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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.'"
From the summary there's no sign that the article says anything about what I regard as the largest misperception--but that might just be simple par for the /. course. On the other hand, if you take the time to read and consider the article carefully, then anything you post about it will be moot, because the EAS (Effective Attention Span) of /. is around 40 minutes. Ergo...
Ma Nature just doesn't care about the waste. Of course the anthropomorphism just obscures things more, but the basic thing about natural evolution is that anything goes--but almost all of the changes lead directly to death. Ma Nature's approach results in vast numbers of tiny variations of the same basic forms that are all scrabbling for survival in a tiny niche. She isn't betting on the existence of a benevolent mutation. She just doesn't care.
Lately I was thinking that one of the weirdest aspects is that things worked out so that every one of us humans is a unique permutation. It would be 2^46 possibilities if you just started with one set of distinct genes from the chromosomes of a single mother and father, but there are so many variations for each of the genes that the actual number of potential human beings is vastly larger than that. Insofar as our genes contribute anything to the situation, each of us could be uniquely suited for some niche on earth. Talk about over-engineering?
Of course the likelihood that we'd ever find such perfect niches is pretty much negligible--but again Ma Nature doesn't care. If we wipe ourselves out in our frustration, she'll just start over again with the surviving cockroaches. So have a nice day.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
He demanded that I support the relationship of Neanderthals with other homo genus members (not even arguing the sapien angle) with fossil evidence of Neanderthals in Africa and only conceded error so far as to say that Neanderthals are as related to homo sapiens as snakes are related to worms. This is an otherwise intelligent person who believes he understands evolution and science fairly well. Apparently he attended a lecture a few years ago on the Lucy find and somehow mutated that lecture into his current understanding. How can you engage with people like this in a productive way without being insulting? TFA addresses the basic misunderstanding and urges for consistently rejecting these sorts of positions, but is that even my priority at this point? Everything about the thought process he's using to arrive at his conclusions is flawed, but his insistence that he knows what he's talking about makes it impossible to discuss anything he might disagree with meaningfully.
Plus, he's an aspiring breeder.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
The problem is not that people do not learn, it is that people learn how to reinforce their prejudice. That is, as a species we tend to gather information that reinforces our fears. My mother in law will forever fixate on anything that proves her theory that leaving the house in general is a bad idea. Information to the contrary -- statistics about airline safety, for example -- will be disregarded. Anecdotes about blonde women raped and murdered in the Caribbean will be referenced on a daily basis.
As soon as we learn a model for the world, we want to actively support that model. We emotionally invest. Few of us have the capacity to re-examine that model constantly. Sometimes, overwhelming evidence will cause a sea change in certain groups' world view, but generally we like to stick to our own.
Some people have a world view that includes a just and active Christian God with a book that explains the way the world works; any evidence to the contrary is dismissed out of hand and any evidence to support it is grabbed on to no matter how irrational. Some (a few) people are just the opposite: they would dismiss any evidence of a deity and hold fast to any seeming contradiction in dogma, no matter how badly translated. I'm in the later group, and I dismiss out of hand anything anyone says about the existence of any god. I'm prejudiced that way, for better or worse.
But simply trying to explain things to the parents will probably not make any great inroads in society. Perhaps, but probably not. More likely, you'll get a group of 10 people pissed off and they'll have nothing better to do than to repeatedly call your boss/underwriter until you are forced to go sell hot dogs on the street for simply suggesting that we should all get along and that no one should be nailed to anything for it. I'm just saying.
You have a point, the actual science behind evolution isn't reaching people who are interested as well as it should be. thee's a lot of very interesting things being done that just don't make it into lectures very often outside of the occasional college lecture in the biology dept. like how chromosome 2 was formed from the fusion of two chromosomes which we found vestigial telomeres, which telomeres are normally found on the ends of chromosomes, in this case we found them buried in the chromosome as well as a second although vestigial centromere which is found only in chromosome fusion events. the subtelomeric duplications are located at base pairs 114,455,823-114,455,838 from the article in nature. which is located here: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v434/n7034/full/nature03466.html as well as the wikipedia article on chromosome 2: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromosome_2_(human) this explains why humans have 46 chromosome while the primates in general have 48. the chromosomes were not lost, two chomosomes fused into one, since each chromosome is paired, it went from 4=>2 [48-4+2=46]
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
There is nothing mystical about life, it's just chemical processes and structured molecules. The difference is that there is organization to the molecules such that the molecules appear to self-replicate. Of course, they don't "self-replicate", a double helix of nucleotides has no concept of self, so cannot have any intent to replicate anything. It's just a biochemical machine which chemically builds another chain. It so happens that the machine (unreiably) copies itself. If it didn't, it couldn't build a living organism. It has to be unreliable, in order to move forward, in order to have got to the point of being replicating inthe first place.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Plato records the opinion that man was the original species. If an individual wasn't worthy it got reincarnated as a lower species. Sort of reverse evolution with a moral twist.
Huh? Explain, please. There is a philosophical distinction that has lost favor over time that living matter is made of some special material (sometimes called 'magic meat') while non-living matter is different. This is used primary for religious or certain philosophical reasons. The most common argument is that if a soul is part of the body, the body must be made of something special to anchor the soul since obviously a piece of granite doesn't have a soul nor does your computer. This view continues that even if you create an object that is identical to a human in all physical ways (a philosophical zombie), it will not be a human nor will it have a soul even though it may act like a human. This is a common view of philosophers who support property dualism and they sometimes support their arguments with a more advanced version of the Aristotelian concepts of matter and form (where normal meat has the potential to be magic meat but it only does so when it is part of a living body).
Most people today think that there is only one type of matter and that the complexity of life is just due to this matter acting like a very complicated machine. They would hold that if there is a soul it is separate from this world. A philosophical zombie would not work in this second view not because the matter has not taken the 'magic' form, but because no soul in the parallel world has attached itself to normal matter in this world. This is a view made popular by René Descartes.
Perhaps I should try to clarify the point from that perspective?
We humans do *NOT* do it that way. We try to produce large numbers of identical units, be they Pentium processors, copies of Microsoft's Windows OS, white lab mice, or even ears of corn. Essentially we're begging for viral disasters of every sort.
If I was a betting man, I'd put my money on the chickens. We've created vast flocks of chickens with almost identical genes, and they in turn have become hosts for vast infections of bird flu. By creating such vast stocks of viruses, we have greatly increased the chances of the appearance of a very serious human-human form of bird flu. But if not the chickens, there are other horses in the race, and right now I'm skeptical if we're liable to learn the big lessons from the disaster when (not if) it happens. Another thing about Ma Nature is that she's seriously patient.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
I don't think that is really true. Biogenesis and biological evolution are really just sub-branches of statistical mechanics. Of course the two fields have the same features, they both apply the same principles, look for allowed changes of a system that would reduce the energy of the aforementioned system, those are the changes that occur. The problem as you have put it isn't that we don't lump evolution in with biogenesis. The problem is that we don't lump biogenesis, evolution and most of the rest of basic biology and chemistry as sub-branches of concrete well established physics.
This is why the suggestion that evolution is wrong is so absurd. Statistical Mechanics is one of the most well established branch of physics and questioning evolution amounts to questioning Statistical Mechanics well within it's established domain of applicability. The statements "the Earth is flat" and "evolution is wrong" are both equally ridiculous because the first can only be interpretted as suggesting that we cant apply Euclidean geometry to the Earth and the second because it assumes you can apply statistical mechanics to creepy crawlies.
It seems quite feasible, possibly likely, that the first few times life started on earth, in the early solar system, it got extinguished by another big impact causing a global disaster.
:)
Actually this is a fascinating subject.
The evidence shows that life appeared just about at the earliest point it could have, pretty much as soon as the earth cooled from a molten ball to a solid surface. And at that time the earth was still taking the occasional insane extermination-level impact.
Allow me to define "insane extermination-level impact". An impact that covers the earth in vaporized rock, boils the oceans bone dry in a matter of days, and leave the entire surface of the earth hot enough to melt lead. Serious sterilization.
Which left a bit of a puzzle on how the record of life on earth is apparently a continuous fixture, from its very first appearance.
In the last several years there has been quite a bit of biological research/exploration in conjuction with commercial mining. It turns out that mines are loaded with all sorts or never-before-seen kinds of bacteria. Exotic bacteria that live off the chemistry of the minerals themselves, and living and spreading throughout the endless cracks in the rocks. Our deepest mines are well over over two miles deep and drill sampling even deeper, and the rock is loaded with bacteria and water creeping through the cracks. At 2.2 miles down into the crust the temperature rises to over a hundred degrees F, and just keeps climbing the deeper you go.
And someone did a neat computer calculation. They modeled the temperature gradient of the crust as it goes down to the sterilizingly hot molten depths below, and they modeled the incinerating heat of a megaimpact. The heat from above works its way down through the crust incinerating everything as it goes for months and years. But the impact is a heat pulse, and the surface does begin to cool back down over time. The downwards pulse of heat decays.
It turns out that the molten sterilization zone below and the impact sterilization pulse from above never quite meet in the middle. Deep down in the crust there remains a merely "very very hot" zone in between where some extreme heat tolerant bacteria could and would squeak by. Bacteria which would work their way back up to recolonize the surface as soon as it cooled.
A seriously neat little chunk of science
We are descended from heat-extremophile rock-eating bacteria that survived multiple insane incinerating impacts by hiding out in the deep crustal cracks.
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For being such a "confirmed theory", it still has some rather large defects.
I know that adaptation is an absolute fact, and I have personally seen this happen in the wild, evolution on the other hand, changing from one species to another, I simply cannot accept due to several areas of dispute. The biggest of all these, is the undisputable non-existence of transitional forms. If species evolved from one species to another, they would of had to die some time in the middle of the evolution. If this was the case, a majority of fossils on earth would be of these intermediate states.
Not sure how it happened, how all these species became as they are, but I am fairly certain they didn't change into each other over time.
As I understand it, there are two chronologies for the order of creation of species in genesis (chapter 1 and chapter 2), and neither of them matches the currently accepted scientific order.
The order of living things in Genesis 1 is: plants, then fish, whales and fowls, then land animals, then man and woman simultaneously.
In Genesis 2, the order is: man, then plants, then beasts and fowls, then woman (from man's rib). I think we can safely dismiss a chronology that has the two sexes of a single species being created at opposite ends of the time scale.
Concentrating on the first account (which includes the "day" wording), this would mean birds and whales were created before reptiles and insects, and land plants before any animals. These are both in contradiction with what is currently understood from the fossil record and phylogenetic studies.
You are right that the details are largely left out. Unfortunately where they are left in, they do not match with what we are able to infer happened in the past. Genesis is - at best - an allegory.
That nineteenth century minister had it almost right. The world wasn't created 6,000 years ago with a fully fleshed out history planted. It was created this instant with a fully fleshed out history planted, including the half-formed thought in your head "could that really be true?". Now you are thinking that instant has passed and the world was created 5 seconds ago, but no, that would be wrong. The world was in fact created this very instant with the memory of thinking you read the world was created this instant, 8 seconds ago.
Tomorrow, when you think of this, you will wonder if the world was created yesterday... but in fact that would be incorrect. Your memory of reading this yesterday is an embedded false memory. The world was just created this instant.
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
Quoth your Parents: "If everyone jumped off a cliff, would you?"
I look at the diversity, and universality, of religion as proof of A) its arbitrariness; and B) that it, itself, is bestowed upon us by evolution.
With A, the plurality of god's and beliefs, it makes it impossible to say "this is THE god", since basically your saying your "righter" than the vast majority of humanity present and throughout time, all of which would offer the SAME claim, with the SAME amount of fuzzy proof.
With B, this does not bestow any special property on religion, or imbue it with any aura of validity. Just because something was useful at one time, does not mean it is useful now, nor, actually, does it mean it was useful at ANY time, actually. It just says that the mental machinery that exists in our head that lets us tie things into a "higher" ideology was not HARMFUL enough to keep us from passing it on, at some point in time.
Yes, I do agree that the current wave of "scientism" is getting rather obnoxious, though. I don't think that science, as a largely mathematical system, can provide all of the answers to reality, and it especially cannot bestow meaning (which is existentially important). For this though, I turn to another, and oft neglected, universal of human history, aesthetics, and not religion which often has messy consequences due to its delusions of objectivity. When was the last war fought between artistic movements? Was the the Expressionist/Dada war of 1920?
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey