Over at Uncommon Descent GilDodgen has A Modest Proposal. It consists mostly of telling scientists what they think about evolution.“Evolution” is an ill-defined term. It can mean:This is unbelievable! The standard definition of evolution is in any evolutionary biology textbook and all it takes is a little effort to find it. (If you know how to read.)
1) Change over time.
2) Common ancestry.
3) Random genetic errors filtered by natural selection as the purely materialistic mechanism that explains all of life’s complexity, information content, and information-processing machinery, not to mention human consciousness and its demonstrable creative intelligence.
Change over time is obvious and undeniable. Common ancestry seems reasonable to me, although universal common ancestry appears to be in big trouble with mounting evidence that Darwin’s unidirectional “tree of life” never existed. It might have been something more akin to a hologram than a tree, as far as I can tell.
What Darwinists really want us to accept — without question, dissent, annoying logical/evidential challenges, or apostasy — is definition 3), so let me make a modest proposal to substitute it for “evolution,” and reveal the Darwinian bait-and-switch scam.
What I'd like to know is whether there's any evolutionary biologist who accepts definition #3. Not even the most ardent adaptationist would accept such a silly definition of evolution.
Does Intelligent Design Creationism select for people with very low IQ's or does accepting Intelligent Design Creationism just make you stupid?
7 comments :
It's pretty simple. An honest and informed definition and they lose. They want to win, so being honest and informed has to go.
It is it clear that GilDodgen has no knowledge of biology other than some sort of odd strawman version he likely picked up from his pastor.
He really ought to get out of his mom's basement more often and do a little reading of real science texts.
But wait, if I cannot make up the strawman of my choice, it is much harder to knock it down???
What is Darwin's "unidirectional tree of life"? I don't recall that Darwin ever said that. (Not that it is other than of historical interest. If Darwin did say that, then the obvious reply is that he was wrong.)
For that matter, isn't "unidirectional tree of life" an oxymoron? The distinguishing characteristic of a tree is being branched, that is, going off in many directions.
TomS
"It might have been something more akin to a hologram than a tree, as far as I can tell."
Look at me, I'm making a completely vacuous statement with a flashy word in it so people who read this and know even less than me about this stuff think of me as a super smart egghead science guy.
Well, what I think he is saying is nonetheless fairly apparent: Someone who did not subscribe to evolution producing all the many and varied life-forms would be outside the camp--at least within the general biology science community.
From what I've seen, that's a fair statement.
And then there are those who espouse that others should accept their view. As people do, when they believe they have a particular grasp on the truth.
Intelligent Design Creationists are idiots, but they do have some value according to this other person's blog which I recently discovered.
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