Okay, thanks.
So which of these steps do you think were not followed by scientists investigating the theory of common descent?
S.
If I could but in here, I would say that it is in all the enormous "
just so stories" within the theory of evolution.
A just-so story, also called the ad hoc fallacy, is a term used in academic anthropology, biological sciences, social sciences, and philosophy. It describes an unverifiable and unfalsifiable narrative explanation for a cultural practice, a biological trait, or behavior of humans or other animals. The use of the term is an implicit criticism that reminds the hearer of the essentially fictional and unprovable nature of such an explanation. Such tales are common in folklore and mythology (where they are known as etiological myths — see etiology).
For example, kin selection has frequently been claimed to predict that humans will be altruistic toward relatives in proportion to their relatedness, while reciprocal altruism predicts that we will be altruistic toward people from whom we can expect altruism in the future (but not strangers). A story of any complexity can be constructed to fit any behaviour, but, critics assert, nothing distinguishes one story from another experimentally.[citation needed]. In reality the claim that kin selection predicts that humans will be altruistic towards relatives in proportion to their relatedness rests on a profound and long-standing misunderstanding of the applicability of kin selection theory to the human behavioural sciences[citation needed]. Kin selection theory takes the form of an evolutionary explanation (rather than a proximate explanation), only specifying some of the necessary conditions (in terms of costs, benefits and regression coefficients of relatedness) for the evolution of altruistic behaviour. It does not address the question of whether the history of a species has created a context for the emergence of altruistic traits, which requires separate investigation. If it were simply true that kin selection universally predicted the altruistic behaviour of closely related individuals, the phenomenon of e.g. salamander cannibalism of siblings would defy explanation.
And there are a myriad of other examples of this. Some animals evolve bigger. Some animals evolve smaller. Some animals don't change size much. The theory has no predictive powere here, only stories.
The theory predicted simplicity. It found enormous complexity. So the theory didn't do any of the things listed above, it just accomodated the data.
The theory predicts birds from dinos. But the evidence, both fossil and genetic is really weak.
The lack of transitional fossils is tremendously weak. Oh, I know you can list a few which are all controversial. But the theory predicts they should be as abundant as the abundancy of extint species, but the theory just accomodates this with "fossils are rare".
And when we talk about the gazillions of beneficial mutations needed for this process the literature is vacuous. Look at Talk Origins. Even they only list a handfull, and many of them are disputable. The examples ought to be undeniable.
Yet at the same time, the evidence for mutational destruction is undeniable. It's a hope and a prayer theory.
And finally, if the evolutionists would just focus their attention on the one simple problem of say 5 miilion years between common acncester and modern man. And the 100 million different nucleotide differences between our supposed closest ancestors. Then the evidence would be overwhelming that there isn't enough time in evo history to fix all of those mutations in the population in that short of a period. But the theory ignores this. That's the power of the story.
