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.

Darwin's Secret Sex Problem

Darwin’s Secret Sex Problem: Exposing Evolution’s Fatal Flaw—The Origin of Sex, by F LaGard Smith. 

For many years the thing that seemed to me most unanswered in the evolution 'history' - even more than how the eye could have evolved in such complexity by chance - was how a male and female could suddenly appear together at the same time, out of the blue, within the same part of the world, and thus set humanity on its course. There seemed no possibility that all the complex requirements of both male and female could come together at the right time. This was the same for all male/female species, of course. 

And then I came across this book, and found someone else who saw the absurdity of believing that a male and a female had suddenly appeared on the evolution horizon at the same time. Thanks, Mr Smith, for this alone you deserve five stars.

The book, truth to be told, is too long, and certainly in the earlier chapters, seems rather repetitive. But there is so much evidence for Mr Smith's point of view that the more of the book I read, the more I enjoyed it and appreciated his arguments. 

It's been obvious to me for many years that evolution was more of a religion than a science, though there are some science factors to it. There are many religious aspects to it as well, though evolutionists won't admit to this. 

I think the saddest part of this book is the discussion of well-known Christians who somehow manage to keep a Biblical worldview in tandem with an evolutionary one. Mr Smith doesn't see this as possible, and I don't either. You have to make a choice in the end. To my surprise, there was a time when C S Lewis, who for the most appears to have one of the soundest Christian minds of the 21st century, could have for so long contemplated the possibility that evolution was true. 

I wrote on Twitter the other day: "I long for the day in the future when Evolution is remembered as a fairytale our ancestors used to tell us, claiming it held the truth for everything, when in fact it explained almost nothing..." Of course that immediately aroused the sarcasm of evolution believers, as you'd expect, though surprisingly, very little of it. 

Mr Smith makes the point that we no longer regard the earth as being at the centre of the solar system, but that this took centuries to change. And those who were most opposed to the idea were scientists more than Christians. So that gives me hope that one day evolution will go the way of the dodo. It certainly deserves to do so.

Failure, success, sex and evolution

Many of life's failures are people who did not realise how close they were to success when they gave up.

Thomas Edison, source unknown, but quoted on page 216 0f The Drunkard's Walk, by Leonard Mlodinow.

The Drunkard's Walk has the distinction of being the first book I read and actually finished in 2009. (Finished an Ian Rankin, but I think I started that in 2008.)

It's a fascinating book on stats, randomness, chance, the way in which ability doesn't necessarily equate to success (perseverance is more likely to, I think). The stats side of it fits in with what I've read on stats and what I do at work in relation to them - and is helpful in clarifying some of the issues with stats. Stats are useful, but they're never the last word.
The way in which randomness isn't quite as random as we like to think is another intriguing outcome of the book, and our willingness to turn a number of random acts into a pattern is another factor we need to take into account.

And in relation to this, here's another quote, this time from Will Catton, a PhD student from the University of Otago, (Dunedin, NZ) who won an essay prize for a piece called: Progress, Laughter, Sex - but not in that order. It was published in the latest NZ Listener magazine dated January 17, 2009

But the idea that sex is essentially a way of shuffling genes misses much of its real significance to biological progress. A spicy new source of amazingness was involved in the lives of your sexual ancestors: the amazingness of their each convincing some other ancestor of yours to fandango. The more finicky those other ancestors were, the more impressive this familial achievement becomes. Evolutionary success, for a sexual beast, is tested by the mating choices of the rest of the species as much as by survival. So sex is the species' biology grabbing the reins on its own evolution. Such control does create new dangers. Fashion is fickle: the peacock's tail, just like hammer pants and the 'hypothetical' speculative housing market, may well be in for a bumpy devaluation. But the immensely beneficial trade-off is this: a sexual species' evolution can be directed with all the subtlety of its members' ability to perceive one another. Sizzling health is nature's oldest aphrodisiac.

Catton is obviously in love with language, which might account for why some of this seems to make less sense than first appears. But the general idea is good.