I know
Richard
So far, you wonât accept DNA evidence. You wonât accept fossil evidence. You wonât accept the evidence of shared and derived features in living species.
So what will you accept as evidence?
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Hardly â itâs a summation of why God is never part of any scientific results: He canât be measured for.
And of course expecting to be able to detect God at work is a category error; it fails to distinguish between artist and brush, or poet and pen, i.e. between maker and means.
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It boils down to taking measurements and working with the results.
Except that your primary data does not exist. You cannot go back and observe the process in action.
Evolution is a concept.
Richard
I recall in my college History of Science course encountering that and most of the class was skeptical. Being good students, we resorted to the library to check a variety of sources, and found it was true.
Thereâs a fun flip side to this: the element technetium was first isolated in a laboratory, having been manufactured by neutron bombardment of some other element. The name was given because scientists believed that it could not occur naturally â but later it was found both in stars and in the Earthâs crust.
Heck, by those criteria most of the fossils found in the last quarter-century are transitional!
This brought to mind the image of mixing three or four jigsaw puzzles together in one box. 
Wow â more than I would have guessed!
I remember an argument in a botany class over whether species is arbitary: in field work we had come across several different varieties of a certain species, and of course asked if they shouldnât actually be considered different species. The argument arose because in nature these varieties could be found growing together but never crossed, while in the lab botanists had gotten them to cross.
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YEC reasoning. Why have you bought into that claptrap?
The primary data is all we have, whether in bone structure or DNA or whatever. This âcannot go back and observe the process in actionâ is fallacious even in lawsuits let alone in science.
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Even âspeciesâ is a doubtful label. In nature, there are individuals, clones and mutualistic organisms like lichen. These form populations with âsoftâ edges - it is usually not obvious where the borders of populations are. As there is variation and clines within and between populations, and there are also temporal changes within populations, the label âspeciesâ becomes a sliding or even arbitrary concept. In fact, there are several definitions for âspeciesâ and none of these definitions work well in all situations.
One definition of âspeciesâ is tied to the possibility to reproduce and produce viable offspring. This definition does not work well because many individuals can produce viable offspring with an individual that belongs to another species. For example, many ducks and geese are such species. They can and sometimes do produce viable offspring even when the individuals belong to different genus. On the other hand, some âspeciesâ form a cline of subpopulations where the individuals from the opposite ends of the cline behave like belonging to different species, they look different and do not usually mate with individuals resembling the opposite end of the cline.
With fossils, the definition becomes even more difficult because there may be a long time gap between two fossils that look almost the same. It would have been impossible for them to reproduce and therefore, the criteria depending on reproduction do not work. If they look almost the same, do they belong to the same âspeciesâ or are they two different species, possibly one evolved from the other? Another example is the breeds of dogs - if we would find bones of a very small and a very large dog, would we classify them as belonging to the same âspeciesâ?
If we could get DNA, we could test how closely related two individuals are and deduce if they have common ancestors but it may be impossible to get DNA from fossils. Even with DNA, the borders of classifying two individuals to the same species is a compromise. With evolving populations, there are always some differences in the DNA. What is the level of differences that warrants classifying to different species? There are some rules of thumb but these are conventions, not fixed limits.
All these difficulties and âdeviationsâ are what we would expect to find with ongoing evolution.
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Great point, and one worth pointing out as much as possible. Also, you explained the âspecies problemâ really well in the subsequent text.
Exactly. The real âspecies problemâ is human bias. We want black/white hard cut categories, but biology just isnât like that. Biology is messy, and made messier by evolutionary processes.
If there is any sensible unit within biology I think it is at the gene pool level. This would be a population evolving in parallel where their interactions affect the genetic makeup of the population. This is a bit more difficult with asexual species, but I think it could be seen in processes like clonal interference. For sexually reproducing species, this process is pretty simple. If they are interbreeding then they are a gene pool. It is not question of could they interbreed, but are they.
But as you say, this is all but impossible for fossils. Again, it is a human bias that we need to group these fossils into what we consider species. It may be convenient for communication, but we should always realize that we simply canât determine who was the ancestor or descendant based on just the features of a fossil. If we came across a human skeleton we couldnât say who their ancestors or descendants are, short of DNA sequencing.
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Unless there are some special constraints like âOnly one species like this is present in the region in the recent, only one similar species is found in the older layers, and there are intermediate forms in intervening layers.â
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LOL
So now, having deduced the sequencing to fit the ancestry you now assess the ancestry according to sequencing. Isnât that circular reasoning?
Richard
Just getting back to the site after a long absence, please forgive me if youâve already answered this, but what exactly do you mean by it being a logical impossibility? Iâm guessing you may mean physically impossibleâŚ? as I really canât see anything making a global flood an inherent logical contradiction, as if a flood that covered the entire planet was in the same category as a married bachelor or a square circleâŚ
Do you mean there literally wouldnât be enough water to cover the entire face of the earth? Or that even the amount of rain as described couldnât cause so much floodwater? Or something else entirely? Iâm curious what you mean by it being an absolute logical impossibility?
Are logical impossibilities constrained to oxymorons? Besides, English usage is a bit broader than formal propositional logic.
I think a matter of degree applies, in that an idea that makes no sense or obviously too whacked to take seriously may be described as illogical. Where did the water come from to cover Everest? Where did the water go afterwards? Of course YEC advocates a kind of flat earth in terms of elevation profile, or gathered up tsunamiâs to deal with this rather glaring difficulty, but these just amplify into yet more such logical impossibilities.
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English usage is broader, yes, but still a âlogical impossibilityâ means that something is indeed logically impossible⌠the words have a meaning, and I for one like to be somewhat precise with terms⌠even the YEC proposals you mention (an earth that at the time had no high mountains as we have now, tsunamis, etc.) are not in any way âlogically impossibleâ⌠after all, doesnât every single person here at biologos believe that, at some point in the past, Everest wasnât as tall as it is at present? A past earth with shorter mountains at some point in the past is essentially an agreed upon fact by nearly everyone, so I donât understand the (ahem) logic of calling it a âlogical impossibilityââŚ
Hence just for clear thinking, Iâd think we could acknowledge that an earth devoid of especially high mountains is indeed a logical possibility, even if one objects to the idea that it would or could have been so at the proposed time of the flood based on physical or geological inference?
Sure, if you compartmentalize your thinking. Some ranges are elevating while others are eroding, and back far enough the planet held no high mountains. But that is not our present world, so under YEC you have to get from there to here in the span of six thousand years or less, and I think that legitimately a logical impossibility, insofar as the laws and symmetries of physics are logical.
Maybe call them physical impossibilities?
I get calling them âlogicalâ since so much of what YECists spout is severely lacking in sense, but âphysicalâ describes the ones youâve mentioned quite accurately.
So, a physics impossibility â which is quite true unless you invoke a heap of meaningless miracles so the result isnât a cloud of plasma cooling in Earthâs orbit.
Yes. Logical was not originally from a post of mine, and it does open up a line of objection. However, I do think Spock would agree that flood geology is illogical.
Given physicsâ relationship with math, it is on some level logical. Your example is particularly applicable. What is more grounded in observational science than the conservation of mass and energy, based in turn by Emmy Noetherâs analysis of symmetry? Yet YEC without any basis advocates accelerated radioactive decay, acknowledging the heat problem but just shrugging it off. As radioactive decay is by definition the conversion of mass to energy, it is indeed illogical to argue that the creation of heat happens without the creation of heat.
Why are people ,still arguing Physical possibilities or scientific accuracy against Scripture? Havenât we established that Scripture is not about science? Or precise history?
Scripture is about the message. If the message relies on either scientific or historic accuracy then the Scripture fails. Fortunately it does not. So why keep arguing about it?
Richard
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