The Anti-theist Thread

[BeardofPants]

Just a couple of things.

Darwinism. Many people cite evolution as a random process. They could not be more wrong. Many facets are factored for in the process, not least including Natural Selection (Survival of the fittest), sexual selection, cultural selection, genetic drift, mutation etc etc. Notice that most of these processes have 'selection' in their names (selection is NOT a random factor). Based on genetic studies, random factors (random mutations, point mutations, crossing over, etc) only account for 1 - 2 % of the processes of biological evolution. This is because most mutations are neutral, in that they don't affect the organism. Therefore, evolution as a process is all about selection, not random factors. Thus evolution can not be compared to a wind blowing through a junk yard to make a boeing 747.

If you were going to create an analogy of a junkyard, evolution would be if someone found a part to improve the fitness of their boeing 747. Then someone liked that extra part so much, they nicked it, and applied it to their plane. Pretty soon, all boeing 747s have swiped that part to increase the fitness of their planes, and are renamed boeing 767s. And the older, weaker model, has died out. Now, no part of this was random, thus, can the same be said of evolution. Organisms constantly selecting for the strongest possible fit. Yes, random factors can be involved, but they are only a small part of the equation.

Darwin's missing link was genetics. He was not trying to find a missing link per se, he was just trying to understand why there was so much variety in his galapagos finches, among other things. His five year mission ( ) on the Beagle, was to select samples from around the globe, of flora, and fauna. His Origin of the Species, was just a by product of this voyage. Remember, Darwin was deeply religious, as was his wife (a pastor's daughter), but he was still drawn to the conclusion that the force controlling the diversity of the flora/fauna he found was part of a process, in which natural selection played a small part. His belief basically means Survival of the Fittest. And random factors just don't cut the mustard. How are you expected to survive millions of years of competition, and so forth, if your species is being randomly selected for? No, this is not possible, as is the analogy of the wind blowing through the junk yard. But I digress, Darwin had the mechanisms right, he just couldn't understand the process of genetics (not discovered until the neo-Darwinism revolution, involving Mendellian genetics). He could understand how competition acted upon the organism, as well as selection processes, but he couldn't understand how a red flower, and a white flower, could produce a) a white flower, b) a red flower, and c) a pink flower. This was his missing link.