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What are your thoughts on the scientific theory of Evolution?

SpikeTalon 10 Feb 19
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1

I believe that the concept of evolution goes far beyond the biological theory. I have always maintained that capitalism is essentially the economic equivalent to evolution. It is not an economic system, it is the natural flow of an economy without a system. This concept permeates almost all fields of study, so I would say that evolution is merely the biological component of a much larger "natural order" for lack of a better term.

Well stated, I agree.

Takk!

Absolutely well put! Everything is hierarchy. Biology, economics, all of science, even Truth itself. I am like you and I see Darwinism in almost everything. The shape of reality is hierarchical.

@BossPig it warms my heart to know I'm not alone in what most people consider madness. 🙂

@Pre-Modernist hahaha I have yet to figure out how to explain this to normal people without sounding like a lunatic... sometimes I do think it's madness.

@BossPig I understand completely!

A proof or disproof is a kind of a transaction. There is no such thing as absolutely proving or disproving something; there is only such a thing as proving or disproving something to SOMEBODY'S satisfaction. If the party of the second part is too thick or too ideologically committed to some other way of viewing reality, then the best proof in the world will fall flat and fail.

In the case of evolution, what you have is a theory which has been repeatedly and overwhelmingly disproved over a period of many decades now via a number of independent lines reasoning and yet the adherents go on with it as if nothing had happened and, in fact, demand that the doctrine be taught in public schools at public expense and that no other theory of origins even ever be mentioned in public schools, and attempt to enforce all of that via political power plays and lawsuits.

At that point, it is clear enough that no disproof or combination of disproofs would ever suffice, that the doctrine is in fact unfalsifiable and that Carl popper's criteria for a pseudoscience is in fact met.

The educated lay person is not aware of how overwhelmingly evolution has been debunked over the last century.

The following is a minimal list of entire categories of evidence disproving evolution:

The decades-long experiments with fruit flies beginning in the early 1900s. Those tests were intended to demonstrate macroevolution; the failure of those tests was so unambiguous that a number of prominent scientists disavowed evolution at the time.

The discovery of the DNA/RNA info codes (information codes do not just sort of happen...)

The fact that the info code explained the failure of the fruit-fly experiments (the whole thing is driven by information and the only info there ever was in that picture was the info for a fruit fly...)

The discovery of bio-electrical machinery within 1-celled animals.

The question of irreducible complexity.

The Haldane Dilemma. That is, the gigantic spaces of time it would take to spread any genetic change through an entire herd of animals.

The increasingly massive evidence of a recent age for dinosaurs. This includes soft tissue being found in dinosaur remains, good radiocarbon dates for dinosaur remains (blind tests at the University of Georgia's dating lab), and native American petroglyphs clearly showing known dinosaur types.

The fact that the Haldane dilemma and the recent findings related to dinosaurs amount to a sort of a time sandwich (evolutionites need quadrillions of years and only have a few tens of thousands).

The dna analysis eliminating neanderthals and thus all other hominids as plausible human ancestors.

The total lack of intermediate fossils where the theory demands that the bulk of all fossils be clear intermediate types. "Punctuated Equilibria" in fact amounts to an attempt to get around both the Haldane dilemma and the lack of intermediate fossils, but has an entirely new set of overwhelming problems of its own...

The question of genetic entropy.

The obvious evidence of design in nature.

The arguments arising from pure probability and combinatoric considerations.

Here's what I mean when I use the term "combinatoric considerations"...

The best illustration of how stupid evolutionism really is involves trying to become some totally new animal with new organs, a new basic plan for existence, and new requirements for integration between both old and new organs.

Take flying birds for example; suppose you aren't one, and you want to become one. You'll need a baker's dozen highly specialized systems, including wings, flight feathers, the specialized system which allows flight feathers to pivot so as to open on upstrokes and close to trap air on downstrokes (like a venetian blind), a specialized light bone structure, specialized flow-through design heart and lungs, specialized tail, specialized general balance parameters etc.

For starters, every one of these things would be antifunctional until the day on which the whole thing came together, so that the chances of evolving any of these things by any process resembling evolution (mutations plus selection) would amount to an infinitessimal, i.e. one divided by some gigantic number.

In probability theory, to compute the probability of two things happening at once, you multiply the probabilities together. That says that the likelihood of all these things ever happening, best case, is ten or twelve such infinitessimals multiplied together, i.e. a tenth or twelth-order infinitessimal. The whole history of the universe isn't long enough for that to happen once.

All of that was the best case. In real life, it's even worse than that. In real life, natural selection could not plausibly select for hoped-for functionality, which is what would be required in order to evolve flight feathers on something which could not fly apriori. In real life, all you'd ever get would some sort of a random walk around some starting point, rather than the unidircetional march towards a future requirement which evolution requires.

And the real killer, i.e. the thing which simply kills evolutionism dead, is the following consideration: In real life, assuming you were to somehow miraculously evolve the first feature you'd need to become a flying bird, then by the time another 10,000 generations rolled around and you evolved the second such reature, the first, having been disfunctional/antifunctional all the while, would have DE-EVOLVED and either disappeared altogether or become vestigial.

Now, it would be miraculous if, given all the above, some new kind of complex creature with new organs and a new basic plan for life had ever evolved ONCE.

Evolutionism, however (the Theory of Evolution) requires that this has happened countless billions of times, i.e. an essentially infinite number of absolutely zero probability events.

I ask you: What could be stupider than that?

Fruit flies breed new generations every few days. Running a continuous decades-long experiment on fruit flies will involve more generations of fruit flies than there have ever been of anything resembling humans on Earth. Evolution is supposed to be driven by random mutation and natural selection; they subjected those flies to everything in the world known to cause mutations and recombined the mutants every possible way, and all they ever got was fruit flies.

Richard Goldschmidt wrote the results of all of that up in 1940, noting that it was then obvious enough that no combination of mutation and selection could ever produce a new kind of animal.

There is no excuse for evolution to ever have been taught in schools after 1940.

1

Evolution is an observed fact. The "theory" explains, or attempts to explain, the process(es) by which evolution occurs.

An observed fact?

@Xtra Affirmative.

0

Thoughts?

2

It depends on what you mean by evolutionary theory. If you mean the changes in species over time, we can observe that much. If you mean the origins of life, I find evolution to be a wholly inadequate explanation.

0
1

It's incomplete and still called a theory for a reason

It's a 'theory' in the scientific sense only; as follows:
'The meaning of the term scientific theory (often contracted to theory for brevity) as used in the disciplines of science is significantly different from the common vernacular usage of theory. In everyday speech, theory can imply an explanation that represents an unsubstantiated and speculative guess, whereas in science it describes an explanation that has been tested and widely accepted as valid.'

3

The official narrative is deeply flawed.

2

Evolution is a theory in the scientific sense (as alluded to in the question) i.e. a hypothesis that works, is a powerful explanation, and has a host of evidence and data to support it, and in everyday parlance it is a fact. We have observed evolution over geological time, we have witnessed in occurring firsthand in many species, most notably Darwin's finches, fruit flies and bacteria/viruses, and we can observe the parts of the process at a molecular level. As the evolutionary biologist Dobzhansky said, 'nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution'.
I dislike sounding like an absolutist, but really the basic premises of evolution are so incontrovertible as to be rather foolish to question them. What's far more interesting to question, I'd say, are the implications of evolutionary processes for humans and the natural world alike, particularly as both are undergoing such profound changes (something that Bret Weinstein touches on quite a bit)...

2

I consider Evolution to be a fact not a theory although there is so much more to discover such as in horizontal gene transference.

2

Seems more legit than any other theory available. DNA alone shows how much everything is alike and I just don't believe a being far more advanced created everything. Somewhere along the line something had to be first and evolution is viable from what I've seen.

1

I do not know how as a non scientist i can have an opinion on a scientific theory. I have not done the work to see if it is true. Sometimes i feel science isnt about facts in pop culture but about forming a grand narrative about life

Leave this to the real scientists like Kent Hovind

2

Evolution is not a theory, it is an observable fact that needs to be explained. Darwin's theory is that life evolves by means of Natural Selection; there are other hypotheses that don't have as much explanatory power, such as Lamarkism. Similarly, Gravity is not a theory; Newtonian mechanics and Einstein's General Theory of Relativity are models that attempt to explain it.

Please note I said scientific theory and not just a regular theory, difference there. I agree with what you stated above, indeed so.

3

I might agree with some aspects of the "theory" but disagree with other aspects. But that doesn't mean I don't believe in your RIGHT to believe what you believe.

The important thing is that we have the CONVERSATION.

Hell yea I appreciate comments like this. We value the conversation aaround here and that's the most important thing. That's why the IDW is so powerful because we are actually WILLING TO HAVE CONVERSATION unlike the partisan hacks out there

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