In fact, I would argue that God has deliberately littered the world with evidence for common descent and speciation (with no post creation examples of God creating other things from dust)… that God is trying to inform YECs of the reality of God’s choices.
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I kind of like the definitions presented in this video. He defines them right out of the gate do you don’t hsve to fast forward or anything
Now hold on pardner. Under the framework where GA is even necessary as an answer to a problem, Genesis one and two are either totally separate accounts or (as I think) separate but connected accounts.
So what if for example, evolution was used for the creatures of the world but special creation was used for domesticated versions of some of those creatures that were for the garden? What would that look like?
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In the @swamidass scenarios… it makes more sense for some/all domesticated mammals being specially created and released from Eden.
And we can place that time anywhere from 4000 to 10,000 years ago.
I listened until he got to the part where he claimed that we now know that the eye is very poorly designed. I guess its not a case of him being wrong so much as his knowing things that are not true.
I think what I have learned here today is that the prior campaign to avoid using the terms “micro” and “macro” evolution is slowly being supplanted by an effort to to manufacture definitions which fit with the original premise for refusing to use such terms. To whit- that there is no difference in mechanisms, only a difference in time so that macro = micro x Y.
I must reject this effort from the Yale professor as more of a rhetorical tactic than an acknowledgement of what happens when bacteria become mammals is different in kind as well as degree from say, existing allele frequencies changing in a population of insects.
Therefore statements like this…
While generally true do not account for people like me who said previously in this thread…
Therefore I think nature can and has produced changes that I would consider “macro-evolution” without believing that nature can do so at the rate necessary to produce all the change we see during certain points in the biologic record and consider that there is likely to be some changes that nature could not produce at all, in anything like the time she has had , without help. I think nature left alone would mess it up faster than she could generate it.
Well I agree with that, though I think it could be as long as 13,400 years ago. And I predict that not only will the area north of Mesopotamia be where many animals (and plants) were domesticated, but that “the rocks won’t match the clocks” here. @T.j_Runyon was frustrated with me on a prior thread because I was trying to make hay out of the rocks and clocks being in conflict on the Cambrian Explosion. But now I am going to say the same thing about events at the edge of human civilization. Many animals are going to genetically look like they were separating from their wild versions long before we see from the history that they did. That is, there will be more genetic change present than can be explained from them being taken out of the larger population of wild animals at the time they were taken out.
In some cases domestication happened more than once. In those cases what I wrote above would probably just apply to the domesticated population from Anatolia/NW Iran.
You wrote:
“… consider that there is likely to be some changes that [N]ature could not produce … in anything like the time [S]he has had without help. I think [N]ature left alone would mess it up faster than she could generate it.”
Again… this is a statement geared to an Atheist audience. Why do you bother formulating it here?
Not for the benefit of our resident atheist, that is for sure. I am trying to show people like you that at some point the lines become blurred. The activity described is both “evolution” and “creationism”. For example, when human scientists add jellyfish genes to mice so that they glow in the dark, and those mice have offspring and pass off that trait, is it evolution or creationism, or both?
I realized this as soon as I adopted the phrase “God-Guided Evolution”.
And yet there still seems to be an adequate SOLID LINE to rely upon:
Speciation by Evolution, or Speciation by Special Creation. Even @swamidass’ dual scenario does not make de novo humans a separate species.
I didn’t like the poor design statement either. And I was going to say the only problem I had with his definitions is I don’t know if macro is just micro plus time. I Lean towards no. You should watch that whole lecture series though. It’s great
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Heres a good history of the terminology
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/macroevolution.html
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I sensed that you acknowledged a distinction. Here the problem seems to me to be that we can know a lot about the tractable part of the matter (pop gen and so on), which has to do with processes visible, regular in some senses, and reproducible. Science through and through.
But the macro- /micro- distinction arose because it was perceived that there seemed to be things happening in the fossil record beyond the reach of the observable mechanisms (henceforth called micro-evolution), partly because they are in the distant past and partly because they seem to involve origins to some degree or other. (How does an arm ever become a wing? How does the exact same pattern of wing in bats appear to come separately in insectivores with echolocation and primates with good eyesight? And why does the stasis/saltation pattern remain in the fossil record even when it is known to give a pretty complete record over time?)
So the “macro-evolution” term is a placeholder for mechanisms as yet unknown - I guess “common descent” might be no worse, but I doubt it is any better, because it’s still covering our ignorance of what may be a multitude of unknown mechanisms, including (to some unspecified degree) the genetic processes we know and love, then all kinds of exotic “natural” processes from hybridization to emergent laws of form or saltations, up to special creation of … something … be that an entirely new organism or a few key mutations.
In other words, we can’t (usefully) simply define our distinction as something precise like “everything below species level is micro, and everything above is macro.” As we all know, “species” is a slippery concept, and microevolution might be capable of producing some of what we term species (I’m thinking of the way that bird races have been split into species recently on genetic grounds), but not others.
Until we have a better fix on mechanisms, we’re not even sure what it is we’re defining, apart from recognising the valid suspicion that there’s “something out there” beyond the old population genetics extended in time. It’s interesting, for example, that some of Richard Buggs’ and Paul Nelson’s work on Orfans has (at this early stage) hinted that there may be commonly a true natural distinction at the level of the genus. If that kind of thing were confirmed, it would be a focus for research on what a genus actually is, and how they arise - but neither “common descent” nor “macroevolution” would be of much further use in describing what’s going on.
I agree that your example of YEC whales from ungulates microevolution is not useful unless we grant that everything is, after all, microevolution. That kind of thinking seems to hinge on this concept of “kinds”, which given how few kinds are in the biblical data (for example, 3 kinds cover all animals on land, none of which are whales, which are created, in old translations, on a separate day) is to me an arbitrary scientific category.
The whale example, though, provides another category of “macroevolutionary” mystery, which is the apparent long-term teleology involved in such a transition, for which neither neutral theory nor adaptationist Neodarwinism seem a good fit. Instead of arterodactyls getting by by being “good enough” in a marine environment, it’s as if they were handed a spec for perfect adaptation to deep-water life and ticked off each modification as they achieved it in a program uninterrupted by dead-ends, climate change, etc. Sea-otters work well enough - why become a blue whale?
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George, you mistook a limiting case for a truth-claim!
Let me expand on that a little, based on the “early Royal Society” distinction of general and special providence I noted on another thread. Essentially, their idea was that general providence was “original creation proceeding according to the laws of nature God created then.” But special providence was over and above that, accounting for (for example) a London earthquake being perhaps a divine warning for sin.
Later, Newton and his followers tried to unify general and special providence (against the Deism of Leibniz which denied special providence), but that’s irrelevant here - I’ll stick with the earlier view for now. The point was that earthquakes might usually be part of general providence, but under some circumstances might be directed by God over and above the laws of nature to his specific ends.
A biblical comparison: every century or two the Jordan river is, naturally, temporarily dammed by rockfalls, but for that to happen when the Israelites needed to cross was special providence, and indeed miraculous. In the case of Jonah, God “provided” a gourd to shelter him overnight - still special providence, but something that would never have happened in nature at all.
Bottom line - in such a view of nature, God is at liberty to work against the background of general providence in special ways, there being no absolute way of apportioning things between “general” (=“natural”) and “special” (=“supernatural”) providence.
In fact, under Newton’s science of nature, according to my source, the two kinds of providence were resolved in favour of making even general providence “supernatural” - Newton himself, I gather, regarded the operation of gravity as essentially the constant miraculous activity of God. It was, after all, spooky action at a distance. That didn’t stop him being able to formulate his laws, because general providence was lawlike.
In some ways, then, Newton’s view of nature is “what God does, sometimes regularly and sometimes contingently.” I find that to be what the Bible teaches, too, but it renders the effort of looking for “divine action” meaningless - though it might leave open a path to distinguishing the general (regular, lawlike) from the special (contingent, “random”).
And so, you see, whether or not my suggestion that science is, methodologically, “regularism”, and that the natural/supernatural distinction isn’t helpful, is right or wrong, it is at least in good scientific company in the person of Sir Isaac Newton.
@jongarvey, The question can be just as easily posed the other way … why are there any otters at all?
The answer is relatively obvious: otters are not able to exploit the deep seas… while those marine mammals that were on the edge of the deep sea niche had an opportunity to spawn a new population that was suited for that.
Maybe you can explain what you mean a little more. What exactly is your position?
I like this characterization of Newton "regarding the operation of gravity as… the constant miraculous activity of God… that didn’t sop him being able to formulate his laws, because general providence was lawlike.
The key is that definitions be consistently used, for the sake of any given discussion.
I’ve found it fascinating that in recent years so many of my Young Earth Creationist friends have basically adopted Ken Ham’s proudly proclaimed hyper-evolution (as depicted in exhibits at the Creation Museum and Ark Encounter.) They are OK with the rapid development of all of the world’s cat family species (lions, tigers, house cats, leopards, etc.) from the original cat pairs on Noah’s Ark in just a few thousand years—as long as nobody uses the word “evolution” to describe it. Ironically, many of the same people who reject the Theory of Evolution by saying “there is zero evidence for evolution” are willing to accept Ham’s imaginary super-speed evolution without any evidence at all for his claims.
Of course, many of those people insist that such a phenomenon is “merely micro-evolution” and is restricted “within a kind”. And just as their imagined boundaries for their idea of “micro-evolution” has gotten wider, so has the definition of “kind” (now known as a baramin among many YECs) become much broader than what I recall from the early 1960’s. It is true that classifications like “cat kind” and “horse kind” have been around for a long time—and Ken Ham claims that a baramin is usually a taxonomic family just as Henry Morris did long before—yet today there is no hesitation to extend a single kind to all bacteria when making bombastic statements like “Yes, bacteria can evolve but the result is still just a bacteria.” (The “just a” argument comes up a lot today.)
One of my great frustrations that led me out of the YEC “creation science” movement was the predictable adjustment of terminology to the brink of the meaningless. Thus, as evidence mounted for evolution, the associated “kind” simple got broadened and the definition of micro-evolution got more ambiguous. (“Yes, Darwin’s finches changed over time but each of those types of birds was still just a finch.”)
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I’m totally in agreement, @AllenWitmerMiller.
This is why I have twice posted a set of links (in 2 other threads) showing how a single species of marsupial arrived in Australia and can be documented as being the ancestral population for:
[1] vegetarian moles (marsupial); as well as
[2] carnivorous Tasmanian devils; and
[3] a generic omnivore…
Each radiating into unique eco-niches that made for solid exploitation by sub-populations genetically most suited to do so.
There is a yet 4th additional branch from which JUMPING kangaroo species emerge.
In this context, my position is that causing a key mutation (or a suite of them leading to a new species) that would otherwise not have happened would be as much a case of special creation as creating Adam from dust, or Eve from Adam’s rib. The difference would be only one of biological subtlety.