[asa] macroevolution

Cameron,

You're as careful as anyone I know about how you use your terms, so I was a bit concerned to see this particular point in your latest post:

<There's evidence for
microevolution, but microevolution is merely the preamble to Darwinian
theory, not the real thing. The real thing is the claim that the mutational
and selective factors that lengthen finch beaks can annihilate gills and
replace them with lungs, while conveniently and simultaneously replacing fins
with feet, and conveniently and simultaneously altering almost every bodily
system in just the right way to be compatible with these changes. No one
has ever established this claim. Macroevolution *presumes* that is true,
and then, having assumed the conclusion that it prefers, goes out after the
fact, trying to find out how it all happened. Darwinian evolution is a
doctrine in search of a detailed mechanism.> (I corrected your misspelling of simultaneously)

My concern is not with the precise statement you have made; I'll let the biologists here worry about whether you have fairly stated an objection. My concern is that the overall impression you seem to want to convey is that macroevolution itself is not true. You seem implicitly to be defining macroevolution as natural selection writ large, vis-a-vis the idea of common descent itself, whether or not natural selection is the main means by which that was accomplished. Perhaps I'm reading this into what you wrote, or perhaps that's part of what you are driving at. Please clarify this, at least for me if not also for the list.

You later say this:

<Does this mean that TE is wrong to speculate about the theological
implications of evolutionary theory? Not at all, as long as TE people
understand why ID people hang back from such speculations. It is
*necessary* to speculate about the theological implications of Newtonian or
Einsteinian theory, because we have confirmed that nature works the way that
Newton and Einstein said it did. It is not necessary, but only *optional*,
to speculate about the theological implications of Darwinian theory, because
we have not confirmed that nature has the power to create radically new body
plans, as Darwin said it did. When that confirmation is in, ID people will
join TE speculations with much more enthusiasm.>

I have two comments on this paragraph.

(1) Your point here seems to reinforce my impression that you want to deny macroevolution, in the sense of common descent; for it is common descent more than anything else that leads to a theological division beteen TE and OEC -- and, I would say, between TE and ID, since most ID advocates would probably have fit neatly into the OEC camp if there were no ID camp with which to identify. Reading folks such as Johnson, Dembski, Wells, and Meyer, one senses that opposition to human evolution (here I mean simply the claim that humans and other modern primates have common ancestors) is just below the surface of their opposition to "Darwinism."

(2) Let's put the issue of mechanisms to one side, at least for a moment. I am not a geneticist, obviously, and I hope that a geneticist will correct me if my next point is mistaken. It is my understanding, however, that when Francis Collins says that the human genome is all the evidence Darwin would ever have needed for his theory -- that the fossils, biogeographical distributions, homologies, and other things are nice but not really needed. I'm in no position to tell Francis that he's wrong about this, and I doubt that you are either. Assuming that he's right, then "macroevolution" looks like it's true, whether or not natural selection is the chief mechanism that did it. Here I'm using "macroevolution" as a term to mean common descent, obviously, but the word has been used that way for generations by antievolutionists and I think that it is commonly understood to have that meaning.

So, if macroevolution looks like it's true, regardless of the details about mechanisms and pathways, then perhaps some ID proponents will now consider "joining TE speculations," with or without enthusiasm. (If things got to that point, incidentally, I don't foresee much enthusiasm; I'm convinced that theological differences are at least as large a factor in the ID/TE conversation as differences over what constitutes enough evidence to accept "Darwinian" evolution.)

Ted

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Received on Mon Jul 20 10:52:08 2009