Evolution: the catch-all explanation

I find one of the most irritating things in much modern scientific writing, or in television 'scientific' programmes is the notion that evolution explains everything. These days if a writer starts to tell me (without any evidence) that something evolved in such and such a way - and particularly if they introduce this without any necessity - I stop reading, or switch off. Evolution has become the catch-all approach to science, and is basically so nonsensical in the way much of it is used that I just can't be bothered to follow these sorts of 'arguments' through. You could say that my own 'bias' is showing here, and that I should 'inform' myself by reading things that I don't agree with. I do, if there's a good reason to do so, but when someone supposedly claims things happened by evolution and does it without anything to back up the statement, I know I'm in the presence of a writer who hasn't really thought through the implications of what they saying. And in case you think that my bias is showing and that I should read things I don't agree with in order to be more informed, check out Dr Cornelius Hunter on the same subject. I quote: ...evolutionists have a seemingly never ending list of mechanisms they use to explain everything in between. Whatever we find in biology, evolutionists say it must have evolved. Their predictions and expectations are often falsified and they have to patch their theory repeatedly. And there is no distinction between a new, fantastic design and a repeated design--both are equiprobable under evolution. If a new, fantastic design appears such as the trilobite eye, then evolutionists ascribe it to natural selection. If similar designs are found in different species, then it is ascribed to common descent. If later cousin species are found to lack the design, then common descent can be dropped as an explanation and the design can be said to have evolved independently. The evolutionary explanation is extremely flexible. More on Cornelius Hunter here.

PDP

pdp apparently stands for performance designed products. I'm not sure what a product not designed for performance would look like.Wouldn't that be a counterproductive, non-performance, undesign?

Don't ask me. I'm assuming that something that is performance designed means (a) it will actually work, which immediately makes it better than many products on the market today; (b) it will be produced to a decently high standard - I'm assuming that, of course, otherwise it would just be classified as a designed product, thus putting it in the same category as pretty much every other product on the planet.

The problem with acronyms, to change the subject somewhat, is that they don't mean the same thing to every person. Looking at Wikipedia on the subject of PDPs, for instance, you find that there are umpteen (well, maybe not umpteen; more like thirty) other interpretations of these three simple letters. I haven't got room to go into all these, though it might make an interesting post sometime, and anyway it's late at night and I need to go to bed.

Comments I don't need...

It happened tonight that I went checking back through this blog to find something related to Bill Bryson and design flaws.  To my surprise there was a relatively new comment on the post, even though the post itself dates from September 2005 (it's one of the earliest ones on this blog, in fact).  I was possibly even more surprised to find it was what you might call a 'spam comment' - in other words, if a human had written it, he or she had done so some time ago, and had then sent out the comment to any sites that would accept it.   There must be something about this blog that allows those sorts of comments to be picked up, at times.  

I scrolled through the other posts around that period and sure enough there were scattered comments on different posts advertising sites where you could buy diet drugs, or cheap insurance and other such stuff.  They mostly seemed to be in the 2005-2007 period, so perhaps the bots that send these things are geared towards older posts so that they're less visible to the blog owners.  

Interestingly enough on one of my other blogs, The Daily Writer, I get notifications via email regularly that 'someone' has 'commented' on a post - but these are newer posts.  One in particular has suffered constant comments of this kind.  Normally by the time I check them out they've been removed - presumably by some program that Blogger/Google runs.  I wonder why that doesn't work on this blog, which is run by Blogger as well? 

Time for a Change

Those familiar with the usual look of this blog will note a slight change.  In fact they may wonder what's become of it....it's gone from a somewhat bland approach, with posts leaking their way down the page as usual, running out of space and becoming 'older posts' and with various other items visible on the page. 

At the moment I haven't discovered what's become of these other items - links to other blogs, and info about the writer and more - but no doubt in due course I'll uncover them.   In the meantime, the new look is actually quite a lot of fun and very visual.   Even the posts that don't have a picture attached claim attention by not having something graphic, as though they were somehow less of the hoi polloi.  

And I've just seen that I'm no longer restricted to one look; by clicking on the menu over to the top left, you, the reader, can change the look of the page to suit yourself.   Apparently.   Currently I've got it on Flipcard, but it can be in half a dozen or more formats.   Phew.  All a bit much. 

Time will tell how I feel about the arrangement overall, and it's possible I may revert to 'normality' if I get frustrated with this new mode.   Now, since visual is all the rage on here, I better attach a photo of something relevant!

Photo by Matt from London

Recognizing the limitations of our understanding is one of the most important insights from Bohr's complementarity. Perhaps there is no single correct path. Solving the world's problems may require both scientific and religious attitudes — two types of faith, not just one or the other.

From Intelligent Design or Intelligible Design? - It's a matter of faith, by Frederick Grinnell.

(Niels Bohr introduced complementarity in 1927 to account for the failure of classical physics to explain the nature of light.)

Frederick Grinnell is a professor of cell biology at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, in Dallas.