Slashdot Mirror
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
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Just some food for thought.
What is this "Creationism" program? And will it run on Linux?
BTW, I am not sure that evolution is incompatible with the idea of "intelligent design" as long as one is careful about defining intelligent design....
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It's that creationism arguments will evolve as well
While the evolution of the eye has never been that much of a theoretical puzzle--there have been lots of plausible theories--this discovery moves us a little away from the realm of theory and into the realm of historical detail.
What effect will it have on the creation/evolution debate? The same effect that all the other mounds of evidence in favor of evolution have so far had on the debate.
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And don't you think that the same can be said the other way around as well? The point is that humans are opinionated creatures. Anyone telling someone 'You beliefs are wrong' is going to be met with a cold stare. Even the scientific community is no exception. Tell someone 'Einstein was wrong' and you would probably get beaten badly even before you say a word about evidence. This is how things are. It takes a lot of courage to accept something contrary to you belief. Think about it.
Here's the mirror
Religion and science don't mix very well in my opinion. Beneath the typical flaming contests there lies a fundamental difference. I kind of look at it as the "outside-in" thinkers vs the "inside-out" thinkers. Religion is based on the Fact that God exists and that he/she is behind the way things happen. Non-religious thinkers (or those religious who keep religion out of their science) start with a meta science philosophy and build up their scientific knowledge based on observation, deduction and extrapolation. The meta science typically tells them not to predict things that can't be proven. The two philosophies are incompatible at the meta level. No matter how loud you scream, we will not settle the argument at the discussion level.
DISCLAIMER: this is just my $0.02
Nobody has a problem with intelligent design as a philosophy or religion.
The problem is that's it's faith, i.e. you just believe it with no basis in provable (or testable) fact. It's the same as believing the Bible, just a little more rational because there's nothing that proves it's not true.
The problem is when people try to masquerade it as science. "I don't understand how this can happen, ergo 'God' did it." is not science, it's faith.
I graduated from a Catholic High School a few year back and one of the Priests said it best,
'Who are we to say how God created or didn't create the World. God could've could've chosen to create the creatures in 7 days or God could've chosen to create the creatures in the world with evolution'
I really don't see the big fuss, whether God created the world one way or another, it doesn't affect the core basis of my beliefs. This has little to do with morality and my day to day life.
It does turn out to be a lively debate that can go on for hours between two opinionated people. And my guess is that those two people usually care more about looking smarter than the other, than they care about their beliefs and Morality.
Brandon Petersen
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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".
I thought Dawkins basically pulverised the "intelligent design" thesis in his "Climbing mount improbable". Maybe I didn't read it right.
The article is an interesting report about a new biological discovery which provides evidence of the evolution of the eye. However, creationism is not mentioned at all; looks to me as if the submitter is trying to start an argument for no reason.
-Stephen
Creationists often point to the human eye as something so perfect that only a divine being could have planned it. However, the human eye is far from perfect. The detached retina model is a serious flaw which can oftentimes lead to total vision loss. Other animals, such as squid, have a significantly more advanced model completely impervious to these problems.
If the human eye is evidence of creationism then it can only be evidence of a flawed creator.
Go look at what has happened to education in public schools in the past 10 years and get back to me.
I have nothing against organized religion.
I do have something against organized religion preaching in direct contradiction to accepted science, while providing no evidence to the contrary, other then "its in this book, so you cant teach the obvious, accepted science."
no
This is the typical 'reasoning' that creationists use to justify their attacks on evolution. The problems comes in places like Delaware, where people actually believe this line of reasoning. It comes from a terrible lack of real science education in this country. You don't see this sort of nonsense in Europe or the more develped countries in Asia, where they have better education systems.
'Loose' is when your pants are three sizes too big. 'Lose' is when you misuse 'loose'.
But there are those who insist that the Earth was created "with age" 6000 years ago, and that fossils, etc, are a diversionary trap for the unfaithful. The same arguments can be made about this work, or anything done with molecular fingerprinting. (or any other technique, for that matter.)
Wearing the right blinders, it will be obvious that your road is the only correct one, and that all else is distractions. There are those who will make the same assertion against scientists, claiming that there are "science blinders" that restrict their vision. While I won't disagree that there are scientists who wear blinders, I would argue that the basic premise of science is to remove the blinders. The facts will guide you, and a scientist is always supposed to be ready to modify or discard a theory if disproven by facts.
I spent a little time with google and "neocon" (and a few other terms, some independent of "neocon") this weekend, and came to an interesting conclusion: Neocon philosophy is *never* wrong. Any mistakes happen because the philosophy was not put into practice vigorously enough. In other words, they compromised too much, and if they'd been sufficiently uncompromising they would have succeeded. Rather a disturbing world view, IMHO. Of course, this is the result of an hour or so on the Web, and my view can be modified by facts.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
It's what made me go from agnostic to atheist. We just use the concept of God whenever we reach personal limits. Time and time again we use God to explain things and we're proven wrong. Me becoming an atheist came after seeing one too many arguments in favor of the God is a coping mecanism rather than truth.
Ahh... natural selection at work...
The creationism website has been slashdotted.
That's all the proof *I* needed! Go Darwin!
MC Hawkins says:
Fuck The Creationists
Trash Talk
Ah yeah, here we go again!
Damn! This is some funky shit that I be laying down on your ass.
This one goes out to all my homey's working in the field of
evolutionary science.
Check it!
Verse 1
Fuck the damn creationists, those bunch of dumb-ass bitches,
every time I think of them my trigger finger itches.
They want to have their bullshit, taught in public class,
Stephen J. Gould should put his foot right up their ass.
Noah and his ark, Adam and his Eve,
straight up fairy stories even children don't believe.
I'm not saying there's no god, that's not for me to say,
all I'm saying is the Earth was not made in a day.
Chorus
Fuck, fuck, fuck,
fuck the Creationists.
Trash Talk
Break it down.
Ah damn, this is a funky jam!
I'm about ready to kick this bitch back in.
Check it.
Verse 2
Fuck the damn creationists I say it with authority,
because kicking their punk asses be me paramount priority.
Them wack-ass bitches say, "evolution's just a theory",
they best step off, them brainless fools, I'll give them cause to fear me.
The cosmos is expanding every second, every day,
but their minds are shrinking as they close their eyes and pray.
They call their bullshit science like the word could give them cred,
if them bitches be scientists then cap me in the head.
Chorus
Trash Talk
Bass!
Bring that shit in!
Ah yeah, that's right, fuck them all motherfuckers.
Fucking punk ass creationists trying to set scientific thought back 400 years.
Fuck that!
If them superstitious motherfuckers want to have that kind of party,
I'm going to put my dick in the mashed potatoes.
Fucking creationists.
Fuck them.
Creationists are a lot like zombies. Slow, but powerful and numerous. And they all want to eat our brains.
Concrete and conclusive are different words. Scientists have long surmised (since Darwin himself, in fact) that the eye evolved from a very crude light-dark sensor by way of various kinds of primitive eye. Now we actually see common chemistry between an existing primitive light-dark sensor and the vertebrate eye. This provides concrete (ie real) evidence to support this view. It is not conclusive (the same chemistry could conceivably have evolved independently), but they don't say it is.
This article supports what the Bible says about all humans descending from Noah in Asia (i.e. Noah's ark settled in Armenia after a global flood about 4200 years ago.)
It's kind of like science proving that God is not real. The effort is meant to fail because science cannot deal with God because it isn't designed to. On the other side, religion cannot, for the most part, deal with science because religion rests on a premise of faith which is by definition, unprovable belief.
When both sides are not even supposed to have common ground on which to argue, the creationist/evolutionist debate is a non-sequitur on both sides.
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.
They just do not believe we evolved from a 1 cell orginism in a pool of muck. To a monkey to a human. The problem with both sides. There is ALOT of gaping wholes in everyones theories.
Just because we can't explain it doesn't mean god did it. Every natural phenomenon was once explained by saying "(a) god did it", we now have scientific explanations for most of those. There's no reason to resort to magical explanations just because we don't have the answer yet.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
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!
I'm sure someone will correct me if I'm wrong ... but I learnt somewhere that not only are octopus eyes as complex as human eyes they are actually better "designed" since they do not have blind spots. I've always thought that was as compelling argument as any against creationism. God may think you're the bees knees, but he gave the good eyes to the celaphopods...
the layman's guide to computer science
When I read the story, I didn't even think about the religious aspect. I'm a devout Christian and evolution is just another one of God's miracles to me. I don't see why Creationism and Evolution are not compatible. After all, God did create Adam from the Earth. God is the master of code-reuse! :-) We can physically be made of the same stuff as all of the other creatures and still be spiritually distinct.
But this isn't the point of the story, really; we've already seen evidence of links between our bodies and behaviors to other creatures. This story just shows that the rods and cones in our eyes developed from certain types of brain cells. It isn't a religious discussion.
You're thinking logically...stop it.
But what Creationists believe is that God did the 7 days and he rested bit...then the Adam and Eve bit (so we can get "original sin" in there right off the bat) and that the Earth is really only 10,000 years old.
If they wish to believe this, that is their choice. As is the choice of the people that say the Earth is flat, and that we didn't really go to the Moon. These people are totally and completely free to believe this, to talk about it and to argue about it. Free speech and all that. I bow to them. I respect them. They're standing up for what they believe and that's fine.
But when they start putting this non-sense in my sons school books, then we've got a problem. They argue that children should be getting both sides so they can choose which to believe. Well, this is about science, not beliefs.
Then the Creationists, if they succeed in gaining a foothold into school science books shouldn't have a problem with other Creation theories. Like the Hindu and Buddists views on creation. Right? They shouldn't have a problem with that...right? What about Native American folklore? They should throw that all in the science books also...so that the children can decide for themselves which is right. But no, sorry...it's only the Judeo/Christian creation their only interested in.
Pot...meet kettle.
"Leo Fender was in a 'state of grace' when he designed the Stratocaster." -- Paul Reed Smith
Personally, I love reading articles like this, but I always have the depressing thought that *nothing* researchers can do will change creationist thinking.
If someone were to create a time machine or "past viewer" so we could watch the entire history of the planet at any accelerated rate we wanted and trace the evolution of all life, it might change the mind of 10% of the True Believers. The rest would consider it to be a deceiving tool of Satan.
-- stream of did I lock the front door consciousness
I've heard this quite a bit. It always seems to me that this is a way to salvage creationism, so one can acknowledge the scientific evidence and still not have to concede that maybe they were mistaken in their belief...
So I'd like to ask; Now that the role of (insert favorite deity here) has been reduced to such an abstraction, what purpose does he/she/it serve in the process, other than maintaining compatibility with what you were taught to believe as a child? At what point does chemistry become divine influence?
I mean, if you believe in creation, that's fine. If you believe in evolution, that's also fine. What does this hybrid belief offer other than a weak compatibility between religion and science?
=Smidge=
But there are those who insist that the Earth was created "with age" 6000 years ago, and that fossils, etc, are a diversionary trap for the unfaithful.
Of course, this could be true. It could also be true that the universe was created last Thursday and that all appearances of age, including fossils memories, are simply manufactured. The problem with this view (Omphalism) is that it's unfalsifiable. There is no observable consequence to distinguish a universe that's actually old from one that simply has the appearance of age or even from a universe even older than our estimates that's been altered to look young for that matter. And even if we could somehow be sure that the universe was created with the appearance of age, then it simply doesn't tell us anything new. The supposition doesn't help us explain or predict any new observations.bzzt.
ID is a codeword for creationism. It claims there are aspects of biology which cannot be explained through evolution, thus requiring... "intelligent design"
This is different from theological schools that integrate god and evolution, of which you are presumably a proponent (as are most sane theologies).
Most arguments in ID nowdays center around the concept of "irreducibly complex" biological components.
Some examples.
The blood clotting cascade.
The human eye.
DNA replication.
Most of the time they argue this while blithely ignoring a myriad of simpler intermediate processes in nature (Darwin himself pointed out that if you look at snails alone you can see almost every form of eye from primitive light sensing cells up to a complex focusing lens like our own) as well as the fact that components that are mutually dependant now may have evolved so without having been so in the past (the blood clotting cascade in humans versus lobsters for example, evidence that simpler clotting mechanisms were refined, and the components becoming inextricably linked - like hummingbird beaks and deep-throated flowers).
In short, it is their usual lack of imagination combined with a poorly concealed agenda of creationism.
One amusing thing is how they try to explain these "irreducibly complex" mechanisms in a biological framework.
A primitive cell created by some being that had all these mechanisms they clcaim required design. The cell had templates for blood clotting, eyes...
This massive cell then, presumably, differentiated into the current lifeforms who lost all this extra information.
-- perl -e'print pack"H*","6e656d6f406d38792e6f7267"'
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.
Its not compatible. The problem for 'intelligent design' is that much of the design is very unintelligent. For example, the design of the mammalian eye is awful - the nerves are in the wrong place, meaning we have blind spots. (If design were intelligent, we would have eyes like octopuses, which are far better). The are plenty of other examples of extremely bad design. Evolution is not about what's good; it's what's better than the competition.
I recommend this site: http://vuletic.com/hume/cefec/ It has a bunch of commonly used creationist arguments and rebuttals to them.
Vivin Suresh Paliath
http://vivin.net
I like
Since the "God planned it all along" argument is non-falsifiable, those promoting it will never have reason to abandon it.
Non-falsifiability means that it's useless from a scientific point of view. A useful scientific theory must make predictions; if those predictions turn out to be wrong, then you discard the theory. You almost never know anything 100% certainly in science, but falsifiability lets you know 100% for certain when something is wrong. Lack of falsifiability means that it makes no predictions and is therefore useless. I can assume that it's true, or that it's false, but that doesn't change what I expect to happen in the world.
Intelligent design arguments are not necessarily non-falsifiable. They predict the existence of features which could not have evolved. The eye was one such feature, but this discovery tends to refute that. There are others, such as mitochondria, which are basically a challenge to evolutionary theory that says, "Show me how that could have evolved".
(Not to mention that God himself could, someday, speak from the sky, cause plagues of locusts, and generally prove his existence in the scientific sense. His reasons for not doing so remain obscure to me, but then, by definition they would.)
Personally, I believe that if there were an intelligent designer we wouldn't have to search so hard for evidence. An intelligent designer had many, many options; if we're not descended from ape-like species, then it was unnecessarily parsimonious of that designer to make us so extraordinarily similar, down the the levels of individual bones and individual nucleic acids. Those pieces of evidence that claim to falsify evolution are few and far between and it generally seems possible to find the refutations for them, given time either to piece out the genetics or the necessarily gap-ridden fossil record.
But that won't change the minds of anybody who believes a non-falsifiable theory in the first place. They don't place the same priority that I do on predictive powers of theories. They're more interested in the moral implications, and will disregard any theory that denies their morality, no matter how much closer it comes to "truth" in the scientific sense. It's just not something they care about.
It's not my cup of tea, and of course I'm upset when they try to force on me a version of truth that I can prove is wrong (using a version of "proof" that they don't accept but which has proven very useful for developing things like toaster ovens and rocket ships). Especially when that version of truth contradicts my moral beliefs. But without even a single point of overlap between us there appears to be no rational place to resolve that. It must be an article of faith. If you wish your faith to contradict perceived reaility, or to make no statements whatever about perceived reality, then I will certainly outcompete you in the building of toaster-ovens and rocket ships, but that may not matter.
It's all OK until:
- Someone else's religious beliefs get in the way of teaching my kids proper science.
- Someone else's beliefs mean my taxes are spent on quack treatments such as homeopathy and therapeutic touch instead of stuff that actually works.
- Someone else's beliefs prevent me from conceiving a child, or choosing not to conceive a child.
- Someone else's beliefs are used to determine funding for the scientific and medical research that may one day save my life.
- Someone else's beliefs are prominent in the election of the leader of the world's most powerful economic and military force.
At this point, someone else's beliefs very concretely become my concern, and I reserve my right to disagree with them and oppose them if necessary.
Sean Ellis
Follow OfQuack's antics on Twitter.
Of course, this could be true. It could also be true that the universe was created last Thursday
Oh, great! It had to be a Thursday! I never could quite get the hang of Thursdays.
Same people that thinks Bush has done a great job. Saved us from EvilDoers (does this sound like a bible term), made the economy strong and healthy, protected the environment, left no child behind .....
If you have faith it doen't matter what reality is out there, it's a closed-loop system.
Help fight continental drift.
Wrong. At least assuming you mean scientists and other intelligent individuals. The reasons that the average person believes what they believe are not relevant to this discussion.
As for scientists, their view on evolution is usually founded in the scientific method and falsifiability.
I don't think any scientist will tell you that the theory of evolution is complete or proven in every aspect - as with most facets of biology, it's complex, and the data we have is essentially a partial, but extensive, set of samples. The problem with Creationists is that they fail to separate articles of faith ('God is the ultimate creator of the world' - a statement that is not incompatible with falsifiable observations) and science ('the world is 5000 years old' - there is no evidence to support this and many other such claims).
Obviously, it's a complicated fray, and some of the Intelligent Design people make less outlandish claims, and instead try to attack the theory of evolution by finding exceptions or outliers. Unfortunately, they often selectively ignore important research and evidence, and have mostly been debunked (yes, I've read some of this stuff by these people out of curiousity to see how they presented their arguments, and I wasn't very impressed).
Most of the arguments, at a basic level, are elucidated quite well on the talk.origins FAQ. Strangely, the site doesn't read like religious mantra to me.
It seems like an aweful lot of people on here have a really low view of creationists. Many people are assuming that all Christian creationists believe that God created the world in 7 days, 10000 years ago. That's just as ignorant and uninformed as saying that all geeks are fat or all black Americans eat fried chicken. Almost all mainsteam Christian groups believe that the whole "7 days" thing is a metaphor. Only a small percentage of people take it to be literal.
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.
Now, repeat after me:
Yea, though I walk through the valley of Friday, I shall fear no Weekend, for a hot chick is with me; My Rod and My Staff, they comfort me, especially when rubbed the right way; Thou preparest a table on which I may lay down my chick in the presence of mine video camera; thou annointest my chick with water-soluble lube, yea, even as her cups overflow. Surely lewdness and merriment shall follow me all the days of my life, perhaps even unto next Thursday, when the World Will End, and I shall dwell in the house of lewdness for ever, and ever. Ah, man.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
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.
They are in some. And in most schools the faculty is too terrified of the fundies to teach evolution at all -- witness the fact that if you ask most high school students, they'll think evolution means "man descended from monkeys". And in fact they can't even tell you the difference between a monkey and an ape.
What bugs me is not that parents with religious conviction are trying to have a say in the education of their children -- I'm for that. What bugs me is that people who cannot define the word "allele" have the gall to spout their opinions on evolutionary biology and demand their arguments be treated as having equal weight with scientific conclusions. That would be like me going to a church and saying "you know, I've never really read Ezekial but we need to stop using it in scripture readings because I've heard it contradicts my field, comparitive linguistics."
I don't think that the simple fact that schools are too scared to teach the theory of evolution is what breaks our schools. But, it is part of a larger trend of religious conservatives fighting tooth and nail against intellectualism in general. And that is what's killing our schools.
All's true that is mistrusted
To paraphrase again...
"In the land of the X eyed, the X+1 eyed man is king."
I believe in most cultures it would be more like
"In the land of the X eyed, the X+1 eyed man is a freak".
Or perhaps
"In the land of the X eyed, the X+1 eyed man is king where x = 0"
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.
If X is the new Y, and Y is "X is the new Y", solve for X.
Had it ever occured to you that the reason cephalopods have better eyes is that Cthulhu created the earth?
or
"God exists" is a belief, not a fact.
No matter how much you believe it, it doesn't make it a fact.
You can't take the sky from me...
The scriptures are ambigious in many areas. It is not the place of a man to fill in the details with opinion. Did Judas hang himself, or did he jump over a cliff? Depends on which Gospel you consult. Did Christ point to the crowds or the Scribes in his famous "you brood of vipers" line? Depends on which Gospel you consult. What were Christ's last words? Considering that none of the Apostles were there, whatever is recorded in the Gospel is a secondhand telling. And even there, it depends on which Gospel you consult.
Ambiguity is just something you have to get used to folks. Fundimentalism, or even a strict interpretation of the scripture, isn't even supported by scripture.
"All scripture (is) given by inspiration of God, and (is) profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness." 2 Timothy, 3:16
You can't quote a single passage of the Bible, without considering what other passages might have to say.
Nowhere in the Bible does it state that the Universe started on any particular day. Nor does it state how man was created, save that God formed us from Dust. Exactly what is meant by that? Was it literally from dirt molecules? Or figuratively, say from a more lowely form of life? Are we reading what the ancient Hebrews understood, or merely the best translation into the written word that their language allowed.
I'm ranting, but I definetly agree with you on all points.
--Sean
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
you are not reading the bible metaphorically enough. When it speaks of God creating the archetypal Adam and Eve that is metaphor for the creation of baryons and leptons.
:)
Original sin is simply a metaphorical way to talk abou the primordial disparity between matter and anti-matter with which the universe has been stuck since early after its inception.
The Jesus story is a metaphorical reference to the time when electrons coupled with matter, and the universe became clear to light.
I think the bible is amazing
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.
> is assumes that everything that's important is observable.
Yes [and no]. If you assume there are hidden agents that affect everything that happens, you can't do any science at all. (Or religion either; see further below.)
But the issue isn't whether science can aspire to omniscience, but rather which is the better guide to reality: what we see, or what our ancestors told us.
[The "and no" is because we don't actually assume that everything important is observable, e.g. the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and all the immense challenges for science that follow from it. But I bracket this because I don't think it's what you meant.]
> Kind of a faith in itself (to see is to believe).
Certainly there's a philosophical problem with it, but we rely on it just to make it through the day. How do you know you're taking your morning leak in the john instead of wetting the bed? How do you know you're eating breakfast instead of jumping off a cliff?
Also, such an appeal to nihilism is pretty useless as a support for keeping creationism in the ring. How do you know the bible really exists, or if it does, how do you know it says what the letters on the page look like they say?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
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...
Ummm, I'm an atheist, but I live in the fundamentalist bible-belt of the world, so I think I can give you two pretty good reasons why biblical literalists cannot accept evolution:
1) The bible is the literal, breathed, inerrant Word of God. For this to be the case (so the argument goes), the stories of creation in Genesis cannot be mere alegory, they must be literally true. Otherwise, who's to say what else is not literally true. Yes, I realize that this is a weak argument.
The second, and IMHO, MUCH stronger argument is the following:
2) Fundamentalists believe in a literal heaven where you go to live after you die. That's not metaphorical. They also believe that non-believers literally go to a hell after they die, which is also not metaphorical. In fundamentalist Protestantism, the only thing that will get you into heaven is belief in Christ. That's it. End of story. But the fundamentalists have to explain WHY this is (in other words, if I live my life in a good way, why do I still go to hell if I'm not christian?). Here's why (again, so the argument goes):
- God is perfect. So perfect, in fact, that He must not allow imperfection in his sight. To avoid this, all those who are not perfect go to a place without God (Hell) and so will not be in His site.
- The fall introduced evil into the world. In so doing, God's creation (Mankind) was made evil. That's ALL of his creation, not just the original "evil doers" (that would be Adam and Eve). As the new testament says "All fall short of the glory of God." And "Man's best deeds are but dirty rags." So basically, since you are inherently imperfect (hence away from God, or "sinful" technically) there is nothing you could possibly do to earn your way to heaven. Woo hoo! We're all going to hell!
- But, what if God made a sacrifice to atone for the fall on behalf of all mankind? The argument is that Jesus did this. In so doing, whomever would accept that Christ did this for him would basically have their own sins atoned for by Christ Himself (who was also God), so that when that person stood before God in Heaven, God would see the atonement of Christ (himself) instead of that person's sins. Hence, heaven is possible, but only for believers.
There's protestant theology in a nutshell. Now, here's where creationism comes in (again, so the argument goes):
If there was no literal first man and woman, then there was no talking snake to tempt them into eating an apple. If that didn't happen, there was no literal fall (the fall had to be by CHOICE, protestants don't accept that God just made humans imperfect from the start). If there was no literal fall, then mankind is not in need of redemption. If there is no need for redemption, there is no need for Christ. This would basically invalidate protestant Christianity.
Usually this combined with the first argument about biblical literalism ensures that it will indeed be a cold day in Hell before protestants can reconcile their beliefs with mainstream science.
Just thought you'd like to know. Christians, feel free to correct me if any of the details are wrong.
The fucking sorry state of America is such that religious morons think that they can invade every aspect of society with "religion", including scientific thinking.
It is such a fucking sorry state that one must argue evolution *all over again*, because morons refuse hard evidence. We are back in the middle ages, when someone takes the Bible literally.
What a drawback. Would this be the beginning of the end for the great U.S., a nation that thrived on independent thinking and scientific investigations brought on by the great influx of immigrant brains post WW-II? I guess so...
What developed the West, what set it apart from the rest, was *science*, not religion.
In that respect, religious rednecks are very much like the fundamentalist muslims they fear and loathe so much.
You seem to have a misperception of scientists' motives. If there was concrete evidence of God creating the universe, that evidence would be used by scientists to better understand reality. You're confusing science with atheism. BTW, scientists have a tendency toward agnosticism, not atheism.
I find it frustrating that religious people (which by your post I suppose you are one, that or badly misinformed about science) think that because they base their worldview on faith, that everyone else does as well. Some of us are perfectly happy admitting that there are things which we do not yet know, and striving to find out in due time.
Your statement is also ironic, seeing that science is constantly challenged/attacked by the religious, who refuse to accept things because they are worried about implications for their beliefs.
To really consider the relation between the science and religion, there's some homework to do. Philosophically speaking, God can not be proved nor disproved. David Hume showed that all proofs of God beg the question of God's existence. That means they're circular proofs; they prove nothing. Similarly, when you're discussing a being/force which can by definition "do anything", it's child's play to refute any assertion based on faith; if someone says that God doesn't exist because of observation X, the retort is that God wants it that way, and is hiding.
If religious people want 100% of the population to believe in God, I have two suggestions: 1) Stop trying to assert that science is untrue on the basis of your personal beliefs. 2) Stop using your social identity as an excuse to do things which are clearly prohibited in your own code of conduct.
This still leaves the religious more "wiggle room" than I would like; but I think we can agree that we'd all get along better if we are considerate of each other's beliefs. And frankly, I have as much right to believe that physical reality has no cause but itself as others do to believe that physical reality must have a cause other than itself because nothing causes itself, therefore it's cause must be God, which has no cause because God has no cause but itself.
When Galileo concluded that the earth must go around the sun, it wasn't because he wanted to disprove God or destroy religion; it was because he observed reality. Galileo didn't attack the church; the church attacked Galileo. When Darwin published the Origin of the species, it wasn't his way of casting doubt on God or religion; it was his theory as to why animals are the way they are. Again, Darwin didn't attack the church, the church attacked Darwin.
What bothers me more than anything is that people who use faith to explain everything seem to have the least understanding of the nature of the spirit and the debate which they wish to participate in. Religion's value is in its charge to its followers to do the RIGHT thing. To help the weak and poor. To repay a wrong with a right. To love and forgive instead of hating and avenging. Religion also has speculative answers to questions which once were considered unanswerable. Now that some of those answers are proving to be *ahem* inexact, *certain* people are very upset. Instead of keeping their cool, they attack the messenger, and everyone who doesn't agree with them. The US is very backward, philosophically, in many places, and this is perpetuated by conservatives for political reasons. Liberals don't want to take your religion away people... we just want the same freedom you take for granted; to believe as we will and live as we choose. Evangelists have missed something here; that their right to swing their fist stops at my nose. You don't want schools teaching that God doesn't exist.. well guess what, they don't address that issue at all. We don't want *you* forcing us to live your lifestyle. You think you're "saving" people. But if atheists were to go around "saving" people from
"A witty saying proves nothing." ~Voltaire
"d'Oh!" ~Homer
Cristian Widnows has CreateProcess() but scientific Linux's processes always evolve from other processes with fork().
I agree that stating that God couldn't is utterly stupid, however the question is on whether evolution occured or not. That question is definitely within the domain of science and not religion.
These discussions reach absurd proportions, someone finds that the cells in a living fossil are very similar to those in a part of the human eye and suddenly it is possible to somehow evolve a complete human eye, lenses and all, just like that.
Yes, this is a valuable contribution, but claiming it shows how human vision evolved is about as absurd as claiming that tea cups show how beer containers evolved because they are similar in some ways.
It could also be pointed out that most parts of the really interesting parts of human vision aren't in the eyes themselves but in the brain.
It is like America is entering a new dark age.
How can America be competetive in Biological sciences (any science) if these groups succeed in destroying even Scientific Method in America.
ID == Creationism. This is backdooring religion into the Curriculum.
This is the divisive issue in America today. It is religious society vs secular society. It seems that Secular society is on the wane and religious is on the rise. Somewhere Osama is smiling because this is certainly the outcome he wants for the world.
I just read the whole thing and I find it highly disturbing. The article brings up many good points, probably the most important point is that the scientific community should not take creationists lightly, these people are dangerous. Not only do they have a desire to strengthen support for their believes through an education system and they are gaining ground, but they are doing it in an insidious manner that leaves a layman with perception that both sides are equal in their scientific background and both sides use rigorous analysis and peer review of their theories.
The main point is that ID generates a discourse where traditional creationists fail to do that. Discourse in itself is the danger. There should not be discourse on a pretence level field, there is no level field.
ID does not stand up to the scientific rigor, analysis and review. The point is that to win 'hearts and minds' of average population it does not have to. It just has to create polemic, hot air and nothing else.
I am tired of people telling me that I should have 'an open mind' for the possibility of the supernatural. I have an open mind. When you provide examples, collect data, create theory, test theory against data and provide statistically sound results that your theory supports the reality and when you publish your findings so that the rest of us can do the same thing on our own. Then I will accept your version of reality. Until then my mind is just that - open for a scientific process.
You can't handle the truth.
Really? Did you skip Deuteronomy?
21:18: If a man have a stubborn and rebellious son, which will not obey the voice of his father, or the voice of his mother, and that, when they have chastened him, will not hearken unto them:
21:19: Then shall his father and his mother lay hold on him, and bring him out unto the elders of his city, and unto the gate of his place;
21:20: And they shall say unto the elders of his city, This our son is stubborn and rebellious, he will not obey our voice; he is a glutton, and a drunkard.
21:21: And all the men of his city shall stone him with stones, that he die: so shalt thou put evil away from among you; and all Israel shall hear, and fear.
Or, in logo-illustrated form for the biblical-language-challenged.
R: That voice. Where have I heard that voice before? B: In about 365 other episodes. But I don't know who it is either.
I was listening to NPR this morning and they were doing a spot on the Constitution candidate running for president. His speech to a 12th grade school class was borderline embarrassing. He was pushing for evolution to be banned from schools and said, "These people want you to believe that your great grand-daddy was a small drop of goop, your grand daddy was a fish and your daddy was a chimp."
Creationism is simple thinking for complex problems. A lot of people are frightened by the idea that some things can't be explained. In ancient Rome they blamed floods and earthquakes on Poseidon. Science later told us that these are explainable natural events, not the work of Gods. Science has given us answers to many of the questions about our world that used to be associated to gods. There are a few really tough questions left that scientists are making some headway on like, "What are we made of?" Which is being understood through particle physics and quantum theory. "Why are we here?" That's a tough and fundamentally esoteric question that I don't think anyone could agree on... and here is where religion comes in. I don't have a problem with religion itself, but I'm uneasy with it because it breeds fundamentalism, hatred and mistrust. A great number of our wars in history have been about, "My god is better than your god." Again, a product of simple thinking. The funniest part is that at the most basic level all religions agree on the same things, love, trust and harmony between man. Often these values are upheld, but more and more people are straying from the basic ideas of what religion was indeed to teach us.
WURD!!
Scientists should not be spending their time attempting to discredit creationists. Any attempt to answer creationists on their own ground merely adds credence to their beliefs.
Science is not a belief. Science follows the scientific method. Accepted principles in science can be independently verified by testing and re-testing hypotheses using the scientific method.
Science is also not static, and it does not offer any guarantee that today's conclusions will match tomorrow's conclusions. While creationists attempt to cite this uncertainty as a weakness, it is one of science's greatest strengths. There is no place for dogma in science. Whereas, religion (and creationism as a sub-part of religion) is rife with dogma and the need to suppress intellectual curiousity.
Creationists deliberately misconstrue statements by various scientists and scientific conclusions in order to paint those statement and conclusions as "beliefs" rather than the results of the scientific method. Except creationists are not true scientists, because they come to the table with a hypothesis, the truth of which they are highly invested in proving. That is not the scientific method, because they do not approach their hypothesis with neutrality. Therefore, they find exactly the answers they seek. That is not science.
Faith and science are not necessarily opposed to each other, though a lot of atheists would like to think they are.
The problem I see is that atheists attempt to pervert science into "proving" that there is no God, as if the techniques of science are somehow suited to grappling with the metaphysical.
The other problem I see is that fundamentalist Christians are denying their faith in God. God - not science - is supposed to be the truth, but if your arguments for faith rest on scientific proofs, then you've supplanted God with Science as the ultimate arbiter of truth. Which is just self-defeating. If God is truth, and He said He created the world in seven days, then He did. End of story. Chasing after "scientific" proofs of Biblical stories only shows one's faith to rest not in God, but in science.
And then comes science. In the discovery of the marvels of our universe, we come to realize that it is ordered - the hallmark of a creative genius. No, it doesn't prove God exists - if it did, science (or logic), rather than God, would be the ultimate truth. It isn't. Not to say science doesn't serve a useful purpose - it does; but rather that it is a tentative explanation of nature. From a logical standpoint, science doesn't prove anything, but rather explains it.
And those who try to base their religion on science only show themselves to be foolish - whether they are the atheists using evolution to bolster their naturalist beliefs, or fundamentals using flawed reasoning to bolster their creastionist ones. In fact, I'd say that both camps have done more damage to the reputation of science than all of the scientific scandals in history (cold fusion, California's fictitious elements, etc...)
Faith is something that one discovers apart from science. And we all look like fools when we attempt to use the scientific method to "prove" what we suspect to be true about God. No amount of scientific proof will ever bring an atheist to salvation, nor will it convince a true believer that God doesn't exist.
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I'm an atheist, and I don't think they are compatible. The main problem with the compatibilist attitude is this: evolution is a blind, mechanical process. There's no need for an agent like a god to do anything; evolution just happens on its own! It doesn't need a god to mutate genes, or put pressure on prey to see their predators better, or urge the lions to catch the slow gazelles, etc. Saying "god did it that way", is to arbitrarily stick a god in the background, where he somehow "endorses" the process of evolution..but there's nothing to do there (besides give believers their security, presumably). In just the same way, you don't need to postulate a shoelace gnome who keeps everybody's shoelaces tied (but uses the mechanism of friction to do it).
You have to look at the motivation of people like the pope when they say these things. They're smart enough to realize that evolution is an incontrovertible fact, but they don't want to give up their religion. So what else are they going to say?
The thing in the box has no place in the language-game at all; not even as a something; for the box might even be empty.
This statement shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the term "evolution". In the biological sense, evolution is a process, not an event. One debates whether a process occurs and whether an event occurred.
I can and do study (and thereby demonstrate the existence of) evolution every day in my research. These days, evolutionary scientists seek to understand and characterize the properties and mathematics of the process of evolution. We observe and characterize it, day in and day out.
The phrase "...whether or not evolution occurred..." is not even lexically coherent. It's equivalent to "whether or not oxidation occurred" or "whether or not gravitation occurred". If someone wants to debate the existence of the process, feel free. But creationists gave up that lane of attack decades ago in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence. They pretend that the difference is now a debate between "microevolution" and "macroevolution" - a distiction which does not exist and cannot be defined.
If instead you want to debate whether the dual processes of evolution and speciation have led, over the course of several billion years, to the particular phylogeny biological species which currently inhabit the Earth, feel free. At that point, we're out of the realm of strict science (meaning the scientific method) and into the realm of observation, speculation, and logical argument because we can't, of course, conduct a controlled experiment.
But for goodness' sake, at least please take the time to understand the terms about which you're debating.
I stole this sig from someone cleverer than me.
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.
No, science is not religion. But naturalism - the philosophy that states that everything can be explained in terms of the natural univers - is a psuedo-religion of sorts, and it finds particularly strong support among atheists and scientists. So you will often find proponents of naturalism using science to bolster their religious convictions, which often has the effect of blurring the distinction between science and religion.
The other is based on total ignorance and acceptance of something without questioning any of it.
As trollish as this might sound, I see this line of reasoning often repeated, so I think I should respond to it. Religion, especially Christianity, is based on both man's experiences and divine revelation. It is not merely the unquestioned acceptance of some nice fantasies. Divine revelation is truthful by definition (if it's not true, it didn't come from the one who is the truth). Contrast this with science in which axioms initially thought true can prove false with greater observation and understanding. One can never know with any degree of acceptable certainty if a scientific theory is true; one can know the observations, but continued observation could disprove earlier theories.
Now this is all fine and good when it comes to material things. Generally speaking, science provides a safe way to bet. But when it comes to things such as eternal destiny, the uncertainty of the scientific method is far from reassuring. Yes, I can trust a physicist to predict the Moon's orbit, but no, I wouldn't trust the same physicist with my eternal destiny.
Now as for man's experiences. Christianity arose from the largest body of scientific data ever assembled - namely, the Bible and the Magisterium of the Catholic Church. This body of data far exceeds that of any other discipline - God has been the subject of more study than any other subject throughout history. Nor is reason contrary to faith - in fact, it is the light of reason which causes us to believe. Anyone who disagrees would do well to read Descarte, who found a reason to believe in God without ever mentioning a Bible verse.
We do not accept Christianity without question. Every mature Christian that I've known has, at some point, questioned their belief. And we always come back to the same place - that God does exist. To think otherwise would require simply ignoring some profound evidence:
Granted, you might not be convinced of God's existence from what I've just written, but at least you should gather that religion, and Christianity in particular, is not opposed to reason. Rather, it is our faith and our reason working together which lead us to believe in God.
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