Darwin built this nice cottage (theory).
What Darwin built was a collection of specimens, illustrations, studies, notes, articles and books that reflect years of effort, during his travels around the world, and for years thereafter, which have contributed to scientific understanding of the natural world with huge ramifications for advancing the biological sciences. To ridicule this reflects a mean, envious, small-minded and foolish kind of ignorance.
wellwisher said:
As it expanded to include more ideas and opinions, the building process had no sense of long term order.
The refinements to Darwin's original statements on evolution are minimal, and do not reflect an expansion as you may imagine. Your perception that people have inflated Darwin's ideas is absurd. What has happened is that countless studies have corroborated evolution by natural selection, period. It is this repeated confirmation -- from the culturing of microbes to the recovery of fossils to the sequencing of genomes -- that has given Darwin such celebrated status.
Contrast your foolishness with this:
Three fields in particular—geology, genetics and paleoanthropology—illustrate both the gaps in Darwin's own knowledge and the power of his ideas to make sense of what came after him. Darwin would have been amazed, for example, to learn that the continents are in constant, crawling motion. The term "genetics" wasn't even coined until 1905, long after Darwin's death in 1882. And though the first fossil recognized as an ancient human—dubbed Neanderthal Man—was discovered in Germany just before Origin was published, he could not have known about the broad and varied family tree of ancestral humans. Yet his original theory has encompassed all these surprises and more.
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/What-Darwin-Didnt-Know.html#ixzz1pW4TQyT4
and this, by Jesuit Teilhard de Chardin:
Is evolution a theory, a system or a hypothesis? It is much more: it is a general condition to which all theories, all hypotheses, as systems must bow and which they must satisfy henceforth if they are to be thinkable and true. Evolution is a light illuminating all facts, a curve that all lines must follow.
wellwisher said:
The convoluted theory that evolved (random house) is hard to work with in terms of common sense predictions.
The only thing convoluted is your own ideation which takes some of the best most elegant concepts from science and twists them with contempt and a deluded sense of self importance. Your use of the term "random house" is another convolution, born of a reluctance to learn what Darwin said about the random nature of mutations within a species, further explained by Mendel, whose work you are also ignoring. You continue to ignore the meaning of "random mutation".
Contrast your convolutions to this:
Let me try to make crystal clear what is established beyond reasonable doubt, and what needs further study, about evolution. Evolution as a process that has always gone on in the history of the earth can be doubted only by those who are ignorant of the evidence or are resistant to evidence, owing to emotional blocks or to plain bigotry.
Theodosius Dobzhansky [pioneering geneticist], “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.”
The American Biology Teacher, March 1973.
wellwisher said:
Let me outline a common sense proof of evolution, that allows one to make a prediction.
You are not expressing common sense nor are you proving anything except your own fallacies. As for predictions, Darwin said in
Origin: "In the distant future I see open fields for far more important researches". The predictive ability lies in Darwin's work, not yours. Look again at the first cite above, note the phase:
Yet his original theory has encompassed all these surprises and more.
wellwisher said:
The premise is, one aspect of evolution can be induced by the imposition of a singular boundary condition.
Hogwash. You alone are imposing boundaries and conditions.
wellwisher said:
In this case, we will start with bacteria and add antibiotics. Since antibiotics will kill bacteria, the new boundary is simple. There is only one place for evolution to go; survival. The prediction is some bacteria will find the funnel hole and will develop a resistance to the boundary condition. This change is evolution. There is no other place it can evolve, since all other paths will end in death.
This is an example of your convoluted reasoning. You seem to be wrestling with the notion of natural selection. It is clear that if you kill all the bacteria, nothing happens next. What you are missing is they are not all killed, because they are not all exactly the same. Some are more resistant that others. This is what Darwin realized a century and a half ago, in part from the work of Mendel, but which you have not yet attempted to understood. Here is where you only need to learn the actual theory instead of twisting it to suit your personal opinion. The prediction is this: resistance is attributable to random mutation and to inherited traits; both of these code the DNA; those with greater antimicrobial resistance will tend to survive and their genes will be handed down, whereas the non resistant cells will die without reproducing. And this is observed.
You continue to fail to acknowledge the way evolution relates to the evolutionary niches. This again from Theodosius Dobzhansky:
The evolutionary process tends to fill up the available ecologic niches. It does not do so consciously or deliberately; the relations between evolution and environment are more subtle and more interesting than that. The environment does not impose evolutionary changes on its inhabitants, as postulated by the now abandoned neo-Lamarckian theories. The best way to envisage the situation is as follows: the environment presents challenges to living species, to which the later may respond by adaptive genetic changes.
Until you learn what the the theory actually says, your attacks are utter nonsense.
