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19 May 2013

Why Evolution is True

by {"login"=>"averagesecurityguy", "email"=>"stephen@averagesecurityguy.info", "display_name"=>"averagesecurityguy", "first_name"=>"", "last_name"=>""}

I know this is off topic for this blog but it's my blog so here goes. I was raised as a Christian, and still hold to the Christian faith. As a part of my upbringing I was always taught that evolution was not true. Not wanting to blindly believe this, I decided to learn more about it and see if the arguments for evolution stand to reason. With this end in mind I bought the book "Why Evolution is True" by Jerry A. Coyne and started reading it tonight. I have read the Preface, Introduction, and first chapter. Evolution, like many other scientific theories has been studied for over a hundred years by people much smarter than I so I don't expect to read this book and be able to prove or disprove the arguments. My primary goal, for now, is to ask questions and once those questions have been satisfactorily answered, then draw my conclusions. With that in mind, these are some of my observations and questions from what I've read so far.

Chapter 1:
On pages 9 and 10, Dr. Coyne says,

"Matchbooks resemble the kinds of creatures expected under a creationist explanation of life. In such a case, organisms would not have common ancestry, but would simply result from an instantaneous creation of forms designed de novo to fit their environments. Under this scenario, we wouldn't expect to see species falling into a nested hierarchy of forms that is recognized by all biologists."

My question here is why does creation imply disorder. Is it not feasible for an entity that is powerful enough to create everything we know to also do it in an orderly manner? If creation was done in an orderly manner, why would we not expect to see a nested hierarchy of forms and similarities in DNA structure?

On page 11, Dr. Coyne says,

"Over time, the population will gradually become more and more suited to its environment as helpful mutations arise and spread through the population, while deleterious ones are weeded out."

This would seem to imply that over the course of tens of thousands of years there were no drastic changes to the environment otherwise natural selection would not be able to keep up. Do other areas of science show these long periods of time with no drastic changes to the earth's environment?

On page 18, Dr. Coyne says,

Imperfection is the mark of evolution, not of conscious design. We should then be able to find cases of imperfect adaptation, in which evolution has not been able to achieve the same degree of optimality as would a creator."

This statement doesn't seem to be provable and it also assumes that optimality is the ultimate goal of a creator. There is no reason that what we see as imperfection could not be purposely designed.

The next chapters get into the science behind evolution and I look forward to reading them. I hope to do additional blog posts as I move through the book.

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