I don't want to keep writing about the political situation. A bunch of crazy or at least misguided people wreacked havoc in the Capitol building, for which they should be fully prosecuted, and the hypocritical Left thta all summer supported and defended rioters and murderers on their side of the political divide, is blaming it on all Trump supporters. Shows how crazy and misguided the Left is as usual, and how dangerous to everything American, but I need a break. Since there's nothing much I can do about it and it's such a gigantic headache, I need a rest from it,
So I stopped thinking about the political mess and have been watching the film "Darwin's Dilemma" rentable at Amazon for $2. I'm not attracted to Intelligent Design which is where this film leads in the end, but it's got a lot of interesting information about the Cambrian Explosion and nice animations of many of the bizarre creatures found in the Cambrian rocks. .
Intelligent Design accepts the basic time frame of evolutionary theory and I don't. I start out from a biblical framework thinking about evolution so I'm not looking to prove that there is an Intelligent Designer, rather I'm thinking about how biological systems actually work to defy the Darwinian idea of the evolution of all life from an ancient origin. The biblical account describes the separate creation of particular animals, after which they reproduce their own kind with variations within that kind but never anything other than that kind. So the objective is to discover the biological facts that demonstrate that.
The film does go to great lengths to show that each creature stands alone without transitional forms leading to 8it or from it to somethihng else, which is of coruse in line with my arguments. . The Cambrian Explosion is their evidence, billions of creatures found in rocks at the very bottom of the geological column with its fossil record that climbs up from there through all the named "time periods" from Cambrian through Devonian through Permian through Jurassic etc etc etc., to Recent time. The existence of those billions of complex creatures which are mostly insects and sea creatures is a problem for evolution because they seem to appear out of nowhere with no evolutionary precursors. Th3e absence of such precursors in the lower Precambrian rocks is astonishing given the assumptions of the theory of evolution. In that frame of reerence they appear in time, as all the fossils up the geololgical column appear in time, millions of years per sedimentary layer or "time period." The creationist idea is that it's not about time at all, the strata with their fossil contents are the result of the great Flood of Noah, all laid down within months. This is not the framework of the film, however, which seems to accept the time periods of evolutionary theory and Old Earth geology.
It's rather fun watching the computer animations of these odd creatures, and the scientific issues discussed are also interetsing. Of course since this is a film out to prove Intelligent Design there are plenty of debunkers in the Amazon comments though my cursory look through them didn't yield any very substantive arguments, mostly a lot of complaining that the film violates science without showing that it does. But then as I say my look-through was cursory and maybe I missed it.
The film answsered a question I've had for some time: where in the DNA is the genetic material that determines the structure of the animal itself. This question comes up because I got into trying to define the Kind apart from my argument about the reducton of genetic diversity. I looked at the Linnaean classification of animals and eventually concluded that the Kind must be definable by its morphology of basic physial structure but that the Linnaean system used some other criteria than I would.
I had to take a look at the skeletons of all kinds of birds in order to decide that "Bird" itself has to be a Kind or Species. The particular kinds of birds are then Subspecies. I don't see the point of the groupings such as Order, Genera etc. But then Linnaeus wasn't trying to deal with evolution. It has some aesthetic and lobical appeal to class things as Vertegrates and the like though so I guess I shouldn't object to that, it just has nothing to do with the question of evolution or descent.
If my eyesight were better I'd like to take a look at many more animal groupings to try to identify the structure I think must define the Kind or Species. Dog, Cat, Bird, and I think Rodent are all I've really thought about. I also figure that the genome of each Kind or Species should show itself to be specific to that Kind or Species in some identifiable way but of course I can't do that kind of research, it would take a geneticist for that. Oh Trilobite, I think Trilobite is a Kind or Species. Biology breaks up all these categories into separate species. But they they are using the term in a different way.
I'm not going to get to sort all this out in this life but the film answered that question I've had for some time: where is the genetic material located in the genome that codes for the body plan? Well, it's not located in the DNA at all according to the scientists in this film. It's located somewhere else in the cell. In the fertilized original cell it contains instructions for the differentiation of all the cells. No particular location was identified, nothing in particular about how this agency within the cell functions, just the statement that it's not in the DNA (though one participant added "as far as we know") and they agree that it is part of the cell itself.
Body Plan is their term but it's a good one and I'll use it. Locating the instructions for the body plan within the cell but not in the DNA means that you could never get from one species to another as the theory of evolut8ion has it. That was argued in a paper by Stephen Meyer that became controversial because in his conclusion he attributed the formation of the body plan to Design by a Designer.
That's all very interesting but there's a way he talks about it that makes me think it doesn't fit the biblical description of a one-time Creattion from which all the different Kinds reproduced in great variety, but something more like individual creative acts as new forms develop out of earlier populations. I'm not sure but that's what it sounds like.
In any case it answered my question. The body plan isn't in the DNA, it's a separate set of instructions built into the organism from its original fertilized cell. ( By the way I had prayed fairly recently for an answer to this question, and I have to say that I hardly ever fail to get answers to that kind of question. It doesn't particularly help me with the project of identifying the original Kinds but at least it seems to establish that there is definitely something immutable about the structure of each creature, which is how it appears. Cats are cats, they have an immutable catness to their form which exists in every kind of cat you'll ever see. That's the idea. When they try to tell me that we have the same body structure as the ape family, I'm very certain that no we don't. The proportions are entirely different. yes if I had another life I'd love to spend time trying to demonstrate all this.
Anyway that's another trend I pursue in arguments against evolution and for biblical creation. the main one remains the argument that evolutionary processes themselves inevitably rduce genetic diversity which defeats the whole idea of evolution beyond the boundary of the species, for which my evidence is pretty much limited to the known genetic reductiont o fixed loci in purebreds and in bottlenecked creatures such as the cheetah. But the fact that a whole new population can evolve very rapidly, over a matter of years, is also important evidence against evolution, examples being the Poe Mrcaru lizards and the Jutland cattle.
Then I just look around the world and everywhere I see evidence of the Flood. A wrecked planet, a tumble-down planet, the result of a great upheaval that destroyed the original perfect Creation. the strata for sure but just the tossed and tumbled look in general.
Now I like the implications of this immutable Body Plan. Just another reason you could never get from a reptile to a mammal, though the mathematics of incremental change defeat that one anyway.
Drat. I hope I'm not doomed to go back to politics now that I've come to an ending with this one.
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