vision2020
Re: The Evolution Debate
Rock On Mark!
Love
Daniel
On Sat, 22 Jun 2002, Mark Rounds wrote:
> Will you look what happens when you let real life interfere with your
> internet habit ;-) This may be late but it is a series of points I think
> were salient to that discussion and I personally wanted to make and thought
> should be made.
>
> 1. I'll say this again. There is no Cabal of Darwinists trying to
> foist lies on an unsuspecting public. The method in which science works is
> far too complex and there are way too many people involved for a conspiracy
> of that magnitude to be kept secret for long. There are young turks in
> every field that can and do publish claims just to make the old guard squirm
> and rethink their standpoints. When you do publish anything that is at all
> controversial, halh a dozen other labs start on the same work to see if they
> were wrong or if you were. Sometimes they get it wrong, the emphasis put on
> the Bohr atom and the concept of wavicles are examples. In each case
> though, it was torn down and replaced with something that was closer to the
> truth. The same has occured in the field of Evolutionary Biology. Claims
> have been made and either proven or torn down. The system works. There are
> flaws, for example the extreme competitiveness has led some to try and
> falsify data but every time it happens, its the ruination of a career as
> everyone tries to duplicate results and the truth comes out.
>
> 2. The point was made if evolution is still going on, won't there be,
> at some point some uberman and unterman (Nazi terms chosen to keep this in
> context)? The answer is no, not really. Here is why. For a species to
> branch off there have to be three things occur. The first is that there has
> to be a small gene pool that is isolated from the rest of the population
> with very little cross breeding with the main population. The second is
> that this small population has to be put under environmental stress. THis
> can come from dwindling food sources, climatic change, competition, etc.....
> and finally, these pressure have to be strong enough to stress the gene pool
> without flat killing it off and have to remain in place for a long period of
> time. This period is not tens of years, hundreds of years or even thousands
> of years, but in the category of hundreds of thousands of years. Consider
> domesticated animals, the oldest domesticated animal can be argued to be the
> dog. THey have certainly been hanging around eating from are garbage piles
> for just about as long as we can actually find garbage piles and yet they
> still interbreed quite handlily with wolves.
>
> For humans, we just move around too much for these populations to remain
> isolated long enough for them to become separated. In the hunter gather
> stage of culture ( what we have been for most all of human history) the
> family groupings wander, merge and split up very often. Also vision quests
> are a staple of all primative cultures and while most of the young people
> who wander off, eventually come back home, some find greener pastures and
> settle far from home. In may take tens of generations for a genetic
> characteristic to progress out of in area and into another but that is
> lighten fast in evolutionary terms.
>
> Secondly, humans, when stressed tend to change their environment rather than
> suffer. We build huts and houses and fires to stay warm. We plant crops,
> try new foods or just plain move when an area stresses us a great deal.
> With the exception of the very bottom of our societies, most humans (even in
> India, Bangladesh and Africa) are not stressed to a high enough degree to
> evolve quickly and they interbreed with the rest of the population so any
> edge they might get transfers rapidly.
>
> We probably won't break off branches of our tree until we can get humans
> separated and not remixing for hundreds thousand years. If the speed of
> light really is the speed limit of the universe (Dr. Forward and others
> think differently but that is another story) we might have enough distance
> in interstellar space to break off distinct gene pools. MY personal opinion
> is that we will figure out a faster way to get around and that won't even
> work.
>
> 3. I also mentioned in my last post it might be that Evolution is God's
> way. Now, I don't propose to be the source of all wisdom but in my readings
> of the bible (several versions), it could very easily be that they are
> compatible. Personally, I do believe that. I think the purposes are many,
> some of which I can't fathom but an important one is to keep us humble. One
> of mandkinds greatest strengths and our greatest failings in pride. It
> allows us to tackle impossible projects and achieve them but when it grows
> out of that to hubris, it drives abominations like the Nazi's and their
> fellow travellers thoughout history.
>
> 4. My last point and then I'll shut up. A tactic used in too much of
> this discussion is the labeling of different factions with labels and then
> impuning certain beliefs or stands to them that may or may not be true.
> Back off and grow up! If you don't like what I say, by all means, discuss
> it or poke holes in it. That is how real intellectual synthesis takes
> place. But please don't tell me to which group I belong and then say I
> believe things because of it. That tends to make me crabby ;-) It is also
> how real discrimination starts.
>
> Mark Rounds
>
> PS. Daniel, in the old days of the internet we used to have .! parties. .!
> was one of the first places where you could post things and carry on debates
> like this. They were great fun. This was before the tactics of the flame
> war though.
>
> PSS. Ms. Joan Opyr, While I don't agree with everything you say, I
> certainly like the way you say it. If we every do have the pot luck Daniel
> has suggested, may I buy you the first drink? My wife has consented ;-)
>
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