Antievolution.org - Antievolution.org Discussion Board -Topic::A proposal for discouraging Creationism

DaveRAFinn

Posts: 15
Joined: April 2005

Posted: Aug. 21 2007,05:33

Caution, the following argument assumes at least some slight familiarity with logic. For example, given the following syllogism, you should no difficulty in recognising it as being logically faulty:

All Darwinian evolutionists are mammals.
All donkeys are mammals.

Therefore all Darwinian evolutionists are donkeys.

Many Creationist arguments only gain plausibility because of major deficiencies in evolutionary theory. Remove the deficiencies and their arguments lose plausibility.

There is one common logical error in many presentations of evolutionary theory, and this proposal is directed to that specific error. With a bit of cleaning up the argument can be expressed as:

The patterns of inheritance among fossils and between species shows that species have been produced by an evolutionary mechanism.
Individual variation plus natural selection gives an evolutionary mechanism.

Therefore the evolutionary mechanism that produces species is the evolutionary mechanism formed by individual variation plus natural selection.

The astute reader will recognise this as being a simple variant of the illogical argument with which I introduced this discussion. Indeed many of the more careful of the writers on evolution are careful to avoid this faulty argument. However many accounts of evolution, and much of the discussion in forums like this appear to assume the two evolutionary mechanisms are the same. This is strange since natural variation plus natural selection has been fairly fully explored as neo-Darwinism and is predominantly a fairly slow, gradual, reversible change in the proportions of alleles within populations of species and the evolutionary process that produces new species appears to be an irreversible, saltatory process that adds genes to a genome.

The issue can be settled as there are at least two very distinctive features of the two mechanisms which make it clear that there are two different mechanisms, which cannot be identified as variants of a single mechanism. The first is the appearance of major new families of organisms, such as insects. The neo-Darwinistic mechanisms must proceed according to the sequence:

The appearance of one or a few individuals forming a new family
Proliferation of the species represented by the individual/group.
Divergence of the species.

The actual fossil record in every case indicates a different sequence:

The appearance numerous wildly diverse species in a new family.
Selection of the most promising species within the new family
Divergence from this selection.

It is easy to come up with a natural evolutionary mechanism that will give year zero diversity for a new branch of the evolutionary tree. It is not possible to modify the neo-Darwinian mechanism to achieve such year zero diversity.

The second difference is a simple case of statistics. Consider three populations of a species, one with a thousand members, one with a million and one with a billion. Whatever mechanisms one assumes for natural individual variation it is obvious that however many genetic variants arise within a thousand individuals in a year the number will be a thousand times greater for a population of a million and a million times as great for a population of a billion. Moreover variants do not last forever and usually eventually become predominant or dropped. If it takes a thousand years to resolve a gene as dominant/lost in a population it will typically take 2 thousand years for a population of a million and 3 thousand for a population of a billion ? so variant genes hang about for longer in large populations. Also, for any characteristic of the species a population of a thousand will have most of its members near the average with only a few individuals found at two standard deviations from the norm. The population of a million will have a few thousand members at two standard deviations from the norm and even a few at four standard deviations. The population of a billion will have a few million at two standard deviations, a few thousand at four standard deviations and even a few at six standard deviations. This comparison can be extended out to species with populations of trillions of trillions.

In the event of a change in the environment which of these populations will be most likely to have a variant group able to survive in the new conditions? Obviously the larger population ? it covers a far greater ?gene space?. This gives a definitive statistical test for evolutionary mechanisms based on individual variation. For any reasonably large sample of species produced by individual variation (and we have a sample in the millions) when, for each species, you look at the immediately preceding species in the evolutionary sequence it will, on average, be one of the most numerous species of its cohort. The actual pattern produced by the natural species-producing mechanism could hardly be more different ? hardly any species are directly descended from any of the most populous thousand species and the majority are descended from a species not even in the most populous million of species. This bit of statistics makes it absolutely certain that the majority of species are not produced by any evolutionary mechanism using natural individual variation as its source of genetic change. Basically neo-Darwinism is a lottery with the individual as the ticket, and observation shows that far too many species are winning descendant species than is accounted for by their ticketholding.

So this is my simple proposal:

Stop making the daft claim that all species are produced by neo-Darwinian evolution ? hardly any are. Research and write up both mechanisms and make it clear which mechanism has what effect (to a first approximation neo-Darwinism is alleles and tuning, the other is gene addition and new species formation). You are left with an evolutionary theory without the gaping holes by which Creationists obtain credibility.

From the point of view of most of my readers there will be one significant objection to this proposal. Few, if any, of you will have the slightest idea how the second evolutionary mechanism works. Be brave, have a go at working out how the second mechanism works. There may even be more than one answer. Some comments from my own analysis: First the good news, it is actually a simple mechanism that can be reasonably easily seen, demonstrated and understood. You quite probably already know all that is necessary to understand it. It provides natural explanations for most of the problem areas in evolution and the arithmetic gives the correct answers. Second, the bad news, it has, apart from being a natural evolutionary mechanism, absolutely no resemblance whatsoever to neo-Darwinism. This is hardly surprising as the driving source of genetic change is not, and cannot be, individual variation. This means that if you maintain a ?drowning man? grip on examples, principles and rules which work for (but only for) neo-Darwinian evolutionary mechanisms then you will have extreme difficulty in understanding the species producing mechanism.

If you can?t find an answer, or wish to check if yours is the same as mine, check out www.nsof.co.nz.

IanBrown_101

Posts: 927
Joined: April 2007

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