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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."
I guess some zealots just won't trust anything that comes from Apple. Sad, really. :)
Seriously, I don't know many Christians, even young-earth creationists, who'd actively go after companies that promoted this exhibit. Jerry Falwell's group might bitch a bit, but they do that anyway.
Maybe ask them why they're opposed to evolution when even the pope (both the current one and the last one) accepts it.
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
None of the high tech companies can belly up to the bar and pick up the tab? That's just sad. I especially think the biotech companies have a duty to pick sides here. Where would some of them be without genetic engineering, proof of evolution if I've ever seen it? Genzyme, Biogen I'm looking at you! Or a company like Intel. What are christians going to give up computers because a chip maker sponsored the right side of the debate? Not after what the Vatican just said. So a small handful of fanatics clinging to dogma are going to push us all around with threats of boycots. I believe that's part of the definition of terrorism.
I've hit Karma 50 and gotten a Score:5, Troll... I win!
Polls get overstated all the time- and this CBS poll was most certainly distorted in both results and leading questions. Another possible interpretation of the *same poll* could lead you to believe 75% of Americans support evolution and 51% dispute the idea of spontaneous genesis.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
show me a bacteria that has become a fish
Go fishing.
Catch a fish.
There you go.
(Okay, that was a flip answer. Here's a serious one.)
The timescale for major evolutionary change in multicellular life is so enormous that we're not going to see bacteria evolving into fish. However, I've noticed that when creationists use this argument, which turns up in many different forms, they have no idea how diverse microbial life actually is. When you say "they evolve, but they remain a bacteria," I think you have no idea just how different from each other various forms of bacteria actually are. There's more difference, in fact, between various strains of bacteria that we have observed evolving into each other than there is between a fish and a human being.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
"A prayer in a public school. God has no place within these walls, just like facts don't have a place within an organized religion." -From The Simpsons
So, that's a glib answer, but when it comes right down to it, I'm hard pressed to agree they're doing anything wrong.
Personally, I'm an atheist, and a believer in the scientific process. ID, in my view, is a load of claptrap. And while I might join you in rolling my eyes as a Sunday school goes on about such unscientific nonsense as "irreducible complexity", you must understand I have a similar reaction when someone goes on about a virgin birth - and I suspect you would not share my contempt, then.
If people want to argue vociferously that faith-based concepts like ID should not be taught in science class (and I agree they should not), then it's hard to get too worked up when they teach them in church. I won't condemn a church for teaching ID within their walls, any more than I would condemn them for the host of other un-scientific explanations and teachings they offer.
The opinion above is fiction. Any similarity to real opinions, including facts and logic, is purely coincidental.
You're missing a, er, fundamental point, which is something the original poster at least hinted at. There are many different kinds of fundamentalism, and your gross simplification of "religious extremist rednecks" is completely inaccurate. They represent a small (but significant) percentage of the overall hostility to science, which comes from numerous different political viewpoints, socio-economic strata, and whatever other categories you threw in. For instance, I work at a non-profit that promotes the value of science, and the overwhelming majority of death threats, harrassment, etc., etc., that we see comes from secular northern environmentalists, animal rights activists, and so on -- in a word, the complete opposite of your idiotic stereotype.
FWIW, since you bring up the prospect of leaving the U.S. for "greener pastures," there are huge concentrations of anti-science leftists here in Canada, and overall a large degree of hostility to science as with other social democratic paradises (e.g. look at Europe's wider social reaction to genetic modification).
Educate yourself!
Fuck it
You are correct about the most long-lived civilizations placing an emphasis on education.
I think it's worth pointing out that for much of human history those teaching and preserving literacy have been the religious.
-stormin
The Southern Baptist Convention has creationism. On Slashdot, we have porn.
Please don't blame/insult the rednecks. Generally the religious extremists think they are above the rednecks. On top of that, my cousin who has talked about himself being a redneck is the least religious extremist on my mom's side of the family besides me. My father's side of the family is mostly Catholics, so they've got the religious side down, but apparently the pope has come down on the side of evolution. My mom's side was Catholic, but have mostly scattered to various apparently unaffiliated churches.
As an aside, intelligent design has many interesting philosophical points, and that's where it belongs, philosopy, not biology. Unfortunately Philosopy education in the United States is poor as well, which contributes to the problem.
The oldest science I have direct experience with comes in the form of Qigong which is an ancient medicinal discipline dating back to at least 4000 years ago. Then again, the modern "scientific" medical community has laughed derisively and dismissed 4000 years of such "science" as nonsense. Things have begun to change recently largely do to the preponderance of anecdotal evidence citing dramatically improved health that correlates with Qigong. As a scientist, I am not saying it is causal; I am just saying there is enough of a correlation that people have stopped laughing.
So China has had a scientific tradition for 4000 years, in which case, they may win the prize for longest lasting scientific civilization, or if you are one of the derisive laughers they are just barely stepping into the scientific world and Europe with only a couple hundred years headstart which is nothing to a civilization that has spanned 4000 years. Then again, many different governments have come and gone in China in that time. Has the society survived that? I'd say that as a nation, the Chinese have had a continuous cultural identity that entire time so, yes.
As far as intelligent design goes, these people are not saying that the scientific method is crap. Not as far as I can tell, and if some are, they are the minority idiots that no one needs to worry about because they are so incapable of rational thought they are not likely a threat to anyone other than themselves. The smart people that support intelligent design are just saying that they believe there are gaps too large in the evolutionary path to be accounted for by Darwinian evolution, as in: over time mutation and natural selection lead to species differentiation in harmony with the organisms habitat. They are not saying that science is crap. They are saying that they feel there are gaps in science that need to be accounted for and are not yet.
I think every scientist worth his or her salt would readily acknowledge that there are gaps all over the place in science. That is what drives us to further discovery. Our curiosity about that gaps. And the intelligent design people are right, if they are saying there are gaps in evolutionary theory. Damn right there are. Did Darwin figure out every evolutionary trick up Nature's sleeve in his lifetime? Have we filled in all the gaps in a couple hundred years, keeping in mind that Nature has been playing this game for hundreds of millions of years at least? No way.
If we some day find a periodic genetic record of a protozoan evolving into homo sapiens, then yes, we could certainly make a very conclusive argument. But I think anyone will agree that it is absurdly improbable that we can do that. Which means that scientists have to take a leap of faith just like any religious person. Every theory or law of physics is a leap of faith. "What if this is true," asks a scientist. Then they go devise real world experiments to show conclusively that the supposition is true. Intelligent design people are saying that Darwin's theory is not supported by enough real world experiments to show a protazoan evolving into you.
Can't really argue with them. Any scientist that discounts God because there is no experiment to conclusively demonstrate existance is as dumb as a person discounting science because it does not conclusively show that my Great^10^100 Grandfather was an amoeba.