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48% of Americans Reject Evolution
MSNBC has up an article discussing the results of a Newsweek poll on faith and religion among members of the US populace. Given the straightforward question, 'Is evolution well-supported by evidence and widely accepted within the scientific community?', some 48% of Americans said 'No'. Furthermore, 34% of college graduates said they accept the Biblical story of creation as fact. An alarmingly high number of individuals responded that they believe the earth is only 10,000 years old, and that a deity created our species in its present form at the start of that period.
Only 51% of physical scientists believe in any form of Darwinian evolution.
This is a lie.
You are a liar.
We're all born with nothing.
If you die in debt, you're ahead.
Uh, too bad evolution is about how life is changing, and completely unrelated to how life started, but keep on with your small minded worldview and ignorance, you're sure to make the history books (as a laughingstock).
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Alright troll, I'll bite.
...just CREATE LIFE IN THE LAB and that will fix it.
Only 51% of physical scientists...
Only 98% of statistics are made up on the spot by people who are full of shit.
Been there, done that, bought the T-shirt. We've shown that every prerequisite for life can be synthesized by processes known to happen on Earth prior to life. The only thing we haven't done in the lab is wait the million years for them to get together and start fucking...yet.
Furthermore, and this is part that we really have you nailed on, Darwinian evolution doesn't necessarily preclude God creating Earth or the first life. Instead, it just describes a mechanism by which life can adapt to changing circumstances. And we've demonstrated this in the lab thousands of times over. (Cancer rats, fruit flies, albino psylocybe cubensis mushrooms) In fact, humanity has been playing with evolution of lesser species for thousands of years. Did you ever wonder why bunny rabbits only exists in people's houses? (Hint: It's because monks bred them from wild rabbits until they became a new species, incapable of surviving in the wild. Evolution works even when we're controlling the circumstances.)
Embryology as a whole cannot be made to fit ANY part of evolution.
We came from apes. Apes came from monkeys. Monkeys came from lemurs. Lemurs came from rodents. Rodents came from some earlier mammal. That mammal came from reptiles. Reptiles came from amphibians. Amphibians came from fish. And so on. In fact, the biggest evidence of this IS embryology. Do some research on it some time. There's a reason human embryos have a tail, and are indistinguishable from nearly every other land dwelling embryo for quite a large amount of it's development.
Nice try, but that is a horrible mis-quote.
Einstein said once, "It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it."
Read all about it here.
Note to self: No more arguing with the faithful.
Actually, if you had been watching the news about evangelicals (besides the whole Ted Haggard thing) you would know that more and more evangelicals are also becoming environmentalists. Many believe that global warming is happening and they are standing side by side with the Sierra Club (and others) to help fix environmental problems. Many are conservative evangelicals that also believe in creationism, etc.
Did anyone read the actual poll response in question?
"Do you think the scientific theory of evolution is well-supported by evidence and widely accepted within the scientific community?"
48% = Well-supported
39% = Not well-supported
13% = Don't Know
39% not 48%. Zonk, you're fired.
Ahh, no its not. There are some good guesses, and they've been able to discover things like short sequences of RNA that can catalyze their own reproduction, but (natural) abiogenesis is by no means a solved problem. The simplest organism that can reproduce on its own (not without a host organism like a virus) is a prokaryotic bacteria, but even there you still have millions and millions of base pairs of DNA, which could not come randomly together by chance.
What's purple and commutes? An Abelian grape.
- "History is a set of lies agreed upon." - Napoleon Bonaparte
- "History is the lie commonly agreed upon," - Voltaire
If the vast majority believes something for long enough, it becomes the truth.
And btw..
"The Teaching Authority of the Church does not forbid that, in conformity with the present state of human sciences and sacred theology, research and discussions, on the part of men experienced in both fields, take place with regard to the doctrine of evolution, insofar as it inquiries into the origin of the human body as coming from pre-existent and living matter."
- Pope Pius XII
Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities.
Aristotele
You have to click through a few links to get to it, but the actual poll states:
It looks like the submitter got mixed up with the two stats that were both 48%.
Disclaimer: This quote has been modified from the original version. It has been reformatted to fit within Slashdot's HTML limits.
Correction...the theory goes that we did NOT come from apes but from a common ancestor...from wikipedia:
Also see http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/library/faq/cat0 2.html.
Of course love is made up of matter. Its a combination of molecules in your brain.
Evolution, like all scientific theories, makes statements that can be used as predictors for future discoveries, even though the process in question happened in the past.
If evolution says that some specific sequence of events is impossible, then finding any evidence that those events occurred would instantly disprove the theory. There are numerous things that could be discovered at any moment that would call into question the most fundamental aspects of evolution, yet in nearly two centuries no evidence of the sort has been found.
Conversely, evolution says that many things pretty much must have happened a certain way to get from point A to point B, and that is prediction. It has in fact happened that scientists have had fossil A and fossil C, but no luck in finding the presumed to exist fossil B. By using the principles of evolution they've determined where the most likely place to find fossil B was -- and found it!
It should also be noted that evolution predicted (in fact REQUIRED) the existence of DNA (or something similar) a century before it was actually found -- indeed, when evolution was first discussed the very lack of something like DNA was one of the biggest criticisms against it. The notion that ALL life on Earth including plants and animals shared some fundamental building block that was completely unknown, eons old yet randomly changeable for no discernible reason, was considered absurd by many. Watson and Crick did more to confirm the accuracy of evolution than almost any other group in the 20th century.
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
We're not talking about whether people believe in some arbitrary omnipotent being. We're talking about people believing specifically in the Christian God. A god who supposedly said things like: "Ask, and it shall be given you." This is clearly an outright lie. So anyone who believes that the bible is anything other than fiction is believing something that they KNOW is untrue. That directly contradicts scientific thinking. "Behold, I give unto you power to tread on serpents and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy: and nothing shall by any means hurt you." Another statement that Christians believe, even though Christians are routinely killed by natural causes, by each other, by non-Christians, by animals, etc.
Let's review:
- Americans are terrified that terrorists are out to get them, despite the fact that terrorism kills fewer Americans each year than the flu, fewer than cancer, fewer than suicide, fewer than murder, fewer than automobile accidents, fewer than natural disasters, etc. That pretty much makes Americans irrational cowards. So much for the "home of the brave".
- Only a handful of Islamic Theocracies have people that are in less acceptance of evolution than America; not to mention the way Americans disbelieve scientists about every other subject as well. The universe is 13.2 billion years old? Of course not! The grand canyon proves the Genesis story! So much for advanced.
- America has one of the highest murder rates in the industrialized world. So much for being anything other than a society of monsters.
- America rather consistently loses wars against third-world countries. Very impressive, and definitely great. Then they criticize the rest of the world for not being stupid enough to get on board for the big defeat. So America is simultaneously weak (for losing), stupid (for going to war in the first place), and petty (for getting mad at nations run by rational, literate people).
- Anti-illectualism: almost unheard of outside of the United States and Islamic Theocracies.
What's remarkable in all of this is how closely America resembled places like Iran. The same obsession with imaginary enemies, quite comparable religion fundamentalism, a disrespect for rationalism of any kind, the idolization of leaders based on their charisma rather than their actual decision making skills, and a tendency to cling desperately to "moral" principles that have been clearly shown to make life worse for everyone.IC isn't exactly the strongest of ideas to begin with (for example, there's no meaningful way to show that a structure is irreducibly complex), but it does have one fatal flaw: Even if it's not possible to take away a part of a system without destroying it, it's likely very possible to add a part and then take away one of the original parts without destroying the system. One might say that an arch is irreducibly complex because removing a stone from it makes it collapse. Does it follow that an arch can't be built? No. It simply ignores the fact that the precursor to the arch had more "stuff" attached to it (supports and scaffolding) than we see now. The arch didn't go from N-1 stones to N stones, because with N-1 stones it would have collapsed. It went from N-1 stones + supports to N stones + supports to N stones with no supports, creating the "irreducibly complex" structure we see today.
I weep for the future of physics if this is the common understanding of the second law of thermodynamics. Please explain this to me: How does evolution violate the second law of thermodynamics but a seed growing into a tree not violate the law? What is the difference between the two. Bonus points if you use math or actually quote the second law in a meaningful way.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
That being said, your argument is a common one. The problem is that the evidence we have supports evolutionary theory, the counterclaims made by evolution skeptics (the bombadier beetle, and so on) were answered years or even decades ago. If other evidence came up, scientists would look at it. Evolutionary theory is constantly being revised, in that we are learning more about sexual selection, types of speciation, rates of change, and so on--it's quite an interesting field, even to a layman.
Then you have a lot of noise from the predominantly (though not exclusively) religiously-motivated community who say that evolution isn't really science because common descent and so on isn't being challenged in the science journals. Even Behe, the ID bigwig, accepts common descent, because the evidence is so overwhelming. What skeptics want is a complete grounds-up reappraisal of common descent, natural selection, and so on, in spite of the fact that no data calls those things into question.
The religious "skeptics" will never accept evolution, and for that matter will never accept methodological materialism, because they want their bible-based explanation taught as science. So much of the "skepticism" is just a PR campaign, as per the well-known Wedge Strategy.