Evolution in action

[Biochemist]

I think Biochemist is stating an idea that offers a philosophical solution to the conflict between the teleological assumption (which I consider the parent meme of creationism), and scientific naturalism.

 

That the Creator created only the initial conditions of the universe (via a process only hinted at by current scientific grand theories such as string, brane, etc., which have yet to, and may never, provide adequate testable claims) and that all phenomena since that creation has been entirely natural, is compatible with a wide range of naturalistic and theistic worldviews encompassing most of humankind...

This is an articulate statement, CD. I agree with your assertion that this approach does somewhat reconcile a number of issues that keep the theists and the Naturalists at odds. There are other variants of this view that are probably even more palatable to the Christian theists, but that would be a topic for another thread. (Feel free to start one in the theology forum.)

 

My only point is that there is reasonable evidence that some evolutionary events (and many speciation events in particular) are complex enough that the default proposition of aggregated mutation seems implausible. If the propensity for a particular genetic modification is driven by intrinsic characteristics of the source genome, it suggests that the source genome has unexpressed information load (at least not in terms of phenotype). In particular, if the source genome can generate the same pleiotropic modification reproducibly (even more than once in a trillion births) it suggests strongly that it is a stretch to lable the behavior as "mutation".

 

It would be useful if we could expand our lexicon to separate proscribed genomic change from non-proscribed (i.e., mutation). The boundary is certainly a little gray, but the concept would be useful to add to the discussion.