Small Dead Fossil Records
October 20, 2007 · By Marsilio Facino
I see guest poster Lance at Kate Werk’s Small Dead Animals has touched off a mini-firestorm with a post on Intelligent Design.
All are welcome to carry on discussion here instead if they’d like to provoke discussion on a favorite topic of mine — the political philosophy of scientific discussion.
ID is a theological theory meant to address the scientific theory of evolution. ID is not wrong because theology is the study of belief systems. It is not a scientific theory, nor can it be treated as such, any more than the scientific theory can address the theological existence of God. While one uses proof to validate their theory, the other uses the absence of proof to validate their theory. The two disciplines are polar opposites in their approach to reality. Over the last 27 years as an Ice Age paleontologist, I have mused on the origins of life, but I don’t confuse the two. Unfortunately, the ID camp wants their theory treated as a scientific theory and that must be resisted.
By evolution, do you mean small changes in an animal ie changes to the bill size, or the change from a one cell organism to a man. There is evidence for the former, not the latter. Evolution as an explanation life is a just-so story about what happened in the past and has nothing to do with real science. Darwin said that once the once the fossil record was better known, his theory would be shown to be true, 150 years latter, all we see are species appearing suddenly with no recognisable ancestor. Natural selection means that there needs to be something to select. The information in the genetic code cannot come from nothing, anymore than a computer program can come into a random string of 1’s and 0’s
“Darwin said that once the once the fossil record was better known, his theory would be shown to be true, 150 years latter, all we see are species appearing suddenly with no recognisable ancestor.”
That’s a very interesting assertion, R. West. Completely wrong, though. Which “species appearing suddenly with no recognizable ancestor” did you have in mind?
[...] CHARGE: In responding to the above, the intellectual level over at “The Politic” asserts itself in an ugly way:R West wrote:By evolution, do you mean small changes in an animal ie changes to the bill size, or [...]
R.West, just a cautionary note - if you’re going to cite the “Cambrian Explosion” as your argument, do a bit of digging first about more current findings - most of the folks who use that as their argument don’t seem too aware of the huge upsurge in pre-Cambrian paleontology and findings since the mid sixties.