Reflectorites
On Mon, 21 Feb 2000 23:46:22 -0800, Cliff Lundberg wrote:
[...]
>>SB>it's the organizing factor. It underlies *all* biological research.
>MG>Really? In what way does DE underly all biological research?
CL>Biological researchers refer to DE about as often as surveyors
>use spherical trigonometry. But the Earth is still round.
>
>Organizing factor? I think Linnaeus and others are more important
>to biology in that sense. DE is a quasi-philosophical idea; scientific,
>but so general and long-term and mysterious, so limited in useful
>predictive power, that it seems more important to philosophy than
>to science.
Agreed. In fact we have it on the authority of no less than the atheist and
committed Darwinist Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA,
that evolutionary arguments don't play a large part in biological research:
"It might be thought, therefore, that evolutionary arguments would play a
large part in guiding biological research, but this is far from the case. It is
difficult enough to study what is happening now. To try to figure out
exactly what happened in evolution is even more difficult. Thus
evolutionary arguments can usefully be used as hints to suggest possible
lines of research, but it is highly dangerous to trust them too much. It is all
too easy to make mistaken inferences unless the process involved is already
very well understood." (Crick F.H.C., "What Mad Pursuit', 1990, pp138-
139)
When you look at Biology texts, they are organised in structural order
which reflect the *design* of the organisms. They are definitely not
organised in any evolutionary order. In fact evolution is usually tacked on
somewhere, often at the end.
So one might more justly reword Dobzhansky and say that "nothing in
biology makes sense except in the light of *design*"!
Steve
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"But although the logic seems inescapable, the importance of identifying
the concept of relationship through descent from common ancestors as
hypothesis is immediately obvious once one makes a statement like: "fish
gave rise to amphibians." How can one show that such a statement is
correct or false, which is a scientifically reasonable thing to want to do?
Although "finding ancestors" is the traditional paleontologists' "proof,"
such "historical events" cannot be tested by assembling nice series of fossils
without discontinuities, because the evolutionary hypothesis is superficially
so powerful that any reasonably graded series of forms can be thought to
have legitimacy. In fact, there is circularity in the approach that first
assumes some sort of evolutionary relatedness and then assembles a pattern
of relations from which to argue that relatedness must be true. This
interplay of data and interpretation is the Achilles' heel of the second
meaning of evolution [organisms are related by descent through common
ancestry]." (Thomson K.S., "The Meanings of Evolution", American
Scientist, Vol. 70, September-October 1982, 529-531, 529-530)
Stephen E. Jones | sejones@iinet.net.au | http://www.iinet.net.au/~sejones
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