The Second Law (and Discovery Institute) Defeat Evolution Once Again

Faith & Science Conversation
114

That’s your opinion. Would you willing to do a survey among evolutionary biologists?
The divorce probably didn’t take.

Evolution is not opposed to the sovereignty of God. It is opposed to the interference of God in the process of evolution.By definition,it’s an unguided process.
I am open to a process of change guided by God. Like I have said before, i wouldnt call it evolution unless science restated the theory as a possibly guided process.
I would call my belief creationism, or intelligent design.
I have repeated this again and again. You don’t seem to get it.

Sure… and a lot of it is just so stories…

Actually if you read Shapiro, he is categorical that science does not go there yet… In fact its one of the most trenchant criticisms against his idea. That he refuses to speculate on what sets the forces of “natural genetic engineering” into motion. And i admire that.Perhaps there are natural causes for what he defines as “natural genetic engineering”, perhaps not, however i respect that he refuses to rely on speculative just so stories.

Depends on what exactly you mean by common descent.Theobold defined it as below -
"the theory of UCA posits that all extant terrestrial organisms share a common genetic heritage, each being the genealogical descendant of a single species from the distant past
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature09014
If the above definition is true, then what Shapiro/Third way people are describing is not common descent in some cases.
For example- endosymbiosis - New traits such as photoysnthesis in plants are hypothesised to have been acquired from cyanobacteria by plants. If speciation happens by these processess, its not a new species arising from an existing one through inherited modifications. Its new species emerging through the combination of two or more existing species. i.e a falsification of common ancestry.
If we drew such a relationship on a graph, we would get a network as opposed to a heirachy.
We know this happens in the history of life. For example. Eukaryotes are understood to have emerged from the hybridisation of eubacteria and archaebacteria.
HGTs in prokaryotes also point to speciation events being caused by the interaction and merging of genetic materials of 2 or more species. Again, this is not common descent.

This would require a redefinition of common descent.Can you give a formal statement of what this refined version of common descent is? Would the below statement be acceptable?
“The genes in every organism have an antecedent in another organism which might or might not be genaologically related to said organism.”

Can such a theory be tested or falsified? And what exactly does it explain?
@glipsnort

Sure, if you define any change in the genome as a mutation… then what exactly does a mutation signify or mean?
Natural genetic engineering is the name for a class of processes. Categorising them under the head “mutations” should not change their significance or make Shapiro’s arguments invalid.

Lotteries are designed so that someone will win. Is that what you are claiming?
Evolution did not start with a large no: of organisms reproducing. It started with one organism reproducing. And nature doesnt care if that thing lived or died… it had to survive by luck… reproduce by luck… etc etc…

I was referring to how this thread started.

Me and my siblings are not an example of common descent. we have two parents. You are confusing issues here.

I didnt fix the title. @pevaquark did… He has a preference for sarcastic titles that distort my claims.

There is a list of published papers in the Evolution news site.

Yes i read the word “part”… i even tried to define it… i asked if natural selection regulates novelty by selection…
he said No. i am curious to know what he means exactly.
There are a lot of evolutionary biologists that give credit to the design in nature to natural selection.

Same to you brother.

115

That would be an interesting survey (just for its own sake), and here is the question I would want answered: “Does the theory of evolution in any way depend on or presume the nonexistence of an active deity?”

And while I agree that it would be interesting to see how biologists at large would answer that today, I am yet more interested in what actual truth is. So for those who would give an affirmative answer (and I don’t dispute many still may --why does Biologos exist, after all!), I would like to hear them explain how or why the theory of evolution does this any more than any other scientific theory. At that point any affirmative answers are revealed to be the result of erroneous theological caricature [or fallacious generalization of one narrow theology as a sole representative of all theology]. So even if you could still find a majority of choir members to sing that song, I am still more impressed by whichever answer is the most coherent one. You have yet to answer it yourself (the “how is it any more necessarily godless than gravity?” question). Those are the rocks on which you have been consistently unable to avoid shipwreck.

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Those two sentences do not even make sense together.

You simply ignored everything I said about quantum mechanics and other branches of science, and how they have included randomness in their theories. Why should I or anyone else on this forum take you seriously?

You seem to be a fan of quantum mechanics. Like the theory of evolution, quantum mechanics explicitly includes randomness. Kindly explain how it is that the randomness-advocating theory of quantum mechanics does not "oppose the interference of God "

While you are doing so, please address the fact that 93% of leading physicists are atheists.

Please address the fact that leading physicists have used the theories of physics as an apologetic for atheism. Most recently, these physicists include:

  • Victor Stenger - wrote “God: The Failed Hypothesis” and “God and the Folly of Faith”
  • Stephen Hawking - stated “There is nothing bigger or older than the universe.” and “Before we understand science, it is natural to believe that God created the universe. But now science offers a more convincing explanation.”
  • Lawrence Krauss - “Forget Jesus. The stars died so that you could be here today.” “Science is only truly consistent with an atheistic worldview with regards to the claimed miracles of the gods of Judaism, Christianity and Islam.” “There’s absolutely no evidence that we need any supernatural hand of god.”
  • Richard Feynman - “Scientific views end in awe and mystery, lost at the edge in uncertainty, but they appear to be so deep and so impressive that the theory that it is all arranged as a stage for God to watch man’s struggle for good and evil seems inadequate.”
  • Steven Weinberg, Nobel Laureate in Physics - “[Muslims] felt that science would be corrosive to religious beliefs and they were worried about it. Dammit I think they were right. It is corrosive to religious belief. And it’s a good thing too.”

These are all prominent, modern physicists who subscribe to the consensus on the theory of relativity, the Big Bang, and quantum mechanics.

Thank you. Have a great day.
Chris

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My answer is practical.You seem to think the theory of evolution exists in some void without people.
Its a fact that majority of evolutionary biologists believe evolution is not guided.
Evolutionary biologists have actively claimed this over the last several decades to the public (from Huxley to Dawkins and beyond). Organisations such as PNAS routinely publish articles that clearly state this. Here are some reasons why they might think evolution has nothing to do with a christian God.

  1. Arguments against Design - Evolutionary Biologists regularly make arguments against Design in Public showing how various parts are badly designed. They show this feature as proof of a mindless process such as Natural selection being the designer as opposed to God.
    This argument has been a consistent part of evolution since its inception and continues to be deployed.
    This is in direct contrast to the Christian view that see Creation as “wonderfully made” and showing the glory of the creator.
    And also flies against the face of the claim that Evolutionary biologists doesn’t say anything about God/the presence absence of a designer. Here is an example of said argument.
    http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2010/03/31/design-flaws-support-evolution/
    The author refutes the idea that such are arguments are beyond science with the following statement:

Blockquote
However, that’s not the argument here. Imperfections and sub-optimal properties are an outcome of evolutionary theory; this is a positive argument that observations of the world best fit a model positing a history of accidents and refinements constrained along lines of descent. If the creationists want to complain, they first have to propose a set of predictions that would discriminate between accident and design, and starting from a god who can do anything at any whim is not a fruitful source of hypotheses.

Irrespective of the quality of the argument. the fact remains that this line of argumentation is a part of evolutionary logic/science.
2) The elevation of natural processes such as natural selection as the Designer - i can show n number of papers that posit that natural selection is the creative process by which design occurs and denies that design for organisms originated in any mind.
3) The fruit of evolution: over the years we see the following fruit of “evolutionary thinking”-
A consistent antagonism and contempt for religion/religious among its proponents. Promotion of ideas such as eugenics, survival of the fittest etc which are opposite to the ideas of grace,mercy,equality etc.

These are all valid reasons from how the theory of evolution has been developed and taught over the last 150 years to conclude that it does not describe a process guided by a benevolent or intelligent God.
You might have a caricature of the theory bereft of history and ignoring how it has been and continues to be presented that allows you to believe it allows for God to guide it.I just don’t see how that is possible… and neither do the majority of the scientists involved (whether christain Id/creationists or more orthodox scientist).
However, in the world we live in it is formulated, researched and taught as an unsupervised mindless process which cannot have a designer.

Edit: This leads me to the conclusion that any need for God to guide evolution would destroy the theory… And thats what is happening now. The theory cannot stand on its own and is being constantly refined… Every decade, Evolution is new wine under the old label…

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Mere weeks ago, I would have been totally with you on this (equating ‘unguided’ with ‘denial of God’). In fact I wrote about that in another thread which I’ll share with you here … and the responses to it that enlightened me to the multiple uses of that word. I’m quoting myself below from that other thread, and then pasting in the pertinent responses to it that I accepted, causing me to alter my views accordingly.

I had written:

“Unguided” raises my hackles for the exact reasons that you nail in your paragraph above [paragraph in another thread]. Unguided by what? Until those same authors are willing to stick “unguided” in front of everything that doesn’t have a conscious agent pushing it around [the unguided wind, … that unguided gravity, the unguided temperature increase there …] it is obvious that “unguided” has and always ever had precisely one target in mind: God. Was there ever anything or anybody else that was a viable candidate?

After my little rant above, I was corrected by one @glipsnort (a biologist) when he replied with the following:

I am not a historian of science [he requested Ted Davis’ input here], but I believe the answer to your last question is “yes”. My impression is that the emphasis on the unguidedness of Darwinian evolution is to distinguish it from various ideas of orthogenetic evolution, in which there is some guiding principle or force, often internal to the organism, that controlls variation and the direction of evolution. (One of the complaints of proponents of an extended evolutionary synthesis is that the Modern Synthesis is so Darwinian that it downplays the extent to which existing developmental pathways determine the possible direction of future evolution.)

…and Ted Davis chimed in per Steve’s request. Here is what Ted wrote:

Yes, Steve, before the modern synthesis (ca. 1930) various types of directed evolution were advocated by some of the leading naturalists. The guidance was usually seen as immanent, not transcendently given by a genuine Creator. But, evolution was not “random” and undirected.

They simply couldn’t accept the idea that an undirected process could produce all living things in their complexity and subtlety.

I am with them on this, incidentally. IMO evolution is “random” only in a formal mathematical sense, not metaphysically.

Later on Steve adds that this concessionary word:

I dare say “unguided” does double duty; Darwinian evolution can be seen as replacing metaphysical notions of teleology with mechanistic explanations.

…which I took to mean that my sentiment was not entirely misplaced … but only became problematic when I insisted that “unguided” could only mean one thing. (I trust you’ll correct me if I misrepresent you here, Steve.)

My own conclusion from all this now? I now allow that the word “unguided” can have valid scientific/mathematical meaning apart from how it can also be applied metaphysically. So I won’t rail against it like I used to … or at least not without clarifying which sense of it I am using.

You (like I recently was) are still painting it all with one broad brush, that the only thing any biologists can mean by the word ‘unguided’ is that this must be a presumptive denial of existence of any active God. Even if you were right that a majority of biologists are happy to use this same broad brush (which I’m happy to provisionally grant, but do not share your certainty of it – it makes no difference to my argument) it does not change the fact that very many Christian biologists do not paint with such a broad brush, happily accepting robust evolutionary theory whilst simultaneously embracing robust Christian faith. Their mere existence renders your uncompromising “wedding” of the two concepts [evolution and materialism] to be simply and irretrievably …wrong.

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119

How about you let me know what your claims are- in various threads your main points have been:

  • Evolution/common descent are not falsifiable
  • Cladograms and the ‘tree of life’ are fairy tales
  • Natural selection makes no predictions and is tautology
  • Evolutionary Creationism is an oxymoron because evolution by definition is ‘unguided’ which is different from every other branch of science somehow
  • The appendix is not vestigial and neither is anything else
  • Whale fossils are arbitrarily arranged in their cladograms to trick people
  • Thermodynamics paper by Biologic Institute highlights how the second Law still defeats abiogenesis and the theory of evolution
  • A few more things on convergent evolution and the third way folks as part of your argument against common descent

If I missed anything, please let me know. Or if you have better thread titles you’re certainly welcome to either PM me what you would prefer or just post here what you’d like. I don’t think I’m quite sure what your particular model is or how you imagined life came to exist in the way that it did. I would be curious to see how your model performs compared to like let’s say one of natural selection/common descent – that has had many actual predictions that have been confirmed. Mini times, what I see with critics of the theory of evolution is that they love to kind of hit and run. So they take a jab here take a jab there never present any model or anything of substance of their own but just simply say ha ha this doesn’t seem to explain everything the way you think it is. And of course it doesn’t! We don’t have everything figured out; what do you think the tens of thousands of researchers in these areas are actively doing. But to point those out and ignore the questions that we’ve already answered is what a lot of post by anti-evolutionary websites and posts seem to do.

A general tactic of yours seems to selectively quotes parts of various papers to try and demonstrate that particular aspects of this whole theory are not quite what people think they are. Now, part of this can be a healthy exercise where everyone gets to learn something new! But what is not good is to ignore the main conclusions and findings of many of these papers and only select the quotes they have that you agree with. This is a quote mine and a tactic I’d like to see you stop using. I appreciate that your quote mines are at least new ones that I haven’t seen - as some posters who have come here literally copy a list of quite mines they got from somewhere else on the Internet as I noted in one particular occasion.

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120

Accusations need evidence to back them.

For example, how is the nested hierarchy a just so story? How is the divergence of exons and introns within a gene a just so story?

We already know the mechanisms of transposon mutagenesis, so I don’t know what Shapiro is trying to say if that is what he is saying. I have read Shapiro’s work, and it is random mutation. He tries to talk about how complicated these mechanisms of mutagenesis are, but it still boils down to the fact that these mechanisms can not differentiate between mutations that help the organisms, don’t help the organism, or harm the organism. Shapiro tries to focus just on the beneficial mutations in his experiments, but what he glosses over are all of the other mutations that happen through those same mechanisms that are not beneficial. It’s a bit like claiming the lottery is guided because a specific person won while ignoring the hundreds of millions of people who didn’t win.

If memory serves . . .

In one of Shapiro’s experiments there is a mobile genetic element in the bacteria he is studying that inserts itself into the genome of the bacteria resulting an a positive adaptation. The mobile element was there at the start of the experiment, and the mutation was inherited vertically by the descendants of the founding bacteria. That looks like common ancestry to me. It certainly doesn’t look like ID/creationism.

The eukaryote had the genes it did because of common ancestry and vertical inheritance. The cyanobacteria that was engulfed got its genome from common descent and vertical inheritance, and probably also horizontal genetic transfer. All of these are natural processes. How does this support ID/creationism?

It explains where the genes came from. Vertical inheritance through biological reproduction as well as horizontal genetic transfer are the mechanisms that result in the genomes we see today.

The way to falsify these theories is to show that the mutations that separate species are not consistent with the observed mechanisms. Massive divergences from the expected nested hierarchy of eukaryotes would be another potential falsification. A good example is lab strains of mice that carry exact copy of genes from distantly related organisms like humans and jellyfish that are not found in other rodent species. This is the result of intelligent design, and it stands in stark contrast to how evolution works.

The theory of evolution states that there is no meaningful connection between what an organism needs and the genetic changes that occur. This is easily falsifiable. All you would need to show is that a specific mutation only happens when it is needed, or that a specific mechanism only produces beneficial mutations when they are needed.

Your genomes are nearly identical because you inherited those genes from a common ancestor.

I was hoping for a discussion.

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121

You have just said evolution is unguided in two ways-

  1. [quote=“Mervin_Bitikofer, post:118, topic:38906”]
    emphasis on the unguidedness of Darwinian evolution is to distinguish it from various ideas of orthogenetic evolution, in which there is some guiding principle or force, often internal to the organism, that controlls variation and the direction of evolution
    [/quote]

2)[quote=“Mervin_Bitikofer, post:118, topic:38906”]
I dare say “unguided” does double duty; Darwinian evolution can be seen as replacing metaphysical notions of teleology with mechanistic explanations.
[/quote]

So evolution guided by God as described by many here would fall under category 2… and wouldn’t be “Darwinian”.

I personally wouldn’t insist on a scientific theory accepting point 2. However, since it directly rejects it, why call any creationist idea theistic evolution? That’s an oxymoron… esp considering most people at biologos advocate for Darwinian processes.
I also think that any natural process would have to be directed as in the first meaning… and hence reject Darwinism.
When it comes to Darwinian evolution (including neo Darwinism),which is what everyone means when they speak about evolution,a guided process is a strict no no.
Did you get that part?

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No. What I said was that there are two broad ways in which evolution could be said to be unguided, and I explicitly reject one of those two ways: the one that weds it exclusively to metaphysical materialism (i.e. your way of seeing it).

There is another way it can be unguided in the sense that there are no controlling mechanisms we can identify that cause mutational changes to be anything other than mathematically (or apparently) random. That is what I get from Steve’s correction to me above.

Does anybody here actually advocate for “Darwinian processes” (or whatever Ashwin actually means by that)? I would want to hear from actual proponents willing to plant their flag with that label before I take your word on what “Biologos people” supposedly believe. [and my mere solicitation among forum participants here does not at all constitute any poll of actual Biologos officials.] But acknowledging at least the list of usual suspects lurking here, maybe some do. If accepting that common descent happened with mutation and natural selection being among the driving mechanisms (in all their random glory, and certainly not excluding or making any statements at all about God), then I guess folks here like myself might qualify. And since many of those folks here are professing Christians, your oxymoron just fell into a hole. And I don’t see anybody helping it get out.

On the other hand, I’m not willing to accept much any label from you (like “Darwinist”) because you have demonstrated a habit of packing into those labels all sort of extraneous baggage and then insisting that everybody sheltering in that tent must carry all your historical baggage around with the label.

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123

Let me guess, you probably also think that “Darwinism” is also synonymous of “materialism”. By the way, I know no people in biology that actually call evolution “darwinism” (I.E I “work with Darwinism in my PhD!”) that is kind of a strawman created by ID.

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124

Have you ever stopped to think that if you are wrong (I know you are adamantly certain that you are not, but lets do a thought experiment), you are just helping militant atheists like Dawkins, Harris, and the like to prove their points and making religious people look very bad? Imagine some guy going around insisting that the earth must be flat, because they just refuse to believe that it is not and that believing otherwise would mean you are a materialist, and he was explicitly motivated to believe in that because of his religion. That would make his religion look very bad, don’t you think?

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Human beings are contrary creatures. People claiming tags that are oxymorons does not negate the claim. That’s one of the reasons the word exists!

That’s a strange comments from someone who believes in common ancestry. Don’t you realise that every idea is shaped by its history. You won’t be able to get rid of the baggage. The same applies for evolution too.

Scientists use Darwinian to differentiate from changes caused by environmental influences… that would be Lamarckism.
Random mutations would be Darwinian/neo Darwinian.
ERVs, epigenetics would be Lamarckian/neo Lamarckian.
So modern evolution is mainly Darwinian except at the fringes.

I see it from a different perspective. Things like insisting on a flat earth are relics of accepting earlier paradigms blindly and forming theology based on it.
It all depends on how real the science is. We are told evolution is proven to be a fact. I think it’s fair to ask what part of it is. When I ask this, people usually point to Common ancestry. I have invited @T_aquaticus to share a formal scientific statement of what common ancestry is and show that it has not been falsified. You are also welcome to try.
However in the public sphere, a bait and switch happens and every ridiculous claim of modern synthesis is declared undisputable fact why should my one accept. I reject it purely on secular grounds.

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Yeah, but that discussion has been dead for decades, and the modern understanding of evolution far surpasses what we knew in the time of Darwin (molecular biology wasn’t a thing, for instance), so calling it “Darwinism” instead of “evolution” is really weird and nobody doest it today except ID people looking for strawman to beat.

With all the evidence we have for common ancestry, the only way I can see one making an argument that it is not been confirmed would be in the same lines of someone saying that “it has not been confirmed that the universe has not been created last thursday, but looking like it was not!”, well, technically that statement is true, we can’t be 100% sure of that, but come on…

127

It’s kinda being resurrected over recent years. And it’s true that evolution can be looked at and defined in a non-Darwinian manner. It’s an important distinction.
Evolution guided by God which involves God causing mutations and orchestrating natural selection wouldn’t be Darwinian. Christians should be aware of this. Otherwise they will go around making ridiculous claims and give a platform to people like Dawkins to belittle them.

Fair enough. Can you formally state what the theory of common ancestry is?
For example, Newtonian concept of gravity can be stated as "There exists an attractive force between two objects that is directly proportional to their mass and indirectly proportional tot he square of the distance between them. The conditions under which this law applies can be clearly defined.
I can tell you for a fact that the formal statement of common ancestry is not universally true for living organisms.(at least the one I could find)
I will invite any biologist here to share the formal definition of common ancestry with credible references so we can test this out.
@glipsnort, @T_aquaticus

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Not a scientist mind you but I wouldn’t mind taking a crack at this.

A and B share a common ancestor if the set of A’s parents, grandparents, great grandparents and … great^N grandparents shares at least one member in common with the corresponding set of B’s forebears.

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That would be ancestors…
It has nothing to do with common ancestry.In the species level, it would be the opposite as it would claim that each species had many ancestries and species are formed by the hybridisation of different species.
Such a scenario would falsify common ancestry.
Try looking for a formal definition of the concept.

130

I think the idea of common ancestry is precisely that every creature shares a common ancestor with every other if you go back far enough. On this planet at least all life forms seem to be carbon based and DNA driven. Perhaps back when life was first forming life could have arisen in two or more different places. Only in that case could it be that not every life form shares a common ancestor, unless you want to assume that something whipped them all up at once, each distinct from the other.

131

Mark, if I asked you to tell me Newton’s law of Gravity… what would you do? Would you tell me your opinion or look for how it is formally stated and tell me that?
Give biology the same respect.

Your opinion on common ancestry is not the theory as it is formally stated.

132

Absolutely!

Sure we can — and do. We drop baggage all over the place, and you do too. We still take astronomy seriously, but we (and I’m betting you too) have dropped astrology straight off the back of the wagon. A lot of history there … now gone from educated consideration. Poof!

Yes. And I also get that ‘guided’ has at least a couple different senses or meanings. Do you get that? I pulled several things together from other places above in order to painstakingly explain that to you. Did you read any of it?

But going back to something earlier, you responded to @MarkD that his example involves ancestors, which you distinguish from common ancestry. As I recall you said somewhere else that even in the realm of family trees and genealogies you don’t come from a common ancestor – you insisted instead that you come from two (your mom and your dad). So do you visualize human genealogies as an inverted tree where your grand parents and great grandparents all keep multiplying out into billions in the distant past – all culminating down to the present person: you? Presumably that’s not how you really see it; but if not, then how do you see human family trees? Do you not think we all came from an original couple?
[with edits]

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Common ancestry is not a theory as such in the same way as the theory of gravity, which also is not a static law, having been refined and defined by relativity and will likely be further modified as we learn more. Such is science. Unlike God, it is not unchanging, and the attempt to make it so is to try to mold science into the image of God.
While I have not followed this post very closely, my question would be, what does it matter? Many scientists as well as lay people have no problem with multiple origins of life throughout the universe, so why would multiple origins on earth be a concern? I might add YEC interpretation of course specifies multiple originations. While current evolutionary thought is that life comes from a common ancestor, little or nothing would change if it could be shown there were multiple origins. Might win a Nobel prize also.

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