From: swf@teradata.com (Stanley Friesen)
Newsgroups: talk.origins
Subject: Re: Atheistic creationism -- a tutorial
Date: 30 Sep 92 19:26:56 GMT
Reply-To: swf@tdat.teradata.com (Stanley Friesen)
Organization: NCR Teradata Database Business Unit

In article <1992Sep30.092907.9462@smds.com> rh@ishmael.UUCP (Richard Harter) writes:
|In article <1130@tdat.teradata.COM> swf@tdat.teradata.com (Stanley Friesen) writes:
|
||Ah yes, Charles Lyell's "steady-state' theory of life.
||This was considered fairly well demolished by Darwin's "Origin".
|
|Huh, where do you get this from?  Lyell's "steady-state" theory was
|indeed demolished because it was inconsistent with the observed historical
|record.  Throughout this exercise I have explicitly conceded the historical
|record.

I still do not see how your 'theory' differs in any meaningful from
Sir Lyell's.  He postulated quasi-continuous creation of new species
by some unindentified process, which he tended to equate with God.

Isn't that what you proposed?

||The evidence for common descent is so strong that one needs a *mighty*
||bizarre form of 'continuous' crration to account for the evidence.
||Not only are living things similar to one another, they are similar in
||rather *odd* way's.  There are numerous cases of vestigial organs, strange
||homologies (the panda's "thumb" is built from a *wrist* bone, not a
||replicated finger), meaningless differences (like the differences between
||a bat's wing and that of a pterosaur).
|
||Any form of 'creation', one-week, or long-term, has a great deal of
||difficulty explaining this sort of hodge-podge.
|
|	I infer from this that you're not attending the argument.
|	The catastrophists postulated cycles of creation/stasis/catastrophe.
|	When this scenario was demolished, there was a degenerate form
|	of catastrophist creation that postulated continuous creation
|	in the form of new whole individuals, i.e. independent lines of
|	descent.

This is not quite right, Lyell's ultra-uniformitarian school was active at
the *same* time as the French catastrophist school - they were great rivals,
and the debate between them was intense.

|	My particular straw man has a rather different constitution,
|	since the "creation" involved is moved to the genetic level
|	and is quite compatible with common descent in the higher taxa.

Ah, I see, you are talking about 'directed mutation' as a source of
directed change!  That was not clear.

This still does not really explain the ad-hocery of most biological
adaptation - since directed mutation (at least when done by an intelligent
agent) would be expected to be rational, and to lead towards consistant
results.

||The *claim* is that the purported mechanisms are inadequate.  Are they?
||I have yet to see any reason to believe they are.  What reasons do you have
||to say this?  (This issue was thoroughly debated by biologists in the 40's
||and 50's, and they have, by and large, concluded that the mechanisms now
||known are *more* than adequate, what evidence do you have that they
||have not already considered).
|
|This is a rather disappointing comment; I expected better from you.  I
|have posted arguments which I expect to be refuted and what do I get?

I have yet to see any meaningful arguments from you on this.
You have presented trivial 'probability' analyses that are refuted
in *any* modern book on evolution that goes into any detail.

|-- appeals to authority -- appeals to anonymous authority at that.  If
|you are going to do the authority gig the least you could do is something
|like "Re your argument on selection:  The obvious fallacy is .... which
|is thoroughly in Dobzhansky, _Genetics and the Origin of Species_".

Read any of Ernst Mayr's books on the history or philosophy of biology.
They all cover this debate in some detail.
["The Growth of Biological Thought" is a good source, but it is massive,
and you may find yourself a little overloaded with data].
Or try reading some of Ernst Mayr's technical papers on the evolution of
birds in the East Indies.

Or read Stephen J. Gould's book, "The Panda's Thumb".
-- 
sarima@teradata.com			(formerly tdatirv!sarima)
  or
Stanley.Friesen@ElSegundoCA.ncr.com
Newsgroups: talk.origins