Dredge writes:
Percy writes:
So to restate what I originally said about evolution: "I can describe the process of evolution, but I can't know any of the specific events of evolutionary history."
Translation: "I claim to know what mechanisms were responsible for the history of life, but I wasn't there to observe it and I have no way of verifying my claim, so the truth is, I actually don't know. Therefore I can't actually claim to know how evolution works."
You make so many errors in so few words that I'm going to have to break this down:
Translation: "I claim to know what mechanisms were responsible for the history of life,..."
More accurately, it is assumed that life in the past followed the same processes as life today. We know how evolution works because we can observe it in real time today.
There
*is* a common creationist argument that life in the past was different from life today. For example, YEC's often argue that before the flood trees went through many full growth cycles every year, and that many years experienced the four seasons many times.
"...but I wasn't there to observe it and I have no way of verifying my claim,..."
There is no evidence from the past, neither recent nor distant, that the processes of life were any different from today. If you think these processes were different in the past and at some point changed to the processes we observe today, what evidence are you looking at that tells you this, and when did the change happen?
"...so the truth is, I actually don't know."
What I would actually say is that I accept what the evidence indicates.
"Therefore I can't actually claim to know how evolution works."
We know exactly how evolution works because we observe it happening in the here and now.
Nothing is proven within science.
... and yet you claim to
know that life on earth evolved according to ToE!
In the sense that you're using the word "know," no, of course not. Everything in science is tentative. What we would actually say is that the theory of evolution provides a robust explanatory framework for the history of life as revealed by the fossil record.
But the evidence strongly suggests that evolution explains the history of life we find in the fossil record.
A red herring. I'm not disputing that evolution has occurred.
Once you've conceded that much, other implications inevitably follow, such as that all life we see today is the product of evolution.
My argument is that no one can know HOW it happened ... and thus, no one can claim to know how evolution works.
You're just repeating yourself and once again ignoring what's already been explained in reply to precisely this argument a number of times. How evolution works is one thing, and the specific events of evolutionary history are a completely different thing. You keep confusing the two. If you don't think they're two different things then explain why. Don't just keep mindlessly repeating your initial argument. That's idiotic.
It's actually a very good analogy, for the very reasons you give. House construction is "readily observable and repeatable," to use your words, and so is evolution.
No one observed any of the (alleged) evolutionary transitions on the fossil record and no one can repeat them ... unlike your analogy of building a house.
Therefore house-construction is a very poor analogy for evolution.
It's still an excellent analogy. It's more that you're working very hard at not understanding.
But let's try a slightly different analogy. You're examining a Pierce Arrow. You know that it was manufactured, but you have no idea of the specific steps involved in its manufacture because all that information is lost to history. Does that lead you to doubt that it was manufactured?
That is why I have marked your paper, "F" (for "fail").
Anyone constructively participating in an exchange of information would ask clarifying questions when a point fails to connect. You instead seem to be working hard at not understanding anything while confounding efforts to communicate using strategies such as making absurd comments about your IQ.
And just as nothing prevents a house from being added to indefinitely, nothing prevents evolution from continuing indefinitely, i.e., macroevolution.
That is an assumption. You cannot prove that genetic change has unlimited potential.
"Unlimited potential" isn't the term I used and I think it's incorrect. What I said was that there's nothing to prevent evolution continuing on indefinitely. Returning to the analogy of a house, no matter how big a house gets, what prevents the owner from adding on to it? Nothing prevents this, right?
In the same way, no matter what the current state of an organism's genome, no matter how much prior change there's been, what could prevent more mutations from occurring? Nothing could prevent this, right? There's nothing that could lock down a genome and prevent further change. If the organism reproduces there will be change, right?
We know how evolutionary change happens: it happens via natural selection of modified descendants.
You can't prove that those mechanisms were responsible for the changes in life-forms evident in the fossil record.
Science doesn't prove things. As with everything in the universe, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, the way we see things happening today is the way they must have happened in the past. Do you have any evidence that life in the past didn't reproduce via the replication of genetic material and that the organisms that passed their genes on to the next generation passed through a selection process governed by the natural environment? In the absence of such evidence, the theory of evolution is the best we have for explaining the available evidence.
You can't even prove that said changes were all part of a contiguous biological process.
Again, science isn't in the business of proving things. That the history of life was a continuous biological process, i.e., that life today came from prior life and so on back to antiquity is the best theory we have for explaining the available evidence. Do you have a better theory?
Therefore you can't possibly claim to know how said changes happened.
The theory that life in the past changed in the same way it changes today is the best one we have. Do you have another? There's certainly nothing in the fossil record to indicate something different was going on.
Getting back to the chromosome difference between chimps and humans, we have no information about the specific sequence of mutations and reproductive acts and environmental pressures that led to the chromosomes combining head-to-head on the line of descent that led to humans. We know that natural selection working on descent with modification produces this sort of change
Another assumption - you don't "know that natural selection working on descent with modification" produced a human from some kind of ape - you simply assume it did.
You're using a different definition of the word know. We don't know these things in the way of some kind of religious certainty. We know them in a scientific sense where we construct conceptual frameworks of understanding that explain bodies of evidence, and if a consensus develops within the relevant scientific community then that theory becomes accepted, and when we speak informally we say that it is something we know.
Then - as is the wont of Darwinists - you attempt to pass off your assumption as a fact.
The theory of evolution is not a fact. But that evolution has occurred and is occurring, that life has changed and is changing over time, is a fact that you yourself have acknowledged.
How much longer are you going to persist in this what by now can only be considered a purposeful misunderstanding that science considers the theory of evolution to be a fact?
--Percy
Edited by Percy, : Grammar.
™ Version 4.2
