Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
81
@EricMH, your last three posts make it easy to walk in your shoes Eric. I sympathize, empathize. Dawkins is first rate, primus inter pares, and I disagree with @LM77. It is extremely dangerous to come up against thinkers like him, Martin Luther King, Brian McLaren in the emerging Church, socialists like Tony Benn and Jeremy Corbyn; they have a beautiful, coherent, uncompromising, prophetic clarity and in my experience if you take up arms against them, you lose the fight and worse. You change sides. You end up fighting with them. After having demonized them. The cognitive dissonance is mind reeling.
Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
84
Why? Where is the empirically, i.e. scientifically, detected intelligent intervention. By whom? When? Both the intervention and the detection? Published where? Why wasn’t it global headline news?
Appreciated. One typically wouldn’t use “Newtonian” unless one was specifically wanting to speaking about that subcategory of physics, and make sure it was clear that any discussion or critique did not apply to other aspects or formulations of physics.
So for what it is worth, many of those who use “Darwinian” evolution, or perhaps “Macroevolution” or the like are specifically doing so to clarify or distinguish their scope of discussion. They are trying to communicate they are don’t disagreeing with evolution at large, or with any and everything that is called “evolution”, but only that aspect of evolution that Darwin introduced and which has been refined over the years but still retains his basic approach… that the radical shifts and improvements in animal life are essentially the result of unguided natural selection interacting on naturally occurring or unguided variation.
Many biologists, yourself included, I would guess would have no need to specify “Darwinian evolution”, or “Macroevolution”, or the like… since I’m assuming that you don’t in fact are any distinction between the two? The large scale biological modifications are simply the cumulative result of many small scale changes over long periods of time. Thus it would make sense why you and other such biologists would see no need for further distinction in terms.
But for those of use who take no issue whatsoever with “evolution” narrowly defined, of natural selection operating on variation t select the list fit (the kind of evolution people believed in, essentially, before Darwin’s time)… but who are skeptical of this process to achieve the great large-scale perfections and intricate marvels of biology (which was Darwin’s unique contribution)… for us it is useful to have some term that clarifies that I don’t disbelieve in “Evolution”, but only particular aspect of it. I’m told “Darwinian” is incorrect, “Darwinism” is offensive, and Macroevolution” is nondescript and too vague to be useful. I find I’m running out of options…
Actually I’ve used the phrase “Newtonian physics” very deliberately to my high school physics students, but that was for the specific purpose of informing them that most of the high school physics year will be spent learning this basic, outdated, and decidedly non-cutting edge physics. It could be illuminating to explore the parallel here. Because we are obviously still spending time on something outdated because it remains so useful, and in fact is probably the only clear learning path to bring one’s understanding up to speed to begin to apprehend the revolutions still to follow in physics.
Perhaps it could be said to be useful in the same way for basic biology students to understand Darwin for some of the same reasons?
The only real, fundamental point of contention amongst all the ID proponents is that unguided variation seems incapable of generating what we see in the biological record, and thus we can empiricaly detect intelligent intervention. Quote from @EricMH
As I said before there is another potion un addition to unguided variation and intelligent intervention and that is intelligent guidance, which comes from ecological selection. I really do not understand why both Darwinians and ID can’t agree on this third option when it seems that at le4ast some have.
“The rule of biology is not to evolve unless the physical or biological environment changes, which is consistent with Darwin,” said Schopf, who also is director of UCLA’s Center for the Study of Evolution and the Origin of Life. The environment in which these microorganisms live has remained essentially unchanged for 3 billion years, he said.
“These microorganisms are well-adapted to their simple, very stable physical and biological environment,” he said. “If they were in an environment that did not change but they nevertheless evolved, that would have shown that our understanding of Darwinian evolution was seriously flawed.”
Newton has been replaced by Einstein, although Dawkins insists that this is not so. Dawkins also insists that Darwin’s theories have not been replaced. I think that Darwin’s understanding of Natural Selection needs to be replaced by ecological selection as indicated above, but others seem to think that any basic change in our understanding of evolution is a concession to Creationism. .
It is because if the guidance is empirically undetectable, then it is outside the area of ID’s concern. On the other hand, if guidance is detectable, then it gets lumped under intelligent design, whether that be front loaded or ongoing intervention. So it is not a third category.
Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
94
Again, undetectable guidance is impossible, is meaningless. And ID is undetectable. As you keep demonstrating.
Yes and no. Strictly speaking, Newton was not correct. But then, if we are to insist on absolute strictness, neither would Einstein nor anybody else (ever) be unless we achieved “knowledge completeness”. So essentially we are confined to asking, “so what is useful?” It turns out that understanding Newtonian physics is still incredibly useful (more so than understanding Einsteinian or later, more correct permutations of it even, provided you aren’t working on super high tech stuff like GPS systems).
So just dismissing Newton as wrong, I feel, fails to capture the necessary appreciation for what all is going on in science. Perhaps some similar things could be remarked of Darwin.
Ecological selection is NOT front loaded OR ongoing intervention, so how would it be lumped under ID?. It is quite empirically detectable as everyone knows that the dinosaurs went extinct because of climate change/ecological selection.
Please do not dismiss something before you have thoroughly considered it.
When we err Einstein model as a different way of looking at the universe as mass bending time and space as gravity, then you see that Relativity is definitely different from absolute time and space and action at a distance.
Dawkins does not want to accept ecological model of Natural Selection as different from Survival of the Fittest or the Selfish Gene.
As has been repeatedly explained by many of us ID sympathizers, and which is all over the ID literature, common descent is not the point of contention. As @EricMHjust Pointed out just a few posts above (With which I specifically highlighted my agreement)…
And as I explained at length to @Shekar on the post outlining my skepticism…
And as Michael Behe spelled out in his first book…
I find the idea of common descent (that all organisms share a common ancestor) fairly convincing, and have no particular reason to doubt it. I greatly respect the work of my colleagues who study the development and behavior of organisms within an evolutionary framework, and I think that evolutionary biologists have contributed enormously to our understanding of the world. Although Darwin’s mechanism—natural selection working on variation—might explain many things, however, I do not believe it explains molecular life.
Plenty of ID proponents do not accept common descent. I know some do. But let’s not pretend they are all fine with the idea. It’s actually a kind of a dirty secret that many lay people are unaware of if they have a steady diet of ENV. Usually when people are making a distinction between microevolution is fine and macroevolution is not, it’s because they reject common descent.
I am not interested what particular ID proponents do or do not accept. The main ID question that matters is unguided evolution sufficient to give us what we have today?