Re: [asa] Re: Reading Genesis theologically NOT historically

Re: [asa] Re: Reading Genesis theologically NOT historicallyJon:

I'm not going to spend any more time on this example with you or Dennis. For the last time, *I did not invent it*. It comes from standard Darwinist popular expositions of evolution. It's along the line of the argument you find in Dawkins about the cheetah and the gazelle each getting a little faster in an "arms race". If you and Dennis find this hypothetical evolutionary argument silly, then what you are saying is that one of the main illustrations used -- for decades -- to promote Darwinian evolution to the public, by both Ph.D.s in the sciences and by popular science writers (who were sometimes the same person) is silly. That's fine with me. I've long believed that Darwinian evolution is silly to begin with.

If you look back at how this mess started, I was merely jumping in on someone else's thread, to defend their point that there had to be a "first" of something. Dennis then objected, accusing me of making biological errors that I did not in fact make, and of asserting biological facts that I did not in fact assert. In any case, John Walley, who is not a biologist, but has common sense, has now given a perfect example: there had to be a first individual in which the alleged "fusion event" occurred. Would you and Dennis deny that, too?
  
I could multiply examples endlessly. How about winged flight in bats? According to standard evolutionary theory (David Campbell can correct me if I'm wrong about the current view) the first mammals were *not* winged, not even partly winged, but were something like shrews. Bats evolved later. It follows that there must have been a first individual who had a proto-wing of some kind, some sort of extra skin attached to a finger bone or something. (I leave it up to the science-fictiony imagination of the Darwinians to cook up some far-fetched "selective advantage" for this apparently useless proto-wing. Their desperate speculations are always good for a laugh or two.) Anyhow, the mutation(s) that caused this proto-wing to appear then spread, through the offspring of this creature, into a wider and wider population, and later on, this proto-wing was built upon, little by little, to produce the wing of the bat. That's the party line. (And yes, before you launch into pedantic qualifications, I know, other things have to change to produce a typical modern bat, like the development of echolocation. But the wing is crucial. We can imagine a bat without echolocation (there may even be modern bat species without it, as far as I know), but we cannot imagine a bat without wings. No wing, no bat.) Now, if I'm wrong in my account of the bat here, then Darwin was wrong, Dawkins is wrong, Ken Miller is wrong, because that is exactly their account of the basic mechanism of evolution. Yes, I know perfectly well that modern evolutionary biology has *augmented* this account with many complications, but underneath them all, just as the Ford Windstar was built on a Ford Taurus platform, the basic Darwinian account is still in place (for 90% of evolutionary biologists, anyway).

Personally I find even the basic Darwinian account preposterous, and I don't think all the complexities that evolutionary biologists have layered on top of it in the last 20 or 30 years can rescue it, any more than caking make-up on an 85-year old starlet can make her look attractive again. I think evolutionary theory for the 21st century, instead of trying to build a van on a sedan platform, should created a new unified design for its van, with its own new platform. And I have a prediction about the new platform. The future lies with various forms of teleological or semi-teleological evolution, whether the teleological language is made explicit or not. (It won't be made explicit at first, because evolutionary biologists, underneath their deceptive Woody Allen builds and nerdy lab coats, are actually testosterone-supercharged "real men" who wouldn't be caught dead either eating quiche or sounding like "creationists".) We can already see some of the outlines of the future of evolutionary theory in Michael Denton, Richard Sternberg, Mike Gene, and (I'm told) in Simon Conway Morris. Fifty years from now, the views of these men, rather than being avant-garde, will be at the core of evolutionary theorizing, and people who still hold the views of Dawkins and Miller and Eugenie Scott will be thought of in the way that my fifteen-year old son thinks about The Beatles. I think the basic Darwinian "mutation plus selection" model is shattered beyond repair, like Humpty Dumpty. And all the Coyne's horses and all Dennett's men, will never put Charlie together again.

Cameron.
        
  ----- Original Message -----
  From: Jon Tandy
  To: 'asa'
  Sent: Wednesday, October 07, 2009 9:14 AM
  Subject: RE: [asa] Re: Reading Genesis theologically NOT historically

  Cameron,

  You wrote:

  "Do the two with later increases both descend from the first one, and are the increases they display "built on", so to speak, the genomic changes initiated by the first one? If so, then in Darwinian terms, it is the first one who should be called the giraffe ancestor. (I am presuming, of course, that the increase in the first one was not due to the "normal variation" of height typical of that population, but was a genuinely new trait, caused by a mutation, that had never previously existed in the population.)

  Of course, in selectionist terms, it is very unlikely that a jump of merely .5 cm would give a decisive advantage to the creature in reaching higher leaves; that is why I suggested a more dramatic jump of six inches, which would make literally tens of thousands more leaves available to the creature during a time of food shortage."

  Besides the vast oversimplification, I think your presumption here is precisely the problem. While I'm sure there are documentable trait variations that cause noticeable overt changes or increases in survivability in a particular individual, there are vastly more complex issues surrounding the subject of genetic variation, population variation, etc.

  As you admit, the 6 inch variation in neck size is very unlikely, so while not impossible, it's not necessarily very useful. I used the .5 cm (times three, in different members of the species) as still an oversimplification, but to illustrate that it is precisely possible that such changes might be due to the "normal variation" in typical height, which is still (presumably) affected by genetic markers, trends, variations, selection, etc. The fact is, you might see 10 successive generations of one species, where the neck height was toward the upper end of the "normal distribution", who later survive to become a dominant population, while their peers fail to survive for any number of reasons. I can imagine that there might have been a particular genetic "transcription error" that conveyed that upward-trending neck length to that particular line, but I think the genetics question is still too little understood on most traits in most species to be able to say for sure. And then, you speak of the "single ancestor" of the modern giraffe, but this just focuses on one aspect, the neck length. I can imagine that it's much more complex than that. For starters, the ancestor "in one trait" as you say, might have different ancestors for different traits.

  Again, I'm not trying to defend the Darwinist worldview, but simply responding to the unrealistic nature of your example (six inch change in one generation), as well as the potentially unrealistic assumption that a normal upward-trending distribution pattern can necessarily lead us to point to a single individual where the trend started. It might, but it might not, as far as I can see.

  Jon Tandy

  From: asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu [mailto:asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu] On Behalf Of Cameron Wybrow
  Sent: Tuesday, October 06, 2009 7:01 PM
  To: 'asa'
  Subject: Re: [asa] Re: Reading Genesis theologically NOT historically

  Jon:

  First, the giraffe example isn't mine; it's the standard example that's been used to promote Darwinism in both textbooks and popular science presentations since time immemorial. I was "defending" it not because I find Darwinian explanation probable (I don't), but because Dennis does accept such explanations, and I didn't see how his remarks squared with it.

  Second, I'm not sure I follow your example. You mention three giraffe ancestors, one with a .5 cm increase, one with a 1 cm increase, and another later on with a .5 cm further increase. Do the two with later increases both descend from the first one, and are the increases they display "built on", so to speak, the genomic changes initiated by the first one? If so, then in Darwinian terms, it is the first one who should be called the giraffe ancestor. (I am presuming, of course, that the increase in the first one was not due to the "normal variation" of height typical of that population, but was a genuinely new trait, caused by a mutation, that had never previously existed in the population.)

  Of course, in selectionist terms, it is very unlikely that a jump of merely .5 cm would give a decisive advantage to the creature in reaching higher leaves; that is why I suggested a more dramatic jump of six inches, which would make literally tens of thousands more leaves available to the creature during a time of food shortage.

  Regarding the fossil record, I was not claiming that we could ever in practice locate the bones of the first individual with the mutation in question. Nor, obviously, do we have any remaining genetic material from giraffe ancestors to analyze. My argument is not empirical, but conceptual. I was claiming only that a first individual with a trait must exist before that trait can enter the population. And I still don't know why Dennis cannot simply grant this. It's hardly even biology, it's mostly just logic.

  Cameron.

    ----- Original Message -----

    From: Jon Tandy

    To: 'asa'

    Sent: Tuesday, October 06, 2009 11:01 AM

    Subject: RE: [asa] Re: Reading Genesis theologically NOT historically

    Cameron,

    Just a question about the okapi example. What if the offspring of the five-foot animal was not five foot six (presumably an unlikely event), but five foot plus half a centimeter, with the extra half centimeter being in the length of its neck. What if three generations down the line, there was a descendent who was five foot plus a full centimeter. Offspring for several generations might have been similar, within a degree of normal variability. What if ten generations later one of the offspring of one of those lines had a neck that was another half centimeter longer, while many of its cousins had been killed off through various environmental events. And so on, until there was a population, maybe 1000 generations later, whose survival had preserved the longer-neck genes and became what we call the giraffe.

    At what point in this sequence would you identify the first *giraffe* ancestor? Which half centimeter (or quarter centimeter, to make the challenge more difficult) increase in which lineage would classify as being the first? Biologists would tell us that the *first individual* of the population is in most cases immaterial, that the migration of population and genetic traits over time are what's more important.

    I have no idea whether this is how it happened, and I suspect that biologists don't really *know* either, but infer something like the above from the gradual nature of the (incomplete) fossil record. It could have been entirely different, with one mutant having a half-foot longer neck and also happening to be the lucky survivor when most of his fellow population got killed, being the proud father of longer necked descendents to a new population. But unless one could find the complete fossil record of every generation before and after that individual (and be able to prove that the fossil record was unbroken), there would be no way to prove that there was a first distinctive individual. Am I wrong?

    Jon Tandy

    From: asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu [mailto:asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu] On Behalf Of Cameron Wybrow
    Sent: Tuesday, October 06, 2009 2:10 AM
    To: asa
    Subject: Re: [asa] Re: Reading Genesis theologically NOT historically

To unsubscribe, send a message to majordomo@calvin.edu with
"unsubscribe asa" (no quotes) as the body of the message.
Received on Wed Oct 7 11:50:44 2009