Good points abut eugenics, Czarofmischief. However, I don?t think we?re discussing whether eugenics is good, bad or indifferent, but what the effects have been or could be of not doing things that eugenics advocates would like. Their agenda is appalling.
Barry, one has to separate real evolution from a concentration towards a particular set of characteristics. By ?real evolution? I mean new changes to the genes, changes that didn?t exist in the population before. By ?concentration towards a particular set of characteristics? I mean the sort of thing we see when, due to external environmental pressures or whatever, a population tends to express particular characteristics but without losing the ability to express other characteristics. This would be like, say, the ancestors of eskimos migrating into colder regions and the population gradually tending towards a more compact, stocky body style to better tolerate the cold. From what we know today, it appears that that eskimo population, if moved to a warm region, would gradually tend towards a more general body style. This is all rather fuzzy because I don?t think scientists have a solid handle on how all this works yet.
I don?t know what you?re talking about with the change of head shape of soldiers. Over what time period are you talking about?
Great comments, Leolaia!
You said:
:: With evolution, "it's all over when the fat lady sings." This is a serious point to understand, because it means that evolution has no direction.
: I think you mean evolution has no purposeful telelogical direction (i.e. progress). Genetic drift can and does move in a particular trajectory of change.
Exactly (see my comment on genetic drift). My point was that, like a particle pushed around in Brownian motion, this genetic drift has no a priori direction; the path taken is seen only with hindsight.
Abaddon, interesting points, as usual.
The Watchtower certainly does teach a form of evolution via the rapid expansion of species required after ?Noah?s Flood?. So do the YECs. The difference is that the JW leaders who are keepers of this, um, ?knowledge? are so stupid/dishonest that they refuse to acknowledge it, whereas the YECs (at least, the ICR people) freely admit that rapid ?microevolution? must have take place only a few thousand years ago. Of course, the lack of evidence for this is not a problem for YECs.
This brings up the question of just who within the JW leadership are the keepers of knowledge of evolution. One Harry Peloyan, a Bethelite since the 1950s and a Knorr protégé, is the compiler of the horrendous 1985 Creation book (Peloyan has been editor-in-chief of Awake! since the late 1970s). Peloyan appears to have only rudimentary knowledge of science. It seems that he had several anonymous JWs, probably mostly not Bethelites, write the basics of the various chapters in the book. Of course, their writings had to pass muster with other JW leaders even more ignorant of science than Peloyan, so you have the blind leading the blinder with anything the Watchtower Society publishes on evolution.
It?s interesting looking at how the Watchtower?s published views on evolution and the Flood have changed over the years. Until about 1965, the published views were essentially unchanged from those of Charles Taze Russell, who pretty much adopted the weird ideas of one Isaac Newton Vail in the late 1870s. In 1961 John Whitcomb and Henry Morris (who later founded the ICR, or Institute for Creation Research) published The Genesis Flood (which borrowed heavily from the writings of the SDA crackpot George McCready Price) which kicked off the modern Young-Earth Creationist movement now popular with Christian Fundamentalists. It appears that within a few years Watchtower leaders had adopted most of Whitcomb and Morris?s ideas, adapting them slightly to the traditional 7,000-year creative day teaching, but retaining the key elements such as that all of today?s sedimentary rocks were laid down in Noah?s Flood, and that life on earth is at most a few thousand years old. However, in the late 1970s they jettisoned most of the YEC nonsense internally, but never published a word about it, except to explicitly condemn YEC ideas as ?unscientific? and even unscriptural. The level of deceit in these changes is breathtaking, as is the Watchtower?s ability to fool the JW community. None of them have the faintest idea what they?re talking about when it comes to evolution and geological history, but that never stopped them from making grandiose pronouncements about them.
In the last 15 years the Society has backed off a good deal from saying anything at all about evolution and geological history, likely because enough loyal JWs who have a bit of training in science have pointed out their most ridiculous errors. But being ?God?s spokesmen? they can?t ever admit to being wrong, as that would lead to unpleasant questioning.
AlanF
