Darwinism

[LonePiper]

SenseiOtho, I find it interesting how you don't want to respond to the arguments and objections that have been put up. Please, I would like to know what your thoughts are.

I'm being facetious, because I actually have a better science education than most ... Just so you know a little about me: I have a Bachelors of Science in Biological Engineering from a major secular university in the USA. Basically take a pre-med degree and an engineering degree and combine them.

Sorry, but I'm not going to respect your opinions more or less depending on your education. I'd rather hear what you have to say about the topic at hand.

Of course you have to be able to read and think for yourself to evaluate the spoon feeding mantra of evolutionary doctrine. It reminds me of the Jedi mind trick from star wars: picture the wave of the hand as "evolution is a fact" is said. Most science books just claim it is true, give some basic ideas behind it then move on to the real science, most science doesn't actually use anything more than observable natural selection and adaptation, even that is limited to the life sciences. The assumption (or interpretation) is that it applies to speciation or "macroevolution" as well.

Science text books include the things that scientists agree with. The vast majority of scientists (particularly those in fields that are relevant) agree with evolutionary theory. Therefore it's in science books. Science books no less need to convince students of the fact of evolution than they do of gravity. They are both equally as established and represented by evidence.

The "facts" are not was is normally disputed. Things like "There is a dinosaur fossil in this layer of rock" or "this bacteria adapted to this new drug", or "gene duplication and other genetic copying errors happen." These are the facts that everyone is ok with, they are scientifically verifiable. The problem is when a person takes the step from facts to theory, or said another way when someone interprets the significance or meaning of the facts. While it is necessary to interpret the facts so that you can apply them. There is a lot that goes into interpretations, such as one's working worldview and previous or "a priori" assumptions. A lot of evolutionist seem to ignore this fact.

No, they don't. That's what "peer review" is all about. When a scientist discovers something, or believes they have discovered something, it is published, ususally in a journal. Then you get a bunch of scientists all around the world trying to disprove them in any legitimate way they can. It's almost as good finding a flaw in someone else's hypothesis as coming up with one of your own. Scientists regularly strip theories to the bare bone for this cause, completely throwing away all "a prioro" assumptions. And papers will often not even be published if they substitute preconceptions for proper references

Most of you it seems to have a purely materialistic worldview where only material causes can even be considered to exists. You have thrown out any possibility of God/design before even looking at the meaning of the evidence. This limits your scope of reason, logic and science. Therefore you have accepted Darwinian evolution as "fact" because you have thrown out any other possibility, when in reality what you really have is just an interpretation of the facts, or a theory.

Again, no. We do not consider intelligent design because we see no evidence of it. And when I say evidence, I don't just mean "this thing is complex, and intelligent things design complex things". I mean something that is unique to intelligence. Something that means that nothing besides intelligence could have created it. Typically the evidence tends to show either natural forces, or if you really want to force an intelligent designer into the equation, a really lazy, sloppy one.
But again, the point of science is to study the natural world. Until we find something that points unequivocably to intelligence that nature cannot explain, science will stick with nature.

Take the fossil record for instance. It is a valid assumption that there were once living organisms that left countless fossils for us to find today. We have the fossil, that is a fact. Gaps in the fossil record is a fact. Coming up with a lineage of those fossils is where interpretation comes in, that common ancestor interpretation is already based on the assumption that evolution is true.

No argument there. Scientists don't spend their whole time dwelling on whether or not their theory is true or not. They also try to work out more far-reaching implications, based on that assumption.

Claiming that gaps (lack of fossils) is evidence for evolution is an interpretation, I can just as easily interpret it to mean that there are no transitions, since there is no evidence.

I don't believe any evolution advocate has ever claimed that a lack of transitional fossils is evidence for evolution. It's merely a gap in data.

So you make your interpretation of the facts fit your assumptions (as I do too). When in reality we don't know the actual lineage of any fossils. If you found two human skeletons buried in the same gave, and you had accurate dating. One being about 40 years older than the other. There is still no way to tell if one was related to the other (other than the obvious both human), fossils just can't give that type of information, it is only a snapshot of a single organism. It gets exponentially harder when you take two different species then say one is a precursor or common ancestor to the other, just because you date one later and they have similar features. It seems that evolution is assumed true, you make a lineage of fossils, then use that as evidence that evolution and common ancestry is true.

The thing with taxonomy and working out lineage is that it works both ways. Finding a transitional fossil increases our knowledge of the lineage of a creature. But we only know it's a transitional fossil of a particular lineage by deductive reasoning. We are not completely in the dark about the "gaps" in evolution. We don't squeeze new fossils we find into the gaps and adjust our "interpretations" of them to suit our expectations. We begin with expectations before we find the fossil, then when it is found we adjust our ideas to suit whatever new data is found.
Take Ida for example - the recently published and acclaimed "missing link" between "great apes" and the other primates.
Before Ida had been properly examined and her significance realised, it was theorised that we shared a common ancestor with more different primates such as monkeys and lemurs about 40 million years ago. This conclusion was reached by comparing and combining many different disciplines in the biology field - bone structure, mitochondrial DNA, geographical distribution, etc. etc. Lo and behold, a skeleton is unearthed that is approximately 40 million years old and shares many characteristics of both branches of evolution that neither share today. Pretty close to what was expected, though certain hypotheses had to be revised.

Just look at modern animals for such as the Giant Panda and the red Panda, if you went by just morphology from bones you would say they are related, yet the debate was finally settled that one is a bear and the other a raccoon, not that one evolved from the other.

While not completely familiar with this example, I see a fundemental problem with it. How did they work out that they two were not closely related? I daresay they took a closed look at the morphology, or perhaps the mitochondrial DNA or regular DNA. As far as I know all of the forms of cladistics or taxonomy are based on evolution and lineage. So what if the two aren't closely related despite looking the same? This is exactly the same reason why scientists know dolphins are mammals and not fish. It's called convergent evolution - when two organisms share a similar lifestyle they tend to adapt a similar appearance. But what lies underneath always gives them away. (And besides, no biologist worth their salt would claim that the Giant Panda evolved into the Red Panda or vice versa. They are both contemporary animals. At worst they shared a common ancestor)

Or look at the marsupial vs. placental animals. They are extremely similar in skeletal structure and morphology, yet they are vastly different and current evolutionary thinking is that they each evolved separately, an amazing claim sense there are correlating wolves, cats, squirrels, ground hogs, anteaters, moles, and mice. All very similar, yet not believed to have evolved from each other. But as just fossils this would be very difficult to say that the two wolves or squirrels are not evolved in the same line.

In light of my last point, I seriously don't see any problem, not would any other evolutionary biologist. As I said, it's convergent evolution. The horse form has evolved many times from many different stocks. The dolphin form also. I'm sure there's many more that haven't been mentioned yet. All of these forms have been known of for years and years by evolutionary biologists, and they have never been given a second thought. Evolution is about adapting to your environment and lifestyle, so it's not surprise that different lineages evolved the same basic body plan in response to the same lifestyle and environment.

... its overreaching to say that it is "fact" and to act like only smart people believe what you believe. Also, It is naive to say that the "facts" are what led to the theory.

It's about as close to a "fact" as we can possibly get, in the descartian sense that we cannot know anything for sure. And yes, the facts are what led to the theory. There's not much else I can say about that. If Darwin had not seen an obvious pattern in the facts, he would not have made the theory.

Evolutionary thoughts and philosophy has been around for over 2000 years, there was a major philosophical movement toward it before Darwin provided any scientific explanation for it.

Broadly, yes. It had been proposed that organisms change through time long before Darwin. But the theory of evolution as we know it now, of common descent and natural selection, did begin in the mid nineteenth century.

The facts are not what's disputed, but the interpretation is. You're just patting each others shoulders and it is clear that you don't understand how thought has progressed throughout history and how scientific evidence for theories comes in degrees, not truth claims.

I'm pretty sure all of this has been covered, but I will reiterate by saying that science always proceeds by degrees. There is no patting of shoulders. There is just rigorous testing and retesting of ideas, trying to find each and every hole. And when a vessel seems waterproof, we just add more weight to it and see if it still floats.

Most philosophies and theories start with a lot of promise because they have a lot of initial explanatory power, normally during this stage a common error is that they get applied to many more areas of thought than they should (such as Descartes trying to explain all of life using mathematics, or evolutionist trying to explain religion or morality) but as they are worked through the realization that they only have a limited application becomes undeniable and a new wave of thinkers rise up in place of the old. At that point it is put in its proper place for another more accurate theory. We have see this easily in physic as the shift from Newton to Einstein to quantum,etc. It's probably easier to accept this type change because it doesn't carry the baggage and implications for life that evolution and design does.
ok, I'll stop now, and sorry I wrote a book I just think it needed to be said.

Let me start by saying that the theory of evolution has evolved. Parts of Darwin's works have become obsolete and redundant as new information has come to light. Its not a static, dogmatic field of interest. It's dynamic, adpating and changing, as all science strives to be. Einstein didn't exactly start from scratch - much of Newton was retained, though in a much elaborated and edited form. It's the same with the current understanding of evolutionary theory and Darwin. It would be as stupid to throw away everything we know about evolution in favour of an "intelligent designer" as it would have been for Einstein to say "Newton was wrong. Gravity is just God holding us down with his hands", but don't be fooled into thinking it's mostly accepted as fact without questioning.