IT IS A FACT that the actual evolution of a new species has never been observed, not in the wild, certainly, and not in a lab under artificial conditions. Even in the most obvious apologetic and polemical claims about that, such claims have to be couched in special definitions and blatantly conditional statements. And that's when those who make such statements are trying to be responsible. Darwin's theory of natural selection carries within it claims that make that evolution in nature impossible to observe but I'll get to that after pointing out a problem with your accusation against me of "intelligent design" with fantastic claims about what "science has done" even as you witlessly grasp onto intelligent design to "prove natural selection" and "disprove intelligent design".
I will start by pointing out about your claim of scientists working in a lab could actually produce a new species, claiming that that was evidence for the reality of natural selection has the insurmountable obstacle that the new species would not have been produced by nature but by the intelligent design of the scientists. You cannot filter out the design of that experiment from the results that you got from it.
They would not "prove" nature did something without intelligent design, they would have proven that they did it with their intelligent design. They'd certainly want that to be the conclusion of anyone who read the paper they'd proudly publish with the intelligent review of their most likely "intelligent design" disdaining colleagues. Though that inconvenient fact about the whole operation would probably be discretely not mentioned.
The idea that any scientist or any group of scientists or even the whole world wide body of scientists could experimentally "prove that intelligent design is unnecessary" for whatever aspect of nature they want to claim is demonstrated by the results they got is a logical impossibility.
While a claim that "intelligent design" is proven in nature from that is problematic, intelligent design having produced the result, it's far less problematic than claiming that what is known to be the crucial component in experimental science is not there and not a crucial consideration in what is known about it.
To reinforce the point, it is possible that, as in human science, intelligent design is present in nature, it is impossible to claim that it is absent from what scientists produce through their designed experiments and from the extension of those into claims of what happens in nature.
As to its presence in evolution, that's almost certainly not a claim that is testable by science, though I have come to the conclusion there is nothing unrespectable about that conclusion as a product of the logical consideration of the complexity of life especially thinking about how complex even the most primitive theorized "first organism" in the line of life on earth would have had to be, the stupendously seeming improbability if it, its survival, probably most of all its entirely unprecedented act of reproduction and the survival of more than one organism in the act so as to increase the number of living organisms on Earth. But that is not a scientific conclusion though many of the conclusions put directly into the professional substance of science by materialists and atheists are not, either, so used are they to getting away with inserting their ideology into science that they don't even notice when they do it.
It is probably as unwise to try to use human science to introduce intelligent design into science as it is unwise to try to dispel it from nature by the same means and for exactly the same reasons. That the culture of Western science has made that folly repeatedly over the past several centuries in a number of ways is something to marvel at but nothing to pretend is an honest practice.
To my point made in a previous paragraph about the impossibility of observing the rise of a new species, a theoretical lab created "new species" produced in a few months or years could no more be reliable evidence of what would happen over many thousands of years in nature than the production of new varieties of cattle or show dogs by human design - in many cases rather cruel and stupid design - under entirely artificial conditions.* I doubt there will ever be a scientific project, with funding, with a reliable line of conduct and reporting as to last as long as that. The longest lines of human culture, such as Hebrew monotheism, pottery making aren't long enough to match it.
That is, by the way, such an obvious flaw in Darwin's presented "evidence" of natural selection in On the Origin of Species, that no new species were produced by animal husbandry and animal husbandry is not natural but intentional human choice that it is a major scandal that he and his disciples got away and still get away with pretending it "proves" to do what it doesn't do at all. What they were observing was the manipulation of existing lines of genetics WITHIN A SPECIES but they either didn't know or didn't take Mendel seriously so they never corrected themselves even after his paper was published. Not that the geneticist Darwinists of the next generations seemed to care to correct it, either.
Darwin's own theory and the geological evidence of how long it takes for species to arise out of parent species makes it obvious that science can never see it happen except, perhaps, in very rapidly reproducing things like viruses which I doubt could have the same mechanisms of evolution that large multi-cellular species of plants and animals can be said to have. That it could happen rapidly enough for scientists to observe it would make the claim that it happened by the same mechanism that requires many thousands or more years in even single-celled species entirely far fetched.
The reproduction of viruses within the cells of other species is certainly not like the reproduction in entire kingdoms of life with entirely different means of reproduction. To believe the same, single mechanistic theory could explain both of those seems to me to require pretending things that are entirely and obviously unlike are like each other. I don't think anyone is required to believe that without conclusive evidence which will never be had.
I have the greatest objection to something which is claimed to take many, many times longer than the longest recorded human lifetime, certainly longer than the history of science and the existence of human culture being claimed to be "observable." Especially if it is claimed that it can be done with the observational rigor and measurement that is required to produce valid science and its reliable knowledge. The means with which the aftereffects of long ago events in physics can be observed and reliable conjectures about those being made - with observable predictions in many cases - would certainly not work in the study of life because living organisms are far, far more complex and far, far more variable than generalizable aspects of non-living objects. But that's a side-track.
To repeat, the many examples of variations within a species grasped onto by scientists as an example demonstrating Darwin's theory of natural selection or, in fact, any other scheme of the origin of species in nature has the added and rather profoundly stupid problem that such new varieties are not new species but merely variants of existing species. I think that in many if not virtually all cases that might be true for every single generation within the evolution of new species. New species don't evolve from long ago parent species, they evolve in the many generations of life which don't remain static but change in every generation, no generation of an existing line can be held to be "unfit" for the time and place they lived and reproduced.
The theory of gradual change over time, and even the already old updated version of that in punctuated equilibrium both of which are theorized to produce new species merely support my contention that scientists and, in fact, human beings have never witnessed the evolution of new species in nature, never mind studied even one incident of natural speciation to be able to reliably describe it from the observation and measurement required to identify things so subtle as mechanisms that work themselves out over tens of thousands of years.
Though I think it's quite probable that what we imagine as a "mechanism" to do that may be nothing like a mechanism at all. To repeat a point just made, the most typical presentation of that as a new species arising and its parent species "going extinct" is likely wrong because what probably happens in many if not most cases is an entire branch of a species changes over many generations, the changes incorporated into that branch of the species every step of the way. No one "trait" defines a new species, even as they might be a stunningly noticeable feature of later fossils as compared to far older ones. Organisms come as a complete package, and in living organisms, especially those that behave, that package is stupendously complex. And evolutionary scientist have a decided tendency to grasp onto one "trait" and ignore the rest of the organisms and their varied lives. If they consider those at all, they make up a cartoonish story about them most often with absolutely no evidence at all.
You might as well say that the ancient ancestors of a continuing family line all go extinct even as their progeny successfully continue into the future. To claim they lost in a "struggle for life" is only true in the sense that everyone eventually loses that struggle as we all die. That claim made from fossils of what seem to be closely related species separated by thousands of years makes as little sense. That is assuming the younger fossils are of the same line as those of an the older species which I wonder how you can tell in most cases, so many intervening generations being lost, probably none of the later examples being from direct descents of the far earlier ones they are compared to. You might be able to make claims in a far more general sense in lines of genetic inheritance among closely or even enormously remotely related species but that doesn't do much of anything to tell you how those changes happened.
As it is usually presented, both in the vulgar understanding and the alleged valid ones, we are to imagine the unchanged "parent" species existing at the same time as the new species and it losing in what got the rather whimpish hypochondriac, Malthusian Brit aristocrat Darwin all hot, imagined stories of them dying in a violent "struggle for life" when by the time the new species is called a new species, probably most if not all of the descendants of the parent species have changed in one or many branches into other species. Most of the individuals of any generation and many entire generations leaving no fossil evidence of their existence including their reproductive success or failure.
If there were identifiable members of the parent species around at the time the new species had changed, the individuals of that species could certainly not be held to be less fit for the environment they were in, I'd guess they probably interbred with the branch of the "new species" all along as we have discovered some of our "extinct cousin" humanoids have with branches of modern humans. I don't get how Neanderthals which have living human descendants can be said to have "gone extinct" anymore than the homo sapiens they had children with can be held to have. If they survived under changed conditions that allegedly caused the rise of the "new species" they must have adapted to such new conditions, their great grand kids may have not looked much like their fossil remains lead us to think they looked but the same is true within modern human families with no neanderthal genes.
I doubt there is any such thing as natural selection except in the human imagination as much as I doubt there is or ever will be any one sufficient explanation of how and why species changed over time. There are apparent and well evidenced events that wiped out many species, such as the impact of a large meteorite that is the current best idea of what led to the end of the big dinosaurs and, certainly, many other species but that has nothing to do with Darwinism. Darwin's imagined Hobbsian (perhaps typically British) mechanism had nothing to do with that. The relationship of that catastrophe and the gradual change of the surviving lines of life are in no way "explained" by the fact of that mass extinction event. I don't understand why you mentioned it.
I think there are probably a myriad of causes in how species change and even how they die out rapidly. The rise of a new strain of viruses, especially in gregarious species such as humans have become, is probably much more to do with it in many cases than Darwin's titillating "struggle for existence" the stuff that fuels the imagination of so many pasty, soft-handed male aristocrats and milquetoast academics and, no doubt, motivates their fantasies and which leads more ambitious Darwinists of action they inspire to commit genocide.
I think a lot of what is interpreted from the geological record of old species "dying out" is actually just entire species evolving over time and changing the general appearance of the scanty fossils of organisms within that continuing line of life. I think the old habits of reading the fossil evidence and telling ripping yarns about it has become one of the most obvious unscientific habits of scientists. One engaged in even by scientists who criticize the telling of "Just-so stories".
It has occurred to me that the habit of story-telling out of our lived human experience or even our imaginations of the several thousand years of highly biased and selective and self-contradicting articulated human history carries a huge danger when it comes to making up stuff about far longer epochs of time, especially those extending into tens, thousands and billions of years, especially in other, especially quite unrelated species. Telling stories, making up scenarios from lived human experience or reading recorded human history as if the ill-understood aspects of that can be made to extend throughout hundreds of thousands of years is certainly an unreliable means of understanding what happened on that far longer scale of time.
Almost a century ago A. S. Eddington rather stunningly suggested there may be realms of physical law that entirely escape human comprehension and which we will never understand (and may well never even notice). I think it's possible there are aspects of long stretches of the history of life on Earth that are, as well, beyond our comprehension. If any of those aspects impinged on speciation, we would never be able to put those into our Just-so stories. The stories might seem plausible because we judge them on the basis of our experience but that resort to familiar human experience could be, I'd say could probably be what makes them unreliable. Or at least of questionable reliability without rigorously tested evidence of which very little to none is available in either the fossil or genetic records. There are things which we could never understand even if the evidence was looking us right in the face. If some hegemonic ideology stood between us and that evidence, as it does in evolutionary biology, I'd say we probably wouldn't be able to see it.
I think if we have a future, the hundred and sixty years and more of Darwinist hegemony of science and the imagination of western culture will probably be looked on as more of a quaint or more honestly called disastrous ancient folly than classical cosmology and such things as alchemy are considered today. Though none of those classical and medieval theories come down to us with such a huge mountain of murders motivated by them so fast. Those kinds of things ruled the culture and intellectual class of their times as much as Darwinism has in its period of hegemonic domination. I think it's long shown signs of being problematic and, really, is just not a very good theory - a theory of science which is not capable of being observed in nature has no more than a fadingly, improbably narrow chance of being the right one - and I think now it is ever less credible as the one and only explanation of what it claims to explain.
That there is no other universally accepted explanatory theory that has taken its place may well be due to the fact that there is no one way in which species arise and, if any are proposed, they also have the problem of not being observable in nature for the reasons I've mentioned above.
I hold that the ideological hold that natural selection has on science makes the requirements placed on any proposed rival or superseding theory entirely higher than natural selection was ever subjected to.
The domination of Darwinist storytelling, as mentioned, will limit the imaginations of most people, the coercive bullying not to criticize natural selection probably even more so. I don't think there will ever be a real, secure, validly scientifically identified mechanism of speciation in nature because the needed evidence is forever lost in the millennia and epochs of the irretrievable past. That one or more will never finally tip the bust of Darwin into the embarrassing boneyard of discontinued science, however; is not anything like certain, even at that.
Biologists might not like that because they use natural selection as if it explained things that it can't be demonstrated to explain and things which, other than by claims of "natural selection," they may not be able to present any evidence for at all. They can pretend they understand a lot of things which they really don't. That habit expanded from story-telling of merely seeming plausibility to fill in the enormous voids in the study of evolution through natural selection's imaginary universal explanatory power into a whole host of rank pseudo-sciences, starting with eugenics and modern scientific racism and the allied pseudo-scientific field of psychology. As mentioned, Darwinism has reaped a body-count already numbering in the millions. It's deeply embedded in the culture and the professional interest of scientists but so were those antique mechanisms of cosmology and chemistry mentioned above.
I have no doubt that all known existing species evolved from earlier species of life, I am certain that the general theory of evolution is true but the longer I look into and think about scientific claims about that other than the most general ones, the dodgier those generally are. I don't think there is any one dodgier than natural selection nor any one which is more stupidly held to be a required article of scientific faith or respectability in the college-credentialed world. And few such follies, other than things like the denial of human-made climate change, are more dangerously maintained.
* Reading through this, I think it's not a surprise that Darwin's use of human breeding to get results human beings wanted from the plants and animals they breed led him to believe that evolution weeded out the "unfit" so the survivors would be "the fittest" even though the resulting varieties of plants and animals human breeding produced very often were quite to entirely unsuited for life in the wild. Making his use of that to make claims about what happened in nature, even more logically inept. No incident of human breeding can ever be reliably claimed to represent what happens over far longer periods in nature, especially if it is claimed that that natural progression happened without the intelligent intent the human act is saturated with.
The folly of mistaking what was held to be economically more beneficial or merely desired from a human standpoint to be a demonstration of "fitness" in terms of the natural world is not surprising as the theory of natural selection starts with Malthus's absurd notion that the entirely artificial consequences of intentionally and interestedly invented English and then British law, which is largely centered around the construction and support of a brutal and unjust economic and social caste system and even more brutally gangsterish imperialism, was a model of how "the law of nature" he proposed leaving the British poor to worked.
That was such a stupid aristocratic idea of nature that not long before Darwin started the production of his theory the British radical William Cobbett correctly noted that if the British poor were left to "the law of nature" as Malthus called for, the poor would quickly strip the rich of what they'd stolen and hoarded from them as nature knows no legal rights to property of the kind Malthus, Darwin and virtually every one of their supporters had as the foundation of their thoughts.
If there is one thing that is obvious in the study of evolution it is the substitution of narrative fiction for actual observation and quantification due to the fact that
a. all but a vanishingly small and almost certainly non-representative sample of evidence of past life is now and forever lost and that evidence tells us little to nothing about the actual lives of the fossilized organisms and their reproductive success or failure,
b. the time scale of the evolution of species is so long that scientific observation of it is impossible in the resolution that would make the identification of the mechanism(s) of evolution nothing but guess work,
c. the actual complexity of organisms, their lives, their reproduction individually and of a species makes any claims as to that absurd,
means that every and all of the stories told by humans about evolution will be intrinsically wrapped up in such cultural and ideological and habitual artifacts of human imagination. There is every reason to believe those stories tell us a lot more about the minds of the tellers of such tales than they do about nature. Other than some very general conclusions based on fossil records and the inheritance of genes, virtually all of the lore of evolutionary science is of unknowable reliability but each item of that lore is of very highly improbable reliability. The shelf-life of claims about evolution as compared to those of experimentally verified physics and chemistry is not impressive. The more elaborate and so attractive the claim is, the quicker it rots. That is especially true of the violent and self-interested theory of natural selection, I doubt much of any of its true believers believes themselves to be an example of a degenerate biological type worthy of weeding out of the future such as they readily consider those they don't like to be.
I think biologists should spend the time they waste on telling Just-so stories that are frequently pretty dangerous on studying aspects of biology that can actually be seen and measured. Those are dauntingly complex enough to be getting on with and may well be extremely important, little to nothing said about evolution matters in the same way. That is assuming the Just-so story tellers had the chops to do important science of that kind. A number of the most famous ones, I doubt could. They should leave telling lies about cavemen to pop-novelists and trashy made-for-TV pseudo-scientific with nauseating-background-music, nauseating video-game-zoomily edited "documentaries." They shouldn't appear on those. Appearing often on TV is a contra-indication of good scholarship or science. TV is intellectually dysgenic.
I hate TV. It makes people stupider.
Note: Still having consequences of Covid, still feel like crap, I'm feeling ranty.
"It seems to me that to organize on the basis of feeding people or righting social injustice and all that is very valuable. But to rally people around the idea of modernism, modernity, or something is simply silly. I mean, I don't know what kind of a cause that is, to be up to date. I think it ultimately leads to fashion and snobbery and I'm against it." Jack Levine: January 3, 1915 – November 8, 2010 LEVEL BILLIONAIRES OUT OF EXISTENCE
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