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From: mrh@cybvax0.UUCP (Mike Huybensz)
Newsgroups: net.origins
Subject: Re: Out-of-Context Quote-of-the-Month.  July 1985.
Message-ID: <628@cybvax0.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 22-Jul-85 11:58:38 EDT
Article-I.D.: cybvax0.628
Posted: Mon Jul 22 11:58:38 1985
Date-Received: Wed, 24-Jul-85 07:40:45 EDT
References: <1296@uwmacc.UUCP> <1310@uwmacc.UUCP>
Reply-To: mrh@cybvax0.UUCP (Mike Huybensz)
Distribution: net
Organization: Cybermation, Inc., Cambridge, MA
Lines: 37

In article <1310@uwmacc.UUCP> dubois@uwmacc.UUCP (Paul DuBois) writes:
> 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.

Quite true.  However, it does stagger belief.  (Reminds me of Time Bandits,
where Evil is sneering that God created numerous species of slugs.  He
would have created microcircuits or lasers first....)

> 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.

No straw man: this actually has been a position held by some creationists.
Creationist literature has an enormous pre-Gish (antediluvian? :-))
history.  You don't hear about it much because most modern creationists
would be embarrassed by it, and because (unlike creationists) scientists
opposing creationism seldom dig up and attack ancient arguments while
implying they are current.  I strongly doubt that you can exclude invariant
species (kinds are a recent creationist invention) from the welter of
positions of creationists today.
-- 

Mike Huybensz		...decvax!genrad!mit-eddie!cybvax0!mrh