More Denton: Reply to Tony (Introduction)

by dhw, Tuesday, July 21, 2015, 21:32 (3203 days ago) @ Balance_Maintained

Thank you for your detailed reply. I can't come up with any definitive answers, but I'll try to cover the various points you raise. The term “species” is always tricky. We talk of the human species, and then we divide that up into species of humans! Anyway, the Dimanisi form of hominid (sorry, yes, there were five skulls) showed “a fresh combination of features we didn't know before in early Homo”. Doesn't this suggest a different "species" within the "species"? However, I don't see the relevance of this to the issue under discussion, which is the theory of common descent.-TONY: Clear your mind of all Darwinian thoughts of evolution for a moment; pretend you had never heard of the theory at all. If I presented you with 10 human skulls of various sizes and shapes, and 10 Ape skulls of various sizes and shapes, would you believe that the humans were anything other than human, or the apes anything other than apes?-Not a problem, if one set is known to be human and the other ape. But I might have a problem if the skeleton indicated features that made it difficult to classify the creature as ape or human, e.g. bipedalism (the Australopithecines). You yourself later mention the difficulty of “a unified classification”, but I take blurred borderlines as evidence FOR common descent, not against.-TONY: Would you assume that similarity meant direct relation or causation? Would you feel compelled to come up with some unprovable (and thus un-disprovable) family tree that may or may not have existed? I don't believe in gradualism, whether miniscule or by leaps and bounds. So I do not feel the need to speculate and conjecture about things that can not be proven to have even happened. -But you do speculate and conjecture etc., and your Creationist explanation of our origins is equally unprovable. I may never have thought of similarities meaning direct relation or causation, but Darwin's book convinced me of the logic of common descent. That's how we learn from one another! I am sceptical, though, about innovation through random mutations and gradual change. (NB, the theory leaves open the possibility that the process was devised by a Creator, as Darwin said repeatedly).-You criticize the assumption that “speciation can even occur, though it has NEVER been observed.” But that is the problem. Species exist, and nobody knows how. That is why we have as many creation myths as we have cultures. Did anyone observe the events described in Genesis? If life began, say, 3.8 billion years ago, and humans have been around for, say, a million years, and writing began, say, 7000-8000 years ago, it's pretty absurd to imagine that humans have an accurate record of what happened before they arrived. All we have to go on are life as we know it now and the remains of creatures that lived before us. (The same applies to all the traces of the past universe that our instruments can detect.) Of course the findings are open to interpretation, methods of dating are suspect, and we can't always trust science or scientists. But fortunately nowadays we are aware of different interpretations, and there are scientists prepared to challenge other scientists. Equally fortunately, there are similar safeguards in religion and philosophy. The man in the pulpit can no longer proclaim without fear of contradiction that his God created Adam out of dust, and Eve out of Adam's rib.-Ultimately, it all boils down to faith, doesn't it? Who can we trust? As I see it, there is currently no reason for me as a layman to challenge the general consensus among scientists that humans came late on the scene, that the genetic similarities between humans and apes and the admittedly sparse but not non-existent fossil record suggest descent from a common ancestor, and that the patterns David talks of are also evidence that organisms derive from earlier organisms. What I do challenge are what seem to me far more contentious claims about how that descent took place, and how its mechanisms came into existence. (I accept that they MAY have been designed by a Creator.) Again as I see it, you prefer to trust ancient books (mostly anonymous) written, chosen and translated by fallible humans, and which other fallible humans claim to have been inspired by a power for whose existence we have no evidence other than what you have called speculation and conjecture. David is also sceptical about the books, and believes in common descent, but only if the process was organized by a Creator (as allowed for by Darwin). David is certainly more qualified to deal with the science than I am, just as you are more qualified to deal with the theology. But many scientists would disagree with him, and many theologians would disagree with you. All part of life's wonderful diversity! That's why it boils down to who we think we can trust.