>See above. There is vagueness in the use of this word "evolutionist".
>It means all things to all men. Even Creation-Scientists can be said
>to be "evolutionists" because they believe in some aspects of
>"evolution", eg. micro-evolution. Patterson may believe in evolution
>(I am sure he does), but is he a *Darwinist*?
No doubt there is a great variety over how the term evolution is used. I
think that all "evolutionists": Darwinsts, cladists, punct-eqers, TE's,
etc. have in mind "common descent". This is the primary meaning that I see
whenever I read Dawkins, Gould, Mayr, Darwin, etc. This then excludes
people who believe in microevolution, but deny common descent. Perhaps
even Progessive Creationists can be said to believe in the common ancestry
hypothesis. If you care to, re-read my recent post and substitute "common
ancestry hypothesis" for evolution when it appears.
>This is putting the chart before the horse! :-) I disagree that
>"nested patterns are perfectly good evidence for evolution".
>Historically they came well before evolution and Darwinism is
>an attempt to explain the nested hierarchy of form found in nature,
>not the other way around:
The history is irrelevant. Evidence usually precedes a novel theory to
explain it. The nested hierarchy is the evidence, the data, that which is
to be explained. Evolution is a possible explanation. If something is an
explanation for set of data, then that set of data is evidence for that
explanatory theory. Please see my second response in this thread,
responding to Kevin's response to my first post (the one you are responding
to). Why is this putting the cart before the horse?
Terry G.
_____________________________________________________________
Terry M. Gray, Ph.D. Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry
Calvin College 3201 Burton SE Grand Rapids, MI 40546
Office: (616) 957-7187 FAX: (616) 957-6501
Email: grayt@calvin.edu http://www.calvin.edu/~grayt