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Darwin Evolving Into A Tricky Exhibit
rbochan writes "The new Darwin Exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History
has 'failed to find a corporate sponsor in the United States because American companies are anxious not to take sides in the heated debate between scientists and fundamentalist Christians over the theory of evolution' according to articles at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Telegraph, and The Register. The $US3 million needed for the exhibit was met by private charitable donations."
Carries no weight with them, insofar as the vast majority of people likely to raise a stink about this kind of thing are evangelicals and not Catholics - in fact, there's a certain amount of overlap between anti-evolution folks and anti-Catholic folks. For them, the fact that the Church does not require a literal reading of Genesis of Catholics is just one more piece of evidence that the RC Church is the Whore of Babylon. All kinds of worms under that particular rock...
ABSURDITY, n.: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion.
Check before you post next time. Darwin was Christian - and literalist, at that - for most of the time he was working on his theory. Even after he renounced Christianity in 1851, he was more of an agnostic than anything else. He even kept helping with parish work - hardly the actions of someone with an "anti-religious agenda".
To know recursion, you must first know recursion.
At the time he developed the theory of natural selection, Darwin was a Christian who had actually studied for the clergy, though probably for career reasons rather than a strong inclination to preach. He was never anti-religion and in fact, he delayed publication of his work in part because he realized the philosophical implications of his work. He eventually identified himself as agnostic.
Darwin in no way had an anti-religous agenda. He even considered becoming an Anglican priest when he was younger. Sure, after he developed the theory of natural selection he became an agnostic, as many (but not all), people who really understand the theory since also have, but he didn't discover natural selection as part of any agenda other than the furthering of biology
The best example is the shape of the Earth. To the ancient Hebrew tribes, their cosmology being based on Mesopotomian notions, the Earth was a flat disc covered by a crystal dome. This is seen plainly in the cosmology put forth in Genesis 1. However, by Greco-Roman times, the spherical shape of the Earth was well known, and no Jew of that period would have doubted that. Thus the older Hebrew cosmology could not be seen as literally true, so Genesis was not read literally.
It is very unfortunate that a certain small breed of Christian has decided to rewrite two thousand years of theology and in the process turn their holy book into an object of derision. A literal reading of Genesis makes it clearly false, and to make it jive, the Literalist ends up having to find interpretations so strained and inane that it undermines their whole position.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Ok let us start with an easy enough reference point, in this case dinosaurs. Here we have a set of creatures we know existed millions of years ago and which is now believed to be the progenitors to the reptiles and birds. We know there were dinosaurs with some ability of flight and some land and some water based dinosaurs. Why did they choose these different habitats and travel methods? Location! Environment has a great deal to do with the evolution of a species.
You have to remember there are plenty of evolutionary paths for any organism to follow. Humans arguably have evolved somewhat separately while still maintaining compatible DNA. Let us take a look at the case of skin pigmentation. People in the northern most extremes of the world like Scandinavia and Russia developed light skin pigmentations because our bodies did not require as much protection from sun light in these areas. The days were shorter and sunlight exposure as such was also shorter, because of locality. Look at people as you move further south, skin tones begin to get darker the longer your days and more direct your sunlight begins to get. You have people in the Mediterranean and Middle East with darker, "olive" skin and as you move into Africa you begin to get individuals with even darker skin.
The Evolution of man is actually well documented from early ape-like humans to modern man of today. Evolution is a long process and not something you can expect to see overnight. Animals and plants have adapted to their environments and find ways to survive, and the ones that survive go on to breed until the new traits have replaced the older ones completely, or a divergence occurs and a new species incompatible with the previous occurs.
Please check out this site and if you come up with a new argument that actually attempts to present fact then please feel free.
"Some days you just can't get rid of a bomb."
Evolution does not guarantee that any structure will form. Intelligence is one solution to a particular set of problems, but the overwhelming number of organisms on this planet survive without even possessing more than one cell. However, that being said, intelligence of any kind will give an organism some specific benefits as far as judging, measuring and accumulating information about the environment. Rerun the tape from say, 500 million years ago, and there's no guarantee that you would have any organism with a brain larger than a few thousand neurons. But once you do have organisms with nerve bundles capable of not only receiving sensory data, but manipulating it, then such a species will overcome some of the barriers to such an expensive adaptation (remember, all structures require energy to develop and maintain, which is eye the biomass of this planet is overwhelmingly unicellular). As each member of a population is going to have some variation, some members will have larger or more complicated neural networks, and providing that such a feature of the primitive brain makes those particular members even slightly more likely to survive and reproduce, then, statistically, you will start to see brain size and complexity increase.
This is precisely what we see with hominid evolution. The earliest bipedal apes had brains little larger than a chimpanzee's. As we can see from modern chimps, a larger brain isn't necessarily required for survival. But for early hominids bipedalism meant a new environment, new pressures that a larger brain would make individual members more likely to reproduce. To loosely paraphrase Richard Dawkins, half a brain is better than no brain at all.
You seem to assume that there is some direction to evolution, that somehow a brain must be an inevitable organ, or that human intelligence is some necessary result of some ladder of evolution. Well, it isn't. It's simply good fortune on our part that a larger neural organ in some distant ancestor gave that critter a slight edge in the survival game. Play the tape again, and you might not have anything more complex than a planarian.
But evolution is not a shit-at-the-wall discipline. It makes some key predictions which have been confirmed numerous times since Darwin's day. The faunal progression was the earliest confirmation, but is no longer the most important. The key evidence for evolution now is the molecular data, which clearly shows, as was predicted, that all extant organisms fit within a nested hierarchy with its root to be found in a single common ancestor. With each species we analyze the genome of, we find this key observation only bolstered. All life on this planet came from a single common ancestral population, probably 3.5 to 3.9 billion years ago, though horizontal gene transfer means that it won't be a single ancestor, but rather a small bush of unicellular organisms swapping genes.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
So you support my point.
Everyone who read our exchange is laughing at this point. I punched holes in your first argument and now you claim I support you.
I say 100,00 years ago the first signs of human intellidence appear, you say over the course of 3.5 million years. How is it we survived? According to the theory of evolution and "survival of the fittest", we shouldn't be here. But we are. Why?
We survived because our intelligence, developed over the course of 3.5 million years, advanced faster than our predators in that same time frame.
Again, you should be getting this from an anthropology text.
Look at it another way: wouldn't certain animal species that use elaborate mechanisms (think peacock) to attract mates also be more attractive to predators and easier to catch and kill? I mean a peacock can't do shit. *I* can catch one and I'm fat lazy bastard. How come they survived? And how exactly and why did they develop the way they did?
Your statement assumes that peacocks of today existed as they did before humans began domesticating animals. If you are looking for an animal that can't protect itself from predators, look at cattle. They can barely give birth to a calf due to the fact that humans have protected them from predators for thousands of years.
Evolution in action.
And don't get me wrong. I don't think reading some 4,000 year old book did it. There is some other explanation for it, and I leave it up to the scientists to figure those things out. The theory of evolution is a start, but it IS flawed or in another sense incomplete.
I would suggest reading Origins of the Species first before claiming evolution doesn't exist. It can be found here.
"Rocky Rococo, at your cervix!"
I've posted this before, in one of the threads a few weeks ago, but there was an article in American Scientist about Intelligent Design that looks at the larger picture. A key bit is this:
Evolution is just the beginning, folks. This is about replacing science with religion.In this universe, we OBEY THE LAWS OF THERMODYNAMICS especially the second one.
Oh my God! You're right! You just proved evolution is impossible! All of those highly educated professional scientists completly overlooked that!
Oh, and by the way you also just proved that it is impossible snowflakes to form. You know, those for complex highly structured snowflakes that spontaneously form out of chaotic water vapor in the air.
It's unbelievable how scientifically illiterate and ignorant people somehow think they are qwualified to critique the ENTIRE educated professional scientific community that has studied these things and all of the evidence. The attacks on evolution are just as commical as if these people were critiquing nuclear fusion and the explanation of how the sun shines.
By claiming that the second law of thermodynamics prohibits evolution all you have done is proove that you are completely uninformed and unqualified to to competently discuss the subject.
I'm sorry for being so harsh, but after the umpteen-hundreth time of people demonstrating their ignorance and making the same flagrantly INVALID arguments it tends to get a bit tedious and one tends to lose patients. You want to see a bacteria evolve into a fish? And what, I sask you, would you say to someone attacking relativity and demanding "show me my watch slow down when I drive fast in a car". What would you say to someone who argued that conservation of mass proves relativity is wrong because things can't get heavier when they move fast?
There is a REASON ththat 99.9+% of educated professional biologists accept evolution. A REASON that there is absolutely zero scientific controversy over the fundamentals of evolution. These educated professionals understand how it works and they have studied the staggering quantities of conclusive evidence.
You don't need to be a professional and have a biology degree to understand what evolution actually says and how it actually works and to independantly review the staggering quantities of conclusive evidence supporting evolution, but you do need the proper extensive education to be able to competently argue these scientists are wrong on anything in particular... much less to make the rather bold claim that THE ENTIRE EDUCATED PROFESSIONAL SCIENTIFIC COMMUNITY is completely wrong about everything.
What would you say to someone with no physics degree who attempted to claim that quantum mechanics was wrong? Who attempted to claim that the entire scientific community was competely wrong about quantum mechanics.
I can only assume your highschool provided a dismal or nonexistant education in evolution and all of the evidence behind it. Hardly supprising, it seems many highschools are failing to provide a proper education i the area because of the public controversy and religious controversy over evolution (as I said there is zero scientific controversy over the fundamentals of evolution). Get a decent science textbook and discover for yourself why evolution is not a violation of the second law of thermodynamics, the same reason snowflakes are not a violation of the second law of thermodynamics.
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