At 06:52 PM 10/21/97 -0600, Eduardo G. Moros wrote:
>Glenn Morton wrote:
>>
>> Hi Eduardo,
>>
>> At 10:24 AM 10/21/97 -0600, Eduardo G. Moros wrote:
>> >There *appears* to be transitional forms, that's all. Clear mechanistic
>> >explanations are lacking and wanting. It also depends on what you call
>> >"transitional".
>>
>> One runs into this argument often in the creation/evolution literature--the
>> idea that we must have a mechanism before we can believe in the transitional
>> forms. This is a flawed argument as can be seen by applying this reasoning
>> to the brain. I am currently reading "The Symbolic Species" by Terrence
>> Deacon, He writes,
>>
>> "Despite all these advances, some critical pieces of the puzzle still elude
>> us. Even though neural science has pried ever deeper into the mysteries of
>> brain function, we still lack a theory of global brain functions. We
>> understand many of the cellular and molecular details, we have mapped a
>> number of cognitive taks to associated brain regions, and we even hae
>> constructed computer simulations of networks that operate in ways that are
>> vaguely like parts of brains; but we still lack insight into the general
>> logic that ties such details together." Deacon, p. 24
>>
>> Applying your argument to this issue I could paraphrase you:
>>
>> There *appears* to be brain function, that's all. Clear mechanistic
>> explanations are lacking and wanting.
>>
>> Is this what we want to do for every item in nature we don't understand?
>
>Sorry buddy, we can do brain reseach, we can put our hands on it, probe it,
>image it, slice it, drug it, etc., and WE KNOW that it works and that must
>have certain connections. Respecfully I must tell you that your analogy is
>flawed.
I thought about this argument much of the past day. Here is what I see as
the difference. You claim that we don't know that the transitional forms
actually occurred, but we actually know that the brain works. This appears
to be a heads I lose, tails you win situation. If I use some other
phenomenon for which we have no mechanism, you can say, "But we don't know
that the phenomenon actually occurs. But if I give you a phenomenon, like
the known working brain, which lacks a mechanism, then you can say that the
analogy is flawed. My point is that we don't have to have a mechanism for
the transitional form to be a morphological intermediate.
glenn
Foundation, Fall and Flood
http://www.isource.net/~grmorton/dmd.htm