Fredwin on Evolution

Fredwin On Evolution
Very Long, Will Bore Hell Out Of Most People, But I Felt Like Doing It March 8, 2005

I was about fifteen when I began to think about evolution. I was then just discovering the sciences systematically, and took them as what they offered themselves to be, a realm of reason and dispassionate regard for truth. There was a hard-edged clarity to them that I liked. You got real answers. Since evolution depended on such sciences as chemistry, I regarded it as also being a science.

[snip]

Evolution, Like Gaul, Is Divided Into Three Parts
Evolution breaks down into at least three logically separable components: First, that life arose by chemical accident; second, that it then evolved into the life we see today; and third, that the mechanism was the accretion of chance mutations. Evolutionists, not particularly logical, refuse to see this separability.
The first, chance formation of life, simply hasn’t been established. It isn’t science, but faith.
The second proposition, that life, having arisen by unknown means, then evolved into the life of today, is more solid. In very old rocks you find fish, then things, like coelacanth and the ichthyostega, that look like transitional forms, and finally us. They seem to have gotten from A to B somehow. A process of evolution, however driven, looks reasonable. It is hard to imagine that they appeared magically from nowhere, one after the other.
The third proposition, that the mechanism of evolutions is chance mutation, though sacrosanct among its proponents, is shaky. If it cannot account for the simultaneous appearance of complex, functionally interdependent characteristics, as in the case of caterpillars, it fails. Thus far, it hasn’t accounted for them.
It is interesting to note that evolutionists switch stories regarding the mechanism of transformation. The standard Neo-Darwinian view is that evolution proceeds very slowly. But when it proves impossible to find evidence of gradual evolution, some evolutionists turn to “punctuated equilibrium,” (2) which says that evolution happens by sudden undetectable spurts. The idea isn’t foolish, just unestablished. Then there are the evolutionists who, in opposition to those who maintain that point-mutations continue to account for evolution, say that now cultural evolution has taken over.
Finally, when things do not happen according to script—when, for example, human intelligence appears too rapidly—then we have the theory of “privileged genes,” which evolved at breakneck speed because of assumed but unestablished selective pressures. That is, the existence of the pressures is inferred from the changes, and then the changes are attributed to the pressures. Oh.
When you have patched a tire too many times, you start


http://www.mensnewsdaily.com/archive/r/reed/2005/reed030805.htm