Re: Darwin misquoted on Wikipedia Natural Selection

On Sep 15, 5:45 pm, backspace <sawireless2...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Sep 15, 3:31 am, RAM <RAMather...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

If you wish to see how destructive this phrase "natural selection" is
in a peer reviewed article in biology replace it with "Ninja turtles"
and evolution with "Aztec Cosmology". And then try and see if you are
still able to grasp the mechanistic description of what the author was
trying to describe before he started "naturaling" all over the
I think he knows he is making a fool of himself; but his religious
need to try any tactic (foolish or not) at misrepresenting evolution
and/or science trumps his rational abilities. This is a dominant
characteristic of crationists here. Being a fool (or liar) for Christ
is not a sin but a way of testifying.

I actually lifted a statement by Professor Philip S. Skell on
replacing evolution with "Aztec Cosmology". You are basically calling Prof Skell a "fool" which a strong word to
use.


Well, as Professor Skell is a chemist who has never carried out any
research or published any paper dealing with evolutionary biology, it
would seem that he is rather foolish to pontificate on matters outside
his areas of expertise.

Please read his paper on the link provided and motivate why you
say Professor Skell is not up to your standards of intellectual
rigueur .

Let's have a go a this "paper" (it isn't, by the way: it's a blog, and
is unedited and has not been subject to peer-review)

"Darwin's theory of evolution offers a sweeping explanation of the
history of life, from the earliest microscopic organisms billions of
years ago to all the plants and animals around us today. Much of the
evidence that might have established the theory on an unshakable
empirical foundation, however, remains lost in the distant past."

FALSEHOOD #1
Darwin built his theory largely on his studies and observations of
existing living organisms, not the fossil record. This still remains
by far the most important evidence supporting evolutionary theory.

"For instance, Darwin hoped we would discover transitional precursors
to the animal forms that appear abruptly in the Cambrian strata. Since
then we have found many ancient fossils¬ - even exquisitely preserved
soft-bodied creatures - but none are credible ancestors to the
Cambrian animals."

FALSEHOOD #2
There are forms from the Ediacran faunas which are just that, and
their existence has been reported for a decade or more.


"Despite this and other difficulties, the modern form of Darwin's
theory has been raised to its present high status because it's said to
be the cornerstone of modern experimental biology. But is that
correct? "While the great majority of biologists would probably agree
with Theodosius Dobzhansky's dictum that 'nothing in biology makes
sense except in the light of evolution,' most can conduct their work
quite happily without particular reference to evolutionary ideas," A.
S. Wilkins, editor of the journal BioEssays, wrote in 2000.1
"Evolution would appear to be the indispensable unifying idea and, at
the same time, a highly superfluous one."

MISREPRESENTATION #1
The next sentence reads as follows: "Yet, the marginality of
evolutionary biology may be changing. More and more issues in biology,
from diverse questions about human nature to the vulnerability of
ecosystems, are increasingly seen as reflecting evolutionary events. A
spate of popular books on evolution testifies to the development. If
we are to fully understand these matters, however, we need to
understand the processes of evolution that, ultimately, underlie
them."


"I would tend to agree. Certainly, my own research with antibiotics
during World War II received no guidance from insights provided by
Darwinian evolution. Nor did Alexander Fleming's discovery of
bacterial inhibition by penicillin. I recently asked more than 70
eminent researchers if they would have done their work differently if
they had thought Darwin's theory was wrong. The responses were all the
same: No."

UNSUPPORTED ASSERTION #1

Evidently A S Wilson disagrees.

"I also examined the outstanding biodiscoveries of the past century:
the discovery of the double helix; the characterization of the
ribosome; the mapping of genomes; research on medications and drug
reactions; improvements in food production and sanitation; the
development of new surgeries; and others. I even queried biologists
working in areas where one would expect the Darwinian paradigm to have
most benefited research, such as the emergence of resistance to
antibiotics and pesticides. Here, as elsewhere, I found that Darwin's
theory had provided no discernible guidance, but was brought in, after
the breakthroughs, as an interesting narrative gloss."

UNSUPPORTED ASSERTION #2

"in the peer-reviewed literature, the word "evolution" often occurs as
a sort of coda to academic papers in experimental biology."

UNSUPPORTED ASSERTION #3


"Is the term integral or superfluous to the substance of these papers?
To find out, I substituted for "evolution" some other word -
"Buddhism," "Aztec cosmology," or even "creationism." I found that the
substitution never touched the paper's core. This did not surprise me.
From my conversations with leading researchers it had became clear
that modern experimental biology gains its strength from the
availability of new instruments and methodologies, not from an
immersion in historical biology."

UNSUPPORTED ASSERTION #4

"When I recently suggested this disconnect publicly, I was vigorously
challenged. One person recalled my use of Wilkins and charged me with
quote mining. The proof, supposedly, was in Wilkins's subsequent
paragraph:

Yet, the marginality of evolutionary biology may be changing. More and
more issues in biology, from diverse questions about human nature to
the vulnerability of ecosystems, are increasingly seen as reflecting
evolutionary events. A spate of popular books on evolution testifies
to the development. If we are to fully understand these matters,
however, we need to understand the processes of evolution that,
ultimately, underlie them."

WOW! So now he quotes the passage which demonstrates that his previous
assertions were false!

"In reality, however, this passage illustrates my point. The efforts
mentioned there are not experimental biology; they are attempts to
explain already authenticated phenomena in Darwinian terms, things
like human nature."

FALSEHOOD #3
If you read the passage, you will see quite clearly that they are not.
"Understanding the processes of evolution" is the key phrase. It is
not post hoc rationalisation as the author asserts.

"Further, Darwinian explanations for such things are often too supple:
Natural selection makes humans self-centered and aggressive - except
when it makes them altruistic and peaceable. Or natural selection
produces virile men who eagerly spread their seed¬ - except when it
prefers men who are faithful protectors and providers. When an
explanation is so supple that it can explain any behavior, it is
difficult to test it experimentally, much less use it as a catalyst
for scientific discovery."

FALSEHOOD #4
Evolutionary theory make very accurate predictions of aspects of
biological systems and populations. A good example was the prediction
of the social structure of mole rats from evolutionary theory.

http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=41102

"Darwinian evolution¬ - whatever its other virtues - does not provide
a fruitful heuristic in experimental biology."

FALSEHOOD #5.
As the example of the mole rats demonstrates, it does.

"This becomes especially clear when we compare it with a heuristic
framework such as the atomic model, which opens up structural
chemistry and leads to advances in the synthesis of a multitude of new
molecules of practical benefit."

MISREPRESENTATION #2
The validity of a theory in science is not premiated on it's practical
benefit.

"None of this demonstrates that Darwinism is false. It does, however,
mean that the claim that it is the cornerstone of modern experimental
biology will be met with quiet skepticism from a growing number of
scientists in fields where theories actually do serve as cornerstones
for tangible breakthroughs."

UNSUPPORTED ASSERTION #5
....and one which is directly contradicted by the quotation from A S
Wilson he uses in this essay!


"Philip Skell responds: My essay about Darwinism and modern
experimental biology has stirred up a lively discussion, but the
responses still provide no evidence that evolutionary theory is the
cornerstone of experimental biology. Comparative physiology and
comparative genomics have certainly been fruitful, but comparative
biology originated before Darwin and owes nothing to his theory."

FALSE LOGIC #1
This is as stupid as asserting that because the movements of the
planets had been studied before Newton, his theory of gravity
contributes nothing to modern astronomy.

"Before the publication of The Origin of Species in 1859, comparative
biology focused mainly on morphology, because physiology and
biochemistry were in their infancy and genomics lay in the future; but
the extension of a comparative approach to these sub-disciplines
depended on the development of new methodologies and instruments, not
on evolutionary theory and immersion in historical biology."

FALSEHOOD #6
Any biologist will tell you that evolutionary theory transformed our
understanding of biology and provides the theoretical framework which
gives meaning to the patterns of character distribution found in
living organisms.

"One letter mentions directed molecular evolution as a technique to
discover antibodies, enzymes and drugs. Like comparative biology, this
has certainly been fruitful, but it is not an application of Darwinian
evolution - it is the modern molecular equivalent of classical
breeding."

FALSEHOOD #7
Just as modern artificial breeding owes much to a knowledge of
evolutionary theory. Note the bait and switch here, by the way: he has
changed the argument from one concerning evolutionary theory to
Darwinism. Modern evolutionary theory owes much to Darwin's theory of
natural selection, but it is the assimilation of the science of
genetics into evolutionary theory which gives it its predictive power.

"Long before Darwin, breeders used artificial selection to develop
improved strains of crops and livestock. Darwin extrapolated this in
an attempt to explain the origin of new species, but he did not invent
the process of artificial selection itself."

MISLEADING STATEMENT #1
Quite so. However, modern plant and animal breeders rely heavily on
evolutionary theory to design their experiments and proceedures.

"It is noteworthy that not one of these critics has detailed an
example where Darwin's Grand Paradigm Theory guided researchers to
their goals."

MISREPRESENTATION #3
Darwin never offered a "Grand Paradigm Theory", nor has any
evolutionary biologist ever referred to Darwin's theory as such.

"In fact, most innovations are not guided by grand paradigms, but by
far more modest, testable hypotheses."

Quite so.

"Recognizing this, neither medical schools nor pharmaceutical firms
maintain divisions of evolutionary science."

MISLEADING STATEMENT #2

Universities don't maintain schools of gravitational science. This
does not mean that they don't teach gravitational theory.

"The fabulous advances in experimental biology over the past century
have had a core dependence on the development of new methodologies and
instruments, not by intensive immersion in historical biology and
Darwin's theory, which attempted to historicize the meager
documentation."

MISLEADING STATEMENT #3
Quite so. But then modern evolutionary theory is not equivatent to
Darwin's theory.

"Evolution is not an observable characteristic of living organisms."

A STATEMENT SO MISLEADING AS TO BE AN OUTRIGHT FALSEHOHOOD

No evolutionary biologist has ever claimed that it is. It's an
observable process affecting populations of living organisms.

"What modern experimental biologists study are the mechanisms by
which living organisms maintain their stability, without evolving."

STRAW MAN
Modern biologists study the mechanisms whereby populations of living
organisms evolve.

"Organisms oscillate about a median state; and if they deviate
significantly from that state, they die."

If this refers to studies in evolutionary theory, this is an outright
and blatant falsehood. Evolutionary theory does not apply to
individual organisms, but to populations of organisms.

"It has been research on these mechanisms of stability, not research
guided by Darwin's theory, which has produced the major fruits of
modern biology and medicine."

FALSEHOOD #8
Research into the medabolic systems which maintain the stablity of
individuals may have yielded research benefits, but that is not an
issue addressed by evolutionary theory. Research based on evolutionary
theory - which includes genetics, of course, has been very fruitful.

"And so I ask again: Why do we invoke Darwin?"

The simple answer is that we don't. Evolutionary scientists don't.
Science has moved on since Darwin's time, and although his
contribution was important, it is by not modern evolutionary theory.

RF



Here is what he said:http://www.uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/philip-skell-revisi...
"..In the peer-reviewed literature, the word "evolution" often occurs
as a sort of coda to academic papers in experimental biology. Is the
term integral or superfluous to the substance of these papers? To find
out, I substituted for "evolution" some other word - "Buddhism,"
"Aztec cosmology," or even "creationism." I found that the
substitution never touched the paper's core. This did not surprise me.>From my conversations with leading researchers it had became clear

that modern experimental biology gains its strength from the
availability of new instruments and methodologies, not from an
immersion in historical biology...."



.

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