[QUOTE="UGAThornhill"] I know that survival of the fittest and natural selection as synonymous. I just use "survival of the fittest" because I think more people understand what that means without going into things like founder effect and so on.
I think the talkorigins webpage was a bit too liberal in defining evolution, at least for this discussion board. When people say evolution, they're talking about "the successive alterations that led from the earliest protoorganism to snails, bees, giraffes, and dandelions" and not "slight changes in the proportion of different alleles within a population". I doubt 10% of the people on this board even know what an allele is. Regardless of what the current defintion is, that's what people are talking about.
I still maintain that shifting in allele frequency isn't evolution but if we want to include that in the evolution definition I won't argue semantics (Other than this thought: Allele frequencies can shift one way or the other given the various environmental circumstances. How do we define which direction is evolution and which is de-evolution? Again, semantics and more of a hypothetical question than a real "point").
Back to what I would define as "the point" though. If you broaden the scope of the definition of "evolution", then yes, to some extent it's true. But people here are arguing specifically about whether man was created by intelligent design (i.e. God) or evolved from single-celled organisms. My main objection was to some of the previous statements that evolution was infallible. There are multiple examples within even a cell that are hard-pressed to be explained simply by shifts in allele frequency and mutations of DNA (or RNA for some of the earlier life).
Decessus
As George H. Smith once said, "Confusion is the enemy of purposeful thought."
Evolution is what it is. It does not really matter that other people think it's something else. I understand what you are saying though, and after this next point, I'll let it drop. I wanted to comment on devolution. It does not exist. There is no such thing as biological devolution. Evolution is a directionless process. A change in the allele frequency of a population is evolution, there is no debating this. Again, evolution is what it is whether people think it's something else or not.
You are right about evolutionary theory not being infallible though. No scientific theory is infallible. If it were, it wouldn't be a scientific theory. Falsification is a necessary attribute for anything to be classified as a scientific theory. However, as of right now, there is no evidence that contradicts evolutionary theory, and there is no evidence that supports intelligent design.
"A change in the allele frequency of a population is evolution, there is no debating this."
-- That's what I thought you'd say. I was just wondering if, over centuries, forces pushed allele frequency one direction and then opposite forces pushed the allele frequency back to it's original starting point if that was evolution or just a proverbial "waste of time". Apparently it is, in fact, evolution.
"Again, evolution is what it is whether people think it's something else or not."
--Again, I agree. My point was that just because the recent scientific definition of evolution is different than the "evolution" people debate here doesn't make the arguments somehow ignorant or invalid. I find that a lot of people can argue about things like this pretty effectively without knowing the B, C, and D that leads from A to E.
My other problem is that you've clearly got more education in this field than most but you still make gross generalizations. Blanket statements like "there is no evidence that contradicts evolutionary theory, and there is no evidence that supports intelligent design" either tells me that you've been drinking the evolutionary kool-aid for too long or you haven't had enough schooling to realize that, especially in science, there are no absolutes.
PS: I find that irreducibly complex proteins make for good intelligent designer support. It's by no means the "silver bullet" for intelligent design people but it makes for good conversation.
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