Joel Kontinen (157) SearchWarp Author Since: February 15, 2008

Total Articles by Joel Kontinen on SearchWarp: 19 (view articles)

Total Readership of Joel Kontinen's Articles on SearchWarp: 527

Most Recent Article by Joel Kontinen:

Evolution and the Decadence of the West (48 days 3 hours ago)

Joel Kontinen is an author and translator currently living in Finland. His bacground includes an MA in translation studies and a BA in Bible and Theology. He mostly writes about origins issues.

 

Blog:. http://joelkontinen.blogspot.com/

 

 

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Sorry, Ben, as you probably have noticed, I have removed your recycled comment. You previously posted a 600+word "comment" to my 350-word article, repeating arguments that you already had used elsewhere on this forum. I'm afraid that over-long posts that merely repeat previous arguments will not take the discussion any further.

 

Hi Ben,

You have obviously been very busy lately but unfortunately you have missed at least some of the irony of both my original article and my response to your comment. Of course, we are discussing serious matters, aren’t we, so we should probably keep irony to minimum.

 You used three different definitions of evolution in your two comments. This, of course, is typical of evolutionists. When evolutionists speaks of evolution they often use the word in one of the following senses, “change”, “change over time” or “descend with modification” (the goo-to-you view) and what is confusing, they might even change the meaning in the middle of the sentence. A bit careless, isn’t it? BTW, which definition did you use?

 But, first of all, let’s make it clear that natural selection is not the same thing as evolution. You might know that Charles Darwin adopted this term from the writings of Edward Blyth (1810—1873), a British chemist and zoologist who had written about the concept twenty years before Darwin. Blyth, as you might remember, was a creationist.

 The full title of Darwin’s 1859 book was On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, which of course is a misnomer since natural selection does not have the capacity to design or create new traits. I’ve read Darwin’s book from cover to cover and was not very impressed with it. Most of it has to do with selective breeding (science) but later on Darwin and his disciples extrapolated the results ad infinitum. Mark Twain put it this way in Life on the Mississippi, “There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.” Here is the context:

 In the space of one hundred and seventy-six years the Lower Mississippi has shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles. That is an average of a trifle over one mile and a third per year. Therefore, any calm person, who is not blind or idiotic, can see that in the Old Oolitic Silurian Period, just a million years ago next November, the Lower Mississippi River was upwards of one million three hundred thousand miles long, and stuck out over the Gulf of Mexico like a fishing-rod. And by the same token any person can see that seven hundred and forty-two years from now the Lower Mississippi will be only a mile and three-quarters long, and Cairo and New Orleans will have joined their streets together, and be plodding comfortably along under a single mayor and a mutual board of aldermen. There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.

 Now, I don’t believe in million of years but I hope you get the point. Natural selection can only select from existing material so evolution also needs mutations that are basically spelling mistakes.

 For evolutionists, there is only one game in town. Anything that smacks of design has to be ruled out a priori. Naturalism is very intolerant of competing theories. Or, as Richard Darwins said, “As a scientist I am pretty hostile to a rival doctrine”. Doctrine is a synonym for the party line, isn’t it? “Evolution is fact” is a doctrine. It has more to do with your worldview than with science. 

 In his recent book The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and its Scientific Pretensions David Berlinski quotes Robert Carroll who says, “most of the fossil record does not support a strictly gradualistic account” of evolution. Doctor Berlinski adds, “A ‘strictly gradualistic’ account is precisely what Darwin’s theory demands: It is the heart and soul of the theory.” (quote from page 189)

 Later, Dr. Berlinski goes to say, “Although Darwin’s theory is very often compared favorably to the great theories of mathematical physics on the grounds that evolution is as well established as gravity, very few physicists have been heard observing that gravity is as well established as evolution. They know better and are not stupid.” (page 191)

 A much more logical explanation for shared traits is common design, not convergent evolution. When just-so stories masquerade as science, as they so often do in evolution storytelling, we might suspect that there might be something wrong with the theory. Calling it fact will not change the real facts. 

 All the best,

Joel

The fact that groups branches on the tree of life regularly have to be re-ordered is not a weakness of the theory of evolution. The orderings were originally speculative in any case, being the "best guess" based on the available evidence. As more and better evidence comes in, we can make better guesses.

 

The article you refer to demonstrates weaknesses in classification methods. The article makes no implication of anything being wrong with the theory of evolution itself! It doesn't suggest that birds didn't evolve by natural selection, it merely demonstrates that previous speculation on the specific paths of their evolution was wrong.

 

Convergent evolution is strongly supported by facts, and shows why the old classification system (based almost entirely on physical similarities = relatedness) was wrong. Dolphins look a lot like sharks, certainly they resemble sharks a lot more than they resemble humans, yet convergent evolution explains why they resemble sharks (e.g. they share the same environment, and the streamlined shape is well suited to it) YET AREN'T CLOSELY RELATED to them. Dolphins are more closely related to humans than they are related to sharks.

 

Hi Ben,

 One of my favourite phrases in articles or papers dealing with Darwinian evolution is “now we know”, which of course is evo-speak for “sorry folks, but what we have been presenting as fact is but guesses”.

 Evolutionists are not too fond of Occam’s razor in their explanations and often have to prop up their pet theory with ad hoc explanations, such as convergent evolution. Evolution itself is never doubted, since that would amount to sacrilege but just like the Marxist theory of history it is always assumed to be true, regardless of the evidence. No true believer would ever let a Divine foot in the door.

 BTW, sharks are what evolutionists call living fossils. The poor creatures have obviously forgotten to evolve for ages and thus provide no evidence for evolution. And neither do trees of life that have to be redrawn every now and then.