Behe on organismal evolution

And this is the already very over used God of the Gaps concept. It is very bad theology and lously logic.Over and over we have stuffed a god into some gap in our knowledge (the source of lightening, earthquakes, disease) and over and over it proved as we learned more to be wrong.Not knowing how something happended does not leave God as the solution. It simply leaves and unknown. The oft repeated pattern is that we find the solution without any requirement for a god.

This is actually a pretty darn good question.It is slightly off since complex things arose sometime before the Cambrian and we are only just finding a few traces. That pushes the time back to somewhere like 600 myr ago. In addtion life seems to have arisin somewhere just over 3.5 gyr ago so the correct time is about 3 billion not 3.5 billion but for this discussion the half billion years isn't really germane.It also is slightly wrong (but perhaps a major misunderstanding) when it says "natural selection". That should be mutations; they give rise to novelty and NS keeps some of the new forms.Without selective pressures to keep novelty that arises it doesn't get a foothold. I've read suggestions that the snowball earth time of 600 million years ago was the selctive conditions that pushed more complex life.It may also be that you (and perhaps all of us) are still stuck with our view of life. Most life (very nearly ALL on a count or mass basis) is still "simple". Almost everything on the planet is a bacteirum or virus. The apparent "big deal" of muticellurlar forms rising may be just one little bump that didn't really need to arise for life to do very well.The quesion also suggests that the step to very simple but somewhat differentiated forms (like worms) isn't a big step while from worms to us is. That may not be really right. It is clear from the physical form and, more, from the genetics that the step from a mouse-like thing to us is not a big step at all. Perhaps (but I don't know enough to really say) that the step from a simple worm to a mouse-like things is a small step too. But the step from green algae to that simplest form of pre cambrian life IS a big deal after all so it took a long time.Remember, our genetic make up is set up to form novelty with every single individual this may allow evolution to happen faster.I don't think there is an answer to the real question though. But, as noted, don't go inserting a God in the gap. We keep closing them and it forces you to have a smaller and smaller god as the gaps shrink.

You'll have to back this up with some details. However it would require a separate thread. I'd suggest one in "Is It Science" with a title like "Scientists whose Personal Philosophies Affected Preceived Validity of Theories".You'll have to kick it off with defintions of the terms (philosophy and validity) and at least a couple of examples. That's a lot of work so you can leave it for now. This one also would have to have a separate thread. It's a little harder to know where to put it but I think "Is it Science" again. Topic title could be "Scientific Discoveries that Lead to Religious Views"It seems to me that this one should be easier to support than the other one. It doesn't, unlike the other, have to be shown to be a wide spread, consensus thing, it just has to be shown that individual scientists went through this. You could quote the writings of a few.This discussion can carry on without those new threads but without them this post of yours doesn't carry any weight at all.