Re: [asa] True Scotsman fallacy - was Of m....

--- Iain Strachan <igd.strachan@gmail.com> wrote:

Thanks for the true Scotsman fallacy. As one with a Scottish heritage I got a
kick out of it.

> It's my view that Vernon has committed this fallacy on two counts.
>
> When I challenged him about evolution producing "good" fruits by mentioning
> the immune system and what it does to fight off infection, Vernon responded
> "Ah yes, but that's micro-evolution, not macro-evolution - it's not the real
> thing". i.e. it's not "True" evolution.
>
Some time ago I got into a debate with Phil Johnson. I pointed out to him
several papers on the web that documented speciation in various kinds of
plants. Phil said well, the plants were still essentially the same and so it
wasn't an example of evolution. In thinking about the paper and Phil's response
I realized that speciation is not the whole story. These plants had split
apart into two species, but to the unaided eye they probably didn't look much
different. I presume the researchers had to prove speciation by trying to
crossbreed the descendents and showing they couldn't. However, they were now
two populations that could not interbreed, and thus free to evolve separately,
and many years down the road might look quite different. So the morphological
changes that are used to identify separate species in the fossil record may lag
the actual speciation by many years.

Bill Hamilton
William E. Hamilton, Jr., Ph.D.
248.652.4148 (home) 248.821.8156 (mobile)
"...If God is for us, who is against us?" Rom 8:31

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Received on Mon Jul 31 15:42:07 2006