(1) There is a reproduction process in which characteristics are inherited (2) Things with X characteristics in Y environment die/live etc.
This merely says that the surviving characteristics will move towards optimal in an unspecified range, assuming there are no other significant influences.
It is not explained how exactly the things with less likely characteristics have appeared in the first place. Is there perhaps another process that causes non-optimality? How could you know the process is not actually stronger than the process of natural selection?
It is also not obvious that this process of improvement can cross boundaries between species. You proved that a healthy dog is more likely to survive than a sick dog. You didn’t prove that the super-healthy dog will evolve to a lion or an eagle.
So this naive observation is actually not in contradiction with creationism. (Of course only after the creationism is updated to include it. But hey, scientists change their opinions, too.)
To move further, we need to know that the information which encodes the organism can change randomly (mutation), and that all species use the very same mechanism, so it is possible in theory to modify the information step by step starting with dog and ending with an eagle, in each step getting organisms which would be optimized for some environment. We need some kind of “universal DNA” hypothesis, even if we don’t know the exact formula for the DNA. And it’s not really obvious that dogs and eagles and fish and trees are all encoded in the same way.
On the other hand, once we have a microscope, the “universal DNA” hypothesis becomes rather simple to prove, because it is enough to explore what we have here and now.
I agree that understanding the extent to which natural selection generated things is easier nowadays than it was previously.
So this naive observation is actually not in contradiction with creationism.
I’m not concerned here with logical disproofs of creationism, moreso with something like arguing that time spent {worrying that evolution by natural selection is significantly overrated} is probably misallocated, or arguing that people are privileging the question of ‘Is evolution by natural selection a good explanation?’ (I’m not entirely sure what my motivation is, but it feels like it’s at least partly something along those lines.)
I also think that there’s a lot of hard-to-enumerate background information available to a person nowadays that should be enough for a naturalistic reductionist to intuit that evolution will not arise from bolted-on complex mechanisms like creation, but rather from mechanisms like natural selection that are inherent to populations with a few basic properties that we have actually observed (e.g. finite lifespans that vary according to characteristic-environment interaction, inheritance of characteristics, etc.). It’s possible you understand this and I’m misinterpreting the point at which you’re challenging my argument, but I would very strongly disexpect somebody thinking like me along the lines of ‘provable properties of populations under observed axioms’ (or the probabilistic/continuous generalisation thereof) to be talking about creationism; rather, I would expect challenges to come in the form of other equally basic, low-complexity processes that arise from what we already know.
I’m not sure DNA/the exact method of inheritance is relevant; I would still consider it to be a win for natural selection if we had, say, Lamarckism/inheritance of acquired characteristics/epigenetics as a significant force.
Well, we have tons of observation that nature can be understood, and that the useful explanations do not involve gods or magic. So yes, it would be a reasonable prior expectation for the origins of species, too.
This merely says that the surviving characteristics will move towards optimal in an unspecified range, assuming there are no other significant influences.
It is not explained how exactly the things with less likely characteristics have appeared in the first place. Is there perhaps another process that causes non-optimality? How could you know the process is not actually stronger than the process of natural selection?
It is also not obvious that this process of improvement can cross boundaries between species. You proved that a healthy dog is more likely to survive than a sick dog. You didn’t prove that the super-healthy dog will evolve to a lion or an eagle.
So this naive observation is actually not in contradiction with creationism. (Of course only after the creationism is updated to include it. But hey, scientists change their opinions, too.)
To move further, we need to know that the information which encodes the organism can change randomly (mutation), and that all species use the very same mechanism, so it is possible in theory to modify the information step by step starting with dog and ending with an eagle, in each step getting organisms which would be optimized for some environment. We need some kind of “universal DNA” hypothesis, even if we don’t know the exact formula for the DNA. And it’s not really obvious that dogs and eagles and fish and trees are all encoded in the same way.
On the other hand, once we have a microscope, the “universal DNA” hypothesis becomes rather simple to prove, because it is enough to explore what we have here and now.
I agree that understanding the extent to which natural selection generated things is easier nowadays than it was previously.
I’m not concerned here with logical disproofs of creationism, moreso with something like arguing that time spent {worrying that evolution by natural selection is significantly overrated} is probably misallocated, or arguing that people are privileging the question of ‘Is evolution by natural selection a good explanation?’ (I’m not entirely sure what my motivation is, but it feels like it’s at least partly something along those lines.)
I also think that there’s a lot of hard-to-enumerate background information available to a person nowadays that should be enough for a naturalistic reductionist to intuit that evolution will not arise from bolted-on complex mechanisms like creation, but rather from mechanisms like natural selection that are inherent to populations with a few basic properties that we have actually observed (e.g. finite lifespans that vary according to characteristic-environment interaction, inheritance of characteristics, etc.). It’s possible you understand this and I’m misinterpreting the point at which you’re challenging my argument, but I would very strongly disexpect somebody thinking like me along the lines of ‘provable properties of populations under observed axioms’ (or the probabilistic/continuous generalisation thereof) to be talking about creationism; rather, I would expect challenges to come in the form of other equally basic, low-complexity processes that arise from what we already know.
I’m not sure DNA/the exact method of inheritance is relevant; I would still consider it to be a win for natural selection if we had, say, Lamarckism/inheritance of acquired characteristics/epigenetics as a significant force.
Well, we have tons of observation that nature can be understood, and that the useful explanations do not involve gods or magic. So yes, it would be a reasonable prior expectation for the origins of species, too.