ellis@spar.UUCP (04/24/86)
>> I fail to see how creationist admissions of lack of evidence (and some >> outright fraud) YEARS after scientists pointed it out shows how >> "evolutionists" should be more "open minded". - Mike Huybensz >> >The stubborness displayed by the young-earth creationists for so many >years regarding the Plauxy River tracks is not so different from the >attitude displayed by some who regard evolutionary theory as having >attained the status of scientific law. The point, Mike, was that a >little tolerance can be displayed on both sides. I think such tolerance >is visible in groups such as the American Scientific Affiliation and >others. It's not just a simple matter of tolerance but of letting the >evidence speak for itself without extrapolations to religion or the >purpose of life, etc. - Dan Diaz As an old-earth creationist, I agree that both sides are typically characterized by excessive devotion to dogma and irrational exclusion of likely alternate hypotheses (although I'd also like to commend certain contributors here on both sides of the issue, regardless of our differences in opinion, for their extraordinary patience and otherwise intelligent approach -- notably Mike Huybensz and Paul DuBois). The problems with Creation Science are obvious enough. Competition with a rival business corporation or religious sect is one thing. Competition against monolithic science itself, however, is hopeless. There is no room in our universities for competing biology departmentS, for instance. Nor do young minds have any choice but to study science in public schools. (I'm not complaining, mind you -- I'm just stating fact). Consequently, Creation Science attracts basically the fringe elements. It's bad enough that Creation Scientists are so frightfully unaware of major improvements to evolutionary theory in the past century. What is inexcusable is the total ineptitude of their application of well established scientific knowledge: Professor Henry Morris has shown that the theory of evolution contradicts the universally accepted laws of thermodynamics. The second law of thermodynamics states that all things left to themselves always tend to go from the complex to the simple, from the organized to the disorganized. Evolution would require just the opposite. - Duane Gish, Ph.D. (Have You Been Brainwashed?) Really? For another example, here is a branch of the evolutionary tree from the same publication (replacing pictures with ASCII characters): bird | pteradactyl | gorilla human | | | | -----------|--------------------- | tyranosaur | | |------------------horse turtle--+----------| |----- frog ichthysaur | | fish -----------| This is typical of the scientific understanding displayed in the work of every Creation Scientist I have encountered (modulo Paul Dubois' excellent contributions to this group). On the other hand, evolutionary theory tends to be characterized by doctinaire feuds that all too often combine aspects of Orwell's 1984 and medieval scholasticism. Perhaps this is because many evolutionists are refugees from strict fundamentalist backgrounds -- I don't know. For instance, recall the religious fervor with which the Lamarckian heresy was stamped out. Yet recent discoveries concerning recombinant DNA indicate that Lamarckian evolution exists: Echols (1981), a prominent molecular geneticist, has coined the term *inducible evolution* for SOS-activated mutation and recombination in E Coli and has called attention to its counterparts in higher organisms. Sensory systems to convey information to genes abound in higher organisms, and some are known to control evolution.. -J Campbell (Evolution at a Crossroads, MIT Press, 1985) It used to be asserted, with equal fervor, that evolution was gradual; recall the noise with which Gouldian "Punctuated Equilibria" were first greeted? Today, in a recent issue of "Science", I read that Darwinian theory REALLY predicted the abruptness of PE all along. What of all those huge gaps in the fossil record the Creation Scientists keep talking about? 100 years ago, Darwin was entirely justified in his hope that these gaps would be filled. After a century of intense effort, gaps among known orders, classes, phyla remain systematic and almost always enormous. Mentioning this embarrassing fact to evolutionists evokes emotional pledges of allegiance to the Cause, or defensive shouts of "Creationist!", rather than any reasonable speculative hypothesis. I'm satisified with the intermediate forms for humans; what bothers me are the cetaceans, the first land animals, the vertebrates, etc.. I seriously doubt that even PE-amended evolutionary theory can explain these mysteries. On my account, the close-mindedness to `heretical' questions and alternate methodologies and metaphysical approaches rampant among many evolutionists is harmful to the cause of open scientific investigation. Evolutionary theory IS scientific fact, as much a fact as any scientific theory around. Consequently, it will be amended according to future discoveries, not just in its details, but in its basic epistemological assumptions. I believe that the randomness and anti-teleological bias typically asserted as absolute unquestionable fact will become the next casualties: There have been a variety of proposals for goal-oriented evloution, but they had to be vitalistic because biology was too poorly understood to suggest explicit mechanisms. Therefore they were dismissed as unscientific. Today it has become possible to identify specific genetic and physiological structures that could allow a species to evolve projectively, and to look for evolution that such structures might have directed. -J Campbell (ibid) -michael