Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

This Paper Discusses Problems With the Evolutionary Tree That You Didn’t Learn in Biology Class

Cornelius Hunter
May 15, 2012
Intelligent Design
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If only evolutionists would tell the world what they tell each other. In the popular media, in detailed books about evolution and in textbooks a unified front is presented: Evolution is a fact as much as is gravity or the roundness of the Earth. It would be perverse and irrational to conclude otherwise. The scientific evidence for evolution is overwhelming. There are no scientific problems of substance with evolution, just scientific questions about details. Simply put, we know evolution occurred, just not how it occurred.  Read more

Comments
Well, Querius, when you get down to it, all the "theory" says is:
Somehow, some things happened at some point in time, kept happening and keep happening to make things the way they are now.
:)Joe
May 18, 2012
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Joe, in assertions like point 2 above, "evolution" is simplified and abstracted enough to make it sound plausible, and then on that basis, it's loaded up with a crock full of story telling. Any new observation can be easily assimilated by starting with the invocation "millions of years ago," followed by a speculation or circular reasoning that's enforced with a rhetorical truncheon named "musta", and then ending with an evolutionary blessing or affirmation. Here's an example . . . "Millions of years ago, this [name of living fossil] musta lived in an environment protected from normal evolutionary pressures, so it remains unchanged even until today, which once again proves the fact of evolution. Amen." Regarding changes in allele frequency, indigenous people in South America have a different frequency of hair color than indigenous people in Scandinavia. Did predatory mega-fauna prefer to eat blonds in South America? Or is the difference due to "intense sexual selection" among Scandinavians but not South Americans? What "musta" happened? ;-)Querius
May 17, 2012
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1- Darwin couldn't say anything about "the" tree of life because Darwin didn't know A) how many seeds were planted nor B) how many developed. 2- Evolution is a fact in the broadest sense of the word, ie "a change in allele frequency over time". Even baraminology agrees with that. 3- The issue is the equivocation, meaning a change in allele frequency over time = all living organisms owe their collective common ancestry to some unknown population(s) of prokaryotic-like organisms via accumulations of genetic accidents (natural selection and drift being two ways in which they accumulate and genetic accidents because they were not planned, ie "just happened to happen"). 4- Darwin argued against a strawman, ie the fixity of species. And guess what? Evos are still flogging the same dog. Sad, when you think about it.Joe
May 15, 2012
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