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Peppered moth[]
Natural Detection and not 'natural selection' from http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Natural_selection
The Peppered moth story: http://www.icr.org and Wells misses the point. Even if the moths were staged and the research a fraud - it doesn't matter. The confusion is one of semantics and intent, specifically the difference between the words "detection, pattern" and "selection,design".
Lets say I walk past a black floor with white marbles on it but I had no original intent of selecting for marbles and just casually walk past, filing the image somewhere in my subconscious mind. Tomorrow somebody looking for marbles wanting to "select" for marbles asks me about marbles and I remember about the visual contrast the previous day that I *detected*. The other person implementing his goal directed decision to select for marbles would have stopped to pick them up had he seen them.
A bird goes out looking for moths to eat. The bird *detects* the white moths, since birds don't have teleological goals towards their higher destiny the correct term to use for the the black moths being eaten is in the (detection, pattern) not (selection, design) sense. The birds engaged in natural detection
Lets paint a room black and release white and black moths and put a bird inside. In the same way that I would have *detected* the white marbles a bird would *detect* the white moths first. One can say the bird *selected* for the white moths, but only if we understand that the word *selection* is used to convey the intent in the detection, pattern sense. Of course I as a free agent implemented my design to have the white moths reduced by using a bird for the purpose in a closed environment. But since nature has no designs nor consciousness nature didn't *direct* the bird to reduce the white moth population.
Darwin tried to extrapolate the selection,design intent of domestic breeding to nature, he confused the patterns in nature with designs. A free roaming cow meeting another cow in a point of space and time making baby cows is a pattern not a design - nobody willed for cows to meet.
What has the bird *detecting* white moths inside the room got to do with the word *natural*? What naturaled in this process of
- detection*. If this process of detecting a color contrast means
something got naturaled then every time my dog sees a white cat on the lawn and goes ballistic he is also getting naturaled.
Lets presume soot was white and thus all the black moths would have been eaten leaving behind the white ones. We would be told that this is also natural selection making the whole story unfalsifiable because no matter what happens it would always be the same universal mechanism that explains everything - natural selection.
All that happened with the moths is that we had a *pattern* - and event took place: White moths got eaten first because the birds
- detected* them due to the color contrast. Nobody implemented any goal
directed decisions to eliminate the white moth variety. The birds original intent was to get grub , it did not have the intent of eliminating the white moths - hence nothing got *selected* or naturaled. Lets drop the word "natural" from the peppered moth story remaining only with the word "selection". If the white moths being eaten is *selection* our question would be "selection by whom?" but because everybody has accepted a semantic impossibility - NS nobody is asking who did the selecting. The Perry Marshall http://www.cosmicfingerprints.com pattern, design distinction was debated at http://iidb.org/vbb/showthread.php?t=135497&page=11
The public is caught in an iron triangle between YEC, Materialists and ID'sts and all three of these suffer from confusion between a pattern and a design. Ham and Humphreys, being YEC should make it clear whether they use the object NS in the patter or design sense.
This pepper moth debate has been raging for years, a debate in irrelevance since everybody used a contradiction in terms - NS. And because of this fundamental mistake in language itself a simple "pattern" vs. "design" explanation was missed by YEC, Materialist and ID'sts. Or at least it was missed by their mainstream movements.
Lou Dobbs for example had Morris, Ruse and Wells on CNN. And from within this iron triangle the poor man was pleading with them literally saying ".. sort of help me out with this..." as Dobbs searched for words to express his doubts about evolution. Take a long hard look at YEC, Materialist and ID'st explanations and ask yourself what is it that all three of these world views are missing. What fundamental "truth" about language itself are they violating, that undercuts any attempt at utilizing logic from their main stream visible representations.
Jesus is Lord[]
The earth was made 6000 years ago because the Textus Receptus and Masoretic says so. In trying to understand this concept one needs some sort of over-arching presupposition. That premise must be the Pattern or design dichotomy. Words like selection are only used to express some sort of pattern or design idea: there are no other options.