Is Creationism the Darwinians' straw man?

Question

Every time anyone expresses any doubt about their ideas, they say, 'Oh, you are one of those people who believe the world was made in 4004 BC and believe every word of the King James Bible.'

Doubts such as:

Nobody has ever observed a new species come along. Millions of generations of mice have been bred, and trillions of generations of fruit flies, but they remain mice and fruit flies.

The dark-winged moths may have prospered in soot-polluted times, and the light-winged before and after, but that is not evidence for species change. The species has remained the same.

Humans have diversified species, but they haven't split any species off - a chihuahua can still mate with a great dane.

We hear 'modern man began 200,000 years ago - but that suggests quite a sudden beginning, There are no missing links. How could so many changes occur more or less simultaneously to produce a new species? And surely only one individual would have been produced? Who would s/he have found to mate with?

The response to this, when not just abuse, seems similar to the 'God is unsearchable' that you get from fundamentalists.

Physicists are quite happy to agree that no one has convincingly reconciled relativity with quantum mechanics. Why can't Darwinians accept that there is something missing in their explanations too?

Answer 1

> "Nobody has ever observed a new species come along."

Yes they have - many times:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._coli_lon...

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/speciati...

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-spec...

> "The dark-winged moths may have prospered in soot-polluted times, and the light-winged before and after, but that is not evidence for species change. The species has remained the same."

No - but it IS evidence for evolution.

Evolution is defined as "a change in the frequency of alleles in a population of ofganisms". The above example (Industrial Melanism of the Peppered Moth) is a perfect example of that - as is the emergence of antibiotic resistance in bacteria, pesticide resistance in mosquitoes, and the new 'flu virus every year.

> "Humans have diversified species, but they haven't split any species off - a chihuahua can still mate with a great dane."

So they haven't speciated yet - that's all.

> "We hear 'modern man began 200,000 years ago - but that suggests quite a sudden beginning, There are no missing links. How could so many changes occur more or less simultaneously to produce a new species?"

They didn't occur "suddenly".

Australopithecus arose about 4 Mya.

The Homo genus arose about 2.5 Mya (with H. habilis)

Homo erectus about 1.8 Mya.

And the first H. sapiens fossils are found dating from about 200,000 ya.

That's 1.6 million years from H. erectus to H. sapiens. Remember that humans and their ancestors were nowhere near as widespread or populous as we are today, so it is not at all surprising that there are limited fossils to be found for that time.

And this ignores the huge amount of other evidence - like the great genetic similarity between us and chimpanzees (our nearest evolutionary cousins).

> "And surely only one individual would have been produced? Who would s/he have found to mate with?"

No. POPULATIONS evolve - not INDIVIDUALS.

> "The response to this, when not just abuse, seems similar to the 'God is unsearchable' that you get from fundamentalists."

I hope you'll agree that my answer has no resemblance to that one :-)

> "Physicists are quite happy to agree that no one has convincingly reconciled relativity with quantum mechanics. Why can't Darwinians accept that there is something missing in their explanations too?"

Oh absolutely. No-one argues that our understanding of how everything evolved is complete. The classification of organisms changes all the time as our picture of the evolutionary timeline expands and improves.

BUT - our understanding of how evolution AS A PROCESS occurs generally is much, much better understood than either relativity or quantum physics. It is probably the scientific theory with the most supporting evidence of any.

Answer 2

You ask a valid question ... although I'll let others debate you on those specific points (as I have in your other question in the Biology section)

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;...

It is an unfortunate part of the lack of discourse, that people pigeonhole opponents, in order to dismiss them outright.   A lot of us feel exactly the same way when people use the word 'evolutionist' or (as you have) 'Darwinian' or 'Darwinist' as a broad label for people who accept the mainstream scientific consensus ... often extending this (as you have not) into questions of the origins of life, matter, the universe, and consciousness.

Other examples are when 'Evolutionist' is lumped in with "atheist", or "Creationist" is lumped in with "Christian."  

That said, Creationism itself is not a "straw man."   Evolution supporters did not invent a ridiculous caricature of Judeo-Christian teachings as an absurdly *literal* interpretation of Genesis.  The Young-Earth Creationists did that on their own, and will happily defend this absurd position without ever correcting it.

Now, I do recognize that the supporters of Intelligent Design are after a different *stated* goal ... that of finding evidence of a creative intelligence at work.   I have no philosophical objection to that (I am not an atheist), but find it dangerously anti-scientific because it constantly appeals to ignoring Occam's Razor ... postulating a new entity that is far more inaccessible and mysterious than the phenomena it is purporting to explain.  

As such, ID encourages the misplaced assumption (or conviction) that science can and will confirm articles of religious faith.  This is a *huge* mistake, and leads not only to BAD science, but to WEAKENED faith.

The questions you pose are perfectly valid questions.  Nothing wrong with asking them as long as you are willing to honestly consider the answers.   But when backed with the pre-determined conviction that evolution has no answers to these questions, then these questions are just an exercise in gamesmanship, not an advance in scientific research.  

>"Physicists are quite happy to agree that no one has convincingly reconciled relativity with quantum mechanics. Why can't Darwinians accept that there is something missing in their explanations too?"

Completely different situation.   Physicists have two really good theorical models that explain two very different sets of phenomena, but would like to be able to combine the two into a fundamental theory of physics.   Nobody is questioning the validity of either relativity or quantum mechanics.   It's not like there is a barrage of "questions" coming from outside of the science community insisting that the physicists are fundamentally, moronically wrong about issues of physics.

Biology is not similarly divided.  The questions you are asking are not coming from within the community of biologists, but from people outside outside of science determined to find "holes" in the mainstream paradigm.

Answer 3

"Physicists are quite happy to agree that no one has convincingly reconciled relativity with quantum mechanics. Why can't Darwinians accept that there is something missing in their explanations too?"

You call biologists Darwinians, why don't you call physicists Newtonians? If you bothered to look at the scientific literature covering evolutionary biology you would quickly note that biologists are eager to argue over all of the missing explanations that you say we're hiding, and this information is readily available on the web if you bothered to look.

Your's is a very simple view of evolution, it's much more complicated than you think - it's more complicated than we all think! But the doubts you enumerate reveal that you don't understand evolution at all.

Why would a million or a trillion generations of cloned lab mice and fruit flies speciate when they are kept in a controlled environment?

You confuse the evolution of a population of British moths with speciation - do you know the difference?

Nothing in the scientific literature suggests modern man appeared suddenly, and most of the missing "missing links" you speak of are no longer missing. Have you even explored our current state of understanding? Try looking up Hominin...

You assert that "surely only one individual would have been produced? Who would s/he have found to mate with?" This is the 19th century "hopeful monster" argument debunked 100 years ago. It is a warning sign that the person who argues from this position is missing the very basics of the evolutionary process.

You need to educate yourself - the idea that you have of evolution is NOT evolution, and that's the real straw man in all of this.

So do yourself a favor - drop your false preconceptions and work through these websites; then you can answer your own questions:

http://www.talkorigins.org/

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution

http://evolution.berkeley.edu/

http://anthro.palomar.edu/synthetic/defa...