In fact, “natural selection” in the Darwiniam context is an illogical verbalism because “selection” implies some intelligence, as Chesterton pointed out, so Darwinian “natural selection” is really an oxymoron.

Chesterton engaged in wordplay rather beneath him, there. Darwin coined the term specifically to compare it to ‘artificial selection’ the breeding that everyone was familiar with. Obviously it’s understood as rather like a sieve – something that ‘selects’ items to pass or block, without conscious intent.

Well, obviously, if you’re willing to actually read what he wrote.

The problem is how or by what intelligible mechanism has the mouse evolved into humans, if that is what you are claiming

Not at all. I’m claiming that they had a common ancestor, and both have diverged from it.

if you claim to be a Catholic,

I don’t.

why the Scriptures insist that all organisms reproduce after its kind and not another — which practically denies evolution of species or macroevolution.

(Fun fact: Hitler claimed that, too – he based his racism on the idea that the human ‘races’ had been created separately. Not directly relevant to this discussion, but interesting.)

I’m reasonably sure that Scriptures insist on that because species don’t usually diverge in human timescales. Thankfully, we have the fossil record, and contemporary examples, like ring species.

For example, the Larus gulls are several subspecies where variants live in a ring around the Arctic. The Herring Gull in the U.K. can interbreed with the American Herring Gull, and the American can interbreed with the Vega Gull in Russia. And so on, until you come to the Lesser Black-Backed Gull in the Netherlands. It basically can’t breed with the Herring Gull. Hybrids are extremely rare and don’t seem to be fertile, like mules.

So, is it a separate species? You could breed it with its relative to the East, and so on. But what if, say, the Vega Gull went extinct? Would you have separate species – or ‘kinds’ – then?

Now, imagine such variations happening across time instead of (or as well as) space, and you’ve got an idea how species actually do form in evolutionary theory.

monkey genes may be very similar to human genes — and what else would you expect in shapes and forms of two similar organisms?

Ah, but there’s the rub. Similar genes imply similar forms, sure… but similar forms do not imply similar genes. The genetic code maps triplets to amino acids… but many different triplets are ‘synonyms’ for the same amino acid, neutral variations that don’t affect function. (More info, and a fascinating practical application, here.)

Books used to be copied by scribes, and (despite a lot of care) sometimes typos would be introduced. Later scribes, making copies of copies, would introduce other typos. It’s possible to look at the existing copies and put them into a ‘family tree’. “These copies have this typo, but not that one; this other group has yet another typo, though three of them have a newer typo as well, not seen elsewhere…” This is not controversial at all when dealing with books, including the Bible.

Now, this process of copy-with-modification naturally produces ‘family trees’, nested groups. When we look at life, we find such nested groups. No lizards with fur or nipples, no mammals with feathers, etc. Living things (at least, multicellular ones, see below) fit into a grouped hierarchy. This has been solidly recognized for over a thousand years, and systematized for centuries. It was one of the clues that led Darwin to propose evolution. (Little-known fact: Linnaeus, who invented the “kingdom, phyla, genus, species, etc.” classification scheme for living things, tried to do the same thing for minerals. But minerals don’t form from copy-with-modification, and a ‘nested hierarchy’ just didn’t work and never caught on.)

Today, more than a century later, we find another tree, one Darwin never suspected – that of DNA. This really is a ‘text’ being copied with rare typos. And, as expected, it also forms a family tree, a nested hierarchy. And, with very very few surprises, it’s the same tree that was derived from looking at physical traits.

(Single-celled organisms are much more ‘promiscuous’ in their reproduction and spread genes willy-nilly without respect for straightforward inheritance. With single-celled creatures, it looks more like a ‘web’ of life than a ‘tree’. But even if the tree of life has tangled roots, it’s still very definitely a tree when it comes to multicellular life.)

I’ll try one last time.

You pointing to a histogram or a probabilistic distribution of the comparison between human and mouse genes means nothing. Naturally, there is some similarity between the genes of all living organisms, and monkey genes may be very similar to human genes — and what else would you expect in shapes and forms of two similar organisms? Nobody disputes that. The problem is how or by what intelligible mechanism has the mouse evolved into humans, if that is what you are claiming; and you, if you claim to be a Catholic, must also explain, as Hovind pointed out, why the Scriptures insist that all organisms reproduce after its kind and not another — which practically denies evolution of species or macroevolution.

These “long” words like “natural selection”, especially “chance”, trouble not only me, but they have troubled philosophers since the dawn of philosophy and science. In fact, “natural selection” in the Darwiniam context is an illogical verbalism because “selection” implies some intelligence, as Chesterton pointed out, so Darwinian “natural selection” is really an oxymoron.

Words “chance” and “random” are especially troubling. See the basic 5 categories wikipedia gives ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chance ) and then try to explore each if you have time. (It may take you years to explore and understand.) The bottom line — chance, especially within the context of science, has puzzled philosophers and mathematicians and it wasn’t until Pascal’s time that science and mathematics of chance or probability acquired some intelligible mathematical meaning. But the controversies about its philosophical meaning have continued and still continue.

No inconsistency. Most ordinary people have enough sense to see through the sophistry.

And as I pointed out to Nick, a substantial number of people “see through the sophistry” of those astronomers who claim the Earth goes around the sun. I’m afraid I don’t trust ‘uneducated’ opinion the way you seem to.

If we wanted to stay on topic in this thread we should be rather using the cosmos, stars, planets, etc.

None of those reproduce with occasional variations, and thus have nothing to do with “Darwin’s theory” – which is what Nick specifically mentioned. They may ‘evolve’ in the sense of changing over time, but biological evolution is a more specific form of change over time. No, I think I’m pretty on-topic, actually.

. You are accusing Harry of using “weasel words” but the words “chance” and “mutation” and “natural selection” are all scientific (or rarther pseudo-scientific) weasel words, or what Chesterton called the “long” words science likes to employ to hide behind.

As opposed to short words like ‘transubstantiation’, ‘aseity’, ‘impassibility’, and so forth? If you want to study a subject – certainly if you’re going to intelligently dispute it – you’ll need to get familiar with the lingo. As I noted, Dawkins takes a lot of guff for not using the vocabulary of theology in his works.

Thankfully, the words that seem to trouble you aren’t hard to define or grasp. “Mutation”, for example, is ‘changing of the structure of a gene, resulting in a variant form that may be transmitted to subsequent generations’. Sure, there are lot of types of mutation, ranging from single-nucleotide transcription errors to chromosomal crossover to endogenous retroviruses, but the basic concept’s easy to grasp.

“Chance” isn’t that hard, either. In the context of biological evolution, it means that the content of mutations is uncorrelated with their function. Lots of evidence supporting that. (See, for example, this link and search for the phrase ‘mouse genes’. You’ll find a graph of the genetic distance betwen over 2,000 human and mouse genes… and you’ll see how well the plot fits the bell curve expected from a chance distribution – the same kind of ‘chance distribution’ people happily accept in other fields where they don’t have an axe to grind.)

Hence, the “mindless” bit. Many attempts have been made to try to find examples of non-human mind(s) tweaking mutations, without fruit. I’ve asked for such evidence in the case of the ossicles, but none has been forthcoming.

“Natural selection” is counterintuitive in some ways, I’ll grant. But it’s not that hard to grasp. Mutations – the genetic variations we just talked about – can and frequently do have an affect on the phenotype, the form of the living thing as it develops. Some of those effects will be bad, some will be good – and if it has a positive effect, more copies of it will tend to make it into the next generation. It’s so easy to demonstrate that even the creationists have had to concede that it happens all the time.

No inconsistency. Most ordinary people have enough sense to see through the sophistry. Nick’s response above is an excellent example.

But there is or was still a significant percentage of those who got fooled easily and who become “useful” in spreading the foolishness or depravity to the point of disrupting the normal course of society. There are many examples of medieval sects and individuals, like Adamites who decided to go naked (even Hussites didn’t tolerate them and simply killed them), or Anabaptists who refused to work and waited for the bread from heaven (they didn’t last long either), or Cathars who practised endura or killing by euthanasia. The life in many Cathar villages became paralyzed to the point of depravity and desperation.

And, arguably, the foolishness due to crazy ideas, say like those of Bruno, in the richer, higher or more educated circles of the society had even more significant impact because these classes owned and ruled their serfs and could impel them to adopt their customs and religions. In fact, that is what happened in Reformation after the Augsburg Peace in 1555. The rich Lutheran princes could now freely choose the faith of their people in the areas they ruled. And it were the Lutheran rulers now who could charge Calvinists, Anabaptists, other sects, and witches with heresy.

If the theory was so bulletproof, it would have conquered all by now – just like the earth moving around the sun.

Even after Kepler had the key insight about elliptical orbits, it took over half a century before heliocentrism took over in astronomy… and it still hasn’t won over everyone outside astronomy 400 years later. Indeed, allegedly about one in five adults in the U.S. holds to geocentrism, and nearly one in three Russians.

So… yeah. Disagreement by the public isn’t quite the evidence you seem to think it is.

It’s important enough for the enlightened Church to protect “the world-view of simple uneducated people” – since they are so easily led astray and their judgment is not to be trusted – that it justifies torture and execution by burning at the stake.

And yet, you seem to think that because “most ordinary people” “instinctively tend to oppose evolution and especially Darwinian evolution”, that’s somehow evidence that the theory is not correct or well-supported.

So… do you support “the wisdom of crowds” or not?