Re: [asa] (macroevolution) The term Darwinism

David Campbell wrote:
>> You have in essence argued that we cannot give full evolutionary pathways --
>> not even full hypothetical evolutionary pathways -- for major organs and
>> systems, for several reasons, notably (1) we simply do not yet have the
>> understanding of the genome necessary for the task, and (2) we cannot
>> reconstruct the environments accurately enough to be sure how selection
>> would have operated.
>>
>> My point exactly. And the logical follow-up question is: if evolutionary
>> biologists are lacking the above knowledge, how can they be so *certain*
>> that microevolutionary processes can simply be extrapolated to generate
>> macroevolution? It is one thing to say that macroevolution *may* be
>> explicable via roughly Darwinian processes; it is another thing entirely to
>> say that "science" has proved this, or that the extrapolation is so
>> unproblematic it does not even need to be critically analyzed.
>>
>
>
>
> However, I would note that we may be talking at cross purposes here.
> Your statement could be taken in two ways
> a) I personally want more evidence.
> b) Evolution is wrong because we don't have that evidence.
>
> b is unreasonable because we do not have the means to produce such
> evidence. a reflects individual judgement and as such is not
> necessarily unreasonable, though it can be if either the standards are
> uneven (the usual human approach being to accept things one wants to
> believe on much less evidence) or ridiculous (e.g., some "if God
> exists, why doesn't He do X").
David

I only hear Cameron saying that the mechanism of evolution of complex
biological features is in doubt not evolution as a whole.

It has been said that evolution must be true so that atheism is
intellectually satisfying. Don't you think that maybe some of what you
describe in
> the usual human approach being to accept things one wants to
> believe on much less evidence
is going on?

> b is unreasonable because we do not have the means to produce such
> evidence
Fine then say that the mechanism of evolution of complex biological
features is likely but unproven. If we had the kind of description
Cameron has requested for one or two complex features then the whole
package would appear to be much more probable, at least to me.

Let me try to give an example from my own field which is in computer
software and compilers and interpreters since 1982. When
multiprocessors first showed up we had to do considerable work to make
performance scale. By scale I mean that when one adds a 2nd processor
the work load should increase by a factor of something like 1.8 to 1.9xx
and not by just 1.2 or less. When we got things to scale to 4, 8 and
even 16 processors we thought we had the problem more or less tamed,
although even that took many many man years and millions of dollars, by
the way Randy's organization funded some of this effort. The last seven
years of my career I worked on the java interpreter and our organization
spend a great deal of time getting java to scale. (For the computer
literate I'm not only talking about getting applications to scale but
getting things like the java interpreter to scale for large banks and
airline reservation systems.) Thus my experience tells me that
processes don't necessarily scale up, ie that small scale evolution does
not necessarily scale up to evolution of complex biological features.

Dave W

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Received on Thu Jul 9 08:01:53 2009