Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.2 9/5/84; site uwmacc.UUCP Path: utzoo!linus!philabs!cmcl2!seismo!uwvax!uwmacc!dubois From: dubois@uwmacc.UUCP (Paul DuBois) Newsgroups: net.origins Subject: Re: Out-of-Context Quote-of-the-Month. July 1985. Message-ID: <1310@uwmacc.UUCP> Date: Sat, 20-Jul-85 16:36:35 EDT Article-I.D.: uwmacc.1310 Posted: Sat Jul 20 16:36:35 1985 Date-Received: Mon, 22-Jul-85 03:56:02 EDT References: <1296@uwmacc.UUCP> Distribution: net Organization: UW-Madison Primate Center Lines: 65 Mike Huybensz suggested that I follow up on the items in this series by posting the quotations *within* their contexts. I think that that is a fine idea, and plan to do so. Here is the context from the last entry. "Antievolutionists fail to understand how natural selection operates. They fancy that all existing species were generated by supernatural fiat a few thousand years ago, pretty much as we find them today. But what is the sense of having as many as 2 or 3 million species living on earth? If natural selection is the main factor that brings evolution about, any number of species is understandable: natural selection does not work according to a foreordained plan, and species are produced not because they are needed for some purpose but simply because there is an environmental opportunity and genetic wherewithal to make them possible. Was the Creator is a jocular mood when he made _Psilopa petrolei_ for California oil-fields and species of _Drosophila_ to live exclusively on some body-parts of certain land crabs on only certain islands in the Caribbean? The organic diversity becomes, however, reasonable and understandable if the Creator has created the living word not by caprice but by evolution propelled by natural selection. It is wrong to hold creation and evolution as mutually exclusive alternatives. I am a creationist _and_ an evolutionist. Evolution is God's, or Nature's, method of Creation. Creation is not an event that happened in 4004 B.C; it is a process that began some 10 billion years ago and is still under way." Theodosius Dobzhansky, American Biology Teacher, March 1973, 35(3), 125-159. Quotation from p127.. Comment: Dobzhansky falls into the error of supposing that he knows what a creator would do, in asking what the good of having 2 or 3 million species is. How does he know? We cannot say one way or the other, without some form of revelation, which, I think, Dobzhansky would not claim to be party to. The "sensibility" or lack of it, of 2 or 3 million species leads to another problem with this statement, i.e., that creationists suppose that all species came into existence pretty much as we find them. First of all, creationists typically suppose things not about species, but about "kinds". Whatever a "kind" is, and we can perhaps agree that a tight treatment of that has not been posted here, it is *not* synomymous with "species". Secondly, Dobzhansky comes very close to identifying creationists with the "creation of invariant organisms" hypothesis in saying, "pretty much as we find them today". It is difficult to say just how close he means to come to "no variation" with this statement, but no creationist believes that there is no variation of organisms over time. This is a straw man set up time and time again by evolutionists - from at least the time of Darwin, right down to the present day. Many creationists (including myself) recognize speciation. Some creationists (including myself) feel that the variation of organisms over time is of great importance. Speaking strictly for myself, I feel that the variation of organisms *without* reference to time, is of perhaps greater importance. But that does not mean that there is any acceptance by creationists of the idea that the variation extends across all classificatory boundaries, as evolutionists maintain. -- | Paul DuBois {allegra,ihnp4,seismo}!uwvax!uwmacc!dubois --+-- | "More agonizing, less organizing." |