On Wed, 12 Jan 2000 Massie wrote:
>A physicist is a scientist looking for a grant. Generally, they
>do not care at all what the philosophical consequences of the
>physics are. This is for some lunnies in another building. Not
>so in biology where some blatantly insert philosophy and
>unsupported assumptions and begin with "evolution (meaning
>evolutionism) is the central concept of biology. Actually, I
>would like to propose the counter that "design" (meaning God) is
>the central concept of biology.
Something smells funny...I think it's a physics snob. Naturally,
physics, being such a good, pure field in which to work, attracts
all those who seek knowledge for its own sake (hang the philosophy)
and biology is what the loonies (philosophers?) do when they decide
to dabble in science.
Come on. You sound so well informed about biologists that I must
wonder from where you got your experience. Textbooks at the survey
level? Books by sophisticated God-of-the-Gappers like Behe? In
my field of ecology (really just a bunch treehuggers ;) ) you
might be surprised that evolution is actually a unifying concept
there as well. And no, we would not sit around saying, "Well,
evolution proves there's no God, so I guess it is up to us to save
this place." Rather, when considering relationships within
ecological communities we talk in terms of competition, selection,
exclusion, disturbances as selective forces, as well as centers of
endemism (as indicative of ground-zero pts. for adaptive radiation)
as focus for reserve selection. Population biology, animal
behavior, taxonomy and systematics (ever heard of a cladogram?),
and immunology are but a few of the many disciplines in biology
relying on evolution for more than an initial disclaimer to
frighten off the faithful.
>Reality is that evolution is inserted in the text here and there
>almost as a chant to some unknown god but not realy for much
>explanatory power and certainly and absolutely no predictive
>power.
Hmmm. My year of college physics (not just the alg. based) did
not mention the general theory of relativity more than a couple
times, and quantum mechanics, per se, never came up. Oh well.
As for lacking explanatory power, I am really dumbfounded. I can
only suggest that you might try digging a little deeper into the
field (beyond BIG survey books and Johnson 'n' the Wedgies) and
you just might find yourself surprised. Try reading a paper in
paleontology (one of my side interests), remove references to the
big E word, and see how much sense it makes. What sort of
predictive power are you looking for? Power to make predictions
like Hal Lindsey and the end-of-the-world crowd? I'm satisfied
that one can make predictions like, if evolution predicts that
we would find a hierarchical pattern of relatedness within life
then I would expect to be able to quantitatively measure degees
of difference in character states (ie, DNA, cytochrome c,
morphologies, etc.) between living creatures and find they fall
into a hierarchical pattern. You might check out one of Glenn
Morton's posts of a few days ago about the predictive power of
the evolutionary assumption in the oil business. I never took
that industry to be much of a refuge for philosophers.
I have nothing wrong with design, per se. I, as a Christian,
also believe God did it. But to claim God's fingerprints reside
only in what we don't know (haven't figured out yet) or what is
misconstrued as mystery (irreducible complexity), then my God
would be an ever-shrinking God. That, along with producing a
dead form of science, makes for poor theology.
Don't let others make up your mind for you. Check it out
before blowing us off as kill-God cultists and Tom Sawyer
white-washers.
Grace and peace be with you. Jeff
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