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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.'"
(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.
He started by noting that simply defining life is as much of a philosophical question as a biological one. He settled on the following: "a self replicating system capable of Darwinian evolution," and focused on getting from naturally forming chemicals to that point. To do so, Ellington developed three different themes.
"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.
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.
I'm no biologist, but it's funny that by "not caring", nature can potentially evolve new and useful stuff.
Take by analogy a genetic algorithm to find some solution to a problem. Combining only the best solutions will make you fall into a local minimum and stay there. You have to keep some of the worse solutions in your set of candidates to break out of it. Similarly in real life, creatures with undesirable traits still survive and breed -- and I'm sure that that, even if simply by sheer coincidence and only in a small number of cases, leads to ultimately desirable traits in some circumstances.
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.
Whereas there is no suggested mechanism for a god intervening, let alone a suggested mechanism of a god itself.
This space available.
And after that, could we review the difference between comedians and mathematicians?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
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
Hi. I was raised as Roman Catholic. I went to a Catholic elementary and a Catholic high school. I was baptized, had my First Communion, and even was Confirmed (on my own, more or less). I was even an altar boy for many many years. You could say that my education as a Catholic was complete.
In my studies, I read the Bible in Hebrew and Aramaic and Greek (with help of course) and learned that many things that are said in English are either out of context or blatantly wrong due to translation and just plain *HUMAN* error. Yes. The original Christian church showed me all of this in theology classes. The Church didn't seem to have a problem telling me that "P" and "J" and other sources wrote down the Old Testament and that Moses was looooooong dead by then. Or that the English "7 days" in Hebrew really meant "a long time." Among other things.
The Roman Catholic Church does not say that Evolution contradicts religion. In fact, the Church even explicitly said it had no argument against Evolution and that science is just fine.
It appears to me that it's the Fundies/Literalists with their King James translated Bible and absolutely no theological training whatsoever that are coming up with this Religion vs. Science debate. There isn't one. The writers of the Bible "the Jews" don't even have a problem with it.
Oh, and I hate to break it to you, but Jesus isn't coming again. His second coming was his Transfiguration (after he rose from the dead). It's just that the Fundies/Literalists don't even bother looking up "Revelation" in a dictionary. Revelations is basically another story about Christ *in the past* but written with a lot of religious symbolism. No prophecies.
What are you going to do with your free time now? Please consider donating your labor to charity groups such as Habitat for Humanity.
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.
Plato believed in idealistic realism. He believed that the basic types had transcendental archetypes that represented perfectly the form of an uncorrupted object.
It wasn't until the scholastic movement when William of Ockham introduced the world to nominalism -- that words are merely approximate descriptions we apply to enable generalization of a real world of many diverse specifics. Reality was reality, and names and generalizations were the source of imperfections in reasoning, not that there are ideal forms for everything.
The archetypal example is the chair. Plato believed that there's such a thing as a perfect chair that personified and was what people should think of when you think of a chair. Ockham believed that people used the word chair as a symbol, or name (nomen) for the many things in the world that we used as chairs. The names were merely conventions.
How does Plato's ideology lead to inaccuracy in his theory of evolution? Well, to him, animals are a type, and as a type, they had a perfect form, the human, naturally, since it was the smartest and most powerful. Thus, any non-human was naturally inferior to the human. Combined with the common belief among Platonists and the religious gestalt of the time that things naturally tended toward corruption when left to their own devices (without, say a Philosopher King to step in and control the masses), Humans were the first and foremost species -- all the rest are merely corruptions of the animal archetype.
Platonism (more specifically neoplatonism) was the philosophic foundation for Christianity and the Catholic Church Fathers more than any other influence. Yes, Catholicism borrowed from Jewish, Egyptian, Babylonian, Persian, Greek Mystery, etc. religions, but the philosophical foundations of its theological systems lay directly with Plato.
For more information on the scourge of Plato and Platonic Essentialism, see Ernst Mayr's "Growth of Biological Thought", particularly the 180 page introduction if you can't read a thousand page book.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.