Hi All,
I have not been ignoring this thread as people might think. I have been busy this weekend as moving into a new flat. Also my internet connection is very slow and makes posting here rather frustrating at the moment - I have lost a number of posts due to my internet connection.
Alceste said
"I don't believe he is a doctor. Or, more specifically, I would rather not believe I might be putting my health in the hands of somebody who rejects the entire science of biology when I go to the hospital or clinic, but in this crazy world I suppose anything is possible. If this guy is a doctor they must be handing out medical degrees like candy in London these days. Thank heavens I moved back home."
Well, where did I throw the "entire science of biology" out?
I worked very hard for my degree in medicine.
Think about my journey through education. I had basic biology teaching at A level suggesting that mutations resulting in small variations over time can lead to speciation and can explain the diversity of life around us. At that time I thought this was entirely plausible.
Then I go to medical school. We had lectures on genetics, with particular attention to mutations - particularly relevant to medicine of course.
At the end of one of the lectures (I forget which one) a question was asked by one of the students, I think he was a Muslim guy. "You have just taught us about many mutations resulting in disease that are currently taking place. Can you name any that are resulting in an improvement?"
The answer (admittedly off the cuff but I am pretty sure he gets this asked a lot) was examples such as sickle cell trait. He then had to go to the world of viruses.
However, the overwhelming impression that I was left with was that mutations that we see in the human population are almost without exception result in early death (miscarriage, neonatal, early childhood) or severe impairment or mild impairment. None that I am aware of in humans result in an improvement.
Therefore, my acceptance of the mechanism of evolution was called into question.
Can you not understand this?
Painted wolf,
"Bacterial evolved resistance to antibiotics and viral evolution (used for predicting the next flu strain) are hot topics in medicine."
I am fully aware of this problem. I see it all the time in my work, that we often have to escalate our antibiotic regimes and there is also a significant variation of antibiotic policies between hospital depending on the strains that each area are experiencing.
However, the viruses are staying viruses. The bacteria are staying bacteria. I am not at all contesting that variation within species is occuring all the time. That is clear cut.
Hence your statement of falsifiability
"Show that allele frequencies in populations do not change over time."
That is merely variation with in species, which I obviously accept.
Noaidi:
"Yes, exactly. Just like any scientific theory, it evolves. Science prides itself in rejecting outmoded or flat outright wrong ideas. If it didn't, we would have all manner of junk to contend with. Being only humans, we are constrained by what we can currently discern. As we progress in terms of technology and ideas, we can modify / reject ideas that are superceded by our current understanding."
I am all in favour of doing this. However, the issue that I am raising is that the mechanism of evolution requires a large period of time to work where small changes over successive generations give rise to a survival benefit that is then selected by environmental changes/stress etc.
This predicted a gradual change and therefore predicted slow change.
The fossil record show no gradual change but sudden appearance of complicated and varied organisms. No gradual change within species over long periods of time.
So the evolutionary theory was modified but the mechanism remains the same.
This is the issue I have with what has happened. In my training as a doctor I came across the overwhelming evidence within a species that mutations result in disease.
Therefore, the improbability of speciation happening quickly resulting in a survival advantage in response to environmental change is such that I think that a modification of the mechanism is required.
Can you see what I am getting at? I think the above is a bit wordy but I think communicates the idea that I am trying to get across.
Back to the thread topic:
I have thought of one area that makes evolution falsifiable:
If the age of the earth was shown to not be millions of years but thousands of years then the theory of evolution would not be able to account for the diversity of species.
Agreed? If the dating of the earth was thousands or tens of thousands of years then evolution would be a redundant theory.
