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Did Humans Evolve? No, Say Americans
Stern Thinker writes "In a 2005 poll covering 33 countries, Americans are the least likely (except for Turkish respondents) to assert that 'humans developed ... from earlier species of animals.' Iceland, meanwhile, has an 85% acceptance rating for evolution." The blurb on the site for Science magazine is less circumspect about the findings: "The acceptance of evolution is lower in the United States than in Japan or Europe, largely because of widespread fundamentalism and the politicization of science in the United States."
Evolution isn't a scientific truth. It's a theory.
Changes of species over time is a fact, in the sense that we've observed it. Explanations for how this occurs and what paths it has taken in the past are theory, and a very well established and emperically backed theory at that. Still, I'll accept this as a useful instance of pedantry.
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because you don't know the very first thing about evolution.
humans did not evolve from apes. humans and apes evolved from a common ancestor.
apes are just as evolved as humans. evolution does not have a goal. apes are not trying to become human. everyone is just trying to survive in their environment as best as they can.
Ahh, but humans didn't evolve from apes; they shared a common ancestor (who no longer exists). Nowhere in evolution does it state we descended directly from apes, current day or otherwise.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
The article is about the US, Japan and a whole swack of European countries (presuming that I can include Turkey as European). Okay, but what about the rest of the world?
Where is the "OK, this is lame" selection?
.. paranoid crackpot leftover from the days of Amiga.
Because apes are pretty good at being apes.
A "daughter species" doesn't necessarily kick the parent species out of its niche. That's common when the environment changes but doesn't eliminate the old environment, or when the old environment splits into to different parts. Humans evolved from tree-dwelling apes who ventured out into the encroaching grassland. That selected for apes which walked on their hind legs at the expense of prehensile feet, but the trees were still there and apes live in them to this day.
Go into an ape's niche and you'll find yourself massively out-competed. You'd make a lousy chimpanzee.
Sometimes a daughter species does compete with, and outcompete, the parent species, and drives it into extinction. We appear to be working on that pretty vigorously. In a century or so the answer to the question "Why are there still apes?" may be "There aren't." But it doesn't really change the answer: new species come all the time without destroying the old ones.
Remember that from the evolutionary point of view, humans aren't "better" than apes, any more than apes are "better" than fish or fish are "better" than amoebas. Each one fits into a niche without driving out the older species. It's only our bias that puts us on the top of an evolutionary ladder.
It's not really survival of the fittest. In fact, that which survives, survives. And when the environment changes, it stops surviving.
I just don't get it. What is the deal with people never changing their minds, or letting in new information?
Do you remember back in elementary school and then high school when you were taught critical thinking, logic, problem solving, and the scientific method as applied to making everyday decisions?
Yeah, nobody else was taught any of that either. Instead we were all subjected to mindlessly memorizing facts by rote, day after day, year after year.
You can't even blame it on modern schools...We have a tradition of this type of mental blindness going back more than a century.
Public schools in this country were based upon the model of mental institutions, with a healthy dose of military brainwashing techniques. I can certainly blame them.
You might want to provide a real link to back up that assertion. Degrading mustard gas shells from the Iran-Iraq war in the 80's do not constitute WMD, no matter how much you silly conservatives try to say differently.
Hans Blix said they didn't have them. Scott Ried said they didn't have them. And except for a long forgotten stock pile of shells, they have never been found. No nukes, no mobile weapons labs, no sarin gas missle. Nothing.
Never by hatred has hatred been appeased, only by kindness - the Buddha
Yes, you're wrong. The Urey-Miller Experiment tested a theory that organic compounds evolved from inorganic compounds over time, in hypothetical ancient Earth conditions. That's nothing like the blind belief that god created the universe with a word.
It's anti-intellectual posers who are afraid of science who look at the ongoing philosophical debates on the definition of "life" and flee into useless blind beliefs like Creationism. People who use the words of logic to pretend to dissect science. You know, the kind of people who post badly hidden Creationist propaganda on Slashdot, using their stupidity and disrespect for learning as a cover for their theocrat agenda.
The people we're discussing in disgust while reading this story, because so many Americans are so ignorant.
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make install -not war
No. Evolution explains how one species turns into another over time. It says nothing about how the original one got there in the first place. Sure, there are various theories, such as the lightning strike you mentioned. But they're not part of the science that is evolution, (at least as the word is most commonly used).
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
It's the same magic that allows one half of a family to move to America, and the other half to stay in Europe!
See, it's not all or nothing. Evolution happens to populations. When one population becomes isolated from another population, they will evolve differently given enough time.
Probably means you've misunderstood the theory. Oh, and overlooked the amphibians, too.
Suppose there's a world in which there are fish in the sea but no vertebrates on land (the insects got there millions of years earlier, though). A fish moving towards the amphibian lifestyle has competition in the sea, but no competition on land and if it plays its cards right it can flourish. In time some of its descendants might come to live entirely on land.
Fast forward half a billion years. Now land and sea are both well stocked with life adapted to all available niches. What role now for a fish trying to make a living on the shore? Not much. Seagull bait. Between the well-adapted fishes still in the sea and the well-adapted animals on land, the intermediate has no niche.
Intermediate forms, in general, are dead. This is why so many people are out in the world digging for fossils. You wouldn't expect to see a half-fish-half-mammal in the world today, but somewhere in the past you might hope to dig up a fossil of one of the earliest vertebrates to settle on land.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
Right, "Theory" in science, and "Theory" in popular conversation are not the same thing. When you say "I don't know where I left my keys, but I've got a good theory", you mean hypothesis.
A "Scientific fact" is usually something that can be expressed as a simple equation or formula. Anything that can't be reduced to that level of certainty probably will never be anything but a Theory.
sig?
A fine anti-Bush troll/joke, but a few facts are in order....
WASHINGTON - All year, the government has promised stepped-up testing to see if bird flu wings its way to the United States. On Monday, the Bush administration announced those tests got a hit -- but the suspect isn't the much-feared Asian strain of the virus.
In almost the same breath, Agriculture Department officials announced that routine testing had turned up the possibility of the H5N1 virus in the two swans on the shore of Michigan's Lake Erie -- but that genetic testing has ruled out the so-called highly pathogenic version that has ravaged poultry and killed at least 138 people elsewhere in the world.
"We do not believe this virus represents a risk to human health," declared Ron DeHaven, administrator of USDA's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service. "This is not the highly pathogenic avian influenza virus that has spread through much of other parts of the world."
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
Yes, they found some old stuff, but it had decayed to the point of being usless of a weapon. It's not a weapon of mass destruction if it can't cause mass destruction.
The people that spout the rhetoric "evolution is a theory, not a fact" just plain don't know the meaning of the word "theory". Here's the best definition of the word I could find:
"In science, a theory is a proposed description, explanation, or model of the manner of interaction of a set of natural phenomena, capable of predicting future occurrences or observations of the same kind, and capable of being tested through experiment or otherwise falsified through empirical observation. It follows from this that for scientists "theory" and "fact" do not necessarily stand in opposition. For example, it is a fact that an apple dropped on earth has been observed to fall towards the center of the planet, and the theory which explains why the apple behaves so is the current theory of gravitation."
Sure, in scientific theory there is always room for stuff to be proven wrong and for improvement. Relativity superceded Newton's laws. Does that mean Newton was wrong and we had to throw all his laws out? No, it just means that he assumed that the conditions under which his observations were made were the same everywhere, he didn't know about relativity. His laws still hold perfectly true under certain conditions. Einstein didn't prove him wrong, he merely came up with a new theory that took that into account. Scientific advancement is building on the shoulders of giants, new theories build on top of existing ones, clarify them, sometimes prove certain points wrong, but it's very rare for an entire theory to be completely wrong. Sure, evolution as we understand it now may not be completely accurate, there may be more factors that we don't know about, things like that. However, learning more about it and clarifying things that we don't understand doesn't invalidate the original theory, it merely adds to it. Saying it's a "theory, not a fact" just shows the ignorance of these people...proving points of a theory wrong doesn't invalidate the entire thing, it merely clarifies and adds to it.
But not all religion is fundamentalist. Building on your "lightning bolts in the slime" notion, we really do have a better story on the origin of life, and it involves little more than natural selection. Stuart Kauffman, in his wonderful book At Home in the Universe offers a compelling vision of the origin of life as autocatalytic sets. (If chemicals A,B,C catalyze chemicals D,E,F and so forth until X,Y,Z in turn catalyze the production of chemicals A,B,C, then technically we have met the first minimum requirement for life: reproduction of organic matter without conscious design.)
Kauffman's work is in turn based on Ilya Prigogine on dissipative structures, in particular the "Brusselator" (devised by the Brussels group) which may be the simplest known autocatalytic set in existence.
What makes this interesting is that Prigogine, a nobel laureate chemist, believes in God. It's the political and religious fundamentalism that becomes incompatible with the scientific method... so you're both right.
Your average non-scientist citizen is not likely to go and check all the sources to verify that, yes indeed, evolution is the most likely explanation for the diversity of species. So, to demand that this average citizen believe in evolution is to demand the same leap of faith as for that citizen to believe in creation
It seems to me the most appropriate solution to this problem is adequate science education in the public schools.
Why don't these polls include an "I don't know, I don't have time to check the facts, and it really doesn't matter in my everyday life" option? I think that would be the best response for a thinking non-scientist.
Did you read the article? These polls did include an 'I don't know' option.
Evolution has been readily observed in microorganisms, which is quite easy to see because they reproduce so quickly. Speciation has also been observed in at least one type of bird, a pheasant, I think, though one gets into arguments about the exact definition of the term "species", because the new species can still breed with the old one, though it almost never does. Is a polar bear a different species from a grizzly?
It did with polar bears and grizzlies.
Out of curiosity, are you a Bible thumper or a scientist? I can't imagine a scientist making such bold and absolute pronouncements about science.
Would you have told Abe Lincoln to make sure he fully understood all the societal and economic consequences before he delivered the Emancipation Proclamation?
Yes. And Lincoln certainly did try to limit the consequences -- there's a reason the Emancipation Proclamation only freed slaves in the seceding states, leaving those in Union states under bondage.
You seem to be confusing Fact and Truth. To intertwine Science with Truth would be a huge mistake. Leave the pursuit of Truth for philosophy and religion.
HUH????? Truth is a fundamental concept in science and math. For example all the algebraic manipulation you ever do with equations and inequalities rests on the fact that you've proven a fundamental concept is true and can be applied to transform that expression such that the expression still holds true.
There is subjectivity in the world of science. Emotions do come into play. The latest theories are too often presented as fact. These are all human failings and failings of the scientific institutions we create. However trying to separate "fact" and "truth" is a strange notion. In the end a "fact" must be proven to be true. I suspect that you have no understanding of either concept.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
This Wikipedia page has links to dozens of specimens of various stages of human evolution. Some even with pictures! I know, I know, you might actually learn something that contradicts your small-mindedness, but it might be worth it.
This page on the Smithsonian Museum's website (I know, I know, it's a 'devil's facility', but bear with me) also has a lot of stuff on evolution, including specimens. But, again, you might actually learn something, and then your straw man would fall apart.
Follow these links with caution, Christian warrior!
Evolution occurs in increments - some big, but most very small. The origins of life are believed to be extremely simple organic molecules that had some ability to replicate. [See research into the origins of life, such as the primordial soup experiments: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_life/ ] Complex attributes, such as binocular vision, opposable thumbs, and consciousness arrive much later in the evolutionary timline. This relates to your second "observed flaw":
This pattern is driven by the "survival of the fittest" mechanism described by Darwin in the book. Evolution is spurred by mutations in the genome [mutations caused by transcription error, radiation/chemical damage, etc]. Most mutations are benign. Many mutations are detrimental - resulting in disability and/or death. Some mutations may allow an organism to better survive in its environment - better camouflage, faster attack/escape, ability to digest different "food", etc. Organisms that are more likely to survive are more likely to live long enough to procreate and pass on those beneficial attributes. [See http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2003/
Our definition of "higher forms of life" is obviously biased, but we could probably agree it involves the addition of some attribute that increases the complexity of the organism in such a way as to significantly improve its chance of survival. The increased brain mass of humans allowed us to push our use of tools and language to the point where we could hunt and gather more effectively, communicate abstract ideas, maintain a record of experiences, radically adapt ourselves to our environment and our environment to ourselves, and ponder the origins of the universe and life.