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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.
(Yeah, yeah, I know... no one RTFAs on /..)
They discuss that, and agree with you. The reason is that in the eyes of the public, the two are regularly conflated, especially by religious hacks trying to dispute evolution. So, they discuss the relationship and lack thereof (they're not completely unrelated, actually), and also discuss why they're talking about both.
The short answer is that they were trying to summarize the current state of scientific knowledge as relates to a particular political and religious debate, and both evolution and the origin of life are part of that debate.
"Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that." - George Carlin
The cool things is to have windows that bounce up and down like a good tits.
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.
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
Life must have originated by a generalized and initially weaker version of the evolutionary process.
Essentially, in
a. certain intermediate-free-energy thermodynamic regimes (regimes in which common
elements and molecules can co-exist in all three of solid,liquid, and gaseous phases so that rigid and semi-rigid
structure can be combined with constrained energy flows),
and with
b. the right soup of lots of different common and chemically combinable elements trapped together in a gravity well,
you get the preconditions for randomly occurring structural and process experiments.
Some of these randomly occurring but probable-due-to-the-regime-and-the-ingredients experiments
end up making structural and process fragments that alter/interact with/use their environment in such a way as to
incrementally, or in some cases dramatically, increase the probability of a similar structure or process
fragment recurring nearby in time and space to the first one. This is already a positive feedback loop.
Eventually, by chance, some cluster of these self-probability-improving structure+processes, a cluster
most likely made of smaller self-made-more-probable structure-process fragments, reaches a threshold
at which its robustness leads to a probability of 1 of structure and process like that existing in the general
area.
Pattern self-preserving functionality transcends pattern occurrence improbability.
Call it stochastic evolution transforming into classical evolution.
Call it the origin of life if you like.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
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.
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)
Whereas there is no suggested mechanism for a god intervening, let alone a suggested mechanism of a god itself.
This space available.
Ah yes, George Carlin. One day you'll learn the difference between median and mean.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
And after that, could we review the difference between comedians and mathematicians?
I think he just knew that the average person in his audience had only heard of the word average, not the others.
This space available.
Median and mean are both a type of average. So no, he was not wrong, just not specific enough for some tastes. And anyway, assuming that intelligence has a normal distribution, median and mean are the same.
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
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
While this link more or less covers these points I'll summarize as it's a lot to slog through. The fossil record is sorted based on time. Radiological dating coupled with clear evolutionary progress as you look at progressively higher layers proves this. If much of the life on Earth died in a flood then you'd expect to see sorting based on density, size and swimming ability with the metal and stone tools of the time at the bottom and a spectrum of animals ranging from big slow creatures that couldn't make it to higher ground and live longer or swim very well on top of the tools and birds, bats and things that can swim for a long time at the top. Considering that the remains of tools are all well above the likes of T-Rex skeletons this is clearly not the case.
The Grand Canyon is pretty much a poster-child for modern geological theories. It's layering is not consistent with a rapid flood and the canyon its self is best explained by the long slow process of erosion by river. I could probably find some detailed studies if you'd like. the mitochondrial DNA studies performed at Berkeley in 1987 [1] I don't know where you're getting that 6000 years figure. The study you cite puts her as living approximately 200000 years ago and it's a bit more complex than "our common female ancestor". I'm tired and it's three am so here's a link...
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/homs/mitoeve.html
If you have more questions about this part I'll gladly answer them when it's daytime. and the existence of comets Seriously? WTF...
What about comets causes problems for you. Tell me and I'll do my best to clear up any misunderstandings you may have.
Also, I've noticed you seem to have a problem common to many Creationists, you conflate geological evolution, astronomy, abiogenisis and biological evolution. Geological evolution is, as the name suggests about the changing of our planet over time and includes stuff like erosion, desertification and plate tectonics. Astronomy is the study of the stars and can include stuff like the big bang and the formation of our solar system.Abiogenisis is the idea that life originated from non-life due to the chemical conditions present on Earth at the time. Biological evolution is what you seem to want to debate and it's all about the adaptation of animals over subsequent generations due to natural selection. Even if one is disproved it doesn't necessarily invalidate the others because they're all separate theories with their own evidence and implications. The fact that they all tend to support each other where they overlap just adds credence to them all.
Talk more when it's day
-David
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.
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.
PZ Myers put it pretty distinctly:
"'Evolution is a theory about the origin of life' is presented as false. It is not. I know many people like to recite the mantra that "abiogenesis is not evolution," but it's a cop-out. Evolution is about a plurality of natural mechanisms that generate diversity. It includes molecular biases towards certain solutions and chance events that set up potential change as well as selection that refines existing variation. Abiogenesis research proposes similar principles that led to early chemical evolution. Tossing that work into a special-case ghetto that exempts you from explaining it is cheating, and ignores the fact that life is chemistry. That creationists don't understand that either is not a reason for us to avoid it."
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2008/02/15_misconceptions_about_evolut.php
It is no longer uncommon to be uncommon.
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?
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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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
The only place in science for proofs are math and logic.
Theories are the "hows" for the "facts" of the universe. Take gravity as an example. Gravity is a fact (things fall to the Earth, masses attract each other, etc.). The *theory* of gravity is the "this is how it works". In fact, there are multiple theories of gravity *in use this very day*. Both Newton's and Einstein's theories of gravity are used, even though Einstein's is significantly more correct more often. But neither theory has been proven correct because you *can't* prove they are correct. All you can do is show how well they match observation.
As for evolution, we know about the fact of evolution. We've seen it happen in real-time. We've seen it happen in the fossil record. We've instigated and directed it ourselves. That's evolution the fact. Evolution the theory (in fact, just like with gravity, theories) are the details, the "how it happens". Exactly *why* do animals evolve? Just *how* does this happen? These are aspect of the *theory* of evolution which all seek to describe the *fact* of evolution.
May the Maths Be with you!
When I read the title I thought, "it's too late for me, I've already migrated to Thunderbird".