Are the Bokshops the only example of people who existed in the past with big brains?

Could this just be an anomoly in the theory of evolution? Even if it was just an anomoly, it doesn't mean it should be disregarded.

What does evolution predict about Humans in the future?

My theory just at a glance of this thread - largely based on my reading of Dawkins - is that the cerebellum and cortex became much more economical with the available space, expanding their surface area, wrinkling up like a walnut and allowing for a lighter and less fragile brain. If I pop back tomorrow I may be shot down for not really reading. Just here briefly to wish you a good one.

Just tracking on the side for a bit:

Muslims don't believe in evolution do they?

I don't see what the harm is in believing in evolution? With the idea that Allah (swt) is the one who directs which way evolution goes?

What about the 'survival of the fittest' theory?

You wrote:

*some* muslims.

Her eis an article by Shaykh Nuh Ha Mim Keller. I have not read it so no idea what his stance is though.

Dear Suleman 'Ali:

Thank you for your fax of 27 June 1995 which said, in part:

"Recently a pamphlet has been circulated around Oxford saying that evolution is synonymous with kufr and shirk. I myself am a biologist and am convinced by the evidence which supports the theory of evolution. I am writing to ask whether the Quranic account of Creation is incompatible with man having evolved. Are there any books which you would recommend on the subject?"
During my "logic of scientific explanation" period at the University of Chicago, I used to think that scientific theories had to have coherence, logicality, applicability, and adequacy, and I was accustomed to examine theory statements by looking at these things in turn. Perhaps they furnish a reasonable point of departure to give your question an answer which, if cursory and somewhat personal, may yet shed some light on the issues you are asking about.

It seems to me that the very absoluteness of the theory's conclusions tends to compromise its "objective" character.

This is meaningless anti-science, prepping the reader to believe that he will now utterly debunk the preposterous theory of evolution. His "logic of scientific explanation" period at the University of Chicago is an extremely weak credential, but that shall not stop him.

It is all very well to speak of the "evidence of evolution," but if the theory is thorough- going, then human consciousness itself isalso governed by evolution.

That isn't, of course, the meaning of thoroughgoing. What he means is if the theory is absolute, which remains a meaningless criticism. To say that consciousness therefore must be governed by evolution, and even then to assume this somehow detracts from any other beliefs concerning human consciousness, is more kneejerk anti-scientific bunk. What kind of point begins, "it is all very well to speak of the "evidence""? A really stupid point!

This means that...

Doubtful.

...the categories that allow observation statements to arise as "facts", categories such as number, space, time, event, measurement, logic, causality, and so forth are mere physiological accidents of random mutation and natural selection in a particular species, Homo sapiens. They have not come from any scientific considerations, but rather have arbitrarily arisen in man by blind and fortuitous evolution for the purpose of preserving the species.

Whatever he said there, total rubbish. Not what evolution says, just confused straw man utterly nonsensical rubbish.

They need not reflect external reality, "the way nature is", objectively, but only to the degree useful in preserving the species. That is, nothing guarantees the primacy, the objectivity, of these categories over others that would have presumably have arisen had our consciousness evolved along different lines, such as those of more distant, say, aquatic or subterranean species.

Let's appreciate that he is talking in the language of a contemplator, not a finder-outer. And he doesn't accept basic facts. What he seems to be saying is that what humanity perceives is somehow less necessarily so if we accept evolution, and in particular the evolution of intellect. His concern is well answered if one takes the view that evolved lifeforms - including the numerous bacteria in our bodies without which we wouldn't really work - are a perfect object for scientific study, rather than lay objections, and that attempting to understand more about these things, whatever the answers, is an inherently noble, perhaps even spiritual endeavour, and that what it does or doesn't document concerning God and a spiritual realm is quite something else. That constitutes a philosophical response to a paranoid concern.

The cognitive basis of every statement within the theory thus proceeds from the unreflective, unexamined historical forces that produced "consciousness" in one species, a cognitive basis that the theory nevertheless generalizes to the whole universe of theory statements (the explanation of the origin of species) without explaining what permits this generalization. The pretences of the theory to correspond to an objective order of reality, applicable in an absolute sense to all species, are simply not compatible with the consequences of a thoroughly evolutionary viewpoint, which entails that the human cognitive categories that underpin the theory are purely relative and species-specific. The absolutism of random mutation and natural selection as explanative principles ends in eating the theory. With all its statements simultaneously absolute and relative, objective and subjective, generalizable and ungeneralizable, scientific and species-specific, the theory runs up on a reef of methodological incoherence.

Does it really though? The attack, which doesn't deserve a thoroughgoing deconstruction, is basically that evolution can only have evolved a subjective intellect therefore to believe in evolution is to confirm one's own stupidity and thus one's inability to know about such matters as evolution. Again he conflates the evolved mind with a diminished God and presumes it inferior to the mind we might otherwise be studying. I propose he embarks on so doing before writing another letter like this.

Speaking for myself, I was convinced that the evolution of man was an unchallengeable "given" of modern knowledge until I read Charles Darwin's "Origin of Species". The ninth chapter (The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. Ed. J.W. Burrow. London: Penguin Books, 1979, 291-317) made it clear, from what Darwin modestly calls the "great imperfection of the geological record" that the theory was not in principle falsifiable, though the possibility that some kind of evidence or another should be able in principle to disprove a theory is a condition (if we can believe logicians like Karl Popper) for it to be considered scientific. By its nature, fossil evidence of intermediate forms that could prove or disprove the theory remained unfound and unfindable. When I read this, it was not clear to me how such an theory could be called "scientific".

That is the complete opposite of what Darwin said. It is a very well known proposition, accepted by every evolution scientist, that if any fossil were to be found in the wrong layer, the theory would collapse. Millions of discoveries have never once included a misplaced remnant. Citing Popper in his own defense, but cynically, makes even more of a fool out of him. Whatismore, it is amazing that fossils are found at all that have been buried in layers of rock or sediment or ash or any other substrate for hundreds of millions of years, and the nearer one gets to the present, say from tens of millions of years ago, there is a miraculously vast number of well-preserved fossils, every single one of them an intermediate species between what went before and what went after, and in every case where a family of species have been found, their position in the fossil layer continues to speak in Darwin's favour. Of course there are gaps. Nobody will find every example of every mutation of any species, because mutations occur in every generation over vast timescales. As for his upset about random mutation: that the fittest survive means that successful species in a given environment can continue to replicate and mutate that species DNA. Mutations are (for the most part) random, visibly, and so at times of chaos were environments, but the synchrony of the two as observed in evolution theory is far from random. He labours the point over several paragraphs which here I omit.

Is the analogy from micro-evolution within a species (which is fairly well-attested to by breeding horses, pigeons, useful plant hybrids, and so on) applicable to macro-evolution, from one species to another? That is, is there a single example of one species actually evolving into another, with the intermediate forms represented in the fossil record?
In the 1970s, Peter Williamson of Harvard University, under the direction of Richard Leakey, examined 3,300 fossils from digs around Lake Turkana, Kenya, spanning several million years of the history of thirteen species of mollusks, that seemed to provide clear evidence of evolution from one species to another. He published his findings five years later in Nature magazine, and Newsweek picked up the story:

"Though their existence provides the basis for paleontology, fossils have always been something of an embarrassment to evolutionists. The problem is one of 'missing links': the fossil record is so littered with gaps that it takes a truly expert and imaginative eye to discern how one species could have evolved into another.... But now, for the first time, excavations at Kenya's Lake Turkana have provided clear fossil evidence of evolution from one species to another. The rock strata there contain a series of fossils that show every small step of an evolutionary journey that seems to have proceeded in fits and starts" (Sharon Begley and John Carey, "Evolution: Change at a Snail's Pace." Newsweek, 7 December 1981).
Without dwelling on the facticity of scientific hypotheses raised under logic above,

Why not?

or that 3,300 fossils of thirteen species only "cover" several million years if we already acknowledge that evolution is happening and are merely trying to see where the fossils fit in, or that we are back to Peirce's abductive reasoning here,

That is not at all true. There are many ways in which rocks and fossils are dated, and it is only because the various dating techniques, some which do the same job and some which apply best to a given timescale, are so consistent in agreeing with each other that fossils can sometimes be used to date pieces of rock, invariably consistent with it's chemical signature (the presence of substances that formed at given times as measured by the decomposition of their constituent chemicals, each of which decomposes at a known and measurable rate).

although with a more probable minor premise because of the fuller geological record

If I'm making any sense of this he is alluding to what I just said merely to acknowledge it as a sort of obvious but irrelevant point, which he does not address. A large part of his essay then goes on to discuss the Islamic tradition versus evolution, and I'm not going to look at most of that.

Unfortunately, this seems to be exactly what most evolutionists think. In America and England, they are the ones who write the textbooks, which raises weighty moral questions about sending Muslim students to schools to be taught these atheistic premises as if they were "givens of modern science." Teaching unbelief (kufr) to Muslims as though it were a fact is unquestionably unlawful.

Surely what ought to be unlawful is denying children access to a proper education in scientific matters because one objects to the scientifically observed narrative of creation insofar as there is such a thing.

As someone from the West, I was raised from early school years as a believer not only in science, the practical project of discovery that aims at exploiting more and more of the universe by identification, classification, and description of micro- and macro-causal relations; but also in scientism, the belief that this enterprise constitutes absolute knowledge.

Most of us are not taught that last part. Strange. Most of us are taught that science is all about testing beliefs and being open to a thesis becoming expanded, diminished or discredited. Eventually, only when all observations concur as to what has been observed, it becomes a dominant theory.

He continues to discuss "categories of understanding" that he feels are diminished by the science of evolution. One such category he does not understand at all is the scientific endeavour.

computers are getting smaller too... evolution is about natural selection - thesurvival of the fittest change is the only univeral constant it is the tragedy of islam that it cannot change

Joie...you read all that.

wow.

I'll probably be shot down too, but I don't buy evolution.

It is necessary that very few cellular changes to occur and then cumulate to produce significant change. I can't see the cell getting past the "little changes" stage. As far as I'm aware, such mutations are always detrimental to the life of the cell.

I think a much more realistic process of evolution would be one where mutating tissue grows and mutates in isolation from the integrated bodily systems and then when after sufficient generations its ready, it's "plugged" in and replaces something old.

Dawud wrote:

It is necessary that very few cellular changes to occur and then cumulate to produce significant change. I can't see the cell getting past the "little changes" stage. As far as I'm aware, such mutations are always detrimental to the life of the cell.

You don't think that genes in the cells mutate from now and then?

And then if the mutation is compatible for the nature that the person is living in for it to succeed and then be passed on to another generation?

I don't see why mutations have to always be detrimental to the life of the cell? Examples?

Dawud wrote:

I'll probably be shot down too, but I don't buy evolution.

It is necessary that very few cellular changes to occur and then cumulate to produce significant change. I can't see the cell getting past the "little changes" stage. As far as I'm aware, such mutations are always detrimental to the life of the cell.

firstly i think we can agree that you have not evolved neither has islam. perhaps you might consider changes in the dna of the sperm or egg which might be harmful such as Down's syndrome or beneficial - stronger body bigger brain and so on. only beneficial changes survive and breed to pass on the mutated gene why does that concept give anybody a problem? thst is a mystery to all but mad religious fundis (be they christian or muslim) that how man created arab horses - selective breeding. tom

I get natural selection and selective breeding to produce variations within species. The bit where I'm not convinced is that such adaptions and variations can ultimately produce a new and different species.

As far as my (limited) understanding goes, the systems of the body within any species are so heavily integrated that to alter them significantly would result in a defective system. I see variations as possible differences within a finite range of modifications. If I'm right and the number of possible beneficial modifications are finite, then they are limited.

Dawud wrote:

I get natural selection and selective breeding to produce variations within species. The bit where I'm not convinced is that such adaptions and variations can ultimately produce a new and different species.

As far as my (limited) understanding goes, the systems of the body within any species are so heavily integrated that to alter them significantly would result in a defective system. I see variations as possible differences within a finite range of modifications. If I'm right and the number of possible beneficial modifications are finite, then they are limited.

Well...adaptations and variations does take time...years and years and years!

Dawud wrote:

I get natural selection and selective breeding to produce variations within species. The bit where I'm not convinced is that such adaptions and variations can ultimately produce a new and different species.

did you never hear of fossils? and look at the fossil record?

did you ever hear of the Cambrian explosion? - one not caused by muslims

s.b.f wrote:

Well...adaptations and variations does take time...years and years and years!

well there has been about 3.5 billion years since life appeared on earth

it would seem that the 7th century arab warlord that you follow did not underatnd these things either. tom

the opposition to darwin is religious is it not? yes i am against islam but the hate comes from your direction. i read the quran probably before you were born and do not rate it - its just a collection of sayings from a 7 th century arab warlord it has attracted a rather unpleasant culture around itself which i think we should discourage in the uk. but that is another (if related) matter

i notice that you did not respond to my points re fossils and the cambrian explosion

enjoy your jihad tom

tom wrote:

i read the quran probably before you were born and do not rate it - its just a collection of sayings from a 7 th century arab warlord

What about all the scientific information in the Qur'an, how do you explain them, how did people know such stuff 1400 odd years ago?

ThE pOwEr Of SiLeNcE wrote:

tom wrote:

i read the quran probably before you were born and do not rate it - its just a collection of sayings from a 7 th century arab warlord

What about all the scientific information in the Qur'an, how do you explain them, how did people know such stuff 1400 odd years ago?

i have read that too it would not convince any non muslim with any acientific education whatsoever it is actually embarassing to read that stuff why can you not just carry on with your superstition in private snd stop trying to pretend that islam is something that it is not.
please define the term "prophet" why do you think mohammed was one?

why don't you get lost?

Noor wrote:

why don't you get lost?

why should he?

ThE pOwEr Of SiLeNcE wrote:

Noor wrote:

why don't you get lost?

why should he?

why shouldn't he?

• its a free county
• We get to communicate with each other.
• If your going to be rude etc, his stereotype will be proved right.

ThE pOwEr Of SiLeNcE wrote:

We get to communicate with each other.

communicate? has he listened to a word anyone has said?

Quote:

If your going to be rude etc, his stereotype will be proved right.

then he is very stupid.

Noor wrote:

ThE pOwEr Of SiLeNcE wrote:

We get to communicate with each other.

communicate? has he listened to a word anyone has said?

you do ur bit and leave him to his bit.

noor wrote:

Quote:

If your going to be rude etc, his stereotype will be proved right.

then he is very stupid.

how? he probably doesnt talk to many Muslims and the ones he does react in the same way they are being protrayed in the media etc, so what is he meant to think?

oh dear.