God's Debris re-read
Dec. 5th, 2005 06:22 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
miriam_eHmmm... I re-read the book last night. Most of the book is as I remember it, stirring the pot and posing crazy ideas and some sane ideas to dispose of some loony ideas. I had completely forgotten his part about evolution though. Even if he may be using the same trick here of using a falsehood to make you question another falsehood it really does seem that he doesn't understand evolution at all. He seems to have the same primitive idea that it is a directed force that knows where it is going that so many religious people have. In fact evolution is the simplest of processes.
Contrary to what he says in the book there are numerous examples of evolution operating right now available for anybody who wants to look. Of course, the process is slow because it depends upon lifecycles, so you need to find things that have very rapid generation turnover in order to see it in a human timeframe. Think small insects, bacteria, viruses.
His question of where a new species of animal would find a mate seems to indicate he doesn't understand genetic drift in populations and the accumulation of change to produce speciation.
His question of why life always seems to produce more complex forms instead of less complex ones, again seems to betray that misunderstanding of evolution. In fact simpler, less complex forms do arise all the time. Look inside any cave to find creatures who have lost many degrees of complexity. It is just that all too often surviving life's arms race depends upon complexity -- accumulating tiny changes and mixing them with mates' accumulations. Although simpler answers arise all the time, they often tend to quietly die off without as many successful progeny.
There is the possibility that he posed these to trip up those who blindly subscribe to evolution and do think of it as some kind of directed invisible hand that magically conjures up mutated new species. It just seems odd that he would let them stand. Surely that would reinforce the kind of unhealthy thinking he tries to thwart in the book.
- Genes get altered in tiny random ways all the time; they are not simply shuffled and handed down intact.
- The variations that survive better... survive better.
Contrary to what he says in the book there are numerous examples of evolution operating right now available for anybody who wants to look. Of course, the process is slow because it depends upon lifecycles, so you need to find things that have very rapid generation turnover in order to see it in a human timeframe. Think small insects, bacteria, viruses.
His question of where a new species of animal would find a mate seems to indicate he doesn't understand genetic drift in populations and the accumulation of change to produce speciation.
His question of why life always seems to produce more complex forms instead of less complex ones, again seems to betray that misunderstanding of evolution. In fact simpler, less complex forms do arise all the time. Look inside any cave to find creatures who have lost many degrees of complexity. It is just that all too often surviving life's arms race depends upon complexity -- accumulating tiny changes and mixing them with mates' accumulations. Although simpler answers arise all the time, they often tend to quietly die off without as many successful progeny.
There is the possibility that he posed these to trip up those who blindly subscribe to evolution and do think of it as some kind of directed invisible hand that magically conjures up mutated new species. It just seems odd that he would let them stand. Surely that would reinforce the kind of unhealthy thinking he tries to thwart in the book.
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Re: Argument from design
Date: 2005-12-05 01:46 am (UTC)It never ceases to amaze me that religious people take an incredibly simple and totally obvious explanation, susbtitute a mystical one for it (while calling it the same thing), then argue against that using only arm-waving and complete lack of explanation.
"Evolution is a mysterious force that produced man as the pinnacle of its work, but that sounds too impersonal to us so we think it is nicer to have a god who created us because he wants us. We can't begin to explain how, or why, or when he did it, but you should believe us anyway."
The weird thing is that the fake magical "evolution" that religious nuts despise so much exactly matches their god... just without the personality. OK, often the religious god explanation goes much further and completely ditches all the evidence, but that is just bizarre and breathtaking in its stupidity. It's like deciding to build a train bridge out of daisies because knowing about shear forces and tensile strength of steel contradicted your faith in daisies... because daisies are prettier than steel.