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Topic: John A. Davison: Correspondence - Do We Have an Evolutionary Theory?
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Moderator
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posted 23. January 2006 14:31
Correspondence: A letter from John A. Davison regarding theories of evolution.
Do We Have an Evolutionary Theory?
Summary: The word theory has several definitions. To facilitate discussion I am going to define theory as follows. A theory sensu strictu is an hypothesis which, having been tested, has achieved a degree of support, thereby enabling it to make certain predictions. When this definition is applied to evolution some curious conclusions emerge.
To read the entire letter, click here.
[ 23. January 2006, 14:32: Message edited by: Moderator ]
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John A. Davison
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posted 28. January 2006 03:32
I take it from the lack of response that all agree with me that indeed we still do not have an evolutionary theory; that all we have are failed and untested hypothesis? The failed ones are Darwinism and Lamarckism. Among the as yet untested ones is the Prescribed Evolutionary Hypothesis which I regard as self-evident anyway based on the exclusion of alternatives. Correct me if you should disagree.
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mark kennedy
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posted 29. January 2006 11:10
There is a reason that Darwinism and it's internal reasoning based on gradualism is untestable, it's substantive, not empirical reasoning. This is one of the biggest problems with subjective/objective duality, particularly in evolutionary biology.
There is a way of measuring natural selection however, the classic synonomous/nonsynonomous ratio KA/KS.
"The KA/KS ratio is a classical measure of the overall evolutionary onstraint on a gene, where KA/KS < 1 indicates that a substantial proportion of amino acid changes must have been eliminated by purifying selection. Under the assumption that synonymous substitutions
are neutral, KA/KS > 1 emplies, but is not a necessary condition for, adaptive or positive selection."
http://www.genome.gov/Pages/Research/DIR/Chimp_Analysis.pdf
What they found was that the protein coding genes were identical in only 29% of the cases. They further found that 77% of the amino acid substitutions were sufficiently deleterious to be eliminated by selection. The prediction of Darwin and Huxley are well known and widely accepted, they are even lauded at the top of this paper. However, when looking at what happens when Amino Acid substitution occur it contradicts their predictions. These are not slight, successive gradual changes like we see in Mendelian genetics.
My suggestion is simply this, find that specific differences in crucial genes and establish the demonstrated effect of changes to them. The Human Genome Project has identified over a million single nucleotide polymorphisms that result in disease and disorder. If evolution happened at the rate required for humans to evolve from apes then why has natural selection stopped preserving beneficial traits?
I don't know if I dragged this off topic or not. I really wanted to suggest the classic ratio as a basis for measuring natural selection. Once you know what the ratio and effects are for specific genes Darwinism becomes testable and altogether falsifiable.
[ 29. January 2006, 11:12: Message edited by: mark kennedy ]
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John A. Davison
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posted 29. January 2006 15:28
I know of not a single demonstrated instance of speciation being produced through artifcial selection and no convincing case of it playing a creative role in nature at the present time. Naturally I have assumed that it never played a role in either speciation or the formation of any of the higher categories in the past either. Leo Berg and Reginald C. Punnett had independently reached the same conclusion long before I did. Like a dog with his bone, the Darwinians continue to adhere to what I regard as a myth. In order to accomplish this they have had to pretend that their critics have never existed. It constitutes a scandal which has become the biggest hoax in the history of science.
I am convinced that evolution is finished and has been at the genus level for at least two million years and at the species level in historical times. All that we see now is extinction with no replacements. I have often asked others to choose any two organisms and produce evidence that one is ancestral to the other. No responses to date and I do not anticipate any. We see not evolution in action but the products of a past, now terminated, evolution. Of that I am convinced and have published as much with the reasons for that conclusion.
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John A. Davison
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posted 21. February 2006 20:22
Let the record show that no one has responded here as elsewhere to my repeated challenge by presenting evidence for a new species appearing from a known parental species in historical times. I say no one can find such an example because such an example does not exist.
How much longer must this madness persist? How much longer can the most failed hypothesis in the history of science continue to persist?
"Never in recorded history have so many owed so little to so many."
After Winston Churchill
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Stephen Wright
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posted 24. February 2006 13:19
quote:
"She argues that inherited variation, significant in evolution, does not come mainly from random mutations. Rather new tissues, organs, and even new species evolve primarily through the long-lasting intimacy of strangers."
-- From L. Margulis’s bio on the U Mass website.
John.
Would you share your thoughts as to Professor Margulis’s theory of symbiogenesis offering a pathway to speciation? While this post is not an assertion that meets your challenge for a specific occurrence in modern times – symbiogenesis may leave the door open to a current or future event.
I’d like to think it falls under the heading of “ain’t love grand” in biology.
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Kazmer Ujvarosy
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posted 24. February 2006 23:52
John, on three points I have to disagree with your otherwise entirely valid criticism of the Darwinian paradigm.
First, you keep an open mind to the possibility that macroevolution played an intimate role in speciation at one time, in spite of the fact that it is not demonstrable today. I assume you believe also that random inanimate processes managed to generate life, in spite of the fact that neither life’s non-existence, nor abiogenesis, has ever been demonstrated. As a matter of fact logically only nonlife could demonstrate to itself that in the total absence of life it indeed has the potential to generate life. Origin-of-life experiments by anything living can only demonstrate what we all know, namely that life comes only and always from life similar to itself.
The point I want to make is that if macroevolution and abiogenesis are not demonstrable today, then we only engage in speculation, not in science. On my part I am convinced that macroevolution and abiogenesis are not demonstrable today because they are simply the figments of the imagination.
Second, in your opinion nature is not subject to experimental control. In my view nature, and what animates nature, are controllable, provided we can identify nature’s output, and find ways to feed back that output to nature's initial input. You may find this incredible, but we have good reasons to propose that nature’s output is human intelligence, and that prayer is a form of information feedback to the initial input, seed, or creator of the universe. By the act of information feedback in the form of prayer we have the potential to influence the actions of our creator -- and, by extension, nature.
In other words, the universe indubitably yields human intelligence, and absolutely no concrete evidence exists that an even higher form of non-human intelligence exists. These solid facts allow us to infer that human intelligence generated the universe for the production of human intelligence in its own image, similarly as a seed generates a tree for the purpose of self-reproduction. Thus the processes attributed to nature are in fact the actions of nature's creator.
Let me add that only the demonstration that at one time no human intelligence existed will convince me that the generation of species is determined by nonhuman and purposeless "natural" selection.
In any case how can selection take place in the total absence of purpose or goal? Selection implies choosing in preference to another or others for some purpose. If there is no purpose, there is no need for selection, be it natural or human. The very act of selection implies a purpose, but Darwin and his disciples irrationally insist that the process of evolution is purposeless. If it is so, what about the struggle for existence, or the survival of the fittest? Isn’t survival a goal? And if the goal of evolution is to survive, then it is most certainly not without purpose.
Third, you are convinced no evidence exists that one organism is ancestral to the other, and I assume you do not anticipate the discovery of a common ancestor. Are you willing to consider the possibility that the initial input, seed, or genotype of the phenotype universe constitutes the common ancestor of all things created? Are you aware that the Apostle Paul in Col. 1:16 identifies Christ as our creator, and teaches that “by Him all things were created, both in the heavens and on earth, visible and invisible, all things have been created by Him and for Him"?
Well, if Christ planted himself in the midst of chaos in order to generate the universe for the production of man in his own image, then he is ancestral to all things created, because he constitutes the cosmic system’s input and output. As he put it in Revelation 22:13, “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end.”
Ultimately the point I want to make is that Darwin wasted his time and energy searching for the origin of species. The origin of all creatures had been disclosed to us a long time ago in the Bible and other ancient cosmologies.
To conclude, contrary to what evolutionists preach repeatedly, the creator of the universe himself testifies that the universe springs from his own oneness, and in the end returns to that oneness. The phase of descent from the creator’s oneness is followed by the phase of ascent back to that oneness. One phase is toward separateness, the other phase is toward oneness. The sequential unfolding of creatures from the creator’s oneness creates the illusion of cosmic evolution from simplicity to complexity, when in fact the universe grows from the most complex body of Christ, i.e., from the initial seed of the universe.
Knowing that the seed of the universe lives eternally, and knowing that all the species that ever lived, live, or shall live, invariably descend from the seed of the universe, I find Darwin’s invention of evolution from a simple beginning amusing. He believed that man evolved from lowly creatures, when in fact our creator personally testifies that the universe originates from his own being. Seeing that any system that yields life is itself the product of no lesser form of life, we can rest assured that our universe that yields human life is the product of no lesser form of life.
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John A. Davison
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posted 25. February 2006 07:39
I do not subscribe to Lynn Margulis' theory of symbiosis because for one thing it cannot or at least has not been verified in the laboratory. More important however, it is not required within the framework of the PEH which postulates that everything was "prescribed" in the beginning anyway. We have in our bodies cells characteristic of all three of the major protozan classes, a ciliated respiratory epithelium, amoeboid white blood cells and flagellated spermatozoa. Are we to infer that these three protozoans got together to form the metazoa? Perhaps some might but I am not one of them.
Thank you for keeping the thread alive. This and my own blog are about the only places left where I can respond in the wonderful world of cyberspace.
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John A. Davison
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posted 25. February 2006 16:53
Kaz
I very definitely do not subscribe to the notion that life at any time arose by chance and I don't see how anyone could ever have made that assumption based on my published works or those of my sources. I do not believe that chance ever played any role in either ontogeny of phylogeny. That is the entire thrust of the PEH. I have rejected every aspect of the Darwinian model as of absolutely no significane to the organic world other than the trivial generation of intraspecific varieties. The entire Darwinian paradigm is a gigantic illusion based on the unwarranted assumption that evolution had an exogenous identifiable cause. Such a cause has never been identified because it never existed. I hope this seves to clarify my position. Thanks for posting.
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John A. Davison
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posted 25. February 2006 17:04
Also I have never maintained that nature is not subject to experimental analysis. My God I am a bench scientist and my entire professionl career has been experimental. My Semi-meiotic hypothesis is testable but has not yet been tested with suitable material. Every bit of experimental science that is emerging today is in complete accord with the PEH and none of it can ever be reconciled with any aspect of either chance or the Darwinian fairy tale, the most discredited hypothesis in the history of science.
Please do not assume what my position actually is as I have made that very clear many times. Science is nothing but the discovery of that which has always been there waiting only to be disclosed.
"Everything is determined... by forces over which we have no control."
Albert Einstein
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Kazmer Ujvarosy
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posted 25. February 2006 17:56
John, you don't see how anyone could ever have made the assumption based on your published works that you believe in abiogenesis -- i.e., in the chance origin of life from nonliving matter. Here is what you wrote in your letter to the Editors: "However, let me say that since macroevolution is not demonstrable today, it remains conceivable that Lamarckian devices could have been of importance, perhaps even of great significance, in the past."
Well, we know that abiogenesis is not demonstrable today, just as macroevolution. Nevertheless in the case of macroevolution you find it conceivable that Lamarckian factors played important roles. It seemed to me that if you find it conceivable, in the total absence of demonstrable evidence, that Lamarckian devices played a major role in organic evolution, then you also find it conceivable, in the total absence of demonstrable evidence, that inanimate factors played important roles in the chance product of life in the past.
In any case I'm glad to hear that you "very definitely do not subscribe to the notion that life at any time arose by chance." Now based on this statement I assume that you very definitely do not subscribe to the notion that Lamarckian devices played any role in the development of organisms.
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Kazmer Ujvarosy
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posted 25. February 2006 18:19
Again you protest, "Also I have never maintained that nature is not subject to experimental analysis." Read what you wrote in your letter, "Do We Have an Evolutionary Theory?":
Central to the Darwinian hypothesis is the notion that Nature does the selecting of that which is essential for evolutionary progress. Of course Nature is not subject to experimental control and so we have had to substitute artificial means of selection to stimulate that which has been assumed to have been the mechanism.
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Kazmer Ujvarosy
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posted 25. February 2006 18:57
John, I agree with you, "The entire Darwinian paradigm is a gigantic illusion ..." What is sequential development from the seed of the universe is seen by Darwin and his victims as purposeless evolution from a simple beginning.
However let me point out that the proposal that what is assumed to be evolution had an exogenous identifiable cause is not at all an unwarranted assumption. As hopefully I made it clear earlier, the seed of the universe is exogenous to the cosmic system it generated, being its input and output. Moreover it has been identified. As Christ disclosed it in Revelation 22:13: "I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end." Stated in contemporary terms, Christ, or his genotype, constitutes the cosmic system's input and output, and created the phenotype universe for the production of human beings in his own image, similarly as a seed creates a tree for the purpose of self-reproduction.
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John A. Davison
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posted 26. February 2006 07:05
Christ's last words were "It is finished." I would like to think that he was referring to evolution but I am very hesitant to let the Christian ethic influence my science in any way. All it does is inflame the atheist Darwinians and as such is definitely counterproductive. None of my sources ever invoked their religious beliefs either. It was not and is not necessary.
Pierre Grasse put it this way:
"Let us not invoke God in realities in which He NO LONGER HAS TO INTERVENE. The single absolute act of creation was enough for Him."
his emphasis
Incidentally, that stands in complete accord with the Prescribed Evolutionary Hypothesis.
Thanks for postimg.
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John A. Davison
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posted 26. February 2006 07:19
Kaz
It was Schindewolf who claimed that evolution could not be studied as an experimental science. If I created the impression that the Prescribed Evolutionary Hypothesis is not subject to experimental verification, I am very sorry. That was certainly not my intent. I have even pointed the way to test it. Furthermore, it it is being verified every day with the publications from the world's laboratories. I am quite content that Darwinism in all its trappings is doomed to imminent oblivion. It should have happened long ago and would have if the Darwinians had not cynically and even diabolically pretended that they never had any critics. The Darwinian fairy tale is the greatest scandal in the history of science.
Thanks for keeping this thread alive.
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