

Part I,Dalton and Darwin











[3]  See Genesis; the Evolution of Biology, Jan Sapp, OUP, 2003, pp 117-122

About Paul Braterman


Posted on July 18, 2012, in Charles Darwin, Creationism and tagged , , , , , , , . Bookmark the permalink. 13 Comments.

  1. We know we can change the features of organisms over time (within limits). Dog breeders knew this, botanists knew this, chemists knew this–long before Darwin’s claim that everything came from a common ancestor. Long before he claimed that we cam from apes and, as human beings, “evolve” at different rates.


    • What’s your point here? I mention how Darwin drew on the experience of animal breeders. I don’t see how chemists come into it, and if (as I suspect) you want to attack the science of evolution, the whole point of my article is that you need to do so the way the science is now,not how it was in 1859 or 1871.


      • The thing is Paul, is that there is no fossil evidence desccribing the detail you say exists. There are a minute amount of chains. There should be more intermediary fossils than that of established species and there is not. You will find many variations of adaption granted although a bird remains a bird and soforth. The slow transitional picture most evolutionists speak of does not exist.


      • You have been lied to. We have something like a score of more or less intermediate forms (whether grandparents or great-uncles, we cannot tell, but that’s not the point) just between humans and their common ancestor with other apes. There are something like 19 separate orders, let alone intermediate species, known between modern whales and their terrestrial ancestor; see (free download), and for the proliferation of links elsewhere in the fossil record, see Prothero’s What the Fossils Say and Why it Matters. You might look up the origin of birds there, since that particularly concerns you.


  2. I very much doubt whether Richard Dawkins would object to being classified as a Darwinist or neo-Darwinist: He has often done so in his works.


    • Interesting point, but you have to be a little bit more specific about context. Our present science is a mosaic of Darwinian, post-Darwinian, and now post-neo-Darwinian elements. Does Dawkins accept Darwin’s ideas of common descent, speciation, and natural selection? Yes. Does he imagine that that is all there is to the subject? No. Consider for example what happens after gene doubling, or incorporation of DNA derived from an endogenous retrovirus. The duplication or incorporation are processes not envisaged by Darwin, nor is subsequent genetic drift, but Darwinian selection may kick in if that drift happens to bring the relevant DNA to the point of having a use for which it can be selected.


  3. Indeed, James, you’re getting MY drift (sorry,couldn’t resist). My point. precisely, is that it is as artificial to call present-day evolution science Darwinism as it would be to call present-day molecular science Daltonism. Of course, Creationists do so obsessively; the next posting discusses why they do this, and why the scientific community shouldn’t.


  4. Regarding James and Paul’s discussion, above, about Richard Dawkin’s language use: I have found that British scholars — whether scientists or philosophers of science — tend to use “Darwinism” as a synonym for evolution much more than North American ones. Paul is entirely correct that this usage is confusing a historical set of ideas (what Darwin thought in the 19th C) with a modern, much more fully fleshed-out explanation. This can mislead nonscientist members of the public (and even scientists unfamiliar with evolutionary biology!) into thinking that evolution somehow depends on what Darwin knew back in the 1800s.

    But Brits (Dawkins, Michael Ruse come to mind) I think naturally fall into using that terminology, maybe because Darwin was their guy. Whatever, it’s good to break habits of communication that mis-communicate, which Paul has illustrated very well. And this is independent of whether opponents of evolution use Darwinism as an epithet! So whether you are concerned with antievolutionism or communicating science, it’s best to avoid the term Darwinism as a synonym for evolution. Another take on the same idea is
    Thanks so much, Paul!


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