If Darwin or the FBI had less than 15% of the data for a case

[Subduction Zone]

Mountains of evidence for variation within the same species.

So you don't know what is and what is not evidence.

Would you like to learn?

 

[QuestioningMind]

The scientific method doesn’t work on a bunch of anecdotal evidence that cannot be examined to start with, and there barely is enough funding to examine in the first place, let alone re-examine stuff that was never and cannot be examined to start with.

There is FAR more verifiable evidence foe the ToE than there is evidence for the theory that the Earth orbits the sun. You really ought to educate yourself on the subject before making ridiculous claims.

 

[Augustus]

All this is fine and good, but it does relate to Darwin nor the science of evolution except for the misuse of science.

What do you think qualifies it as 'misuse'? And why does it not relate to the science of evolution?

 

[shunyadragon]

What do you think qualifies it as 'misuse'? And why does it not relate to the science of evolution?

If I misuse science it does not qualify as a legitimate relation. That would be the same as Answers in Genesis uses science to justify Creationism is a legitimate relationship to the science of evolution, and it is not.

 

[Guy Threepwood]

Never?

Interestingly Darwin himself in his original edition spoke of virtually all eminent scientists disagreeing with him and so Darwin would be the first to say you should not make the current scientific consensus the bar of truth

and yes there are myriad problems with Darwin. Animals symbiosis together being just one of many which he admitted another being social Darwinism which he was a proponent and most people recognize as flawed

In the end, survival of the fittest doesn't explain the arrival of the fittest. It just doesn't

True.

And Darwin was very open about potential problems with the theory, in a way which followers 150 years later are not, even after many of Darwin's own doubts have been confirmed

So by his own standards I think he would be a skeptic today, & certainly not afraid of offending the peer pressure review system!

 

[Augustus]

My impression is that he believed "savage" to be judgment about the present cultural state of a population, not about genetic inferiority. After some comments about the face painting and (lack of) clothing of the natives of South America, he added "such were we, once" (or something like that), where "we" refers to God's Englishmen. Obviously then he didn't think that "savagery" was an inborn and unalterable inheritance.

His views often seem a bit contradictory at times to me. I have to admit that I've only flicked through the text mostly regarding his discussions of Galton and Spencer though so I don't pretend to know the whole picture.

He does seem to believe in 'superior' and 'inferior' genetic stock, although not necessarily based on reified concepts of race or racial superiority.

With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilised men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.

Then you get passages like this:

The belief that there exists in man some close relation between the size of the brain and the development of the intellectual faculties is supported by the comparison of the skulls of savage and civilised races, of ancient and modern people, and by the analogy of the whole vertebrate series. Dr. J. Barnard Davis has proved70 by many careful measurements, that the mean internal capacity of the skull in Europeans is 92·3 cubic inches; in Americans 87·5; in Asiatics 87·1; and in Australians only 81·9 inches. Professor Broca71 found that skulls from graves in Paris of the nineteenth century, were larger than those from vaults of the twelfth century, in the proportion of 1484 to 1426; and Prichard is persuaded that the present inhabitants of Britain have "much more capacious brain-cases" than the ancient inhabitants. Nevertheless it must be admitted that some skulls of very high antiquity, such as the famous one of Neanderthal, are well developed and capacious.

Followed by:

But the most weighty of all the arguments against treating the races of man as distinct species, is that they graduate into each other, independently in many cases, as far as we can judge, of their having intercrossed. Man has been studied more carefully than any other organic being, and yet there is the greatest possible diversity amongst capable judges whether he should be classed as a single species or race, or as two (Virey), as three (Jacquinot), as four (Kant), five (Blumenbach), six (Buffon), seven (Hunter), eight (Agassiz), eleven (Pickering), fifteen (Bory St. Vincent), sixteen (Desmoulins), twenty-two (Morton), sixty (Crawfurd), or as sixty-three, according to Burke.17 This diversity of judgment does not prove that the races ought not to be ranked as species, but it shews that they graduate into each other, and that it is hardly possible to discover clear distinctive character between them.


The totality of his views certainly don't seem possible to do justice to with cherry picked quotations. If you were so inclined you could make him sound quite enlightened or you could make him sound awful. His views clearly overlap, at times, with eugenicists and Social Darwinists, yet he was not an advocate for either of these seemingly based on his moral principles.

His views are certainly pretty complex and nuanced, it's quite an interesting subject though.

 

[Laughing Coyote]

For example at the time of the association of John Kennedy, the FBI had about 15% of the information for the case that exists today. Does that warrant a fresh look or reexamination

And by the same token, since Darwin had less that 15% of the mammal species to examine and no genetic information or theory to go on, does that warrant a fresh look or reexamination?

Not only are you making false analogies, you are setting up a red herring, as usual. Making "fresh examination" is the very basis of science. There have been probably millions of fresh examinations of every element of Darwin's work, and fresh examinations of these fresh examinations, and so on continuing into the present by scientists, philosophers, historians, etc. for the last century and a half. Darwin himself made fresh examination of the work of geologists, biologists, philosophers and others at his time. I might suggest trying to understand not just the particular topic of science one wishes to criticize, but the nature of science itself, if one wishes to make a useful contribution.

 

[Augustus]

If I misuse science it does not qualify as a legitimate relation. That would be the same as Answers in Genesis uses science to justify Creationism is a legitimate relationship to the science of evolution, and it is not.

Eugenics is not comparable to 'scientific' creationism though. One is basically religious apologetics, whereas the other relates to proven concepts used on other animals, and (at least in the past) was supported by many genuine biologists from across the religious and political spectrum.

While the ethics are certainly questionable, and it is possible that the science was misused at times, it certainly isn't all bunk.

 

[Subduction Zone]

True.

And Darwin was very open about potential problems with the theory, in a way which followers 150 years later are not, even after many of Darwin's own doubts have been confirmed

So by his own standards I think he would be a skeptic today, & certainly not afraid of offending the peer pressure review system!

You could not be more wrong about those problems.

You are either completely ignorant about them or totally dishonest. Bring up these problems that he mentioned one at a time and I will gladly explain to you whether they have been solved or not.

 

[Guy Threepwood]

You could not be more wrong about those problems.

You are either completely ignorant about them or totally dishonest. Bring up these problems that he mentioned one at a time and I will gladly explain to you whether they have been solved or not.

sticks and stones...

 

[Subduction Zone]

sticks and stones...

Please, not sticks and stones. You were either lying or you are totally ignorant about the topic. I offered to help you to understand. Lying about me indicates that you know that you were lying. An honest person would discuss the topic and learn from his errors.

 

[Guy Threepwood]

Mountains of evidence for variation within the same species.

True, beyond that we find mountains of extrapolated assumptions, artistic impressions, along mountains of excuses for why the actual evidence for them never showed up.

 

[Laughing Coyote]

True.

And Darwin was very open about potential problems with the theory, in a way which followers 150 years later are not, even after many of Darwin's own doubts have been confirmed

So by his own standards I think he would be a skeptic today, & certainly not afraid of offending the peer pressure review system!

One issue with this statement is that the problems which worried Darwin have been largely solved by subsequent work. One example, which was basically solved even in his time, was the question of how mutations might be passed across generations without being watered down. This was already solved by the Augustinian monk Gregor Mendel's work on the transfer of inheritance. This work never came to Darwin's attention because the scientists of the time could make no sense of the paper when it was presented to them. Much of Darwin's work, particularly with human evolution, extended speculatively beyond what knowledge was available to Darwin at his time. There are whole new disciplines and a vast amounts of new material that Darwin did not even imagine, from geology to microbiology, carbon dating, molecular biology, high energy physics, anthropology and archaeology, to say nothing of genetics. There are problems now, of course, since the full complexity of the world can never be known, but not with the theory as a whole.

True to your last sentence, despite his limitations, Darwin is a difficult act to follow. But as Karl Popper, and not to mention Alfred Whitehead earlier pointed out in different words, science like all human culture including religion is always limited by paradigms and premises which involve prejudices. After all it is being done by humans whose interaction of the world even as scientists is mediated by particular cultural-historical frameworks. But when paradigms are overcome people are led to new breakthroughs that brought revolutionary changes not just in thought but society. And new problems. Some examples were the earth-centered universe, Newtonian concept of the universe, and so forth. But even Einstein didn't overthrow gravity, what he did was to lead to an understanding of gravity as displacement of time and space rather than mass attracting mass. Things still fall but our understand of how they fall is different, with far-reaching implications.

My feeling is that the big paradigm shift in evolution will be from a species-centered focus to planetary evolution being the important thing. To understand it will require changing how we humans relate to our planet as a species. Perhaps it is something we will never overcome. But if we humans are to survive for a reasonable length of time as a species we had better come to terms with it before we totally trash it and everything living on it. We depend on it, all of it.

 

[Guy Threepwood]

The Captain of the HMS Beagle, Robert FitzRoy, captured 3 people from Tierra del Fuego (South America) and took them back to England (although not for taxidermy). Darwin met them on board the Beagle.



The Descent of Man is full of talk about "savage" and "civilised" races though. To be fair, the discussion is a bit more nuanced than the crude racialism being projected. While it not surprising that he was very much a man of his time and some of his views sound horrifically racist compared to modern PC norms, he often spoke quite compassionately about those he encountered and some of his views regarding them could probably have been considered at least relatively progressive for their time.

Voyage of the Beagle is a very interesting read- on natives, I think he reflects the views of Cook and many other European explorers, he doesn't lump them all together. there were many different cultures. Some more advanced, some understood mutually beneficial trade which was great, explorers generally did not want a fight. But some only wanted to steal from, and literally eat their enemies- and it would be difficult for any of us to witness and comment on that, without being horrified and disparaging of the entire culture

"relatively progressive for their time"
But the idea of the stereotypical 'noble savage' is not new either, it was very common then among journalists, academics, many who never boarded a ship in their lives, to believe that all natives were fundamentally pure of heart, being corrupted and taken advantage of by selfish explorers. The truth was a little more complicated..

 

[Guy Threepwood]

One issue with this statement is that the problems which worried Darwin have been solved by subsequent work. One example, which was basically solved even in his time, was the question of how mutations might be passed across generations without being watered down. This was already solved by the Augustinian monk Gregor Mendel's work on the transfer of inheritance. This work never came to Darwin's attention because the scientists of the time could make no sense of the paper when it was presented to them. Much of Darwin's work, particularly with human evolution, extended speculatively beyond what knowledge was available to Darwin at his time. There are whole new disciplines and a vast amount of new material that Darwin did not even imagine, from geology to microbiology, carbon dating, molecular biology, high energy physics, anthropology and archaeology, to say nothing of genetics. There are problems now, of course, since the full complexity of the world can never be known, but not with the theory as a whole.

Yes, he acknowledged problems that were merely 'potential' at the time like the Cambrian explosion, but predicted, as crucial to the theory, that such gaps were mere artifacts of an incomplete record, to be filled in over time.
In contrast the gaps, jumps, sudden appearances have become ever more abrupt and well defined- hence splinter groups like punctuated equilibrium.

More importantly, accounting for the diversity of life by undirected processes, began with the assumption of the cell being as it appeared in his microscope; a relatively simple blob of 'protoplasm', which could presumably be accounted for by simple chemical mixing

he could never have dreamed of nano-machines processing digital code, or contemplate the creation of the nested hierarchical information systems necessary to underwrite the whole thing - i.e. the problems have become far greater, more complex. not simpler/lesser, and so along with the amount of speculative assumptions required.

True to your last sentence, despite his limitations, Darwin is a difficult act to follow. But as Karl Popper, and not to mention Alfred Whitehead earlier pointed out in different words, science always is limited by paradigms and premises which involve prejudices. After all it is being done by humans whose interaction of the world even as scientists is mediated by particular cultural-historical frameworks. But when paradigms are overcome people are lead to new breakthroughs that brought revolutionary changes not just in thought but society. Some examples were the earth-centered universe, Newtonian concept of the universe, and so forth. But even Einstein didn't overthrow gravity, what he did was to lead to an understanding of gravity as displacement of time and space rather than mass attracting mass. Things still fall but our understand of how they fall is different, with far-reaching implications.

Yes, before quantum mechanics, all physical reality was though to be accounted for, by a handful of simple 'immutable' laws, which given enough time and space for random interaction, would produce all the wonders of physical reality eventually- sound familiar? This is the model of reality in which Darwin shaped his theory- it was a perfectly logical extrapolation at the time.

But we cannot explain evolution through adaptation, any more than we can explain gravity through classical physics, both are design features of reality, not design mechanisms, both face the same ultimate paradox when we try to extrapolate these superficially observable processes into a comprehensive 'self explanation'- tempting as maybe

My feeling is that the big paradigm shift in evolution will be from a species-centered one to planetary evolution being the important thing. To understand it will require changing how we humans relate to our planet as a species. Perhaps it is something we will never overcome, and if we humans are to survive for a reasonable length of time as a species we had better come to terms with it before we totally trash it and everything living on it. We depend on it, all of it.

Agreed, from a larger perspective we are playing an important role in the continuation of life on Earth.

During the Cambrian, plants enjoyed levels of 7000+ ppm CO2, but over millions of years they consumed and buried this vital resource, reducing it to a near starvation level of a scant 270, helping open up vast deserts across the globe which used to be lush. We are recycling a tiny fraction of this nutrient back into the atmos, extending the potential life span of the entire biosphere

Was this part of the plan? even our primary function here? who knows

 

[Set Free]

If there were any record of Darwin doing anything at all resembling this, it would have been endlessly trumpeted by anti-Darwin/anti-evolution authors. It would have become far, far more notorious than the quote about the "savage races" being on the route to extinction, which itself is cited religiously by such authors. (If I told you that Donald Trump was on record recommending the nuclear annihilation of Mecca, would you need to know him personally, or even have any faith in his character, to conclude -- correctly -- that this had to be an invention?)

There are records of testimonies from human beings that Darwin wasn’t the stand-up citizen projected in the present. First off, I’m not anti-evolution. Second off, even if Darwin was not of perfect morale, it doesn’t mean that he was wrong about everything that he said. Third, humans evolved the nature of lying, capability of deception, acting, artificially changing what may be true or false, about records of history, evolved the biased tendency to project their heroes as nearly perfect that they agree with and project their non-heroes as “religious” or some other unsound judgement. Fourth, Donald, as all humans do, are capable of saying stuff in a joking or sarcastic manner, where also humans are capable of reading more into meaningless words than what may have actually been said. It also doesn’t mean that Donald is incapable of saying anything that isn’t accurate or that he has no morale. Any bias leads to social Darwinism. Do you place anti-Darwin/anti-evolutionists into a social class and evolutionists/Darwinists into a social class?

I conclude, with no bias, that I did not personally know Charles and what I do know about the actual reality of human nature is that it tends to be biased and selfish.

 

[Set Free]

So you don't know what is and what is not evidence.

Would you like to learn?

What is evidence and what is not evidence according to Subduction Zone?

 

[shunyadragon]

Many think that the standard evolutionary theory needs re-examined.

Standard? Who? The scientists in the fields involving evolution are constantly re-examining the evidence. I do not believe there are many scientists in the fields that deal with evolution seriously question the science, I am a geologist and in the years I have been looking there are less than 20 world wide, and almost all work with Answers in Genesis and the Discovery Institute.

What is your point?

 

[Set Free]

There is FAR more verifiable evidence foe the ToE than there is evidence for the theory that the Earth orbits the sun. You really ought to educate yourself on the subject before making ridiculous claims.

Do you demand that your opinions and judgements be true or do have substance we can actually discuss in an honest and intellectual manner?

 

[shunyadragon]

Unless you’re going around having sex with as many people as possible to pass down your genes and have as many offspring as possible, you’re unfit to explain a theory that excludes your reality yet makes you a product of it.

Huh!?!?!?!!?