retain the continuum but postulate agency interference with its progress (eg directed mutation and/or ‘intelligent selection’).
ID doesn’t require any interference and with a GA interference is not necessary.
That said NS is the only non-design mechanism that has been posited to be a designer mimic. And taht means without NS all you have is sheer dumb luck, however NS also boils down to sheer dumb luck.
And what kind of “theory” is base on sheer dumb luck?
DrREC:
Please define theistic evolutoon and Intelligent Design.
I bet that you won’t- most likely because you can’t.
Chas –
A few notes – it is true that Darwin was hazy about the sources of variations, but the part where he wasn’t hazy (and also the part which continues today in the minds of many biologists) is that the mutation sources (whatever they were) were accidental. This has been retained into the modern literature.
I appreciate your taking the time to delineate the options for ID mechanisms. Most ID critics have not thought it through that much! I mostly agree, but let me add one other option.
3) A large body of information was included in the original organism(s). Thus, one would not require either discontinuity or intelligent selection. This would be “directed mutation”, but not in the sense of someone making active modifications. Think of an installer for an operating system. You have the single program (the installer) carrying information for a multiplicity of programs, which get activated at a later time.
I personally have room for all three options. Some (like Behe) only go for option (3). Others favor (1) or (2). In any case, the mode of detection should be the same in all cases. Teasing out their natural history is another question! But I don’t think it’s undoable, just a difficult question, and one that will probably require additional tools.
On a similar note, I want to add another piece of what I think should be included in the essence of all “materialist” theories of evolution – that, at least in the long view, there has been in natural history a move *from* an information-poor genome *to* an information-rich genome. It is this movement that primarily catches the ire of ID’ers.
I should also note that “interference” has a bad connotation. It is correct in the sense that it is non-material, but that the material is given priority is more of an artifact of modern convention, not a necessary feature of the world. ID views the interaction of agents with the objects being modified as being more-or-less natural. What is more natural than consciousness, or choice? If these characterize the universe as we find it, then classifying the use of consciousness and choice as being “interfering” acts means that most of life is spent “interfering”.
“mutation sources (whatever they were) were accidental. This has been retained into the modern literature.”
No, the modern literature DEMONSTRATES that mutations, recombinations, transposons, etc. strike in manners that are random with respect to need, and most often, are deleterious.
Theistic evolution is the proposal that evolution is a tool some entity uses to develop life towards some goal.
Intelligent design calls that entity an intelligent designer.
It is a distinction without a difference.
1- Theistic evolution is about God, not some entity
2- There are different flavors of TE one says God got it all started and let it be, one says God guided and has a hand, ie intervenes, and one says what you did
3- Most TEs I have talked to say that we cannot know any of that, meaning there isn’t any way to tell the difference between Theistic and atheistic evolution- just faith.
4- ID says we can know and understand the design and that the evidence for the designer comes from the design, not faith
“random with respect to need” is meaningless and most often wrong.
Ya see in most cases variation aids survival, mutations provide the variation, and the organisms need to survive to reproduce.
But anyway the modern literature does not demonstrate that mutations, recombinations, transposons, etc., are random in any sense of the word. No one would even know how to go about making such a determination.
“Ya see in most cases variation aids survival”
Joe, you’re forgetting your own talking point about how deleterious most mutations are, and how few helpful ones there are.
“But anyway the modern literature does not demonstrate that mutations, recombinations, transposons, etc., are random in any sense of the word. No one would even know how to go about making such a determination.”
Scientists sequence parents and offspring for several generations, or related species, or populations, sequence their genomes and determine the pattern of mutations an transpositions.
Scientists study the mechanisms behind mutations and recombinations.
These studies show genetic variation is random.
I think many theists believe proof of the existence of God can come from evidence.
Aquinas’s proofs come to mind.
Yes. Evidence from logic, working in the realm of metaphysics. Philosophy.
Good point Brent….I didn’t mean to imply those would be scientific proofs.
Given the overlap in content in Aquinas’s proofs and ID arguments made here, it would be a litte silly to call the former philosophy, and the latter science.
This is incorrect. The Luria-Delbruck and the Lederberg experiments are often used to make this point, but it has both a logical, a conceptual, and an experimental problem.
Logical Problem: The selection applied during these experiments is usually very lethal. Therefore, it is unlikely even if mutations could arise in response to selection, that they would actually happen quickly enough to be noticed by these experiments. The selection is lethal enough that only the cells which already have the mutation are saved, there is not time to create the mutation.
Conceptual problem: I have argued that there are many instances where, while random with respect to the *individual*, are non-random with respect to the *population*.
Experimental problem: there are many experiments which demonstrate mutational mechanisms geared towards providing adaptation in response to selection. You can read about a few of them here.
Of Note to Aquinas’s, and other ancient’s, philosophical logic and the modern empirical evidence that substantiated their logic:
The Theistic claim for all of reality is this;
To which it can honestly be asked:
Before the breakthroughs of modern science in Big Bang Cosmology and Quantum Mechanics, we ‘knew’ this from logic; Here are the logical arguments, that I know of, that preceded the empirical evidence for the Big Bang;
Here is the empirical evidence which verified those logical arguments for the ‘First Cause’ or for the ‘Uncaused Cause’:
This is the logical argument that preceded our discoveries from breakthroughs in Quantum Mechanics:
Of Note to Aquinas’s, and other ancient’s, philosophical logic and the modern empirical evidence that substantiated their logic:
The Theistic claim for all of reality is this;
To which it can honestly be asked:
Before the breakthroughs of modern science in Big Bang Cosmology and Quantum Mechanics, we ‘knew’ this from logic; Here are the logical arguments, that I know of, that preceded the empirical evidence for the Big Bang;
Here is the empirical evidence which verified those logical arguments for the ‘First Cause’ or for the ‘Uncaused Cause’:
This is the logical argument that preceded our discoveries from breakthroughs in Quantum Mechanics:
I find this centuries old philosophical/logical argument, for the necessity of a ‘First Mover’ accounting for change occurring at each moment, to be validated by quantum mechanics. One line of evidence, from quantum mechanics, arises from the fact that there actually is a smallest indivisible unit of time, Planck time, which directly contradicted the seemingly common sense contention that time was continuously ‘flowing’;
The ‘first mover’ of Aquinas’s argument was further warranted to be necessary from quantum mechanics since the possibility for the universe to be considered a self-sustaining ‘closed loop’ of cause and effect was removed with the refutation of the ‘hidden variable’ argument, as first postulated by Einstein, in quantum entanglement experiments.
(of note: hidden variables were postulated to remove the need for ‘spooky’ forces, as Einstein termed them — forces that act instantaneously at great distances, thereby breaking the most cherished rule of relativity theory, that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light.)
This proof was further solidified in 2010:
And this proof was further extended in 2011 by Anton Zeilinger, and team, to falsify local realism (reductive materialism) without even using quantum entanglement to do it, i.e. this experiment extended ‘non-local’ realism to the particles themselves, thus extending the empirical evidence to be directly in line with what was posited in Aquinas’s ‘First Mover’ argument:
a further breakthrough in 2011 was here, showing that quantum information is ‘conserved’:
As well, preceding the fact that there must be a ‘First Mover’ for the movement of the particles themselves within this universe, there is now also shown to be a necessity for a sufficient ‘conscious’ cause (God/First Mover) to explain why quantum waves collapse to each unique point of conscious observation in the universe.
Here is the key experiment that led Wigner to his Nobel Prize winning work on quantum symmetries:
i.e. In the experiment the ‘world’ (i.e. the universe) does not have a ‘privileged center’. Yet strangely, the conscious observer does exhibit a ‘privileged center’. This is since the ‘matrix’, which determines which vector will be used to describe the particle in the experiment, is ‘observer-centric’ in its origination! Thus explaining Wigner’s dramatic statement, “It was not possible to formulate the laws (of quantum theory) in a fully consistent way without reference to consciousness.”
Moreover, The argument for God from consciousness can be framed like this:
It is also interesting to note that materialists, instead of honestly dealing with the obvious theistic implications of quantum wave collapse in quantum mechanics, will many times try to invoke something along the lines of Everett’s Many Worlds interpretation when dealing with quantum mechanics, in which the quantum wave is held to be abstract instead of real.
Yet the ‘quantum wave packet’ is shown to be real, not abstract in the following;
It is important to note that the following experiment actually encoded information into a photon while it was in its quantum wave state, thus destroying the notion, held by many, that the wave function was not ‘physically real’ but was merely ‘abstract’. i.e. How can information possibly be encoded into something that is not physically real but merely abstract?
The following paper mathematically corroborated the preceding experiment and cleaned up some pretty nasty probabilistic incongruities that arose from a purely statistical interpretation, i.e. it seems that stacking a ‘random infinity’, (parallel universes to explain quantum wave collapse), on top of another ‘random infinity’, to explain quantum entanglement, leads to irreconcilable mathematical absurdities within quantum mechanics:
Further notes on the ‘quantum wave packet’;
Thus the ‘necessary consciousness’ that is collapsing the wave packet to each central point of unique conscious observation in the universe, is found to be a ‘infinite dimensional consciousness’ which possesses the attribute of control over infinite information. i.e. God
Further notes:
Verse and Music:
Reference please.
Pattern? Who said that directed mutations would form a pattern?
They don’t know the mechanisms behind them. THAT is the point, duh.
Only ignorance sez genetic variation is “random” in any sense of the word.
What you are saying is like having a computer scientist taking an ocsilloscope and looking at one data bus line and seeing a scramble of 1s and 0s and concluding they are random.
Dr REC:
We are talking about THEISTIC EVOLUTIONISTS, not just theists.
Additional note as to the scope, and breadth, of the ‘First Mover’ argument as laid out by Aquinas:
Verse and Music: