Christifidelis
New Member
I am not a "Scientific Creationist", but I believe I can demonstrate that large-scale or macro-evolution is impossible on logical grounds alone.
The first question that needs to be asked in this regard is not how any species or higher-level grouping of living creatures came into being, but how any single individual - whatever classifications s/he or it may fall under, did. According to the modern "scientific" theory of evolution, any such individual would have had to come into existence through a chain of matings (and asexual splittings in the remotest past) stretching back, through hundreds of millions of years, to the beginning of life itself. It is to natural selection, genetic variation and environmental change that any individual bacterium, frog, dog, or human being owes his, her, or its existence.
Were this the case, however, such chains of sexual or asexual procreations would be quite inaccessible to the pressure of natural selection, which is supposed to be the main driver of the evolutionary process. For the immediate cause of the coming into being of each "link" of any given chain would reside in the procreative activity of its parent(s), not in any competition for food, mates, or the like. Competition, or survival of the fittest, can concern only populations of living beings, not individuals. Ancestral chains of individuals, in other words, would be self contained, and therefore indifferent to natural selection, because by their very nature they would have to constitute unbroken or continuous series of creatures; they would be "vertical" phenomena, if one will, whereas a force like natural selection can operate only "horizontally", or on the level of groups of creatures co-existing in time.
It is for this reason, I think, that natural selection, while it has been demonstrated to be an operative force of nature, can only be a conservative one, that is, one that works to preserve pre-given living forms in optimal condition through differential survival and reproduction. It can in no wise be conceived to be the creator of such living forms. The hypothesis of large-scale transformative evolution would seem, therefore, to be based on a confusion between fundamental change and simple variation, with the latter being supposed to account somehow for the former, or to be continuous with it. The inescapable truth is that in none but the smallest scale changes can the creation of living forms have come about in any other way than "vertically" - by which I mean, this time, as a result of a creation which had ultimately to come from above.
I will explain more about what I mean by this last statement in the future.
Christifidelis
The first question that needs to be asked in this regard is not how any species or higher-level grouping of living creatures came into being, but how any single individual - whatever classifications s/he or it may fall under, did. According to the modern "scientific" theory of evolution, any such individual would have had to come into existence through a chain of matings (and asexual splittings in the remotest past) stretching back, through hundreds of millions of years, to the beginning of life itself. It is to natural selection, genetic variation and environmental change that any individual bacterium, frog, dog, or human being owes his, her, or its existence.
Were this the case, however, such chains of sexual or asexual procreations would be quite inaccessible to the pressure of natural selection, which is supposed to be the main driver of the evolutionary process. For the immediate cause of the coming into being of each "link" of any given chain would reside in the procreative activity of its parent(s), not in any competition for food, mates, or the like. Competition, or survival of the fittest, can concern only populations of living beings, not individuals. Ancestral chains of individuals, in other words, would be self contained, and therefore indifferent to natural selection, because by their very nature they would have to constitute unbroken or continuous series of creatures; they would be "vertical" phenomena, if one will, whereas a force like natural selection can operate only "horizontally", or on the level of groups of creatures co-existing in time.
It is for this reason, I think, that natural selection, while it has been demonstrated to be an operative force of nature, can only be a conservative one, that is, one that works to preserve pre-given living forms in optimal condition through differential survival and reproduction. It can in no wise be conceived to be the creator of such living forms. The hypothesis of large-scale transformative evolution would seem, therefore, to be based on a confusion between fundamental change and simple variation, with the latter being supposed to account somehow for the former, or to be continuous with it. The inescapable truth is that in none but the smallest scale changes can the creation of living forms have come about in any other way than "vertically" - by which I mean, this time, as a result of a creation which had ultimately to come from above.
I will explain more about what I mean by this last statement in the future.
Christifidelis