Darwinism and the pathetic fallacy

I've been talking recently about evolutionary theory and how it depends on various reifications, and logical fallacies. Here's a very brief example of the kind of thing I've been talking about.

Quotes and comments;

A. "A basic property of life is its capacity to experience Darwinian evolution..." [1.]

- While this might be called a pathetic bit of writing, it's really an example of the pathetic fallacy. [2.]
The authors have reified an abstraction called life. (Life doesn't exist; has no capacities, and does not experience anything... let alone something called evolution.) What we find in the world are specific living organisms; not life.

The sentence should read; 'Common to all living organisms is a tendency to suffer genetic mutation and change over time.' (This by the way is a proposition that I thin all creationists would agree with.)

In my opinion materialist prefer to speak of life in the abstract for the simple reason that all living organisms possess genetic code; and we know of no way this code can be produced by the random actions of inert matter. The idea is floated around that something called 'life' exists (or existed) that doesn't have genetic code. There is no warrant from science for such a belief or dream.

The pretense (here unspoken) is that 'life' has the capacity to 'evolve' upward... that it has the capacity to gain specified information. This isn't a claim that has any scientific warrant. What we see is the opposite.

Contrary to what some materialists claim, it is Not only creationists who refer to evolutionary theory by the Darwin monicker... as this example shows.

Notes;
1. Metabolism-First Origin of Life Won’t Work Creation/Evolution Headlines 01/05/2010
2. 'The pathetic fallacy or anthropomorphic fallacy is the treatment of inanimate objects as if they had human feelings, thought, or sensations.[citation needed] The pathetic fallacy is a special case of the fallacy of reification. The word 'pathetic' in this use is related to 'empathy' (capability of feeling), and is not pejorative.
The pathetic fallacy is also related to the concept of personification. Personification is direct and explicit in the ascription of life and sentience to the thing in question,
3. From the article;
“We do not know how the transition to digitally encoded information has happened in the originally inanimate world; that is, we do not know where the RNA world might have come from, but there are strong reasons to believe that it had existed.”
- Strong reasons? I guess you could say they have strong reasons if you call a rejection of God and a belief in materialism strong reasons. Apart from that there's no reason I can see of to believe such a scenario ever existed. (Again; this isn't science; this is metaphysical speculation.)
4. 'Later in the paper, they disparaged the habit of applying Darwinian terms, like “selection values”, to prebiotic molecules. Such terms are “devoid of meaning” in a chemical context, they said. “The unfortunate usage of words with clear Darwinian connotations—such as adaptation, fitness landscape, and coevolution—in the realm of pre-Darwinian systems cannot be overemphasized.”
- Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't they do this themselves?
5. 'Three days after our report, Science Daily reported about this paper, based on a press release from Free University of Barcelona. Aside from getting the name of NASA wrong, they defined life as “self-sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution.”
- As the authors said themselves, you can't have 'Darwinian' evolution in non-living (reproducing) entities.
- Systems aren't people; they're not 'capable' of anything. They exhibit behavior (motion) this is not the same as being capable of these actions.
- There is no such thing as being capable of evolution. This is more reification.
6. 'Since subsequent Darwinian evolution has nothing necessarily to do with the origin of genetic information, the statement lends more support to a definition of life made by astrobiologist Benton Clark: “life reproduces, and life uses energy. These functions follow a set of instructions embedded within the organism.”
- Though this is one of the better definitions of 'life' I've seen in the e. literature, I need to point out that this is more reification. There is no such thing as life. If you replace 'life' with living organisms, the definition is not that bad.
- Since life doesn't exist, it can hardly reproduce. (I realize many people will think I'm being pedantic here, but I think it's important that people think in concrete terms and not in abstract terms... i.e. as much as possible. Abstractionism leads to sloppy thinking and is a source of almost endless error.