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The Eye: Evolution versus Creationism
Sox2 writes "SciScoop is running a story about researchers in Germany who claim to have solved the "mystery" surrounding the evolution of the mamalian eye. The work, published in Science, goes some way to answering the issues raised in the "intelligent design" debate that has become the mainstay of creationist thinking."
The article is essentially saying 'we found the smoking gun'; that light-sensitive cells originated within the brain, and migrated slowly outwards to form eyes. Ergo, the famous Darwin reasoning 'any form of eye is an evolutionary advantage, and therefore given even a truly-awful eye you would expect it to develop over time into something useful' is at least plausible. Evolution at work within a large-enough population.
I remember reading in 'PCW' back when I was at school (20 years or so ago
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
Intelligent design? That's soo 1700s! ...
Actually, I'm a proponent of the theory.. And while I'm not an expert on the official "intelligent design" theory, I think it's completely compatible with evolution.. (eg. evolution is the way the design is achieved).
Online Starcraft RPG? At
Dietary fiber is like asynchronous IO-- Non-blocking!
I picked up a copy of Wired the other day. (First time in years.) It had an interesting cover story on the people and strategies behind "intelligent design".
The actual difference is that creationists take their personal beliefs as axiomatic and work from there, whereas scientists use observables to winnow out which beliefs are true and which aren't.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Agreed. Tolerance goes both ways people. Religious right folk have just learned to ignore reasoned arguments after having too much anti-religious vitriol spewed at them. So correct or not, angry rants are counterproductive.
Besides that, people are too quick to paint all religious folk with the same brush. My wife is an Anglican, and believes that "Christian science" and literalism are ideological suicide. Faith is faith - whether a Christian-concept God exists or not, there will be no proof, no evidence, real-world implication that it exists... and an abrupt "creation" doesn't seem subtle enough for that. The universe shuold be taken at face value, and religion applied to wonder about what exists outside of it.
Both sides in this Evolution v Creationism flamefest have it totally wrong.
The creationists are wrong because they misunderstand their own religion. The key factor in religion is faith. It is not necessary to prove that God exists. In fact, that's missing the entire point. A true religious person will take the existence of God on faith, and will neither need nor desire to prove His existence.
The evolutionists are wrong because there is no reason to try to prove that creationists are wrong. Doing all of this work just to show that somebody's imaginary friend didn't create life seems a bit strange.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
Except it has been compiled very selectively. There are many apocryphal books of gospel that have been 'decreed' heresy without much explanation as to why. and these books give a very different view of the proto-christian community in Palestine at the time of Jesus.
Having said that, the argument you make is a little misleading in other ways. The creationism part of the bible is in the Old Testament which is the "Jewish" part of the bible and was written before the ministry of Jesus.
I don't see the difficulty in conceiving evolution as merely a tool of your creator
How does that challenge anyone's faith?
Some evangelical christians (not uncommon in the US) believe that the bible is the literal word of god. Therefore to say that life evolved over millions of years is in direct conflict with phrases in the bible that say god created the earth in 7 days.
Basically, there is really no arguing with such people. They believe the bible is the word of god because it says that it is the word of god. When faced with (il-)logic like that, you obviously can't use logic to change their opinions.
Hope this explains the beliefs of some Americans.
-Spyky
Sure, but you get a different common ancestor depending on what gene cluster you pick, which is to be expected.
It is an easy thing to misunderstand genetics and think that, say, Mitochondrial Eve could have been Eve of the Bible, but thinking so would betray a lack of understanding about what these mathematical common ancestors mean.
Mathematically you can back-calculate that since you have two parents, and 4 grandparents and so on, that pretty soon you'd outnumber the past population, meaning everyone is inter-related. Picking different genes you can find out how long ago the common ancestor for that gene was, but it does not tell you that the common ancestor was the only human at that time.
You and your siblings share common ancestry through your parents, but there are plenty of the rest of us around.
The big fuss is that it still remains true that as a set of cognitive beliefs about the existence of God in any recognizable sense continuous with the great systems of the past, religious doctrines constitute a speculative hypothesis of an extremely low order of probability. Ergo, some of us don't believe in god because it's highly unlikely that he (she? it?) exists. Some would go so far as to say god _doesn't_ exist, but absence of proof is not proof of absence. As long as you (religionists) are willing to leave me alone, and not try to validate your beliefs via specious reasoning (ie, creation "science"), then there's no fuss. It's when people try forcing their beliefs on me and tell me that their way is the one true way that I start to get a little indignant.
Nathan's blog
The late 19th century was a time of great philosophical and theological upheaval. This period was also one of the critical defining moments in natural science as a discipline. Geologists and biologists began to observe the earth more effectively and with greater rigor. Scientists began to assert the validity of their observational and experimental procedures as being concrete and repeatable. They began to see beyond Aquinas and the Scholastic tradition, and to make new conjectures about the chronology and functional characteristics of our planet.
What do these new scientific discoveries have to do with religion on a theoretical level? Who were some of the key players, and what did they do (if anything) to stimulate the 'conflict'? What did Christians think at the time? What did scientists think?
Gregor Mendel, Nicholas Copernicus, Galileo Galilei, and Francis Bacon are names synonymous with the scientific revolution and the enlightenment. These men are famous scientists, astronomers, and thinkers who are in large part responsible for propagating the modern intellectual culture. In addition to being men of such intellectual merit, however, one more similarity exists between them that is often overlooked. Gregor Mendel not only discovered the essential principles of genotype and phenotype, but was also a Catholic monk. His experiments were conducted in the bean patch of his Augustinian monastery. Copernicus was the first to accurately portray a heliocentric universe, but he also held the office of canon in his cathedral chapter. Galileo, although often troubled in his work by reactionary church polity, made a well thought-out attempt to reconcile his new scientific discoveries with the Christian faith. Francis Bacon made sweeping pronouncements about how science should be carried out, and played a pivotal role in formulating our modern scientific culture. In his writings, Bacon addressed the need for God, and His role in the life of an intellectual community (Moore 1986, p. 322). The Baconian Compromise has influenced many generations of thinkers and scientists, and this understanding is still widely held today by many in form if not in name.
Christianity is often viewed as being opposed to science. In order to determine whether or not the conflict exists in fact, it is important to go beyond cultural ideas and stereotypes. It is necessary to look at the historical records of both the scientific community and the historical account of Christianity, the Bible.
Owen Chadwick, a notable church historian, found it to be important to discern the difference "between science when it was against religion and the scientists when they were against religion" (Lindberg 1986, pg.7). The general consensus among historians is that two texts have set the present tone for the hostility between the scientific community and the Christian faith.
John William Draper, in 1874, wrote a History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science. Draper, the son of a Methodist minister, was highly successful with this book, in which he applied the traditional forms of Christianity to a new doctrine of science and metaphysics. In the preface, he pointedly stated that, "The history of science is not a mere record of isolated discoveries; it is a narrative of the conflict of two contending powers, the expansive force of the human intellect on one side, and the compression arising from traditionary faith and human interests on the other" (Draper 1874, p. vi). He frequently makes allusions to the battle of good, as human intellect, versus evil, as faith. He refers to the previous period in Europe as "intellectual night... passing away... into daybreak". These themes are reminiscent of passages in both the Old and New Testaments, such as 2 Samuel 22:29 "the Lord turns my darkness into light", Psalms 112:4 "even in darkness light dawns", John 1:5 "the light shines in darkness", and 2 Corinthians 6:14 "What fellowship can light have with darkness?". Donald Fleming, Draper's biographer, descr
"If you think you have things under control, you're not going fast enough." --Mario Andretti
1 Corinthians Chapter 2
When I came to you, brothers, I did not come with eloquence or superior wisdom as I proclaimed to you the testimony about God. For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. I came to you in weakness and fear, and with much trembling. My message and my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words, but with a demonstration of the Spirit's power, so that your faith might not rest on men's wisdom, but on God's power.
We do, however, speak a message of wisdom among the mature, but not the wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age, who are coming to nothing. No, we speak of God's secret wisdom, a wisdom that has been hidden and that God destined for our glory before time began. None of the rulers of this age understood it, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. However, as it is written:
"No eye has seen,
no ear has heard,
no mind has conceived
what God has prepared for those who love him" -- but God has revealed it to us by his Spirit.
The Spirit searches all things, even the deep things of God. For who among men knows the thoughts of a man except the man's spirit within him? In the same way no one knows the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God. We have not received the spirit of the world but the Spirit who is from God, that we may understand what God has freely given us. This is what we speak, not in words taught us by human wisdom but in words taught by the Spirit, expressing spiritual truths in spiritual words. The man without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually discerned. The spiritual man makes judgments about all things, but he himself is not subject to any man's judgment:
"For who has known the mind of the Lord that he may instruct him?" But we have the mind of Christ.
Each must make up his own mind who Christ is, and what He's done for them. After that, we'll all sit around the throne in Heaven and talk with God like neighbors around the '67 Mustang --"So, THAT'S how you supercharged the intake." -- "So, THAT'S how you micro-mechanically sequenced the RNA to replicate the DNA so that the photo-sensitive proteins in the eye would transfer from one generation to the next."This sig is a test. If this had been an actual sig, you would be reading something quite a bit wittier than this now.
1. Bible: God is the Creator of all things. (Genesis 1)
Evolution: Natural chance processes can account for the existence of all things.
2. Bible: World created in six days. (Genesis 1) These must be literal days; see #23.
Evolution: World evolved over the aeons.
3. Bible: Creation is completed (Genesis 2:3)
Evolution: Creative processes continuing.
4. Bible: Oceans before land. (Genesis 1:2)
Evolution: Land before oceans.
5. Bible: First life on land. (Genesis 1:11)
Evolution: Life began in the oceans.
6. Bible: First life was land plants. (Genesis 1:11)
Evolution: Marine organisms evolved first.
7. Bible: Earth before sun and stars. (Genesis 1:14-19)
Evolution: Sun and stars before earth.
8. Bible: Fruit trees before fishes. (Genesis 1:11,20,21)
Evolution: All fishes before fruit trees.
9. Bible: All stars made on the fourth day. (Genesis 1:16)
Evolution: Stars evolved at various times.
10. Bible: Birds and fishes created on the fifth day. (Genesis 1:20,21)
Evolution: Fishes evolved over hundreds of millions of years before birds appeared.
11. Bible: Birds before insects. (Genesis 1:20-31; Leviticus 11)
Evolution: Insects before birds.
12. Bible: Whales before reptiles. (Genesis 1:20-31)
Evolution: Reptiles before whales.
13. Bible: Birds before reptiles. (Genesis 1:20-31)
Evolution: Reptiles before birds.
14. Bible: Man before rain. (Genesis 2:5)
Evolution: Rain before man.
15. Bible: Man before woman. (Genesis 2:21-22)
Evolution: Woman before man. (by genetics).
16. Bible: Light before the sun. (Genesis 1:3-19)
Evolution: Sun before any light (on earth).
17. Bible: Plants before the sun. (Genesis 1:11-19)
Evolution: Sun before any plants.
18. Bible: Abundance and variety of marine life appeared all at once. (Genesis 1:20-21)
Evolution: Marine life gradually developed from a primitive organic blob.
19. Bible: Man's body created from the dust of the earth. (Genesis 2:7)
Evolution: Man evolved from monkeys.
20. Bible: Man exercised dominion over all organisms. (Genesis 1:28)
Evolution: Most organisms extinct before man evolved.
21. Bible: Man originally a vegetarian. (Genesis 1:29)
Evolution: Man originally a meat-eater.
22. Bible: Fixed and distinct kinds (Genesis 1:11,12,21,24,25; 1 Corinthians 15:38-39), although speciation does occur.
Evolution: Life forms in a continual state of flux.
23. Bible: Man's sin is the cause of death. (Romans 5:12)
Evolution: Struggle and death existent log before the evolution of man.
Didn't Noah's sons include his daughters-in-law in the Arc? If he had daughters, did they bring their husbands?
Where did that genetic diversity go?
Noah had three sons. Noah, his wife, and his sons and thier wives, were the only humans beings who entered the ark. The Bible records a male genetic bottleneck 4200 years ago -- i.e. all the males in the ark were descendants of Noah.
The following quote is from a NY times article about an interesting genetic study from a few years ago. It speaks about how the male lineage began to descend, referring quaintly to the Y-chromosome originator of the lineage as 'Adam' (could more correctly be 'Noah'). Note how it talks about three sub-lineages:This is shown clearly by this figure(NY Times subscription may be required).
In other words, the Y-Chromosome ancestor was:
- A single male chromosomal ancestor
- With three descendant male lineages
- The third male lineage had seven sub-lineages
- These seven sub-lineages from the third lineage populate all the world except the Middle East and Africa.
The Bible says the same thing:
- We are all descended from a single male ancestor - Noah
- Noah had three male descendants
- One of the three sons, Japeth, had seven sons
- The Japeth lineage (his seven sons and their descendants) populated all the world except the Middle East and Africa.
The pit viper was already known so that wasn't hard. However, about 5 years after I read Dawkin's speculation, some oceanographers brought up some blind shrimp that had heat sensitive patches on their topside. The shrimp apparently use the ability to "see" heat to find smokers which provide the energy basis of the food chain at the bottom of the ocean.
Anyone know of a creature that uses a camera obscura for an eye?
My favorite creationist example of something that looks like it had to have been "by design" is the explosive defense of the bombardier beetle. It takes 3 simultaneous ingredients to make it work, and having all their production and injection systems arise simultaneously by chance seems to be highly unlikely.
Meanwhile, I think it's pretty obvious to anyone who bothers to think about it that any eye (or photosensitive cell) is better than no eye, and that better eyes are more likely to survive. In other words, every feature we possess was advantageous in its lesser forms also.
That isn't true. There was a time when theists believed that the sun revolved around the earth and they were dissuaded of this view by overwhelming evidence to the contrary. It probably took a long time for the evidence to become so compelling that no thinking person could dispute it. So it is with evolution. Don't give up.
Man: Lord, how long is a million years to you?
God: Only a minute.
Man: Lord, how much is a million dollars to you?
God: Only a penny.
Man: Lord, can I have a million dollars?
God: In a minute.
It is naive of us to believe that Genesis is to be interpreted as literal fact, in much the same way that it is naive of us to believe that anything so transcribed, translated, and retranslated by fallible men is the infallible word of God.
Further, it is naive to assume that someone several thousand years ago could have understood evolution if God had described it to him/her. Jesus spoke in parables as a way of boiling complex issues down to a simple metaphorical truth. It seems perfectly consistent to assume that Genesis is similar: God taking a very complicated subject (for the time period) and distilling it to its very essence so that primitive minds could understand.
Creation versus evolution is not inherently a conflict except for those weak in faith. A faith that cannot be challenged---that cannot accept the possibility that it might have gotten some details wrong---is not true faith. True faith must grow, change, sometimes even die entirely to be reborn anew in a stronger, more vibrant form. That's what the Bible says, but some people forget this and angrily defend the exact words of the Bible as God's absolute truth, thus refusing to allow their faith to be tested. A faith untested cannot be strong, for it is in being tested that our faith becomes deeper than a superficial understanding of God.
God did not come to this Earth thousands of years ago never to return. He did not abandon us. He works in our lives every day, whether we're scientists or random church-goers. Does it not, therefore, stand to reason that evolution might be a new truth that God has revealed to us? Not all new truths are heresy. Earth is not flat. The Sun does not revolve around Earth. Women and men are equal. God created the world in billions of years. No difference.
That said, I could be wrong, but so could everyone else---and that is the point.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Your first point, that one cannot be "born" Christian is, technically, true. After all, a newborn can't meaningfully be anything in terms of philosophy or religion. However, if one has been raised Christian for one's entire life, "lifelong" Christian is a perfectly good description of it. In Catholicism, at least, you are expected to make a conscious choice after reaching adulthood (or some reasonable facsimile thereof) to continue being Catholic, but that doesn't mean you weren't Catholic growing up. This is similar in the other Christian faiths with which I am familiar, and I assume in most, if not all, of them.
I don't mean to give offense, but had your second point not been surrounded by what seems to be reasoned text, I would call troll. Your statement that Christianity and Evolution are fundamentally incompatible is simply ridiculous. You are equating "Christianity" with "literal belief in the Bible as written," which is, quite plainly, false. There are Christian faiths, of course, which do subscribe to a strict-to-the-word belief in the Bible, but most do not.
The belief that man is fundamentally flawed and therefore can (and does) succumb to temptation does not rest upon the (patently false - after all, who did Cain marry?) strictest interpretation of the Bible. It rests solely upon the observation that man is flawed, and does sin. To reconcile this with a perfect creator (the "problem of evil") is a non-trivial philosophical task, but that's a different issue, and doesn't conflict with evolution whatsoever.
At its root, Christianity is simply the belief that there is a God who created everything (one way or another), and that His son, Jesus, died to redeem man of his sins after explaining how people should behave.
Everything else is added trappings and expansions (and, as a Catholic, let me tell you that various flavors add a lot of trappings and expansions). Some of those, such as strict intepretation of the Bible, do conflict directly with macro evolution. Others, such as the Assumption, don't.
In any event, in no way is Christianity fundamentally opposed to macro evolution. Strict interpretation is, but not Christianity.
Reality has a conservative bias: it conserves mass, energy, momentum...
Here's the old discussion, with links to the three papers mentioned below:
[Please don't view anything in this post as trying to show you the 'error of your ways' or any such nonsense. I'm just trying to show that even theologians are irritated by the same things.]
What you're talking about is a well-known heresy: in theological circles it's called the God of the Gaps Fallacy. Priests, ministers, rabbis, imams and pretty much everyone else with formal theological training despises the God of the Gaps, with solid theological reasoning. If we use God to fill in the gaps in human understanding, then to advance in human knowledge is to diminish God's majesty--and that is simply not allowed to occur. That means we have only two choices: we can either not advance human knowledge and let God live in those gaps, or else we can not put God in those gaps in the first place.
Of those two choices, we can't do the first: not just because it's the natural state of knowledge to progress, but because it's heretical to think that God should fit into the world where we want Him to fit. It turns God into a false idol, something we create for our own convenience, and that's major heresy.
Unfortunately, for all the sincere and educated theologians out there, there's an Al Sharpton or another self-appointed minister without theological training who says "no, no! Science is the work of the Devil!"
[sighs] God, you know I love you. But some of your followers are cause to make me doubt your existence, to say nothing of your wisdom.
Which says:The article authors are simply trying to resolve a difficulty with another theory which states Tasmanians were isolated for 12000 years. If all humans descended from one man who lived about 3500 years ago, how could Tasmanians - who supposedly were isolated 12000 years - be descended from him too? So they conjecture that interbreeding with Europeans in the last 200 years has modified Tasmanians genetic data to look like the rest of the world's. This lets their conclusions not dispute the 12000 year isolation theory.
You said: "It doesn't mean that all genes originate from the same individual, ".
It does.
See quote below from an article called "The Human Family Tree: 10 Adams and 18 Eves" in the NY Times (free subscription required)
The human genome is turning out to be a rich new archive for historians and prehistorians
Population geneticists believe that the ancestral human population was very small -- a mere 2,000 breeding individuals
But the family tree based on human mitochondrial DNA does not trace back to the thousand women in this ancestral population.
The tree is rooted in a single individual, the mitochondrial Eve, because all the other lineages fell extinct.
The same is true of the Y chromosome tree, a consequence of the fact that in each generation some men will have no children, or only daughters,
This ancestral human population lived somewhere in Africa, geneticists believe, and started to split up some time after 144,000 years ago, give or take 10,000 years, the inferred time at which both the mitochondrial and Y chromosome trees make their first branches.
The tree is rooted in a single Y chromosomal Adam, and has 10 principal branches, Dr. Cavalli-Sforza reports.
Non-falsifiability means that it's useless from a scientific point of view.
I used to hold this view very near and dear until I read a little about Bayesian statistics (the same stuff that makes your spam filter work). The problem is (and this is also brought up in the book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintainence) is that there is an infinite number of potentially valid hypothesis if one simply operates from this falsifiability standpoint, and therefore objective scientific progress is impossible.
Instead, all reason (scientific or religious) involves a prior subjective probability, a "hunch" if you will, against whichs one checks the validity of a experiment. In other words, scientists ask P(u|x), that is, what is probability of the truth "u" given the observation "x" which one can easily show depends strongly on your initial prior belief in what "u" should be. As you observe more "x", you become better able to judge the probability of "u" being true. Fundamentalists have a prior probability distribution of 1 and therefore even in the Bayesian approach will never reject "u". They are simply a limiting case of the scientific method, and most science falls in somewhere in the spectrum on this sliding scale, but science is by no means objective.
I would also like to point out that scripture is mum on the mechanics of how God worked, and continues to work.
One important thing for both Christians and others to understand about "creationism" is that the "common sense" or "literalistic" interpretation many/most modern day conservative evangelicals/fundamentalists apply to the creation narrative is a newcomer to Christianity.
Prior to the early 1900s, many conservative theologians (most notably, B.B. Warfield) had no problem with evolution.
See "Fit Bodies, Fat Minds" by Os Guiness or "The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind" by Mark Noll for examinations of when and why American Christians took a turn in this direction.
I think you are unfortunately correct about the thinking of some people, particularly most modern skeptics (like you, it appears) and "fundamentalists."
The more traditional (and superior, imo) view acknowledges God as the creator of the universe as well as the author of the scriptures. The scriptures are the ultimate authority, but they don't speak exhaustively, and our understanding of what they say isn't perfect. Christians should listen to scientists (who "read" God's "other book") when considering topics about which scientists may legitimately speak.
P.S. You probably mean "theist," not "deist."
This is quite right. The difference is simple: the photoreceptors all have to feed into a neural network for processing, and then the outputs of that neural network are connected by axons (wires, basically) that run down into the optical nerve to transmit the information from the brain.
The cephalopod retina does this the way you'd expect: photoreceptors up front receiving the light, neural network behind it, axonal connections behind that.
The eye in all chordate (spinal-cord bearing, i.e. mammals, birds, reptiles) organisms is built the other way around: the photoreceptors are at the back of the retina, with the neural net in front of them and the axonal network in front of that. Before light reaches your photoreceptors, it has to pass through several layers of cells. Your "blind spot" is the area right on top of the optical nerve where the axons go back through the whole layered structure, taking up the room that might otherwise be used for photoreceptors. Take a look at the photo on the wikipedia page about the retina. In that cross-section of the retina, the light comes in from the left.
From an engineering point of view, it's totally retarted. But evolved organisms have this kind of kludge all the time, because once you have a structure locked in, it's really hard to get away from it by mutation. You could concieve of a series of organisms with a few mutations at a time where by the end the structure of the retina was reversed and they had better eyes. BUT, the organisms in the middle of the series would probably be blind so you'd never get to the end.
Another fantastic example is the fact that our lungs are above and in front of our stomach, but our nose is above our mouth. This requires our air-path and food-path to cross each other, opening the possibility of choking to death. How stupid is that?
But the number and combination of mutations required to restructure the entire neck and jaw so that your trachea could be behind your throat
Particularly things like body-plan order that happen early in development tend to get really locked in by evolution. This is why we can see so many "bad engineering decisions" in biological organisms.
I stole this sig from someone cleverer than me.
There's a lot of Creationist bashing going on here. But maybe we can view the two sides in a different light. Perhaps we can view the two sides as being locked in a co-evolutionary system.
Darwin posited his theory which was generally rejected by the religious. Later Creationists 'evolved' their ideas in a more 'scientific' direction by raising problems with the theory. They sometimes raise legitimate questions which deserve an answer.
Evolutionists then had to work harder to 'evolve' their theory to answer the Creationist's critique.
Now we have the ID (Intelligent Design) school raising objections to the theory. The evolution of the eye has been a longstanding question (as in "how could natural selection account for the development of the eye"). And now the evolution side has come up with perhaps a more complete answer.
Really, I'm not sure why there is so much antagonism toward Creationists (at least the ones that try to posit well-reasoned, thought out questions - yes, they may be in the minority). In some sense aren't the Creationists helping the Evolutionists to hone their theory? If everyone agreed with the theory, and nobody questioned it, how would the theory develop and improve?
Maybe instead of a "how dare you question evolution!" sort of an attitude, the evolutionists should thank thoughtful Creationists (or even just doubters of evolution who are not Creationists) for playing some part in the development of the theory.