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Author
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Topic: I am an ID evolutionist
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Bruce Fast
Member
Member # 924
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posted 10. March 2006 12:56
As I am sure most who participate in Brainstorms are, I am frustrated with the "ID creationist" label.
While anyone who knows me knows, there is some truth in the label for me. I, unlike many in the ID commumity, am protestant Christian. Which is to say that I fit the mould of ID Creationist better than many IDers do. However, I am far from being a young earther. I do not believe that a special creation event happened for each species. In fact, I believe that at most one special creation event happened to create life. I am, however, prepared to consider that saltations happened along the way. If a designer takes an organism that he has made, and adds some genetic code creating a new organism, have we really lost common descent? I think not. Organism 2 is "built upon" organism 1. Organism 1 is Organism 2's ancestor.
I recently read "The Meanings of Evolution"
by Meyer and Keas In this document they present 6 definitions of evolution:
1. Change over time; history of nature; any sequence of events in nature.
2. Changes in the frequencies of alleles in the gene pool of a population.
3. Limited common descent: the idea that particular groups of organisms have descended from a common ancestor.
4. The mechanisms responsible for the change required to produce limited descent with
modification; chiefly natural selection acting on random variations or mutations.
5. Universal common descent: the idea that all organisms have descended from a single
common ancestor.
6. Blind watchmaker thesis: the idea that all organisms have descended from common
ancestors through unguided, unintelligent, purposeless, material processes such as natural
selection acting on random variations or mutations; the idea that the Darwinian mechanism
of natural selection acting on random variation, and other similarly naturalistic mechanisms,
completely suffice to explain the origin of novel biological forms and the appearance of
design in complex organisms.
By definition 1,2,3 and 5 I am an evolutionist.
When I dialog on discussion boards, I frequently have to help the people in the evolution camp to understand what ID is. Their view of ID is often crouded by the "creationist" label.
I therefore propose that even for those of us who are Jodeo/Christian, even for those who also add the excercise of trying to harmonize the Bible with nature, we actively refer to ourselves as ID evolutionists. I think, for those of us who can, that we clearly attest to common descent.
This is my proposed little war against the "creationist" label.
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John A. Davison
Member
Member # 1425
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posted 10. March 2006 13:53
Change of allelic frequency with time has and had nothing to do with creative evolution. The accumulation of deleterious genes may have played a role in extinction but had nothing to do with creative evolution. If it did it could be demonstrated experimentally. All attempts to transform species through the selection of allelic mutants have failed. To accept that as a criterion for evolution is without foundation.
"A cluster of facts makes it very plain that Mendelian, allelomorphic mutation plays no part in creative evolution. It is, as it were, a more or less pathological fluctuation in the genetic code. It is an accident on the 'magnetic tape' ON WHICH THE PRIMARY INFORMATIOJ IS RECORDED."
Pierre Grasse, Evolution of Living Organisms, page 243 (my emphasis)
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Bruce Fast
Member
Member # 924
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posted 10. March 2006 15:16
Dr. Davison
quote:
Change of allelic frequency with time has and had nothing to do with creative evolution.
I agree, I cannot see any way that change of allelic frequency has anything to do with "creative" evolution. However, change of allelic frequency surely happens. As the term "evolution" has been used as a synomym for "change", well, it's "change".
Bottom line, you present the PEH. By definition, you are an evolutionist. PEH presumes upon a designer, (though I wonder if that presumption might be immature) therefore it is ID. So I would think that you are an ID evolutionist. I think that you subscribe to definition 5, universal common descent, do you not?
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kyle7
Member
Member # 191
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posted 18. April 2006 23:15
I find the notion of the ID evolutionist oxymoronic. Either you believe in an act of creation (some version similar) or you don't. The ID evolutionists typically do believe that a Creator built the intelligence in the physics, necessitating the origin of life. So why do these ID proponents want to distance themselves from their creationist beliefs?
Creationists are treated as ignorant boobs by the scientific establishment so "ID evolutionists" want to maintain some respectability. But this allows the straight jacket to stay on which prohibits the possibility that an Intelligent Designer had a role in creation -- a bias that has profound scientific consequences.
I don't agree that physics necessitates evolution. Thermodynamics just doesn't allow it. Although, the mainline thermodynamic community is trying to rationalize thermodynamics with evolution, their progress has been abysmal. Essentially, they make tremendous leaps without any scientific detail. A simple bifurcating system does not compare to life.
Biologists and others studying evolution are looking at a black box without understanding the details that explain what is happening. When they see evolution an equally rational explanation is Design. Complex nanomachines are actually intelligently adapting as the environment necessitates. Rather than being some random or semi-random process of mutation coupled with adaptation, there is an intelligence programmed at the molecular level.
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Bruce Fast
Member
Member # 924
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posted 19. April 2006 00:15
Kyle7: quote:
I find the notion of the ID evolutionist oxymoronic.
quote:
Creationists are treated as ignorant boobs by the scientific establishment...
Kyle7, you make my point well. You haven't considered the definition of evolution that I provided. I am, for instance, quite convinced of common descent (with possible saltations, but even these saltations are surely code injected into a pre-existing organism -- common desent.) Common descent has been the cornerstone definition of evolution. I find it reasonable for anyone who recognizes common descent to claim the title of evolutionist.
John Davison defines his hypothesis as the "prescribed evolutionary hypothesis" Davison is hardly a neo-Darwinist. If I understand his view correctly, he sees that the variety of life that exists on earth grew just as a complex organism like yourself grows. It followed the growth instructions laid out for it from its birth, bouncing through the maise of historical events such as asteroid strikes just as you bounced through the maise of your life's experience. Yet life followed a fairly predictable pre-ordained course. If Davison is right, then there were no saltations, common descent fully occurred, just as you migrated through childhood, into adolescence and arrived in adulthood. Davison is clearly an evolutionist by the "common descent" definition.
Anyway, thanks for keeping the post alive and spurring on debate.
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