Timescale and Neo Darwinism - some more thoughts
Posted: Tue Jul 16, 2013 10:29 pm
Whenever the neo darwinian tale is questioned in the slightest, it is automatically seen as a denial that the development of life is the product of evolutionary forces.
A skilled rhetorician like Richard Dawkins can present highly persuasive thought experiments of how the sifting and accumulation of very small differences can produce large scale outcomes.
We recently had a post about a thought experiment Dawkins asks us to consider the following:
A physical scientist both by training and instinct would have a strong desire to see an estimate, however rough it may be, of how many small steps (represented by Dawkin's snapshots) take us from a slightly light sensitive cell to a fully formed eye, and of approximately the number of generations required for mutations to occur.
An order of magnitude answer is a reasonable request for a scientific matter. After all, we are not dealing in fairy tales here.
And yet, biologists like Dawkins tell us that it can't be done (of course it cant) and end the discussion with the reasoning that "It's happened and so it MUST HAVE happened this way."
This is not an argument for denying the evolution of creatures. It simply is a very reasonable position to take if we are asked to accept something as a scientific fact.
I mean, right?
A skilled rhetorician like Richard Dawkins can present highly persuasive thought experiments of how the sifting and accumulation of very small differences can produce large scale outcomes.
We recently had a post about a thought experiment Dawkins asks us to consider the following:
These countless snapshots lead conclusively to a fish of some sort. As the snapshots flip in succession, the images become less and less clear. This flip card movie has some clarity to it but eventually becomes a blurred tale that does not allow us to fully appreciate it because we can no longer see what is/was on camera.Imagine pulling out your family genealogy. Now snap a photo of each ancestor going back 185 million generations. What would it show? First off, your very distant grandfather was a fish. Secondly, you can never put your finger on the very first human being, a proverbial Adam and Eve. 185,000,000 snapshots can never capture that one moment.
A physical scientist both by training and instinct would have a strong desire to see an estimate, however rough it may be, of how many small steps (represented by Dawkin's snapshots) take us from a slightly light sensitive cell to a fully formed eye, and of approximately the number of generations required for mutations to occur.
An order of magnitude answer is a reasonable request for a scientific matter. After all, we are not dealing in fairy tales here.
And yet, biologists like Dawkins tell us that it can't be done (of course it cant) and end the discussion with the reasoning that "It's happened and so it MUST HAVE happened this way."
This is not an argument for denying the evolution of creatures. It simply is a very reasonable position to take if we are asked to accept something as a scientific fact.
I mean, right?