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Correcting Misperceptions About Evolution
Beagle writes "The science of evolution is often misunderstood by the public and a session at the recent AAAS meeting in Boston covered three frequently misapprehended topics in evolutionary history, the Cambrian explosion, origin of tetrapods, and evolution of human ancestors, as well as the origin of life. The final speaker, Martin Storksdieck of the Institute for Learning Innovation, covered how to communicate the data to a public that 'has such a hard time accepting what science is discovering.' His view: 'while most of the attention has focused on childhood education, we really should be going after the parents. Everyone is a lifelong learner, Storksdieck said, but once people leave school, that learning becomes a voluntary matter that's largely driven by individual taste.'"
Is the origin of life really a part of the theory of evolution ? I thought it was the origin of species. The origin of life, to me, seems more like a discrete (soapy, fatty) chemical process that doesn't have a lot in common with the process of evolution. Why convolute the two ?
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
Seriously. I went to a lecture series on evolution, and was rather disappointed upon leaving.
The speakers spent most of their time discussing why Intelligent Design is wrong, and getting into semi-religion-bashing. I heard nothing about any of the things that the summary to this article mentions, for instance, which was actually something I wanted to know more about. I'm not very familiar with all of the specific evidence myself (I'm not a biologist).
Now look -- as a scientist, I can completely respect and agree with the fact that ID is not science, for a multitude of reasons. But look at it from the point of view of someone "new" to science that was curious -- they showed up to an event, hoping to learn more about what evolution is and understand the "debate", and all they heard was how Creationism is wrong and how we need to fight religious groups and educate the people about the truth. "Educate with what?", that person will ask. "They haven't given any proof yet, and just seem to talk about how much they hate religion when they get together.". THAT is what the average person sees, and it doesn't really make scientists look good, and gives ammunition to the people that spread misinformation about evolution. Will that person ever go back to an evolution talk in order for us to clear up misconceptions? Probably not; forever, that person will now think "Wow, Evolutionists are crazy, I'm not going to that again.".
There's other issues of course, but the public image of an evolution scientist right now needs to be cleaned up before many will even bother to listen.
Three reasons:
- No, not everyone is a lifelong learner. That's the ideal not the reality. Just look at how hard it is for some older people to pick up computers after 40.
- The religion that's indoctrinated them has done so since birth. You're going to ear bash them for an hour or two and expect them to change their lifelong beliefs? You'll only create resentment.
- You have a much better chance at reaching the parents through the children. However if you only reach the children, it simply won't be an issue in 40 years.
Limit going after the parents to insisting that science is taught in science classes and religion is not.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Getting people to change their opinions, beliefs, or conclusions is just difficult all over. For example, a group of smart -- really smart (I mean two-plus-standard-deviations-out-of-the-global-mean and scientifically-trained smart) -- people recently debated how to define a planet.
They and their fathers had grown up thinking that Pluto was a planet because of mankind's relative inexperience at astronomy. Recently, mankind learned facts that required rethinking of what "planet" meant so that when the term was used, everyone knew what it did and didn't mean.
Remember how easy and sensible that debate was? When it was "over", the definition had as many footnotes as principles.
And those were scientists. Heaven help us when we have to reteach anything to the general public.
"We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." --The American President (20.1.2009)
This has some big consequences.. that recursion would mean that whatever was a common ancestor would need a common ancestor,, all the way down. and perhaps plants and animals are fundamentally different arising from different organisms, and a few trunks might appear for bugs, fungus, and bacteria..
By choosing traits carefully, a phylogeny was developed, which related animals to each-other.. strangely this worked really well.
Anyway, evolution predicts that there is a tree structure, and that endpoints dont cross over.. so mammals dont get 4 chambered lungs like birds, but might still have some egg laying abilities like reptiles. Not should we see the octopus eye structure in humans. or bug armor on birds. Armadillos will have armor from keratin like a rhino horn, or fingernails.
Anyway, once molecular biology and sequencing came out, it solidly backed the theory.. Phylogeny people have been re-mapping the tree, bacteria took some serious adjustment, larger organism less so.
Now there is a push to generate "ancestral genomes" so that we have an idea of what the predecessor organisms were capable of... and where some of the novel enzymes popped into being. So enzymes which appear to be adaptation from our last ice age might be related in some way to survival of the cold, or eating rodents without GI distress. But with some timing, and some idea of the climate, the flora, and fauna some good guesses can be made as to why a subtle change might have happened.
So evolution theory may help in figuring out why humans stopped making vitamin C, and rats never need a vitamin C pill or fruit in their lifetime.
Or it can confirm things that we might already have guessed.. that humans make less stomach acid during pregnancy might be an evolutionary adaption to morning sickness.. because most pregnant women don't seem to have chronic bulimia problems, ie rotten teeth, esophagus ulcers, which would occur at higher acid concentrations. anyway, once they find the control mechanism I'm betting that it'll point to roughly the time when we started bipedalism.
Yes evolution is science, it does matter, knowing the history of automobiles lets us understand why tempered glass isnt appropriate for a windshield. Knowing the path that our ancestors evolved with lets us know what we should watch out for when we start tinkering.
Storm Storm
I suggest that we make a rule that if you do not believe in evolution you cannot be prescribed any of the newer antibiotics in case you get a bacterial illness since the earlier ones should be just as effective. If creationists are right, they will save some money, and if they are wrong we will exert a gentle evolutionary force toward people with better critical thinking skills.
At the intersection of computation and biology.
First, you really should link to the articles in question, as that would be the polite thing to do: Cann | Gibbons (pdf).
Second, it is obvious that you have chosen a belief system and grasp at any evidence to support it, blatantly disregarding all other evidence. A google of those papers make them look to be two "classics" that creationists refer to again and again. The youngest is over 10 years old. Where are the more recent Science/Nature papers that confirm the conclusions of these papers? They don't exist.
Here is an acid test for good research: Does it stand the test of time? Is the field explosive in the scientific field 10 years later? Some examples of paradigm shifting fields are stem cells, apoptosis, and RNA catalysis. The papers you cite do not measure up to these standards and so are highly suspect. Good science gets confirmed by other scientists and not by conjecture or preachers who thumpin bibles. Where are the papers confirming the 6500 year old mitochondrial clock or have recent advances shown problems with the previous model? Do the research yourself if you are objective like you think you are--or you can remain blinded by your belief system. But if you wish to remain blinded by your belief system, don't burden others with your belief system like you are doing here.
When uninformed people have opinions on science that smell of belief and bias, my suggestion to them is to go spend five to seven years to get a PhD in a field of natural science. Don't cop-out and pick some religious school where you end up with a thesis full of bible quotes. Find a real state-run university without any allegiance to any religion. Do actual research out in the field (dig bones, sequence DNA, dissect plants, count the strata of geological formations, etc.), synthesize the data and write your thesis on what you have discovered. Don't lie and make up data to support your belief system! Even [insert your favorite religious prophet or diety here] wouldn't do that, right? Integrate the comments of your committee and defend your thesis in front of them. Once you have your PhD from the accredited state-run university without any religious affiliation, come back and examine your belief system from the perspective of a trained scientist. Until then, you are simply fooling yourself, discrediting the members of your faith, and annoying the knowledgeable.
Just callin' it like I see it.
There are self-replicating objects that do not seem to be alive, but they do grow and expand to fill their niche.
That's the problem with abiogenesis: we need to define what counts as alive before we can say what started life.
Mind you, that's a problem religions avoid quite assiduously too: where does the soul get put in? Too early and the infant dies with a soul (natural termination). Too late and we have premature babies without a soul. So where does "life" begin? Why do humans get one but not Apes? How different from a human does a human have to be before it doesn't get a soul? E.g. did "Lucy" have a soul?
PS your PZ Meyers quote means nothing. It just states a position and doesn't actually bring anything to the table.
Abiogenesis is chemistry, correct. But chemistry doesn't define what "life" or "alive" is. And that definition IS what Abiogenesis is. As I said, we already have self-organised non alive collections that exhibit many of the characteristics of life. We have a line which is "definitely alive" and a line that is "definitely not alive" but these lines DO NOT MEET.
Abiogenesis is how to bridge the gap between to show how "Not alive" and "alive" are part of a spectrum and something "not alive" can gain the characteristics we assign to the "alive" side. If we never find how that happens, maybe THAT is the "irreducible complexity". But the IDers aren't looking for it. They take on faith that anything they don't understand NOW is irreducibly complex. And that isn't how to learn. It's just dogma.
Does PZ Meyers' discourse help in that goal?
The process of evolution is a highly confirmed theory, to the point that most of us just go ahead and refer to it as a fact. To say it's only a theory at this point requires an esoteric discussion of the definition of theory vs fact, and the only rational people I know who have any lingering doubts about it are deeply religious and take the Bible quite literally.
However, exactly what happened in the past, and when, gets murkier as we go back in time. By the time we get to the actual origin of the self-replicating life form from which we all evolved, we have very little insight. Some scientists even suspect that Earth's initial life form may have come from an asteroid, and evolved initially outside the Solar System. Others, more religious than me, suspect God had a hand in it, and I have trouble rationally arguing against that theory.
I think it's best to focus on more recent evolution in discussions with less educated parents, and those who purposely avoid learning about it. I find few people who believe God made the Earth in seven days have any clue how massive the body of evidence for evolution is. To respect their point of view, I generally concede that a "day" could have been a very long time back then, or perhaps God has reasons for trying to fool us. We don't even need to settle the "fact" vs "theory" dispute. Simply educating people about why we believe evolution is happening would be a great step forward. Arguing about what happened billions of years ago to create life in the first place just gives fud-slingers an opening to refute the entire body of evidence for evolution.
Beer is proof that God loves us, and wants us to be happy.
Actually, if your goal is to convince parents to allow evolution to be taught to their children, this isn't the best point to make. How about, "The process of evolution is a highly useful theory" instead? Even if God created the world 6,000 years ago exactly as it was 6,000 years ago, and let evolutionary processes take it from there, would it really matter? Evolutionary science would still be just as useful in understanding life - well, whatever life is...
Just $0.02 from a real, live evangelical Christian in the wild... ;-)
As a Christian, the way I see it, why can't evolution be the process that God has used (and is still using) to create the universe? The Bible says that God created the world in 7 days (rested on the 7th), but does not define what a day is. A day to an eternal diety could be billions of years. The Bible also does not go into details of how he created things. If I remember correctly, it simply says that he 'said let there be and there was and he saw that it was good.' Evolution could just be what happened behind the scenes. The Bible also refers to creating the "heavens and the earth". It seems a bit confusing there. Is "earth" the 3rd planet from the sun in this solar system in the milky way galaxy, or is "earth" simply planets? God created a firmament between "the waters", and called the firmament Heaven, and then he created land in the waters below Heaven to separate the waters into seas. To me, that sounds like he created our planet Earth, and Heaven is all of the stuff outside Earth (the universe?). So what about the waters above the firmament (Heaven)?
Having a smoking section in a public restaurant is like having a peeing section in a public swimming pool.
Would it matter? Absolutely. Evolution works on far grander time scales. Few are the species that have emerged over the course of 10,000 years. The climb from the ooze to land too hundreds of millions of years. The rise of the mammals, the emergence of primates, the appearance of immediate human predecessors - none could have occurred via evolution if you constrain the world to 6,000 years old. Changes would occur, but not the glorious diversity of life as we know it.
You missed a rather large point (God could create diversity, too), but forget that for the moment. Focus on the main point for a moment, and try to empathize.
If your goal is to convince parents that their children need to understand evolutionary theory, is it better to say, "Your most deeply held beliefs are wrong, wrong, wrong, and we're going to teach them a different view because we're smarter than you and know it's right, right, right!", or is it better to say, "Regardless of whether history played out as you believe or as we believe, the evolutionary model is the best tool that we have for understanding the biological world as it exists today, and if your children don't understand or actually misunderstand it, they will be at a serious disadvantage in the competitive marketplace of ideas and jobs!"?
If you answer the first because it better fits your world view, then be prepared to continue to fight a losing battle. Evangelicals are extremely focused on children, and will perceive the first approach as an attack on their children and their own right to raise them in accordance with their culture and beliefs. As with bears, you mess with the cubs at your peril. It's not a recipe for success; it's a recipe for irrelevance. If you don't believe me, look where it's gotten you today.
Sometimes it's the science geeks who can't see the forest for the trees...
The facts of it are that we have an extremely limited knowledge of the process of evolution. The scientific community is pretty good with the effects as observed, but not the process, although there are some good sub-theories about that.
How and Why are good questions. Ask them more, explain your answers if you think you have them, and don't put down people who doubt if they're willing to listen and make good counter-arguments; those things will just help you refine your own thinking.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
As a Christian, the way I see it, why can't evolution be the process that God has used (and is still using) to create the universe?
Although that is, in fact, my opinion, I think religious scholars balk at this concept because it pigeonholes God into a smaller player in the universe. If God has to play by His own rules (and I'm not sure we have any documented proof that He has violated them), then it comes down to the opposite of what Einstein said about quantum mechanics: God ONLY plays dice with the universe. If the only effect God can have is to change the rolls of the dice, it limits God in a way that many highly religious folks don't believe He should be limited.
The fact that we can trace most species back through DNA and how it's expressed physiologically in the fossil record means that God doesn't appear to be Creating much new life these days-- just letting the process run its course. And if you include humans in that tree and assert that there were billions of years of pre-human life that later formed humans, it again diminishes God's direct role as our immediate creator, and relegates Him to an indirect force that set things in motion a long time ago.
Anyway, I think that's the objection.
E pluribus unum
Repeat after me.
There is. No. God.
Once you get over the initial discomfort you will realise that a great many kludges you unconsciously apply to your day to day living can be done away with altogether, and indeed the entirety of your world view can be refactored into a far more consistent state to which a genuinely ethical basis can be applied if you only reject the nonsense you have been taught by the church and embrace the simple (and obvious) truth encompassed by the phrase:
There is. No. God.
No, really.
Because of Occams Razor: Entities should not be multiplied needlessly.
... kn*x^n-1 can always be made to fit for any 10 points)
If you can explain the development from single-cell organism to homo sapiens to satisfaction without ever mentioning God, and then you add, as sort of an afterthought; this all happened because God wanted it so.
Then "God" in your theory is superfluos: your theory *with* god doesn't explain or predict anything that your theory *without* God doesn't do equally well, so there's no reason to include him in the theory in the first place.
Given equal explanatory powers, the simplest theory is the superior one. If you have 10 points from a data-set that happen to lie on a straigth line, there is guaranteed to be a 10th-degree equation that matches all the 10 points, but that's not the theory you should choose, given that data you should instead suggest the relationship may be linear.
(in general k1*x^0 + k2*x^1
The distinction is silly anyways.
If you can observe and test that a certain process works for 1, 10, 100 and 1000 generations, then the most reasonable assumption is that it'll work the same way with a 100 thousand or a 100 million generations too. Atleast absent some reasonable explanation for why it would not.
"macro-evolution" is a cop-out from Creationists that have a hard time ignoring the fact that any high-school that cares to can run evolution as an experiment (with artificial evolutionary pressure) and see clear results inside of 5-10 generations of the choosen organism. (this need not take that long, yeast-cells divide on a time-scale of an hour/generation or thereabouts, even with something larger like mice the experiment will run inside of a single school-year)
In essence, it says: "Yeah, sure it works for a day, a week, a month, a year, a decade, but it somehow WONT work for a millenium or a million years. I refuse to give a coherent argument as to why not, but will now stick my fingers in my ears, sing lalalala and pretend I won the argument."
Others, more religious than me, suspect God had a hand in it, and I have trouble rationally arguing against that theory. - I don't. We have never observed the laws of physics/math/chemistry to change from day to day, we have not observed causality not to work. Indeed in a Universe where causality would not work in 100% of cases, long term organization wouldn't be achievable. Universes have to be very long lived in order to organize themselves enough to produce stars, to burn stars to produce heavy elements, to create other stars with these heavy elements, to spread the elements around the Universe, to form Solar systems with those elements, to create planets from the dust with those elements. Universes have to be so big, as to allow chance to take place to create 'livable' Solar systems and to allow at least some of those Solar systems to produce life and for life to become intelligent enough to start asking such questions as how did we get here?
If at any step of this sequence it was necessary for a god to get involved, then why wouldn't he/she/it just shortcut and really actually produce a universe in 6 days with the solar system and the people and be done with it? Why wait so long? Unless we discard every shred of evidence that this Universe, the Solar system, this planet and live on it exist for very very long periods of time, then we cannot seriously claim that everything was created in a very short period of time. Why should a god wait if he is omnipotent and only after some long period of time break causality of natural order of this Universe and introduce an outside influence? There is no reason, were I god and had I wanted to make a Universe to put life into it I would just go ahead and do so immediately and without waiting (of-course I am assuming that I would be an impatient god, but why shouldn't I? If I was a patient god I would setup the Universe to deliver me something unexpected, something I wouldn't be making directly, I would want a surprise and then I wouldn't break causality of the new Universe anyway.)
It is however imperative that a Universe is not meddled with by introducing events that do break causality, if causality is broken even in small number of cases, given the time it takes to organize events it would make it impossible to achieve any real amount of organization leading to life appearance. Causality that is broken would leave trace behind that would be detectable and we would not be able to create a scientific theory to explain such a phenomena with any degree of usefulness.
1. Either there is a god and he set up the laws for this Universe and let it develop by itself without meddling.
OR
2. There is no god.
OR
3. God compensates for every time causality is broken in a way that is extremely extensive and reorganizes the Universe, making the Universe extremely unstable in principle but not allowing us to observe the effects of his/her/its meddling. So he goes into great length to convince us that he doesn't exist.
OR
4. God has only done this once to introduce life into the Universe. Then why did he bother waiting such a long time for the Universe to develop itself into something that could support life? - this implies god is stupid.
In either case it is actually irrelevant whether god exists or not, so there is no reason to introduce him into this equation, it doesn't change anything from our perspective. Thus reducing the complexity of this equation makes most sense.
Cheers.
You can't handle the truth.
Reading comprehension just isnn't a strong suit on /. *sigh* I'll give it one more go.
I wrote, "if your goal is to convince parents to allow evolution to be taught to their children... would it really matter?" Your response is to claim science is seeking "truth" (how noble). Philosophy seeks "truth" - science seeks understanding. Science is horseshoes - a better model wins points, even if it's still not exactly right. Newton's theories are demonstratably wrong (i.e., not the "truth") - but they greatly help me to understand how matter interacts because they are close enough for practical purposes. That's useful!
Evolution helps me understand how life transforms itself through generational variations to fulfill environmental niches created by changes in its environment. Despite that I'm obviously not a biology major, and so have only a weak laymen's understanding of evolution at all, I find that useful. I don't give a flip whether it's "truth" or not.
I strongly believe children should receive the best training in science - all of science - as we possibly can. Toward this goal (and note it's not my only goal!), I don't care whether their parents believe life originated from the primordial sludge, God Almighty, or the Giant Flying Spaghetti Monster, as long as their kids learn how to handle science and so can better understand their world, I'll consider that a good thing.
Just as an aside, I teach three Bible classes to children most weeks, and I use science experiments to illustrate Biblical concepts (I teach the science concepts at the same time). This is right in line the St. Paul's argument that he would "be all things to all men that I might persuade a few". Because I have found Christianity to work very well for me (compared to my disastrous attempts at atheism), I'm very interested in helping children to know God (that's an even bigger goal of mine). I believe that will be very helpful to them, and having done this for several decades, I now know adults who agree that it does. And if children learn science along with the Bible, more's the better.
Anyway, now that's $0.09 worth, and I've probably exhausted my quota of words on /. for the month. I just trying to warn you that "evolution == anti-Christian" is a losing tactic at least in the USA, where 75% or so of the population self-identifies as Christian. "Evolution == a useful tool for understanding life" is a winning tactic for convincing parents to permit their children to learn about evolution. Even for geeks, marketing matters. But do what you like.
the only rational people I know who have any lingering doubts about it are deeply religious and take the Bible quite literally.
If you take the bible literally, you are not a rational person.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
You wouldn't take stories about old Greek myths and say their days were figurative and really represented a longer time. Specially when it's connected with evening and morning day x.
Sophocles would disagree with you. You know, in Oedipus Rex? The Riddle of the Sphinx?
"What goes on four legs in the morning, on two legs at noon, and on three legs in the evening?"
The answer is "A man, who crawls on all fours as a baby, walks on two legs as an adult, and walks with a cane in old age."
So, here we have an "old Greek myth" with a figurative day representing longer time, despite morning, noon, and evening being clearly represented.
It's good that my humanities degree is finally coming to use.
Next question...
I'd rather have someone respond than be modded up.
May the Maths Be with you!
Well said.
Let me add another car to your train of thought:
People who renounce rationality, are stuck with only one method to judge the truth of others' ideas: by judging the speaker's articulateness.
That is why scientists need not (and usually are not) articulate: in the rational realm, it is a secondary skill. It is certainly useful, but it isn't a requirement. Not so with the irrational realm: preachers et. al. need eloquence as a primary skill, because that is how their audiences judge the truth of their words.
FATMOUSE + YOU = FATMOUSE