Alexiev wrote: ↑Tue Mar 04, 2025 5:48 pm
Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Tue Mar 04, 2025 3:25 pm
We can play out both.
If the processes are random, then it should be quite obvious we should expect a lot of "false starts" in the genetic process. After all there's no "guidance" in the system that's limiting the kinds of mutations to those that will eventually be more likely to be survival-enhancing, and it's sheer luck when one such thing appears, and happens to survive because the particular mutation "works" well. This is Dennett's "wasteful process": for every successful mutation, there have to be millions of unsuccessful ones.
But then...where are the fossils to justify our belief in this "wastefulness"?
On the other hand, if the process is "guided," then the problem becomes, "what Force or Law" is at work compelling the evolutionary process toward what we conceive of as "success"? How were the kinds and numbers of mutations constrained so as to produce a neat sequence of pre-humans, and not to produce the many false starts we should otherwise expect?
So the first one gives us the expectation of a very vast record of fossils of 'unsuccessful" subspecies, particularly pre-humans, since we are, by any fair estimate, a very sophisticated kind of animal, supposedly constructed over vast amounts of time and though innumerable, subtle mutational shifts. And we don't have that record.
The second one immediately injects design, intentionality, constraint and teleology into the evolutionary program, so very naturally brings back in the God hypothesis...which is the very hypothesis that Evolutionism most wants to explain away.
So it's a case of "Which way would the theory of human evolution like to fail -- by the deficiencies of the fossil record, or by readmitting intelligent design?"
There are several problems with this argument. First, there probably are fossils that represent "false starts". I don't know.
The first problem is that you "don't know" whether or not there is an adequate number of such fossils? Well, you can easily cure that. There isn't. Not even remotely close. Not within millions or even billions, given the time-spans for which Evolutionists argue.
Second, if mutations (or simply variation due to sexual reproduction) are maladaptive, then they will end up being rare in the population. Those individuals with these traits are likely to die, or fail to pass on the traits. Therefore, the traits will be scarce in the fossil record.
The opposite is true. If many unsuccessful mutations are happening, and all die, that makes it more, not less likely, that they'd be in our fossil record. You're not going to have an abundance of successful cases to get fossilized, but rather an vastly larger abundance of specimens weeded out by survival-of-the-fittest.
If by far the majority of humans and proto-humans represent genetic "success", why would we "expect" to find many false starts?
Because the alleged mechanism is "randomness," and "randomness" is unbelievably wasteful. For every success randomness produces, it has to produce multitudinous failures, precisely because it is random, and doesn't calculate in favour of any particular outcome at all.
The human body is composed of billions of cells, each one capable of sustaining a genetic injury, or mutation. What are the chances of any random mutation turning out to produce a survival advantage? So if randomness is what's doing it, there should be billions of false starts for every successful production.
We don't have remains of every hominid. On the contrary, we have only a very small percentage.
That's precisely the problem. How would we get so lucky that the only remains we would find would be all the success stories, and every last one of the billions of possible false starts mysteriously never got fossilized?
...the record is quite complete; there are no "missing links".
You'd better do some research before you make a claim like that. It's all too easy to disprove.
In fact, the
American Scientist notes that "Ironically, even as one link is found, two new missing links are "created"—one the immediate ancestor and one the immediate descendent of the newly found creature." You'll find that not only are there missing links, but new missing links constantly being produced by every alleged finding of a possible progenitor, as well.
And I'm sure you're quite oblivious to the numerous frauds that have been associated with the "human development tree," such as the old monkey-to-man chart, which used to be depicted in magazines, diorama-ed in museum displays, and taught in schools as complete orthodoxy, and is still believed to be "scientific" by many in the credulous masses today, but which is totally debunked scientifically, in favour of a "common ancestor" theory, that holds that the last possible connection would have been 6-7 million years ago, at the genetic level (Smithsonian). Even that theory would require us to believe that a relative level of genetic similarity or correspondence was proof of causality...which is, of course, a logical fallacy.
There's a lot of hocus pocus going on around the theory of human evolution -- that much is very clear. There are a lot of people who are quite desperate to convince themselves and everybody else that human beings evolved, and that evolution is random. But you can see the problems, I'm sure.
