No, Patrick. You are wrong about that. The one thing that I think everyone else knows around here is that Collins believes God guided evolution… and that it was not “natural processes [without God]”.
Collins, as NIH Director, better be working under the premise the “Humans and other living things have evolved over time due to natural processes”. His work at NIH must be completely secular (and there is no indication that it isn’t).
Ok Brad, your article was great. Especially the part where you say studying evolution won’t make you and/or your kids into atheists as George is implying
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So very sorry, but I am going to go with the science on this one. You can make up dogma on the fly if you want.
This is a fairly important question. Are you saying we should have THREE categories?
1] God-Guided Evolution;
-
Evolution Not Guided by God - but by Natural Selection (where Natural Selection is defined as “not random”);
-
Evolution Not Guided by God - and NOT by Natural Selection (so it would be Random Evolution).
Do you think setting up interlocking definitions which requires the 3rd category is helpful?
George
George,
number 3 makes no sense at all to me scientifically or by the evidence that exists.
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Okay… so what I’m gathering is that my use of the word “Random” is the strange one?
At first, Patrick, I thought you were implying that we didn’t need the 3rd category because who would imagine Evolution as being non-random.
But I finally realized that you are quite happy with the idea that Evolution, because it responds to Natural Selection, is NOT random.
Both of you, @beaglelady and @Patrick, think that
Evolution can be non-random because of God AND Natural Selection, or
non-random JUST because of Natural Selection (no God).
But aren’t you ruling out “Genetic Drift” ? Are you saying that Genetic Drift is different from Evolution?
Or does Evolution include inevitable genetic drift?
George
“Sometimes I believe in as many as six impossible things before breakfast”
-Alice
“Or more than six, after visiting BioLogos”
-Beaglelady
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How about agnostic with regard to God as a part of evolutionary processes?
Why don’t you take the free course on Evolution offered by Coursera? Introduction to Genetics and Evolution
It starts VERY soon, so sign up asap.
Miss Beagle, I went ahead and signed up for the Evolution course you recommend; it does look good!
But I hope you aren’t going to make me take a course every time I ask you a question.
Remember … the question I asked was: Is random “Genetic Drift” PART of Evolution … or something that we define as distinctly separate? Because you want to define Natural Selection as “non-random”.
Anyone else have an opinion? I’ll report back from the class…
George
George,
Let me try something here regarding randomness. When someone talks about something being random, they are usually talking about the future. Can I predict the outcome of a coin toss, can I predict what gene will mutate, can I predict what neutron will decay. Randomness, stochastic processes, Darwinian processes are random processes that model the future.
Now when we talk about the past, it is not random as it has already happened. The probability of an asteroid strike 66 million years ago killing off the dinosaurs is 1. It doesn’t make sense to talk about randomness in the past as it happened. We need to figure out what happened in the past and the causes of why it happened. But if we ran the proven random processes backward in time, it doesn’t get you back to the starting line it gets you somewhere else completely.
So if you keep randomness for the future, all should make sense.
I think everyone gets the idea of what I prefer to do…
I prefer to use definitions that REDUCE division and contention. In this case, it is looking like I need to adopt someone ELSE’s idea of Randomness.
I can see the advantages. If we say that Natural Selection drives Evolution in a non-Random way, that is very helpful to focus the audience’s mind on the internal logic of Natural Selection … rather than get all hung up on the anxiety-causing word “random”. So that’s a plus.
But, as in the first class of the Evolution course I started this afternoon pointed out, Natural Selection is just ONE contributor to Evolution. The course has not yet listed ALL the causes of Evolution … but I presume one of them will be genetic drift - - which is the inevitable nature of genes to mutate and change - - with or without any specific reason. This is pretty random! - - unless, of course, God is behind the changes (in a Front-Loaded Creation scenario, for example).
So… if my hunch is right … we are going to have Evolution where PART of it is NON-RANDOM “Natural Selection” (maybe even most?) … mixed in with other factors which may very well be RANDOM (the class hasn’t arrived at this point).
George
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I’m glad you have signed up for the course and hope you enjoy it. Don’t you think that Professor Noor is a good teacher?
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The whole approach is a great use of mixed media - - close captions… audiio… lecture notes… appeals to all the senses…
George
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