I recently watched a re-run of Attenborough's Tree of Life documentary. A paean to evolution.
It provided a great summary of doctrinaire evolutionary boosting, which I had expected. In so doing it provided a wonderful succession of conflation of fact and presumption, misinformation, intellectual slight of hand and fallacious logic, which was a bonus.
If I was to run a Saturday seminar for high school students (now there's an idea), clips from this video would be part of it!
I'll summarise.
Early on we are given the estimate of the number of species: just to dazzle. The range is from a few million to many times that: so large as to indicate it is pure guesswork and so not worth mentioning. This sets the scene for the staggering complexity and variety of life being claimed as unavoidably the result of evolution.
Next we are rightly introduced to biblical belief, with a reading from Genesis 1; well, lampooning really. DA fails to express any wonder at the identification of broad ecological and coupled zoological categories that the account contains, the orderly progression of the creation of ecological divisions, and the continuity of those categories with what is evident to us today. Pretty remarkable for a book by 'ignorant ancients'.
We are treated to a pop history of Darwin's adventures completely cut off from the intellectual history of the time he lived in and the atmosphere pregnant with evolutionary ideas (including early description of 'natural selection' by Edward Blyth, a creationist). He also fails to mention the tendentiousness of the 'long age/slow process' project of the time to unseat Moses' credibility.
A whole lot of non-evidence of evolution is presented in commission of the fallacy of 'affirming the consequent' (of the form: 'when it rains puddles of water form...oh look, there's a puddle of water, it has rained' neglecting other causes for puddles of water) on the question begging presumption of evolution occuring being the proof of evolution having occured (and still occuring presumably).
DA makes much of Darwin destroying the idea of 'fixity of the the species' erronously conflating 'species' with the genesian 'kinds', failing to unlink the two ideas, falling for the Aristotelian influenced idea of fixed species! Not biblical at all. He didn't bother pointing out that bibilical 'kinds' are broad observational categories, not narrow genetic ones and one could well extend from this that the concept of 'kind' was not concordant with rigid fixed species...whatever 'species' might mean in reality. Thus from the biblical data we need not be surprised by the proliferation of sub-types of creatures within broad 'kinds'. So DA deceitfully plays the straw man game.
Next stop is genetics: the discovery of the double helix, and the evidence this provides for genetic continuity between 'species'. This comes as no surprise given the looseness of 'kind' and that everything in a biosphere should have similar biology to exist in said biosphere. No surprise here either.
We get the full bottle on Natural Selection as 'survival of the fittest'. I know that's its epigraph, but survival of the fittest is not required...only survival of the least unfit in any particular ecological setting at any particular time. But reality doesn't sound as good as propaganda, even in biology and it is not explained how this is the 'engine' of evolution instead of what we observe: resistance to degenerative change.
Close to the end we are taken through Darwins 'fear' of the eye as an evolved thing. DA glibly explains that there are all sorts of organs that sense light...so one could have evolved into the other. No shred of evidence is offered for the vast functional differences, and the coordinated development of interlocking systems and sub-systems required for vision to occur, let alone the meaning of vision for organisms.
Lastly of my summary, we sweat with Darwin over his long and painstaking work with species studies...no critique of Darwin's un-self-critical question begging mission here either, nor of the obvious critique that he was describing a plausable analysis of speciation within kinds....of which we see evidence, but driving this beyond evidence to a total materialist history of biology.
DA ends with Paley's watch...but fails again to deal with the true implications of the analogy, particularly for evolution which remains a set of footnotes that attempt to save a Victorian era gross morphology fiction as making any contribution to anything, concocted in complete ignorance of the vast complexity of even the 'simplest' life forms.
My conclusion: the film is a great discussion starter for a seminar on biblical creation.
