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Friends of Uncommon Decent write to us about the “missing link” – which we never missed, really

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What’s it to us if the thing never shows?

We complained about that term, “missing link,” here, earlier today. It’s an example of Darwinthink that assumes what can and can’t happen, in defiance of evidence. Anyway, a scientist friend writes,

What’s “missing” — the missing link — is an information change and innovation model and mechanism.

That’s what James Shapiro et al are working on. The info system is capable of rapid complex change and innovation, convergence [repeating similar solutions], etc.

Non-Darwinian changes can and do happen — and in fact they dominate the natural record — because of the characteristics/capabilities of the info system reacting “intelligently” to ecological stress/opportunity.

As Shapiro expressed in “A Third Way”, both fiat-creationists and material-naturalism evolutionists may be dissapointed by the emerging 21st century view of “evolution.” And yet it is very strong support for ID.

Meanwhille, journalist Tom Bethell, formerly of The American Spectator, writes to say,

The concept of the “missing link” is useful to Darwinists. It is used interchangeably with “god of the gaps.” Here is how the Darwinist mind thinks about this topic:

“Oh, how those Creationists do cherish their ‘gaps’ and ‘missing links’! Then they have found a role for God. At the same time they implicitly concede that most gaps have been filled — by us hard working scientists doing the grunt work here below.”

We concede that the “gap” between Julius Caesar and us has been filled. But the more interesting question is whether any evolutionary, inter-species “gap” has ever been filled. I mean filled in the sense that an unquestionable, unbroken parent-offspring chain has been established. We might want to concede that dogs evolved from wolves — but I’m not sure we would want to go that far.

For anyone in this group with access to evolutionary biologists, a useful exercise is to ask an acquaintance, in as friendly a spirit as possible: “What group or species would you say was ancestral to xxxxx [you fill in the blank].” See how they answer. After all, they have these “gaps” filled, right? Mostly, I think you will find, the answer is perplexity, a shrug, or sometimes a veiled tautology — a disguised assertion that evolution is true. The classic form of this type of reply is: “Vertebrates evolved from invertebrates.” That is, the ancestral group is defined by the absence of the character that defines the descendant. What did cats evolve from? Non-cats. And so on. It works in every case! In each case the illusion is created that busy paleontologists found the answer by going out into the field and digging up fossils with shovels. In fact they looked up words in a dictionary.

Colin Patterson of the Natural History Museum in London liked to say that all such indubitably asserted “links” are of this type. “Ape,” for example, is defined by the absence of the characters that define humans. Thus “humans evolved from apes.” “Reptile” is another such improperly defined ancestral group. It consists of non-mammalian, non-avian amniota. Hence, the statement “mammals evolved from reptiles” is true, IF evolution itself is true.

Can anyone answer this: Who first used the phrase “missing link”? Probably it was used by Christians, who (wrongly) assumed in the first, heady period of Darwinian Enlightenment, that evolution really had been shown to be true. Christians, on the defensive, then found a way to cling to religion, saying, “Ah, but the “ape-human” link had never been established.”

Only now are we beginning to see that NO LINKS have yet been certainly established. In fact, Darwinism is built on an infrastructure of faith, which is why its supporters like to ask unwary politicians (and laymen), “Do you BELIEVE IN evolution?” To which the appropriate answer is: “I didn’t realize that science depended on belief.”

Science, no. Darwinthoughts, yes.

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