Evolution For Coggies

[_Moniker]

This is moved over from the sealings thread.

Oh dear! I snipped too quickly. Didn't see this lil nugget! :)

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:

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.

[_Moniker]

Try again Coggins. hint: Something to do with the key words I bolded.

And can you try to be succinct?

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.

You just seem to make the argument that it is fueled by chance. Natural selection is not chance. Genetic mutation is chance -- and that fuels what natural selection then has to work from.

You've confused me. Are you saying because genetic mutation is chance that this somehow makes the process of evolution random?

[_Moniker]

Okay, Coggins, how does gene flow fit into your theory of chance?

Did I lose you? Where'd ya go?

[_Coggins7]

You've confused me. Are you saying because genetic mutation is chance that this somehow makes the process of evolution random?

The entire process of evolution, as a whole, must logically be understood as random, if the blind, mechanistic forces that initiated it are random and if it is understood, as say, Dawkins understands it, that those blind, mechanistic forces define the sum total of all possibility in the universe. Any process derived from those forces, unless they obtain intelligent information form outside themselves, must continue to be random.

Natural selection is, while not random, also not intelligent or mediated by an intelligent agency. In other words, as I said above, natural selection, while itself not random, is a feature of a larger system that itself can be understood (in the full Darwinian paradigm) in no other way.

At the end of the day, natural selection is not intelligent, but simply contingent upon certain environmental conditions encountered by various forms of life as they evolve. While not perhaps, random, in the way evolutionary mutation itself is random, it is still very much purely mechanistic and, more importantly, completely independent of intelligent initiation, design, or support.

It is still, in other words, utterly blind, having no teleology within itself or in relation to a larger metaphysical context, if not random.

[_bcspace]

Evolution is not incompatible with LDS doctrine in any way.

[_Moniker]

Evolution is not incompatible with LDS doctrine in any way.

And evolution does not discredit God.

[_Coggins7]

Natural selection is not chance. Genetic mutation is chance

Natural selection is a purely mechanistic process derived from and constrained by processes that are, not only mechanistic and non-teleological, but utterly random.

This is not, you can see, germain to the ID argument, which, in various nuanced forms, is that none of the processes whatever, including natural selection, could be possible without an intelligent designer initiating, guiding, and controlling the various processes. Natural selection can still be understood to be a process functioning, essentially on its own, while yet also being understood as itself a part of a cosmos and organic biosphere that could not have existed in coherent, organized form, without God.

[_Coggins7]

Evolution is not incompatible with LDS doctrine in any way.

I only wish I could get that point across to those here who believe very sincerely that it is, or that you have two choices, the full, unexpurgated Darwinian paradigm (not evolution per se, but Darwinism with all its assumed implications) or fundie creationsim.

[_Coggins7]

And evolution does not discredit God.

That's all well and good. Now go talk to Beastie, Seth, marg, tarske, Richard Dawkins, Sephen Hawking, or Daniel Dennet about the matter. What you will see in this world is the idea that evolution precludes and forecloses acceptance of theism of any kind.

That is what ID is about. People who try to poison the well by conflating ID with creationism are just throwing chum into the water.

[_bcspace]

Evolution is not incompatible with LDS doctrine in any way.

And evolution does not discredit God.

Amen. Evolution does not even address the existence of God or that man is made in His image.

Evolution is not incompatible with LDS doctrine in any way.

I only wish I could get that point across to those here who believe very sincerely that it is,

Yes, the assumption seems to be that we must be creationist. The Church is neither because it recognizes there are no revelatory details to preclude either.

or that you have two choices, the full, unexpurgated Darwinian paradigm (not evolution per se, but Darwinism with all its assumed implications) or fundie creationsim.

For me, it all starts with 2 Nephi 2:22 in which we see that Adam was created into a state of no death. This leaves room for a previous creative state whose properties are undefined and therefore it is not unreasonable to think that death existed in the creative state.