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Evolution Named Scientific Achievement of 2005
lazy_hp writes "The BBC reports that research into evolution's inner working has been named rtop science achievement of 2005 From the article: 'The prestigious US journal Science publishes its top 10 list of major endeavours at the end of each year. The number one spot was awarded jointly to several studies that illuminated the intricate workings of evolution. The announcement comes in the same week that a US court banned the teaching of intelligent design in classrooms.'"
Common sense.
I'll form my OWN solar system! With blackjack! And hookers!
Not that I support Intelligent Design (I think it's hokum, personally), but I can't help thinking this decision is politically-motivated. Doesn't mean it's not deserved, but it sure is convenient, coming on the heels of the ID court decision.
Aw, what do I know?
Check out my world simulator thingy.
How about you guys just keep to your beliefs and stop trying to change ours? We don't need or want your "message" - so keep it to yourself like most other religions do. If we are interested in Christianity we will ask you about it.
And, hello -- how about the HapMap?
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
....but creationists? For some reason each and every single time a story about evolution, intelligent design or even the origins of life appears, it amasses enourmous amounts of comments in a short period of time. I predict the same for this story, with regret.
./'ers are simply venting here? This might be, but I've seen a lot of comments from Slashdoters in support for ID one way or the other. It's scary because the Slashdot readership to me is apparently amoung the most educated on the net. We are mostly geeks after all.
I'm wondering what the hell is going on? Is it just a political hot potato and
It would be scary to think that all the geeks around me actually believe in religion. When I was younger I just assummed that most people were completely secular like me, and didn't believe in religion at all; delegating it to the status of fictional works like comic books etc. It came as something of a shock to my world view that most people are not in fact secular but do hold religious beliefs. I haven't quite recovered from it.
Or maybe it's just trolling by the GNAA et al, with Slashdotters flaming back. I'd like to believe this.
May the Maths Be with you!
The elements that created everything had to come from somewhere.
Where did the Intelligent being come from? The elements that comprise the being had to come from somewhere.
Whatever you reply to this "he always existed" or whatever, is the same reply I'll give you to you about where the elements came from. It's just as logical as yours.
"I think the planets should be renamed because they're named after fake gods."
You are free to call the planets whatever you wish.
But clearly what you really want is the power (through government dictate) to force others to use names that are approved by your particular religion.
I hear a lot of Christians complain about how oppressed they are.
In the end the complaints turn out to be about wanting the power to control others.
Maybe that was a Good Thing, but should decisions like identifying the Best Scientific Achievement of a year and medical decisions of vast importance be something we leave open to the whims of politics? I realize that in this case there was no "buckling" from pressure but it apparently was intended to reflect political shifts of our time. Whatever the case, it just doesn't sit well with me.
Insightful? More ironic
"Our conclusion today is that it is unconstitutional to teach intelligent design as an alternative to evolution in a public school classroom"
I'd link to other news sites, but you can google it yourself.
this sensationalist headline needs to die. intelligent design was not banned by the ruling, the previous board's policy of mandating its teaching (along with the wider scope of their attempt to actually remove science from the curriculum and replace it with religious studies) was found unconstitutional. teachers are still free to discuss it with their class if they wish under this ruling, though i'm sure they recognise that it could lead to action against themselves.
"Scientifically proven" is an oxymoron. No scientific theory has ever been proved. Ever.
faith is defined in the bible as the assured expectation of things hoped for. Hebrews 11:1. So no one can prove it to you, only you can.
P2P Anonymous Distributed Web Search: http://www.yacy.net/
If you go back and look at my previous posts on this subject, you'll no I'm no fan of ID. Teach it to kids in Sunday school, but not in biology class. Now granted evolution and a lot of the bio-sciences have been on the run in the US over the past while, the only reason this award was granted was to bolster the bio-science community by the other scientists saying "Good on You!".
There is nothing wrong with that, in fact if you have a weak team in a sports league, the other teams in terms of PR will say good things about that team and try to get the fans out. ID got a boot from the courts this week, but I don't think anyone thinks that will kill the issue. The sides are still on the field and the thinking people have to say "go team!".
I think the dismissive phrase "just meat" implies that there isn't much to it. In fact you can implement some incredibly cool things using "just meat". Intelligent life, for example.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
I agree with you. To be pedantic though, I think scientific objection to ID is Falsifiability. The ID pushers make few claims that we can observe. Fortunately, they do say that the earth is only ~6000 years old, something we can measure objectively.
The social problem with ID is that the people doing the pushing are religious bigots. Make no mistake about it. They're as open-minded as the taliban. They don't care whether it's scientific. They're not interested in a dialog or the truth. They have a message for you and their only interest in you depends on your acceptance of that message.
I'm just curious now how other religions interact with the idea of evolution. What about India's Hindu population? What do they think?
Sort of off topic, I guess. But hey. Maybe someone here who's bilingual will know.
You're falling in to the same trap the fundies always do.
Evolution is not the 'big bang' theory. Evolution doesn't give two shits about cosmic expansion, collapse, black holes or matter/energy interactions. It doesn't care where Earth came from, how long it had been there, or what color the sky was when the Flying Spaghetti Monster first set the amino acids rolling.
Evolution is about the trends of change among individual organisms. That's IT. There are other theories about all the other events, but they are off-topic.
Neo-darwinism?
Why the -ism suffix?
Where are the Newtonists? Galileoists? Einsteinists?
And what exactly is new about it?
It is not an ideology, as some would have you believe. It is well founded science.
I believe that the same comment has been made about "String Theory", and while I would admit that it isn't falsifiable in general (though there are specific tests...such as mathematical correctness), I would still maintain that it's a scientific hypothesis.
A more subtle definition appears to be needed. Falsifiability is needed for many purposes, but it doesn't seem (to me) to be the bedrock of what is scientific.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Could you please provide us with a single previous example of metaphysics accepted as science that still stands today? Let me run it down for you.
metaphysics = not observable
metaphysics = not testable
metaphysics = not falsifiable
metaphysics = not science
Once again...
metaphysics = not science
Say it again...
metaphysics = not science
No one has said that you cannot discuss ID in a comparative religion or philosophy class. These are the classes for metaphysical discussions, not the biology classes.
One more time...
metaphysics = not science
Got it yet?
metaphysics = not science
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String theory is a working hypothesis. A good many of the physicists out there will shuffle their feet if not outright proclaim it not yet a scientific theory. It isn't yet testable, but it does offer at least some potential means, though it's going to take a few generations of particle accelerators before we get to that point. But that is key to even a hypothesis, it must at least hold out the possibility that it can be tested and falsified. ID cannot even provide some hypothetical means by which one could falsify, it is compatible with all observations, and thus has no explanatory power.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
it was an unplanned, unguided and random process.
I think this statement with regards to evolution is not correct. True it is unplanned and random, but the process, as a process is not unguided. Each creature evolves with its evironment as a guide.
Imagine some organism in a world full of oxygen and very little carbon dioxide. Let's say this organism has three offspring (A), (B) and (C). (A) is just like the original organism. (B) uses more carbon dioxide. (C) uses more oxygen and less carbon dioxide. (A) will continue just as the original organism did, (B) will be worse off, and (C) will be better off. Thus (C) and its offspring will be better suited to live in the environment.
The guide is the world the organisms live in. That world may have been created randomly. Each particular mutation may arise randomly. But the process of evolution for each species is guided by the environment of that species.
You also say that life is a statistical anomoly. This seems nontrivially related to the inverse gambler's fallacy. Further, there are hundreds of billions of solar systems. Many of them probably have planets (we have already found some, I suspect we will find that solar systems are more and more likely as we gain the ability to see such things). If the odds of life forming on its own is, let's say, 100,000,000,000 to 1 against (which seems very generous to the people who think life is unlikely, given experiments with the common elements which form the building blocks of life and lightning), and there are 100,000,000,000 planets. On average, there will be life somewhere. Further, the only people that will notice will be from that planet (because there won't be life anywhere else!). They may think themselves extremely special and favored by the universe. They would be wrong.
If you're going to claim that basic life (single celled organisms, let's say) may occur reasonably often but in order to evolve there needs to be guidance in the mutation process, I'm just going to claim that the right environment needs to be in place to encourage mutations with the appropriate features. And given the mutations I can speculate with some accuracy (or at least, historically we have been able to) about the conditions at the time which made such mutations useful. This makes my theory bear extra fruit while you simply put some being in and say "it did it", and that tells us nothing extra. So even if the theories were otherwise equivalent in terms of their predictive power, I can predict things about the environment after the fact, and you cannot. This seems to be an extra point in favor of my theory all other things being equal, which, obviously I don't think they are.
dan_sdot wrote:
The real problem--primitive superstitious beliefs aside--is that people think that ``order'' can never come from ``randomness.'' Which, of course, is pure bullshit.
Take a heaping handful of marbles and toss them purely randomly into a shoebox. Hey-presto! Order from chaos!
Or, if you like, drop enough bowling balls onto a beach, close enough to each other, that they start to pile upon each other. Once again, order spontaneously arises from chaos--no matter how randomly you add the balls to the pile.
It's the exact same reason why crystals are so pretty, why large astronomical bodies are (essentially) spherical...and why life exists. In one word, ``entropy.''
If a state with higher entropy--and, therefore, one that's more stable--is more ordered than an alternative state with lower entropy, over time, the more ordered state will predominate. And, of course, local conditions will play a huge role in what's more stable. Those marbles in the box will take one configuration if the box has right angles to the edges, and another if the edges are round....
Really and truly, that old chestnut about the puddle being fascinated that it exactly fits the shape of the footprint is spot-on.
Cheers,
b&
Of course, the other big problems are that people have no fucking clue just how long a billion years is, or how large and diverse the Earth is. Start with any ludicrously improbable number you want to put on abiogenesis, and multiply that by a billion years and a third of a billion square miles of surface and a third of a billion cubic miles of ocean...and by the billions of solar systems in the galaxy and the billions of galaxies in the universe...and I guarantee you, your answer is greater than 1. b&
All but God can prove this sentence true.
Bullshit. Bullshit. Bullshit.
Feel free to take four minutes and eight seconds to learn precisely how the human eye probably evolved.
If you can handle the four minutes and eight seconds, perhaps you'd be willing to do some reading about how a bacterial flagellum could form without a designer.
I'm also sure you've heard the name Behe before. Did you know that in 2001 Michael Behe admitted that his work had a "defect" and does not actually address "the task facing natural selection." Futhermore, irreducible complexity is rejected by the majority of the scientific community. The main concerns with the concept are that it utilises an argument from ignorance, that Behe fails to provide a testable hypothesis, and that there is a lack of evidence in support of the concept. As such, irreducible complexity is seen by the supporters of evolutionary theory as an example of creationist pseudoscience and amounts to a "God of the Gaps" argument.
Can ID answer the following questions?
If you can't answer the last one at the very least, stop reading now. Go back to the link above, click on it, and spend the four minutes and eight seconds educating yourself.
The point to those questions is that NONE of them can be answered with ID. Can't be predicted with. Can't be tested with. None. Zero.
But do you know what can? Evolution, every one of them.
That said, while you accuse others of not understanding what ID actually is, I contend that you do not understand what evolution is.
First of all, the article this discussion is linked to references how scientists have learned new "specifics of how life evolved from a scientific point of view..."
Second, evolution has NOTHING WHATSOEVER to do with how life was created on what was once only a molten planet. Nothing. At all. Evolution is the transition -- of a population -- from one form of life to others forms of life over (usually long periods of) time.
Creation of life where there is no life is what is known as abiogenesis, not evolution. Now stop what you're doing! I can see you reaching for that reply button and Googling for references to the Miller-Urey experiments from the 1950s.
Stop it! You didn't even read that abiogenesis link, did you? I didn't think so. Nothing I can say can convince you to if your mind is already made up (read: clouded by mindless dogma). However I will leave you with one thing so that you can look it up yourself and do the research.
Abiogenesis experiments conducted by Dr. Sidney Fox. Don't even b
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And speaking of eyes, how come we got ripped off in the eye department? Octopi do not have the blind spot you and I have. There are species of shrimp who can see colors we can't even imagine as they have six different color sensors compaired to our three. Bees (and other insects) can see into the ultraviolet. We can't. An hawk can spot a mouse in the grass from half a mile. Can you even see a dog at half a mile?
And the problem with a theory is? Or do you not know what at theory is? It's not just a collection of wild guesses and half-assed ideas.
Evolution is not a thoery. It is a fact. It happens. It is happenning as we speak. The "theory of evolution" (of which there are several) is our attempt to explain how it is happenning, what makes it work. Not knowing how every part works no more invalidates that it doe shappen than not knowing how the insides of a pocket watch work means it can't keep time or that our incomplete understanding of how gravity works means things will not fall down.
I have to ask, which group of anti-evolutiuonsists do you hail from?
- The "evolution means Genesis is wrong and invalidates my religion" group?
- The "evolution means we're all just animals and not God's favorite" group?
- The "evolution means the universe is billions of years old and that makes my life an insignificant eye-blink" group?
- The "I'm not a monkey, damn you!" group?
- The "if we all evolved from Africans, that makes us all black!" group?
- The "if I'm wrong there is no Heaven and death is final!" group?
Yeah, I've heard all those as last-ditch reasons to not beleive in evolution. I don't buy into any of them.Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
The weird suggestion that the human eye is a perfect design and so establishes the existance of God is rather stupid and irrelevent - there are better eyes out there and evolution is a better answer than something stupid like God stuffed up or hates blind people.
As the man said, "If atheism is a religion, then not collecting stamps is a hobby."
Uh, and what exactly would looking at the pilgrims tell me about the structure of the united states? They lived in the same place a few hundred years earlier, and they were brutal religious zealots; what exactly is looking at them supposed to show me? Just a reminder of how glad I should be that such dogmatic savages had nothing to do with the forming of my nation?The scientist that have studied long and hard and thought through the physics, biology, mathematics, geology etc. have very powerful reasons to doubt the evolution
That would be simliar to the number of scientists who reject the sun being powered by nuclear fusion, and who instead support the "Electric Universe" crap that oddly keeps appearing on Slashdot.
In otherwords the number is essentially zero.
Roughtly 99.9% of professional biologists accept evolution. There is no genuine scientific controversy over evolution. A negligable number of crackpots making arguments and claims that have been reviewed and invalidated by all the the rest of the experts in the field does not make a genuine scientific controversy
Go ahead, check out what fraction of professional biologists reject evolution.
1) life never comes from non-life
I thought we were talking about evolution?
That's like attacking the theory of chemistry because it doesn't explain the origin of elements. The theory of chemistry is perfectly valid science even if we DON'T yet have a strong well supported theory of nuclear fusion to explain the origin of elements.
Evolution explains the behaviour of life once it exists, just as chemistry explains the behaviour of elements once they exist.
The theory of "the origin of life from nonlife" is abiogenesis. Considering that it attempts to address a singular microscoping evend shrouded behind the mists of several billion years, and that it has left no direct trace, it is hardly supprising that it is a poorly developed and poorly supported area of science. And no one is disputing it is poorly developed and poorly supported. However it is a lot better developed and better supported that you realize. However I'm not going to even try to get into it with you. Lets simply agree that poorly developed and poorly supported science has little or no place on a highschool science curriculum. There IS NO FIGHT over the origins of life in or highschools. The all of the fighting is over evolution.
2) explosions don't bring order
ARG! that argument is a pet peeve of mine, and I really hate seeing it (and explaining it) over and over and over and over.
Basically the argument is that the second law of thermodynamics prooves evolution impossible. That is the statistical law that says entropy (disorder) increases. That law only says the average disorder must increase, and it does not apply at all when there is a system with energy flowing through it.
It is quite normal and common for structure and order and complexity and information to spontateously arise out of nature when you have a system with energy flowing through it. In particular the sun is pumping energy into and througha variety of systems on the earth. For example the sun evaporates disordered water molecules into even more disordered and chaotic water vapor, which can then cool and condense as highly ordered complex snowflakes.
Order and structure and complexity out of chaos. The sun metling ice and evaporating water *is* your metaphrical explosion blasting apart the water molecules into random bits of water vapor, and the final outcome of that explosion is an increase in complexity in the final snowflake.
3a) Mutations occur but almost always bring harm
Most mutations are neutral. A population builds up an increasing library of mutations, beneficial ones and neutral ones, and even mildly harmful ones. And in fact evolution would proceed with no trouble even if we assume there were NO beneficial mutations. Each generation mixes and suffles that library of neutral and mildly negative mutations looking for combinations that are valuable. A mutant gene producing a mild toxin on the blood is a negative mutation, and a mutation where the sweat glands leak blood protines onto the skin is negative, leaking out valuable blood protines. However if you combine those two negative mutations you wind up with a frog leaking and building u
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