HOW KIND? Yes it is true – I have hammered and will continue to hammer after their kind. You claim my use the of the term ‘kind’ is spectacularly vague. Nonsense. It is experimentally proven that organisms reproduce after their kind. What’s vague about that?
Kind simply refers to all those creatures that are related as in mankind being unrelated to the bird kind or the ape kind. You want the actual details on how God created? We know about as much about that process as evolutionists know about abiogenesis. But here is the difference. Complex information ALWAYS comes from intelligence. Always. This is where evolution fails big time. We have a source of complex information in the intelligence of God. Evolutionist have to rely on experimentally unsupported, yet to be found mechanisms they accept by blind faith alone! You continually view mutations/natural selection as the hero of the evolution story when there is no evidence that our laboratory efforts can mutate new types of organisms and gain new complex information. Our
attempts to scientifically reproduce the evolution fantasy have all proved to be failures. And that with carefully controlled lab conditions, scientists etc., and not natural non-guided conditions which is what evolution demands. The amount of your faith in evolution is admirable but foolishly founded in desperation. As Dr. Kemp curator of Zoological Collections at Oxford University so clearly stated; “To account for evolutionary changes that take millions of years to completion solely by reference to processes that can be studied only over tens of years requires an extraordinary faith.” T S Kemp, Fossils and Evolution, Oxford University Press, 1999, p 251. No, that is not a quote mine.
DATING TREES: I couldn¹t believe you would waste space in the debate on tree ring chronology since showing that a pine tree is old only undermines your case. If pine trees have remained pine trees for 10,000, or 30,000 or 300,000,000 yrs, then you have made a
claim that is no help to your argument for evolution. Knowing how old they are does not tell us where they came from. But the older you make them the longer we can argue they have not evolved! There is no observation evolution does happen, no mechanism to show it can, and no evidence to support it has ever happened! On this basis Dan I could allow you millions of years and safely predict you will find nothing evolves into a new KIND of organism. Case closed! Yet again- but are you listening?
John: thank you for defining “kind” for me. You say the term refers to a group of organisms that are all related by common descent. OK, fine. What I’m really asking for, then, is this: by what method or methods can we determine whether a group of organisms is related by common descent?
Everyone else uses the logic of common descent (as described in my language analogy post and subsequent discussion). But you seem to think that logic is unreliable – you said it works for languages, dog breeds, and finches, and now you seem to include apes and birds (really? you agree that all birds form a kind?). But you reject that very same method for primates, mammals, and seed plants. (See the journal Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution for thousands of more examples.) Why on earth do you do this?
You say that you have no insight into how God created the original kinds. So do you acknowledge that He might have created them by a process of copying and modification, i.e. common descent? Since the logic of common descent applies so beautifully, not only to languages, dogs, and finches, but to primates, mammals, and seed plants, shouldn’t you take this to provide exactly what you say you lack, namely insight into God’s method of design? I totally fail to see why you don’t take this step. It is at least one way in which you could stop flying in the face of common sense! Because the logic of common descent just is common sense, as everyone should be able to see from the language example. (As I said, the blinders come off for that one.)
There is another method that allows us to determine common descent: direct observation of the process. This could be direct observation of a process of intelligent design, where a designer copies and modifies earlier designs. Or it could be direct observation of a process of random variation and selection, e.g. simulations on a computer, or the Lenski experiment on E. coli. In your post here, John, you seem to suggest that this is the only method that can reveal common descent. But you can’t really think that’s true – otherwise you wouldn’t accept the finch kind, or the wallaby kind, or many others that I think you do accept. We didn’t directly observe all those finches coming from other finches, coming from previous ones, all the way back to the original population. We used the logic of common descent.
You also accept another method: the authority of The Bible – if The Bible calls it a kind, then you’re committed to accepting it as a kind. (Of course, I don’t think this is a very reliable method.) But you couldn’t possibly think the Bible mentions all the kinds – what about various types of plankton, dinosaurs, and trilobites, for instance?
This means you are absolutely committed to accepting the logic of common descent in some biological cases. Again I ask: why not all? As I pointed out, this doesn’t even mean you have to discard your designer! It just means that our debate would turn to a new topic: what is the mechanism of common descent?
At that point we could revisit your attacks on what biology says the mechanism is: mutation plus natural selection. Actually, you accept natural selection (within a “kind”); you just doubt that mutation can ever give rise to new “kinds”. In fact, you go even further, saying that biologists believe this on the basis of nothing more than “blind faith.” (Ironic, given that I’ve shown here and here that the principal basis for your entire hypothesis is a dogmatic faith in the literal truth of Genesis.) That’s preposterous – but it’s also a different subject, and so should be moved to a new main post. In that post (tentatively entitled “The mutation half of the evolution mechanism”), I’ll show why John’s “attacks” on mutation are utterly ineffectual.
So, John, the main followup for you here is: why don’t you accept my olive branch of Divine Design by Common Descent?
(Oh right, John brings up pine trees here for some reason(?!): his point is exactly the same as the one he made using comb jellies and filamentous bacteria, and I’ve replied to it here (the last bit), here (just the last bit, again), and here (note 1). John hasn’t responded to those points, beyond saying that the first one is a “cop-out”. Why is it a cop-out, John?) Also, I brought up the trees in the oral debate primarily to demonstrate that a very basic dating method that even a creationist can’t twist clearly demonstrates that the Earth is over 10,000 years old – the wacky denial of which is an essential part of John’s young earth creationist position.)
John rejects my olive branch here (while not answering or addressing most of the rest). Too bad, I thought we might make some progress. After you read John’s “Kind” post, the next place to go is: this comment.