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Why Darwinism is failing

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Further to Barry Arrington’s post, “Zachriel goes into insane denial mode,” which has garnered so far 170 comments, and doubtless counting:

The biggest problem for Darwin’s supporters (paleo, neo, extended, whatever) today has nothing to do with Uncommon Descent or with any design hypothesis.

The problem is genome mapping. Blame people like Francis Collins and Craig Venter.

Darwinian evolution was always a theory, by which Darwinism (natural selection acting on random mutation generates huge levels of information, not noise) .

It was the single greatest idea anyone ever had, and could be believed without evidence because “Darwinism is the only known theory that is in principle capable of explaining certain aspects of life.” (p. 287, Blind Watchmaker, 1986)

And it has been believed without evidence. Darwin’s On the Origin of Species is considered by a broad swathe of lay people to be the most influential academic book they know, with very little evidence backing it.

It is a theory that is in constant search for evidence, which results in masses of Darwinian fairy-tales about everything from why stressed mares miscarry through why insects kill their moms, or how people vote and why they tip at restaurants.

One need only map some circumstance in life onto the theory, chop off the inconvenient bits, and there we are: More “science” at work.

Loud crash is heard, some time around 2000.

Today, we know much more than we used to about how life forms change over time. Evolution has become a history, not a theory. Like all histories, it is messy. It only indifferently supports a theory.

Mechanism differs from theory in that it answers Behe’s question, “How, exactly?”: For example, one mechanism of the evolution of some life forms is simply absorbing genes from another organism (horizontal gene transfer):

Bacteria that grow on crustaceans can absorb fragments containing more than 40 genes, using a small “spear.” Researcher Melanie Blokesch describes that number as “an enormous amount of new genetic information.” That may explain why antibiotic resistance sets in so quickly. More.

Jut think of all the Darwinian fairy tales that could have been, and maybe were, told about how natural selection acting on random mutation caused the antibiotic resistance, when they were, for practical purposes of explanation, caused by bacterium equipped with a small spear.

We are now much closer to the world of Popular Mechanics than the world of Philosophical Quarterly.

Mechanism doesn’t answer the kinds of questions “science vs. religion” types or “God-and-science” types explore. But it does answer questions about how evolution happens.

It happens in a variety of ways.  Sometimes it doesn’t happen (stasis). Sometimes it reverses (devolution). Sometimes there are patterns. Other times, that’s unclear.

It has become a history.

Nowhere is there any reason to believe that Darwin’s claimed mechanism, that massive increases in information somehow happen just because the “fittest” at any given time survive and reproduce, explains anything in particular. And the claimed random creation of high levels of information just does not fit with what we know about the universe we live in.

Darwin’s faithful are thus reduced to endless terminological squabbles about what “stasis” or “primitive” mean.

It keeps us on our toes, and keeps up our site numbers.

Note: Francis Collins has had to walk back his earlier enthusiasm for junk DNA, to support some kind of Christian Darwinism, and Craig Venter doesn’t even put much faith in common descent.

And these guys still have jobs! Goodness! Darwin’s lobby must start calling on Top People for support more often, not?

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Comments
Andre @ 31: And yet his prime example of beta globulin is a fallacy itself and an incredible example of a gene set with remarkable design features. Soon we will find many pseudogenes do in fact possess regulatory functions and then the materialists will maintain this is exactly what we would expect from Darwinian processes.Dr JDD
November 23, 2015
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News: Darwin’s On the Origin of Species is considered by a broad swathe of lay people to be the most influential academic book they know, with very little evidence backing it. You don't seem to have read Origin of Species. If you had, you would discover that Darwin marshals many lines of evidence from many different fields of study. It is certainly reasonable to argue that he is wrong, but it is not reasonable to claim that Darwin didn't rely on evidence to support his theory.Zachriel
November 23, 2015
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Something is bothering Prof Moran........ http://www.sandwalk.blogspot.co.za/2015/11/what-do-pseudogenes-teach-us-about.htmlAndre
November 22, 2015
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I have lurked on this site for a while and am impressed with the articulation of TOE skeptics. While I use my logic & common sense to my advantage, I know there is no definitive and absolute proof but interpretation of the evidence. I am able to sense the just-so stories and everything that I've read tips me in favor of ID. I was hoping to interest someone here to pay a visit to a particular Amazon forum to perhaps engage some of the die hard evolutionists there. This would perhaps be both informative and entertaining as they could use a good challenge from a learned member of UC, if there's any takers here? Cheersnobodys_business
November 22, 2015
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It’s only through the methods of evolutionary biology that many of the results you talk about here are even known.
Well this is a curious statement as it implies that without the evolutionary paradigm much of today's biological scientific findings would not have been made. This is frankly, very incorrect and grossly assumptive.Dr JDD
November 22, 2015
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“Intelligent Design has never been about the evidence.” Says the man who believes that unguided material processes created his brain
Human brain has more switches than all computers on Earth - November 2010 Excerpt: They found that the brain's complexity is beyond anything they'd imagined, almost to the point of being beyond belief, says Stephen Smith, a professor of molecular and cellular physiology and senior author of the paper describing the study: ...One synapse, by itself, is more like a microprocessor--with both memory-storage and information-processing elements--than a mere on/off switch. In fact, one synapse may contain on the order of 1,000 molecular-scale switches. A single human brain has more switches than all the computers and routers and Internet connections on Earth. http://news.cnet.com/8301-27083_3-20023112-247.html The Half-Truths of Materialist Evolution - DONALD DeMARCO - 02/06/2015 Excerpt: but I would like to direct attention to the unsupportable notion that the human brain, to focus on a single phenomenon, could possibly have evolved by sheer chance. One of the great stumbling blocks for Darwin and other chance evolutionists is explaining how a multitude of factors simultaneously coalesce to form a unified, functioning system. The human brain could not have evolved as a result of the addition of one factor at a time. Its unity and phantasmagorical complexity defies any explanation that relies on pure chance. It would be an underestimation of the first magnitude to say that today’s neurophysiologists know more about the structure and workings of the brain than did Darwin and his associates. Scientists in the field of brain research now inform us that a single human brain contains more molecular-scale switches than all the computers, routers and Internet connections on the entire planet! According to Stephen Smith, a professor of molecular and cellular physiology at the Stanford University School of Medicine, the brain’s complexity is staggering, beyond anything his team of researchers had ever imagined, almost to the point of being beyond belief. In the cerebral cortex alone, each neuron has between 1,000 to 10,000 synapses that result, roughly, in a total of 125 trillion synapses, which is about how many stars fill 1,500 Milky Way galaxies! A single synapse may contain 1,000 molecular-scale switches. A synapse, simply stated, is the place where a nerve impulse passes from one nerve cell to another. Phantasmagorical as this level of unified complexity is, it places us merely at the doorway of the brain’s even deeper mind-boggling organization. Glial cells in the brain assist in neuron speed. These cells outnumber neurons 10 times over, with 860 billion cells. All of this activity is monitored by microglia cells that not only clean up damaged cells but also prune dendrites, forming part of the learning process. The cortex alone contains 100,000 miles of myelin-covered, insulated nerve fibers. The process of mapping the brain would indeed be time-consuming. It would entail identifying every synaptic neuron. If it took a mere second to identify each neuron, it would require four billion years to complete the project. http://www.ncregister.com/daily-news/the-half-truths-of-materialist-evolution/ The Puzzling Role Of Biophotons In The Brain - Dec. 17, 2010 Excerpt: In recent years, a growing body of evidence shows that photons play an important role in the basic functioning of cells. Most of this evidence comes from turning the lights off and counting the number of photons that cells produce. It turns out, much to many people’s surprise, that many cells, perhaps even most, emit light as they work. In fact, it looks very much as if many cells use light to communicate. There’s certainly evidence that bacteria, plants and even kidney cells communicate in this way. Various groups have even shown that rats brains are literally alight thanks to the photons produced by neurons as they work.,,, ,,, earlier this year, one group showed that spinal neurons in rats can actually conduct light. ,, Rahnama and co point out that neurons contain many light sensitive molecules, such as porphyrin rings, flavinic, pyridinic rings, lipid chromophores and aromatic amino acids. In particular, mitochondria, the machines inside cells which produce energy, contain several prominent chromophores. The presence of light sensitive molecules makes it hard to imagine how they might not be not influenced by biophotons.,,, They go on to suggest that the light channelled by microtubules can help to co-ordinate activities in different parts of the brain. It’s certainly true that electrical activity in the brain is synchronised over distances that cannot be easily explained. Electrical signals travel too slowly to do this job, so something else must be at work.,,, (So) It’s a big jump to assume that photons do this job. http://www.technologyreview.com/view/422069/the-puzzling-role-of-biophotons-in-the-brain/ Quantum Entangled Consciousness - Life After Death - Stuart Hameroff – video (1:58 minute mark) https://youtu.be/jjpEc98o_Oo?t=117 ,,, zero time lag neuronal synchrony despite long conduction delays - 2008 Excerpt: Multielectrode recordings have revealed zero time lag synchronization among remote cerebral cortical areas. However, the axonal conduction delays among such distant regions can amount to several tens of milliseconds. It is still unclear which mechanism is giving rise to isochronous discharge of widely distributed neurons, despite such latencies,,, Remarkably, synchrony of neuronal activity is not limited to short-range interactions within a cortical patch. Interareal synchronization across cortical regions including interhemispheric areas has been observed in several tasks (7, 9, 11–14).,,, Beyond its functional relevance, the zero time lag synchrony among such distant neuronal ensembles must be established by mechanisms that are able to compensate for the delays involved in the neuronal communication. Latencies in conducting nerve impulses down axonal processes can amount to delays of several tens of milliseconds between the generation of a spike in a presynaptic cell and the elicitation of a postsynaptic potential (16). The question is how, despite such temporal delays, the reciprocal interactions between two brain regions can lead to the associated neural populations to fire in unison (i.e. zero time lag).,,, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2575223/ Component placement optimization in the brain – 1994 As he comments [106], “To current limits of accuracy … the actual placement appears to be the best of all possible layouts; this constitutes strong evidence of perfect optimization.,, among about 40,000,000 alternative layout orderings, the actual ganglion placement in fact requires the least total connection length. http://www.jneurosci.org/content/14/4/2418.abstract "Complexity Brake" Defies Evolution - August 8, 2012 Excerpt: Consider a neuronal synapse -- the presynaptic terminal has an estimated 1000 distinct proteins. Fully analyzing their possible interactions would take about 2000 years. Or consider the task of fully characterizing the visual cortex of the mouse -- about 2 million neurons. Under the extreme assumption that the neurons in these systems can all interact with each other, analyzing the various combinations will take about 10 million years..., even though it is assumed that the underlying technology speeds up by an order of magnitude each year. http://www.evolutionnews.org/2012/08/complexity_brak062961.html
bornagain
November 21, 2015
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I agree with gpuccio @ 20.Mung
November 21, 2015
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Jones:
But you believe your brain is the result of dumb chance and not intelligently designed so your opinion is worth squat.
I like the sound of this. We don't want opinions (which is all that evolution is about). We want real science, not just-so stories from a clueless dirt worshiping cult.Mapou
November 21, 2015
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Understanding biology does not depend on evolutionism. That is because evolutionism cannot account for biology.Virgil Cain
November 21, 2015
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"Intelligent Design has never been about the evidence." But you believe your brain is the result of dumb chance and not intelligently designed so your opinion is worth squat.Jack Jones
November 21, 2015
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Intelligent Design has never been about the evidence. It has always just been about "the Logos theology of John's Gospel restated in the idiom of information theory."Seversky
November 21, 2015
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7 Jack Jones November 20, 2015 at 8:57 pm @5 If it is not relevant then you won’t need to mention that you are an evolutionary biologist again.
. Game, set, match. .cantor
November 21, 2015
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Darwinism has never been about the evidence. It has always been about the atheist/materialist narrative.William J Murray
November 21, 2015
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Guys: If wd400 is an evolutionary biologist, why shouldn't he say it? He states: "I’ve never played a credential-game and claimed that fact I’m an evolutionary biologist makes me right". And I can say that, according to my interactions with him, he is saying the truth. If he values his anonymity, he is certainly entitled to that. I would encourage all to be fair, and engage wd400 (and anybody else) on his ideas. I rarely agree with him, but I have found that he offers his ideas with respect and clarity, and I do consider him a good interlocutor. Just my point of view.gpuccio
November 21, 2015
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I've always wanted to be a Marine Biologist. A noble field. Helpful.ppolish
November 20, 2015
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wd400 is in full spin mode above. I agree;The readers can decide. It is amusing though that you seem to inadvertently doubled down on your original claim. Now you are saying that a person can be completely wrong (in your view) about evolutionary theory and still lead to a successful conclusion one of greatest undertakings in applied biology in the history of the world.Barry Arrington
November 20, 2015
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AMEN. IT is a history. It is not scientific investigation of biological origins. History is intellectual and right to do in origin subjects. Yet the process for biological origins has not yet found its Newton or Einstein. Its still in early stages. Darwin is just aristotle or some later dude who got a few points right but most wrong. Its very hard to investigate past and gone processes and results. All we have is now the result. People have different colours etc etc and so how did biology do this since a creator did not in these things. Post flood. I say ID thinkers and UD should do a better aim at the claims of evolution evidence by examining if fossils are evidence for biology processes. i say they not. Yet ID do embrace geology ideas in order to make the Cambrian point. i think it can be made anyways but geology is being used as biology for evidence. A error.Robert Byers
November 20, 2015
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Well, I'm pretty confident people can click on that link and read my comments and know I didn't say that. I'm curious to know if you really think I did. It's also quite possible to depend on the results/methods of evolutionary biology without understanding much of the theory from which they are built (which was my point about Collins getting junk, HGT and gene counts wrong).wd400
November 20, 2015
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wd400
It’s only through the methods of evolutionary biology that many of the results you talk about here are even known.
Can this be the same wd400 who said that even world famous molecular biologists, including the head of the human genome project, can do their jobs just fine without even knowing anything about evolution, much less depending on it to do their jobs?Barry Arrington
November 20, 2015
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It's funny how Lizzy speaks with such authority, as if her words should be taken at face value and respected because they are coming from a superior being. I got news for you, Ms. dirt worshiper. In the end, you're nothing but a clueless, math-challenged, dirt worshiper and you belong to a [DELETED] cult of other equally clueless dirt worshipers. :-D UDEditors: No profanity.Mapou
November 20, 2015
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Good quotes, Born. I can't stand it when clueless Darwinists falsely lay claim to biology, as if science belonged to them by some invisible genetic right.Mapou
November 20, 2015
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As much as I would like to experiment on you born, it's not allowed. So yes, when he says that our current understanding of biology is dependent on evolution, he's correct. I wouldn't expect you to understand this though.Alicia Cartelli
November 20, 2015
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Much contrary to wd400's claim that,, “It’s only through the methods of evolutionary biology that many of the results you talk about here are even known.” ,, much contrary to that claim, I hold that it is impossible to do biological research without presupposing design on some level. In fact, it is impossible for biologists to describe biology without using words that invoke teleological thinking
The 'Mental Cell': Let’s Loosen Up Biological Thinking! - Stephen L. Talbott - September 9, 2014 Excerpt: Many biologists are content to dismiss the problem with hand-waving: “When we wield the language of agency, we are speaking metaphorically, and we could just as well, if less conveniently, abandon the metaphors”. Yet no scientist or philosopher has shown how this shift of language could be effected. And the fact of the matter is just obvious: the biologist who is not investigating how the organism achieves something in a well-directed way is not yet doing biology, as opposed to physics or chemistry. Is this in turn just hand-waving? Let the reader inclined to think so take up a challenge: pose a single topic for biological research, doing so in language that avoids all implication of agency, cognition, and purposiveness1. One reason this cannot be done is clear enough: molecular biology — the discipline that was finally going to reduce life unreservedly to mindless mechanism — is now posing its own severe challenges. In this era of Big Data, the message from every side concerns previously unimagined complexity, incessant cross-talk and intertwining pathways, wildly unexpected genomic performances, dynamic conformational changes involving proteins and their cooperative or antagonistic binding partners, pervasive multifunctionality, intricately directed behavior somehow arising from the interaction of countless players in interpenetrating networks, and opposite effects by the same molecules in slightly different contexts. The picture at the molecular level begins to look as lively and organic — and thoughtful — as life itself. http://natureinstitute.org/txt/st/org/comm/ar/2014/mental_cell_23.htm
This working biologist agrees with Talbott’s assessment:
Life, Purpose, Mind: Where the Machine Metaphor Fails - Ann Gauger - June 2011 Excerpt: I'm a working biologist, on bacterial regulation (transcription and translation and protein stability) through signalling molecules, ,,, I can confirm the following points as realities: we lack adequate conceptual categories for what we are seeing in the biological world; with many additional genomes sequenced annually, we have much more data than we know what to do with (and making sense of it has become the current challenge); cells are staggeringly chock full of sophisticated technologies, which are exquisitely integrated; life is not dominated by a single technology, but rather a composite of many; and yet life is more than the sum of its parts; in our work, we biologists use words that imply intentionality, functionality, strategy, and design in biology--we simply cannot avoid them. Furthermore, I suggest that to maintain that all of biology is solely a product of selection and genetic decay and time requires a metaphysical conviction that isn't troubled by the evidence. Alternatively, it could be the view of someone who is unfamiliar with the evidence, for one reason or another. But for those who will consider the evidence that is so obvious throughout biology, I suggest it's high time we moved on. - Matthew http://www.evolutionnews.org/2011/06/life_purpose_mind_where_the_ma046991.html#comment-8858161 Denying the Signature: Functional Information Is the Fact to Be Explained - Stephen C. Meyer - November 19, 2015 Excerpt: historian of biology Timothy Lenoir observes, "Teleological thinking has been steadfastly resisted by modern biology. And yet in nearly every area of research, biologists are hard pressed to find language that does not impute purposiveness to living forms."2 http://www.evolutionnews.org/2015/11/denying_the_sig_2101021.html "It has become clear in the past ten years that the concept of design is not merely an add-on meta-description of biological systems, of no scientific consequence, but is in fact a driver of science. A whole cohort of young scientists is being trained to “think like engineers” when looking at biological systems, using terms explicitly related to engineering design concepts: design, purpose, optimal tradeoffs for multiple goals, information, control, decision making, etc. This approach is widely seen as a successful, predictive, quantitative theory of biology." David Snoke*, Systems Biology as a Research Program for Intelligent Design podcast: "David Snoke: Systems Biology and Intelligent Design, pt. 1" http://intelligentdesign.podomatic.com/entry/2014-08-11T17_19_09-07_00 podcast: David Snoke: Systems Biology and Intelligent Design, pt. 2 http://intelligentdesign.podomatic.com/entry/2014-08-13T16_30_01-07_00 How the Burgeoning Field of Systems Biology Supports Intelligent Design - July 2014 Excerpt: Snoke lists various features in biology that have been found to function like goal-directed, top-down engineered systems: *"Negative feedback for stable operation." *"Frequency filtering" for extracting a signal from a noisy system. *Control and signaling to induce a response. *"Information storage" where information is stored for later use. In fact, Snoke observes: "This paradigm [of systems biology] is advancing the view that biology is essentially an information science with information operating on multiple hierarchical levels and in complex networks [13]. " *"Timing and synchronization," where organisms maintain clocks to ensure that different processes and events happen in the right order. *"Addressing," where signaling molecules are tagged with an address to help them arrive at their intended target. *"Hierarchies of function," where organisms maintain clocks to ensure that cellular processes and events happen at the right times and in the right order. *"Redundancy," as organisms contain backup systems or "fail-safes" if primary essential systems fail. *"Adaptation," where organisms are pre-engineered to be able to undergo small-scale adaptations to their environments. As Snoke explains, "These systems use randomization controlled by supersystems, just as the immune system uses randomization in a very controlled way," and "Only part of the system is allowed to vary randomly, while the rest is highly conserved.",,, Snoke observes that systems biology assumes that biological features are optimized, meaning, in part, that "just about everything in the cell does indeed have a role, i.e., that there is very little 'junk.'" He explains, "Some systems biologists go further than just assuming that every little thing has a purpose. Some argue that each item is fulfilling its purpose as well as is physically possible," and quotes additional authorities who assume that biological systems are optimized.,,, http://www.evolutionnews.org/2014/07/when_biologists087871.html Systems Biology as a Research Program for Intelligent Design - David Snoke - 2014 http://bio-complexity.org/ojs/index.php/main/article/viewArticle/BIO-C.2014.3
bornagain
November 20, 2015
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@8 Good quotes Born, Biologists etc get on just fine without evolutionary just so stories.Jack Jones
November 20, 2015
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UDEditors: That did not take long. BD is out for outing other contributers.brian douglas
November 20, 2015
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wd400 claims that "It’s only through the methods of evolutionary biology that many of the results you talk about here are even known." Please don't be bashful. Please do tell us exactly what breakthrough in modern science that evolutionary theory has contributed to that has advanced biological research:
Science owes nothing to Darwinism – Jonathan Wells - video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EfWb8BaXoRc "Certainly, my own research with antibiotics during World War II received no guidance from insights provided by Darwinian evolution. Nor did Alexander Fleming's discovery of bacterial inhibition by penicillin. I recently asked more than 70 eminent researchers if they would have done their work differently if they had thought Darwin's theory was wrong. The responses were all the same: No.,,, In the peer-reviewed literature, the word "evolution" often occurs as a sort of coda to academic papers in experimental biology. Is the term integral or superfluous to the substance of these papers? To find out, I substituted for "evolution" some other word – "Buddhism," "Aztec cosmology," or even "creationism." I found that the substitution never touched the paper's core. This did not surprise me. From my conversations with leading researchers it had became clear that modern experimental biology gains its strength from the availability of new instruments and methodologies, not from an immersion in historical biology." Philip S. Skell - (the late) Emeritus Evan Pugh Professor at Pennsylvania State University, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. http://www.discovery.org/a/2816 "In fact, over the last 100 years, almost all of biology has proceeded independent of evolution, except evolutionary biology itself. Molecular biology, biochemistry, and physiology, have not taken evolution into account at all." Marc Kirschner, Boston Globe, Oct. 23, 2005 "While the great majority of biologists would probably agree with Theodosius Dobzhansky’s dictum that “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution”, most can conduct their work quite happily without particular reference to evolutionary ideas. Evolution would appear to be the indispensable unifying idea and, at the same time, a highly superflous one.” A.S. Wilkins, editor of the journal BioEssays, Introduction to "Evolutionary Processes" - (2000). “Truth be told, evolution hasn’t yielded many practical or commercial benefits. Yes, bacteria evolve drug resistance, and yes, we must take countermeasures, but beyond that there is not much to say. Evolution cannot help us predict what new vaccines to manufacture because microbes evolve unpredictably. But hasn’t evolution helped guide animal and plant breeding? Not very much. Most improvement in crop plants and animals occurred long before we knew anything about evolution, and came about by people following the genetic principle of ‘like begets like’. Even now, as its practitioners admit, the field of quantitative genetics has been of little value in helping improve varieties. Future advances will almost certainly come from transgenics, which is not based on evolution at all.” (Jerry Coyne, “Selling Darwin: Does it matter whether evolution has any commercial applications?,” reviewing The Evolving World: Evolution in Everyday Life by David P. Mindell, in Nature, 442:983-984 (August 31, 2006).) "Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed, but rather evolved. 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 figure out exactly what happened in evolution is even more difficult. Thus evolutionary achievements can 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." Francis Crick - What Mad Pursuit (1988) Darwinian Medicine and Proximate and Evolutionary Explanations – Michael Egnor – neurosurgeon – June 2011 Excerpt: 4) Evolutionary explanations by themselves are worthless to medicine. All medical treatments are based on detailed proximate explanations. http://www.evolutionnews.org/2011/06/darwinian_medicine_and_proxima047701.html Limited role of Darwinism in medicine - May 2, 2014 Excerpt: In eight well-written and thoroughly researched chapters, Ferngren takes the reader from ancient times to the Greco-Roman period, early Christianity, into the Middle Ages and the Islamic world, to the early modern period, and on into the 19th and 20th centuries. The roots of Western medicine, we learn, can be found in the transformative effects of Judeo-Christian traditions. But the story told here is also about the eclipse of those traditions. While it is not a book on or about Darwinism, Ferngren states accurately that “Darwin’s theory did not make a significant contribution to clinical medicine.” https://uncommondescent.com/evolutionary-psychology/limited-role-of-darwinism-in-medicine/
In fact, as to the somewhat minor extent evolutionary reasoning has influenced medical diagnostics, it has led to much ‘medical malpractice’ in the past:
Evolution's "vestigial organ" argument debunked Excerpt: "The appendix, like the once 'vestigial' tonsils and adenoids, is a lymphoid organ (part of the body's immune system) which makes antibodies against infections in the digestive system. Believing it to be a useless evolutionary 'left over,' many surgeons once removed even the healthy appendix whenever they were in the abdominal cavity. Today, removal of a healthy appendix under most circumstances would be considered medical malpractice" (David Menton, Ph.D., "The Human Tail, and Other Tales of Evolution," St. Louis MetroVoice , January 1994, Vol. 4, No. 1). "Doctors once thought tonsils were simply useless evolutionary leftovers and took them out thinking that it could do no harm. Today there is considerable evidence that there are more troubles in the upper respiratory tract after tonsil removal than before, and doctors generally agree that simple enlargement of tonsils is hardly an indication for surgery" (J.D. Ratcliff, Your Body and How it Works, 1975, p. 137). The tailbone, properly known as the coccyx, is another supposed example of a vestigial structure that has been found to have a valuable function—especially regarding the ability to sit comfortably. Many people who have had this bone removed have great difficulty sitting. http://www.ucg.org/science/god-science-and-bible-evolutions-vestigial-organ-argument-debunked/ Vestigial Organs: Comparing ID and Darwinian Approaches - July 20, 2012 Excerpt: A favorite criticisms of ID is that it is a science stopper. The opposite is true. The Live Science article shows that the "vestigial organs" argument has not changed for over a century, since Wiedersheim coined the term and listed over a hundred examples (in 1893). Evolutionary theory, in fact, has been worse than a science stopper: its predictions have been flat out wrong. Only a handful of alleged vestigial organs remains from Wiedersheim's original list, and each of those is questionable. http://www.evolutionnews.org/2012/07/vestigial_organ062281.html
As well, besides evolution being a 'science stopper' throughout the last 90 years with vestigial organs, Darwinian evolution is still currently being a 'science stopper' by its metaphysical insistence on junk DNA see our own Larry Moran and wd400 for prime examples of Darwinists using the 'science stopping' junk DNA argument trying to defend Darwinian claims.bornagain
November 20, 2015
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@5 If it is not relevant then you won't need to mention that you are an evolutionary biologist again. It's not like it is the first time you claimed it. You can pretend to be an evolutionary biologist if it floats your boat but as you claim it is not relevant to making you right, then we should see that you won't be mentioning it anymore.Jack Jones
November 20, 2015
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Maybe they don't have WD-40 where wd400 is from.Mung
November 20, 2015
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I value my anonymity, as do many people online for a variety of good reasons. I've never played a credential-game and claimed that fact I'm an evolutionary biologist makes me right, so I don't it's relevant. If you do, well, I'm sorry to disappoint, but I'm not going to tell you.wd400
November 20, 2015
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Jack Jones, now that you mention it, what IS WD400's name? I keep having this Freudian slip where I picture a can of door hinge oil, but I know it can't be that, so ... so ... ?News
November 20, 2015
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