Re: Scientific theory

Rich Faussette wrote:

"Evolution is a a painfully slow process, not an intrinsic state of matter like you can test in physics. Dogs have been bred (artificially selected) long enough to have displayed the tremendous variety that evolution is capable of...."

Variations in dogs are variations in phenotype. I understand that all dogs can interbreed (at least if you use artificial insemination), so they are not of different species. If you let all dogs go wild, I'm guessing they'd eventually revert to something close to what they were before humans got involved in breeding them. In other words, variation in dogs, suggestive as it is, doesn't really illustrate evolution. At best it illustrates how changes in phenotype under the right (hypothetical) conditions might lead to evolution.

It's useful in discussing this topic in a religious context to distinguish evolution as fact from evolution as mechanism. Evolution as fact is well established largely by the voluminous body of paleontological evidence demonstrating that life forms of one geologic period are often different from those of adjacent periods. Over all geologic time the differences are commonly dramatic. Extreme. Furthermore, paleontology strongly suggests by way of apparent "transitional fossils" that later life forms descended from earlier ones. Although it is logically acceptable for a creationist to assert that God brought each of the millions of different kinds of life forms into existence as a special creation, this assertion at the very least forces one to question God's motives or competence if not also his sanity. That is, for example, why would he create life forms only to see them go extinct ten million years or so down the road?

The proposed mechanisms of evolution are far more open to challenge on religious grounds than the facts of evolution. First of all, since we're talking science, any proposed mechanism must exclude God as a direct cause, because science as we practice it deals only with physical causes. For a religious person, this stipulation may be too restrictive. ID scientists, for example, imply we should not honor it. The reality, however, is that we know of physical mechanisms related to DNA, mutation, natural selection, etc., that can produce observed life-form changes in principle. No one can prove that any observed change in life form in nature owes exclusively to such material mechanisms. At the same time there is no widely accepted scientific alternative.

Hence evolution is a very respectable scientific theory: It accounts elegantly by means of known physical mechanisms for a huge body of facts, and it suggests many avenues for further investigation. As with all scientific theories, it may not constitute the final word on the subject, nor can it be said to have been "proven."

For religious persons such as I who believe that the created world was not competent enough to go from beginning to end without outside help, the theory of evolution does not preclude my postulating divine interventions from time to time, provided I don't claim that such postulations are scientific.

Don

  ----- Original Message -----
  From: RFaussette@aol.com<mailto:RFaussette@aol.com>
  To: asa@calvin.edu<mailto:asa@calvin.edu>
  Sent: Wednesday, December 08, 2004 4:48 AM
  Subject: RE: Scientific theory

  In a message dated 12/7/2004 10:42:02 PM Eastern Standard Time, "Alexanian, Moorad" <alexanian@uncw.edu<mailto:alexanian@uncw.edu>> writes:

>Dog breeding goes back thousands of years. Evolution deals with millions or billions of years. Can we do better than dogs!
>
>Moorad
>

  Evolution is a a painfully slow process, not an intrinsic state of matter like you can test in physics. Dogs have been bred (artificially selected) long enough to have displayed the tremendous variety that evolution is capable of. DNA evidence is valid in court. The human genome has been mapped. Parents are genetically tested to be sure they are not carrying deleterious genes before they get married. We now have drug cocktails for AIDS to counter the quick mutation of the AIDS virus. All of these advances are possible because we understand the genetic structure that is the very agent that supports the processes of evolution, yet you say, evolution need a "test."

  rich
Received on Wed Dec 8 12:19:27 2004