New book: Evolution has to happen!
|May 13, 2011||Posted by News under Intelligent Design, Darwinism, stasis|
This point is apparently made in Cameron M. Smith’s The Fact of Evolution:
Walking the reader through the steps in the evolutionary process, Cameron uses plenty of real-world examples to show that not only does evolution happen, it must happen. Cameron analyzes evolution as the unintended consequence of three independent facts of the natural world that we can observe every day: (1) the fact of the replication of life forms (producing offspring); (2) the fact that offspring are not identical (variation); and (3) the fact that not all offspring survive (selection). Viewed in terms of this analysis, evolution is no longer debatable; in fact it has to occur. It is simply the inevitable consequence of three obvious, observable, factual natural phenomena.
If evolution has to occur, hadn’t someone better tell the cricket, who has done nothing for 100 million years, the horsetail grass for 150 million years, and the deplorable pterobranch for over half a billion years?
Shouldn’t something be done about this? If evolution has to occur, it is a law of nature, and these creatures are in clear violation of that law, setting a bad example for thousands of extinct and endangered species.
David Tyler has some interesting comments on avoiding the significance of stasis. He calls it “denialism.”