g-rh@cca.UUCP (Richard Harter) (02/18/84)
This is in way of reply to Byron Howes. First of all, Byron, I hope that this won't offend you, but boy are you gullible. For the record I am an atheist, and assess the credibility of creationism to be on a par with Velikovsky, Daniel Home, and the tooth fairy. Also for the record I have read Kitchner, the Origin of Species (honest!), and a large number of other works on evolution, origins, artificial intelligence, and philosophy. Kitchner's book, incidentally, disappointed me. I felt it ran too much to muckraking and was far too diffuse. However, the points that I made in the article are all more or less valid. For example, there are no known significant transitional forms between the dinosaurs and the birds. Archaeopteryx is pretty clearly a feathered reptile; it could never have flown. There is a distinct possiblity that it is not in the line of descent of birds at all -- merely an interesting precursor in a line that died out. For an interesting and quite readable analysis of the problems of assessing the likelihood of abiogenesis, see Crick's "Life Itself". As he points out, there is no way, given the current level of knowledge, to assign a meaningful probability for Abiogenesis. Evolution must, of necessity, work by accretion. There are, however, some real problems with the evolutionary schema. Principally these are a consequence of the fact that we don't know very much. Remember that a single cell is a system rather more complicated than any modern operating system and that a multicellular organism consists of trillions of cells also organized in a bewildering complex system. Suspose a single gene mutates so that it produces a slightly different protein. We are not able to say if the impact will be beneficial, deleterious, indifferent, or indeed, what they impact will be at all. (Except in rare cases.) As a consequence of our level of ignorance, we do not know what the possible options are for the evolutionary process, i.e. we do not know what increments are potentially available. Another kind of ignorance is that we know almost nothing of the internal physiology of deceased lifeforms. Were the dinosaurs warm-blooded? The current view seems to be that most of them stabilised temperatures with thermal inertia; a minority view holds that they used active biological mechanisms for temperature stabilization. What do we know of the glands, the organs, the circulatory systems, the hormonal systems of deceased species? Virtually nothing. What do we know about the possible evolution of internal physiology? Even less. The fundamental point here is that not all transitions are possible. There are adaptive limitations -- all of the transitional forms must survive. There are also biochemical limitations -- it must be possible for the postulated changes to occur. We understand virtually nothing of the latter limitations and damned little of the former. Furthermore, we do not know enough to know whether the limitations matter. For computer types, look at this way: in assembly language there are usually many ways to skin a cat. If a particular desired instruction is not available, there is usually some equivalent sequence of instructions. In such case, the limitations (the actual instruction set available) doesn't matter much. On the other hand, the transition from one architecture to another may be effectively impossible. (Provide an evolutionary sequence from OS to UNIX!). In actual fact the postulated evolutionary history of life deals with only a small percentage of life, deals only with selected features, and relies on the existence of postulated mechanisms that are not understood. Furthermore, the evolutionary scenarios are much more in the line of plausibility arguments rather than actual attempts at reconstruction. That is, a scenario outlines a possible scenario, and provides some cues to checking the feasibility of that scenario. It doesn't directly eliminate other scenarios. In short, the evolutionary process and life itself is not well understood enough to directly assess the validity of evolution. On the other hand, it should be pointed out that the evidence that life is genetically inter-related is massive. We are, humans, beetles, orchids, and blue-green algae, all part of the same family. Species were not created de novo with independent biological mechanisms. The question is: did evolution occur by chance, or was there intervention? The answer is that we don't know enough to answer the question. On the evolution of man: sorry, but things are not as simple as you think. It has been claimed that the difference in intelligence between the anthropoid apes and man is one of quantity only. This is, to put it politely, a debatable proposition. Again, our ignorance is profound. We literally do not know what the nature of human intelligence is, nor do we know what changes were necessary to make the transition form ape to man. We also are rather ignorant of the details of human evolution. We are not even certain if Homo erectus is a direct ancestor -- we think so, but it wouldn't shock me if it turned out to be the case. To summarize, given our present level of knowledge of life, the universe, and everything it is unwarranted to rule out as unneeded the interventionist hypothesis. Occam's razor really only dictates that we assume as a working rule that intervention did not occur unless we have good reason to believe otherwise. I leave it as an exercise to the reader to advance at least three hypotheses of supernatural inter- vention that are consistent with the scientific method. SUCK WOMBATS, YOU COMMIE WIMPO, HUMANISTS Respectfully submitted in the tradition of the Net Richard Harter