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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?'"
discuss.
There's a lot of stuff on there that makes me question whether or not people are evolving.
Which candidate's are Anti-Evolution exactly?
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?
Because (believe it or not) there are people who don't know the difference between "the universe", "the Galaxy", and "the Solar System", and there are fundies that actively exploit that ignorance.
It's easy to screen out the radical fundamentalists. They answer "6000 years" and are at least honest about their base.
But the dangerous ones are the ones who "teach the controversy", because "Them crazy scientists can't seem to agree on anything! Some of 'em say everything's 14 billion years old, and some of 'em the world's just 4.6! They can't both be right!"
Vote only for a politician who is smarter than a fifth-grader; that is, one who knows that "The Universe", is approximately 14 billion years old (I'll take any number between 10B and 15B) is much bigger and older than "The Solar System", which is 4.6 billion years old (hell, I'll take anything between 5 and 4.5).
Mr. Candidate, sir, given the overwhelming body of evidence from hundreds of different scientific fields ranging from archeology to physics to zoology, can you explain to us how you can seriously believe that the world was created 2,000 years after the Babylonians invented beer?
A-Bomb
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.
Umm, you are showing your own lack of knowledge by assuming a theory is not fact. You are using the common tv version of the term, as in "I have a theory..." this is incorrect. A theory is only a step behind a scientific law. It is supported by experiment, factual data and has not been disproven by experiment or factual data.
From wikipedia: "In science, a theory is a mathematical or logical explanation, or a testable 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 theories commonly used to describe and explain this behaviour are Newton's theory of universal gravitation (see also gravitation), and general relativity."
Creationism is NOT a theory. If isn't even a conjecture or hypothesis. It is nonsense. There is no data whatsoever to back it up. There is no experiment that can show it to be true. There is nothing.
Evolution is a fact. It can be tested in a laboratory. Unless you don't believe in things like tuberculosis, drug resistant tuberculosis actually. We can evolve bacteria easily. There is solid evidence in the fossil record, in the linkage between DNA sets, in fucking DOG BREEDS.
It is not open for debate, it is not one of several competing theories, it is the ONLY theory there is for the existence of life and how it got to where we are today. There are no other theories. I am using the PROPER usage of the term here. Why this is something people have to argue about is beyond me. Why don't we argue about the existence of the moon while we're at it. It is just as stupid an argument.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It is good to note that even if we could create our own pocket universes which were left to chance but measured for complexity after that fact that we could not prove that intelligent design is necessary. If complex life proved extremely statistically unlikely to arise on its own, that would only prove we were an anomaly and not the nature of the anomaly. Even if we created life intelligently, that would only prove it's possible, and not that we arrived via the same route.
;-) . You don't have to believe in it. You don't have to believe it was unguided if you do believe in it. You do have to learn it and you do have to learn to apply it and reason about it. No matter what you believe, science is based on evidence, and despite the beliefs, hopes, and dreams of many people, evolutionary theory is a good model for understanding things. Even though Newtonian physics have been overtaken by Einstein, and Einstein's physics might be overtaken by QM or string theory, Newtonian physics is still a good framework for lots of things. That's why people need to learn about evolution: for all the doubts one might personally have about it, there's lots of evidence for it and it explains lots of things. Those students who don't want to believe in evolution emotionally are free to feel that way, but intellectually the class will act based on evidence and not emotion. The test is the same no matter how you feel about it.
We likewise cannot disprove that we were created by an intelligent creator. Even if we found it was easy in our pocket universes for complex life to thrive, that would not be proof that our specific origins were not special.
We could only offer absence of proof, and never proof of absence. This puts the definition of "fact" quite contrary to anything to do with intelligent design, unless we all one day in some afterlife meet the creator and are shown how we were created. We can neither prove nor disprove intelligent design, so it is outside the scope of science.
I rather like what my high-school biology teacher said about evolution. This is not verbatim by any means, as it was erm... a while ago that I was in high school
In case anyone's wondering, the teacher was Southern Baptist and didn't believe in evolution as truth about the past at all. She did, however, believe what she said about it being necessary to understand it because scientific progress was being made based on it. I never asked whether she thought intelligent design should be taught in public schools, but another student tells me her opinion is that it should be mentioned in passing that some people believe in it if a student asks, and the class should get right back to evolution.
STACK OVERFLOW
++NO CARRIER
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,
So then, while God may be recursive, he doesn't have any end condition.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
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.
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
So god crashed eons ago and humanity is just the core dump?
Despite many humanly-imperfect drawings, the Flying Spaghetti Monster has no beginning and no end - he is a beautiful bifurcating strange-loop of Noodly Goodness (plus some meatballs for eyes).
RAmen!
Rather than ask whether they believe in evolution, why not ask if they believe in the Scientific method? Maybe the right question to ask the candidates is something like:
We can all see how successful the methods of Science have been at discarding wrong ideas about Nature that were widely believed for thousands of years, and we depend upon the ability of scientists to discover and correct mistakes in their ideas in order to build our wondrous technologies. The same scientific methods that have led us to computers and airplanes have brought us modern medicine and biology. As a biological researcher, the framework of Darwinian Evolution is as essential to my work as a microscope or a centrifuge. Do you believe that I should teach anything in my Biology classes that hasn't survived the rigorous testing of the scientific method?
Creationists often try to lead you off track talking about the origins of life or even the universe. This immediately cuts out all that irrelevant nonsense and goes straight for the neck - if we didn't descend from apes, then why on earth could evolution, based on the premise that we did, make this prediction? There are more airtight pieces of evidence, like ERV patterns and the Vitamin C gene, but none so simple - two chimp chromosomes match the gene sequence, the human one has a second, broken structure that normal chromosomes have just one of, and it has bits of DNA in the middle that are normally at the end. Everything matches position with the two chimp chromosomes. Brilliant.
im in ur
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.
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.