This article from @Wayne_Rossiter is worth quoting in detail. He exhumes some really important quotes from the forum discussion that are important to understand my position. Though he does disagree with me, I’m thankful he did that:
https://shadowofoz.wordpress.com/2016/09/15/a-response-to-dr-swamidass/comment-page-1/
Specifically, the individual argued,
[The Theory of Evolution (TOE)] is a semantic statement, and the only paradigm in the sciences that cannot be derived from first principles (mathematical rigor), nor can we perform straightforward experimental verification of its fundamentals (which by definition ought to be equated with first principles).
In that context, Swamidass responded,
I must respectfully and forcefully disagree on several points. This may come as a surprise, but there is a very solid mathematical foundation to evolution, and a very strong experimental grounding. This doesn’t make it ‘True’ (because science does not make truth claims), but evolution is very compelling in science.
And some important quotes from me, which I still stand by:
There are several other theories that are derived in a very similar way as evolution, and are not verifiable by straightforward experimentation. A great example is inflation and the Big Bang. Also black holes, the age of the earth, the Higgs Boson, and many many more things. Even things that are ‘testable’ were often settled upon long before their truly seminal experiment (e.g. heliocentricity, general relativity, and many more). Moreover, there are whole fields of science focused on ‘emergent’ properties that are not derivable from ‘first principles,’ thinks like protein function (because we cannot derive protein structure from sequence) and (e.g. action of psychiatric drugs) medicine are great examples.
And this surprise about Darwinism (repeated in the blog post):
Rather, if specific mechanisms of evolution are true, they make testable predictions about how biological systems behave today. We can test these predictions in biological systems experimentally, and there is an immense body of work that does just this, finding that predictions from some mechanisms are wrong (e.g. neo-Darwinian positive-selection dominated change) and of others are correct (e.g. neutral theory and common descent). This [is] one of the big reasons that I (as a biologist) say there is very strong evidence for evolution.”
Whoa! What!?!? Science has demonstrated that the neo-Darwinian theory of evolution has failed, and it has validated neutral theory and common descent? Call the Royal Society, the National Academy of Sciences, and the publisher of every general biology textbook on the market.
If there is any doubt, in the 1960’s Kimura and Haldane demonstrated that positive-selection dominated change does not explain most of DNA. This is well known in biology. So arguing against scientific “Darwinism” is anachronistic if we mean anything but atheism.
It seems that @Wayne_Rossiter does agree, despite his surprise:
My point is, as Swamidass offers,
Positive selection is important, but it is not necessarily the most important mechanism.
And correctly quotes my definition of evolution, which I think really should be the default definition:
Defining evolution correctly as just common descent is really helpful. There is nothing intrinsically atheistic about it. CD [common descent] is also the most historically and scientifically consistent and correct definition. To be clear, also, I am not adding to this definition abiogenesis (origin of life) or universal common descent. These things are up for debate in the scientific community, and not part of evolution proper. One group of scientists thinks that life arose multiple times (so they do not believe in universal common descent). Another group of scientists severely doubts any natural mechanism for abiogenesis could ever be found. Regardless, evolution is just common descent of all life to a few (or one) ancestor.
Put plainly, for Swamidass, “evolution” is just the evidence for universal common descent. Here acknowledges much that no other evolutionary biologist (or theistic evolutionist) would admit: Darwin’s mechanism is not the dominate force in evolution, there is serious debate about the origins of life, and universal common ancestry might be false.
To be clear, I am not actually saying something surprising to scientists here. The fact that positive-selection dominated change does not explain DNA is well known among competent biologists. I’ve always argued that the fundamentally most important and difficult part of evolution is the “common descent of man,” not whether bacteria all share a common ancestor.
Human evolution has always been where the conflict lies, even for Christians that affirm evolution. That is why my work focused there, and why the progress we have made has a chance to really reorder the debate.