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I would never support young Earth Creationism but I find it of some interest that Creationists do generally accept Darwins natural selection they just see it as a minor modification within a particular related group of organisms. So for instance if you were to take Darwins Finches shown below they are quite happy to accept that this was brought about by natural selection and adaptation to their environment and food sources.




The argument they would make here is that you have natural selection and you have different finches they aren't accumulating genetic changes toward anything that isn't a finch or something that isn't even a bird. The natural selection is only operating on the genetic structure of a particular kind of bird which in this case is a finch. So regardless of how long you would leave this natural selection to occur you would ever have on your hands would be a group of finches living on different islands. They wouldn't become anything else through random genetic mutation and selection upon that change because there isn't any non-finch or non-bird genetic material entering the population and building towards something entirely new. Another similar point is you can breed all kinds of different dogs but all you can ever breed from dogs are dogs you couldn't eventually breed a dog into a cat even if you had millions of years in which to do it. They would say to conclude that given a million years you could change dogs to cats is an assumption without any evidental basis in anything that can be observed. So this may be interest it's even if it's coming from people who believe in a literal Adam and Eve and Noahs Ark.

Ruskin wrote:I would never support young Earth Creationism but I find it of some interest that Creationists do generally accept Darwins natural selection they just see it as a minor modification within a particular related group of organisms. So for instance if you were to take Darwins Finches shown below they are quite happy to accept that this was brought about by natural selection and adaptation to their environment and food sources.




The argument they would make here is that you have natural selection and you have different finches they aren't accumulating genetic changes toward anything that isn't a finch or something that isn't even a bird. The natural selection is only operating on the genetic structure of a particular kind of bird which in this case is a finch. So regardless of how long you would leave this natural selection to occur you would ever have on your hands would be a group of finches living on different islands. They wouldn't become anything else through random genetic mutation and selection upon that change because there isn't any non-finch or non-bird genetic material entering the population and building towards something entirely new. Another similar point is you can breed all kinds of different dogs but all you can ever breed from dogs are dogs you couldn't eventually breed a dog into a cat even if you had millions of years in which to do it. They would say to conclude that given a million years you could change dogs to cats is an assumption without any evidental basis in anything that can be observed. So this may be interest it's even if it's coming from people who believe in a literal Adam and Eve and Noahs Ark.

Excellent points. I agree.

I do not dispute that natural selection and genetic drift play some role in the change of species over time. But to think that that is all there is to it is absurd, and precisely because of the reasons you just delineated. Obviously there is much more to it than science could ever suppose, and their model cannot adequately explain the growth and formation of entirely new "functional infrastructures" such as limbs, wings, eyes, ears, etc. The standard explanation (http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/vertebrate ... volve.html) simply does not suffice.....

Evolution is not a random process - this link may help: livescience.com/48103-evolution-not-ran ... andom.html

Ruskin wrote:
The argument they would make here is that you have natural selection and you have different finches they aren't accumulating genetic changes toward anything that isn't a finch or something that isn't even a bird. The natural selection is only operating on the genetic structure of a particular kind of bird which in this case is a finch.

That circle represents concurrent varieties within a single species. It does not represent evolution. That would be a very tall, very old, very complex tree structure.

So regardless of how long you would leave this natural selection to occur you would ever have on your hands would be a group of finches living on different islands. They wouldn't become anything else through random genetic mutation and selection upon that change

Regardless of how long? Try going back 75 million years sciencedaily.com/terms/feathered_dinosa ... osaurs.htm and then work your way up the tree toward birds. You get to a proto-pigeon theguardian.com/science/grrlscientist/2 ... n-taxonomy
about 60 million years ago, which differentiates into all the modern songbirds, including finches.

because there isn't any non-finch or non-bird genetic material entering the population and building towards something entirely new.

You don't need outside genetic material. Mutation means a change - usually very small - in one of the existing genes. Selection means that some mutations confer an advantage on their bearer, who will then have a better chance at breeding. If he passes the improvement on to his progeny, they will out-breed, and eventually replace the normal population.

Another similar point is you can breed all kinds of different dogs but all you can ever breed from dogs are dogs

Human directed breeding doesn't tell you much about natural selection: most of our artificial dog-breed would die out in two generations in the wild.

you couldn't eventually breed a dog into a cat even if you had millions of years in which to do it.

You don't have millions of years - the most time human may have been breeding dogs at all in about 100,000 years - so what is that statement based on? No species turns into another existing species. However, both dogs and cats (and a few dozen other species) come from the same ancestor. dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-253 ... -dogs.html In another fifty million years, neither dogs nor cats ass we know them will exist: they will each have given rise to a dozen new species that we've never heard of - and never will, because by then," we " will have given rise to a dozen new species, and we won't exist anymore.

Why do people argue about evolution if they have not even bothered to learn the basics? http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/article/evo_02

-- Updated July 19th, 2015, 12:43 pm to add the following --

The brief introductory course "does not suffice" to explain every step of every stage of every adaptation. For that, you'd need to read quite a lot more science. There is more science, and it has more detail. But it's longer than three chapters of Genesis.

The point about evolution is that it is the ONLY possibility currently available.

If you don't like it, it is probably because you don't understand it. Because it is a very beautiful and elegant theory.

And don't be deluded by the notion that it is 'only a theory'; just about everything that relates to the real world is 'only a theory'. It is just that some theories are better than others. And some theories, such as evolution, are so far ahead of the rest of the field that there are effectively no others in the race.

Could the theory of Darwinian evolution be mistaken?

If you're asking whether the basic mechanism by which speciation occurs is wrong then, no. There is overwhelming evidence in support of evolution by natural selection.

If your asking whether there is anything more to learn about about evolution, whether there are details we don't yet fully understand, then my answer would be yes. But that goes for all of science. We'll never know it all. But that doesn't make our theories wrong. When a theory does not explain what we observe we dump it. In terms of explaining the living world evolution has been brilliantly successful. Indeed, as Theodosius Dobzhansky said, "Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution".

We have no reason whatsoever to think that we are mistaken about the basic mechanism behind Darwinian evolution.

Greta wrote:Evolution is not a random process - this link may help: livescience.com/48103-evolution-not-ran ... andom.html

I never said it was random but the point was Darwinian or Neo-Darwinian evolution where you have random genetic mutation followed by non-random natural selection may as the Young Creationist fundamentalist folk believe only account for what you could call micro-evolution. Any example you can produce to support an occurrence of evolution from finches to moths is a case of natural selection either modifying the physical traits of an existing linage of organisms or you have natural selection operating already existing genetic variation in the case of the white and black moths. Someone like Ken Ham does believe that camels and llamas shared a common ancestor and the two diverged through natural selection and adaptation. The argument is you will only ever have minor differences between very closely related organisms through this mechanism going back to the example that you can breed dogs from wolves but you could never breed a dogs into cats even after hundreds of millions of years you will still have dogs or dog like animals of some description the genetic structure of the organism will remain stable. To breed dogs into cats you would need massive, sustained and functional genetic modification as there is only so much you can do by shuffling and deleting genetic material you already have to hand.

This drastic level of genetic change would have occur relatively quickly as changes on this scale if it were done through the 19th century Darwinian method would take perhaps billions of years and leave a whole spectrum of transitional forms in the fossil record. There isn't a spectrum of transition in the fossil record we just have distinct individual species that appear very suddenly fully formed as they are.

Even if you take the human evolutionary tree transitional forms between the different human species are absent and you have very rapid speciation taking place in less than 6 million years.




This isn't necessarily anything like what Darwin had in mind originally, he perhaps may have expected a spectrum of very gradual transition over a significantly greater period of time. If this was random selection on entirely random mutation it would take a very long time indeed but 5 million years isn't that all long period relative to the history of life on Earth. When change on this scale occurs we're looking a rapid and explosive event leading to a radiation of entirely new species not a long gradual transitional process over eons of time.

Greta wrote:Evolution is not a random process - this link may help: livescience.com/48103-evolution-not-ran ... andom.html

Ruskin wrote:I never said it was random but the point was Darwinian or Neo-Darwinian evolution where you have random genetic mutation followed by non-random natural selection may as the Young Creationist fundamentalist folk believe only account for what you could call micro-evolution.

This is what I responded to in your OP:

Ruskin wrote:They wouldn't become anything else through random genetic mutation and selection ...

Genetic mutations are not always random either. It was once believed that they were but it's been found that their expression is shaped by environment. Further, "random" is the wrong word with a misleading semantic - the actions are not random but seemingly "chaotic", based on what we know today.

Greta wrote:Genetic mutations are not always random either. It was once believed that they were but it's been found that their expression is shaped by environment. Further, "random" is the wrong word with a misleading semantic - the actions are not random but seemingly "chaotic", based on what we know today.

There is only one simple thing to understand about evolution:

Nature has billions of years to experiment.

Nature is like water: if it finds a crack in the roof, it will seep in.

If it can be done, by the laws of physics and chemistry, nature will try it.

Nature tries EVERYTHING!

Whatever works survives.

As simple as that.

Elder, true randomness probably does not exist because it evokes the causeless cause rather than endless knock on effects following chaotic lines of possibility.

The other issue is that evolution is not a fully chaotic/random process, although it has chaotic elements. However, there is conservation and passing on of information from prior iterations via DNA (or humans, directly). Evolution on Earth has never gone back to square one, even after the most severe extinctions.

Theoretical computer scientist, Scott Aaronson illustrates the idea here, around 13:30 into the video:

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In his blog SA added a slight correction to his observations in the video: http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1487

-- Updated 20 Jul 2015, 19:12 to add the following --

One missing square bracket

Ruskin wrote: Any example you can produce to support an occurrence of evolution from finches to moths.

I'd suggest you're missing the point. Evolution caused by genetic mutation does not have to achieve a specific change to be a valid method. For a finch to become a moth would require a series of specific genetic changes, which we might one day be able to achieve in the laboratory if we directed it, but the likelihood of those changes occurring spontaneously and surviving natural selection in the wild are sufficiently small as to be highly unlikely.

I think Ruskin's points are valid and important. To think that the theory of evolution is complete is a basic error. At best, it's a step in the right direction. But to move beyond it and find out more requires the kind of skepticism seen by Ruskin, which is not seen in most proponents of the theory....

Greta wrote:Evolution is not a random process - this link may help:

I'd suggest that this article refers to survivable mutations, it does not account for those mutations which might occur and not survive precisely because they have made too great a change to the proteins structure for it to function correctly. I would suggest it is more accurate to state that mutation is random, but natural selection restricts those that survive to a smaller less random sub group, however and it's a big however, if what you need to survive has made a sudden and significant change then the selective pressure has suddenly changed, then what survives may suddenly be very different.

Looking at the original question of course it could be mistaken but the evidence we can observe with our senses suggests this is the simplest solution we are presently aware of.

Atreyu wrote:I think Ruskin's points are valid and important. To think that the theory of evolution is complete is a basic error. At best, it's a step in the right direction. But to move beyond it and find out more requires the kind of skepticism seen by Ruskin, which is not seen in most proponents of the theory....

That's not skepticism; that's ignorance. If science had to start over from there, it would have to lose 150 years; deconstruct, uncompare and re-bury many tons of fossil. His arguments are like spit-balls besieging a fortress.

Here's an interesting video that deals with the some the kinds of issues concerning the Darwinian version of evolution, it touches upon the points concerning the differences between "micro evolution" and "macro evolution". It's from 1981 so it's a little dated but it could well be that the standard Darwinian model of evolution as we currently understand it is the dated hypothesis. In a couple of centuries perhaps future generations will laugh at our current ideas on this subject as they may have a far better understanding of the process than we have today, science is very much like that. I'm not saying there is anything involved that is beyond human science to discover but there definitely is a valid scientific ground for argument against Darwin.