Fringe voices continue their unsuccessful attacks against mainstream evolutionary theory

Keep in mind that more people (maybe lots more) have clicked on your link(s) than the little numbers indicate. (Those only advance if a person normal-clicks your link to open it in the same window/tab). I’ll admit, I opened your first one, but didn’t read far before I just started skimming. Once I saw them go down the road of: “The evolution of the eye hasn’t been explained …” - by which the author means, they haven’t proved and found fossils for every possible detail for every step along the way - I didn’t see the need to read much further. I’ve read Dawkins “Climbing Mt. Improbable” where he does an excellent job plausibly explaining (not proving) all the steps that could have led from a microbial light-sensitive spot all the way up to full eye-sight. Asking for the impossibly high bar of proving all the details of all steps is like insisting that you are still going to think a certain suspect guilty of murder (even though you have zero evidence to even warrant your suspicion) unless you can watch 24-hour video surveillance of them over their entire adult life. In other words, you’ve already decided they’re guilty.

I never clicked your 2nd link at all.

You might get more reaction here if you choose some point from those sources that you think particularly important. More people will have time to read a few sentences from you than they will to wade through entire articles.

^This. Pick something you want to discuss and start discussing it. The ‘Extended Evolutionary Synthesis’ isn’t a topic – it’s a marketing slogan applied to a grab bag of very different evolutionary concepts, one that has been discussed here repeatedly.

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Then perhaps you could discuss them.

What is it about phenotypic plasticity that you think supports ideas like the Earth being young, a recent global flood, or separate creation?

Why is it about the the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis that you think opens the door for creationism of whatever stripe?

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Such as this one?

I’m sorry, but when you ask if anything to do with either evolution or non-evolution supports the idea of the earth being six thousand years old, it’s clear that the questions you are asking are loaded ones.

You won’t get any support for a young earth by debunking evolution. In order to get any support for a young earth, you must first debunk measurement. And even then, that is necessary but not sufficient.

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Evolution theory is full of holes and requires huge leaps of faith to consider it. My exploration and comparison to creation God’s Word, left just one possible solution, the Bible. I found that almost all university students will say they are searching for truth, but in reality, while the journey is exciting, few really want to find truth because it is scary and hard to accept into one’s chosen lifestyle. So the beat goes on. There are no “between species” fossils.

Thanks for your reply, Avsec. Perhaps you could give us some examples?

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Could you, please, give examples of these holes? I am certainly no expert on evolution, but always found the explanations of it in my biology classes a useful and logical for understanding the history of, connections between and processes of living things.

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Swiss cheese is full of holes too. But that doesn’t mean there’s no cheese there.

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That is a true statement. I was just reading a review of one of Enn’s books, (Evolution of Adam as I recall) and one of his points was that people prefer the comfort of a group to the truth:


The root of the conflict for many Christians is not scientific or even theological, but group identity and fear of losing what it offers.”

Evolution has holes, which is true of all scientific theories, but what is does not have is the outright contradictions present when looking at a young earth scenario.

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Link to review:

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That is not a valid argument against any scientific theory. If a scientific theory could be falsified by the fact that it is “full of holes,” then we would be able to claim that earthquakes do not happen because we don’t know how to predict them. Try telling that to anyone living in Japan or on the California coast.

Every area of study has “holes” or unanswered questions. But that’s why people do PhDs. Scientific theories are not falsified by “holes” or unanswered questions; they are only falsified by contradictory evidence.

The only “holes” that falsify a scientific theory are ones that the theory unequivocally tells us should not be there. For example, a young earth predicts that we should have sequenced the T-Rex genome by now. We haven’t.

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A difficulty is that popular headlines generally don’t portray the discussion accurately. “New discovery overturns physics!” probably actually is “Someone thinks that a discovery might require adjusting our current models in one particular area of physics.”

In the case of the EES, it doesn’t make much difference to my research, which focuses (among other topics) on identifying how different species of mollusk are related to each other. I’m not too worried about what genetic factors played the largest role; rather I am looking for genetic markers that trace the connections. It’s an interesting discussion, something to mention as I teach biology, but it’s about the relative roles of various factors in evolution.

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Fringe academic voices, trying to make a name for themselves, get picked up by pseudoscience and have never been so successful in infecting the masses through the marketing tool of the internet. As long as real science is still financed by the taxpayer and consumers generally through corporations regardless, we’re OK. Perversely even if deluded taxpayers vote not to, business will still pursue real science for competitive advantage. Unless it’s made illegal for irrational reasons…

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