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Still More Evidence for Evolution
Uche writes: "Biologists at the University of California, San Diego have uncovered the first genetic evidence that explains how large-scale alterations to body plans were accomplished during the early evolution of animals."
Well, you have the good fortune to live in a country where the majority of people are sensible. Those of us who live in the US have to deal with states banning the teaching of evolution in public schools and other nonsense. I don't expect this to cause all the nuts to go away overnight, but hopefully this will speed their departure.
The article only refers to the repressor genes, (i.e. 6 legs instead of 12). But the creature still has to go through the slow process of developing legs itself in order for the gene to have some effect. It also doesn't explain how appendages like for instance wings on that fruit fly came along. They would have to start somewhere and I can't see how wings could be useful in any but their mature form. They wouldn't be needed to slow an insects fall(as they are small enoguh not to be hurt) and I can't see a pair of fans growing the muscle control and speed necessary to flight. What steered the evolution of the fruit flies to lead them to functioning wings?
I stole this Sig
and this one...
Doesn't it seem that these scientists are going out of their way to discredit creationists? While the real bible-toting creationists constantly rail about the godlessness of science and the inherent evil they see in the theory of evolution, I always thought that the scientific view would be to let the results of solid research speak for themselves. A thinking person would be able to decide for himself what to make of the whole debate. These two paragraphs really disturb me. They clearly desire not only to further the study of evolutionary processes, but also to denigrate those who hold onto the creationist point of view for dear life (no pun intended). This seems to be way too over the top for my liking. Is it necessary to drag down opposing viewpoints while making your own best case? It's almost as though they actually see the by-the-book creationists as a threat to their cherished beliefs. Certainly, creationists feel that way about what science has shown us since the days of Darwin. Is it necessary to stoop to the same tactics?
Thank you, O Lord, for creating these wonderful genes which allow macroevolution to take place.
./configure --with-booklungs --with-antennae --no-fishybits \
--legs=6 --enable-experimental-wing-thingies
make critter
./critter -buz
Just happened like a week or two ago.
The creationists mostly lied the whole time.
1) They misaplied the 2nd law of thermodynamics very poorly by treating a race of species as a closed system. A few chemist and myself (a physics major) were very upset at these outright lies.
2) They denied the existence of any transitional fossils, and basically said that scientists were arranging bones and fossils how they wanted to see them.
3) They made false accusations against radioactive dating that haven't applied sense the birth of the field.
4) And finally they had to make up for logical loop holes by stating that early man was far superior to present man, and that in the begining all species existed at once, including the dinosaurs.
5) In all of the debate, they only had one true argument, and it was a bad argument at that. Guess what that argument was? "Positive" mutations haven't been reproduced or observed in the laboratory, therefore they do not exist, therefore evolution is false. And this article is about just that.
Before the debate, I thought it would be interesting to see why someone would believe in creation. Afterwards I was a bit depressed. I had no idea how far a person would go to decieve themself and perpetuate a lie. I felf very sorry for the young teenagers that came with their church group. They were being raised by liars.
One of the debaters agrugment was based on the very results that this article brings up. I know if he saw this now, it would not change his opinion one bit. He has no reason, he creates what ever psuedo reason needed to calm the conflict between his arogant soul and his mind. I bet he doesn't even know that his words are lies.
Any way, I thought I would share this with you people. I don't know what can be learned from this, but anyway, good luck in this sad and ignorant world maya.
Many years in the future, a bunch of scientists manage to contact God.
"God," they go on to say, "we no longer need you. Anything you can do, we can do. We know now how everything works."
"Is that so?" God responds. "Well, in that case, how about a contest? You create a man, and I'll create a man and we'll see which turns out better."
"Agreed," the scientists repond.
"But," God continues, "you'll have to do it like I did and create a man from the dirt."
"Not a problem," the scientists chortle, knowing enough to be able to resequence basic elements into complex structures like DNA. So, in unison, the scientists get out their beakers, bend down, and scoop up some dirt.
"Whoa, whoa, whoa," God says. "You get your own dirt."
My point? Evolution is a non issue. The real debate is in the origin of the framework by which everything evolves. Scientists playing with DNA can make pretty much anything happen. But they still can't create matter with a thought.
- JoeShmoe
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-- I wonder which will go down in history as the bigger failure: the War on Drugs or the War on Filesharing
Unfortunately, while the scientists presuppose the existence of matter in your argument, you presuppose the existence of a God that can create that matter. No one wins this argument, like any other of this sort.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
I think you're missing the point. This sort of thing isn't really taking a stand on the issue you're talking about, although we all tend to jump right to that anyway. Like you said, it can't be proven (or at least, we have absolutely no conception as to how to prove it right now) but what they are finding is the mechanism by which these things happen.
Before you discount the importance of this in the face of "God/No God", think of this: where would we be if Newton hadn't told us that, yes, the universe does have rules. Pasteur told us that, yes, there is something tangible (not just "sin") that causes disease. It might not directly be addressing your fundamental question, but it is an important thing to answer for both sides of the debate, as well as anyone in the middle or way out in left field. If you're looking to understand God or the Universe or something else entirely, discoveries like these help to realign your perceptions about how the world works in very jarring and enlightening ways. You don't have to go around believing you got the plague because you were a bad person, even though you thought you did everything right. You don't have to believe that there was a storm because you were destined to wind up at the bottom of the ocean for that affair you had. You can believe these things if you want to, but you gain the freedom and knowledge to make a more informed decision than our ancestors were able to make.
That, in my opinion, is the ultimate form of progress.
This does not really impact the fundamental question that you're addressing at all, nor does it take away from the beauty of the world around us. Indeed, I think things like this only serve to enrich both, and I find it sad that most people use these sorts of findings just to deconstruct the world for science or God.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
... so that we can give our kids the needed tools to spot, analyze, and tear apart ALL intellectual fraud and pseudoscience.
:-)
Along those same lines, I would expect to teach:
o) geocentricism, "the moon landings hoax/nasa big lie", "mars face", etc. in astronomy
o) flat earth in geography
o) "free energy", "100mpg carburetor" in physics
o) "breast enlargement pills","penis enlargement pills" in sex ed
o) all the current all-natural/herbal/psychic/magical/religious "cures" in the "health food"/"alternative medicine"/"complimentary medicine" industry.
etc etc etc.
Most of the effort in current teaching methods seems to be emphasis on teaching existing theories, and little to no effort is given on how to dissect and examine "alternative" claims for validity.
In all of the debate, they only had one true argument, and it was a bad argument at that. Guess what that argument was? "Positive" mutations haven't been reproduced or observed in the laboratory, therefore they do not exist, therefore evolution is false. And this article is about just that.
What about antibiotic resistant bacteria? A relatively quick case of evolution in action. Obviously not a positive mutation from our viewpoint - but a positive one from the organism's viewpoint.
[Insert pithy quote here]
Found an article that nicely describes antibiotic resistance and evolution:
From the FDA Web site The Rise of Antibiotic Resistant Infections:
The increased prevalence of antibiotic resistance is an outcome of evolution. Any population of organisms, bacteria included, naturally includes variants with unusual traits--in this case, the ability to withstand an antibiotic's attack on a microbe. When a person takes an antibiotic, the drug kills the defenseless bacteria, leaving behind--or "selecting," in biological terms--those that can resist it. These renegade bacteria then multiply, increasing their numbers a millionfold in a day, becoming the predominant microorganism.
[Insert pithy quote here]
First, the thing to keep in mind is sucess is not being better at anything, success is passing on your genes. If you manage to pass on your genes, you're done. For all intents and purposes, you can drop dead at that point, your job is done. Now it's up to your offspring to procreate. As long as they manage that, the "species" is OK. Just keep poppin' em out faster than they drop dead or get eaten.
/. with some guy about the eyeball, I don't want to have it again.
Second, nobody said you need to grow a fully formed stomach when there was none before. I've already has this conversation on
Stop thinking stomach, and start thinking proto-organs, or even single cells that exist symbiotically within another organism. Ameobas don't have stomachs, they have, I dunno, specialised cell groupings that secrete a 'digestive' chemical that extracts nutrients from any external piece of whatever that happens to float by. This is not a "chicken/egg" problem, so stop coming at it from that angle. As for those 999,999 generations of nonworking "stomachs": that took a whole 2 or 3 days of debugging in a pond somewhere to get the right one, way back 600 million yrs ago. After that it was just code tweaking.
What is it with people and evolution, that they can't imagine some slimy chemical mud that has "intent" - in so far as it gravitates toward another chemical gradient (food) - being alive?
Imagine Q or Rod Serling standing next to a small puddle explaining this to you OK? Here we have a pool of chemical x that naturally moves towards chemical y. In a few moments, this chemical soup will undergo a common reaction involving common chemicals. It will become "alive". It will contain a few simple organic compounds that, given some quiet time to themselves, will intermingle and maybe even begin to replicate - the ablity to harvest nearby chemical compounds and assemble them in a *near* mirror image. Hell some of those compunds can be from other "proto-organisms" and we already have predator and prey evolving. Neat huh?
Asking how stomachs and eyeballs formed while imagining them as real functioning eyeballs and assholes is like asking how you get a fully formed modern man equipped with a cell-phone -- from a club-swinging neanderthal. You don't. Because the neanderthal never picked up a club with the express purpose of building a cell-phone. If he did, he would have quickly found that he was without the proper environment to create one, let alone NEED one.
So too, did early life not set out to outfit itself with a stomach, but instead went for the more practical "I just found a new way to eat my food by actively enveloping it instead of passively absorbing it from my environment -- COOL"
what follows sounds like a linux bash but i cant be bothered to clean it up, take what you want. I'm getting tired....
And your comp sci analogy doesnt work either, as building the Linux kernel that way is akin in biological complexity to building a chamaeleon or something from scratch. Try creating a kernel that can "eat", "defend" and "replicate"(sounds like windoze). Your Linux/chaemaleon is wasting time trying to be 10 different species/server tasks. Whereas a flatworm just does what it needs to divide and move on. Maybe you should write the comp sci equiv of a flatworm (haha windoze again), then maybe your flatworm kernel will be able to withstand random mutations?
My friends and I have been batting this one around, maybe you can help. It concerns how one gets from a primordial soup full of replicators (see 'The Selfish Gene', by Richard Dawkins) to something like a cell, way before anything like a regulator gene.
.5%, you go through each of the 62 characters / genes in an agent, roll the dice, and if it comes up .5% or less, you mutate that character.
Every environment can be thought of as presenting a utility function to the organisms that inhabit that environment. Dawkins gives an example of the following utility function:
Try to see if a population of organisms can "discover" the line of poetry "This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper." You'll note that there are 29 possible choices for each letter (26 letters + commas + periods + spaces). And in the above string, there are a total of 62 characters. So, to present the power of evolutionary theory, Dawkins imagines a population of agents randomly initialized to 62 characters. One of these might be:
"jkdzcn43asdf lkjasdfhaokjshfla ksdhfoiuykjahs, asdasd. sdfsdf."
you can imagine that each agent reproduces unequally based upon how well it does given the utility function -- in this case, the utility function returns an integer from 0 to 62, where 0 indicates no letters match and 62 represents a perfect match for the entire sentence. Each generation is exposed to mutation in the Dawkins example, though one could easily add crossover (which implies sexual reproduction) and inversion. The code is roughly:
1) initialize X agents in a population to random strings of length 62
2) write a function where each agent reproduces unequally based upon how well it optimizes the utility function given above. This choice matters, but not a lot. For our purposes, imagine that every organism below some threshold X has a 10% chance per time period of dying outright. And every organism above this threshold has a 10% chance of replicating.
3) After step 2 (which represents one tick on the clock), expose each organism to genetic operators. Mutation is simple: pick a % chance Y (where Y is small; if it is too large, you lose information too quickly) for each character in an agent (or gene if you prefer) to mutate to a random character. Thus, if Y is equal to
4) repeat steps 2 and 3 until you see equilibration of your population.
After a bit, it should be obvious to you that most of your agents will approach the correct sentence, whatever their starting values. Further, not all of the organisms in a population will ever be at the "right" outcome, given mutation in step 3.
So what does this tell us? Simple math helps out. To optimize the utility function above is simple, and we know this because we can compute the number of steps it would take to optimize it. Couple of points:
1) the function Dawkins uses (outlined above) is separable. No character / gene depends upon any other character / gene to determine the utility of its expression. This is huge. Think about it until you get a smile on your face. For real organisms, this is NOT the case (i.e., genes are non-separable). This is why evaluating the results of the genome project is ugly. If we had, for example, one gene acting alone to determine intelligence, it would be easy to detect / modify. Sadly, multiple genes acting in concert determine intelligence, and modifying one gene in the set changes the value for the entire set.
2) The number of steps needed to optimize the above function is 29 * 62 = 1798, which is an extraordinarily TINY search space.
3) If the characters / genes were non-separable, as they are in real organisms, things are quite different. Worst case is completely non-separable -- i.e., every character depends upon the value of every other character for evaluation under the utility function. In this case, you have 29^62 (where the '^' represents the exponent function). Obviously, this is a freaking HUGE number. Even low levels of non-separability (e.g., pairs of genes that depend upon each other to produce a trait) generate huge search spaces.
The fraud of Dawkins is thus simple. He proposes a set of operators that
define his theory of evolution -- unequal reproduction, crossover, mutation,
and inversion, and illustrates their efficacy (i.e., the "success" of the
theory) on a simple toy problem. The ugliness, however, is that solving
separable problems, which is the class of utility functions Dawkins uses
to "test" his theory, is trivial. Everything / anything works well on them,
and there is no real way for any given theory to fail on this class of
utility functions. The other, more interesting class, which has the
property of being an analog to REAL ORGANISMS WITH REAL GENES is when the
utility functions are non-separable, and the theory / set of operators
Dawkins proposes has NO success searching the spaces induced by this type of
utility function.
It is as if I set up a craps game, you come to play, and the rules are, I
win all double sixes and you win everything else. You commence to roll
double sixes until I have all the money in the world. I assert that the
dice are not loaded.
The dice for complex life are loaded somehow, or we don't understand the
mechanisms of genetics. The existence of these regulator genes simply begs
the question.
None of this, of course, displaces evolution as the best fit for the
available evidence.
Karl
The second derivative of the space-luck curve is infinite at my nexus, at least on the pong axis.
So explain Psychology,
I see your point. God MUST have created us, because of Psychology!
you conscious (if you have one),
You either mean consciousness (self-awareness), which other animals have been shown to have; or conscience, (awareness of right vs. wrong), which is part of abstract reasoning which does indeed make humans unique. I'll give you that, even though some researchers believe otherwise. But your argument wasn't that humans were unique, was it?
human compassion
Define compassion. Some humans have it, some don't. Will humans ever be able to live more peacefully than, say, deer? I doubt it, but one can only hope.
why we can talk,
Hmm. This is one of the arguments used to bolster evolutionary theory.
why we have a great capability to learn and a drive to achieve...
Because it increased our chances of survival in ancient times?
But you say, oh apes can talk and can learn, and have compassion. And I say, you are correct, so can my dog. But neither has made any great advancements in scientific research lately
You mean like the research you are currently discounting out of hand?
and my dog likes to go pee on my fence on regular basis.
Um, my arguments end here.
-bp
bp
I'd find Creationists a bit more convincing if they didn't have to resort to blatant misinformation in their arguments again and again. Half-truths and distortions do nothing more than convince me that some of these Creationists don't even believe their own propaganda, since they can't stick to the facts.
The whole argument is stupid, anyhow. It's based on a mistaken belief that one must cling to a questionable interpretation of the Bible as a matter of faith. Has anyone noticed that only Creationists tie Evolution, Geology, and Atheism together? Those who research Evolution do not insist that one must be an atheist if one believes that evolution rather than recent creation is a better explanation for the development of life on Earth. Those who teach and research modern geology do not insist that one must be an atheist if one believes that geologic processes rather than recent creation is a better explanation for the current geology of Earth.
However, since Creationists fallaciously tie acceptance of modern geology and evolutionary theory to disbelief that God created the Earth, and therefore disbelief in God (i.e., atheism), it has become a matter of faith to oppose evolutionary theory and modern geology as a false, atheistic (and thus, probably diabolic) doctrine by any and all means. If you don't believe me, go read articles and web sites by Creationists that are targetted toward Christians, as opposed to the general public.
To my mind, it is all very pointless because there is no contradiction between evolution and God; who are they to say how God created the universe and life? How can they know that evolution and geological processes are not just more tools in God's toolbox? They can't know, and they who presume to know how God created the universe or to put limits on the methods God used in creation are both small-minded and arrogant beyond belief!
To my mind, the power and grandeur of God is elevated, and not diminished by evolution and geology. To achieve His unknown goals, He started out at least 15 billion years ago with the Big Bang, and designed the entire process of star formation, planet formation, geological processes, evolution, etc! That's a lot bigger than POOF! The Earth was wished into existance a mere 6000-8000 years ago, complete with fake fossils and fake geology.
I wonder if Creationists are afraid of the power and knowledge of the God who created evolution and the Big Bang; I wonder if they want to cut Him down to a size they can comprehend?
---dragoness
Interesting commentary, and I must say that I happen to believe that a "He spoke and it came into existence" does sound a heckuva lot like a "Big Bang".
However, the fact remains that many adherents to the Atheistic Faith (to say that, conclusively, there is no God takes just as much faith as the converse) seek to throw up Big Bang and Evolutionary arguments as proof of the non-existence of God.
I'm also of the opinion that adhering to the tenet that we are descended from Great Apes goes a long way towards reducing people's willingness to believe in the superiority of homo sapiens. I believe that God created us in His image (and the Bible says nothing of intermediary steps in the process) and so, to claim that there was an "open beta test" for hominids is fairly sacreligious, as it calls into question both God's intent and His competency as a Creator.
I'm a big fan of Don Behe's "irreducible complexity" theory (see Darwin's Black Book, ISBN: 0684834936), as it goes a long way towards highlighting the biochemical obstacles to macro-evolution).
Then again, you can always take the Douglass Adams tack: Creation itself is proof of a Divine Creator and since conclusive proof would obviate the need for Faith, Poof! He vanished in a puff of logic.
Man, I'm sorry he's (errrm, Adams, not God) dead. Would have been nice to see the 6th book in his 5-part trilogy completed before his death (instead of the old Tolkien-Unfinished-Works-style book that we'll be getting...)
I wish I had a kryptonite cross, because then you could keep Dracula and Superman away.
I'm not quite sure that's true. For example, there are observations, which I would say are "facts". For example: "This table is brown". Of course, you could get very philosophical and start discussing what it means to be brown, and so forth, but at that point I think you're nitpicking.
Actually, there are some legitimate nitpicks here. Hanson (1958) and Kuhn (1962) argued that empirical observations are 'theory-laden' and that scientists see the world through paradigmatic world views, respectively. Which is to say that one's theory influences what one observes or interprets his or her observations. These philosophers were not just skeptics -- they were influenced by the gestalt and 'new look' psychological theories of visual perception.
Some of the best evidence for the subjectivity of even empirical observations comes from cases where seemingly sober scientists 'saw' things that their theories told them were there but which actually do not exist. Some quotes:
"During the seventeenth century, when their research was guided by one or another effluvium theory, electricians repeatedly saw chaff particles revound from, or fall off, the electrified bodies that had attracted them. At least that is what seventeenth-century observers said they saw, and we have no more reason to doubt their reports of perception than our own." (p. 117, Kuhn, T. S. (1996). The structure of scientific revolutions. (3rd Ed.) Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.)
"In 1903 Rene Blondlot claimed to have discovered a new kind of ray, instances of which were recorded and investigated by a large number of eminent French scientists. Outside France interest in N-rays waned when it was reported by the American physicist R. W. Wood that during a visit to Blondlot's laboratory he surreptitiously removed from the apparatus an essential prism. Despite the secret sabotage of his equipment, Blondlot still reported seeing the effects of the N-rays." (p. 120 of Bird, A. (2000). Thomas Kuhn. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.)
"There have been cases in the history of science in which skilled scientists of the highest repute have 'seen' or 'verified', through observation and experiment, the prediction of some hypothesis, even though this prediction subsequently turned out not to correspond to reality and could not be reproduced by other observers. For example, Sir William Herschel (1738-1822), discoverer of the planet Uranus, the father of John Herschel and the most famous astronomer of the eighteenth century, was able with the powerful telescopes he manufactured to resolve into individual stars several nebulae that had previously appeared to be milky luminous patches in the sky. In the mid 1780s, he conjectured that all nebulae were composed of individual stars so that none were made of a luminous fluid. In 1790 he did observe a nebula that he was forced to interpret as a central star surrounded by a cloud of luminous fluid. In the interim period, however, Herschel claimed to resolve into individual stars both the Orion and Andromeda nebulae. In fact, though, Orion is a gaseous cloud containing a continuous distribution of matter, not just individual stars, while Andromeda is a galaxy of stars." (p. 10 of Cushing, J. T. (1997). Philosophical concepts in physics: The historical relation between philosophy and scientific theories. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.)
Gould's "Mismeasure of Man" contains similar anecdotes.
> Isn't it funny how that bible states that the earth is round? and this was written in the bible when the earth was still considered to be flat. Isn't that interesting? Think about it... Now, how on earth could that get into the bible? And it wasnt by pure chance, unlike the theory of evolution which depends puerly on chance.
There are a few possible answers to this. If I felt contrary, I could say that the "Earth=round" was inserted into the Bible after the fact. Maybe it was a lucky guess. Perhaps it really was divine inspiration. The point is that it's not compelling evidence that it's divine inspiration. Oh, and evolution doesn't rely solely on chance. That's an extreme oversimplification, usually only used when one is trying to "straw-man" the theory.
> People are so gullable these days. Because some scientist somehere says something, everyone believes it, without question.
No argument here, although I'd extend it to anyone with a real or perceived claim to authority or expertise.
> How can you predict what happend some 12 billion years ago? The weather is bearly accurate to more than one day, and yet evolutionists claim they know what was in the earths atmosphere billions of years ago.
You have a skewed idea of the definition of "predict" if you think one needs to predict the past. The reason the weather long ago is better known than the weather tomorrow is that the long ago has already happened. Scientists can tell what the Earth's climate was like long ago by seeing the evidence of its effects. When meteorologists predict the weather, they're merely taking what they have and extrapolating educated guesses.
> When Charles Darwin came up with the theory of Evolution, not only did the world not believe it, but neither did he. As i see it, the theory of evolution was made up to create a substitute belief to creation.
Whether he believed in it or not is irrelevant to whether it's consistent with the evidence. And, as I see it, it was put forward as a theory to explain biological diversity in the Galapagos Islands.
> People dont want to believe that there is a being somwhere in the heavens that is superior to them, a being that created them and the universe. This being is able to create the universe, and all that is in it, from giant starts, to microscopic life in six days.
Based on the fact that 95% of the world believes in said higher power, I'd say that people do want to believe in a higher power.
> People dont understand how this is possible, and so they create a theory, which allows them to deceive themselves into thinking that they are the superior being. They dont want to have to submit to the one and only true God, they want to do their own thing, which is evil.
Apologies, but this is just nonsense. Firstly, nobody who follows the theory of the origin of the species thinks they they are the controlling factor in that origin, so your claims they they're thinking they are the superior being is incorrect. Second, "the one and only true God" is not science, it's religion, so it can't be applied to the theory of origins in any meaningful way.
> I'm not providing much scientific evidence here for creation, but, any critical person, should be able to see that the theory of evolution is only a THEORY.
You seem to imply that because it's a theory, that it's necessarily wrong. The theory of relativity is also considered a theory, but it has stood up to much experimentation. "Theory" means "not yet proven" but should not be extrapolated to mean incorrect. It's more appropriate to say that theories are incomplete.
> How can we, who dont even understand life, who cant create life in a controlled enviroment, claim that life came about by chance?
There are two points here. First, nobody on Earth can explain why gravitation works. Nobody knows the reason why massive bodies attract one another. To say, however, that this means we can't discuss gravitation in a meaningful way is just silly. We discuss gravity by examining its effects on our universe. We discuss evolution the same way.
Second, I don't personally know anybody who claims that life "came about by chance", and this is the classic straw man argument about evolutionary theory. All this statement demonstrates is that you haven't actually read or studied the theory, because your statement demonstrates gross misunderstanding of the mechanisms of evolution. I won't go into the gory details unless you wish me to do so, but suffice it to say you're badly misinterpreting evolutionary theory, and it ruins your argument.
> With all of our intelligence, we have not been able to create life in a lab, and this is with inteligent input. There was no intelligent input in the theory of evolution. Just chance.
Refer to my statements above about incomplete understanding, and about the "evolution=chance" argument. I will add here that not being able to create life in a lab has no bearing to this discussion, because it assumes that because we haven't done it yet, we never will, and because we don't understand it now, we never can. A mere one hundred years ago, nobody could build a heavier-than-air flying machine, or a computer, or a television, or any of a thousand other things. We learn. It's what we do best.
Virg
Maybe God created a World that looks like the result of billions of years of evolution.
Or maybe God created a world that is the result of billions of years of evolution. I'm not particularly religious, but it has always amazed me that so many people apparently believe that a very old Earth/Universe and biological evolution somehow preclude the existence of a higher power. The last time I checked, biology (and the natural sciences in general) was in the business of answering the "how" questions. It makes no attempts to answer the "who" or "why" questions.
Certainly, if a person believes in an all-powerful God, then said person must (by definition) believe that said God would be capable of creating life by employing evolutionary processes. If you were an engineer charged with populating a planet, would you design a species, wipe the drawing board clean, and start from scratch to design another species that is 99% similar to the one you just got done with? I know I wouldn't, and I'm just a lowly code monkey.
I'm an apathetic agnostic, but as far as I can tell, this whole "evolution versus creation" debate is the biggest non-issue in recent history since, by and large, they are the same thing. Oh, I'm aware that there are problems with evolution if you are one of these Biblical literalists who believe that every last word of the Bible is 100% true and that the Universe is 6,000 years old. But I've always been under the impression that these folks constitute a small (but vocal) minority of American evangelicals. Certainly, the Christians that I talk to consider these folks to be a bit of an embarassment.
The "rift" between science and religion (to the extent that there is one) is largely a creation of militant fundamentalists and militant atheists taking pot-shots at each other from opposite sides of a barbed-wire fence. To the rest of us, there is a large middle ground that has more than enough room to hold us comfortably.
We're going down, in a spiral to the ground
Intelligent conversation and discussion can only occur when you throw away all your stereotypes before stepping up to the table. Some
philosopher talked about this once, but basically, you are supposed to try your best to approach the situation without making any
assumption about the person/people with whom are you discussing, how it will benefit you, etc.
I believe quite the opposite. Because of science and its ability to give us solid facts, it's wrong to give all views equal credence at the starting line in a scientific discussion. Of course the idea appeals to us because most of us believe in democracy, equality, etc, and in a purely philosophical question like ideas of right & wrong, aesthetics, etc, you'd be in the right. Science, however, is by no means democratic, by which I mean that any idea MUST match known facts. Discussions on evolution are thus NOT philosophical in nature, because they seek to project facts to formulate an idea about the past. The theory being contested is that animals, including ourselves, developed over time through natural selection. Whether this is true, for a scientist, can only be demonstrated and proven with facts. Creationists OTOH choose to use science when it suits them and discard it when it contravenes their religious beliefs.
This leads me to another argument of yours, that creationists are in the majority. That may be so, but the facts do not rely upon consensus, only on veracity through experimentation. Also, the silly pretense that creationism isn't a religious belief is belied by the fact that it relies on a sort of de novo, deus ex machina placement of life on the planet by a higher power, an inherently religious phenomenon. One could argue in response as Richard Dawkins does, that the idea of the development of man over millenia from more basic organisms is infinitely more awe-inspiring than being plopped here by the almighty about 6000 years ago.
Creationism is to some worthy of ridicule, and understandably so. It's a relic of a time when humans looked up at the sky and thought the stars spoke to them, when we didn't understand why the ground shook or the sun turned dark in mid-day. While I don't agree with bashing people's religious beliefs, when they want to use those beliefs to create public policy, or mandate the passing of those beliefs on in schools, in science classes no less, it's only my duty as a scientist and someone true to simple fact to oppose such stupidity, here and anywhere else I see it.
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Bias Disclosure: I am a Christian and Biblical Creationist.
The article opener claims that this finding can explain how sea creatures could evolve into insects. That isn't what it explains at all.
So they change a key gene or two and the shrimp lose some legs. SO WHAT? As useful as this may prove to be for gene therapy and all, this does not explain away the Creationists' argument!
To my knowledge, no evolutionist claims that insects were the first land animals. An animal that can survive in a marine environment just cannot migrate to land, no matter how many legs it has.
To explain away the Creationists' argument, not only does a candidate mechanism such as this have to be found, but there must be a detailed explanation of which changes occurred, to which species, in what order, and how the resulting creatures could survive in either land or water.
The evolutionists still have a lot of work to do. If a shrimp loses legs and gills, and absorbs oxygen through the skin, can it still survive in water long enough to go ashore?
Whenever I get in a discussion with evolutionist types, they often respond with an attitude of over-skepticism. Stuff like, "I won't even consider this belief system without absolute proof!" Are those same people now criticizing Creationists for not bowing before this non-proof?
Now as for myself, I have very little knowledge of Biology (just high school level), but I'm no dummy. I know all about the black and white moths, and the drug-resistant bacteria, and the Galapagos finches, and all that. No one I know, Creationists included, doubts that variations occur over time. But I for one reserve the right to doubt an idea like evolution, that if true would completely invalidate my world-view, without more evidence than we currently have.
NOTE: I did not say that I have no doubts about Creationism. I have quite a few, not the least of which is the "Starlight & Time" problem. But that's another topic.
My point in summary: Lots of you Slashdot types love the stance of universal skepticism, but everybody believes something they can't prove. Evolution may be yours, or atheism, or astrology, but Creationism is mine.
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Just my $.02 that's likely to get lost in the /. noise:
First, just so everyone knows where I'm comming from, I was raised a creationist. And in the past I've been a devote creationist that would try to "debate" with others to promote my point of view -- thinking that if you believed in evolution you were an atheist. However, as I have matured (a little bit, not much), I can say that my own beliefs have evolved.
I don't understand anymore this animosity that Christians and Evolutionist have between each other -- this fierce compitition. When I read the Genesis account (first few chapters) and get all the imagery out of my head that I was raised with (the presuppositions so to speak) I see a very general story that is not intended to be a science text book. I think details are purposely omitted because the point of the book is not for us to know exactly how everything came into being, but to understand that a supernatural being created it and the relationship that we have to this being.
Christians that are threatened by evolution don't have a true concept of the omnipotence of an all powerfull God (or Yahweh, Jehovah, Cosmic Spirit, or whatever name you attach). Think about it, if you had unlimited processing power and data, you could drop thousands of pieces of paper from a plane at 10K feet and know exactly where each paper would land. Moreover, now assume that you can control all of the variables (wind speed/direction, ordering of papers, turbulance, etc) -- then you would be able to cause each of these papers to land where you wish them to land. Now, back up to the Big Band (or whatever started the Universe). Assuming that all energy and matter that exists in the universe today was involved in the Big Bang (to my knowlege science has not found any exceptions to the law of conservation of energy and matter). Now lets assume there's an all powerful being that causes this Bang and sets up all the variables to Its liking. This being, in theory, could then foreordain the entire universe as we know it today in a single instance at the time of the Big Bang. To the Creationist, all of this appears to be the work of God, Its creation. However, to the Evolutionist, all of this appears to be the work of chance (just a question for thought, but is anything really random? Or do we just label events as random when they become too computationally complex?). Add to this that God is outside of time (exists in all of time at all instances at once) and you realize that there's more the the Genesis account than meets the eye! I guess what I'm saying is that I don't think that science and the Bible are mutually exclusive.
Now, on the flip side, I don't understand why some scientists are so bent on disproving the Bible and slamming Christians -- almost a fear of Judeo-Christian beliefs (well...maybe I do, there have been and still are some pretty crummy people that call themselves Christans). The Bible was written by over 40 authors from 3 continents and from various backgrounds (kings, prophets, common folk, political prisioners, etc) and it was written over a span of 1500 years! What a wealth of knowlege and wisdom it contains. Some claim that it contains a meta-narrative of a God trying to reconcile a relationship with mankind. If nothing else it contains history and 1500 years of culture and living experiance. How you choose to read it is where faith comes into the picture. It's just a shame that there are all of these debates about the Bible and Science, but very few people actually read the Bible (including Christians) even though it is classic literature and a great read once you understand the context/culture/timeline in which it was written.
\forall code \in C, \frac{\Delta readability(code)}{\Delta t} < 0
"So we will stop being wolves and start being domestic dogs."
... probably taller"
We are already domesticated. A key indicator of domestication is neotany--retaining the characteristics of youth. The flatter human face with the bulging skull makes us look much more like babies, and also giver room for a larger brain. The human jaw is shrinking, and canines becoming much blunter than in ape. (Generally--mine look like a baboons, which is a real pain if I bite my lip)
"Intelligence creates material success, which is a prize factor for breeding."
I'm going to have to disagree with you here. People who are wealthier tend to have fewer children, later, than people who aren't. True, this is a cultural trend, and will probably reverse itself. Otherwise we'll end up in Kornbluth's world of the _Marching Morons_.
"Human beings will continue to become
I could be wrong, but I don't think people are evolving to become taller. I believe that all the increases in height (fairly recent, and much to rapid to be evolutionary) are due to better diet. This is an environmental change allowing a fuller expression of genetic potential for height, not a genetic evolutionary change tht will be passed down to our descendents.
Wow.
;-P
All of this creationism hot air. But on Slashdot? Isn't this a technodweeb's paradise? A science geek's home?
Whenever a debate on evolution springs up on the net, does some appointed sentinel of the far right ring the clarion call of Christian Fundamentalism and call forth a vanguard of babbling halfwits running to the scene of the crime to proclaim The Truth?
I'm really sorry. Mod me troll, mod me flamebait. I know it is no good to throw a pail of water on the idea of commentary on a website devoted to comments. But this is Slashdot, isn't it? We believe in science and tech here, no?
Look, some guidelines for non-creationists, as I see it, for whatever it is worth:
Don't talk to them.
PLEASE! Don't take the bait! They only relate babbling pits of tomfoolery to your mind. You can not reason with them! Every pound of logical heft you hurl in their direction will be replied with immediately by 10 pounds of so much clangityclank of the brain that you will only be left dumbfounded by the psychology of it all. The point is to not engage them. Because engaging them will not allow their ideas to die the ignoble historical death their ideas deserve. The dustbin of history must not be disturbed, as it is already disturbed enough as it is. The more you try to persuade them to reason, the more you breathe life into a sinking ship. Your pleas for reason will only be replied with with flim flam.
They mean well, and that is their problem. But they can't get their brains past a bad idea. They must justify it, by any means possible. So the harder and harder you blow against them, the harder they hold their cloak of belief. Stop blowing, let time and solitude relax their grips on their insanity.
I hear some primitive tribespeople fear having their pictures taken because they think the camera steals a bit of their soul. So if they don't see a camera, they don't get excited. And when their backwards beliefs are not challenged, they live peaceful, harmless lives. In other words, don't show creationists cameras. Get it?
After all, Al Qaeda is nothing more than a Muslim Fundamentalist backlash against the "decadent West." New ideas are dangerous. Progress is disturbing to some people. Some do not accept new, and better ideas. They instead cling to old, crazy ones and get very defensive about it. They frame it in absolutes, that evolution goes against God, for example. Evolution does not go against God. Science is not allied against religion. Any forward-thinking religious person can incorporate evolution into their world-view without evolution challenging their beliefs. It will, in fact, enrich their understanding of the world, deepen the mystery of life by making more clear the complexity of it all, and therefore, eventually, reaffirm their belief in God. But all of this assumes an open mind. Unfortunately, there are a lot of closed ones.
Don't show creationists cameras!
Leave them to their strange ways. Left in peaceful backwards isolation, they will eventually go the way of the Dodo, no irony intended. Right now their numbers are too large and the voraciousness of their passion too disturbing in the USA to be considered harmless. They are quite harmful, to the education and intelligence of all of our children. Give it time, many years, and they will fade away into history. Someday, decades from now, creationism will sound almost cute and harmless, like we laugh at the Spanish Inquisition in Monty Python skits.
Until then, they are just a massive pain in the ass. Please, ignore them! Here on Slashdot, and in the rest of your life. Your intentions are good in trying to challenge them in honest debate, but please, just walk away from them. There is no winning, just lots of hot air for you to inhale.
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