Does biology need the theory that all life shares a common ancestor?

Faith & Science Conversation
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You’re missing an important distinction. If all you do is explain an observation after the fact, then all you’ve done is generate a hypothesis. That’s what Gould was complaining about: making up stories and assuming they were correct. Predicting new observations based on your hypothesis is a very different matter. That’s how you test whether your story has any truth to it. It’s how you do science, whether it’s applied science or not.

So that means it’s very likely a good description of what’s actually happened. Do you have another explanation for why common descent can consistently predict what we’ll see when we look at new data? Why does creationism fail so completely at the same task, if it’s so easy?

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As I noted before, I was using a theory to learn something important about the real world. The specific conclusion that I used from common descent – that local divergence between species reflects the mutation rate there – was predicted in advance and then turned out to be true when tested.[quote=“Dredge, post:72, topic:35756”]
Of what use is your “paper science” to applied biology?
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Why is it so important that it have implications for applied biology? Isn’t the more important question whether it’s true or not?

As it happens, the primary reason for everything I do in biology is so it can be applied. I work at a biomedical research institute whose goal is to apply biology to human health. We do the studies we do in pursuit of that goal. In the particular case I mentioned, we used information about the local mutation rate to provide the first evidence that recombination in humans is concentrated in hot spots, a fact that enabled us to start a massive program in genome-wide searches for genetic risk factors for disease, which is helping us slowly unpack the molecular basis for everything from macular degeneration to schizophrenia to heart disease.

Could we have gotten there anyway without reference to common descent? Sure, we would find a way. We could also find a way to work with our eyes closed and still get results. But why would we want to?

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Let me ask you a different, but related, question, @Dredge. Where would one draw the line between the "micro"evolution you readily admit is indeed valuable and "macro"evolution you fervently deny? What biological evidence is there for the existence of evolutionary barriers called “kinds”? AiG is now in firm support of extremely rapid speciation in the last ~4000 years, due to the discrepancy between the number of species that could have fit on the Ark versus the number of species alive today. It’s very important to realize that a majority of us here see evolution a single process, without splitting it into one process that leads to easily-observable change over time and another that allows these changes to accumulate to a point past the realm of “kind”.

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Common descent is a human construct in the same way that

e = mc2

is a human construct.

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Could you be more specific? If you had a month and day, that’d be great. I’m trying to plan a surprise birthday party for Adam.

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i accept natural selection as a fact and the indispensible role it’s plays in microevolution. I part I can’t accept is macroevolution.

The thing is, structure prediction works through a vast range of species and over a vast range of time. So at least the original question, “Does biology need Darwinism: if Darwinism could be removed from the science of biology, would it suffer? …”, my answer would be “yes”. Particularly the area where we use genetics to actually determine 3D structures of proteins or RNA.

I don’t hate darwin; the problem I have with milllions of years of evolution is simply that I can’t see how it can be reconciled with Scripture, especially when Adam and Eve aren’t regarded as real historical people and/or notions of poplygenism are entertained.

Yes, this is definitely the problem that people who grew up in the church seem to have about accepting evolution. I was changed around age 22, from a largely secular upbringing, so ironically, my greatest barrier to Christianity (aside from the obvious difficulties of accepting Jesus in our largely triumphalist culture) was most vividly the people who believe the earth is 6000 years old. :wink:

If everything in the bible matched up exactly word for word, event for event, prediction for prediction, I guess it wouldn’t be hard to obey God, or at least know the consequences of disobedience. I had to learn trust from the other angle. I was never obliged to believe that any of the bible was true. In fact, quite the opposite. So for me, issues like death before the fall and the absolute historicity of Adam and Eve, whereas it complicates how I am forced to understand scripture, it focuses too much on the very tiny details and too little on the more important questions to make issue of that.

What really matters is whether there is any purpose to our existence. If the universe simply popped into existence, there is no God, nothing actually right or wrong about anything just what it is, then following Jesus is basically foolishness; there is no good or evil and no meaning in anything. Life then is only vanity and striving after the wind. I would say try to look at it from that very big picture first, and then maybe those details will be a little easier to cut some slack on.

by Grace we proceed,
Wayne

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Naturally, this is a common complaint, indeed the central complaint, about how to accept the real world observations of Evolution compared to the Bible - - an ancient book, written before humanity had any reliable notions regarding the nature of physics, biology, genetics and how the world really functions.

The Book of Job Allegory
The Book of Job includes a section quoting God about his storing snow and hail in vast storage chambers in the sky … waiting for a time to make it snow or hail.

The Book of Jonah Allegory
The Book of Jonah talks about Jonah being swallowed whole by a fish …(what?)
living inside the stomach of a fish for e days … (what the ?)
and then being returned to shore to tell the story … (right). And yet many Hebrew scholars can point to the elements of the story that tell experienced readers that the story is an allegory about spending 3 days dead, in the chaotic waters of the Underworld, similar in many ways to Jesus being described as visiting Hades!

The Jesus in Hell Allegory
1 Peter 3:18-20
For Christ also suffered once for sins, the just for the unjust, that He might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh but made alive by the Spirit,
by whom also He went and preached to the spirits in prison,
who formerly were disobedient, when once the Divine long-suffering waited[ in the days of Noah…"

And yet plenty of Protestant denominations reject the Roman Catholic interpretation of this text … and have concluded that the Church should have not have gone beyond what Augustine wrote … which was that this text was “more allegory than history”!

"Augustine, one of the chief architects of Christian theology, argued that Peter’s passage is more allegory than history. That is, Jesus spoke “in spirit” through Noah to the Hebrews, not directly to them in hell. But even Augustine said the question of whom, exactly, Jesus preached to after his death, “disturbs me profoundly.”

Footnote for Augustine on 1 Peter 3:18-20 and Jesus in Hell

The Allegory of Moses vs. the Egyptian Priests
In Exodus we read that Moses converts a staff into a snake, … perhaps this is not so surprising, anything is possible with the Lord’s help!

But then we read that the Pharaoh’s wise men also knew how to perform that miracle!

Exodus 7:9-12
So Moses and Aaron went in to Pharaoh, and they did so, just as the LORD commanded. And Aaron cast down his rod before Pharaoh and before his servants, and it became a serpent.

But Pharaoh also called the wise men . . . they also did in like manner with their enchantments. For every man threw down his rod, and they became serpents. But Aaron’s rod swallowed up their rods."

Do we really think any Egyptian knew how to make a staff into a real serpent? Isn’t this a rather obvious allegory of the competition between Moses with Aaron and their Egyptian rivals?

Crossing the Red Sea - Not Allegory !; see Napoleon’s Crossing
Interestingly, the crossing of the Red Sea is actually not an allegory. There are predictable times when a portion of the Red Sea is walkable. There is a famous (yet still little known) story of Napoleon and his horse guard making just such a crossing to see a historical site, but almost drowning on his return trip because of not being careful about the time he had!

How anyone can reject the story of Creation as allegory … when even the simplest part of the story … the first 3 days of creation … is marred by the obvious problem that you can’t mark 3 days of Creation if the Sun isn’t created until the 4th day!

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To the best of my knowledge, all applied biology operates at the level of microevolution. In stark contrast, macroevolution is useless and exists only in the La La Land of theoretical biology. Unfortunately, the science of biology was long ago hijacked by atheists, who preach to unsuspecting and naive biology students that macroevolution is somehow “essential to understanding biology.” Nonsense, I say. The truth is, macro’ is just an atheist creation story (aka atheist theology) and is as irrelevant to science as a fairy tale.

For a biologist to be effective (read: useful) there is simply no need to believe, for example, that humans and chimps share a common ancestor or that whales evolved from a deer or that all life on earth evolved from some single-cell organism.

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[quote=“gbrooks9, post:56, topic:35756, full:true”]The preachers who say that the Bible has to be infallible or you have nothing - - make the same sounds, to me, as the Austrian politicians just before WWII … it was all or nothing. It was a lie then. And it’s still a lie.
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For a moment there, George, I thought you were being serious! But after reading some of your other posts, I put one and one together and realised that you must be Biologos’ resident jester or devil’s advocate or something. Phew … you had me worried!

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That is my understanding of “yom” as well. But in Exodus 20:8, Yahweh is instituting the seven-day week (that exists to this day), so here He is directly equating the “six days” of Genesis with six days of 24 hours duration.

Plus, in the Genesis account, each of the six days is delineated by “there was an evening and there was a morning”. Why? Well, surely there is only one sensible answer - the author wanted the reader to know that each day is a literal day - ie, 24 hours. No one in ancient times would have interpreted it in any other way. If he Lord wanted “day” to mean a very, very long, then He surely went about it in a strange way!

If God used evolution over millions of years to produce life as we see it today, why didn’t He just say so? Why beat about the bush with a mendacious fairy tale about six days of creation?

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@Dredge, you are not representing conservative YEC or ID-believing Christians very well with rhetoric like this. Please have the courtesy to deal with those (like @glipsnort) who have dedicated decades of their lives to understanding and applying biology with a bit more respect.

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Are you truly audacious enough to claim to know exactly what was in God’s mind as He inspired the writing of Exodus? Could you at least concede it is possible that He could have meant something other than 6 24-hour periods?

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The problem with your position is quite simply that there is no stark contrast.

One of the first things you learn once you get into biology is that the nice neat definition of species is often useful, but not at all rigid. Many species don’t interbreed with neighboring species under normal conditions, but may hybridize occasionally in unusual circumstances. But expanding the definition to ‘genus’ level doesn’t simplify matters: a few cross-genus hybrids are possible too. And once you get into plants and other life that routinely self-fertilize, the definition of species gets even more arbitrary.

Baraminology is an attempt to sort all living things into ‘kinds’ that could and could not be descended from each other, but it turns into an exercise in hair-splitting at whatever level you choose to work. There is no obvious division between ‘kinds’ of animals, much less plants, fungi, protists, etc. How many ‘kinds’ of deer are there under the umbrella Cervidae? Shouldn’t this be a trivially easy question to answer, if macroevolution is false?

What if everyone is overthinking the interpretation of ‘God created all kinds of animals?’

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I’m audacious enough to apply simple common sense to Scripture, but not audacious enough to try and squeeze the square peg of an atheist myth into the round hole of God’s Word.
Please explain why each of the six days in Genesis is delineated by “there was an evening and there was a morning”? Do these words suggest a very long period of time to you? If so, please explain how you came to that rather odd conclusion.

If Yahweh meant the “six days” in Exodus to be milllions of years, this is something akin to a Jehovah’s Witnesss equating “144,000” to the “24 elders”! Yahweh said the creation in question took “six days” - these are His exact words. If He was really talking about millions of years, then He wasn’t telling the truth, simple as that.

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You are not going to like this answer, but I accept the Genesis account as figurative poetry relating the truth that God is responsible for and sustains life. The “take home” message is that God created the universe and everything in it. If you take every single word of the Genesis account literally, you run into problematic questions like “What were evening and morning prior to the existence of the sun?”

Personally, I am not going to limit God to what my own intellect can understand. Although it isn’t always comfortable, I can face questions about theology and science without fearing the answers. I can accept that sometimes my own theology may be in error without questioning the truth of the Almighty.

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@Dredge

Where did you come up with this idea?

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I think he has transformed the idea that whales and deer have a common ancestor (which is correct according to biology) into the idea that whales evolved from deer, which is quite different and of course incorrect according to biology.

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It’s my (very much non-expert) understanding that as Hebrew had fewer words than English, it’s quite common for a broader range of meaning to exist for Hebrew words than for English. But fortunately, we don’t have to look far even under more narrow English definitions!

Definition 2 has nothing to do with a 24 hour day! Does the same hold true for “evening?”

Yep! “2. The latter portion”

Clearly we are not overly restricted in interpretation. The ISV even uses the words “twilight” and “dawn,” none of whose Merriam-Webster definitions support the very specific interpretation you wish to make.

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Bold words! @glipsnort, who works professionally as a computational biologist, told us this:[quote=“glipsnort, post:65, topic:35756”]
I can’t do my work as a biologist without relying on both common descent and natural selection. Specifically, I have repeatedly and successfully used the common ancestry of humans and chimpanzees
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Thus you are contending that he has no idea what he is talking about.

You are telling a professional biologist that he doesn’t understand how to do his work. Please tell me, @Dredge, how it is that you have this awesome super-power? And can you kindly solve the P=NP and Turing Halting Problems while you’re at it? I would like some professional help from a guy like you.

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@Dredge

Hold onto your suspenders… I am not playing devil’s advocate at all. The Church teaching that the Bible has to be 100% correct or it is worthless is one of the most toxic Evangelical propositions in the doctor’s bag of Theology.

You would think a position like that would be clear enough that all the Evangelical groups that hold to this principle would pretty much share the same views about an entire range of subjects …not just 6 day Creation.

But in fact, this is not what we see, thus demonstrating the bankruptcy the position. How can the position be valid if we have singing in tongues in one group that think the Bible is error-free, and we have other groups who think singing in tongues is an abomination?

And on the flip side of the coin, while growing up I would have to say that I have known, or know, Hundreds of men and women, in the aggregate mostly Congregationalists, Presbyterians and Methodists, who did not, or do not, believe the Bible is 100% error free. And they feel no compunction at all to jettison their belief in Jesus and the Church because of it.

“All or nothing” is flim-flam bunk. It is taking an epistemological conundrum and turning it into an Occam’s Razor of foolishness.

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