What matters is the evidence for evolution and that evidence is massive and extremely powerful. The facts of evolution are the strongest facts of science.
Anyone who raises doubts about evolution in public discussions with non-scientists knows the automatic response you always get from the Three Monkeys crowd. Hands wrapped tightly over eyes, ears, and mouth, they chant: See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil -- about Darwin!
That's not exactly how it comes out. People will say things more like: But science has spoken! Scientists say! Science wins! Which sounds reasonable at first, until you reflect that it's a little like a Roman Catholic fending off some challenge to his faith by pointing out that 98 percent of Catholic priests agree with Catholic doctrine, and who knows more about Catholicism than Catholic priests? So it must be true. (Or substitute rabbis and Jewish doctrine, pastors and Protestant belief, etc.) As James Le Fanu smartly notes in his new book Why Us? How Science Rediscovered the Mystery of Ourselves (Pantheon), there is a similar circularity to the "Scientists say!" case for Darwinian dogma:
"The commitment to Darwin's materialist explanation of the living world would, in time, become a qualification requirement for all who aspired to pursue a career in biology -- where to express doubt (at least publicly) was tantamount to confessing to being of unsound (or at least unscientific) mind."
Read the rest there.
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R Hampton,
Lots of technical terms. Very interesting. Clades, mitochondrial data, etc. Where is this all demonstrated in the fossil record?
Thanks.
Mike Corum,
there are fossils of all the known members of the carnivore family - that's how we have come to know of them. Spend some time doing the research (its not hard these days with Google).
From the comments I just read it seams that a lot of people seperate what they know form what they believe.
Unfortunately there is the silly, and there is the absurd; the price of allowing knowledge based hypotheses that can be tested is to also consider that which is contrary to rational observation. The grand unifying principle of all that is biological (the now of all organisms) and paleontological (the past of all organisms in so far as is documented by discoveries) is the "synthetic" theory of evolution as brilliantly documented by Charles Darwin, and later enhanced by workers such as Mayr, Dobzhansky and Simpson, never mind Watson and Crick. The accomplishment stands beside Einstein's revolution in physics as theories that explainn more than any others in all of space and all of time. Both work on Earth and at the edges of a 13.2 billion light year universe. Evolutionary science is as universally real as the rotation of the earth and the craters of the Moon; denial seems such a terrific waste of time and intellect and not to be taken seriously.
Any framwork or philosophy of religion must accept that fact or risk appearing not just silly, but patently absurd.
I read about the similarity of the dna of different species. That is a demonstrable fact. The question then becomes, why the similarity? Some say that it is because all life descended (interesting term there) from a single organism. I propose that it is just as plausible that the Designer knew He had something going in this dna stuff, and decided to replicate it in other living things. Just as an auto maker uses the same general design of motor, transmission, etc., in all the automobiles he builds.
My point is that the similarity of basic building blocks does not rule out the possibility of a Designer, but conversely could just as easliy argue for the existence of such a Designer. When you think about it, if you were designing a carbon based life system, you would probably use some very simliar structures to achieve that end.
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