It is quite interesting that Pastor Russell advocated a theistic form of evolution, even interpreting the Bible as implying it, e.g. "Let the earth bring forth living creatures according to their kinds" meaning, God allowed nature to bring forth the different kinds of animals in an orderly way.
DO JWS BELIEVE IN HYPER-EVOLUTION?
by badboy 27 Replies latest jw friends
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Satanus
Marmot
Thanks. Yah, i guess vestiges are like that.
Awakened
Amazing vid.
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Midget-Sasquatch
The WTS has to concede that microevolution is real. Its a cold hard fact evidenced by the emergence of drug resistant strains of bacteria and viral mutations. Most of the jws I've talked with about this aren't phased at all about it and often retort "well they're always bacteria or viruses....its not like they evolved into another kind of creature".
Blasted ambiguous "kinds". Makes them completely stop any further thought on comparing rates of change that are empirically calculated with living species and what would be required from a post flood radiation. Sounds like that video on youtube is awesome at hammering that point. Too bad it takes forever through dialup so I won't personally see it.
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zack
The WTS has given the nod to hyper-evolution, although they never really say it. But this is only recent.
Even if you are a beleiver in the Bible, why would the creation account be exclusive of evolution? Instead of one short miracle, it could
have been one long miracle. I think the hang up is with Adam and Eve. Fundies don't like to think they may have come from the same genetic stock
as modern day apes.
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jaguarbass
jaguarbass, I'll just say what will from now on be my standard reply on these matters: Read "The Blind Watchmaker" and "The God Delusion" by Richard Dawkins. I don't view Dawkins as some kind of "god" (as the inevitable counter argument of this post would be by some), I just happen to mostly agree with him and think he articulates his (and now my) views in a good way, and at the same time manages to make himself understood for people who lack the higher education to really go deep into the matter (but the deeper understanding is there for those who wish to find it).
Of course, simply stating "God mustv'e dunn it." is a lot easier, and easier to understand for most people than scientifically establishing a whole theory and reading enough to understand it, but there are many resources which can explain evolution in quite the layman's terms (like those mentioned
I will buy and read the blind watchmaker, if you will go on Amazon.com and read some of the critical reviews of the book.
I dont really care if we evolved or not. I dont believe in the bible and doubt the bible God. But I dont see order coming from kaos. And organized things break down to a state of disorder thats the third law of thermodynamics.
I am curious as to our origens and direction and dont find evolution or the bible satisfy my curiosity or intelligence.
If by chance we evolved then I havent evolved enough brains to figure that out and you have.
But in my world I think reality is the other way around. I've lived long enough and been around a ton of people that bark loudly up the wrong tree.
I watched over half the united states fail to read the daily news and believe some dingbat telling them that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and bankrupt the united states taking us to war.
Then I watched 3/4 of the united states turn on the dingbat for being the worst president ever.
This is a bad topic for me because there is no satisfactory answer for me. Some of you look at the data and conclude evolution, Myself and others look at the data and see design. Unfortunately I am aligned with a lot of bible thumpers on this one.
If we evolved then you know where we came from. And you also know where we are going. End of story.
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badboy
BTTT
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Awakened07
I will buy and read the blind watchmaker, if you will go on Amazon.com and read some of the critical reviews of the book.
OK, I have now done so - and thanks for reminding me, btw, 'cause I had meant to do so for some time.
I've read at least two of the 1 or 2 star reviews that I found. In at least one of them, it is clear that the reviewer - despite having read the same book I did - did not fully grasp the concept(s). For example:
3. Page 46 to 49: In this part of the book, Dawkins shows the difference between his "cumulative selection" and "single step selection". Single step selection means that each selection you make starts over from scratch in random selection without regard to the intended end result. Dawkins proposes that with "cumulative selection", where one keeps the changes of steps that are headed in the right direction, that evolution is not as improbable as commonly believed. This logic seems fine except...IN THE SELECTION PROCESS, WHY DOES IT KEEP STEPS THAT ARE CLOSER TO THE END RESULT IF IT DOESN'T KNOW WHAT THE END RESULT is AHEAD OF TIME. Using his example, the selection process has to "know", or have it built in to the selection process, a decision making step to keep letters that match the phrase "Methinks it is like a weasel". He says on page 49, "If, however, there was any way in which the necessary conditions for cumulative selection could have been set up by the blind forces of nature..." Again, he is suggesting here that "blind" forces can act based on a future goal. I'm not sure why the author even discusses this because he actually admits this lack of future intent of evolution on Page 50 but then suggests something he calls "recursive branching"....
It does not "keep" the steps that are closer to an end result; that would mean evolution was guided. If Dawkins was this easily refuted, I'd be worried. What actually happens, according to the theory, is that those traits - caused by random mutation - that are advantageous for a specie's survival and reproductive capabilities will be "kept", for the simple reason that those genes are propagated in the offspring, in greater numbers. In other words; mutations happen all the time, but are rarely seen to a great extent because in a relatively stable environment, any animal's mutation that would not be more advantageous than that of it's parents traits would cause that change to "evaporate" in a few generations, perhaps one. Mutations are also rarely beneficial. If the environment in a specific location changes, the same kind of mutation may suddenly become an advantage in that changed environment, the animals with this mutation has suddenly an advantage, and those genes are therefore propagated in their offspring.
[edited] I should additionally explain that in the book, Dawkins uses an example of - as you can see in what I quoted above - a random 'hammering' of typewriter keys with the help of cumulative selection to in the end form the words "Methinks it is like a weasel". This is of course only an analogy, and the "cumulative selection" in this analogy - the mechanism that "keeps" the 'correct' letters, are supposed to be analogous to the environment an organism lives in. The "letters" have to fit in with the "environment", and the "environment" in this case is the words "Methinks it is like a weasel". So each letter that is placed in a more correct place in order to make that sentence is "selected for" by cumulative natural selection. Again - it is just an analogy, but it's important to understand what parts are analogous to what in nature. [/edited]
Simpler put: a species of white mice may have an edge over any other coloration of mouse in the area, because their white fur hides them (say, in snow). If the environment changes into a darker one, over time the mutations that cause a darker fur will prevail, because predators will more easily see the white mice (just like they previously more easily could see the darker mice on the snow). The end result will be that it appears that the change is guided by the color of the ground, but that's only half of the truth. Another famed example is that of the eye. How could that have evolved? As Dawkins also argues, it could only have happened in many many small steps. If you look at a human eye from an engineers point of view, it is not perfect, but it does work very well and is obviously very complex. But it should be possible to imagine a slightly less complex version of the eye. One that would work only ever so slightly less well as yours or mine. Many people after all live happily with less than perfect vision (today with the aid of glasses or contacts). One can then imagine an even slightly less complex eye, with even slightly worse vision (but still sufficient to notice a predator or other danger, especially compared to someone with no eye). And so on and so forth in many many steps, down to an animal that has perhaps little more than a patch of light sensitive cells, which are still an improvement in noticing danger than no eye at all. To imagine a large "jump" from the patch of light sensitive cells to the very complex human eye is ludicrous, but - as Dawkins argues - if you go step-by-step all the way by cumulative natural selection, it could be done. And the way in which it is done is by random mutations, some of which would be neutral, some of which would be deleterious, and some of which would make the eye work slightly better than the previous generation and therefore be 'selected for'. There's more to change than this, for instance sexual selection, but this is the gist of it (of course, in addition to mutation, the mix of genes from both parents will also change animals within a species over time).
How evolution really works - YouTube.
I will not be as dogmatic about this matter as the maker of that video is, and I also think he is too sarcastic toward creationists than I would personally prefer, but I link to him anyway because I think the gist of what he says in his videos is factual.
4. One thing Dawkins glosses right over in his branching model is the fact that he has presupposed three major things are already in place: (1) reproducing life that have cell division, (2) a genetic system of development for those dividing cells (in the model, his "branching rule" and aspects of it "Genes 1-9")and (3) a genetic system of hereditary variation. These are pretty incredible mandatory things for his theory of evolution to skip over their origins. How did these (1), (2), and (3) come about??
-It's important to know and remember that the theory of evolution does not cover the origin of life; the first reproducing cells. It is often misunderstood or misrepresented as being a theory that goes all the way from the Big Bang to the formation of planets and then the first sign of life. It is only a theory of the origin of species; how animals change over time due to random mutation and natural selection. But - for the part I quoted above, it is true that Dawkins in this book does present his own hypothesis on how the first life may have came about. It is of course a logical step to take, especially when being an atheist and wanting to get to the bottom of where life came from, not only how it got to be the way we see it today. But that part is not part of Darwin's theory of evolution, it's part of abiogenesis. One often may hear wording like "how the universe evolved", but in those cases it does not refer the the theory of evolution of species, but simply is another use of the word 'evolve'.
I'll leave the specific Amazon reviews there.
One point I'd like to take up from one of the reviews though, is the notion that Michael Behe's "Darwin's Black Box" would be a good book to read in order to be able to refute the theory of evolution. To that I would like to say that Intelligent Design, as Behe is the proponent of, is not considered a science, as it does not work by the scientific method at all, but rather - at least it seems that way superficially - is only a collection of cases where they feel evolution has no answer; 'gaps' in the theory of evolution if you will. However - Micheal Behe and Intelligent Design has been deemed inappropriate to teach in science classes - by a court of law, no less.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2OAYRqBa7I
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQQ7ubVIqo4
Creationists often support the notion of 'microevolution', small changes within a population, but they do not support 'macroevolution', in other words speciation. This is of course because speciation - the formation of two separate species from one parent species - would negate the biblical "definition" of 'kind' ("each after it's own kind"). They also do not believe mutations can result in beneficial change, which must happen for evolution to be successful:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8HE2wnydxn8
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speciation
When a speciation event first has occurred (in other words, two groups of initially the same species are no longer able to interbreed), and the two groups are separated for long enough under varying enough environments, big changes will happen and they will in the end look very different and be what we today commonly refer to as separate species - or "kinds", even.
Finally - if you can spare the time, I have a "favorite" rather lengthy video I like to link to (and I'd recommend watching the rest of that series as well):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZhxJkGwS_9U
- Again - I am not ready to be very dogmatic about all this - for that I have been out of the JWs for too short a time. So I won't - at least not quite yet - call this the Truth. But I think it's very compelling. It is crucial to really understand the concepts though.
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jaguarbass
Awakened07 I will buy the book. It will look good in my library. I will read it. I get paid to read. I am a detention officer on the midnight shift. In one sense I agree with you. Evolution is a fact. Living organisms evolve change people alive today are taller than many were 2 hundred years ago. I can accept that all of the varieties of dogs originated from a pair of wolves. And all of the varieties of insects came from a couple of bugs.
I will buy and read the book. I have to go to work.