Darwinist ignorance and confusion (Introduction)

by dhw, Monday, June 14, 2010, 11:55 (5276 days ago) @ xeno6696

MATT:
We agree that evolution requires these things:
1. An organism capable of change
2. A change must happen (by whatever mechanism we've discussed)
3. Natural Selection must be applied to it. 
We already have discussed and agreed that 1 & 2 have three categories: Good changes, Neutral changes, and bad changes. Natural selection operates on both Good and bad, and ignores neutral. So when we're discussing speciation it seems clear that at this level it's a two step process, and in terms of speciation, step 3 is the most important.-David agrees***, but adds that "the new species must contain adaptive mechanisms (epigenetic) that can move quickly against challenges."
 
My objection was to your describing NS as THE lynchpin of evolution. By definition, you cannot have new species without innovation, and so your steps 1 and 2 are indispensable to the process. The reason why I object to the downgrading of steps 1 and 2 is, as I said in my earlier post, that it distracts attention from the enormous complexity of the mechanisms involved in innovation (mutations and adaptations). That is why some materialist scientists try to make NS synonymous with evolution, and even go so far as to claim that it "explains the whole of life", (The God Delusion, p. 116), which is patently absurd: it does not explain the origin of life or of the mechanisms that produce the changes that take place before nature can make its selection. Natural selection requires no intelligent guidance ... it is an automatic process. But the mechanisms that give rise to change, which are also a lynchpin of evolution, cannot be attributed to an automatic process, and are considered by some theist scientists like David to be too complex to have come into being of their own accord.
 
*** I see from David's latest post that in fact he agrees with me that NS and the other mechanisms are equally important. Presumably his agreement was only to what you wrote about the function of NS.