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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.
This is interesting, but not for the obvious reasons.
The poll looks fairly well-constructed, but the problem is that evolution has become extremely politicized. For many, this question wasn't asking about science-- it was a political question (are you with the conservative-christians or the liberal-atheist-scientists?).
I think the real story here is the process by which scientific issues get politicized. It's a process that we really need to understand. John Timmer over at Ars Technica often writes about this.
It wasn't that long ago that we were having evolution trials, witch burning and with most of the world's states controlled by various churches.
Even with the rise of the evangelistic movement and the ties many have to the anti-evolution movement, they still pull only 48%.
Sounds not half bad to me.
There are actually two versions of Genesis, the old Hebrew one where God is not a single being but Ilohim (which is plural and I may have spelled it wrong). Then there is the Christian version which has God as singular and omnipotent, all knowing and all seeing. The problem comes from Calvinism and it's strong (to this very day) influence on Christianity. If Genesis isn't literal to these people the foundation of Christianity falls apart. Evolution directly contradicts the Bible. You can not logically combine the two and have the same religion. Hell the Bible contradicts itself enough as it is, bu when you add evolution, all the theology goes right out the window.
Check out Calvinism and Arminianism on Wikipedia sometime. Use it as background for reading Miltons paradise lost and you'll begin to understand the history of the debate that still rages on today.
The braindead cry loudly evolution does not happen. Scientist silently go to work. Maybe to find a way to prove facts, which will convince even those, which of course is impossible. But more likely because they don't care, thinking truth will always win.
The braindead cry more and louder, because there is nobody who really opposes them, they win more and more often. Without dedicated opponents they win at schools, they win in the public media. They are fare more visible than they deserve. The final result is, that two legged protein lumps, which would be better suited as emergency food rations in hard times govern you and tell you what is right and what is wrong.
This couldn't be more on topic
I'm a rabbit startled by the headlights of life
Evolution is not intuitive. Richard Dawkins was showing a possible explanation why in his book, The God Delusion.
Basically according to the research he quotes, there are stances the brain takes of thinking. Like the "physical" stance, how an object will react to gravity, etc. But that is slow and not really useful in judging complex machines (like animals for example). So there is a "design" stance, where you judge the function of an object and determine it's expected behaviour. That is sometimes too slow, so there is the "intention" stance, which assigns intentions to things. That tiger over there is going to attack me not because it has sharp claws capable of killing, but because he intends to kill me so I better run. Get the point. Anyway, according to research, infants and young children are especially prone to think in an intent stance. Thus it is conceivable that the thinking that something must have a reason or intent, is something to be discarded through a conscious effort.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
Personally I'm a lax hindu*, and evolution fits right in with my world view, and that of others I know. Infact AFAIK I don't know a single creationist.
*by which I mean I'm religious on Tuesdays and during holy festivals and other holy days.
If I have nothing to hide, you have no reason to search me
In this entire line of reasoning, the assumption appears to be that these people can't possibly hold one wrong view yet also do anything else right.
Rejecting evolution makes you a gibbering idiot who is unable to govern your own life and hates science? Do you realize how incredibly arrogant that is?
I don't believe in Evolution. I haven't seen enough facts to support it. I hold the same to be true for all mechanisms whereby the earth, life, and the universe were created. Nothing has enough evidence to support any kind of solid conclusion. There's a bit too much guesswork for me to accept it.
So, IMHO, all it takes is a few preconcieved notions to get you to pick one theory over another. Which one is right? Beats me. I, like most of society, have the luxury of not needing to know how things started to function. And not just function - an understanding of virtually all science, technology, culture, art, and search for truth is available to me without being sure about that.
The only thing I have to deal with is a very special kind of ignorance. The ignorance of the halfway educated - of those who believe that they have Learned and now Know the Right Answer and can therefore Show Others the Way. Once you really start to getting into how things work, you realise that you Know Very Little and Always Will.
How can you be so sure?
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The fact that you have just explained it in a way which is subtly wrong supports the idea that it is counterintuitive. An animal does not adapt. It is born with a certain set of DNA, which it cannot change or control, and it lives or dies as a result what DNA it has (along with other factors like chance).
In fact, this makes for a bit of a paradox. A single organism cannot ever adapt. Its DNA is essentially immutable, or at least it certainly cannot do anything to change its own DNA in any useful way. So you have an organism, and that organism has offspring, and so on. You have a whole chain (lineage) of organisms, and none of them can adapt, so how does the adaptation occur?
The answer, of course, is that adaptation in that sense doesn't really occur at all. What occurs is that new, different organisms are created when organisms reproduce, and the different ones either are already adapted or are not already adapted at the moment they're born, and the well-adapted ones end up reproducing.
This is a bit counter-intuitive because it's not how people solve problems. Humans generally apply intelligence to a problem. If you're a car company and you want to sell a new model of car, you don't make a bunch of new types of car at random without any direction, then ask potential customers if they suck or not, then throw out the ones that suck. That would be enormously wasteful and slow given limited resources, so humans rarely ever do that. Instead, you figure out what you want, you apply theory, and you make a plan to go directly where you want to go (or as directly as possible).
As it turns out, my sister is a Ph.D. student in genetics, and I am a computer programmer. We've had conversations about the similarities and differences of computer code and genetic code, and it took me a while to grasp, but there are really more differences than there are similarities. If a programmer wants to create a construct, he sits down with a piece of paper (or whiteboard), charts out what he wants it to do, and writes some code, hopefully (if he has any training) in a nice, orderly manner. If he's any good, he makes it modular and separates concerns so that (say) code for the GUI is not mixed in with code for the filesystem.
DNA does not work like this AT ALL. There are huge, gigantic sections of DNA code that are never used. Then there are sections in certain places which are used for two TOTALLY UNRELATED purposes just because the particular sequence of base pairs happens to fit both purposes. It is the equivalent of compiling a header file full of constants (say, error codes or strings) and then after you're done compiling, going, "Oh hey, since we are using a Pentium processor, that sequence of bytes for the error codes happens to also be a valid sequence of opcodes. So now I don't need to bother writing the first half of memmove(), because it already exists right there! Whoopee!" Except that it's worse than that because the DNA will have 100 other copies of memmove() in other places, all different, all incompatible, and most with bugs. Except that you can't call them bugs, because there is no spec. You expect them to do "wrong" things every now and then, indeed often, and the only real crime is to do something so wrong that the organism doesn't survive. And the only reason it does survive is that the system is pretty redundant and tolerates chaos pretty well, except when someone gets heart disease, cancer, dementia, a sore lower back, etc.
The point is this: imagine how you would design a human. Now look at a real human -- it's almost nothing like what you'd make. It's simultaneously way more "clever" and way sloppier. It's totally whacked, totally effective, and the way it works is pretty alien to how we think. Biology, in general, is very complex and is not very intuitive.
I don't believe in Evolution. I haven't seen enough facts to support it. I hold the same to be true for all mechanisms whereby the earth, life, and the universe were created.
Wow. I love when people talk about how arrogant it is to accuse people of being gibbering idiots, and then go on to prove what gibbering idiots they are? Arrogant? Seems more like prescient.
Evolution isn't an explanation for the origin of the universe. It's not really an explanation for the origin of life, either. It's the scientific model that explains the history and diversity of life on Earth by means of mechanisms like random mutation and natural selection.
And to the extent that a scientific model can be proven, evolution has been proven. Life on Earth evolved and continues to evolve (we know that from the fossil record and from continuing observations.) The theory of evolution tells us how that evolution happened. If you haven't "seen the evidence", then it's because you've never been in a biology classroom, or because you don't even understand what you're looking for evidence of.
How can you be so sure?
Who has to be sure? You need to accept uncertainty into your life. Just because we don't know everything doesn't mean we know nothing. There are questions in biology that evolution doesn't yet answer. Thank goodness, there's a lot of biologists who would be out of work, otherwise.
I never have frustrations, the reason is, to wit:
If at first I don't succeed, I quit!