aharvey
New member
Morphy,
Here's the deal. When Darwin's ideas began to take hold in the scientific community, fundamentalist Christians got up in arms and vigorously attacked "evolution." This was long before antibiotics, much less resistance to antibiotics, and the Biblical interpretation at the time held that all modern organisms occur in forms unchanged from when they were created. So these ancestors to modern YECs emphatically rejected evolution, natural selection, adaptation, the whole Darwinian story. But even though Darwin was not the first to discuss the possibility, his name became inextricably linked to the term "evolution;" ergo, the conflict became known as "Creationism vs. Evolution."
As interest in Darwin's ideas prompted vast amounts of new research, it became clear that organisms do change over time in response to environmental factors in pretty much the way that Darwin argued. Short-term changes in population genotypes, and the specific forces that triggered them, were soon impossible to deny. This created a quandary for Creationists, who I think gradually came to terms with these within-species changes but were still completely hostile to the idea that one species could evolve into another, a process that is actually called “speciation.� So the original "Creationism vs. Evolution" dichotomy was now clumsily inaccurate, as it implied a rejection of something they no longer had a problem with, and did not allude to the real issue (i.e., speciation). On the other hand, there was a lot of equity invested in the "creation vs. evolution" slogan. So, instead of replacing "creation vs. evolution" with a more accurate slogan, they have apparently decided to redefine the concept of "evolution" itself.
Part of the reason they went this route may have been a second awkward realization, namely that there are far more species, extant and extinct, than anyone had realized in Darwin's day. The notion of eight simple folk somehow bringing together millions of species onto a single ship, and keeping them fed, watered, cleaned, and healthy on a single ship for a year, was clearly impossible. This led to the uncomfortable conclusion that Noah's ark could not have held all the species of animals that we know exist or have existed, and therefore that some post-Flood speciation must have occured. That is, Creationism could no longer automatically equate "species" with "biblical kind" (i.e., created independently of all other kinds), and therefore even "creationism vs. speciation" wasn't exactly right.
At present, unfortunately, “biblical kind� is an ungrounded concept; no one has been able to determine how to identify the limits of a kind, and thus you can find YEC literature that approximates kinds with everything from species to domains. Nonetheless, it figures prominently in the new debate that is implied in the “Creation vs. Evolution� slogan as brandished here at TOL and other YEC strongholds. Specifically, any “change in population genotypes over time� that occurs within a biblical kind is NOT evolution, as you’ve been told here, it is “adaptation� (be aware that this is NOT how actual biologists use this term). “Evolution� is restricted to the transition from one biblical kind to another (ditto, of course). However, given that the origin of a biblical kind is by definition independent of all other biblical kinds, “evolution� defined this way is logically impossible.
Pretty clever, eh? “Evolution� is a concept that has now been defined out of existence by creationists, but it is a trivial version of “evolution� that no actual biologist would ever use. Keep this in mind when you read the YEC literature. Also realize that if you define an idea to be impossible, it will of course be impossible to find evidence in support of that idea, and you don’t really need to present evidence against that idea. What YECs really done, but seem much more reluctant to discuss, much less rant and rave about, is change the question to “How many times did life independently originate on Earth?� Evolutionary biologists would of course say the evidence suggest the answer is once; I hope you have better luck than me extracting an answer from creationists.
Here's the deal. When Darwin's ideas began to take hold in the scientific community, fundamentalist Christians got up in arms and vigorously attacked "evolution." This was long before antibiotics, much less resistance to antibiotics, and the Biblical interpretation at the time held that all modern organisms occur in forms unchanged from when they were created. So these ancestors to modern YECs emphatically rejected evolution, natural selection, adaptation, the whole Darwinian story. But even though Darwin was not the first to discuss the possibility, his name became inextricably linked to the term "evolution;" ergo, the conflict became known as "Creationism vs. Evolution."
As interest in Darwin's ideas prompted vast amounts of new research, it became clear that organisms do change over time in response to environmental factors in pretty much the way that Darwin argued. Short-term changes in population genotypes, and the specific forces that triggered them, were soon impossible to deny. This created a quandary for Creationists, who I think gradually came to terms with these within-species changes but were still completely hostile to the idea that one species could evolve into another, a process that is actually called “speciation.� So the original "Creationism vs. Evolution" dichotomy was now clumsily inaccurate, as it implied a rejection of something they no longer had a problem with, and did not allude to the real issue (i.e., speciation). On the other hand, there was a lot of equity invested in the "creation vs. evolution" slogan. So, instead of replacing "creation vs. evolution" with a more accurate slogan, they have apparently decided to redefine the concept of "evolution" itself.
Part of the reason they went this route may have been a second awkward realization, namely that there are far more species, extant and extinct, than anyone had realized in Darwin's day. The notion of eight simple folk somehow bringing together millions of species onto a single ship, and keeping them fed, watered, cleaned, and healthy on a single ship for a year, was clearly impossible. This led to the uncomfortable conclusion that Noah's ark could not have held all the species of animals that we know exist or have existed, and therefore that some post-Flood speciation must have occured. That is, Creationism could no longer automatically equate "species" with "biblical kind" (i.e., created independently of all other kinds), and therefore even "creationism vs. speciation" wasn't exactly right.
At present, unfortunately, “biblical kind� is an ungrounded concept; no one has been able to determine how to identify the limits of a kind, and thus you can find YEC literature that approximates kinds with everything from species to domains. Nonetheless, it figures prominently in the new debate that is implied in the “Creation vs. Evolution� slogan as brandished here at TOL and other YEC strongholds. Specifically, any “change in population genotypes over time� that occurs within a biblical kind is NOT evolution, as you’ve been told here, it is “adaptation� (be aware that this is NOT how actual biologists use this term). “Evolution� is restricted to the transition from one biblical kind to another (ditto, of course). However, given that the origin of a biblical kind is by definition independent of all other biblical kinds, “evolution� defined this way is logically impossible.
Pretty clever, eh? “Evolution� is a concept that has now been defined out of existence by creationists, but it is a trivial version of “evolution� that no actual biologist would ever use. Keep this in mind when you read the YEC literature. Also realize that if you define an idea to be impossible, it will of course be impossible to find evidence in support of that idea, and you don’t really need to present evidence against that idea. What YECs really done, but seem much more reluctant to discuss, much less rant and rave about, is change the question to “How many times did life independently originate on Earth?� Evolutionary biologists would of course say the evidence suggest the answer is once; I hope you have better luck than me extracting an answer from creationists.
