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Monday, June 1, 2009

A real problem for Darwinian theory

Origin of Soulish Animals

I saw this this morning and thought it demonstrates how the origin of species fits a Biblical model better than a naturalistic one.

Vera

1 comment:

Steven J. said...

At one point in the article, Ross states:

Bolhuis and Wynne contrast the cognitive capacities of birds and primates. In the Darwinian models, apes and humans are closely related and share a relatively recent common ancestor. Birds, on the other hand, are distantly related to both humans and apes. Thus, Darwinists predict that of all animals, apes come closest to manifesting the cognitive capabilities of human beings.
Would a "Darwinist" actually predict this? It seems roughly on a par with "in the Darwinian model, alligators are more closely related to birds than mammals are, so the fact that they can't fly but bats can is a problem for Darwinism." And perhaps Ross has, or someday will, advance that argument, but it is not very sound.

Darwin himself argued that the gap between what Ross would call "soulish" apes and "spiritual" humans" was spanned by intermediate "ape-men" who were wiped out by more advanced hominines: the intermediate steps between what chimpanzees are capable of and what humans are capable of is occupied not by living species but by extinct ones: the australopiths, "early Homo, and "archaic H. sapiens."

These "ape-men," not crows or marsh tits, competed with early humans for an ecological niche, and they seem to have fared badly in the competition. So there is no reason to suppose either that the intermediate stages between "soulishness" and "spirituality" never existed (certainly there seem to have been appropriate bodies for such intermediates), or that living apes should represent the most sophisticated non-human minds.

I'm not sure how the fact that marsh tits don't have larger hippocampi than birds that don't store food is a "problem for Darwinism." It's a problem for one particular theory of how bird brains work. Unless the "testable creation model" is that they work by magic (and maybe it is; I don't know), I don't see how this helps or hurts either evolutionary theory or Ross' creationism.

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