Evo: What is Natural Selection

"The theory of intelligent design holds that certain features of the universe and of livings things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection. (Stephen Myers)


What is meant by the term “Natural Selection” (and what explanatory power does it posses in the overall theory? In what major way is the concept limited?

In what sense is the idea of Natural Selection a “tautology” and why is natural selection (in itself) incapable of directing or advancing evolutionary change?

The Jordan observation of the distracting hand. In magic, a “prestidigitator” may ask you to watch his hands, as if his hands, at that moment, were the focal point of the magic maneuver. In most cases however, the “watch my hands” command is meant to take your eyes off of action elsewhere. In the case of evolution, it is my general sense, that attention is often placed on Natural Selection and removed from the far greater problem of random mutation (including the character and latitude of mutation.) My own thinking has led me to believe that Natural Selection is the most certain, indeed, the absolutely unquestionable component of evolutionary theory. It is also a limited concept, and has within itself, none of the generative (or creative) power associated with the evolutionary model.

Natural Selection is totally passive, it can only be said to “act” upon what is already there.

Matteo (Blog comment) The problem with Natural Selection is that is merely another name for death, and as such is a destructive force, not a constructive one. Its fans keep speaking of it as a probability enhancer or probability multiplier, making possible that which pure chance could never accomplish.


But this is akin to saying that the monkeys at the typewriters will more quickly produce Hamlet, provided you regularly massacre the majority of them.

Are evolution and a belief in God compatible?

You’d think that, for a website devoted to reconciling faith with the facts of science, the idea of Genesis as inspirational fiction would not be negotiable. If anything is absolutely, rock-bottom true, it’s that life evolved, beginning about 4 billion years ago, and that the creation myth of Genesis can’t be true.  Jerry Coyne, Commenting on BioLogos ( Francis Collins: A site given to theistic evolution)

http://richarddawkins.net/articles/485753-biologos-don%E2%80%99t-tell-people-that-genesis-is-fiction


Despite my initial links, there are really two questions here.  Is belief in God and evolution possible (or viable), and is such belief compatible with the Christian scriptures.  In as much as we can point to many individuals who embrace both the Christian faith and evolution, the possibilty of holding to both is a certainty.  "How" those who do so is another question.   It also very certain that Evolution and the Genesis account, as read (in a direct hisorical sense) are at odds.  The question then becomes, how do Christians who embrace both full bodied evolution and the authority of scriptures do so.  At minimum, they must read Genesis as something other than a direct historical account.  At max... they may just assume Genesis to be a soley human document.



A plea from a Christian (Rachel Held Evans) who embraces evolution, not to make evolution a Faith deal breaker.

http://onfaith.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/guestvoices/2010/09/when_atheists_and_baptists_agree.html

Albert Mohler (head of the Southern Baptist Convention) respons:

http://www.albertmohler.com/2010/10/01/evolution-when-atheists-and-baptists-agree/

Rachel Evans responds to the response.  (I must add, while I am far from convinced of the the case for evolution) I deeply appreciate the tone or Rachel's Response.

http://rachelheldevans.com/al-mohler-response?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+RachelHeldEvans+%28Rachel+Held+Evans+-+Blog+Posts%29








The Origin of the Species not only challenged prevailing scientific views but also shook the deepest roots of Western culture. Darwin’s view of life contrasted sharply with traditional beliefs of an Earth only a few thousand years old, populated by forms of life that been created at the beginning and remained unchanged ever since. Darwin’s book challenged a worldview that had been prevalent for centuries. (AP Biology 7th Ed, p439)



Challenge to religion is twofold.



1) Departed from the teaching of the Bible

2) Proposed adequate and comprehsive natural mechanisms, reducing or obliterating the need for a supernatural explanation KJ.





It is also irrelevant whether various religions differentiate between natural and supernatural. Once again, this is the TELEOLOGICAL ARGUMENT, people. Wake up. The teleological argument demands a diametrical opposition between "designed" and "evolved". The terms are mutually exclusive. Something evolved doesn't have a designer, and is therefore not designed. Something designed has a designer, and is therefore not evolved. Evolution, by definition, does not progress through the arbitrary whims of a designer. Design, by definition, does not occur through the blind forces of evolution.



--69.209.242.45 04:19, 20 August 2005 (UTC)



Hmmmm, although I agree with the sentiment, there is no diametric opposition between design and evolution. Evolution does not exclude the possibility of design, it merely makes it redundant as an explanatory factor. Design does not exclude evolution, it just says that design at some point in time was involved with the origin of certain features of life/the universe. -Superiority 06:08, 9 November 2005 (UTC)

I've reverted all this. It may be that some of it could be reinstated (in modified form), but most of it was simply a matter of misunderstanding. A lot of that was terminology (e.g., to call it the argument from design is question begging, as was explained at the time of the change; premises can't be logically sound — they're either true or false, accepted or not accepted), but also of matters such as the relationship between the design argument and evolution (many people believe that design does indeed occur through evolution; in fact, that's the main position among non-fundamentalist Christians). The article needs work, but as a process, not as one person coming in, swearing and shouting at us, and making wholesale mistaken edits. --Mel Etitis (Μελ Ετητης) 08:27, 20 August 2005 (UTC)



Excerpt from a Wikipedia discussion page (Teleological design). Comment posted August 2005








Now a third one of Darwin's great contributions was that he replaced theological, or supernatural, science with secular science. Laplace, of course, had already done this some 50 years earlier when he explained the whole world to Napoleon. After his explanation, Napoleon replied, "where is God in your theory?" And Laplace answered, "I don't need that hypothesis." Darwin's explanation that all things have a natural cause made the belief in a creatively superior mind quite unnecessary. He created a secular world, more so than anyone before him. Certainly many forces were verging in that same direction, but Darwin's work was the crashing arrival of this idea and from that point on, the secular viewpoint of the world became virtually universal.




ERNST MAYR: WHAT EVOLUTION IS

Introduction by Jared Diamond

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/mayr/mayr_index.html








Notre Dame ReSource: Evolution and Christianity

By: Dennis Brown

Date: July 18, 2005









A renowned philosopher from the University of Notre Dame supports recent comments by Cardinal Christoph Schönborn that belief in evolution as accepted by some in science today may be incompatible with Christian beliefs.



“Cardinal Schönborn has it right,” said Alvin Plantinga, the John A. O’Brien Professor of Philosophy and one of the world’s leading scholars in the philosophy of religion. “Evolution means different things to different people. Some of these things are perfectly consistent with Christian belief, but others are not.



“Some think of evolution as the theory of common ancestry: Any two living things share ancestors, so that we and the poison ivy in our back yard, as well as other living creatures, are cousins. This is surprising, but compatible with Christian belief.”



Problems arise, according to Plantinga, when “scientists and others take evolution to be a process that is wholly unguided and driven by chance, so that it is simply a matter of chance that rational creatures like us exist. This is not compatible with Christian belief, according to which God has intentionally created us human beings in His own image. He may have done so by using a process of evolution, but it isn’t by chance that we exist.”



Plantinga adds that the idea that “human beings and other living creatures have come about by chance, rather than by God’s design, is also not a proper part of empirical science. How could science show that God has not intentionally designed and created human beings and other creatures? How could it show that they have arisen merely by chance. That’s not empirical science. That’s metaphysics, or maybe theology. It’s a theological add-on, not part of science itself. And, since it is a theological add-on, it shouldn’t, of course, be taught in public schools.”



http://newsinfo.nd.edu/content.cfm?topicid=12242



Evolution and Christianity

By: Dennis Brown

Date: July 18, 2005



Evolution and Belief in God (or in a God who is active in the creation of species) are incompatible:)

Only a tad more than one in four teachers really believes in evolution as scientists conceive of it: a naturalistic process undirected by divine beings.  Nearly one in two teachers thinks that humans evolved but that God guided the process.

Can we count those 48% of “guided-by-Godders” 0n our side?  I agree with P. Z.: the answer is NO.  Yes, they do accept that our species changed genetically over time, but they see God as having pulled the strings.  That’s not the way evolution works.   The graph labels these 48% as believers in intelligent design, and that’s exactly what they are, for they see God as nudging human evolution toward some preconceived goal.  We’re designed.  These people are creationists: selectivecreationists.

To count them as allies means we make company with those who accept evolution in a superficial sense but reject it in the deepest sense.  After all, the big revolution in thought wrought by Darwin was the recognition that the appearance of design—thought for centuries to be proof of God—could stem from purely natural processes.   When we cede human evolution to God, then, we abandon that revolution.  That’s why I see selective creationists like Kenneth Miller, Karl Giberson and Francis Collins as parting company with modern biological thought. 

          Jerry Coyne  http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/

From Baptist press   http://www.bpnews.net/bpnews.asp?id=21375

Mohler, a young-Earth creationist, says the Bible is clear about the way in which God created the earth in six days. He argues that Christianity and evolution offer opposing views of human origins.

“Given the human tendency toward inconsistency, there are people who will say they hold both positions,” Mohler writes. “But you cannot coherently affirm the Christian-truth claim and the dominant (me) model of evolutionary theory at the same time.

“... I believe the Bible is adequately clear about how God created the world, and that its most natural reading points to a six-day creation that included not just the animal and plant species but the earth itself.

“But there have always been Evangelicals who asserted that it might have taken longer. What they should not be asserting is the idea of God's having set the rules for evolution and then stepped back. And even less so, the model held by much of the scientific academy: of evolution as the result of a random process of mutation and selection."

What is Micro Evolution, or What is Macro Evolution

B: Special Evolution v General Evolution. (or Micro Evolution v Macro Evolution.


Q: What is Special Evolution, What is general Evolution, how do they differ?



"Special evolution" and "general evolution" are opposite processes. Specialization corresponds to configuring a computer program - turning off undesired features or loading optional modules. Generalization corresponds to writing code to implement new features.



*This may sound wacky, but it almost seems that the term Special evolution (a term used by Darwin) has fallen out of favor by use among evolutionists. I could find little on it on the web. It appears that the very distinction between special and general evolution add undesirable clarity to the debate, and is hence avoided.



Gould: (After talking about what he sees as incontrovertible arguments for observable evolution): “Creationists have tightened their act. They now argue that God only created “basic kinds,” and allowed for limited evolutionary meandering within them. Thus toy poodles and great Danes come from the dog kind and moths can change color, but nature cannot convert a dot to a cat or a monkey to a man.”

Gould is right: everyone agrees that micro evolution occurs, including creationist. Even creation-scientists concur, not because they “have tightened” their act,” but because their doctrine has always been that God created basic kinds, or types which subsequently diversified. The most famous example of creationist’s microevolution involves the descendants of Adam and Eve, who have diversified from a common ancestral pair to create all the diverse races of the human species. The point in dispute in not whether microevolution happens, but whether it tells us anything important about the processes responsible for creating birds, insects, and trees in the first place. (DoT Philip E. Johnson, p 68)



Note: While “everyone” including all the young earth creationists (that I have read) embrace the reality of Micro-evolution, not all are willing to use the term.

Scientists who embrace the account of biblical creation have no problem with speciation, natural selection and change within a created kind, all observed (like the example above) to take place over time in nature. Yet, the sort of change which is observed in all examples to date of such ‘speciation’ entails a mere sorting or loss of genetic information, and is thus very different from the sort of change which is needed for molecules-to-man upwards evolution which implies an enormous gain of genetic information.

So changes observed here are really just variations (i.e. different species/breeds) within a kind, where new species/breeds can form fairly rapidly from other species/breeds (only within the limits of the information already in the gene pool of those kinds), but not a transition between kinds. Definitely not the sort of change required to, step by step, turn microbes into microbiologists. It is therefore quite misleading in this particular context to speak of “evolutionary” changes, as Van den Heever did.    

http://creation.com/church-leader-against-evolution

Q:  Why do some creationists avoid the term “Micro Evolution?”

a) because the believe that mere diversification (caused by genetic recombination and loss of information – and not by a gain in information, does not quality as evolution.

b) they do not want to validate the larger concept by using a word of ambiguous connotation.