tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13522238.post113026027226541339..comments2024-03-28T17:53:43.541-04:00Comments on DarwinCatholic: Intelligent Design: The Illusive StepDarwinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08572976822786862149noreply@blogger.comBlogger4125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13522238.post-45520121863512456472009-10-17T15:37:18.710-04:002009-10-17T15:37:18.710-04:00I like all the "hmmm's"...I like all the "hmmm's"...Christinehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05205862627682998184noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13522238.post-1131642021762349812005-11-10T12:00:00.000-05:002005-11-10T12:00:00.000-05:00Brendan,You may already have seen this, but Mark P...Brendan,<BR/>You may already have seen this, but Mark Perakh has a good critique of Behe's assumptions and terms here:<BR/><BR/>http://www.talkreason.org/articles/behe2.cfm<BR/><BR/>Worth reading with a highlighter.<BR/><BR/>:)John Farrellhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/18280296574996987228noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13522238.post-1131544470231514562005-11-09T08:54:00.000-05:002005-11-09T08:54:00.000-05:00Rhonda,I'm not sure I completely follow the questi...Rhonda,<BR/><BR/>I'm not sure I completely follow the question, but I'll give it my best shot.<BR/><BR/>First off, any 'evolutionist' who says that life is 'an accident' is either making a rhetorical point about how unlikely he thinks the formation of life is (i.e. that there is a very low chance of life forming on a given planet) or he's making a philosophical point that doesn't necessarily follow from science. It seems to me like 'accident' deals with whether or not something was intended -- which is a question that biology simply can't answer. <BR/><BR/>The question of environment vs. heredity is more of a both/and than either/or. First off, the important thing to remember is that evolution deals with population drift over time, individuals don't 'evolve'. If you have a given population, say it's a population of horses, within that population you'll have a certain range of genetic variation: some horses will be larger, some smaller, some brown, some black, some white, etc. The idea behind evolution by natural selection is that if a selection 'pressure' is placed on the population (say they live in a very cold climate, so horses with shaggier hair are more likely to survive) the variation range will drift over time. While originally perhaps the population was 50% short haired and 50% medium haired with occasional outliers that had very little hair or very long hair, now you have 10% short haired, 60% medium haired and 30% really long haired.<BR/><BR/>Now that sort of selection is far from controversial. It makes sense to just about everyone that if animals with a certain set of characteristics are more likely to survive to have children, and those children are more likely to survive to have children, then those characteristics will become more common.<BR/><BR/>When people debate evolution, the question is essentially how far the scale can slide. Given tens or hundreds of thousands of generations (or even ten or hundreds of millions) will the population's characteristics continue to drift farther and farther based on selective pressure, or is there a point where you hit the end of a species' genetic diversity and you just can't breed any farther towards the extreme.<BR/><BR/>With selective breeding of plants and animals, we generally don't actually get new species, just incredibly wide variation withing a species (say between a great dane and a chihuahua). However those variations result from breeding over a very short period of time. Evolutionary biogists tend to theorize that over significantly longer periods of time, the build-up of small hereditary variations (resulting from various kinds of small mutations or copying errors are DNA replicated and recombines) will 'replenish' the gene pool, allowing the divergence to 'stretch' farther than you see with selectively bread domestic plants or animals.Darwinhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08572976822786862149noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13522238.post-1131481962972823932005-11-08T15:32:00.000-05:002005-11-08T15:32:00.000-05:00According to evolutionist, living things are here ...According to evolutionist, living things are here merely by accident and are ever changing according to their environments.<BR/>Environment not hereditity are the deciding factors.<BR/>But, biologists will tell you the opposite. That living things maintain an ideal organized form true to it's original intention. <BR/>Is that right?Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com