On Thu, 06 Aug 1998 09:25:37 +1000, Donald Howes wrote:
I meant to say welcome to you in my previous message. I note you are
from Australia but over on the other side. Welcome!
DH>I have a question, how did different types of lungs and other breathing
>stuff evolve?
I assume you are a creationist as I am? If so we have to be careful of what
exactly we mean by "evolve". If we fall in with the naturalists trick of
defining evolution so broadly that it cannot be false and creation so
narrowly that it cannot be true, as in the following science dictionaries,
then we have lost almost before we start. All the naturalist has to show is
*some* change over time in *one species* and "evolution" has won and
"creation" (defined as "special creation") has lost!
First "evolution":
"EVOLUTION. Cumulative change in the characteristics of populations or
organisms, occurring in the course of successive generations related by
descent. The theory that evolution accounts for origin of all kinds of
organisms now existing is opposed to the theory of special creation, i.e.
that each kind of organism was created as such and is therefore not related
by descent to any other." (Abercrombie M., Hickman C.J., & Johnson
M.L., "The Penguin Dictionary of Biology," 1980, pp109-110)
"Evolution The gradual process by which the present diversity of plant and
animal life arose from the earliest and most primitive organisms, which is
believed to have been continuing for at least the past 3000 million years.
Until the middle of the 18th century it was generally believed that each
species was divinely created and fixed in its form throughout its existence
(see special creation)." (Isaacs A., Daintith J. & Martin E., eds., "Concise
Science Dictionary", 1991, pp251-252)
"evolution, n. an explanation of the way in which present-day organisms
have been produced, involving changes taking place in the genetic make-
up of populations that have been passed on to successive generations...
Evolution is now generally accepted as the means which gives rise to new
species (as opposed to SPECIAL CREATION) but there is still debate about
exactly how it has taken place and how rapidly changes can take place."
(Hale W.G., & Margham J.P., "Collins Reference Dictionary of Biology,"
1988 reprint, p214)
Now special creation:
"Special Creation. The belief, in accordance with the Book of Genesis, that
every species was individually created by God in the form in which it exists
today and is not capable of undergoing any change. It was the generally
accepted explanation of the origin of life until the advent of *Darwinism.
The idea has recently enjoyed a revival, especially among members of the
fundamentalist movement in the USA, partly because there still remain
problems that cannot be explained entirely by Darwinian theory. However,
special creation is contradicted by fossil evidence and genetic studies, and
the pseudoscientific arguments of creation science cannot stand up to
logical examination." (Isaacs A., Daintith J. & Martin E., eds., "Concise
Science Dictionary", 1991, pp646-647)
"special creation, n. a theory of evolution that postulates the formation, de
novo, of species by an all-powerful creator." (Hale W.G., & Margham J.P.,
"Collins Reference Dictionary of Biology," 1988 reprint, p492)
This is what Johnson calls "the `official caricature' of the creation-
evolution debate":
"The Weiner article and book review illustrate what I would call the
"official caricature" of the creation-evolution debate, a distortion that
is either explicit or implicit in nearly all media and textbook
treatments of the subject. According to the caricature, "evolution" is
a simple, unitary process that one can see in operation today and that
is also supported unequivocally by all the fossil evidence. Everyone
accepts the truth of evolution except a disturbingly large group of
biblical fundamentalists, who insist that the earth is no more than ten
thousand years old and the fossil beds were laid down in Noah's
flood." (Johnson P.E., "Reason in the Balance," 1995, p73)
Yet there is no reason why creationists should voluntarily adopt a losing
strategy of accepting a narrow definition of creation dictated by the
dominant materialist-naturalist worldview. There is no Biblical, theological
or philosophical reason why a Creator could not have used natural processes
over time in developing His living world:
"The concept of creation in itself does not imply opposition to evolution, if
evolution means only a gradual process by which one kind of living
creature changes into something different. A Creator might well have
employed such a gradual process as a means of creation." (Johnson P.E.,
"Darwin on Trial," 1993, pp3-4)
A historic view of the Christian Church since Augustine in the 4th Century
and Calvin in the 16th Century and Charles Hodge in the 19th Century is
Mediate Creation:
"But while it has ever been the doctrine of the Church that God created the
universe out of nothing by the word of his power, which creation was
instantaneous and immediate, i. e., without the intervention of any second
causes; yet it has generally been admitted that this is to be understood only
of the original call of matter into existence. Theologians have, therefore,
distinguished between a first and second, or immediate and mediate
creation. The one was instantaneous, the other gradual; the one precludes
the idea of any preexisting substance, and of cooperation, the other admits
and implies both. There is evident ground for this distinction in the Mosaic
account of the creation...The whole of the first chapter of Genesis, after the
first verse, is an account of the progress of creation; the production of
light; the formation of an atmosphere; the separation of land and water; the
vegetable productions of the earth the animals of the sea and air; then the
living creatures of the earth; and, last of all, man....There is, therefore,
according to the Scriptures, not only an immediate, instantaneous creation
ex nihilo by the simple word of God, but a mediate, progressive creation;
the power of God working in union with second causes." (Hodge C.,
"Systematic Theology," [1892], James Clark & Co: London, 1960 reprint,
Vol. I, pp556-557)
Therefore, because of the way that "evolution" is defined today, as apriori
excluding creation:
"The diversity of life on earth is the outcome of evolution: an unsupervised,
impersonal, unpredictable and natural process of temporal descent with
genetic modification that is affected by natural selection, chance, historical
contingencies and changing environments." (National Association of
Biology Teachers, 1995 Statement on Teaching Evolution, in Johnson
P.E., "Defeating Darwinism by Opening Minds", 1997, pp15-16)
as a Christian theist I simply return the compliment and define "creation"
(ie. Mediate Creation), as apriori excluding "evolution"! Since the Naturalists
(including Theistic Naturalists) appropriate all facts of nature as
automatically evidence for evolution, I return the compliment by
appropriating all the same facts of nature as evidence for creation (ie.
Mediate Creation)!
Having clarified those metaphysical assumptions, lets look at your example.
DH>I don't see how it could be an advantage to have a partly developed
>breathing system?
The fact is that there is one animal living today, the lungfish, which *has*
both lungs and gills:
"The lungfish is a classic example. If has fins, gills and an intestine
containing a spiral valve like any fish but lungs, heart and a larval stage like
an amphibian." (Denton M., "Evolution: A Theory in Crisis," Burnett
Books: London, 1985, p109)
"The name 'lungfish' for this species is not entirely apt since in well
oxygenated water this species uses its gills for breathing." ("Lungfishes,"
Encyclopedia of the Animal World," Vol. 12, 1982, p1145)
Stephen Jay Gould has a good article "Full of Hot Air," in "Eight Little
Piggies," 1993, pp109-120. He shows that the most primitive fish have
*both* lungs and gills and that most fishes lungs have become
swimbladders. This was not a prediction of Darwinian evolution at all, and
Darwin took it for granted that swimbladders evolved into lungs:
"Consider Darwin's treatment of the evolution of vertebrate lungs and their
relationship with the swim bladders of bony fishes-an example that Darwin
obviously viewed as important to his general argument because he repeats
the story half a dozen times in the Origin. Darwin begins by noting,
correctly, that the lung and swim bladder are homologous organs-different
versions of the same basic structure, just as a bat's wing and a horse's
foreleg share a common origin indicated by the similar arrangement of
bones in body parts that now work in such different ways. But Darwin then
draws a false inference from the fact of homology. He claims, with
increasing confidence ending in certainty, that lungs evolved from swim
bladders:
`All physiologists admit that the swim bladder is homologous...in position
and structure with the lungs of the higher vertebrate animals; hence there
seems to me to be no great difficulty in believing that natural selection has
actually converted a swim bladder into a lung, or organ used exclusively for
respiration. I can, indeed, hardly doubt that all vertebrate animals having
true lungs have descended by ordinary generation from an ancient
prototype, of which we know nothing, furnished with a floating apparatus
or swim bladder.' (Darwin C., "The Origin of Species," 6th edition, 1967,
reprint, p171)
Many readers will be puzzled at this point, as I have perplexed several
generations of students by presenting the argument in this form. What can
be wrong with Darwin's claim? The two organs are homologous, right?
Right. Terrestrial vertebrates evolved from fishes, right? Yes again. So
lungs must have evolved from swim bladders, right? Wrong, dead wrong.
Swim bladders evolved from lungs." (Gould S.J., "Full of Hot Air," in
"Eight Little Piggies," 1993, p111)
The fact is that the earliest fish were more complex than later fish and
swimbladders *de-evolved* from lungs. This is better explained by Mediate
Creation than Naturalistic Evolution:
Indeed, Gould points out that this transition from lungs to swimbladder
(not the other way around) was made possible by a built-in capacity for
future use, which he calls redundancy:
"Neither situation is rare, and the two phenomena-one-for-two and two-
for-one-are not really separate at all. Both are expressions of a deeper, and
profoundly important, principle- redundancy as the ground of creativity in
any form." (Gould S.J., 1993, p117)
Here and elsewhere Gould extols the virtue of redundancy as a mark of
"Creativity":
"Creativity in this sense demands slop and redundancy-a little fat not for
trimming but for conversion; a little overemployment so that one
supernumerary on the featherbed can be recruited for an added role; the
capacity to do several things imperfectly with each part." (Gould S.J.,
1993, p98).
But so blinded is Gould by his materialistic-naturalistic metaphysical
assumptions that it escapes his notice that built-in capacity for the future is
the mark of far-sighted *intelligent design* not a blind watchmaker.
According to Darwin, the blind watchmaker would be "daily and hourly" at
work eliminating everything that was not immediately useful:
"It may metaphorically be said that natural selection is daily and hourly
scrutinising, throughout the world, the slightest variations; rejecting those
that are bad, preserving and adding up all that are good; silently and
insensibly working, whenever and wherever opportunity offers, at the
improvement of each organic being in relation to its organic and inorganic
conditions of life." (Darwin C., 1967, pp83-84).
But as Denton shows, redundancy is a major feature of both intelligent
design and nature:
"Another very intriguing aspect of development in higher organisms which
has become increasingly apparent over the last ten years, and which is
bound to impose additional constraints against any sort of bit-by-bit
undirected change, is the use of partially or totally redundant components
to buffer organisms against random mutational error and ensure reliability,
particularly during development. As one authority points out: "The idea
that redundancy may be quite common in cell and developmental biology
has its origin in Spemann's (1938) idea of double assurance, a term taken
from engineering." (L. Wolpert (1992). The strategy of using several
different means to achieve a particular goal, where each of the individual
means is sufficient by itself to achieve the goal, is used in all manner of
situations to guarantee that the goal will always be achieved, even if one or
more of the means fail. Missiles, for example, are often guided to their
targets using a number of different automatic guidance systems, including
ground- based radar, map matching, inertial guidance, following a graded
signal (heat-seeking). Even if one fails, the missile will still home in
unerringly on its target. Reliability of information storage on computer
discs is increased by encoding the information in two or more different
ways. The functional reliability of complex machines such as aircraft and
particularly space vehicles invariably involves the use of redundant
components. The space shuttle's on-board inertial guidance system, which
it uses during boosting into orbit and during reentry, consists, according to
the McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Science and Technology, of "five
redundant computers and three inertial measurement units. Dual star
trackers are used for periodic realignment in space.... A radar backup
system is provided for safety during launch and landing." Another instance
where redundancy is exploited to increase reliability is in human and animal
navigation, where most often a number of different and individually
redundant clues are followed to minimize the risk of navigational error,
which might accrue from following only one type or set of clues....It now
appears that a considerable number of genes, perhaps even the majority in
higher organisms, are completely or at least partially redundant." (Denton
M.J., "Nature's Destiny: How the Laws of Biology Reveal Purpose in the
Universe," The Free Press: New York NY, 1998, p337)
DH>A bird for example has an extremely complex system that allows it to
>breath while flying, how could something like that evolve?
Now that *is* a difficult problem! Denton in his recent book has repeated
his claim in his 1985 book "Evolution: A Theory in Crisis" that the avian
lung (amongst other things) is "not led up to by any known or even, in
some cases, conceivable series of feasible intermediates":
"Compounding the problem was the additional challenge, to all
evolutionary theories both directed and undirected, that at a gross
morphological level the organic world appears to be markedly
discontinuous. There are innumerable examples of complex organs
and adaptations which are not led up to by any known or even, in
some cases, conceivable series of feasible intermediates. In the case,
for example, of the flight feather of a bird, the amniotic egg, the
bacterial flagellum, the avian lung, no convincing explanation of how
they could have evolved gradually has ever been provided." (Denton,
1998, p275)
DH>And the change from gills to lungs, how did it happen?
See above. There was *no* "change from gills to lungs". They both are
separate organs that were present in the fish last common ancestor, ready
for their future role in the conquest of the land. See my rendering of
Gould's diagram (view in monospaced font):
Mammals L L Reptiles KEY
Amphibians L \/ L = Lung
Fish S | / X Sharks S = Swimbladder
\ L |/ / X = Neither
Swimbladder \ | / /
converted here - |/ - Lungs lost here
\ | /
\|-/
|
Common
ancestor
(Gould S.J., 1993, p113)
You will note that Gould just ignores birds lungs on the above diagram!
"As Thomas Kuhn taught us, a shaky paradigm lives on through its power
to make anomalies invisible." (Johnson P.E., "Darwin on Trial," 1993,
p211)
DH>Please indulge my ignorance,
That's OK. Most of us are learners in this field!
Steve
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Stephen E (Steve) Jones ,--_|\ sejones@ibm.net
3 Hawker Avenue / Oz \ senojes@hotmail.com
Warwick 6024 ->*_,--\_/ Phone +61 8 9448 7439
Perth, West Australia v "Test everything." (1Thess 5:21)
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