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Putting Anti-Evolution Candidates On the Spot
hmccabe writes "YouTube is currently taking submissions for their next debate, in which the Republican candidates will answer questions. This seems like a good opportunity to challenge those candidates who say they do not believe in evolution. But since I am not an expert in the subject, I would be interested in how you all feel the question should be presented. For my own part, I think it is important to present the overwhelming body of evidence on the subject as incontrovertible fact, much the same way DNA evidence is presented during a criminal trial, and ask why the candidate feels they can pick and choose what facts they believe in. Moreover, I am wary of coming across like Christopher Hitchins, so vitriolic the candidate will defend themselves rather than answer the question. Perhaps the most important aspect of posing the question is to inform the viewers who watch the debate that this is really not a matter of opinion, but of science. So my question is: 'Hey geneticists, have you considered addressing evolution in the YouTube debates? Can you do it in 30 seconds?'"
What's the point of bringing it up in an election debate? Aside from educational funding, stance on evolution really isn't even on my radar for politicians.
If I was going to ask a question, I'd ask "How will you calm the media down from distracting issues like evolution and focus on real issues for which governmental action is appropriate?"
Now that is a question I want to hear politicians answer!
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
Do you really care what the answer is or do you just want to know how best to ask a question to make the GOP candidates look bad? From the summary it sounds like the latter. Just curious ...
"It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance." - Thomas Sowell
It seems to me that a great many American's don't believe that evolution occurred. Confronting a candidate on this issue is more likely to boost support among these people than it is to erode support among people who already know that the target candidate is a throw-back to the 14th century. This might do more to energize the religious right if they get a bee in the bonnet over a perceived attack on their beliefs.
The pro-evolution camp might win the debate, by lose the election.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
I honestly don't give two craps whether a person believes or doesn't believe that evolution is concrete fact. What matters to me is whether the belief or lack of belief results in a regressive, narrow minded, receptiveness to scientific research and inquiry.
Candidates which don't "believe in evolution" may be in the habit to reject other scientific evidence which conflicts with whatever goes on in their minds.
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I think it's actually a very bad idea to get into sound-byte debates with creationists, because that is exactly the kind of debate they want. You can't explain the science in 30 seconds, but they can certainly rattle off all their "evidence" in that amount of time. You also run the risk of legitimizing them by getting into a debate in the first place. You don't see geologists getting into debates with crazy people on the street who say the Earth is flat, because it's not something that sane people debate. This is a problem that needs to be attacked at the root (in schools while children are young) and in long-format discussions.
People in bamboo houses shouldn't throw pandas...Jesus said that! -Ninja
Romney- You once said you want to "double Guantanamo." Why do you condone, rather, endorse one of the darkest spots on America's record? Should we continue to deny them rights in the Geneva Convetnion?
Giuliani- Are you running as anything but the 9/11 candidate?
McCain- You've supported continuing the Iraq war voceriferously, when do we call it quits? After 1,000 troops are dead? 10,000? You joked about invading Iran, would you consider it?
Paul- You oppose abortion. Would you enact legislation to counteract (or severely restrict) Roe v. Wade?
There's a bunch more candidates, but why pick evolution? It is a fairly unimportant topic (considering the others at hand) and it is unlikely that a President will seriously impact what is taught in the tens of thousands of school districts across the nation (who pick their own cirriculum generally).
If you're going to try and correct people, get your own terminology correct before doing so.
Tell me something...it's still "We, the people"... right?
It means you do believe in it about as much as most other scientifically-minded persons do. You believe that it's "just a theory", but you probably know that it currently has a well-deserved position as a mainstream theory(the mainstream theory, one might say). You happen to know what "theory" means, but from the tone of your post, it seems you also know why there's no need to put that word on alarmist stickers on biology books.
Have you ever gotten a flu shot?
Sure it can be.
If a dog ever conceives a cat, then evolution has been falsified. It's as easy as that.
Instead, take the opposite approach: Ask them what evidence would convince them that evolution is valid - and, as a followup, you could also ask why they feel the current body of research fails to fulfil these criteria. If they dismiss the theory out of hand, it shows an element of close-mindedness. If they don't, you open the avenue for the discussion of what the actual evidence is.
Of course, such a line of questioning is more valid for a real debate, rather than a 30-second talking point which the candidates respond to.
Disclaimer: I'm a molecular biologist who studies bacterial evolution at a molecular level.
Disclaimer 2: I'm a lifelong democrat and don't care what the Republicans say at this point.
There are simply so many more important things that we could challenge the republicans on: Why are you all so fucking incompetent? Why are you even more crooked than the Democrats? Have you no shame? I could go on.
Funding for the sciences is something of an important question - and I'll acknowledge a link between acceptance of objective reality and support for scientific funding. But as a scientist I will happily say that federal support for my work is far lower on the list of priorities than clean and transparent government, sound economic and social policies, better/cleaner funding for general education, and a foreign policy based on something other than bellicosity and greed. If someone wants to challenge the republicans on their failure to deliver any of those things, I might listen.
But even so, these debates are sheer pablum - I'm sure all the Repubs favor clean government which is why they want no limitations on lobbyists. The odds of getting any of these people to seriously engage on real questions approach nil.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
So you don't consider the ability to use logic and reason important?
Belief in evolution is a dividing point between rational people and the 'faithful'. I believe there's no better yes or no question ["Do you believe that humans evolved from much simpler life forms over millions of years?"] for dividing people in the US these days.
Now, between a rational person and an irrational, person full of faith, I'd probably take the rational one I disagreed with over the irrational one I disagreed with. Because I'd have a chance of reasoning with the rational person. It's hard to change someone's mind when they ignore evidence and logic.
Awesome furniture, accessories and cabinetry in Santa Rosa, CA: http://humanity-home.com/
It's plenty relevant. You wouldn't want to elect somebody who holds power over the lives of hundreds of millions of people and trillions of dollars who based major decisions on faith?
I mean, if he honestly believes the world is only 6000 thousand years old, who knows what other wacky shit he goes to bed with comfortably at night?
And before you think I'm trolling, I'll ask all of you here this: Would you, or would you not, vote for somebody to believed the biblical rapture was close to happening and that their main priority was laying the groundwork for it to kick off?
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
Because they do a damn good job of it, that's why.
The NSF and NIH are far from perfect, and as taxpayers (I'm a scientist, as well) we are entitled to many critical improvements in transparency, but they are vastly more efficient than equivalent systems in Europe (I don't know so much about asia) which are riddled with hidebound cronyism, or than private systems in the US which are extremely wasteful and seldom private anyway (see next paragraph). I really shouldn't need to defend DARPA on slashdot - maybe computers are not your thing though.
Anyhoo, the reason we have computers, container shipping, automation, tele-operation, intelligent drug design and genetic engineering is because the US Federal government payed the R&D costs. Sometimes they provided outright subsidies, but they also provided an initial customer base without which many of these technologies couldn't have been developed to the point that became viable as consumer-oriented enterprises. Personally, I think that the general public is entitled to some of that money back, once technologies developed at public expense become profitable, but this is penny-pinching on my part: the return on the investment in computer technology, for example, has been absolutely fabulous.
Now, a lot of this was done through the military system - but what the military *buys* seldom really has much to do with what the military really needs. DARPA, in particular, is in the business of providing a military cover for technology that is in fact being developed for the supposedly-ancillary civilian purposes. They also do research which really does have a military motivation: it's about 50:50.
If you're some kind of fanatic who believes in the infinite grace of market forces:
1) You are about as connected to reality as a creationist.
and
2) You are proposing that we scrap the most powerful engine of technological and economic growth in human history because it doesn't groove with your ideological fantasy worldview. If you have a big bushy mustache, that's *two* things you have in common with Stalin.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
Someone who believes that their ancient "holy book" is a better guide to questions of objective fact than the best scientific knowledge, has a bad relationship with reality, and should not be trusted with authority.
If someone's religious beliefs interfere with their perception of reality, it will definitely interfere with the way they govern.
Indeed, maybe the best thing is to broaden the question: "Mr. Candidate, while we all have our own internal spiritual lives, which are very important, we also all share the same objective world. What do you believe is the best way to learn about that objective world: observation and experimentation, or ancient religious texts? And why? (And if ancient religious texts, how do you know which ones?)"
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Wrong. Intelligent design is a thesis, a philosophical position. It's not testable. Hypotheses have to be testable. Intelligent design, or a teleological argument as it is more properly called, basically says that because of the complexity of objects in the world, such objects could only come about as the result of creation rather than natural processes.
IAALS.
To me it matters because it would demonstrate someone who thinks rationally and has an appreciation for science (after this administration which flat out hates scientists)... it also would demonstrate to me someone who is willing to stand up for what makes sense even when a sizable portion of the population is against it.
Imagine if an atheist ran for president.
I want someone... for a change... who represents my view. We don't need to keep electing more-of-the-same candidates who are "willing to listen" to my side of things. It's about time the other sides actually had... well... actual representation in government.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
When people who don't believe in evolution try to set up straw men and undermine general scientific understanding and the scientific method, I have a problem with it. The problem is that anyone who doesn't believe in evolution doesn't believe in the scientific method, which would basically put us back in the dark ages.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
There's no zealotry in not voting for someone who rejects a well-established scientific theory in favor of a rather silly Biblical interpretation. If you think it's okay to vote for people who are willing to ignore reality or suspend it in their heads then go for it.
People who reject evolutionary theory are either ignorant of that theory (in which case, they shouldn't comment on it at all) or have a serious issue with reality. If they're ignorant but unwilling or incapable of admitting it, they shouldn't be running a country. If they have issues with reality, they shouldn't be running a country.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Accordingly, evolution (as it stands today) has considerable merit and quite a bit of explanatory power. Intelligent design has no substance to even consider for this question. As a result, the famous words of physicist Wolfgang Pauli (uttered for other crackpot fantasies of his time) are most appropriate when judging ID or Creationism - "it is not even wrong".
To address the subject of this thread - "Do you believe in evolution" is hardly a useful question to ask anyone because both affirmative and negative answers signify ignorance of subtly different kinds. The answer that science would put forth is that a scientific theory does not require your belief for it to be correct. Bernoulli's principle works every time an airplane flies. You do not need to believe in it for it to work. THAT is the reason why science has come to dominate the way we think today - it works.
This semantic trap is also the reason why scientific issues cannot be constructively debated in a public forum. It is not simply a lack of detailed knowledge on the part of the public at large that messes things up. On the contrary, a well-informed public can be quite knowledgeable about certain things. The idea of using tools that WORK is something the layperson tends to forget and instead ends up espousing his/her pet cause, regardless of the details. Thus we have a rabid eco-terrorist movement, stemming from an activism based largely on ignorance. Further, we have the abortion debate, where the arguments have left the realms of legitimate scientific inquiry and degenerated into opinion polls.
Science philosophers, in my opinion, are responsible by way of shirking their duty of informing the public about the paradigms of evolving theories and definitions of truth insofar as it pertains to natural law.
If it's not testable, it's just a conjecture. If you want to argue that just because no one hasn't found a test yet that doesn't mean it's not testable, then I'll be forced to argue that you might not even exist. I'd rather not go there. :)
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Wrong. Intelligent design is a thesis, a philosophical position. It's not testable.
Which is exactly why that nonsense has no place in a science classroom.
Trolling is a art,
The Bible has thousands of years of evidence
Does it? Please point me to any peer reviewed journal with this evidence.
Trolling is a art,
I feel like death on a soda cracker.
When discussing gaps in the theory of evolution, it's important to distinguish between "does evolution happen" and "what evolved from what, when, and how fast." Science is unanimous that it happens, but the specifics are, and probably will forever be, still being researched, and so our understanding changes.
Here's a car analogy: suppose you're at the scene of an auto accident, and you point to some aspect that doesn't make sense. That's a gap in our understanding of how Newtonian physics led to the evidence we observe. And if scientists studied that crash, they would probably have different theories of how it happened, and those theories would change over time. But unless you were driving at a significant fraction of c, there won't be anything that contradicts Newtonian physics. Despite the gap you found, it's still appropriate to teach physics to our high-schoolers.
The same goes for evolution - the gaps are in the details, but the theory as a whole is very solid.
No, not an "opinion". Fact. Absolute, 100% uncontrovertible fact.
You know that. I know that. Everybody else knows it.
We, humans, know that god is fiction because he is OUR fiction. We invented him. We made him up.
There's those of us who are honest enough to admit that god is fiction, Jean-Luc Picard is fiction, The Matrix is fiction, Dr. Frankenstein is fiction. And then there's those amongst us like yourself who are too dishonest to allow a pretty piece of fiction to be fiction.
Claiming that Star Trek is fact is a lie. Claiming that it "might be" fact or "could be" fact is a lie. Claiming that there's an open question here anywhere is a lie. Claiming that any of this is "opinion" is a lie. And it doesn't become any less of a lie because Mr. Picard is replaced by Mr. Anderson or Mr God.
Between evolution and global warming, I'm getting awfully sick of zealots proclaiming the science is settled and that any skeptic is irrational.
Are you truly skeptical of global warming, or have you been told to be skeptical?
Do you see weaknesses in data, or have you been told there are weaknesses?
Have you been getting your information from sources that have much to lose if the status quo changes?
Are your sources known for their rigorous scientific reporting, or do they only talk about evolution and global warming?
THAT would be a good start on the road to skepticism.
Literalism isn't a form of humor, it's you being irritating.
BS. The entire justification for Intelligent Design is that something as complex as our universe couldn't of just happened by itself, it had to have had a creator. Obviously if our universe is to complex to have just happened, then the same must be true for our even more complex creator. If the creator could have just happened without a creator then there is no reason why the universe couldn't have just happened as well.
In other words, the whole theory is nothing but a contradictory, pseudo-scientific ploy to force God^W an unnamed creator who could be God but doesn't have to be God into the public schools. Even the creationists would have found the whole theory absurd back in the day before they became afraid to call themselves creationists in public.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
Thank God! that secular, humanist people are turning the tide everywhere in the world (even in e.g. muslim countries -- see turkey) and relegating religion to the place it belongs, the private life of individual people.
What you describe as the "humanist people" from Turkey, is probably in reference to the sweeping reforms undertaken by Ataturk following the emergence of the Turkish republic from the ashes of the old Ottoman empire. Turkey had emerged as a modern state - a secular state, where religion was delegated to ones private life.
Unfortunately, in Turkey there is an ongoing backlash against secularists. For example, the people who won the recent elections in Turkey (AK party) are essentially very analogous to the religious extremists and their power bases in many parts of the world, except that they are good at spinning themselves as being "modern", just as fundamentalist Christian counterparts in the US for example. Its support base is generally the poor and uneducated - people with a very anti-intellectual bent. The only difference is that they are Muslim.
As in many countries, the teaching of critical thinking skills in Turkey has slid backwards by decades on account of education policies focusing on strategies for university entrance examinations and the much higher numbers of students passing through schools which could be described as fundamentally religious.
One of the by-products of all this: many people, even those who are not of a practicing religious background, treat "creation science" and "Intelligent design" as being "proven" scientific theories, just as similar counterparts in the US and other countries do. Interestingly, many fundamentalist Muslims and fundamentalist Christians have such almost identical viewpoints on this topic. When discussing the topic of evolution with a fundamentalist Muslim, I could well be speaking with the graduate of a 2nd rate Bible college in the US, had I not known better.
There is one scary thing I have observed when teaching at a university in Turkey. Students from fundamentalist Muslim backgrounds, and even secular ones, are referencing very famous creationist and "Intelligent design" sites located in the US for their written work to support their views in written topics such as those comparing people with animals. And this is at one of the better universities in the country I might add.
The anti-intellectualism of "Creation Science" and "Intelligent Design" is not just a problem in the US or in Christian countries...
Disclaimer: I am a foreigner who has lived and taught in Turkey for a few years now.
People sometimes ask me if I believe in God. I always reply that the question is meaningless to me, because God's existence or nonexistence cannot be proven, and it has no bearing on my life. That is, I would behave exactly the way I do whether or not God were proven to exist or not, or even if I chose to believe he did or did not exist. You might as well ask me if I believe in life beyond the reaches of the galaxy. Perhaps it exists, perhaps not, but either way it doesn't matter. And any position you might offer on the topic is nothing but speculation.
You define the statement "we will never know if God exists or not" as agnosticism, but I would call that a humanist approach, with the addendum that the question really makes no difference. Your belief that there is no God--and your implication that your belief has some relevance to your life--strikes me as self serving, not to mention "intellectually lazy/bankrupt". You clearly haven't bothered to reason out the facts, because if you had you would realize that the facts cannot be reasoned out. You cannot logically disprove the existence of God any more than anybody else can prove His existence. Science simply isn't equipped to answer questions about the supernatural, nor should it be. So you have chosen to simply draw your own conclusion, and argue through sheer verbiage that your position is the only rational one.
You may, of course, say that you shouldn't have to disprove something, and you'd be correct. However, just because nobody has proved the existence of something doesn't necessarily mean that thing does not exist. But realize that, in this case, you are choosing to believe it does not. And that's a choice you're free to make, but I don't understand why anyone would make such a choice unless it somehow made him feel better about his own conduct (for that matter, the converse is true--I don't know why one would choose to believe in God unless it brought him some comfort to do so). For choosing not to believe in God implies that you consider the question relevant to your life, and have modified your behavior according to your beliefs. How are you any better than those who congregate weekly to pray to the deity of their choice? Do you really think they arrived at their own personal conclusions regarding God's existence through a reasoning process materially different from yours?
I am a human being. I have no need for God whatsoever, so I see no reason to take a position on His existence. Clearly, you have a need for God not to exist. And that is why, as I said before, you are a slave to your own desires.
That is exactly backwards. Absence of proof is not proof of absence. Absence of evidence is evidence of absence.
In fact, "absence of evidence is evidence of absence" can be seen a simple rephrasing of the scientific method. Consider some falsifiable and testable proposition P. How do we give ourselves confidence that P is true? We repeatedly test the proposition P. If we consistently find P (that is, the event ~P doesn't occur, that is, there is absence of ~P), we more strongly believe P (that is, we have evidence that ~P is false). It is not a proof, because P is falsifiable, but we have evidence of the falsity of ~P.
-Tez
Haskell, the static-typed, lazy, polymorphic, programming language.
Not quite. Contrary to what some rethorically challenged people like to state, you can prove a negative. You can prove that a certain entity doesn't exist by proving that it has contradicting characteristics. In this universe, there are certain well-established limits to physics and biology. I don't think it's at all clear that leprechauns "could" exist. For example, if they have those tiny heads, do they have enough brain cells to make them behave the way stories claim they behave?
You can't prove that Santa Claus doesn't exist (in fact, if you work in retail or marketing, you know he's very real), but you can prove that a sledge pulled by reindeer couldn't reach the speeds and accelerations required to visit every home on Earth during that one night. So you have to either accept that Santa doesn't exist or change your definition of "Santa Claus" to something slightly different (or very different), that at least could (even if you can't prove that it does).
The trouble with "god" is that there is no universally accepted definition. So, until you define what "god" is, indeed you cannot prove it doesn't exist. "Proof" of something that is undefined is logically meanigless. For some definitions of "god", its existence can be proven in purely logical terms, but what do we gain by that?
You can take any simple system and add layers of useless, self-cancelling complexity to it, so it would be trivial to "weave god into reality". The real question is: are gods necessary to make sense of the universe? And the answer to that seems to be a pretty resounding "no". In fact, if anything, attributing phenomena to supernatural, unknowable entities is a way to limit our understanding of the universe. Ockham's razor and all that.
To quote Lewis Carroll, "Don't be in such a hurry to believe next time - I'll tell you why - If you set to work to believe everything, you will tire out the muscles of your mind, and then you'll be so weak you won't be able to believe the simplest true things. Only last week a friend of mine set to work to believe Jack-the-giant-killer. He managed to do it, but he was so exhausted by it that when I told him it was raining (which was true) he couldn't believe it, and rushed out into the street without his hat or umbrella, the consequence of which was his hair got seriously damp, and one curl didn't recover its right shape for nearly two days."
And then there's the separate (but often associated) issue of religion, which is responsible for more irrationality, obscurantism, death and self-righteous cruelty than just about any other part of human culture.
There are stories, but no evidence. All of the evidence strongly suggests that sexuality is absolutely immutable. The best so-called reparative therapy can offer is a very high suicide rate and asexuality -- which isn't even that, really, it's constantly refusing to act on your impulses. If you decided never to look at a girl again, and you managed to follow through, that wouldn't mean that you were no longer straight.
Give it a few years. I guarantee you that the guy's still gay. I went through something similar back when I was still trying to be straight. I even dated a girl for a year and a half. People thought we were the cutest couple, completely in love, and so on. I was the only one who even had a hunch that girls weren't for me. You hear stories all the time about marriages failing after 20 years because the guy is gay. It's not something that you can will away with enough time, or suck out with enough vaginas.
For whatever it's worth, I've dated a wonderful guy for a long time now. We're completely monogamous and disease-free, and we don't do any drugs or engage in any risky practices. We're both highly, highly educated and on very high-income and stable career paths. We're still completely in love, we're perfect for one another, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if we spent the rest of our lives together. How could that possibly be a sin?