The Appendix/Cave Fish Eyes/Etc. are (NOT) vestigial

Hi Ashwin,

You haven’t been reading many popular astrophysics titles, I see. Do the names Lawrence Krauss, Stephen Hawking, and Victor Stenger mean anything to you? .

Neither does biology. Natural selection is a decidedly non-random factor. This has been pointed out to you several times:

Admittedly, the notion that randomness is not ontological is not easily grasped. Many scientists and philosophers (e.g., Krauss, Hawking, and Stenger) do think it is ontological. But why would you agree with Krauss, Hawking, and Stenger? Why not, instead, carefully consider what your fellow Christians on this forum are saying to you?

For your edification, I would like to recommend some more in-depth articles on the topic of “randomness” and teleology from the Biologos site:

Research (cited dozens of posts ago) shows that
(1) the blind hypogean populations have mutations in multiple regulatory genes;
(2) the specific mutations differ between the hypogean populations;
(3) the epigean populations do not have the alleles linked to blindness;
(4) there are hypogean populations that are not blind.

Absent empirical evidence to the contrary, then, all this evidence argues against the assumption that the blindness rate is more than infinitesimal in epigean populations.

I invite any biologists reading this thread to correct any flaws in my reasoning.

What’s incoherent is the notion that the forces in engineering and in linguistics are similar.

In fact, the forces in linguistics are much more similar to those in biology than to those in engineering. That’s why nested hierarchies have appeared in both the domain of biology and in the domain of linguistics.

For the life of me, I cannot fathom why you leaped to the conclusion that this reasoning is incoherent.

Grace and peace,
Chris Falter

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