Sigh . . . fine. I will use whatever term you like for people who strongly believe in Darwin's theories, as long as it is not something like "people who are right," or "smart people," or "people who understand science" or whatever. I'm a skeptic of both Darwin's theories and of biblical or other religious creation myths. What I believe is commonly known as intelligent design theory and I'm not the least offended if people call me an intelligent designer. I also understand that it is no more a theory than Darwinism, just a belief - like Darwinism.
I suppose you are equally offended by "neo-Darwinist?" I will gladly call you a "Darwin adherent," a "Darwin believer," a "student of Darwin," or what you will. I'll even call you a "natural selectionist," though I would wonder why you would distance yourself from Darwin. I will make the effort to remember to do that if you will provide concrete examples of fact that fit Darwin's model, but do not fit a model in which a designer is responsible for the variations among and within species.
I have to say that every fact presented to me so far in my nearly forty years as a skeptic of Darwinian theory has fit in far better with intelligent design, than with natural selection.
I did not say that most changes are negative. My statement was:
I thought that was a pretty well-known fact:
Effects of Mutations
The majority of mutations have neither negative nor positive effects on the organism in which they occur. These mutations are called neutral mutations. Examples include silent point mutations. They are neutral because they do not change the amino acids in the proteins they encode.
Many other mutations have no effect on the organism because they are repaired beforeprotein synthesis occurs. Cells have multiple repair mechanisms to fix mutations in DNA. One way DNA can be repaired is illustrated in Figure below. If a cell’s DNA is permanently damaged and cannot be repaired, the cell is likely to be prevented from dividing.
Beneficial Mutations
Some mutations have a positive effect on the organism in which they occur. They are calledbeneficial mutations. They lead to new versions of proteins that help organisms adapt to changes in their environment. Beneficial mutations are essential for evolution to occur. They increase an organism’s changes of surviving or reproducing, so they are likely to become more common over time. There are several well-known examples of beneficial mutations. Here are just two:
- Mutations in many bacteria that allow them to survive in the presence of antibiotic drugs. The mutations lead to antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria.
- A unique mutation is found in people in a small town in Italy. The mutation protects them from developing atherosclerosis, which is the dangerous buildup of fatty materials in blood vessels. The individual in which the mutation first appeared has even been identified.
Harmful Mutations
Imagine making a random change in a complicated machine such as a car engine. The chance that the random change would improve the functioning of the car is very small. The change is far more likely to result in a car that does not run well or perhaps does not run at all. By the same token, any random change in a gene's DNA is likely to result in a protein that does not function normally or may not function at all. Such mutations are likely to be harmful. Harmful mutations may cause genetic disorders or cancer.
bio.libretexts.org
Actually, it takes a large population to survive long enough and produce enough individuals for us to find fossils, since the fossilization process is dependent on so many factors occurring randomly that an extremely tiny percent of any species would be fossilized. I'm surprised you don't know that, it has always been the excuse for why we don't find many fossils transitory species. So any fossils of "dead ends," were not dead ends until after many, many generations of propagation.
That is a very good explanation, except that it completely lacks examples. They are a series of statements, which, if they were backed up by examples, would be great arguments. I think that the mistake that most people make is assuming that whoever makes that argument must have studied many examples. Not I, I'm from Missouri.
Pick an example. 96% of the animal kingdom has eyes. Did they all evolve from a single, sighted ancestor? If so, how? Be very specific, vagueness is antithetical to honest debate.
Dawkins also pointed out that life has the appearance of design, and that the origin of life on Earth might have been space aliens. He also cannot right about evolution without using the language of selection, and then quickly rationalizing that it is only an analogy. One of his books is called "The Selfish Gene." Why not simply leave out such language of selection, if there was no selection?
Because, he understands that biology makes no sense if it were random.
I don't doubt gravity, the age of the Earth, nor the roundness of the Earth. All three can be demonstrated to any fifth grader with no reliance on "what if's" and assumptions of correctness before evidence is shown. Nearly all of the so-called "evidence" of Darwinian theory is evidence that it is not impossible, not evidence that it actually happened.
For people eager to reject the possibility of a designer, showing that Darwinism might have been possible is good enough. But that isn't good enough for science.
