More on Evolution from Evangelical Realism

It looks like the Professor would like to respond to my last article as well. I hope I answer his objections to everyone's satisfaction. Lets start with evolution in general:

If “Darwinists” are wrong about evolution, then that means the Creator failed to equip the biological portion of His Creation with the kind of sophisticated, elegant, and ingenious design that Darwin and his successors have come up with. Evolution, after all, is a mechanism that not only provides for tremendous innovation and refinements in biological systems, it’s also a tuning and repair mechanism that allows an ecosystem to replace species killed off by disease, disaster, or ordinary extinction. What’s more, evolutionary scientists are claiming to derive their detailed knowledge of this simple yet powerful system through observation of nature (i.e. of Creation), but if God failed to create it, then that means they are inventing a superior system without His help. That would mean scientists are at least acting smarter than God, assuming a smart God might have some reason for implementing a stupid design that was inferior to what unbelievers could come up with.

This is rather weak even as a strawman. I have never stated that there is no evolution. fully believe that species change and that natural selection is a great way to winnow out the defects that crop up. My argument has been that Darwinists haven't shown that this is sufficient to explain the full picture. Specifically, that the Intelligent design is still a valid competing theory. The link the Professor either failed to follow or ignored is but one example of my arguments in this area. Oh, and as far as ID being a "stupid design that was inferior to what unbelievers could come up with," not knowing the reason for the design is not the same thing as knowing that the design was inferior. There are too many examples of this proving true IN EVOLUTIONARY STUDIES to believe your statement in this regard was anything more than baseless rhetoric.

Now, lets talk about race and genetics:

Hogwash. Geographical isolation, like other forms of isolation, produce separate species, not separate “races.” Racism is not part of “standard evolutionary theory.” Humans are all in the same gene pool, which is why Bob Jones University felt it necessary to ban interracial dating until just recently. From an evolutionary perspective, the only “distinct race” is the human race.

The Professor can be forgiven for believing this. After Hitler, the Eugenics movement, and other Darwinistic embarrassments, it became unfashionable for evolutionists to believe in a genetic component to race. However, quite a few recent studies suggest just the opposite.

From the New York Times:

People have continued to evolve since leaving the ancestral homeland in northeastern Africa some 50,000 years ago, both through the random process known as genetic drift and through natural selection. The genome bears many fingerprints in places where natural selection has recently remolded the human clay, researchers have found, as people in the various continents adapted to new diseases, climates, diets and, perhaps, behavioral demands.

A striking feature of many of these changes is that they are local. The genes under selective pressure found in one continent-based population or race are mostly different from those that occur in the others. These genes so far make up a small fraction of all human genes.

...

The most striking instances of recent human evolution have emerged from a new kind of study, one in which the genome is scanned for evidence of selective pressures by looking at a few hundred thousand specific sites where variation is common.

Last year Benjamin Voight, Jonathan Pritchard and colleagues at the University of Chicago searched for genes under natural selection in Africans, Europeans and East Asians. In each race, some 200 genes showed signals of selection, but without much overlap, suggesting that the populations on each continent were adapting to local challenges.

Another study, by Scott Williamson of Cornell University and colleagues, published in PLoS Genetics this month, found 100 genes under selection in Chinese, African-Americans and European-Americans.

So yes, professor, race has a genetic component influenced by natural selection.

Continuing:

Tell it to the Bedouins. If you’re familiar enough with modern science to know the history of deserts in Africa, you know enough to realize that the best available evidence (from genetics, etc) indicates that all modern humans are descended from African descendants. It doesn’t take a frikken space program for a clever species like homo sapiens to get out of Africa. Or back in again.

I fully agree that humans can get out of Africa. It is even possible to get back in. However, the tendency seems to be more toward getting out several tens of thousands of years ago and staying out. Apparently, for example, prehistoric Americans didn't feel the need to swim across the Atlantic to find brides in Kenya and keep the gene pool uniform.

Continuing further:

Just as they’ve used the Bible to achieve the same proof. So bigots claim they have some kind of reputable basis for their bigotry–so what? If a bigot tries to justify his bigotry, that doesn’t automatically mean they’re right. What science proves is that “race” is a misnomer, and an arbitrary and foolish criterion for dividing mankind into “them” versus “us”. But it’s up to us to take what science shows us, and then respond in an ethically sound manner.

I do have to give the professor credit here. Ignorant people can use poorly understood knowledge from ANY source to justify their biases - even the Bible. Granted, according to recent science (but not necessarily from a biblical perspective) he's wrong about race, even cutting edge genetics acknowledges a much closer relationship among races than the crude estimations of early Darwinists. I also give him kudos for not trying to state that science itself forms a basis for ethics.

We're almost done here:

Heh, as if such silly and self-congratulatory bluster deserved an intelligent response? He wants me to take seriously a charge that the reaction against Watson is because of the apology rather than because of the original racist remarks? No, I think I addressed the only part of the original screed that had any intellectual merit, and if you read the comments to the original post, you’ll find the two Key Words co-hosts discussing the same issue I did.

Yes, the reaction against Watson was because of the racist remarks. However, you will note that Watson's apology did exactly NOTHING for him. Conservatives, coming from a Biblical perspective, forgive when someone repents - as Watson clearly did. Liberals have no such inclination and, as everything subsequent to the apology has shown (his suspension is now a "retirement," his status as advisor on the Seed Media Group board is being challenged and the cry is rising for all Africa to condemn his racist comments - after he retracted them), if anything, attacks on him are only getting worse. Given that contrition and penitence only earn scorn and rebukes from Liberals, why apologize for anything?

Oh, and if you notice on the comments, my argument is, and has been, that there is NO evidence for a genetic difference in intelligence among races.

I hope this clarifies things for the professor. Again, I do appreciate his links!