RE: Confronting Friends and Family
November 6, 2012 at 10:31 am
(This post was last modified: November 6, 2012 at 10:38 am by Kirbmarc.)
Quote:he hasn't got an argument Kirby.
I disagree. I think he has an argument, and a much stronger one than the usual "intelligent design" fallacies.
Ultimately, however, his argument is based on a misunderstanding of how evolution works and has a strong anthropocentric bias.
Scientifically speaking, the idea of a "guided" evolution is not impossible, but it is an unnecessary hypotheisis, not to mention the staggering amount of evidence that show us that if there is a design behind evolution it's pretty confused and ineffectual one.
The main evidence against design is not only the fact that living beings retain obsolete features from their ancestors (a phenomenon known as vestigiality) but the extinction of 99.9% of all species that ever lived.
Daniel's idea of a "driving force" behind evolution is more vague and therefore can't be directly disproved, but it is based on a series of dated assumptions (like the ideas that individuals do not matter, and that all competition is intra-specific) that were revealed to be wrong years ago. He's criticising Darwin's original theory, not the theory as we know it today.
