Evolution For Coggies
Posted: Mon Jan 07, 2008 2:25 am
This is moved over from the sealings thread.
Coggins reply:
Moniker wrote:Coggins7 wrote:Moniker wrote:Oh dear! I snipped too quickly. Didn't see this lil nugget! :)Coggins7 wrote:
The debate between ID and evolution is about the plausibility of the evolution of life as a purely blind, random chance process, not necessarily about whether evolution occurred.
Are you one of the "serious ID folks", Coggins? Might want to brush up on evolution before you try to discuss it. :)
Moniker, this indicates that you are clearly not in the loop regarding the central thesis of ID and its criticism of Darwinism, so if you'd like a discussion on the subject, fine, if you'd like to be educated upon the subject, fine. Don't, however, try to educate me on the subject. If you don't understand the historic difference between what has come to be called "ID" and Protestant Fundamentalist "creationism", bow out now.
Hi. I know that there's a crucial problem with stating that evolution occurs through a "random chance process".
Do you?
Coggins, reply to me in a new thread if you feel the need.
Coggins reply:
Coggins7 wrote:beastie wrote:I also wait with bated breath. This is the most common error anti-evolutionists make. It will be interesting to see if Coggie can even recognize the error.
No, there's no error, and I'm not going to play the clever Stephen Gould semantic games over it either. The reason Dawkins and many other militant atheist scientists think that evolution precludes belief in God, and is the final nail in his coffin, is precisely because of what evolutionists have always claimed are the inevitable intellectual consequences of full acceptance of the theory and its implications: the entire universe, and all the objects within it, including all biological life on this planet, are a consequence of purely random, blind, mechanistic forces working through time against vast improbabilities to produce both the planet and the biosphere.
Life appears designed, but it is not. It is a complete and utter accident, an epiphenomena of the universe, as is human consciousness. I understand the augments surrounding the idea that natural selection is not random but functional; that which survives survives because of the local environment in which natural selection takes place, and hence, is linked to form and function in a practical sense.
There is en element of sophistry that enters into the discussion, however, when Darwinian fundamentalists attempt to deflect philosophical criticism of their extrapolations from the mechanics of evolution to origins and meaning. While natural selection itself is not random, the entire matrix of genetic mutation, variation, and development; the entire process and history of the micromutational steps that led to the particular form and function of any creature, most certainly is conceived of in this manner. It is also the case that the environment around any species that allows a specific phylogenetic line to survive and reproduce, has itself, come into being as a result of purly random evolutionary developments, and this included the inorganic, geological environment, climate, and the existence of the earth itself. Natural selection cannot be invoked to explain the creation of the earth, the oceans, the earth's fortuitous placement in the solar system, or global climate dynamics, as these these are not living things but complex physical systems that are themselves the products of unimaginably fortuitous chance events that happened to produce the earth and its various dynamic physical and chemical systems.
So what we have is evolution as a purely random process of the accumulation of traits and attributes, but natural selection as a process that is, in a way 'guided" by environmental factors. However, natural selection is a function of evolution as a process, which is random, which means that any guiding that occurs in the selection process is itself predicated upon the larger evolutionary framework, which is based in unmediated randomness. In other words, natural selection is not random, but the evolutionary process itself; the genetic mutations and modifications that allow selection to work, are. Hence, natural selection could not exist without evolutionary change, which is a purely random process. Randomness then, produces creatures that have been molded by random mutation combined with environmental pressures that channeled evolution into various niches by favoring some kinds of adaptations over others. Logically, the entire things still appears utterly blind and random to me, as all of it is assumed to have come into being without intelligence, design, or intelligent organization and initiation.
So this is really a red herring for the ID debate, which isn't about natural selection (a function of evolution that itself guides the evolutionary process), but about whether any of this, including natural selection as a feature of evolutionary processes, could ever have arisen by pure chance at all. A further, more religious extrapolation from this, might ask whether any of this could be maintained without some continuing connection to both the divine template of creation (the design, the blueprints or schematics of organic and inorganic creation) and a continuing guiding influence that channels and controls the evolutionary process.